The new US National Security Strategy, the first of its kind during President Donald Trump’s second term, was released today and stands out for acknowledging that China is no longer arriving on the world stage; it has already arrived.
The National Security Strategy, which presidents typically release once each term, offers a formal statement of the U.S.’s global priorities.
The 33-page document offers a rare, formal, and coherent window into Trump’s worldview, his priorities, and his view of the global geopolitical chessboard, as his public statements and frequent Twitter outbursts can often seem confusing and self-contradictory.
The report is set to influence how the US government allocates funds and manages its relations with other countries.
Given Trump’s realist bent, the report stands out for its frank admission that China is already a near-peer competitor of the US.
Furthermore, the report stresses that challenging China in the Indo-Pacific, maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, preserving the status quo in Taiwan, stabilising relations with India to counter China, and maintaining US supremacy in the Western hemisphere, a Trump Corollary to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, remains the top priority of the Trump administration.
Besides, the report exhorts US allies to increase defense spending, underlines the importance of NATO countries raising defense spending to 5% of their GDP, and controlling immigration to the US.
However, the focus of the report is on managing the China challenge, underlined by the space the report gives to China, over six pages of the 33-page report.
The China Challenge: How Trump Plans To Tame The Dragon
The China section begins by highlighting what the Trump administration believes to be the historical mistakes of the last five decades of US policy towards Beijing.
“President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called “rules-based international order.””
However, “this did not happen. China got rich and powerful, and used its wealth and power to its considerable advantage.”
“American elites—over four successive administrations of both political parties—were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial,” the report says, adding that since the Chinese economy reopened to the world in 1979, commercial relations between our two countries have been and remain fundamentally unbalanced.
The report acknowledges that China is already a near-peer competitor to US power.
“What began as a relationship between a mature, wealthy economy and one of the world’s poorest countries has transformed into one between near-peers, even as, until very recently, America’s posture remained rooted in those past assumptions.”
The report also highlights how China is adapting to Trump’s tariff policy since his first term.
“China adapted to the shift in U.S. tariff policy that began in 2017 in part by strengthening its hold on supply chains, especially in the world’s low- and middle-income (i.e., per capita GDP $13,800 or less) countries—among the greatest economic battlegrounds of the coming decades.”
It underlines Trump’s often-repeated complaints against China’s unfair trade practices, among them, “Predatory, state-directed subsidies and industrial strategies; Job destruction and deindustrialization; Grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage; Threats against our supply chains that risk U.S. access to critical resources, including minerals and rare earth elements; Exports of fentanyl precursors that fuel America’s opioid epidemic; and Propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion.”
For these reasons, the report highlights that the tariff policy against China will remain in place.
“Going forward, we will rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.”
India’s Role In Countering China Challenge
Notwithstanding the ongoing bitter conflict with India over tariffs and New Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil, the report highlights India’s importance in countering China.
“We must continue to improve commercial (and other) relations with India to encourage New Delhi to contribute to Indo-Pacific security, including through continued quadrilateral cooperation with Australia, Japan, and the United States (“the Quad”).”
Notably, this year’s QUAD summit was scheduled to take place in India in November, but it has been postponed indefinitely.
“Moreover, we will also work to align the actions of our allies and partners with our joint interest in preventing domination by any single competitor nation,” the report said.
Interestingly, the report is released on the same day that Russian President Vladimir Putin is in India.
Furthermore, the report once again repeats the claim that Trump helped negotiate a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, a claim India has repeatedly rejected, and a source of friction between India-US relations.
The Taiwan Question
The report underlines the US commitment to maintaining the status quo in Taiwan and its criticality for the overall US policy in the Indo-Pacific.
“There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters.”
“Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the U.S. economy. Hence deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”
The report repeats the US commitment to the status quo on the Taiwan question.
“We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
However, the report underscores that the US cannot manage the China challenge in the Indo-Pacific alone and highlights the importance of US allies.
“We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain. But the American military cannot, and should not have to, do this alone. Our allies must step up and spend—and more importantly do—much more for collective defense.”
However, while the US will remain committed to the Indo-Pacific, the report makes clear that its priority will be maintaining its supremacy in the Western Hemisphere.
This prioritization of the Western Hemisphere can also be read as a subtle acknowledgement that the US could no longer maintain its primacy globally.
Western Hemisphere: The Trump Corollary To The Monroe Doctrine
The report says that after years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.
This policy declaration assumes significance in the light of ongoing hostilities between the US and Venezuela.
The Monroe Doctrine is a U.S. foreign policy established in 1823 that opposed European colonialism in Latin America and underlined the US primacy in the Western Hemisphere. It stated that any further European colonization or intervention in the Americas would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States.
In almost similar language, the report declares that the US will not allow “non-Hemispheric competitors” to influence the region.
“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
However, there is one crucial difference.
While the Monroe Doctrine was directed at the European colonial powers in the 19th century, in today’s context, this policy declaration seems more aimed at China, which has dramatically increased its strategic investments in Latin America.
While the present report simultaneously underscores US primacy in the Western Hemisphere, as well as reiterates US commitment to the Indo-Pacific, security analysts have expressed concern that, over the long term, this policy could mature into a silent acknowledgement of China’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific, in return for a commitment from Beijing not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere.
In fact, even in the present report, one finds subtle acknowledgements of the fact that the US can no longer maintain its dominance over the entire world.
“After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.”
“Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the report says.
Furthermore, the report says that US elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens, to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.
“They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.”
“They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. “
“In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.”
There can hardly be a more concise acknowledgement of the fact that slowly but certainly, the US is coming to a realization that it can no longer dominate the entire world, or play the role of global cop.
In the future, will this mean US domination only in the Western Hemisphere, and Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific?
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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- He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com
