by Our Defence Affairs Editor
The 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States published this week is framed as a repudiation of what it calls decades of “laundry lists of wishes” that “misjudged what we should want,” but beneath its rhetoric lies a deeper revelation: an obsessive fixation on China that bleeds into every regional prescription, distorting American engagement around the globe. The document insists that “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China,” claiming that opening U.S. markets merely enabled Beijing to “get rich and powerful” while “American elites… were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial.” This diagnosis becomes the ideological fulcrum for a sweeping attempt to reengineer global politics through coercive economics, revived spheres of influence, and an almost atavistic prioritization of sovereignty that diverges sharply from earlier strategic traditions.
Throughout the text, China is treated not only as a rival but as a kind of omnipresent contamination. Even discussions ostensibly about the Western Hemisphere quickly turn toward the danger of “non-Hemispheric competitors” acquiring “strategically vital assets,” a euphemism clearly aimed at Beijing. The strategy’s so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine goes further, promising to “deny” outside powers the ability to “position forces or other threatening capabilities” anywhere in the region. If earlier administrations invoked the Monroe Doctrine sparingly, largely to signal broad opposition to hostile military intrusion, this version widens the aperture to encompass infrastructure, finance, technology, and even “ownership of key assets.” The result is a doctrine less about territorial security than about freezing out Chinese commercial expansion through aggressive intervention in the economic decisions of sovereign countries.
This marks a dramatic departure from past American grand strategy. During the Cold War, containment rested on the premise articulated by George Kennan that U.S. power should be “patient, firm, and vigilant,” yet sufficiently restrained to avoid trying “to influence by threats or bluster the internal developments” of other societies. By contrast, Trump’s strategy boasts of using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to reshape entire national economies in the Western Hemisphere. It mandates that ambassadors become economic enforcers, charged with “pressure” and “incentives” to “discourage collaboration” with foreign competitors. The line between diplomacy and economic compulsion is deliberately effaced.
The document’s Asia section reveals the full extent of this strategic metamorphosis. Here, China is cast not simply as a competitor but as the gravitational center of every threat. The strategy laments that commercial relations have become “fundamentally unbalanced,” asserting that China relies on “predatory, state-directed subsidies,” “industrial espionage,” and “propaganda,” while also “exporting fentanyl precursors” that exacerbate America’s opioid epidemic. These accusations—some widely corroborated, others more contestable—serve to justify a new economic paradigm. All trade with China, the strategy insists, must be “balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors,” and the United States must “restore American economic independence” through tariffs, supply-chain repatriation, and alliances converted into instruments of economic blockade.
More striking is the claim that halting China’s rise requires a coordinated restructuring of global markets. Allies are instructed to “rebalance China’s economy toward household consumption,” a demand that effectively asks foreign democracies to manipulate their economic policies to engineer the internal transformation of a rival state. This sharply contradicts the strategy’s earlier moralizing about respecting “separate and equal station” and avoiding the imposition of “democratic or other social change” on foreign societies. The principle of sovereignty, invoked throughout the document, thus reveals itself not as a universal norm but as a shield for American exceptionalism and a cudgel against adversaries.
The obsession with China’s economic influence metastasizes into an extraordinary directive: U.S. capital markets should be mobilized to “bind” the currencies of low-income countries to the dollar, embedding them in structures that foreclose reliance on Chinese finance. The strategy treats global development as a competitive battlefield in which infrastructure financing, mineral extraction, and digital networks are all arenas of geopolitical struggle. It boasts of the United States’ ability to “tip decisions” through “inducements” such as high-tech cooperation or defense sales. If Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative has been criticized as debt-laden statecraft, Washington here proposes a similarly transactional system, framed not as exploitation but as the enlightened alternative.
This China-centric worldview reshapes how the strategy approaches Europe as well. Though the document castigates the continent for “regulatory suffocation,” “cratering birthrates,” and a looming “civilizational erasure,” its underlying concern is that Europe may remain economically intertwined with China. References to Germany’s chemical industry “building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China” and to European officials’ “unrealistic expectations” about the war in Ukraine are deployed as evidence that Europe must be forced to align its economic posture with Washington’s Sino-skepticism. Even the call for ending “the perception… of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance” serves as a prelude to insisting that Europe redirect its strategic attention toward “mercantilist overcapacity, technological theft, cyber espionage, and other hostile economic practices.” The subtext is unmistakable: Europe must be reoriented away from Russia as its primary specter and toward the Chinese challenge prioritized by Washington.
Even the Middle East section, ostensibly focused on shifting burdens and consolidating peace, is refracted through the China lens. The region is envisioned as a platform for “international investment” in advanced technologies—nuclear energy, AI, defense systems—that must remain anchored to American firms and standards. The text celebrates Gulf states’ preference for “America’s superior AI technology,” subtly implying that steering their modernization away from Chinese alternatives is now a strategic imperative. The strategy’s call to abandon “hectoring” about internal governance norms is partly an appeal to maintain influence in states increasingly courted by Beijing’s non-conditional diplomacy.
What emerges across these pages is not merely a reassessment of China policy but an attempt to rebuild the entire global order around resisting Chinese influence. Every region—Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East—is reframed as a front in a diffuse strategic confrontation. Even when addressing migration, industrial policy, or cultural vitality, the language circles back to foreign adversaries who “hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.” The narrative suggests that China is not just a competitor abroad but a corrosive force reaching into the American domestic sphere.
Yet this framing carries risks. By casting China as a ubiquitous antagonist, the strategy courts the danger of overextension—precisely the error it accuses earlier administrations of committing. It demands expansive economic coercion while professing to avoid “global domination.” It invokes sovereignty while intruding deeply into the economic decisions of other nations. It celebrates restraint while seeking to “enlist,” “pressure,” and reshape entire continents. The result is a vision of American power that is neither isolationist nor interventionist but something more paradoxical: a hyper-engaged nationalism, animated by a rival it cannot stop invoking.
In its attempt to portray this as a “focused definition of the national interest,” the strategy inadvertently reveals the challenge of building a coherent worldview around a single adversary. For all its denunciations of past misjudgments, the document risks becoming the very thing it condemns—a sprawling catalogue of threats, anxieties, and ambitions, unified not by a constructive vision but by the specter of China that it cannot release.
