An independent analysis of the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine, the RAND multi-domain strategy, and the structural reasons why a declining hegemon may attempt to topple the game board rather than accept a multipolar world
Editorial Analysis | September 2026
The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, drafted under the supervision of Paul Wolfowitz and leaked to the New York Times in March of that year, articulated a strategic vision that has shaped American foreign policy for more than three decades. The document stated that the United States’ “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival” and that American policy should aim to “maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”-. That language was not a description of an existing reality but a declaration of intent, and the intervening decades have demonstrated the consistency with which that intent has been pursued. The document’s authors understood that the collapse of the Soviet Union had created a unique historical moment in which the United States could establish a position of unchallenged global dominance, and they sought to institutionalise that dominance in perpetuity.
The RAND Corporation published Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground in 2019, a report that laid out a comprehensive strategy for competing with Russia across multiple domains simultaneously. The report’s table of contents confirms a structure that includes Economic Measures such as hindering petroleum exports and imposing sanctions, Geopolitical Measures such as providing lethal aid to Ukraine and promoting regime change in Belarus, and Ideological and Informational Measures-. The report’s explicit recommendation to withdraw from the INF Treaty was subsequently implemented in 2019, and the measures it proposed have been pursued across Republican and Democratic administrations alike. This continuity of agenda demonstrates that American foreign policy operates according to institutional imperatives that are not substantially altered by electoral outcomes, because the think tanks that produce these policy papers are funded by defence contractors and foreign governments whose interests remain constant regardless of which party controls the White House.
The National Endowment for Democracy’s involvement in Nepal represents a documented case study of the political subversion component of this multi-domain strategy. Leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone revealed that the NED and its affiliated International Republican Institute spent hundreds of thousands of dollars tutoring Nepalese youth to stage the protests that led to the resignation of Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli in September 2025-. The documents describe a clandestine campaign designed to cultivate a Nepalese network of young political activists explicitly intended to “become an important force to support US interests”. Nepal occupies a strategic position on China’s border, and the destabilisation of its government served to weaken Chinese influence in the region, consistent with the strategy of encircling China with politically captured proxies that the RAND report had outlined.
The United States seized control of Venezuelan oil following the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, an operation that had direct consequences for China’s energy imports. Before the US military blockade that began in December 2025, Venezuela exported 952,000 barrels per day, of which 778,000 barrels were sent to China, giving Beijing an 81.7 percent share of Venezuela’s oil exports. The disruption of these exports represented a material blow to China’s energy security and formed part of a broader strategy of distant blockade aimed at strangling China through the interdiction of energy and raw material imports beyond the reach of China’s military capabilities to counter.
The Pentagon formally acknowledged that military operations in Yemen killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others during 2025, with all confirmed casualties occurring during three strikes conducted as part of Operation Rough Rider between March and May 2025-. The strikes occurred on 6 April near Sanaa, on 17 April near Ras Isa Port, and on 28 April near Sa’ada at a migrant detention facility holding Ethiopian migrants. Independent estimates from the Yemen Data Project put the civilian toll at least 238 killed and 467 injured, while the Costs of War Project at Brown University estimated that American airstrikes from late 2023 to mid-2025 killed 213 civilians-. The Pentagon’s own figures are the minimum, and the discrepancy between official acknowledgment and independent documentation is itself a datum requiring explanation.
The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on 25 March 2025, stated that “the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “has not reauthorised the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”. The Arms Control Association confirmed that the consensus view among American intelligence agencies before the Israeli attack was that “there was no imminent threat that Iran was weaponizing its nuclear program”. When the President of the United States was asked about his own Director of National Intelligence’s assessment, he stated publicly that he did not care. The war was not launched because Iran was building a bomb, but because the policy repertoire required a war, and the intelligence assessment was an obstacle to be ignored rather than evidence to be weighed.
The National Endowment for Democracy adopted a new policy in April 2025 that eliminated public disclosure of the individuals and groups it funds. The organisation’s Public Disclosure Policy states that “we only publicly share grantee or partner information when doing so is consistent with their security, consent, and the objectives of their work” and that “we do not publish names, locations, or project details that could endanger individuals operating in hostile environments”. The practical effect is that an organisation created to provide transparent support for civil society abroad now operates with less transparency than the covert agencies it was designed to displace. This shift towards opacity occurs precisely as the costs of confrontation are rising, reducing the possibilities for accountability and public scrutiny.
China’s shipbuilding capacity is approximately two hundred times that of the United States, a disparity that has profound implications for the strategic balance in the Pacific and beyond. The Chinese Communist Party now operates the world’s largest navy, with 234 warships compared to the US Navy’s 219, and the United States holds just 0.1 percent of global shipbuilding while China controls between 53 and 63 percent of global output-. China builds 200 merchant ships a year for every one America builds, and its four largest shipyards possess a combined capacity that dwarfs the entire American shipbuilding industry. The roots of this disparity lie not in any single policy decision but in the structural erosion of the American industrial base following the Cold War, when consolidation reduced suppliers and production lines for critical inputs were either scaled back or allowed to stagnate.
