Behind Trump’s bluff and bluster, could there be plans to limit the military reach of US imperialism? David Lockwood explores a new defence strategy issued by the Pentagon.
At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (1948)
It has become an almost reflex action to pour scorn on the latest pronouncements from US President Donald Trump and his retinue of clowns. This one, however, may merit some serious attention.
In January, the US Department of War produced the 2026 National Defense Strategy. Naturally, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth attempted to credit the entire brilliant strategy to the Great Leader (“President Trump’s historic approach to our nation’s defence” etc etc). In fact, it’s clear that this has been worked on by Pentagon high-ups and others for some time.
It begins with a breezy dismissal by Hegseth of the rules-based international order as a ‘cloud-castle abstraction’ (someone should tell Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong). But moving on to the expert content, the real thrust emerges. The US is no longer going to rush around protecting US interests all the time, all over the world. Instead, emphasis will be placed on “the Homeland”. That sounds like the US, right? But it also encompasses access to “key terrain” including the Panama Canal, the ‘Gulf of America’ and Greenland, and indeed, the Western Hemisphere as a whole. America’s allies in the hemisphere (like Canada (!), Central and South America) will have to help. And if anything goes wrong, the US will fall back on “focused, decisive action” (no doubt like what we have seen in Venezuela with the kidnapping of its president, Nicolas Maduro).
So, the policy sets out a ‘spheres of influence’ approach. As Filipino leftist, Walden Bello, puts it:
The US sees the Western hemisphere, including Latin America, as its sphere of influence. Russia is informally acknowledged as being dominant in Eastern Europe, Western Europe is left to fend for itself, and the Asia-Pacific is seen as China’s sphere of influence.
‘King Donald and his Asian Vassals,’ Foreign Policy in Focus, November 2025.
A little too neat perhaps and we shall have more to say on the Asia-Pacific below, but you get the general idea.
Meanwhile the US demands “burden-sharing with [US]allies and partners”. In the Indo-Pacific and in Europe “allies will take the lead against threats that are less severe for us but more so for them, with critical but more limited support from the United States”. The burden sharing will be strategic, but crucially, financial as ‘allies and partners’ will need to cough up billions upon billions for US military hardware.
Surprisingly, the Middle East does not get much of a mention, except through ritual denunciations of Iran and its nuclear program – which, we are reminded, the US “obliterated”. Here, the heavy lifting is left to Israel – “a model ally” – and the US will “further empower it to defend itself and promote our shared interests”.
The strategy seems to indicate a shift in the Trump Administration’s attitude towards China. China is now to be deterred in the Indo-Pacific “through strength, not confrontation”. The goal will be “strategic stability with Beijing as well as deconfliction [sic] and de-escalation more generally”. On the surface at least, America’s intention is not to dominate, strangle or humiliate China, but to achieve “a decent peace, on terms favourable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under”. Mind you, this still involves “a strong denial defence along the First Island Chain” (the arc of island in the Western Pacific from Japan through to Borneo which is seen as a barrier to China’s access to the open Pacific Ocean).
So, a “decent peace” where China knows its place. We shall see how that goes.
Nonetheless, there is a change of tone here. For the last decade or so, since the Obama-Clinton “Pivot to Asia”, China has been portrayed as Enemy Number One by successive US administrations. Australia has dutifully fallen in with these campaigns both internally (dark stories of Chinese intelligence infiltration) and externally (through the Quad and AUKUS).
But now, if this really is a shift in strategy, the US now considers China one Great Power among three – albeit with the US being ‘the greatest’. And Beijing, so long as it knows its place, is now a power with which Washington is ready to do business.
As Professor Wanning Sun, Deputy Director of the Australian-China Relations Institute at UTS put it in Crikey in December: “This could mean that China, while still a strategic rival and competitor, may no longer be front and centre of the US’ strategic focus.”
Which brings us to AUKUS.
For the awkward AUKUS trio, China certainly was front and centre of their strategic world. The whole point was a forward defence posture aimed at China and its alleged threat to shipping lanes, the South China Sea and Taiwan. That’s why Australia must buy submarines that can operate thousands of kilometres to its north; why there has to be a base for US long-range bombers at Tindall; why there has to be a naval base in WA for US and UK submarines that can reach China’s coast. Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute described the whole AUKUS project as “a weapons system that is almost specifically designed to operate thousands of kilometres to our north and which is perfectly suited to fighting a military campaign against China”. (Quoted in ‘AUKUS gets Awkward Down Under,’ Foreign Policy 24 March 2023.)
But if China is no longer America’s Main Enemy of choice, where does that leave those – like the Labor Governments in Australia – who have hoisted themselves so enthusiastically aboard the AUKUS battleship? The new US National Defense Strategy does not mention AUKUS or Australia a single time.
Perhaps our leaders will be breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of continuing our cosy economic relationship with our major trading partner with less fear of offending our major military ally. But if the US starts to scale down its active confrontation with China, we will still be burdened with the AUKUS bill. That’s what ‘burden sharing’ is all about.
If the new US defence strategy represents a shift, a step back or even, as Walden Bellow suggests, “the fighting retreat of an imperial power in decline”, why now?
It could be (Bellow again) that Trump’s domestic situation is not proving to be as malleable and easily disguised as he thought: the economy, the civil war, Epstein. But it also could be that hubris (and Trump has bucketloads of that) breeds overreach – and overreach is dangerous.
If we think back to early this year, Trump seemed to be walking the US into:
- A war with Venezuela
- A war with Columbia
- A war with Mexico
- A war with Iran
- An abandonment of Ukraine
- A war with Denmark
- A war in Minnesota.
This is not an exhaustive list. The whole performance was conducted at the highest possible volume, interspersed with a series of increasingly bizarre statements from Trump about … things.
Actually, none of these events took place (unless you count the kidnapping in Venezuela). In fact, Trump was stared down on tariffs by China, confronted by Canada and reduced to meaningless waffle over Greenland. But the period represented an application of his friend, Steve Bannon’s strategy: ‘flood the zone with shit’. Not to confuse or divert friends and/or enemies (and who can tell?) but to disorient them.
The period produced an enormous churn in ‘international relations’, in which all the great and the good were talking about Trump and what he would or wouldn’t do. Then a collective sigh of relief when he did not do very much. The object of the game seems to be to periodically keep all of the world’s ruling classes on their toes, in a permanent state of disorientation, to provide the US with the greatest choice of allies, enemies and deals.
I would suggest though, that capital does not like churn in perpetuity. It prefers some kind of stability in which the squabbles of national ruling classes do not disturb the means of making profits. Trump’s usefulness to American capital – whatever that is – may not survive too many more such periods.