President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) appears to cement a radically different US approach to international relations. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” this Strategy reads. Instead, Washington will engage the world only according to its “core national interests.” This approach suggests Washington will all but abandon the international order it created after World War II, which has made the United States the most powerful and prosperous nation. 

What comes next is likely an era of disorder, in which US opportunism, offshore balancing, and selective engagement increasingly facilitate a spheres-of-influence paradigm that would weaken Washington’s global influence and undermine international stability. In doing so, the Strategy’s shift away from hegemony and downgrade of strategic competition threatens to jeopardize the very interests the Trump administration seeks to secure.

Rather than abandoning the empire its predecessors have built, the Trump administration should enact a strategy of shared primacy to change how the United States upholds it. Shared primacy requires Washington to lead its allies and partners to secure relative power superiority over adversaries collectively and to strengthen influence structures that shape state behavior to benefit US interests. 

The National Security Strategy implies that sustaining US hegemony and the US-led international order are inconsistent with the pursuit of America’s foreign policy interests. Indeed, an internal version of the Strategy reportedly states that “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable.” 

On the contrary, hegemony is both desirable and, with the right tactics, achievable. This approach is desirable because it maximizes the United States’ international influence, enabling Washington to align state behavior with its interests. And it is achievable because the United States and its allies together possess most of the world’s relative power. Abandoning order leadership would limit Washington’s influence, necessarily reducing the United States’ ability to secure its interests.

Since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, the United States has enforced its desired norms through a system of constraints and incentives to shape state behavior patterns that support US interests. This international order, built on US defense alliances, forward-deployed forces, economic power, trade agreements, leadership in international institutions, human rights and governance principles, and other pillars, has generally fostered stable, predictable, and peaceful state interactions aligned with US priorities. 

Hegemony and leadership accrue unmatched strategic and material advantages to Washington. Far from charity, this practice allows the United States to control the very environment in which states interact, creating conditions that intrinsically favor US interests and that make desired outcomes easier to secure. However, the US-led order requires sustained American power, management, and commitment to function properly.

Unfortunately, the United States’ declining power relative to China and the erosion of its industrial capacity mean Washington can no longer uphold its order alone. Yet rather than seeking different ways to ensure American hegemony, the Trump administration’s NSS aims for a new international relations paradigm altogether.

The NSS rejects the pursuit of US hegemony and order leadership to maintain stable regional power balances, supposedly enabling Washington to secure its interests at reduced cost. It emphasizes transactional engagement, offshore balancing, and opportunism, particularly through economic deals and coercive leverage, to shift burdens and align states with US priorities on an ad-hoc basis. The document prioritizes Western Hemisphere control over all other foreign policy interests and appears to downgrade, if not abandon, strategic competition with China and Russia over international order. 

Central to this Strategy is........

© The National Interest