The new United States National Security Strategy (NSS), released on 4 December, represents the most profound reorientation of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, with far-reaching implications for the international order. By explicitly breaking with the dogmas of globalism and (unilateral) free trade, and abandoning the project of global liberal hegemony, the document enshrines a strategic shift rooted in realism, balance of power, geographical selectivity, and the prioritised defence of the national territory and the Western Hemisphere.
Before moving to a more detailed analysis of the NSS, we should note its first materialisation: “Operation Absolute Resolve”, conducted in the early hours of 3 January, on Venezuelan territory. The operation resulted in the destruction of military, communications and weapons systems within the South American country, as well as the capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, an accomplice in crimes of terrorism and international drug trafficking.
What happened in Caracas is less relevant from a specific military tactical perspective than as a fundamental change in the paradigm of interactions between the United States and hostile powers worldwide, and in the Western Hemisphere in particular. Following a military operation lasting about 90 minutes, the US effectively placed under its virtual custody oil reserves equivalent to 303 billion barrels (USD 17 tn at current prices). The action signals the end of the (poorly used) broad strategic autonomy that Latin American countries have enjoyed for the past 35 years.
For Latin American and global leaders alike – whether allies or adversaries – the operation triggered a brutal repricing of the cost of opposing United States strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere. This reality would not have escaped any regional capital, from Mexico City to Brasília, and could have been anticipated by a careful reading of the National Security Strategy, published nearly a month before the military operation in Venezuela.
Returning to the analysis: at the heart of the proposed strategic reorientation is a clear rejection of the idea that the US must sustain the international order as its primary political, military and economic guarantor – a role thought to have weakened the country, drained resources, and increased the risk of involvement in great power wars. In this scenario, Washington redefines its role as that of a great power that recognises limits, chooses priorities, and accepts the logic of a multipolar world.
Yet – and this is revealing – the NSS was met in Brazil with near-total silence from the media, as if a structural change in the strategy of the world’s leading power were an irrelevant detail.
This indifference is not accidental. It exposes the precariousness of Brazilian strategic debate, marked by ideological reflexes, rhetorical attachment, bureaucratic careerism disguised as strategic commitment, empty diplomatic formulas (such as the simplistic defence of multilateralism as an end in itself and the ideologically selective application of international law), and a profound inability to think about power, hierarchy and conflict in concrete terms – reflecting the absence of a clear direction for a nation that insists on connecting to the world without understanding it.
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Strategy as choice: less ambition, more focus
The starting point of the NSS is a blunt diagnosis: by trying to transform virtually any international issue into a vital interest, the US ended up prioritising nothing. This unlimited expansion of the external agenda diluted resources, eroded domestic support and generated prolonged wars with no proportional gains.
Examples of this costly, dispersive strategy include the US military presence in Afghanistan (2001–2021), the Second Gulf War (2003), and American involvement in the regime changes in Libya and Egypt following the “Arab Spring” (2010–2012), as well as in the Syrian Civil War (2011–2024), among others.
The new NSS revives an elementary principle of strategic thinking: strategy requires choice, and to choose is to renounce. Not all countries, regions or causes can be central to US foreign policy. The focus now shifts to protecting core national interests: territorial security, geopolitical stability among great powers, and the preservation of the economic, industrial and technological base that underpins military power.
At this point, the document goes beyond the strictly military field and assumes a decisive political-economic dimension. The strengthening of industry – especially the Scientific, Technological and Defence Industrial Base, including its Artificial Intelligence (AI) dimension – ceases to be seen as a technical or sectoral issue and becomes a central instrument of national power. Without robust autonomous industrial capacities, deterrence loses credibility.
Reindustrialisation, in this context, means generating skilled jobs, rebuilding domestic production chains, reducing external vulnerabilities, and regaining the ability to sustain high-intensity conflicts over extended periods – something increasingly unlikely after decades of deindustrialisation. The premise is that markets are not neutral from a strategic standpoint. Excessive dependence on global supply chains, the outsourcing of production, and the unrestricted submission to the logic of free trade have proved sources of national fragility.
Strategic autonomy, in this view, does not mean autarky, but the state’s capacity to guarantee the material means of its own security. Here, the NSS breaks with the globalist paradigm dominant since the 1990s, arguing that unilateral free trade and industrial offshoring gravely weakened the US Defence Industrial Base, degrading its ability to produce weapons, munitions, air, naval and land platforms, strategic systems, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals on a scale compatible with the needs of a hegemony.
Moreover, it asserts that these policies directly contributed to China’s rise as the US’s main rival – a process fuelled by trillions of dollars in indirect subsidies, privileged access to the American market, and broad technology transfer. What was presented as economic efficiency was, from a strategic standpoint, a monumental transfer of power.
In this context, reversing deindustrialisation, shortening supply chains, and reducing external dependencies become strategic objectives as vital as formal alliances or forward military presence. This reorientation also seeks to attract long-term productive investment, signalling that Washington is willing to coordinate, protect and prioritise critical sectors – from the arms industry to sensitive technologies, encompassing energy, strategic minerals, logistics, semiconductors and AI data centres.
The expected outcome is twofold: to reinforce military capacity and to rebuild the domestic social contract, severely affected by deindustrialisation, precarious work, and the erosion of the middle class.
In theoretical terms, this marks a clear break with the classic principles of economic liberalism, which assume a separation between economy and security and the primacy of market efficiency over strategic considerations. The NSS adopts a logic of the political economy of power, in which the state, industry and national security are inseparable components of a single strategic project.
