中文
By Bradley Blankenship
Lead: The 2025 National Security Strategy's China section reveals an American state unable to distinguish between myth and reality, projecting internal failures onto a civilization that has never subscribed to Washington's ideological narratives.
The China section of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), released by the Trump administration in early December, may be the most revealing document the contemporary American state has produced — not because it displays strategic clarity, but because it exposes a former superpower that has lost the ability to distinguish between its self-image and the empirical world.
This portion of the NSS does not merely outline a foreign policy posture; it inadvertently illustrates the internal fracture of an empire trying to impose an ideological hallucination onto a world it no longer controls.
A strategy built on retrospective mythology
The text begins by framing the current administration as the sole force that "reversed" decades of error regarding China. Before articulating actual policy, the authors perform a ritual of political blame. This is required because the United States needs a symbolic reboot to compensate for institutions that can no longer deliver actual solutions.
The deeper psychological reality is that Washington has only recently awakened to the fact that China never subscribed to America's ideological narratives, and that the "rules-based order" was always a euphemism for U.S. discretionary power. China played by material rules — state capacity, industrial policy, fiscal discipline and national coherence — while the U.S. played by rhetorical ones.
The NSS reframes this as predation because the alternative interpretation is too painful: America misread an entire civilization, and its elites projected their own fantasies onto a country that never agreed to be molded.
Economic competition as the mask for industrial collapse
The economic section reveals the real wound. The NSS laments distorted trade, illicit subsidies, IP theft, supply chain vulnerabilities, fentanyl precursors and deindustrialization. But hidden inside these accusations is a devastating truth: China no longer depends on the U.S., but the U.S. still depends on China.
The NSS acknowledges that Chinese exports to the U.S. have fallen to roughly 2% of China's GDP, while exports to low-income countries doubled from 2020 to 2024. Beijing has already diversified past reliance on the American consumer. However, Washington has not diversified past reliance on Chinese manufacturing.
This asymmetry is fatal to the political mythology of the U.S., which still imagines itself as the indispensable core of global commerce. In reality, the U.S. voluntarily forfeited its industrial base. No foreign adversary forced the offshoring of American manufacturing; U.S. political and corporate elites made that decision themselves, and now seek absolution by attributing the consequences to Beijing.
"Indo-Pacific" strategy as deterrence theater
The "Indo-Pacific" portion reads as a script written for an audience that must be reassured — not informed. The stated objective is preventing "regional domination" by any competitor, a euphemism for preventing China from assuming the natural role that any major civilization-state assumes in its immediate environment, as noted in the "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine.
However, the "Indo-Pacific" region is, to a great extent, already economically oriented toward China. Demography is on China's side. Geography is on China's side. Supply chains are on China's side. Trade flows are on China's side.
The NSS responds not with strategy, but with demands: Allies must spend more. Allies must allow deeper U.S. access. India must align. Japan and South Korea must rearm. Southeast Asia must resist China's economic gravity. The Taiwan region must remain permanently militarized.
This is not a vision of future equilibrium. It is a list of prerequisites for delaying the inevitable. The U.S. is attempting to prevent history from unfolding.
Projection as strategic doctrine
The psychological heart of the document appears in its list of behaviors the U.S. must "end." This inventory reads less like a foreign policy assessment and more like a catalog of America's own self-inflicted wounds: job destruction, industrial hollowing, supply chain weakness, drug epidemics, infrastructure fragility and cultural fragmentation.
The NSS calls these Chinese "threats," but they are simply the symptoms of domestic failure. This is why the administration's China policy cannot achieve coherence: It refuses to look inward and instead constructs China as a symbolic container for everything the American political system cannot confront within itself.
Washington is attempting to restore legitimacy not through reform, but through projection, which is a dangerous sign of state fanaticism.
The quote that reveals the delusion
Midway through the China section, the NSS delivers a sentence that perfectly crystallizes the American state's rupture from material reality:
"What differentiates America from the rest of the world — our openness, transparency, trustworthiness, commitment to freedom and innovation, and free market capitalism — will continue to make us the global partner of first choice."
This line is astonishing in its total detachment from material fact.
It asserts "openness" as the U.S. builds the largest domestic surveillance apparatus in human history, with no apparent impact on genuine national security threats.
It asserts "transparency" even as the federal government classifies more information than ever before, while the public information environment collapses and truth-telling is discarded as a civic responsibility.
It asserts "trustworthiness" after two decades of failed wars, financial crises, domestic espionage and institutional corruption. It asserts "innovation" as the U.S. attempts to tariff its way back into relevance. It asserts "free market capitalism" while openly planning state-directed industrial policy.
And most importantly: It asserts that America is the "global partner of first choice" at the exact historical moment when the Global South nations are visibly reorienting themselves away from it.
This sentence is not a description of the world. It is an affirmation ritual — an incantation meant to restore a fading identity. The U.S. is telling itself what it needs to hear, not what is true. It is like watching Rome in its final decadence, except it is playing out on social media.
The unspoken admission: Multipolarity has already emerged
Despite its tone, the NSS implicitly concedes that the unipolar era is finished. You can see this in the shift from domination to "burden-sharing," from unilateral dictate to coalition management. These euphemisms serve the same purpose: they enable Washington to redefine retreat as a strategic move.
China is never framed as a peer, but the concessions to its reality permeate the text. Beijing is acknowledged as a technological competitor, an industrial superpower, a major financial force, a diplomatic actor, a civilizational state and a long-term strategic presence.
The U.S. cannot articulate this openly, so it instead constructs a narrative of rivalry, suspicion and mobilization. This is how fading empires stabilize their domestic legitimacy while conceding.
The real message
If we read the China section correctly — not as policy, but as a historical artifact — the real message becomes unavoidable: the U.S. is experiencing a profound crisis of identity, and it can no longer differentiate between self-description and reality.
Moreover, China is being used as a mirror for American decline. The NSS functions as an instrument of domestic narrative control, not foreign strategy. The quote about "openness and trustworthiness" is the most revealing line because it declares an identity contradicted by the U.S.'s own behavior.
Finally, the U.S. is preparing its public for a future defined by rivalry because the alternative — acknowledging multipolarity — is ideologically impossible.
In short: This is not a strategy for managing China. This is a strategy for managing American disbelief.
Bradley Blankenship is an investigative journalist, columnist, author, political analyst and the founding chairman of the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project, a local U.S. anti-corruption network and civic oversight body.
