For more than 30 years, Washington has pursued a strategy based on globalist illusions: that America could act as the world’s “policeman,” that it could expand NATO indefinitely, extend security guarantees indefinitely, and launch interventions to reshape societies in its own image.
These plans — under the guise of a “rules-based international order” — seem to be showing signs of wear and tear, while their often flawed implementation to this day seems to be questioning the very meaning of democracy.
Now, however, it seems that the unipolar period that began in 1989 is over. And yet, what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos — but a return to a different normality. The international system seems to be heading towards a post-hegemonic, polycentric and regionalized world where dominant, cultural powers coexist and balance each other within their historical spheres of influence.
The insistence on a major transformation highlights the reemergence of geopolitical complexity and cultural diversity after a brief, and often misapplied, artificial experiment in imposing universal principles.
The change
In the Trump doctrine, there is a recognition of this reality. And in this context, the Pentagon’s new “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) offers a particular change. Accepting the return of history and geopolitics, the proposed version confirms the need to adapt to the changing international environment.
It seems to be showing the world that it prioritizes defending the homeland and the contested borders of the “American sphere of influence” from extra-regional interventions — over global military containment of China or Russia.
However, many in Washington, and even some government officials, will reject this change, because they believe that when you are the world’s leading power, you should defend your spheres of influence anyway, but also try to constantly expand them. This position has its advantages and disadvantages, like any position-doctrine. Trump seems to have declared war on the bipartisan consensus that saw the drawbacks of the above-mentioned position-doctrine, where America paid for the security of its spheres of influence by supporting institutions that limited it and intervening in conflicts. Whatever one thinks of its style or execution, his insistence on “America First” was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American diplomacy is to the American people. But the other position-doctrine also defended the American people by importing the “wealth” from its spheres of influence into the United States at the lowest possible price.
The Globalization Bias
However, this type of “realism” will not only be interrupted by the positions of its opponents regarding US global leadership, but also by a deeper, more entrenched force: the ideological power of all the forces of globalization that is less about free trade or international cooperation and more about a broad cognitive bias.
MAGA is both an ideology and an institutionalized reflex mechanism that permeates the foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even some among the MAGA movement who fight the “establishment.” It is a mindset that is directed towards the globalizers of free trade.
The cosmopolitan dream of uniformity and the imperium of the Woke
This mentality manifests itself in two forms. The first is the universality of the liberal values of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organizations, and liberal democracy: all in the pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream of global uniformity.
In the post-Trump era, however, its most enduring variant is the militarized conception of the global whole of the US of figures like John Bolton. This second group insists on permanent global dominance of the US and an American monopoly on the world, achieved through the supremacy of the US armed forces.
Bolton’s followers—and their followers—weaponize an idea of… defending global civilization in a Manichean struggle against a caricature of global barbarity and international terrorism.
The liberal internationalists that Trump overthrew defended the universality of American values and desired an imperium that would accommodate woke ideology. For Bolton’s followers and the secretive ultraconservatives who have successfully infiltrated the MAGA movement, the insinuation of imperial power reigns supreme.
Yet both groups are globalists, both are dogmatic defenders of U.S. global hegemony, and both find a common interest—according to MAGA ideology—in mortgaging American national sovereignty on the altar of ideology. However, it is not lost on us that the ideology of the MAGA proposes as a solution the introversion of the United States, leaving the spheres of influence that were conquered with “blood” after the Second World War undefended.
The case of Ukraine and the responsibilities of the United States
Let us examine Ukraine. NATO expansion — promoted as a defense of the liberal order — has in reality destabilized Europe and involved America in a destructive war with no clear end.
By offering promises that America was neither willing nor able to fulfill, America led Ukraine down a false, illusory path that left it devastated, Russia strengthened, and Europe in submission. Instead of ensuring stability, then, NATO expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into yet another open-ended commitment far removed from its vital interests. But Europe is the American empire on the European continent, as Japan and South Korea are in the Pacific. These two “fortresses” are the US’s protection against its Asian rivals or enemies.
Or take the Middle East, where Bolton’s supporters have raised their flag even louder. Just a few weeks ago, the US found itself embroiled in a war between Israel and Iran. Despite Israel’s heavy bombardment of Iranian military targets and uranium enrichment facilities, overshadowed by its own attacks, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, its technological know-how, or its determination to rebuild.
Iran emerged wounded but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Nevertheless, Washington reflexively positioned itself as a belligerent—risking escalation, depleting its munitions, and distracting from higher priorities.
