America alone: New US strategy dumps on the world

TOI Correspondent from Washington: At a time the Trump administration is attriting India’s security and economy with punitive tariffs and indulgence towards hostile neighbors, the new US 2025 National Security Strategy wants to enlist New Delhi to prevent domination by “any single competitor nation” while advancing its own primacy.

The 29-page report released on Friday marks a significant reorientation of US foreign policy in generations, rejecting the bipartisan internationalist framework that has guided Washington since the end of the Cold War. In doing so, it fundamentally redefines America’s posture toward Asia, India, and the Indo-Pacific, recasting it to advance US interests, seemingly at the expense of allies and partners it ostensibly views as vassal states.


Where previous iterations of the NSS emphasised alliances, trade liberalisation, multilateralism, and the maintenance of a rules-based international order, the 2025 document characterises such commitments as the misguided work of “our elites,” who allegedly saddled Americans with an unsustainable burden. It argues that successive administrations built “a vast military, regulatory and foreign-aid apparatus” while enabling allies to “offload the cost of their defence onto the American people.”

In stark contrast, the new NSS is blunt in announcing what it calls a “Necessary, welcome correction”: a hard pivot toward unilateral action, economic nationalism, and the uncompromising pursuit of “core national interests” — sovereignty, homeland defence, self-reliance, and domestic industrial strength.

Gone is the aspirational language of values promotion, democracy assistance, or stewardship of the global commons. In its place is an isolationist, highly transactional framework that explicitly rejects the foreign-policy consensus of the Obama, Bush, and Biden eras. Essentially, it offers a foreign policy of withdrawal wrapped in the language of national resurrection, with a focus on domestic economic renewal and sovereignty.

The change is particularly stark for India, which finds four mentions in the report, including the discredited claim of Trump having brought about a truce in war with Pakistan.

“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”),” the report says, mirthlessly prefacing its outlook with that assertion that the US “must work with our treaty allies and partners to counteract predatory economic practices and use our combined economic power to help safeguard our prime position in the world economy” – this at a time Washington has kneecapped India’s economy with punitive tariffs and sanctions while kissing up to China.

Elsewhere, the report says America should “enlist our European and Asian allies and partners, including India, to cement and improve our joint positions in the Western Hemisphere and, with regard to critical minerals, in Africa,” forming “coalitions that use our comparative advantages in finance and technology to build export markets with cooperating countries.” By most accounts, the US is attriting any advantage India has in finance and technology.

Broadly, the NSS reframes India as a diplomatic challenge to be managed rather than as a strategic partner, as viewed by previous administrations, including during Trump 1. Instead of treating New Delhi as a counterweight in balancing China, the NSS positions India as a participant whose contributions to regional security must be coaxed rather than cultivated through shared values or long-term alignment.

Remarkably for a country that was largely built by European settlers with land stolen from Native Americans, the report also takes on the burden of protecting western civilisation, asserting the US wants to “support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilisational self-confidence and Western identity,” warning of a continent where “certain Nato members will become majority non-European.”

The NSS was widely panned both by Trump critics, as expected, but also from MAGA nativists. While Europeanists lamented that the report made no mention of the draconian authoritarianism of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, or any other country and the only region that the NSS accuses of "anti-democratic" policies is Europe, MAGA hardliners pointed out that there was “zero mention of the threat Islamic terrorism poses to our national security.”

But the one thing everyone agreed on: the 2025 NSS makes it clear that the era of the US “shouldering the world’s burdens” is over. It will now march to its own tune -- even if it is out of tune.