JENNIFER LIND is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She is the author of Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny.
DARYL G. PRESS is Faculty Director of the Davidson Institute for Global Security and Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author, with Keir Lieber, of The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age.
Less than six months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration’s foreign policy has generated widespread dismay and confusion at home and abroad. The use of tariffs against allies and adversaries; the threats to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama; and the unusually blunt criticism of Washington’s closest partners appear both arbitrary and destructive, especially to policymakers who have spent their professional lives managing the U.S.-led international order. They believe that creating order in a world full of complex transnational challenges requires alliances, credibility, and soft power—precisely what the Trump administration seems bent on destroying.
Aspects of its policies may be difficult to understand, but there is a logic at the core of the administration’s national security strategy. The Trump administration sees the previous U.S. strategy—which aimed to build and maintain a global order led by the United States—as a misguided effort that has sapped U.S. power. It views Washington’s moves to cultivate soft power as leading to meddling and overstretch, and it perceives highly credible American security guarantees as encouraging most of the United States’ allies to reduce their defense efforts and rely on its protection.
Instead of trying to create global order, the Trump administration now appears to be pursuing a more focused strategy: prioritization. Its reasoning is simple. The United States has limited resources and China is its greatest geopolitical threat, so Washington must energize recalcitrant allies around the world to manage their own regions, freeing the United States to concentrate on Asia.
At this early stage, prioritization is only one of several approaches the Trump administration may pursue. But for now, signs of prioritization are evident in the administration’s words and actions. In the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance, circulated at the Pentagon in March, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described China as “the Department’s sole pacing threat” and the “denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan—while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland” as “the Department’s sole pacing scenario.” This echoed ideas promoted for years by Elbridge Colby, who is now the undersecretary of defense for policy and whose 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, contended that the top priority of U.S. foreign policy was to assemble an “anti-hegemonic coalition” in Asia to prepare for the possibility of “a war with China over Taiwan.”
In practice, the logic of prioritization clarifies many of the Trump administration’s actions with regard to Europe. Tough talk to NATO allies is meant to convince them that they can no longer rely on Washington and must do more for themselves. Ending the war in Ukraine quickly and bringing peace to the continent would enable the United States to reduce its military presence there and focus its resources on Asia. Even the schisms between the United States and Europe over the terms of a settlement between Russia and Ukraine are connected to prioritization. European leaders insist that the U.S. military play a major role in monitoring a peace deal because they desperately want to keep the United States in Europe; the Trump administration wants those responsibilities to rest on European shoulders because it wants out.
The principles of prioritization predate the Trump administration, and they will likely endure beyond it. Every U.S. president since Barack Obama has tried to “pivot” U.S. national security focus from Europe to Asia, because they have all understood that the greater threat to the United States lies in Asia and that U.S. allies in Europe have more capacity to defend themselves. If Trump’s team can make this titanic shift happen—if it can draw down U.S. forces in Europe and concentrate U.S. military strength in Asia—future presidents are unlikely to shift back.
When the United States faced another rising great-power rival, the Soviet Union, in the late 1940s, it adopted a strategy that became known as containment to counter the threat. That strategy was initially flawed but refined over time. The first version of prioritization, too, has important weaknesses. Although the strategy is built on the recognition that U.S. resources are limited, the Trump administration has requested higher defense spending. And although prioritization is designed to prevent China’s domination of East Asia, some of the Trump administration’s policies may be courting unnecessary danger in pursuit of that objective. Policymakers will now have to work through these tensions in the new U.S. strategy. In one form or another, prioritization is here to stay.
THE STRATEGIC EQUATION
For more than three decades, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has pursued a highly ambitious objective: to create, expand, and lead a liberal international order. But for the Trump administration, that order is a fantasy. Efforts to transform global politics have sapped American power and left the United States with near-constant wars, an overextended military, and free-riding allies. Liberal principles such as free trade and the right to asylum, although appealing in theory, robbed the United States of the ability to preserve its domestic industrial power and control its border. Maintaining the international order, prioritizers say, has meant putting the United States second.
Prioritization reframes U.S. national security policy by focusing on the safety, prosperity, and social cohesion of the United States. But prioritizers are not isolationists who want to concentrate only on homeland defense. Instead, this strategy offers a middle position between isolationism and the longtime U.S. strategy of global leadership. It narrows the goals of U.S. foreign policy to focus on the country’s most urgent threat—the rise of a rival regional hegemon, China—in order to avoid overstretching the United States’ finite resources.
