The Unraveling: America's Strategic Retreat and the Dawn of Multipolarity

The Facts: Documenting Hegemonic Decline

On December 4, 2025, the White House released a National Security Strategy that reads less like a foreign-policy roadmap than a farewell statement to the post-Cold War international order. This document represents not merely a policy adjustment but a fundamental retreat from the institutional and hegemonic architecture that the United States built, financed, and led for nearly eight decades. The strategy openly questions concepts that once defined American global leadership, including the “permanent dominance of the American-led world order” and even “free trade”—the very mechanisms that cemented U.S. global primacy are now portrayed as threats to the American middle class.

The document exhibits profound strategic contradictions: it calls for “strategic stability” with Russia while branding Europe as a symbol of “civilizational decline”; it urges NATO allies to shoulder greater security burdens while questioning their reliability; it celebrates the sitting president as a “president of peace” while openly endorsing the use of “lethal force” in cross-border operations. Most fundamentally, the strategy substitutes coherent grand strategy with personal promotion, casting the president not as the leader of an institutional system but as the central hero of peace-making and deal-brokering.

Regarding China, the document demonstrates strategic confusion by reducing the China challenge largely to economic risks while calling for “mutually beneficial relations,” even as it continues technological decoupling and containment policies. The approach toward Russia is equally contradictory, speaking of restoring strategic stability while accusing Europe of ignoring popular support for Ukraine and advocating limiting NATO expansion without justification.

The document explicitly states that the United States will no longer “carry the burden of global order,” demanding that NATO members spend five percent of GDP on defense—a move that reads less as burden-sharing and more as burden-shifting coupled with political extortion. By condemning “transnationalism,” the strategy effectively repudiates the institutions that once enabled the United States to exercise power both legitimately and affordably.

Context: The Historical Arc of American Hegemony

The 2025 strategy must be understood within the broader context of American hegemony since 1945. The United States built an international system based on security guarantees, open markets, and credible institutions—what hegemonic stability theory describes as providing public goods to sustain order. This system, while often serving American interests, also created a framework that many nations, including those in the Global South, had to operate within.

For decades, developing nations have navigated a world shaped by American rules, often facing pressure to conform to Western economic models and political systems. The institutions created under American leadership—the IMF, World Bank, NATO, and others—have frequently been instruments of soft power that reinforced Western dominance while constraining the policy space available to emerging economies.

The current moment represents a historical inflection point where the architect of this system is voluntarily dismantling its own creation. This isn’t happening through rebellion by rivals but through the disillusionment of the hegemon itself—a phenomenon without precedent in modern international relations.

Opinion: The Global South’s Moment of Reckoning and Responsibility

The Collapse of Imperial Pretensions

What we witness in the 2025 National Security Strategy is nothing less than the spectacular unmasking of American imperial overreach. For decades, the United States positioned itself as the indispensable nation, the guarantor of global order, the arbiter of international norms. Yet this document reveals the hollow core of that project—a hegemony unwilling to bear the costs of leadership, a superpower that prefers transactional extortion over institutional commitment, and a nation that would rather retreat into isolation than adapt to a changing world.

This isn’t merely strategic retrenchment; it’s the bankruptcy of an entire worldview. The American establishment has finally admitted what the Global South has known for generations: that the “rules-based international order” was never about rules but about Western dominance, never about order but about control. The institutions that amplified American power are now being abandoned because they no longer serve narrow national interests—revealing that the commitment to multilateralism was always conditional on maintaining unipolar dominance.

The Contradictions of a Fading Hegemon

The document’s internal contradictions are not merely policy failures but symptoms of civilizational fatigue. How can a nation simultaneously seek hegemonic power while abandoning the architecture that sustains it? How can it demand cooperation while eroding trust? How can it proclaim peace while threatening force? These are not strategic choices but the death throes of an empire losing coherence.

The personalization of foreign policy around individual leadership rather than institutional continuity represents the ultimate betrayal of the hegemonic project. True enduring power resides in systems, not personalities; in institutions, not temperaments. By making security cooperation contingent on ideological alignment and reducing alliances to transactional accounting, the United States is systematically dismantling the very foundations of its own influence.

Opportunity and Danger for the Rising World

For nations of the Global South, particularly civilizational states like India and China, this moment presents both unprecedented opportunity and profound danger. The opportunity lies in the space created for strategic autonomy, for the diversification of partnerships, for the assertion of indigenous development models free from Western imposition. We can finally pursue national interests without exclusive dependence on Washington’s approval or disapproval.

The danger, however, is equally real. History teaches us that periods of hegemonic transition are often marked by instability, arms races, and miscalculation. The vacuum left by American retreat could lead to regional conflicts, economic disruption, and security dilemmas. The very unpredictability that the document embodies becomes a source of global risk.

More fundamentally, the Global South must resist the temptation to simply replace American hegemony with another dominant power. Our objective should not be to recreate unipolarity but to genuinely advance multipolarity—a world where multiple civilizations, development models, and cultural traditions coexist as equals. This requires building new institutions that reflect contemporary realities rather than 20th-century power distributions.

The Responsibility of Civilizational States

India and China, as ancient civilizations with continuous historical consciousness, have particular responsibility in this transition. Unlike Westphalian nation-states, civilizational states understand time in centuries rather than election cycles, value harmony over domination, and prioritize civilizational continuity over transactional advantage.

Our approach to this geopolitical shift must be guided by several principles: First, we must reject any attempt to simply recreate hegemonic structures under different management. Second, we must build institutions based on mutual respect and civilizational diversity rather than Western templates. Third, we must ensure that the transition to multipolarity benefits all humanity, not just emerging powers.

The technological decoupling and containment policies mentioned in the document represent continued Western attempts to maintain technological dominance. The Global South must respond not with imitation but with innovation—developing our own technological ecosystems, research networks, and digital infrastructures that serve our developmental needs rather than Western security anxieties.

Toward a Truly Post-Western World Order

The unraveling of American hegemony represents the end of a 500-year period of Western dominance in world affairs. This is not cause for celebration but for sober reflection and determined action. The transition must be managed with wisdom, compassion, and foresight.

We must build new frameworks for international cooperation that acknowledge the equal dignity of all civilizations, that respect different developmental paths, and that prioritize human flourishing over geopolitical scoring. The institutions we create should facilitate dialogue rather than enforce conformity, enable cooperation rather than mandate alignment.

For too long, international relations has been conducted through Western categories and Western priorities. The emerging multipolar order must make space for Indian concepts of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is one family), Chinese notions of tianxia (all under heaven), African philosophies of ubuntu (I am because we are), and countless other non-Western ways of understanding human community.

Conclusion: Birth Pangs of a New Era

The 2025 National Security Strategy will likely be remembered as the document that acknowledged American hegemonic decline without offering a coherent path forward. For the Global South, it represents both validation and challenge: validation of our long-standing critique of Western-dominated international structures, and challenge to step forward as architects of a new international order.

This is our historical moment—the time when we must move from resistance to construction, from critique to creation, from opposition to proposition. The future of international politics will be shaped by how wisely we navigate this transition, how inclusively we design new institutions, and how compassionately we wield our growing influence.

The unraveling of the American-led order is not the end of history but the beginning of a more authentic, diverse, and equitable global community. Let us ensure that the multipolar world we build reflects the best of human civilization rather than the worst of imperial ambition.