Aside from the fact that both Europe and the Middle East are peripheral to America’s core strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, as the NDS notes, perhaps the highest priority for the wise American strategist is ensuring U.S. competitiveness in the 21st century through a plan for national renaissance. What escapes the MAGA, however, is that the Middle East has been the gas station of the so-called West, led by the US, for decades.
How will the US remain a hegemonic power – according to MAGA ideology?
To remain a great power, Washington urgently needs to upgrade its infrastructure and production capacity, while at the same time creating locally integrated supply chains for essential goods such as processors, pharmaceuticals and processors.
By contrast, by remaining embroiled in perpetual confrontations abroad, America has accumulated $37.5 trillion in debt, destroying communities and marginalizing the middle class. For most Americans, bombing the Houthis — whom they have never met in real life — to protect shipping to Europe could never justify the costs.
Moreover, the extensive U.S. intervention has serious military consequences, compounding its social and economic impact. In June, in less than two weeks, the U.S. spent billions to defend Israel, exhausting its stockpile of advanced missile defense systems like THAAD, even as it revealed serious weaknesses in the supply chain and overall readiness of the military. All of this, of course, makes America less safe.
The first part of the productive reconstruction of the GNA is right and could be achieved by the very position of the liberal globalists who are also within the GNA. The difference is that the MAGA is trying to limit the financing of wars in the US spheres of influence, when technology makes it possible to wage wars but at a cost that is horribly undermultiplied from the cost of war we have known until now. As for the reconstruction of the productive capacity of the US, this will be achieved if and only if Global American Capital decides to sacrifice its profits by sacrificing the return to the homeland. Difficult and perhaps the most difficult of all policies. It is Global American Capital that made America a leading power. Expanding globally, you draw not only cheap labor by selling your products, but also the best minds in the world.
The Hegemonic Concept of Homeland
In any case, MAGA supporters believe they are revealing a deeper truth. They believe that the idea of globalization in all its forms — whether liberal or warlike — erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the spirit of justice that underpins counter-hegemonic movements like America First. Furthermore, they believe that it shrinks the diversity of cultures into a single standard, one imposed by force and maintained by empire. It multiplies and expands the permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its ruling class, while betraying the fundamental principles of democracy.
Even currents of neorealism, such as John Mearsheimer’s aggressive realism, fall victim to this globalist bias: by globalizing great-power competition and advocating for the military containment of China, they present the field of international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic, all-against-all struggle for hegemony, everywhere and forever.
But this is not a realist position either; it is a rationalization of globalization. And it has led Washington, like Athens in Thucydides’ story, to an empire or great power that overextends or overcommits, and declines.
Who benefits under the MAGA ideology?
Ultimately, a state can be a conservative commonwealth that serves its people, or an empire that enriches the special interests close to power, the war oligarchs, and those seeking a rent from defense spending.
But it cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalized soul, has chosen empire.
In fact, the bipartisan consensus on U.S. foreign policy has corrupted and redefined the national interest itself, turning it into a justification for perpetual war.
The danger today is that the globalizing bias keeps us all tied to the illusions of unipolarity, luring us with seductive appeals for hegemony, like the sirens of Greek mythology.
By focusing our gaze on the 20th century and the postwar status quo, they reduce the world to a zero-sum battleground between eternally competing blocs — encouraging perpetual military interventions while reviving old doctrines to justify them.
In short, the cognitive bias of the globalist mindset prevents us from conceiving a coherent grand strategy for the post-hegemonic era that has now arrived, keeping us vulnerable and accelerating the decline of the United States.
A Radical Foreign Policy Free of Ideology
What the country needs now is something that will be called sovereign realism: a radical foreign policy free of ideology, free from illusions of the universality of values, and based on the preservation of American power.
This means prioritizing national sovereignty over globalizing crusades, local balances of power over global policing, collective protection over absolute or generalized primacy,” and renewal at home as the foundation of power abroad.
It means diplomacy without illusions: talking to enemies and allies on the basis of reciprocity and strategic understanding, not arrogance or moralizing.
Above all, it means adopting a new approach that adapts to the polycentric world before us, rather than resisting it with futile efforts at monopolitical power.
The Great Transition is not a threat to be faced, but a reality to be managed
For, in the end, the postwar international community was little more than a projection, the international legal order a noble fantasy, and globalization artificial and contrived.
What follows is not disorder but the world as it really is — a collaboration between cultural powers that insist, like America, on their own national sovereignty and resist a hegemonic empire from either Washington or Beijing.
