David Maxwell
Carl von Clausewitz wrote about centers of gravity in an era of monarchies, armies, and capitals, yet his insight remains unsettlingly current. Power, he argued, does not rest everywhere at once. It concentrates. It binds. And when it fractures, the state weakens from within. His warning was blunt. The blow must be directed against those elements that hold a system together. When applied to the United States in the contemporary global geostrategic environment, this insight forces a hard reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy. Not as bureaucratic texts, but as signals of where American power truly resides, and where it is most exposed.
The center of gravity is real, and it is vulnerable. The question facing American strategy is whether it will defend that center deliberately or continue to assume it will hold on its own.
The question is not whether the United States faces threats. The NSS and NDS assume that as a given. The harder question is whether these strategies correctly identify America’s own center of gravity, and whether they protect it or unintentionally place it at risk.
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