China and the US retreat from global primacy

Decline of US global leadership will accelerate the emergence of a multipolar international system, with China, the EU, India, and regional powers filling the void.

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The 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS) marks the most significant doctrinal shift in American statecraft since the end of World War II. For nearly eight decades, successive administrations, Republican and Democratic alike viewed US engagement across the world as indispensable to preserving a liberal international order underwritten by American power. The 2025 strategy decisively abandons this premise.

Instead, it embraces an explicitly regionalist orientation centred on what the NSS frames as the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: the idea that US prosperity and security are best protected not through global leadership but through the consolidation of a fortified Western Hemisphere, with limited and highly selective involvement beyond it. Xinhua pronounces it as more “prioritized” and more pragmatic strategy aimed at “sustaining American hegemony.”

This shift has far-reaching implications not only for US alliances, global governance, and great-power competition but also for the future distribution of geopolitical power. The following analysis explores the central pillars of the new NSS, China's response and assesses the likely international consequences.

One, at the core of the 2025 NSS is a striking reorientation, pronounced as the “most disruptive adjustment” by Wang Peng, Research Fellow at the School of Marxism, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The United States is reducing its responsibilities as a global power, narrowing its priorities to the Western Hemisphere, a kind of course correction comparing earlier flawed choices. Unlike the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which sought to deter European intervention in Latin America as a precondition for US expansion, the “Trump corollary” aims primarily at domestic insulation.