The Bilibili international app represents a potential challenge to American information dominance, which remains one of the few domains where the United States retains significant advantages. Bilibili, the Chinese platform with 376 million monthly users often described as China’s YouTube, relaunched its international app in August 2026 and is building an English-language site. The new international app eliminates previous requirements for identity verification, such as passports or identity documents, making it easier for global users to sign up. The platform is recruiting community managers in Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Istanbul, and Tokyo, and it is offering creators up to $0.70 per 1,000 views as it expands globally-. The construction of alternative platforms beyond the reach of US censorship, manipulation, and control represents a necessary component of any strategy to challenge American information dominance.
The material foundation of American military power has eroded to a point that the architects of the current escalation appear not to have anticipated. The United States expended roughly half of its pre-war inventories of Patriot, THAAD, and Precision Strike Missile munitions during the opening months of the war against Iran, alongside approximately one-third of its JASSM, SM-2, SM-3, SM-6, and Tomahawk stocks. The roots of this depletion lie in the structural erosion of the American defence industrial base, which prioritises shareholder returns over production capacity and cannot rapidly expand output without guaranteed contracts and the industrial infrastructure that decades of consolidation have destroyed. The gap between the rhetoric of American military dominance and the material reality of American military capacity is widening, and the war against Iran has exposed that gap for all to see.
A materialist analysis must begin by identifying the class forces and institutional interests that drive the policy of global primacy. The think tanks that produce the intellectual justifications for confrontation are funded by defence contractors and foreign governments, creating material conflicts of interest in the production of foreign policy analysis. The Atlantic Council, the Center for a New American Security, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies were the largest recipients of Pentagon contractor funding, and foreign governments and foreign government-owned entities donated more than $110 million to the same think tanks over the same period. The Brookings Institution, which produced *Which Path to Persia?*, received $17.1 million from foreign governments and $3.91 million from Pentagon contractors. These think tanks produce the intellectual justifications for policies that serve the material interests of their funders.
The class composition of the institutions that produced and sustained this policy repertoire requires explicit identification. The authors of the policy papers and the officials who implement their recommendations are members of what may be described as the foreign policy fraction of the professional-managerial class, individuals whose careers circulate between think tanks, government agencies, university departments, and corporate boards. Their material interests are tied to the perpetuation of the foreign policy apparatus and the conflicts it manages. Their salaries, their institutional budgets, their access to policymakers, and their professional standing all depend on the continued salience of the national security paradigm they serve. This does not mean they act from conscious corruption. It means their structural position generates a set of assumptions about the world that make confrontation appear natural and diplomacy appear naive.
The defence contractors that fund the think tanks occupy a different position within the same class configuration. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are the principal beneficiaries of the policy repertoire that the think tanks produce. Every missile, every ship, every aircraft produced translates into revenue for the companies that manufacture these systems. The relationship is not one of corruption in the narrow sense of quid pro quo. It is a structural alignment of interests in which the intellectual producers of policy and the material beneficiaries of that policy occupy overlapping institutional spaces and share a common commitment to the expansion of the national security state. The think tank analysts who write the reports, the defence executives who fund the think tanks, and the government officials who implement the recommendations are not three separate groups. They are three fractions of a single ruling class whose interests converge on the perpetuation of American military dominance.
The continuity of agenda across Republican and Democratic administrations is itself a materialist insight that the electoral theatre of left versus right serves to obscure. Voters are presented with a choice between two factions of the same class configuration, while the actual policy agenda continues regardless of who occupies the White House. The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance was drafted under a Republican administration. The Aegis Ashore deployments occurred under Democratic presidents. The INF Treaty withdrawal occurred under a Republican president. The Typhon system was developed under a Democratic president. The party labels changed. The policy did not.
rational pursuit of profit by a class configuration that has successfully externalised its costs onto the population it claims to serve. The architecture of primacy is, from this perspective, an architecture of extraction, and its dismantlement will require not merely a change in policy but a fundamental reconfiguration of the class relations that produce it.
The final assessment must remain analytical rather than definitive, because multiple plausible outcomes remain possible. The United States could attempt to escalate further, accepting higher costs and greater risks without any guarantee of success. The conflict could expand to encompass additional theatres, drawing in Russia, China, and other regional actors in ways that transform the character of the war. Or the exhaustion of American military and economic capacity could force a negotiated settlement that falls short of the stated objectives, leaving the multipolar world intact and the American position diminished. The indicators that would confirm or undermine each scenario are observable: the pace of industrial production in China and Russia, the willingness of the American public to bear the costs of prolonged confrontation, the decisions of European and Asian allies regarding alignment with the United States, and the success or failure of alternative information platforms in challenging US information dominance. What is clear from the evidence assembled here is that the policy of global primacy was not adopted to protect the American people from any external threat, but to sustain an imperial system whose material foundations are eroding and whose beneficiaries are concentrated in a narrow stratum of the population. The architecture of primacy that Washington has constructed cannot be sustained indefinitely, and the forces that will ultimately dismantle it are already in motion.
Authored By: Global GeoPolitics
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