The virtue of America First Sovereign realism is the future

For more than 30 years, Washington pursued a strategy built on globalist illusions: that America could serve as the policeman of the world, that it could enlarge Nato endlessly, extend security guarantees without limit, and launch interventions to remake societies in its image. These projects — sold under the pretext of the “rules-based international order” — have drained their strength while hollowing out the republic.

Now, though, the unipolar moment that began in 1989 is over. Yet what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos — but a return to normalcy. The international system is reverting to its natural condition: a post-hegemonic, multi-nodal, and regionalised world where sovereign, civilisational powers coexist and balance one another within their historical spheres of interest. Elsewhere, I have called this process the Great Transition, one which emphasises the re-emergence of geopolitical plurality and cultural multiplicity after a brief, artificial experiment in universalism.

If there is any coherence to a Trump doctrine, it is in recognising this reality. And in this context, the Pentagon’s new “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) offers a much-welcome shift. Accepting the return of history and geopolitics, the proposed draft affirms the need to adapt to the changing international environment. It prioritises defending the homeland and the contested boundaries of “American Sphere” from extra-regional interference — over the global military containment of China or Russia. Yet many in Washington, and even some Trump appointees, will abhor this shift.

From the moment he came down that golden escalator, Trump declared war on the foreign policy blob — the bipartisan consensus that treated America as a sucker, paying for others’ security, underwriting institutions that constrained us, and intervening in conflicts that made us less secure. Whatever one thinks of his style or execution, his insistence on “America First” was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American statecraft is to its own people.

Still, these welcome bouts of realism are not only bound to be interrupted by the expected fervors of moralism and tired shibboleths about US global leadership, but also by a deeper, more entrenched force: globalism. This globalism is less about free trade or international cooperation and more reflects a broad cognitive bias. It is not a coherent ideology but an ideational reflex so deeply institutionalised that it pervades our foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even some among the MAGA counter-establishment. It is not a cabal to be purged but a mentality that saturates the very air of Washington.

This mindset itself manifests in two forms. The first is the liberal universalism of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organisations, and liberal democracy: all at gunpoint and in pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream of global homogeneity. In the post-Trump era, however, its more enduring variant is the militarised globalism of figures like John Bolton. This latter group insists on permanent unipolarity and American unilateralism, achieved via the primacy of the US military.

The Boltonians — and their acolytes in Jerusalem — weaponise a cartoonish idea of “Western civilisation” in a Manichaean struggle against a caricatured notion of global barbarism and international terrorism. The liberal internationalists Trump deposed championed the universalism of US values and yearned for the “woke imperium”; for the Boltonians and closeted Neocons who successfully infiltrated the MAGA-verse, the universalism of imperial force reigns supreme. Nevertheless, both groups are globalist, both are dogmatic defenders of US global hegemony, and both find common cause in mortgaging American sovereignty at the altar of ideology.

Consider Ukraine. Nato expansion — promoted as the defence of liberal order — has in fact destabilised Europe and entangled America in an attritional war with no clear endgame. By offering promises America was neither willing nor able to fulfil, Washington walked Ukraine down a primrose path that left it devastated, Russia emboldened, and Europe vassalised. Instead of securing stability, then, Nato expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into another open-ended commitment very far from its vital interests.

Or take the Middle East, where the Boltonians have hoisted their flag most strongly. Just weeks ago, the United States found itself dragged into the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran. Despite the IDF’s heavy bombardment of Iranian military targets and nuclear enrichment facilities, shadowed by America’s own strikes, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, technological know-how, or its will to rebuild. Iran emerged bloodied but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Yet Washington reflexively positioned itself as a co-belligerent — risking escalation, draining munitions, and distracting from higher priorities.

Besides the fact that both Europe and the Middle East are peripheral to America’s main strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, as noted in the NDS, perhaps the highest priority for the savvy American strategist is ensuring US competitiveness in the 21st century through a project of national renewal. To remain a great power, Washington must urgently upgrade its infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, while creating regionally integrated supply chains for essential items like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and microchips.

Instead, by remaining enmeshed in endless conflicts abroad, America has accumulated $37.5 trillion in debt, devastating communities and harming the middle class. For most Americans, bombing the Houthis — whom they have never even met in real life — to protect maritime trade to Europe could never justify the costs. Additionally, rampant US intervention has serious military consequences, compounding their societal and economic impacts. In June, over less than two weeks, the US spent billions to defend Israel, depleting its global stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors like THAAD, even as it exposed serious vulnerabilities in its munitions procurement and overall military readiness. All this, it goes without saying, makes America less secure.

In any case, these examples reveal the deeper truth. Universalism in all its forms — whether liberal or militarised — erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the righteous spirit that undergirds anti-hegemonic movements like America First. It collapses the diversity of civilisations into a single template, one to be imposed by force and maintained by empire. It multiplies and extends permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its managerial class, along the way betraying the republic’s founding principles.

Even strands of neorealism, such as John Mearsheimer’s brand of offensive realism, fall prey to this globalist bias: by globalising great-power competition and advocating for China’s military containment, they portray international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic, Hobbesian race for hegemony, everywhere and forever. But this, too, is not realism; it is rationalised universalism. And it has led Washington, like Athens in Thucydides’ history, towards imperial overstretch and decay.

Ultimately, a state can be a conservative commonwealth serving its people, or an empire enriching its special interests, war oligarchs, and security-rentier class. But it cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalist reflex, has chosen empire. In fact, our “bipartisan” foreign policy consensus has corrupted and redefined the “national interest” itself, turning it into a justification for permanent war.

The danger today is that the globalist bias — be it liberal or realist, Neocon or Boltonian — will keep us chained to the illusions of unipolarity, luring us with enchanting calls to hegemony like the sirens of Greek mythology. Fixating our gaze on the 20th century, and the postwar status quo, they reduce the world to a zero-sum battlespace between perpetual black and white blocs — encouraging endless military intervention while resurrecting old dogmas to justify them. In short, the globalist cognitive bias prevents us from conceiving a cohesive grand strategy for the post-hegemonic era that has now arrived, keeping us vulnerable and hastening our decline.

What the country needs now, instead, is something I’d call sovereign realism: a radical foreign policy unburdened by ideology, freed from the conceits of universalism, and grounded in the conservation of American strength. That means privileging sovereignty over universalist crusades, regional balances of power over global policing, selective protection over blanket primacy, and renewal at home as the foundation of strength abroad. It means diplomacy without illusions: talking to adversaries and allies alike based on reciprocity and strategic empathy, not sanctimony or moralism.

Above all, it means adopting a new approach that shapes itself to the polycentric world at hand, rather than resisting it with futile bids for unipolarity. The Great Transition is not a threat to be conquered, then, but a reality to be navigated. For, in the end, the postwar “international community” was little more than a projection, international law a polite fiction, and globalisation artificial and contrived. What lies ahead is not disorder but the world as it truly is — a concert of civilisational powers insisting, as America itself does, on their own sovereignty and resisting a managerial empire: whether run from Washington or Beijing.

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