The 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) marks the most significant doctrinal shift in American statecraft since the end of World War II. For nearly eight decades, successive administrations, Republican and Democratic alike viewed US engagement across the world as indispensable to preserving a liberal international order underwritten by American power. The 2025 strategy decisively abandons this premise.
Instead, it embraces an explicitly regionalist orientation centred on what the NSS frames as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: the idea that US prosperity and security are best protected not through global leadership but through the consolidation of a fortified Western Hemisphere, with limited and highly selective involvement beyond it. Xinhua pronounces it as more “prioritized” and more pragmatic strategy aimed at “sustaining American hegemony.”
This shift has far-reaching implications not only for US alliances, global governance, and great-power competition but also for the future distribution of geopolitical power. The following analysis explores the central pillars of the new NSS, China’s response and assesses the likely international consequences.
One, at the core of the 2025 NSS is a striking reorientation, pronounced as the “most disruptive adjustment” by Wang Peng, Research Fellow at the School of Marxism, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The United States is reducing its responsibilities as a global power, narrowing its priorities to the Western Hemisphere, a kind of course correction comparing earlier flawed choices. Unlike the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which sought to deter European intervention in Latin America as a precondition for US expansion, the “Trump corollary” aims primarily at domestic insulation.
It rests on the argument that global engagements drain American resources, entangle Washington in distant conflicts, and distract from challenges closer to home, especially migration, narcotics flows, and the economic vulnerability of North American industrial capacity. According to an article in the Anquan Neican, “this inward-facing shift could intensify domestic divisions over immigration, cultural issues, and social policy. The reduction of emphasis on ‘globalism,’ social welfare, and institutional regulation may also affect long-term innovation ecosystems and social inclusiveness.”
The Western Hemisphere as a strategic fulcrum raises immediate questions about whether the US can curtail the deepening Chinese footprint in Latin America. China’s trade with Latin America exceeded $515 billion in 2024, though half the US trade with the region, but remains a major source of infrastructure financing, and increasingly influential in sectors such as telecommunications, rare minerals, and energy. The NSS is unlikely to reverse or significantly slow Chinese influence.
Two, another dramatic departure from recent strategic documents is the downgrading of China from an existential systemic rival to a mere economic competitor. The Chinese reports have widely used the phrase from the 2025 ISS that US-China relationship has now evolved into one that is “near-peers.” Since 2017, US strategy has framed China as the central long-term challenge to American power, shaping everything from supply-chain policy to defence planning.
The 2025 NSS reverses this framing. It portrays the bilateral contest as a competition for advantage within global markets rather than a contest for global order, Chinese analysts have interpreted it as “Washington seeking cooperation in exchange for retrenchment” and the US conducting a “cost-benefit assessment to shift strategic resources away from ‘expansive global containment’ and toward the core zones that it believes determine the survival of its hegemony.” Chinese experts like Wang Peng sees this shift as a more precise, pragmatic, and sustained “targeted containment” of China, a “hybrid warfare” aimed at maximizing American advantages, minimizing American costs, and raising China’s development costs.
This reframing has two major consequences. Though the NSS talks about building a military “capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” and developing “deterrence necessary to keep those lanes open, free of ‘tolls,’ and not subject to arbitrary closure by one country” however, Washington’s ability to claim regional leadership is further undermined by its stated unwillingness to expend resources without reciprocal financial commitments from allies.
Although the strategy affirms support for quadrilateral cooperation with India, Japan, and Australia, the logic behind the group’s existence—countering China’s rise—is diluted. The NSS simultaneously criticizes partners such as India for trade imbalances and imposes tariffs that undercut America’s credibility as a reliable economic collaborator. Consequently, while the NSS maintains rhetorical support for the Quad, its broader policy framework reduces the grouping’s geopolitical relevance, as the fulcrum of the NSS is Western Hemisphere in place of the Indo-Pacific. As Washington seeks strategic alignment while practising economic coercion, over time, this approach will encourage middle powers to pursue new minilateral arrangements independent of US leadership.
Three, the most ideologically consequential shift in the 2025 NSS is the explicit abandonment of democracy promotion as a pillar of US foreign policy. Instead of advancing liberal values abroad, the strategy seeks to export debates on social conservatism, particularly targeting Europe. The statement that the European Union is facing “civilizational erasure” signals a profound normative divergence from previous US administrations, which consistently viewed the EU as a pillar of Western democratic identity, shared values and norms. Instead, the NSS asks Europe to seek “strategic stability with Russia.”
The implications of this shift could be visualised in the deepening internal divisions in Europe. By validating narratives used by populist movements within Europe, the NSS risks intensifying the EU’s ongoing ideological fractures. Washington may inadvertently undermine longstanding transatlantic cooperation, shifting the centre of Western democratic leadership away from the United States, thus marking the end of the “liberal international order” narrative.
Four, the 2025 NSS reaffirms the US commitment to deter unilateral changes to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. However, this commitment is explicitly outsourced to allies and conditioned on them sharing the burden. The strategy insists that Japan, South Korea, and other regional partners must pay their fair share for deterrence initiatives, implicitly threatening a scaled-back US role if they do not. According to the Anquan Neican article, “this shift will likely accelerate defence capacity-building among European and Asian allies, but it may also undermine US credibility within traditional alliances, leading some countries to worry about the durability of American security commitments.”
Unlike previous NSS documents that emphasized integrated deterrence, the new approach creates uncertainty for both allies and adversaries. Beijing may interpret fragmented allied support as an opportunity to increase coercive pressure. At the same time, allies may view the US conditional commitment as a sign of declining resolve, prompting them to explore independent security options. North Korea omission suggests that Washington no longer views it as a priority threat, a stance that may embolden Pyongyang and complicate regional security calculations for South Korea and Japan.
Finally, the cumulative effect of these doctrinal shifts points toward a profound transformation in global geopolitics. One, decline of US global leadership will accelerate the emergence of a multipolar international system, with China, the EU, India, and regional powers filling the void. Two, allied networks may fragment, giving rise to minilateral groupings centred on shared regional or economic interests rather than US leadership. Three, China’s influence in Latin America and the Indo-Pacific will likely expand as US engagement becomes more selective and transactional. Nevertheless, the analyst in Anquan Neican, predicts that “it will intensify major-power competition and may drive global economic and technological systems toward bloc-based fragmentation.” Four, it will weaken global governance mechanisms. Global norms will become more contested, as the US abandons the liberal value framework that underpinned post-war international institutions.
In effect, the 2025 NSS marks the formal end of the era in which the United States acted as a self-appointed guarantor of global order. The world that emerges from this transition will be more pluralistic, more economically integrated with China, and more ideologically diverse, but also more fragmented and less predictable. China, as argued by Wang Peng, will “maintain strategic composure, consolidate its internal foundations, break through the targeted containment and expand its strategic space.”
