By Kenneth M. Stokes* – Article sent to Other News by the author
If you want to understand where America thinks it’s heading, you don’t just read its recently published national security strategy for the bullet points. You read it, as it were, against the grain: you look at what it assumes, what it fears, what it doesn’t say. The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) is revealing in exactly this way. On the surface, it is an assertion of strength and sovereign clarity. Read more closely, it also tells us how Washington imagines the world in an age of polycrisis—and where that imagination might be too narrow for the storm it is sailing into. In this regard it is particularly useful to conduct a comparative reading of the NSS and the Wolfowitz-era Defence Planning Guidance (DPG) from over three decades ago.
The DPG was drafted in the early post–Cold War moment, when Washington sought to lock in unipolar advantage; the NSS is a public strategy written in a far noisier era of renewed rivalry, economic weaponry, and domestic strain.
This comparative reading introduces two different ways of taking strategy apart—one built like an atlas, the other like a briefing—so that what usually sits beneath policy talk (the organising assumptions, priorities, and blind spots) becomes visible, and therefore open to judgment. It does not compare policy line by line so much as compare what the deconstructions reveal about the premises beneath policy. It cannot tell you what is classified or what will be competently implemented; it can show you the assumptions that make certain moves feel inevitable.
To see why this kind of comparison matters, it helps to name the genre of writing we are dealing with. There is a particular kind of document that does not argue directly about what a government should do, but about what a government believes the world is. These are second-order readings: mirrors held up to strategy, less concerned with the day-to-day merits of policy than with the deeper architecture of assumptions, priorities, and silences that make some actions feel “obvious” and others unthinkable.
These two readings do the same kind of work, but in different idioms. Both use close, interpretive reading to bring out the strategy’s hidden wagers—the axioms it relies on, the quiet premises that make the logic hang together—and the silences those wagers create. The DPG analysis is forensic and almost cartographic: it is “network-ready”, translating premises and exclusions into a form you could diagram. The NSS analysis takes the same hermeneutic, axiom-tracing approach, but is written as a briefing for partners and allies, sketching a world-view shaped by sovereign priority, growth, hierarchy, and managerial confidence—and noting blind spots on climate risk, sanctions blowback, and Global South agency.
What emerges is not merely a contrast between eras. It is a contrast between two styles of American power—as these readings render them—and two ways of coping with a world that feels less and less amenable to reassurance.
At bottom, the readings bring a master wager in each document into view. The DPG rests on the belief that security depends on stopping any peer rival from consolidating power in the world’s “critical regions”. The 2025 NSS rests on a different belief: that security depends on restoring sovereign strength at home—and then using the infrastructures of interdependence (energy, industry, finance, borders) as levers abroad.
These wagers are not academic: they determine which tools Washington reaches for first, what kinds of costs it exports to allies, and what kinds of blowback it tends to overlook.
Two ways of “reading” strategy: the atlas and the briefing book
Seen in that light, the Wolfowitz/DPG deconstruction is built like an atlas. It distinguishes what the text declares openly from what it relies upon quietly, and what it excludes altogether; it then translates those findings into a structured schema that could be used for comparative mapping across a wider corpus. The very form matters: it suggests that grand strategy is not only rhetoric but an organised system of dependencies—assumptions that presuppose, reinforce, negate, or silence other assumptions.
The NSS deconstruction keeps the interpretive ambition but relaxes the scaffolding. It follows a three-step method—storyline, underlying assumptions, silences—then offers a picture of how the document sees the world and how that vision may land with other states. The upshot is simple: one analysis gives you a map you can query; the other gives you a brief you can use.
This difference in form is already a political clue. When strategy is treated as diagrammable, it invites technocratic governance: if you can map the system, you can optimise it. When strategy is treated as communicable narrative, it invites coalition management: if you can frame the story, you can keep partners onside.
Power as position, power as management
Beneath the methodological contrast lies a deeper shift: from power as geopolitical positioning to power as system management.
The DPG: a world of “critical regions”
In the Wolfowitz reading, security is tied to preventing the re-emergence of a peer competitor. The world is imagined as a set of “critical regions” whose resources and consolidation could generate rival global power. The strategic grammar is anticipatory denial: preclude hostile consolidation before it becomes irreversible.