A reckoning with the end of U.S. primacy has driven this shift in strategy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States faced no superpower rivals and could therefore act as what former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the “indispensable nation,” the country that would solve conflicts and lead multilateral efforts around the globe. Those days are gone. Prioritizers condemn that kind of global activism as producing what Colby has described as “overextension” in pursuit of “wildly ambitious goals” predicated on “a gauzy conception of the ‘sacredness’ of alliances without real strength or prudence to back it up.”
Fiscal constraints reinforce the call for greater discipline in U.S. foreign policy. The United States has amassed $29 trillion in public debt, roughly equal to the country’s GDP. To make matters worse, the federal budget deficit, at more than six percent of GDP, is higher today than at any time in the past century (except for periods of war or severe economic downturn), pushing the national debt ever higher. And as the U.S. population ages, federal spending on Medicare and Social Security will also increase. As Americans face difficult tradeoffs between spiraling debts, higher taxes, and entitlement reform, it will become harder to pay for the type of military that a strategy of global leadership requires.
“There is a logic at the core of Trump’s national security strategy.”
China, meanwhile, has become a far more powerful rival than the Soviet Union ever was. It is an economic peer of the United States and a leader in many critical technologies. Beijing is rapidly building up its conventional military capabilities and nuclear arsenal, which were once areas of comparative weakness. Competing with China will therefore require focused U.S. attention, leaving Washington with little time and few resources to manage the world.
Prioritization is a realist strategy, and what keeps realists up at night is the threat of a rival great power controlling an economically vital part of the world. Historically, that fear drew the United States into World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Were a powerful U.S. adversary to gain regional dominance, the thinking goes, it could use that position to structure world politics in ways that harm the United States, such as by weaponizing trade and isolating the United States diplomatically.
Today, the only vital region with a potential rival hegemon is Asia. In Europe, Russia is aggressive but completely outmatched. It has around one-third the population and one-tenth the GDP of the European Union, and it lags far behind Europe in the emerging technologies that will drive economic growth and warfighting in the future. European countries therefore have plenty of latent power to contain Russia; they merely need to mobilize it. The balance of power is more lopsided in Asia. China has the demographic, economic, and technological might to dominate maritime East Asia and seems intent on doing so. Using “gray zone” tactics, including coercive diplomacy and military pressure, Beijing is increasing its control over disputed territory in the South China and East China Seas. To pressure Taiwan, in particular, China conducts influence operations, cyberattacks, and military incursions. It isolates Taipei diplomatically, denying it membership in international institutions. And all the while, China is modernizing its military and conducting exercises to prepare for a blockade or invasion of Taiwan. In the logic of prioritization, because Beijing has both the will and the ability to achieve regional hegemony, it poses a threat the United States must counter.
To balance China but avoid overstretching U.S. resources, prioritization calls for a U.S. military drawdown in nonprioritized regions. This includes Europe, where the United States currently devotes significant attention and military capacity. Washington must convince all of its allies, but particularly those in Europe, to enhance their own defenses. This step is essential because a weak ally could become a target of aggression, which would force the United States to come to its aid. European allies must be made to understand that the United States will only be their last line of defense—compelling them to coordinate among themselves and generate real domestic defense capabilities.
DELIVERING THE PIVOT
The concerns that drive prioritization also did not begin with Trump. In 2011, Obama declared a pivot of U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military resources to Asia to address China’s growing power and influence. But the pivot was less doctrine, more New Year’s resolution—proclaimed, then abandoned. The Obama administration urged U.S. allies in both Asia and Europe to spend more on defense, but those pleas were ignored. American attention eventually strayed to the Middle East as civil wars erupted in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011, and to Europe after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. The pivot was put on hold.
The first Trump administration renewed U.S. focus on Asia. Its 2017 National Security Strategy highlighted threats from China and Russia and emphasized the Indo-Pacific region as a priority theater. Trump, as a candidate and later as president, shocked European allies with his remarks criticizing their failure to meet NATO spending targets, and he warned that the United States might not protect allies that did not adequately fund their own defense. In 2020, the Trump administration even announced the withdrawal of 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany, although the Biden administration canceled this plan the following year.
