The United States National Security Strategy for 2025 should not be read merely as a conventional technical security document but as a historical document. For the first time since the end of World War II, the central state of global capitalism formally acknowledges its structural limits in managing the international order.
What appears in this document is not simply a change in priorities or a redefinition of threats. It represents a historical transition: from the era of the “global policeman” to a strategy of selective crisis management on a smaller and more controllable scale.
The explicit emphasis on the Western Hemisphere as America’s natural sphere of influence signals a conscious retreat from the role of global leadership and an acknowledgment of the structural limits in maintaining the international order the United States helped construct after 1945.
This retreat is not merely a political choice. It reflects the deep erosion of the economic, industrial, financial and social capacity of capital reproduction within the United States itself.
When read through the lens of the theory of the historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital, the meaning of this document becomes clearer. The current crisis of capitalism is not a classical cyclical crisis but a systemic crisis affecting every level of reproduction: material production, profitability, the state, ideology, science and the international order.
The United States can no longer sustain the material, military and ideological costs of a unified global order. The turn toward a more limited geopolitical scale is therefore not a sign of strength but an attempt to manage crisis under conditions of historical decline.
Retreat to the Western Hemisphere
This shift also signals the end of liberal globalization as a historical project. The international order that emerged after 1991 – based on NATO expansion, integration of peripheral regions into the global market and the vision of a unified liberal world – is now eroding.
In its place we see a return to the classical logic of imperialism: defined spheres of influence, constrained balances of power and managed geopolitical competition.
One immediate consequence is the growing internal tension within the Atlantic alliance. NATO remains as a military structure, but its political and strategic cohesion is increasingly strained.
Europe remains heavily dependent on the U.S. security umbrella, while Washington is increasingly unwilling to provide this guarantee without direct economic and political returns.
Permanent War Without World War
Within this historical context the logic of war itself is transforming. A global nuclear war can no longer function as a mechanism for the reorganization of capital because it would destroy the material conditions of reproduction on a planetary scale.
Instead, contemporary capitalism relies on a system of regional, fragmented and continuous destruction.
Regional and proxy wars – in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza – are not anomalies but the dominant form of warfare in the era of capitalism’s historical crisis.
These wars perform functions similar to the world wars of the twentieth century: destruction of surplus capital, displacement of labor, restructuring of accumulation zones and the reconfiguration of fragile political orders.
The war in Ukraine should be understood in this context. It does not represent the beginning of a new world war but rather the extension of the proxy-war model into the European core.
Meanwhile, the rivalry between the United States and China remains primarily geo-economic. The central arenas of competition are technology, energy, supply chains, financial dominance and digital infrastructure.
Direct military confrontation between two nuclear powers is neither rational nor functional for capital reproduction. Military conflict therefore appears mainly in regional or proxy forms.
For the proletariat, the decisive issue is not predicting a hypothetical world war but organizing within the reality of permanent war.