It is the language of the map: buffers, footholds, vacuums, zones. Even the metaphors have a spatial feel—“strategic depth”, “shaping”, “vacuum/foothold”, “zone of peace”—each nudging policy towards forward presence, anticipatory constraint, and a morally coded geography of order.
The contrast is not merely stylistic. It rests on what each strategy takes to be the source of power: territory and consolidation on one side; infrastructures and leverage on the other.
The NSS 2025: a ranked system with a manager at the centre
The NSS reading finds a different centre of gravity: a sovereign republic whose “core national interests” dominate the calculus, with a special security status assigned to the Western Hemisphere. The world is hierarchically ranked—Western Hemisphere and Indo-Pacific at the apex; Europe as a civilisational peer in crisis; the Middle East to be stabilised with reduced U.S. involvement; Africa framed primarily as resources, competition, and investment.
But where the DPG thinks in regions, the NSS thinks in systems—the world as spreadsheet: supply chains, financial architectures, energy leverage—structures assumed manageable from an American centre. It is not simply “America acts”; it is “America coordinates”. In this world-view, power is exercised by arranging the circuitry of modern life. Think of export controls on advanced technology, sanctions and financial restrictions, energy exports used as leverage, and efforts to re-shore or “de-risk” supply chains.
You can see the practical effect most clearly in alliances: the bargain shifts from reassurance (troops, guarantees) to alignment management (sanctions, export controls, industrial policy, energy arrangements). The latter asks partners to absorb economic costs, and it often produces compliance tinged with quiet hedging.
Europe sits right on this fault line. Under the older posture-driven bargain, the principal question was how to keep deterrence credible while avoiding overextension. Under the newer leverage-driven bargain, the question becomes how far Europe will align economically and technologically—on sanctions, export controls, investment screening, defence-industrial scaling—without importing the feedback effects into its own political centre.
This is where “strategic autonomy” stops being a slogan and becomes a costed choice. Autonomy, in practice, means redundancy: deeper defence-industrial capacity, energy resilience, and substitutes for choke-points that sit outside Europe’s control. Those are slow, expensive projects, and they require political unity that Europe often lacks.
The risks are therefore less abstract than they appear in communiqués. Economic tools generate adaptation quickly—workarounds, substitutes, parallel arrangements—and Europe, as an open trading bloc with acute energy sensitivities, may feel the blowback more sharply than the United States. Recent sanctions episodes have shown how quickly trade can be rerouted through intermediaries and substitutes developed off-shore or at home. When external alignment translates into higher prices, lost markets, or perceived deindustrialisation, foreign policy ceases to be “foreign”: it becomes an internal legitimacy contest.
The planet, too, complicates the bargain. If Washington treats climate chiefly as something to be traded against competitiveness, Europe faces a double bind: align too closely and dilute transition aims; diverge too far and risk friction in the very alignment architecture it depends on. The practical opportunity is real—Europe can shape standards by treating ecological disruption as a first-order security driver—but only if it can sustain the coalition to do so.
Europe’s response menu is therefore likely to be mixed: deep alignment on core security questions; selective carve-outs where competitiveness and social stability are at stake; slow redundancy-building in defence, energy, and critical technology; and quiet diversification to reduce dependence on any single choke-point.
For the reader trying to see tomorrow’s headlines in today’s logic, three signals matter in Europe: whether alignment remains mostly military or becomes deeply economic; whether redundancy-building becomes real mobilisation rather than rhetoric; and whether domestic politics—migration, prices, identity—turn external strategy into a permanent internal fight.
Uncertainty admitted, uncertainty domesticated
The same shift that unsettles alliances also reshapes how uncertainty is handled.
Both readings converge on a tension modern strategy can rarely escape: it acknowledges complexity and unpredictability, then reaches—almost reflexively—for control.
The Wolfowitz reading points to a striking admission: events repeatedly defy near-term prediction; “appreciation for uncertainty” is “critical.” Yet this opening is quickly domesticated: uncertainty becomes justification for posture, reconstitution capacity, and technological lead, rather than for institutional humility or a more plural approach to security.
