Global geopolitics

American Primacy, Structural Entrenchment, and the Path to Permanent Conflict

On 8 March 1992, the New York Times published a front-page report under the headline “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” based on a leaked draft of the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance for fiscal years 1994 to 1999. The document, drafted under the supervision of Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and co-authored with I. Lewis Libby, described the United States as the world’s sole superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union and made the prevention of any rival power’s emergence, whether in Europe, Asia, or the former Soviet space, the central, organising objective of American grand strategy. The draft stated that the United States should be prepared to act alone, that it should maintain military strength beyond challenge, and that it should preempt threats from states seeking to acquire weapons capable of projecting regional power. The public backlash was sufficient to prompt a redraft that softened phrases about acting “unilaterally” to “with only limited additional help,” a cosmetic revision that Libby justified to Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, on the grounds that such formulations were “more defensible” while preserving identical strategic substance.

Every American administration since 1992 has, in its actual conduct if not always in its public rhetoric, followed the logic of that document. The Clinton administration pursued NATO expansion eastward despite assurances given to Soviet negotiators during German reunification talks. The George W. Bush administration codified the preemption doctrine formally in the 2002 National Security Strategy, drawing on Wolfowitz’s 1992 framework almost verbatim. The Obama administration prosecuted drone campaigns across seven countries simultaneously and oversaw the destabilisation of Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. The Biden administration deepened the Ukraine proxy war, formally contracted the Pentagon’s satellite infrastructure with SpaceX, and presided over the largest expansion of military aid to a foreign belligerent since the Second World War. The Trump administration, on returning to office in January 2025, published its own National Security Strategy on 4 December 2025, which the Stimson Center described as replacing “one unsustainable vision of primacy with another,” substituting liberal internationalism’s institutional architecture for what the document itself called a “burden sharing network” with the United States as convener and supporter, a formulation that means, in operational terms, outsourcing the costs of confrontation to politically captured allies while preserving Washington’s control over the strategic objectives being pursued. The Chinese government’s analytical community read the document as most Western commentators did not: not as evidence of American retreat, but as a blueprint for leaner, more sustainable primacy that exploited proxies more efficiently than previous strategies had managed.

The structural driver behind this continuity is the corporate-financial architecture that commands American foreign and domestic policy regardless of electoral outcome. The United States military budget reached one trillion dollars in fiscal year 2026 through a combination of the defence appropriations act and the reconciliation provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law on 4 July 2025. The Trump administration subsequently requested one and a half trillion dollars for fiscal year 2027, representing a forty-four percent increase over the 2026 figure and exceeding, as a share of projected GDP, any military spending level since the Cold War period of the mid-1980s. The White House fact sheet accompanying the request stated that the increase “approaches the historic levels just prior to World War II.” The House Armed Services Committee introduced a complementary $1.14 trillion defence authorisation bill on 26 May 2026. The Iran conflict’s operational costs are not included in either figure. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics are the primary beneficiaries of contracts flowing from that budget. Each of these corporations operates on a shareholder primacy model under which legally enforceable obligations to generate increasing quarterly and annual returns drive every material strategic decision. A corporation structured to maximise shareholder returns through defence contracts has a structural interest in the persistence of the conditions that generate those contracts. Permanent military readiness and perpetual conflict are not unfortunate side effects of this arrangement; they are its functional requirements.

The ideology that sustains public consent for this expenditure is American exceptionalism, a doctrine without legal foundation or institutional accountability that asserts the United States possesses not merely the right but a moral and near-theological obligation to exercise global hegemony. The practical function of American exceptionalism in political life is to convert what are straightforwardly corporate and financial interests into the language of civilisational duty, allowing the populations that pay for the strategy through taxation, debt accumulation, and the lives of military personnel to experience those costs as patriotic contribution rather than extraction. The mechanism is comprehensively described in the academic literature on manufacturing consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s 1988 analysis of how media systems serve institutional power remains the foundational text, but its operational form in 2026 consists of the daily political spectacle of congressional hearings, cable news cycles, think tank publications, and presidential social media posts that consume public attention while the structural decisions about military procurement, alliance management, and adversary containment are made in Senate Armed Services Committee testimony, Pentagon budget submissions, and RAND Corporation research briefs that most of the population never reads.

