Power Without Certainty: America at a Strategic Crossroads

The newly released US National Security Strategy invites neither instant judgement nor definitive conclusions. It is a document that demands to be returned to over time, tested against unfolding events rather than taken at face value. Any early commentary can only be provisional, a first attempt to sense the direction of American strategic thought as it confronts a sharply altered global landscape. 

The confidence with which the document rests on intelligence-based threat assessment is unmistakable. Yet American history repeatedly reminds us that intelligence accuracy has never guaranteed strategic wisdom. Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all unfolded under the assurance of intelligence-backed judgement. The deeper failures in each lay not in information collection but in misreading political will, societal endurance, and an adversary’s capacity to absorb punishment while reshaping the battlefield of legitimacy. The present strategy too proceeds from firm assumptions about power trajectories and adversarial intent. Whether these reflect a true reading of an emerging world, or merely rationalise a politically chosen direction, remains the most unsettling question of all.

Language of Partnerships
Running through the document is a clear preference for transactional relationships—alliances measured less by shared values and more by visible contributions. The emphasis on “fair sharing” of security responsibilities is unmistakable. Yet it remains difficult to determine how much of this reflects a settled institutional shift and how much flows from the personal worldview of the current President.

The distinction matters. If personality-driven, it may prove transient; if institutionalised, it signals a far deeper reorientation of how Washington now views alliances. The US has traditionally drawn strength from the reliability of long-term commitments and the reassurance supplied by continuity across administrations. That continuity now appears less assured than at any time since the end of the Second World War.

The strategy implicitly acknowledges a deep unease with the legacy of the post–Cold War order. For three decades, globalisation was not merely an economic phenomenon but a strategic doctrine—the belief that integration would neutralize rivalry, that interdependence would soften competition, and that US leadership of open systems would permanently entrench American primacy. The US itself architected China’s re-entry into global economic structures to counter Soviet power, with little reflection on what a resurgent China might become thereafter. It championed financial openness and industrial dispersal without fully calculating the eventual costs to its own manufacturing base, technological sovereignty, and middle-class stability.

With hindsight, it now appears that some of the most consequential American strategic choices carry a delayed, self-altering logic. Decisions that secure dominance in one era can generate formidable challengers in the next. The present strategy reflects recognition that globalization, once an instrument of unchallenged leadership, has also redistributed power in ways that now constrain American freedom of action.

Primacy and Its Price
At the heart of the document lies its most revealing tension. For over 70 years, American primacy was inseparable from American cost‐underwriting. The United States did not merely lead; it paid the strategic premium required for stability. It guaranteed sea lanes, underwrote deterrence in Europe and East Asia during the Cold War and after, absorbed disproportionate military risk, and normalised the expectation that ultimate security insurance flowed from Washington. It also remained the single largest contributor to the United Nations system, enabling peacekeeping across volatile regions. The present strategy challenges this inheritance. It seeks to preserve the authority of leadership while reducing the liabilities of guardianship.

The US now wishes to remain the senior partner everywhere while pressing partners to assume a far greater share of the burden. History offers little encouragement for such an aspiration. Leadership has never existed without unequal obligations, and deterrence has never functioned on balanced cost accountancy. The attempt to separate strategic primacy from strategic underwriting introduces a paradox that runs through the entire document. If the US no longer guarantees security unconditionally, what precisely binds others to accept its geopolitical seniority? Authority without ultimate insurance risks being tested, negotiated, and eventually discounted.

This paradox sharpens when one considers the document’s implicit shift from dominance to denial as the organising aim of American power. For much of the post–Cold War era, US strategy sought to shape outcomes, control escalation, and define regional orders. The new emphasis is more modest in appearance, yet more revealing in substance; preventing adversaries from winning has replaced the ambition of decisive American control. Denial is a strategy pursued by states that accept contestation as permanent and parity as increasingly unavoidable. The unspoken implication is that the US may already have accepted a world it no longer fully commands; that could be a reality too.  If so, this strategy represents not restored supremacy, but a recalibration toward managing relative decline without openly acknowledging it.

Shape of Coming Order
Nowhere does this recalibration carry greater consequence than in the question of Taiwan. For decades, the island has been a litmus test of American credibility in East Asia, sustained by a carefully cultivated ambiguity that deterred both unilateral Taiwanese defiance and Chinese coercion. That equilibrium is now under strain. The strategy’s language reflects not certainty but risk management, suggesting an American posture increasingly oriented toward managing escalation rather than guaranteeing prevention.

What was once treated as a bright red line risks being reframed as a grey zone. This need not imply imminent abandonment, but it does signal a shift—from assurance to exposure. If Taiwan is ultimately lost to conflict or negotiated absorption, the consequences will extend far beyond the Taiwan Strait, reshaping how allies interpret American promises in the age of contested primacy.

India appears as a valued Indo-Pacific partner, yet the relationship carries deeper complexity than formal phrasing conveys. The US is comfortable with allies and junior partners; it has always been less at ease with autonomous poles rooted in civilizational identity rather than ideological alignment. India’s strategic personality does not sit easily within alliance frameworks built for bloc discipline. Its preference for partnerships over alignments, and for issue-based convergence rather than permanent entanglement, introduces a variable American strategy finds difficult to domesticate. 

An Indian pole with global ambitions is not merely an asset in balancing China; it is also an independent centre of gravity capable of shaping coalitions and pursuing interests not always congruent with Washington’s preferences.

Seen in this light, the new US National Security Strategy is best understood not as a finished doctrine but as a document in transition, reflecting a country negotiating the distance between the world it once structured and the one now emerging. It reflects anxiety about the consequences of past certainties, the resilience of alliances forged under very different conditions, and the rise of civilizational powers whose timelines do not match electoral cycles.

This first reading suggests the document is less a declaration of triumph than an admission of complexity. It exposes the tensions within American power as it confronts a world moving beyond unipolar comfort. The United States is now apparently writing strategy for a world it does not dominate with unquestioned authority—a world that resists control, redistributes power, and compels even the strongest state to recalibrate its ambitions against the realities of endurance.