When President Joe Biden came into office, his administration sought to repair relations with European countries, but it also tried to direct additional attention to Asia. It presented the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 as a move that would permit greater focus on the Indo-Pacific. Through a “latticework” of security and economic initiatives with various regional partners, it sought to construct a counter-China coalition; through multilateral arms export controls, it sought to limit Chinese military might. But when war broke out in Ukraine in 2022 and in Gaza the next year, the Indo-Pacific once again took a back seat.
With prioritization, the second Trump administration is delivering the pivot that was long promised but never executed. Under this strategy, the United States would accelerate its preparations for a conflict in East Asia, with particular focus on the defense of Taiwan. To deter China and to improve U.S. warfighting capability, the United States would seek to restore its own weakened defense industrial base. It would maintain export controls that are designed to deny China cutting-edge weapons. Beyond the military realm, Washington would counter Beijing’s regional economic influence with new trade, technology, and development initiatives.
Prioritization would still see the United States coordinating and training with its allies, as well as seeking increased defense contributions from them. Most of their defense budgets fall near or below the global average as a share of GDP, which is inadequate given the high threat they face. The United States cannot contain a superpower without allied support—containing the Soviet Union required the mobilization of Western Europe, particularly the military capabilities of West Germany. At its peak, the Bundeswehr deployed a force that in size and capability was the equal of the U.S. Army in Europe. Just as NATO countries mobilized to counter the Soviet threat, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others must do the same to counter China today.
The shift of U.S. resources and attention to Asia will also mean resetting European expectations about the American role in any future European conflict. Since the late 1940s, U.S. deployments on the continent ensured that the United States would be the first to join the fight and would supply the largest contingent of forces. Prioritization would change that. The United States would stay in NATO, expecting to help defend its allies should the need arise, according to Article 5 of the alliance’s charter. But the United States would reduce its ground and air forces stationed in Europe in peacetime, perhaps transferring some of them to Asia.
For decades, U.S. military planners have spent their days figuring out how to rapidly introduce forces to Europe in the event of a conflict. Now, the U.S. goal would be the opposite. According to the logic of prioritization, the U.S. military would reduce its ability to quickly deploy large numbers of troops across the Atlantic. Like other NATO allies, instead of arriving on day one with the preponderance of forces, the United States would plan to arrive later and with less. Only by removing this safety net can Washington push NATO allies to assume the financially and politically difficult task of taking the lead in their own defense.
European countries will have to adjust to this new normal. Most NATO armies are underfunded and undersized, lacking the personnel necessary to sustain high-intensity operations. They rely on the United States to provide key capabilities, notably command-and-control and functions related to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. European countries must overcome political disunity and serious budgetary problems to restore the continent’s military power and fill the gaps that a diminished U.S. contribution would leave. The good news is that, with massive economic and technological advantages over Russia, Europe has the latent capability to address the threat.
THIS IS HAPPENING
For decades, U.S. and European diplomats described their alliance using words such as “ironclad” and “shoulder to shoulder” to nodding heads in Brussels conference rooms, at the annual Munich Security Conference, and at World War II commemorations. This language sought to assure anxious Europeans that the United States could be relied on to protect European security.
Trump tore up the script. In a memorable photo from a G-7 summit during his first term, the U.S. president sat, arms crossed, glaring at an indignant German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This February, Trump and Vice President JD Vance welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House, only to berate him on television. When Vance attended the Munich Security Conference the same month, instead of delivering the usual soothing words, he lambasted Europeans for shirking on defense and for stifling freedom of expression in their countries. Next came punishing tariffs and reports of senior U.S. officials insulting European allies on a leaked Signal chat. To Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top foreign policy official, it looked as if the United States were “trying to pick a fight” with Europe.
The Trump administration doesn’t want a fight, exactly, but a separation. Its effort to create political distance from Europe advances its desired shift in U.S. strategy: to convince—truly convince—European foreign policy elites that there will not be a return to the “ironclad” relationship and that the United States will no longer provide the continent’s first line of defense.
The change in the way Washington talks to and about Europe is not the only evidence of a shift toward prioritization. In Ukraine, the Trump administration is trying to end the war quickly in a manner that allows for a U.S. drawdown from the continent. European peace plans have sought to keep the United States engaged, proposing, for example, a cease-fire that would be guaranteed by a U.S. security force. But the Trump administration has flatly rejected that prospect. In the logic of prioritization, a U.S.-led force in Ukraine would be a strategic mistake since it would trap the United States in a European quagmire, preventing it from pivoting to Asia and allowing NATO allies to offload responsibility.
