Greg R. Lawson
The Trump administration has rightly reoriented US foreign policy toward domestic renewal, more balanced alliances, and hemispheric protection.
For nearly a decade, a small but growing group of analysts has argued that American foreign policy needs a massive course correction. With the unveiling of President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy yesterday, that broad-based course correction is at hand and clearly articulated.
While the United States cannot, and should not, retreat into isolationism, it has desperately needed a reorientation toward the world as it actually is. For too long, Western intellectuals, policy wonks, and political leaders bought into the “End of History” and “Unipolar Moment” framing of how the world would operate after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Instead of continuing to act as if the United States could perennially play the role of Atlas holding up the world, a consistent theme emerged in realist policy analysis: the United States could no longer afford a foreign policy driven by ideological aspiration, institutional inertia, or the comforting illusions of unipolarity. The United States needed a realism fit for a new competitive age—not the caricature of realism that pretends America can withdraw behind its oceans, but a realism grounded in material strength, strategic triage, and an unsentimental view of how great-power politics actually works.
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