On December 4, 2025, the White House released a document that reads less like a foreign-policy roadmap than a farewell statement to the post–Cold War international order. The 2025 National Security Strategy not only reiterates familiar “America First” slogans, it signals a deeper and more consequential shift: a visible retreat from the very institutional and hegemonic architecture that the United States built, financed, and led for nearly eight decades.
In the document, ideas such as the “permanent dominance of the American-led world order” and even “free trade” are openly questioned—almost as if the very mechanisms that once cemented U.S. global primacy are now portrayed as threats to the American middle class. This rhetorical shift is not merely an ideological recalibration; it reflects a deeper strategic contradiction. The United States continues to seek hegemonic power and global influence yet no longer shows willingness to bear the political, institutional, and security costs required to sustain that role.
From a realist perspective, hegemony is not upheld by slogans but by strategic clarity, credible commitments, and the capacity to coordinate allies. The 2025 strategy falters on all three fronts. It simultaneously calls for “strategic stability” with Russia while branding Europe as a symbol of “civilizational decline.” It urges NATO allies to shoulder greater security burdens while questioning their reliability. It celebrates Trump as a “president of peace” even as it openly endorses the use of “lethal force” in cross-border operations. What is presented as a grand strategy amounts instead to a catalogue of unresolved contradictions.
Most fundamentally, the document substitutes strategy with personal promotion. The president is cast not as the leader of an institutional system but as the central hero of peace-making and deal-brokering. Such personalization erodes the structural credibility of U.S. foreign policy. Hegemony endures only when anchored in institutions, not in the temperament or charisma of the individual occupant of the White House.
Ambiguity toward China further illustrates this strategic confusion. Unlike the 2017 strategy document, which declared great-power competition with China and Russia as the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy, the 2025 version reduces the China challenge largely to economic risks and calls for “mutually beneficial relations,” even as it continues technological decoupling and containment policies. These two paths are irreconcilable. Either China is a systemic rival demanding comprehensive strategic competition, or it is an economic partner governed by the logic of cooperation. Attempting to pursue both does not constitute strategy—it amounts to the postponement of decision.
The contradictions are even starker regarding Russia. The document speaks of restoring strategic stability while accusing Europe of ignoring popular support for Ukraine. It advocates limiting NATO expansion without explaining why such concessions should be extended to a power that initiated an unprovoked war. For Europeans, this approach appears less an invitation to peace than a signal of American retreat that leaves the continent with diminishing security guarantees.
The document’s critique of alliances marks perhaps the clearest sign of the erosion of the American hegemonic order. Hegemonic stability theory emphasizes that dominant powers sustain order by providing public goods—security guarantees, open markets, and credible institutions. Yet the 2025 strategy states explicitly that the United States will no longer “carry the burden of global order.” Demanding that NATO members spend five percent of GDP on defense, rather than representing genuine burden-sharing, reads as burden-shifting coupled with political extortion: security becomes a conditional reward for compliance rather than a standing institutional commitment. Such logic hollows alliances from within, since alliances are built on trust, not on transactional accounting.
The document’s ideological posture toward Europe deepens this decay. European societies are accused of censorship, cultural decline, and civilizational weakness, while American conservative values are portrayed as criteria for loyalty within alliances. Security cooperation thus becomes contingent on ideological alignment, undermining predictability and cohesion. The implicit message is clear: future European governments unpopular with Washington may find no guarantee of continued partnership.
The ultimate blow, however, is delivered to the rules-based international order itself. By condemning “transnationalism,” the strategy effectively repudiates the institutions that once enabled the United States to exercise power both legitimately and affordably. These institutions never constrained American sovereignty—they amplified it. Abandoning them means relinquishing tools of long-term influence and replacing them with reliance on raw coercion or short-term transactions. This is not the consolidation of hegemony but the hallmark of hegemonic decline.
The document’s regional postures reinforce this trajectory: reduced military engagement in the Middle East coupled with acceptance of authoritarian realities; a revival of unilateral interventionism in the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine; and in Europe, the demand for greater financial contributions alongside practical distancing from the Ukraine war. These do not form a coherent vision. Rather, they reflect a gradual withdrawal from systematic leadership.
For regional powers, this moment presents both opportunity and danger. Opportunity lies in greater strategic autonomy and diversification of partnerships, allowing national interests to be pursued without exclusive dependence on Washington. Danger lies in the growing unpredictability of the international system. Periods of hegemonic decline have historically been marked by instability, arms races, and miscalculation.
The 2025 National Security Strategy will likely be remembered not as the birth of a new doctrine, but as the moment when the United States quietly abandoned the very idea of “grand strategy.” Its internal contradictions—calling for stability while alienating allies, demanding cooperation while eroding trust, proclaiming peace while threatening force—reflect not merely the preferences of a single administration but the structural limits of American hegemony in a world that is no longer unipolar.
The liberal order built by the United States after 1945 is unraveling not through rebellion by its rivals, but through the disillusionment of its own architect. The central question today is not whether American hegemony is ending, but whether rising powers and regional actors can manage the transition to a multipolar order—or whether the world will descend into a prolonged era of chaos and chronic instability. The answer will shape the future of international politics.