By pushing for an end to the war, the Trump administration is trying to create a future that European countries can manage on their own. A smaller U.S. presence would ease Europe into de facto recognition of Russia’s core interests near its borders, leaving Ukraine outside NATO. Compared with a situation in which the EU or, worse, NATO pushed eastward, which would provoke Moscow, this would reduce (if not eliminate) a key source of conflict between Europe and Russia. As long as European countries commit the financial and political resources necessary to develop strong defenses, they should be able to deter future Russian aggression—even from a Russia emboldened by gains in Ukraine and a U.S. withdrawal from the continent.
MOVING ON
Prioritization has attracted criticism not only from horrified European allies but also from American advocates of the previous U.S. strategy of global leadership. In the United States, those advocates on the center left and center right share the view that a militarily powerful United States, with a large network of alliances, provides essential, pacifying leadership in global politics. They argue that, as the strongest country in the world, the United States still has sufficient economic and military power to defend multiple regions. Some also downplay the threat posed by Beijing, arguing that China’s power is exaggerated and that the country faces serious demographic and economic challenges that undermine its capability to establish regional hegemony. Voting against Colby’s confirmation in April, Senator Mitch McConnell, a conservative advocate of U.S. global leadership, condemned the prioritization strategy Colby supports as “geostrategic self-harm that emboldens our adversaries and drives wedges between America and our allies” that those adversaries then exploit.
The outcry from many parts of the foreign policy establishment at the Trump administration’s gutting of foreign aid encapsulates the differences between the old and new strategies. To those who favor a strategy of American global leadership, the move was callous and irresponsible, damaging U.S. credibility and squandering the relationships and soft power that Washington has built over decades.
For the administration, the disruption was exactly the point. Trump’s foreign policy team dismisses soft power as a tool for managing a global order that it no longer intends to lead. U.S. policies today are aimed not at reassuring American allies but at energizing them. Aid programs may give the United States influence, but the Trump administration sees no need for that influence because it is not interested in managing politics across the so-called global South. More to the point, foreign aid, in the administration’s view, is another example of taking care of the world’s problems rather than those of the United States.
Prioritization, like any strategy, comes with tradeoffs. The biggest is that diminished U.S. credibility may lead to the spread of nuclear weapons in some regions, an outcome neither prioritizers nor their critics relish. Already, the Trump administration’s efforts to distance the United States from Europe have fueled doubts about the reliability of the NATO nuclear sharing program. Since the 1960s, Washington has promised to transfer nuclear weapons to certain NATO allies in the event of a major attack. A U.S. pivot away from Europe could undermine faith in that commitment. Fearing a nuclear threat from Russia, European countries may then develop a joint nuclear force, or individual countries such as Germany or Poland could seek independent arsenals.
The possibility of nuclear proliferation is an argument against prioritization. But if navigating today’s world means that countries must take responsibility for their own national security, then developments such as a European replacement for the U.S. nuclear umbrella in Europe may be unavoidable. Washington’s handling the security for the entire “free world” may have sounded plausible in the late 1990s, when the United States enjoyed a budget surplus, economic and military primacy, and no rival superpower. In 2025, things are different. The spread of nuclear weapons would be lamentable, but that does not change the reality that the global leadership strategy that prevents it is no longer viable.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Prioritization creates additional tensions that must be addressed. For decades, the credibility of U.S. security promises enabled European leaders to cut back on defense and spend liberally on social welfare. They grew dependent on Washington, confident that the United States would protect them. A prioritization strategy rectifies this problem in Europe—but invites a similar dynamic in Asia. Having declared that managing China’s rise is the foremost U.S. national security concern, the United States will have a hard time convincing its Asian allies to help it balance against China.
Indeed, even when the United States’ attention was spread all around the world and less focused on their region, Asian allies elected to “cheap ride” on U.S. commitments. For the past few decades, while China rose and began asserting its claims to disputed territory more forcefully, Japan’s defense spending remained flat at one percent of GDP. During the same period, defense spending in the Philippines and Taiwan fell. In the past few years, Japan has made some notable changes to its famously restrained security policy, including investment in counterstrike capabilities and a pledge to increase military spending. But Tokyo has not lifted significant legal limitations on its ability to dispatch military forces and to cooperate with allies, and its defense spending remains low, at a planned 1.8 percent of GDP in 2025. Taiwan’s defense spending has also risen in recent years. But despite facing an existential threat from China, it still spends less than 2.5 percent of its GDP on defense, which is around the global average. A U.S. pivot to Asia, with all the resources and promises that come with it, would only weaken regional allies’ incentives to spend more on security.
