The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) is a crucial document for understanding the current state of US imperialism.1

In a previous article about a draft of this document, I noted it represents “a dramatic reversal in the foreign policy of U.S. imperialism” as it “marks the end of its attempts to defend its status the global hegemonic power.”2 The now published official version confirms this assessment.

The new National Security Strategy recognises that the US can no longer play the role of global hegemon:

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests. Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex.

A few pages later, the document repeats: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”

A longer, unpublished version of the NSS is even more explicit. It discusses the “failure” of US hegemony and states: “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable.”3

Instead, the official document states Washington must focus on what it calls “America’s core foreign policy interests.“ The first such “core interests” are the homeland and the Western Hemisphere Michael Pröbsting a strategy it calls “a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”.

After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere…

We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.

In other words, Washington wants to fully dominate North and South America and keep its imperialist rivals — most importantly China — out of the region. Trump’s military threats against Venezuela, but also Colombia and Mexico, are part of this strategy that aims to replace governments in the “Western Hemisphere” with loyal lackeys.4