https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/core-interests
Richard Beck
22 May 2026 Politics

Though published just this past December, the second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy already reads like a dispatch from a vanishing world. A slightly awkward genre, the NSS is a mandatory report which Congress requires presidential administrations to produce shortly after taking office. The 2017 NSS amounted to little more than a Trumpian gloss on standard Republican priorities, but last year’s document was a more ambitious attempt to synthesize the competing (and often incompatible) strains of foreign policy thought within Trump’s governing coalition: to square the circle of promoting US global supremacy alongside a militarized, hemispheric retrenchment that some have incorrectly termed ‘isolationism’. While a preamble declared that ‘this document is a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth’, the introduction clarified that ‘Not every country, region, issue, or cause – however worthy – can be the focus of American strategy. The purpose of foreign policy is the protection of core national interests.’

So, which national interests are the ‘core’ ones? In the usual Trumpist style, the NSS characterized its goals as a thorough rejection of the preceding thirty years of US foreign policy-making (‘American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short – they have been laundry lists of wishes . . .’). It railed against the ‘erosion’ of American ‘sovereignty’ by ‘transnational and international organizations’, vowing that the US would no longer tolerate ‘free-riding, trade imbalances, predatory economic practices and other impositions on our nation’s historic goodwill that disadvantage our interests’. It promised that ‘after years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine’, and credited Trump with ‘single-handedly’ reversing ‘more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China’. It asserted that Europe’s problems run deeper than its diminishing share of global GDP (‘this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure’). It insisted that the United States should promote economic growth in Africa rather than lavishing the continent with aid. And it argued that there are no longer good reasons for the US to prioritize the Middle East ‘above all other regions’. Going forward, the main priority there would be avoiding any new ‘forever wars’.

Of course, the NSS overstated its originality. Preventing China from achieving regional hegemony in the Southwest Pacific has been a goal of the US for fifteen years, since the ‘pivot’ to Asia inaugurated by Obama and extended and amplified by Trump and Biden. The Biden administration was also desperate to deprioritize the Middle East, as seen in its attempt to add Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords. Prior to the October 7 attack, officials repeatedly told journalists they wished to avoid getting ‘bogged down’ in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Even Trump’s strange pursuit of the restoration of Europe’s civilizational identity rhymes with Biden’s approach to the continent, which presented America’s relationship with Europe as weakened and in need of reaffirmation, on the basis that a common political heritage – liberal democracy – was under threat. For the Trump administration, the issue is a different kind of heritage, one based on a never fully specified amalgam of Christianity and whiteness.

Notwithstanding its revisionist posture, this foreign policy prospectus was therefore largely in keeping with many long-standing goals. It did have two novel features, however: an aspiration to recentre Atlanticism around alliances with the reactionary governments of Southern and Eastern Europe, and a new and explicitly bellicose approach to Latin America. The first of these has borne little fruit so far. Hungary dashed the hopes of the American hard right by voting Orbán out of office, while Trump’s relationship with Meloni soured after he described the Pope as ‘weak on crime’. The second objective has been much more consequential. Operation Southern Spear, launched in September 2025, brought the administration’s insistent characterization of drug smugglers as ‘narco-terrorists’ to its logical conclusion, with missiles raining down on small boats traversing the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific (whether those boats were being piloted by cartel members or poor fishermen seemed of little interest). As with the use of the category ‘military-age male’ to justify drone strikes during the war on terror, the ‘narco-terrorist’ designation expands the president’s ability to murder at will.

The initial phases of this campaign prepared the ground for the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, held since January in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on ludicrous drug-trafficking and weapons charges. While Maduro’s capture constitutes an even more brazen violation of international law than Bush the Elder’s capture of Noriega (at least Panama’s national assembly had declared a ‘state of war’ with the US), Trump had good reason to expect the operation to go smoothly. He only sought to remove Maduro the individual from power as opposed to replacing Venezuela’s government or political system (‘Everybody’s kept their job except for two people’, Trump boasted); Maduro himself lacked a firm base of institutional or popular support; and his deputy Delcy Rodríguez, now serving as Venezuela’s acting president, assured the US before the operation that she and the rest of the government would cooperate. Despite the US press’s uniform depiction of Maduro as a brutal dictator, he was politically weak, both inside Venezuela and throughout Latin America, his regional support taking a serious hit following the fraudulent 2024 election.

The spinelessness of most of the world’s heads of state in response to Israel’s ongoing atrocities also gave Trump ample reason to believe that he would face little meaningful opposition. While the ICC’s decision to charge Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity in November 2024 was a welcome development, it did not slow the genocidal slaughter in Gaza. Nor did the declaration of a ceasefire in October 2025 have much effect other than to push Gaza off the front pages and allow Israel to redirect some of its firepower to its campaign of expansionism against Lebanon and state degradation in Iran. Israel has violated the ceasefire more than 2,400 times. Nevertheless, fewer than ten of the 125 signatory nations to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court have recalled their ambassadors or severed diplomatic relations with Israel since October 7.