The Trump administration may be uniquely suited to mitigate this problem. If there has ever been a U.S. administration that is willing to work with allies but happy to walk away if they do not step up, it is this one. Trump himself has made clear that he is not deeply invested in alliances or in any particular vision for Asia’s future, as long as it does not include Chinese regional dominance. Both the Japanese and South Korean governments understand this, which is why leaders in Tokyo fear Washington will cut some sort of deal with Beijing, and why leaders in Seoul fear that Trump will reach a nuclear agreement with North Korea that disadvantages South Korea. To be sure, motivating allies in Asia to contribute more to their own defense will be a persistent challenge, but the transactional nature of the Trump administration may reduce allies’ temptation to cheap-ride.
Another problem with prioritization is that it is excessively confrontational toward China. To deny China regional hegemony, for example, prioritizers in the Trump administration argue, the United States must draw a redline between the mainland and Taiwan and enhance U.S. forces in the region to defend the island. In effect, the United States is adopting a strategy that would have it fight a war, if need be, against a nuclear-armed superpower that sees unification with Taiwan as a matter of national sovereignty. By making it impossible for both Beijing and Washington to achieve their core interests, prioritization seems to put the rivals on a collision course.
Finally, although prioritization is driven by an appreciation of U.S. resource constraints, it does little to ease that pressure. In fact, the defense budget requested by the Trump administration is as big as or bigger than those of previous administrations. Meanwhile, U.S. annual deficits are enormous, debt is mounting, and entitlement spending will soon rise. And prioritization will only become more expensive if the United States enters a major war against China.
The solutions to these problems—the strategy’s confrontational nature and its high price tag—may be intertwined. It is not surprising that the current version of this strategy is rather bold because its main advocates so far are those analysts and policymakers who have articulated the clearest vision of the dangers posed by Beijing. They were so energized by that threat that they made an effective case to overhaul decades of entrenched U.S. foreign policy thinking.
But even though future prioritizers will similarly focus on preventing China’s regional hegemony, they need not accept the most assertive version of the strategy. There is nothing about prioritization that requires the United States to confront China with any particular redlines, set of allies, or military force posture. Where to draw the redlines and how best to counter Chinese military power in the region should be—and are already being—debated. Taiwan could be inside the protective bubble or outside it. The United States could contain China with a full spectrum of offensive military capabilities or with something closer to a “porcupine” strategy of strengthening the national defenses of regional partners against Chinese predation. Some of those more restrained alternatives would demand less of the U.S. military and thus cost far less, too.
NO TURNING BACK
Many advocates of a U.S. global leadership strategy—particularly those in Europe—hope that the current moment is merely an aberration, that, as Biden did after taking office in 2021, the next U.S. president will announce that “America is back.” They are likely to be disappointed. The seeds of prioritization were planted long ago. Since the Obama administration, all U.S. presidents have recognized the need to shift U.S. military resources to Asia, and they all wanted NATO allies to do more for their own defense. But no previous administration was willing to pay the political costs of making the necessary changes. Now, the second Trump administration is ripping off the Band-Aid.
Future U.S. administrations may reverse elements of Trump’s foreign policy. They might reinstate foreign aid, arguing that a country as wealthy as the United States can afford to be charitable. They might also restaff international institutions or show greater warmth toward NATO allies. But once scarce defense resources are moved out of Europe, it is unlikely that another U.S. president would move them back. Asia needs those resources more than Europe does.
The last time the United States mobilized to confront a rising regional hegemon, when it embarked on a long-term project to contain the Soviet Union, the earliest formulations of the strategy were flawed. The first versions of containment asked little of U.S. allies, relied excessively on nuclear weapons to deter and wage a potential war, and seriously considered the possibility of initiating preventive war to defeat the Soviet threat once and for all. Strategy development is often an iterative process, and containment was fortunately refined over time. Washington eventually adopted more sensible approaches that mobilized the resources of key allies, developed a wiser balance between conventional and nuclear tools, and assumed a less confrontational attitude toward Moscow.
The new U.S. national security strategy is in its early stages and, like containment, will need to be refined over time. The United States will be Asia-focused, and China-focused, for many years to come. It now falls on both supporters and critics of the Trump administration to develop alternative versions of prioritization that minimize its costs and risks.