The argument that Donald Trump represented a departure from this architecture was, in retrospect, precisely as credible as the document record always indicated it would be. The RAND Corporation’s 2019 report Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground was commissioned and published during the first Trump administration. Force Design 2030, the Marine Corps restructuring that dismantled all tank battalions and rebuilt the Corps as a maritime anti-shipping force for operations against China, was initiated by Commandant General David Berger in March 2020, also during the first Trump administration. The tariff policies that Trump positioned as economic nationalism were assessed by the Brookings Institution in early 2026 as having “backfired” in their stated objective of decoupling from China while adding costs to American manufacturers and consumers. The reindustrialisation rhetoric that accompanied Trump’s 2024 campaign was understood within Pentagon budget submissions and Senate Armed Services Committee hearings as serving a geopolitical rather than a civilian economic objective: building the arms production capacity required to sustain simultaneous confrontation with China, Russia, Iran, and the multiple proxy theatres each of those confrontations requires. A nation genuinely seeking to rebuild its domestic civilian industrial base does not simultaneously request a forty-four percent increase in military expenditure while cutting domestic social programmes by ten percent to partially offset it.

The material basis for China’s rise is structural and cannot be resolved through financial pressure, export controls, military encirclement, or energy supply disruption, all of which Washington has deployed in varying combination over the past decade. China produces approximately 3.57 million STEM graduates annually, a figure that represents roughly forty percent of all Chinese university degrees and that the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2024 confirmed has now surpassed the United States at the doctoral level as well. The United States produces approximately 800,000 STEM graduates per year by comparable measures, with 58 percent of American computer science doctorates and 51 percent of engineering doctorates in 2024 awarded to foreign nationals on temporary visas, a dependency structure that the Trump administration’s immigration restrictions actively undermined. China has a population four times larger than that of the United States, a vastly larger industrial base, infrastructure investment that has transformed connectivity across an entire continent, and supply chain depth built over four decades of sustained manufacturing integration. Russia, with a population smaller than the United States, produced approximately 520,000 STEM graduates per year by 2025 estimates, a figure comparable to American domestic output from a country one-third its size. The strategic gap between American primacy doctrine and the material conditions that could sustain it has been widening continuously for twenty years, which is precisely why the urgency and recklessness of current American policy is explicable: Washington’s institutional actors understand that the window for forcible reassertion of dominance is closing and that within a decade the capability differential will have shifted to a degree that makes military confrontation with China qualitatively more dangerous.

The 2025 National Security Strategy acknowledged this trajectory obliquely while declining to draw the obvious conclusion from it. The document opens with the admission that for decades Washington pursued what it described as “permanent American domination of the entire world,” a policy it characterises as having produced costly wars, failed nation-building, and reduced security. Having identified the problem with unusual candour, the strategy proceeds to propose a solution, burden-sharing through allied proxies, economic coercion, and targeted partnerships, that preserves the objective of preventing rival power centres from emerging while redistributing the costs of pursuing it. Ukraine absorbed the costs of containing Russia. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia are being prepared to absorb the costs of confronting China. Persian Gulf Arab states and Israel absorbed the costs of the initial Iran campaign while the United States conducted nine hundred airstrikes on 28 February 2026 and subsequently imposed its own naval blockade. The 2025 NSS’s own language confirms the operational logic: “The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability.” Insisting on reforms that anchor long-term stability is a bureaucratic formulation for dictating the domestic political arrangements of client states, which is what the United States has done in Ukraine since 2014, in Georgia, in various Latin American states across multiple administrations, and which it is doing in Australia through the AUKUS architecture.

The question of whether the United States could manage a voluntary transition to a constructive role within a multipolar international order, reshoring genuine civilian industrial capacity, auditing and substantially reducing military expenditure, withdrawing from forward deployment positions, and rebuilding dollar credibility on productive economic activity rather than financial rent extraction and reserve currency privilege, has a structurally determined answer as long as the corporations whose shareholder returns depend on the existing system retain their purchase over the institutions that set policy. The defence industrial complex, the major oil and gas corporations whose global market positions depend on American military dominance over producing regions, the financial institutions whose dollar-denominated asset portfolios depend on the reserve currency status that military supremacy underwrites, and the technology companies whose monopoly positions depend on the regulatory environments and market access that American political power secures, none of these actors benefits from a stable multipolar world in which American power is proportional to American productive capacity. The transition from rent extraction to genuine production that a sustainable and constructive American foreign policy would require is, for these interests, an existential threat to their current business model, which is why it is consistently treated as one regardless of which party holds the White House or which individual occupies it.

Historically, the transition from a declining hegemon to a reconfigured international order has rarely been managed through negotiated grand bargains between rational institutional actors. The British Empire’s displacement by American power occurred across two world wars and a depression, not through a diplomatic settlement acknowledging changed material realities. The Spanish Empire’s contraction unfolded through military defeat and colonial collapse over more than a century. The Soviet Union’s rapid disintegration was anomalous in its relative speed and relative bloodlessness, and even that transition produced two decades of instability, proxy conflicts, and economic devastation across the former Soviet space. A hegemonic power that has built its currency, its institutional architecture, its corporate profit structure, and its domestic political ideology around the premise of permanent supremacy does not voluntarily renegotiate that premise when the material conditions supporting it shift. The precedents suggest it pursues escalation until the costs exceed the capacity to sustain them, a threshold that in 2026, with a one-trillion-dollar defence budget that excludes the Iran war’s operational costs, a forty-four-percent increase already requested for 2027, and simultaneous active military operations in the Middle East alongside proxy confrontations in Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific, remains some distance away but is no longer structurally inconceivable.

The populations paying the costs of this trajectory are distributed across every continent except North America. Southeast Asian nations dependent on Middle Eastern energy for sixty to ninety-five percent of their oil needs, confirmed by Trends Research in April 2026, are absorbing energy price shocks they had no role in generating. Ukrainian civilians have paid in lives and infrastructure for a war whose strategic purpose, as Austin stated in April 2022, included weakening Russia as a geopolitical actor rather than merely defending Ukrainian sovereignty. European populations are absorbing energy costs, inflationary pressures, and military expenditure demands that flow from the severance of the Russia-Europe energy relationship that preceded any Russian military aggression and that served, as the RAND Corporation documented in 2019, identifiable American strategic interests. The average American, meanwhile, receives defence contracts only as diffuse and decaying infrastructure, hollowed public services, and a national debt that the Congressional Budget Office projected in early 2026 would add five point eight trillion dollars over the next decade under the defence spending trajectory already legislated. The less than one percent of the American population whose financial portfolios are substantially composed of defence industry equity, oil majors, and dollar-denominated financial assets benefits directly from the system as configured. The institutional architecture designed to prevent that distinction from becoming politically actionable, the media cycle, the exceptionalist ideology, the partisan political theatre that absorbs public attention, has functioned with considerable success for thirty-four years since Wolfowitz and Libby drafted their strategy in 1992. Whether the material pressures accumulating across 2026 are sufficient to begin eroding that function is a question the evidence does not yet answer.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times, 8 March 1992

Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby, Defense Planning Guidance FY 1994–1999 (Draft, 18 February 1992), declassified, National Security Archive, George Washington University

I. Lewis Libby, cover memorandum to Dick Cheney on DPG redraft, 31 March 1992, National Security Archive · Trump Administration, National Security Strategy 2025 (released 4 December 2025), 33pp

Stimson Center, Experts React: Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy (January 2026): “replaces one unsustainable vision of primacy with another”

The Diplomat, How Chinese Analysts Interpret Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (December 2025): “blueprint for leaner and potentially more dangerous U.S. primacy”

Chatham House, Trump’s New National Security Strategy: Cut Deals, Hammer Europe, and Tread Gently Around Autocrats (December 2025)

RAND Corporation, Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground (Arroyo Center, RR3063, 2019)

White House Fact Sheet, Rebuilding Our Military: FY2027 Budget (April 2026) – $1.5 trillion request, 44% increase; $1 trillion FY2026 topline confirmed

Arms Control Association, U.S. Defense Spending Rises by More Than 17 Percent (March 2026) – $1.05 trillion FY2026 figure

Washington Post, House Rolls Out $1.14 Trillion Defense Bill, 26 May 2026

Christian Science Monitor, What’s in Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Defense Budget (April 2026): “approximately 42% more than the United States spends now”; Iran war costs not included

Congressional Budget Office, cited in CSMonitor: $5.8 trillion projected debt addition over next decade

General David H. Berger, USMC Force Design 2030 (March 2020)

National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2024 – China has surpassed the United States as top producer of STEM doctoral degrees globally · Airswift / Georgetown CSET, Top Countries for STEM Talent 2025 China: 3.57 million STEM graduates annually; United States: 800,000

Brookings Institution, Why China Is Winning in Tech and What the U.S. Is Overlooking (April 2026): “12.22 million students projected to graduate from Chinese universities in 2025 alone”

Georgetown Centre for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), China projected 77,000+ STEM PhD graduates per year by 2025 vs 40,000 US

ITIF (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation), China Welcomes STEM Talent While the United States Pushes It Away (November 2025): 58% of US computer science doctorates in 2024 awarded to foreign temporary visa holders

Trends Research and Advisory, The Global Economic Shock Triggered by the US-Israel-Iran War (April 2026) – Southeast Asian energy import dependency 60–95% · Britannica, 2026 Iran War (updated May 2026)

Secretary Lloyd Austin, press conference remarks, Kyiv, 25 April 2022

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 1988)

Brookings Institution, Breaking Down Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (February 2026)

Brian Berletic, “America’s Future: A Prosperous, Peaceful Nation, or a Bankrupt, Violent Empire?” video commentary, YouTube, 24 May 2026,

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/h89eZfDTkNA?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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