The National Security Strategy of a Nervous Superpower

 For all the talk of a “new American century,” Washington’s 2025 National Security Strategy reads less like a roadmap for global leadership and more like a manifesto for managed decline.

Salman Rafi Sheikh

It places the US in a scenario in which China is treated as an economic contagion to be quarantined and Europe as a dying civilization in need of ideological resuscitation. It is a worldview that sees rivals everywhere, allies nowhere, and the world order as something to be bent—if not broken—to America’s domestic anxieties.

Europe is useless for the US

In the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), Europe is no longer portrayed as the democratic heart of the West, but as a civilization in terminal decline, unraveling under pressures so deep that Washington now doubts its ability to remain a meaningful partner. The document warns of nothing less than Europe’s “prospect of civilizational erasure,” a phrase that casts the crisis not as policy miscalculation but as existential collapse. Europe’s slide, according to the NSS, is driven by self-inflicted wounds: “cratering birthrates,” “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,” and a political culture that has lost faith in its own identity.

The NSS is explicit that Europe’s core problems are internal and ideological. It accuses “the European Union and other transnational bodies” of “undermining political liberty and sovereignty,” a charge that recasts the EU not as the guarantor of European unity but as a force accelerating fragmentation. Worse, the strategy claims Europe’s elites are responding to these pressures through “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition,” implying that the continent’s liberal democratic institutions have mutated into instruments of coercion. Europe’s economic decline serves as evidence of this civilizational weakening: its share of global GDP has collapsed from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today, a trajectory the NSS attributes to “national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.” In this reading, Europe is not simply falling behind; it is forfeiting the dynamism that once defined the West.

The NSS reads less like a blueprint for renewed American leadership than a confession of profound strategic loneliness

What makes the document extraordinary is its insistence that Europe may not survive in recognizable form. It bluntly states that, without drastic reversal, the continent “will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” And because a collapsing Europe cannot help the US compete in the 21st century, the NSS proposes something unprecedented: direct American alignment with “patriotic European parties” that seek to overturn the continent’s current trajectory. The strategy positions Washington not just as Europe’s ally but as a would-be architect of its cultural and political revival.

In short, the NSS envisions Europe as a failing civilization—which is demographically shrinking, economically waning, and politically brittle—and casts the US not as its partner, but as its instrument of rescue. For the EU, therefore, the US is not necessarily an ally but an external intervening force. The NSS, in fact, is a blueprint for the EU to review its alliance with the US and reposition itself globally. This reposition might begin the end of the transatlantic ties as we know them. Much of what is driving the US position about the EU  also has to do with the fact the theatre of global competition is no longer Europe, at least in Washington’s calculation. It is the Indo-Pacific region—the “key economic battleground,” according to the NSS—where China must be tackled, contained, and defeated systematically.

China as the Challenger That Must Be Broken

If Europe is depicted as a civilization collapsing under its own weight, China is cast as the ascendant adversary whose rise must be contained and ultimately reversed. The NSS leaves no ambiguity: China became powerful because “American elites…were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial,” allowing Beijing to convert US openness into “grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage” and “predatory, state-directed subsidies” that hollowed out American industry. The document argues that this dynamic has produced a strategic competitor capable of undermining US prosperity at its core. To counter it, the US must “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence,” a formulation that casts the challenge not as competition between equals, but as a zero-sum struggle over who will control the commanding heights of the global economy. Washington signals that defeat is not an option: it must “protect and defend our economy and our people from harm, from any country or source,” and China is the only state named repeatedly as the source of that harm.

Military power is treated as an extension of this economic confrontation. The NSS insists the US must maintain a force capable of “denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” and must deter China from seizing Taiwan, whose position is deemed so critical that a conflict there would have “major implications for the US economy.” The language is blunt: Beijing cannot be allowed to dominate the Indo-Pacific, cannot be permitted to weaponize supply chains, and cannot be permitted to control the South China Sea. In short, China must be checked everywhere and in all possible ways, including economically, technologically, and militarily.

Strikingly, the NSS does not cast Europe as America’s partner in this struggle. The document repeatedly frames Europe as too distracted, too divided, and too weak to function as a genuine counterweight to China. Europe’s internal crises—its “loss of national identities and self-confidence,” “regulations that undermine creativity,” and “suppression of political opposition”—are presented as evidence that it lacks the strategic coherence needed for long-term competition. The NSS even suggests Europe’s governments have “unrealistic expectations” about global politics, making them unreliable in sustained geopolitical contests. Whereas China is a challenger to be defeated, Europe is a burden to be managed.

A Strategy That Ensures America Stands Alone

Taken together, the NSS reads less like a blueprint for renewed American leadership than a confession of profound strategic loneliness. Europe is written off as a civilization in collapse, incapable of partnership; China is cast as an existential economic predator; the Middle East is to be managed at arm’s length; and Africa and Latin America are treated primarily as arenas for blocking competitors. What remains is a world in which the US trusts no one, burdens every ally, resents every institution, and measures every relationship in terms of threat or deficiency. A superpower insisting that it alone can reindustrialize, deter China, reform Europe, patrol the seas, rebuild the defense base, reengineer global trade, and restructure the developing world is not projecting confidence; rather, it is signaling strategic exhaustion. By narrowing its universe of trusted partners to essentially no one, the US is constructing a foreign policy that cannot be sustained, economically or politically. The paradox is devastating: a strategy meant to preserve American primacy instead accelerates the conditions that will erode it.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs