John Jefferson
President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive election victory gives him a once-in-a-generation mandate to finally implement an America First grand strategy and thus replace the outdated globalist post-World War II framework. Trump’s vision is a hard-nosed realist strategy very well suited to the current era of intense strategic competition and geopolitical peril. The new grand strategy includes securing the border and economic nationalism, core elements of Trump’s agenda, but its most important component is prioritizing the containment of China as the driving principle of U.S. foreign policy in the new Cold War against the Chinese Communist Party.
After three decades of being the only unquestioned regional hegemon and global superpower, and hence benefiting from the geopolitical and financial advantages conferred by this privileged status, a peer rival is now on the horizon. And while conflicts in the Middle East or Russia’s war in Ukraine dominate the daily headlines, there should be no higher priority for America’s grand strategy in coming years other than containing China’s quest for regional hegemony and global superpower status.
The rhetorical commitment to contain China on the part of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington is worthless, and even dangerous, unless it is accompanied by an overarching offensive realist grand strategy shaping specific U.S. strategies and policies across military, economic, diplomatic, energy, and technological lines. Unlike the establishment internationalist grand strategy, America First prioritizes great power rivalry over other strategic goals, and China as the biggest threat to achieve peer rival status and thus threaten America’s unique position in the international system. This ruthless prioritization is needed because the United States now operates in a multipolar world, and while it is still the only superpower by virtue of being the only regional hegemon with global power projection capabilities, it can no longer afford to finance the undisciplined post-Cold War global-ordering internationalist grand strategy.
The $30+ trillion national debt (growing every year) necessarily means that hard trade-offs are here for defense and foreign policy budgets. The era when the U.S. military assumed it could prepare to win two simultaneous major wars or that it can conduct long-term counterinsurgency campaigns to defeat terrorist groups is over. The Pentagon must urgently refocus the bulk of its force posture and defense strategy, as well as its training and doctrine, on the challenge of denying the PLA the ability to establish regional hegemony in East Asia through a conquest of Taiwan or through military aggression in the South China Sea. Modernizing and expanding the U.S. Navy should take precedence over the more land-oriented services, and investing in cyber, space, and AI should take precedence over vulnerable legacy platforms. Lastly, America’s nuclear deterrent is also in need of a long-delayed modernization in light of China’s massive recent nuclear buildup and Russia’s continuing reliance on nuclear threats and upgrades to its own nuclear arsenal.
In the realms of geopolitics and international diplomacy, Washington similarly needs to reorient its foreign policy towards a diplomatic containment of Chinese influence. The overarching goal of U.S. alliances, bilateral diplomacy, and of its participation in international institutions should be to counter Beijing’s attempts to coopt or coerce other countries into its strategic orbit, particularly in the Asia Pacific region, in Latin America, and in the Middle East. During the Cold War, America’s global alliance posture revolved around NATO and Europe as the primary focus to a large extent, given the threat from the USSR, with the Middle East and the Asia Pacific as secondary but occasionally important theaters. The post-Cold War era saw inertia rather than strategic calculus shaping the focus of U.S. foreign policy, until the global war on terror eventually focused its orientation towards the Middle East. Therefore, the alliances in the Asia Pacific should take priority over Europe and the Middle East, while Latin America should also reclaim a top-tier place, given that Washington must solidify its endangered regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere at the same as it seeks to deny China’s quest for regional hegemony in Asia.
The geopolitical competition against the CCP is as much about geoeconomics as it is about traditional diplomacy and military alliances. Beijing often prefers economic diplomacy and leveraging their investments to obtain geopolitical and strategic benefits from resource-rich countries in the Global South, as well as to integrate themselves into the supply chain of Western companies and thus constrain the actions of U.S. policymakers.
Only an America First realist approach to industrial policy and international trade, energy production, and technological superiority offers the best chance for developing the sinews of power needed to outcompete Beijing in the long run. The U.S. can no longer afford to keep its grand strategy hostage to partisan political priorities, whether in the area of limiting domestic energy production or catering to the business community asking for more market access to China. Only by implementing a clear set of policies aimed at reversing the strategically dangerous integration of the US and Chinese economies that occurred over the 2000s could a decoupling be achieved. Such policies include not just tariffs and subsidies to domestic manufacturing, but also the “friend-shoring” of key industries to other countries.
The energy global market is another area of intense competition where the U.S. is currently faltering by self-sabotaging its own energy industry with onerous and misguided limits on oil and gas production, while China is capturing the global market for rare earth minerals and other key components of alternative energy supply-chains through government-directed strategic investments. The U.S. must adopt an “all of the above” energy policy that doesn’t discriminate against fossil fuels, one of America’s comparative advantages given its resource endowment in oil and natural gas.
The right grand strategy principles are useless without a vigorous implementation effort, and this is the biggest risk faced by the America First approach. Despite valiant efforts by some outside organizations like the Heritage Foundation to provide the new administration with staffing options, the Washington foreign policy bureaucracy ideologically opposed to Trump will certainly attempt to frustrate his realist agenda. The American people made their choice clear and voted for a much-needed correction to U.S. grand strategy, now it’s up to the new administration to follow through on their promises and bring it about.
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