The Great Power Threat is Back: Why America Needs a National Security Reset

Andrew A. Michta

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As Donald J. Trump takes office as the country’s 47th President, American foreign and security policy are at an inflection point.

While analysts routinely predict various and sundry policy changes when a new administration arrives on the scene, I will refrain from assessing the defining pillars of the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda until the principals are in the saddle and the policy process moves forward.

Instead, I would like to focus on where the United States is today regarding its relative power position in the world, and how we got here.

And the news is not good. In just one generation, America’s policy elites frittered away an inordinate amount of power. Following the collapse of the Soviet empire, the US policy community all but abandoned our traditional pragmatism and the respect for geopolitical constraints that heretofore had tempered America’s strategic thought.

In short, we let ideology overpower geopolitical considerations.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has played a normative game, professing that we lived in a world of rules tied to principles-based interlocking systems that would compel states to pursue integration into the global trade networks to set them on the course for reform, liberalization and “complex interdependence.”