The “America first” approach that the President has always championed is now being expressed in foreign-policy documents as a focus on the Western Hemisphere, which is identified as being particularly important for the issues that most animate his base — the drug trade, energy security, and migration. The rest of the world features as well, but in a manner that is frankly tangential.
China is still viewed as a rival but not as a systemic competitor, merely a challenger that seeks to take the US’ place. It is not viewed as providing an alternative method for organising international relations — or, if it is, this alternative is not seen as worth addressing. The concerns are more direct, of the sort that any state would have about the rise of another that might displace it from certain supply chains and favoured positions.
In systemic competition, the US would seek to ensure that Beijing is not able to create networks with other states that replicate and extend its worldview. It would seek containment. This is how the US approached the Soviet Union, for example. But in a more naïve contestation, it would simply seek to ensure that other countries gave it a “better” deal than China. In one, countries are sought as allies; in the other, they are treated as battlefields.
Europe, meanwhile, is seen not as a force multiplier in systemic competition as it was for 80 years, but as an extension for the US’ own culture wars. The US’ only foreign-policy concerns in Europe are not related to its security but to ensure that its markets create American jobs and profits, and that its own politics is remade in the image of the US’ own right wing.
The rest of the world matters only as a market or as a source of certain raw materials that are not specifically available in the US. This is not a status-quoist view of the world, nor is it radical or aggressive. It is essentially defensive. US interests are defined far more narrowly than earlier, and are more localised. But they will be as aggressively and unilaterally defended as ever, perhaps more. That is precisely what we saw in Venezuela.
The world has to properly reckon with what the withdrawal of the US really means. Empires might be built on blood, but their abrupt withdrawal can leave decades of devastation in its wake as well. Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the agonies of the Middle East since the Ottomans were dethroned, our own Partition — these are all reminders of the painful costs and long shadow of the unplanned end of empire.
The US’ decades-long hegemony was not formally an empire as paranoid campists might have argued, but certainly did some of the things empires do. It created a powerful client class, provided a security umbrella, and occupied crucial spaces in the hierarchy of power that others would not compete for. When these disappear, there will be a human cost.
We are already seeing that in places like Sudan, which is an internal civil war that is fomented and sustained by outside support but one in which the US has no role and apparently no interest. The invasion of Ukraine, a possible attack on Taiwan — even the sudden re-emergence of Pakistan as a security actor in West Asia and Turkey’s attempt to build a Turkic sphere of influence — all these should be viewed as the jostling for position, and consequent security threats, that inevitably follow the departure from the scene of a previously dominant actor.
What is essential is that, on the security side, countries have a clear picture of what the absence of an American security guarantee actually means. What happens if India loses access to US intelligence or its defence supply chains? What can Korea and Japan do together in the Taiwan Strait? Which country in Southeast Asia will be the next target for Chinese influence, and will the US protect it in any way? These are hard questions, but ones which Washington’s withdrawal to the west has rendered essential.
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