The NSS reading finds a different tone: a stronger confidence in strategic rationalism, where ends and means can be aligned because threats and instruments are sufficiently knowable. Complexity is translated into calculable risk rather than treated as a limit on prediction and control. A particularly sharp formulation is its discussion of the “erasure of radical uncertainty”: climate, finance, cyber, deterrence, and supply chains are portrayed as challenging but ultimately governable through better capacity and design.
Different tones, similar impulse: acknowledge turbulence, then build a machine to master it. When uncertainty is treated as manageable, policy tends to grow more confident—until feedback arrives.
That shift also changes the hazard profile. A strategy that mainly moves troops and reassures allies has fewer “control surfaces” than one that turns trade, technology, money, and energy into tools. The more knobs a state adds, the more ways the system can push back—quickly, creatively, and often off-script.
The silences that matter: the planet and the periphery
If the most revealing parts of strategy are sometimes what it cannot quite say, both analyses share a sobering diagnosis: the planet does not quite make it into the room as a strategic actor.
Both analyses converge on an absence: Earth-systems dynamics are not granted ontological standing as forces shaping security. The NSS analysis makes the point in contemporary terms: climate is not treated as an autonomous driver of instability, but appears largely through critique of specific policy choices, limiting the strategy’s ability to anticipate cascading climate-related security risks. The older document largely overlooks the planet; the newer one more often treats it as a policy variable to be traded against competitiveness—an important difference between absence and subordination.
A second shared narrowing concerns Global South agency. The Wolfowitz reading suggests that non-core regions appear as peripheral contingencies—named, but not fully agentic in the strategic imagination. The NSS analysis similarly notes that Southern states often appear as objects of investment or competition rather than as co-authors of order with their own projects and visions.
Taken together, these habits of seeing translate a world of multiplying centres of initiative into a world of managed peripheries, sometimes with neocolonial overtones. This is not merely a moral weakness; it is an analytical hazard. A strategy that underestimates other actors’ capacity to improvise is a strategy that will be repeatedly surprised.
A subtle but important shift: from spatial metaphors to temporal rupture
Language, too, becomes part of the toolkit, and one of the more elegant contrasts is about time.
Wolfowitz-era metaphors are spatial—buffer, foothold, zone—sustaining a geopolitics of emplacement and denial. The NSS’s narrative devices introduce sharper temporal rupture: “Era of Mass Migration Must End,” a phrase that turns policy into a civilisational pivot and can license harsh measures as historical necessity.
This matters because temporal rupture is a powerful political technology. It does not simply describe urgency; it manufactures it, and in doing so it can compress debate, shorten horizons, and reduce the tolerance for ambiguity.
What all this suggests, in plain terms
Read together, these two interpretive analyses suggest a durable American disposition: strategy repeatedly strives for coherence in a world whose defining characteristic is systemic spillover—feedback effects, second-order consequences, and adversaries who adapt. The implication is less “one era was right and the other wrong” than this: the toolkit of U.S. primacy has expanded faster than reflexive governance (monitoring feedback and adjusting quickly) has matured.
– The DPG’s core move is to prevent: deny the conditions under which a rival might emerge.
– The NSS’s core move is to manage: rank the world, restore domestic foundations, and treat interdependence as leverage.
Where they most reliably falter differs. The older wager tends to break on the logic of rivalry: efforts to prevent peers can encourage balancing and counter-coalitions. The newer wager tends to break on the logic of feedback: the more interdependence is weaponised, the more others adapt—rewiring supply chains, building substitutes, and quietly hedging alliances.
Yet both risk the same trap: acting as though the system will respond as planned.
In practice, that means strategies that look coherent on paper can generate new rivals, new workarounds, and new crises faster than institutions can learn from them.
And that, perhaps, is the sharpest conclusion to draw from the comparison: not that American strategy lacks intelligence, but that it is repeatedly tempted by the idea that intelligence can substitute for humility.
Watch, in the months and years ahead, for three pressure points: the speed with which others adapt to economic coercion; the degree to which domestic resilience limits external ambition; and the intrusions of climate and other systemic shocks that ignore strategic design.
*Kenneth M. Stokes, Ph.D., President at World Sustainability Forum. The Forum’s hermeneutic, complexity-minded analysis, referenced above, is indicative of its wide-ranging research programme on power, security and planetary fragility.