Fortress America: The White House’s Terrifying Plan to Partition the World
Government white papers are usually excellent cures for insomnia. They are typically filled with bureaucratic grey noise, polite diplomatic fictions, and the sort of tentative language that allows civil servants to sleep at night. You expect them to be dull. This document, the newly published “National Security Strategy of the United States,” is far from dull. It reads like a manifesto blending a victory speech, an ideological tract, and a corporate hostile takeover bid for the planet written by a dementing Darth Vader screaming ‘I want’ 47 times throughout the US ultimatum to the world.
We need to talk about the sheer psychological force radiating from these pages. The opening letter sounds like a rally. Written with a cadence of superlatives and moral binaries, it presents a “President of Peace” who has single-handedly resolved eight global conflicts in eight months from Gaza to the Congo while obliterating drug cartels now designated as terrorists. It is a form of myth-making that borders on confabulation. It uses the proper nouns of diplomacy to create an impression of global reach while demanding total suspension of disbelief. The message is clear. Institutions failed you. Elites betrayed you. Only the Great Man can save you.
This narrative of betrayal is the engine driving the entire strategy. The text paints a vivid picture of a “Grievance Narrative” where the American people have been sold down the river by post-Cold War elites. These elites, the document argues, pursued an impossible dream of global domination through “transnationalism” that only served to hollow out the American heartland. It is a diagnosis that will resonate with populists from the Rust Belt to the Red Wall. The proposed cure is a regression to a hierarchical empire. The United States is defending the nation-state. But it is doing so by ruthlessly asserting its own sovereignty while treating the sovereignty of others as a conditional privilege.
Nowhere is this double standard more glaring than in the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. This new corollary goes far beyond the gunboat diplomacy of the past. It declares a total economic exclusion zone. The document explicitly targets Chinese-owned ports and Russian investment as “hostile foreign incursions” that must be uprooted. It threatens to rip up the commercial fabric of Latin America to deny competitors a foothold. It is a demand that the entire hemisphere disconnect from the global economy and plug solely into the American grid. The hypocrisy is staggering. The United States demands an “open door” in Asia while slamming the door shut in the Americas. It treats the people of the Global South not as partners with agency, but as inventory in a warehouse owned by Washington. By carving out this exclusive zone, the White House is effectively telling Beijing and Moscow that the world is being partitioned. It is an invitation for every great power to ring-fence their own neighbourhood.
We must catch the signal amidst the noise here. For the first time in living memory, an American security strategy ranks the Western Hemisphere as the absolute top regional priority. It sits above the Indo-Pacific. It sits well above Europe. This is the blueprint for “Fortress America” where the drawbridge is permanently up. The strategy outlines a plan to “enlist and expand” local deputies to do the heavy lifting of border security. It treats the entire continent south of the Rio Grande as a defensive buffer zone against migration and narcotics. By focusing so intently on its own backyard, Washington is implicitly telling its allies in Europe and Asia that the lease is up. They are seceding from the global order they built, taking the keys to the economy with them.
Then we reach the section that should send a chill through the chancelleries of Europe. The document explicitly links national security to demographics in a way that is profoundly disturbing. It frames migration as an “invasion” and a primary threat to the state. It warns of “civilizational erasure” in Europe and openly questions the future loyalty of NATO allies whose populations might become “majority non-European.” This is the “Great Replacement” theory codified into superpower statecraft. It explicitly racialises the Atlantic Alliance, suggesting that a diverse Europe is a weak Europe. It signals to London, Paris, and Berlin that Washington no longer views them as partners in democracy. It views them as racial traitors to a shared “civilizational” project.
The strategy brings the American culture wars directly into the situation room. “Radical gender ideology” and “woke lunacy” are identified as threats on par with ballistic missiles. It vows to root out “DEI” initiatives as anti-meritocratic dangers to military readiness. Most dangerously, it dismisses climate change as an “ideology” that subsidises adversaries, pivoting back to fossil fuels with aggressive enthusiasm. This is the weaponisation of resentment. By attaching physical danger to cultural grievances, the administration creates a permission structure for purges within the military and the civil service. They are walling themselves in while the planet burns.
For the United Kingdom and Europe, the bill for this new worldview has arrived. The “Hague Commitment” demands that NATO allies spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence. It is a figure designed to break the back of the European welfare state. But the financial cost is secondary to the political threat. The strategy explicitly states a preference for working with “patriotic parties” over the current EU establishment, which it views as illegitimate. It is a divide-and-conquer approach. The goal is to strengthen NATO’s military utility for American ends while weakening the European political project.
We must also notice the pivot on democracy. The document abandons the “hectoring” of authoritarian regimes. It signals a willingness to accept Gulf monarchies and regional strongmen as they are, provided they align with U.S. interests. Stability has replaced liberty as the currency of the realm. It is a transactional realism that strips away the veneer of American moral leadership to reveal the raw power dynamics underneath.
It is easy to recoil from the brutality of this text. It is a mirror that exposes Western hypocrisy, revealing an imperialism that was often masked as a “rules-based order.” It diagnoses real failures in the hubris of the last thirty years. Yet the solution it offers is a retreat into a fossil-fueled, ethno-nationalist fortress.
We have a choice. We can panic, or we can look at this landscape with clear eyes. This document forces us to grow up. We can no longer rely on a benevolent protector. We must rediscover a European project that stands for something more than trans-Atlantic subservience. If America is retreating behind its walls, we cannot simply wait outside the gates. We must build a new coalition of the willing. We need an architecture based not on shared heritage, but on the shared reality that climate change and inequality care little for borders, even ones guarded by a Golden Dome. America has stated clearly what it wants. Now we must decide what we are willing to build to replace it.
Read it and weep https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
Quentin Budworth 