Inside the US, the prospect of accountability for Israel and those who supported or covered for its bloodthirsty campaign is no better. As John Mearsheimer said recently, ‘If we had Nuremberg trials – we’re not going to have them – but if we had Nuremberg-like trials, Joe Biden and his principal lieutenants and Donald Trump and his principal lieutenants would be hanged.’ The culture of impunity that began to take root during the early years of the war on terror, and which spread further into Washington’s institutional machinery under Obama (consider the bureaucratic management of his ‘kill lists’), now fully pervades the American system. Trump both exploits and exemplifies this at every turn. Though he has a long history of caving in the face of competent opposition, whether in business or politics – hence the popularity of the acronym T.A.C.O. (Trump always chickens out) within the finance industry – he also has a keen sense for exploitable weakness.

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While the longer-term fallout of America’s belligerence toward Latin America is still to be determined, one consequence of Maduro’s kidnapping has already begun to unfold halfway around the world. The US-Israeli attack on Iran flagrantly violated almost every one of the NSS’s stated objectives. It is this war’s outcome – rather than rhetoric about hemispheric retrenchment – that will deliver the ultimate verdict on the foreign policy of Trump’s second term. His explanations for launching the war have changed almost on a daily basis. Critical commentators have emphasized the role played by Israeli pressure, but it is also clear that he initially saw it as Venezuela but bigger and better, like when a Hollywood studio triples the budget for the sequel to a blockbuster. ‘What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario’, Trump told the New York Times less than forty-eight hours after the first round of strikes had killed Supreme Leader Khamenei. The organizing principle of this action franchise would be regime change without any of the difficult parts, such as installing a new regime. The Venezuela operation convinced him that ‘winning’ in Iran would be no more complicated than swapping one head of state for another; that pundits and world leaders would grudgingly admit that they approved of the ends even if they whined a little about the means; and that global impunity for war criminals would insulate him from any negative personal consequences if mistakes were made along the way, such as the 28 February murder of more than 150 schoolgirls in an airstrike on an elementary school in Minab, for example. He assured the Times he had several ‘very good choices’ for who could now lead Iran, adding ‘I won’t be revealing them now.’ He didn’t reveal them later either, except to say that ‘most of the people we had in mind are dead’, having been killed in the initial strikes. Recent reporting revealed that one of the figures Trump had in mind was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of all people.

Trump does not appear to have given any thought to the risks associated with this new venture, however. While its outcome remains uncertain, the war is plainly a strategic error. It has already had at least three major consequences, all of which degrade the US’s global standing. First, it has allowed Iran to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and begin charging a reported $2 million per ship for transit. In addition to the potential for this revenue stream to help mitigate the impact of the punishing US sanctions regime were it to become permanent, taking payments for passage in yuan or dollar-pegged stablecoins represents a direct challenge to the petrodollar. Second, it has provoked the biggest energy supply disruption in history. Inflation is soaring in emerging markets, energy rationing and plant shutdowns have hit Southeast Asia, and airlines have begun to ground planes and pare back summer schedules in Europe. At the beginning of the war, some suggested America would be insulated from the effects of the energy crisis, as though wishing could make it so, but reality is now beginning to set in. Inflation is at a three-year high, and gas prices are up by more than fifty per cent. ‘The war in Iran is real’, as one KPMG economist said, a statement one could only feel the need to make when speaking to Americans. It is only a matter of time before this wholly unnecessary global stagflationary crisis starts ripping through America’s political and economic life. Its claim to be a responsible superintendent of global energy flows, one of the pillars of its superpower status, is in tatters. Third, the diversion of military equipment and personnel from East Asia to the Middle East has increased the likelihood of China achieving regional hegemony.

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How could the US have made such an enormous unforced blunder? Not even those who planned the 2003 invasion of Iraq can be said to have so thoroughly ignored the likely consequences of their actions. The question brings us to a further upshot of the war: revealing with unprecedented clarity both the incompetence of America’s foreign policy leadership and the hollowing out of the institutions that are meant to compensate for the inadequacies of individual leaders. Both are symptoms of a larger crisis of governance, an underappreciated factor in the unfolding decline of American power.

On the first count, it is odd, given the attention that was rightly paid to Biden’s decline, that relatively little has been paid to Trump’s since his return to power. Without venturing any kind of diagnosis, Trump increasingly resembles an erratic, senescent man whose stamina, inhibitions and ability to focus – never his strong suits – are deserting him. His Truth Social post threatening the imminent nuclear annihilation of Iran – ‘a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again’ – was the most repulsive public statement ever made by a sitting president, raising questions of basic competency and mental illness, not strategic or tactical acumen. In late April, it became very difficult to tell if Trump knew anything about his administration’s plans to participate in ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan. At a cabinet meeting, he delivered a five-minute monologue about his preference for Sharpie markers rather than pens. He has also developed a habit of mishearing or misunderstanding something an adviser tells him and then disgorging it as an imaginary fact: witness his claims that Iran’s oil pipelines would ‘explode’ of their own accord, within three days, unless the US allowed them to resume exports (‘It’s a very powerful thing that takes place sort of having to do with nature.’) Whatever mixture of senility, carelessness and ineptitude lies at the bottom of all this, and in spite of the fact we’ve had more than a decade to get used to such behaviour, it remains shocking that someone like this could be the elected leader of any state, much less the most powerful in world history.