By refocusing its foreign policy on these pillars, the US abandons the ambition to manage the world and instead concentrates on what is essential to its survival as a great power. Less universal ambition, more strategic focus. Less normative rhetoric, more material capability. This is the logic – uncomfortable for globalists – that structures the new US grand strategy.
From global superpower to hemispheric power
One of the central axes of the document is the redefinition of the US geopolitical role, shifting from a superpower with diffuse global commitments to a predominantly hemispheric power, returning to a strategic logic closer to that before the Second World War. The ambition for universal presence gives way to the explicit prioritisation of the geographical space considered vital to American security.
In this new arrangement, where the Western Hemisphere assumes centrality, priority objectives include border protection, combating transnational crime, controlling migratory flows, and excluding extra-hemispheric powers from acquiring relevant military, logistical or infrastructural positions in the region.
To achieve its objectives, Washington will, if necessary, limit the strategic autonomy of Western Hemisphere countries, particularly in relation to strategic partnerships with extra-regional powers that may threaten American strategic interests.
This approach, seen as an updated Monroe Doctrine adapted to the context of geopolitical competition with China and Russia, removes Latin America and the Caribbean from diplomatic periphery and places them again as direct components of US national security – a trend already visible in the concentration of naval assets in the Caribbean, pressure on the Venezuelan regime (culminating in Operation Absolute Resolve), the renewed strategic valuation of the Panama Canal as a critical logistical chokepoint, and explicit interest in Greenland as a key asset for power projection and Arctic surveillance.
Consistent with this logic, the strategy anticipates a structural redistribution of US military forces. Permanent military presence in Europe and the Middle East is likely to be reduced, while resources, capabilities and strategic attention are progressively reallocated to the defence of the national territory and the Western Hemisphere. This is, in essence, a geographical contraction of American power – not out of weakness, but as a strategic choice.
China and Russia: realism, strategic accommodation and the return of the balance of power
Perhaps no change is more revealing of the break promoted by the new NSS than its simultaneous reinterpretation of relations with China and Russia. Unlike the 2017 NSS, and especially that adopted under the Biden administration, the document abandons the language of existential threat, ideological crusade, and permanent confrontation between democracies and autocracies.
China is no longer described as a military pacing challenge or inevitable systemic enemy. Instead, it is characterised as an economic and technological competitor, while the NSS advocates peaceful coexistence, trade reciprocity and regulated competition, rather than a comprehensive military containment strategy in the Indi-Pacific. This is a deliberate choice: Washington recognises that direct escalation with Beijing would exponentially increase the risks of a superpower nuclear conflict, with incalculable human, economic and strategic costs.
This shift contrasts sharply with the Biden administration’s approach, which treated rivalry with China as the near-exclusive organising axis of US foreign policy, expanding military alliances, fostering bloc logic, and deepening Indy-Pacific militarisation – notably through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD, comprising the US, Japan, India and Australia) and the AUKUS partnership (US, Australia and UK). The new NSS rejects this path, considering it unsustainable, dangerous, and paradoxically counterproductive to US interests.
Regarding Russia, the break is even clearer. The logic of structural hostility and permanent containment – dominant since 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and radicalised after the start of the Ukraine war (2022) – is abandoned. In its place, the NSS proposes a pragmatic rapprochement, seeking to transform Moscow from adversary into circumstantial geostrategic partner. The calculation is straightforward: neutralise the Russia–China strategic alignment and restore a minimum of stability to Europe’s security architecture.
Here, the inspiration from classical realism is unmistakable. Just as Henry Kissinger in the 1970s exploited the Sino-Soviet rivalry to preserve global balance, the new NSS recognises that Washington’s greatest strategic mistake in recent decades was to push Moscow into Beijing’s arms. Selective cooperation with Russia, even between actors with profoundly different political values, is presented not as a moral concession but as a strategic imperative.
This explicit return to realism – uncomfortable for globalists, liberal interventionists and neocons – redefines the entire logic of US foreign policy. Competitors are not automatically enemies; adversaries need not be eternal; and regional disputes do not justify the permanent mobilisation of the global military apparatus.
It is in this context that Latin America re-emerges with renewed importance in US strategy. By choosing to accommodate China and Russia on the global board, Washington shifts its focus to where it considers vital: the Western Hemisphere. Containing Chinese, Russian and Iranian presence, controlling strategic routes, critical infrastructure and supply chains, and ensuring the political stability of its immediate periphery become central priorities – with direct and profound implications for Brazil that remain largely not debated.
The deafening silence of Brazilian foreign policy in the face of this reconfiguration reflects the absence of a national grand strategy capable of understanding that the world has returned to being governed by hard choices, power hierarchies and explicit national interests. And in international politics, silence is never neutrality: it is irrelevance.
While Washington redefines its priorities with brutal clarity – rejecting endless wars, accommodating rivals and concentrating power where it deems vital to its national interest – in a realist strategy based on limits, costs and priorities, Brasília remains trapped in slogans, ideological automatisms and a diplomacy devoid of both concepts and content.
The inability to read this strategic inflection and respond with a clear vision of the national interests to be pursued – integrating ends, means, resources and political actors (economic, industrial, military and technological) – represents a first-order political risk. It is precisely this mismatch between Washington’s geopolitical clarity and Brazil’s absence of grand strategy that will be addressed in the second part of this essay.
This article was first published on 04 January 2026 on Gazeta do Povo.
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