Individuals like these get to launch wars on the basis of their illusions and grievances in part because the institutional apparatus of US foreign policy-making is in ruins. More than 3,800 State Department employees have departed since Trump took office, including many career diplomats and officials with hard-to-replace expertise in the department of Near Eastern Affairs. The Trump administration has also reduced the size of the National Security Council, the organization previously responsible for synthesizing foreign policy information and advice from across the federal government in order that they can be relayed to the president. In addition, Congress continues to demonstrate an extreme reluctance to involve itself. The Democrats made a pathetic show of threatening to restrain Trump’s war on Iran by putting forward a war powers resolution, which – wouldn’t you know it – was sunk by a single vote, thanks to four Democratic legislators siding with the Republicans. This pantomime was wholly transparent: the party leadership instinctively approves of Trump’s war, they just don’t want to support it too openly in public given its toxic unpopularity and the upcoming midterm elections. As a result, another possible restraint on Trump is inoperative.

Since 2016, neither of America’s political parties has been able to meet the challenge of staffing the Oval Office with a competent executive. Nor has either party been up to the task of coalescing around a governing agenda that can command a voting majority for consecutive presidential terms. The recent pattern of anti-incumbency, resulting in policy upheaval every few years, appears set to continue for the foreseeable future, and with each new round the prospects for American’s system of governance worsen. States can only bear the strain of such incompetent and destructive leadership for so long. Individuals and institutions within and around the US government may still lay out foreign policy goals in speeches or documents like the NSS, but it is now an open question whether the US has the capacity to pursue a coherent strategy over the medium or longer term.

With Trump’s self-defeating war on Iran, this crisis of governance has reached an inflection point. Regarding any substantial accommodation of Iranian interests as an unacceptable humiliation, the Trump administration has been unable to put forward anything resembling a reasonable proposal for a negotiated peace. The best that can probably be hoped for is that the combination of worsening economic news and domestic political pressure forces Trump to give in to some of Iran’s demands. Among the more likely and much worse options would be for Trump to attempt to distract from the Iranian debacle by launching yet another war, this time on Cuba. Just this week, the Justice Department indicted 94-year-old Raúl Castro on murder and conspiracy charges, on the same day that the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz entered the southern Caribbean Sea. For now, Trump has landed on a blockade of Iranian shipping as his preferred mechanism for coercing Tehran into abandoning its nuclear programme. While certainly painful for Iran, this will also continue to worsen a global energy crisis whose ramifications have barely begun to unfold. It is not just the price of gasoline that will increase through the rest of 2026 in the United States – with fertilizer costs spiking since February, food prices are going to jump as well.

Registering the magnitude of this crisis, some commentators have interpreted the Iran war as marking the end of American hegemony. That end has been announced many times in the past. But such a claim may be underplaying the significance of what is happening today. Hegemony is a form of dominance that is at least partially consensual, and from which a plurality of the dominated understand themselves to benefit to an extent that makes their domination tolerable. Thus defined, it becomes harder to argue that America’s hegemony remained intact even before Trump’s war on Iran. Giovanni Arrighi said that US hegemony passed into history with the invasion of Iraq, which I’ve slowly come to believe is the simple truth. What persisted, he wrote, was ‘mere domination’.

It would therefore be more accurate to say that what is now at stake is America’s status as the world’s lone superpower, and its unquestioned capacity to dominate. That is not to deny the considerable advantages that the US still enjoys over its rivals. Its military will remain the world’s most powerful and most fearsome for years to come, its corporations the world’s most profitable for the foreseeable future. But weapons and money aren’t sufficient on their own. Economic might must produce at least a minimum shared experience of social well-being and security in order to be sustainable, whereas American elites hoard wealth on a scale not seen even in Ancient Rome. And a gigantic military needs competent strategic guidance for its coercive power to translate into global standing.

Perhaps the blockade will ultimately prove too much for Iranian society to withstand. Perhaps Iranians will defy all expectations and finally mount the popular uprising that America’s hawks have been dreaming about for decades. Perhaps Israel will successfully expand northward at Lebanon’s expense and deliver the decisive blow against Hezbollah. Perhaps Europe will persist in its craven obeisance and decide that even a global recession and twinned food and energy crises are not grounds to reconsider its submissiveness towards the moronic behemoth on the other side of the Atlantic.

But if those things do not come to pass, and if Iran emerges from this conflict weakened in absolute terms but strengthened in relative terms, then we may be looking at the end, not of America’s hegemony, but of its supremacy. The hallmark of secure superpower status is that other states do not even try to challenge it directly, anticipating overwhelming defeat. Should Iran avoid this fate, the idea of smaller states openly and effectively resisting American interests around the world may no longer seem far-fetched.