The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published last week, presents itself as a decisive break from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has shaped Washington’s posture since the end of the Cold War. In some respects, it is exactly that. The document repeatedly denounces the “laundry lists of wishes” and vague universalism of earlier strategies and takes aim at what it calls the “fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal” of permanent American global dominance. It argues instead for a narrower, interest-driven agenda grounded in...

As a long-time critic of Washington’s obsession with the so-called “China threat”—and having written an entire book debunking it, The Fake China Threat—I could not in good conscience allow this year’s Report to Congress of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission to pass without comment. If anything, the 2025 edition is an even more sweeping reiteration of the assumptions and exaggerations I have challenged for years. Page after page, the report presents an alarming narrative about Beijing’s intentions and capabilities, while simultaneously insisting that every corner of the...

For more than two decades, the United States has waged a quiet, little-noticed air and special operations war across the Horn of Africa. If most Americans are unaware of this fact, that is no accident. The campaign in Somalia has been conducted so far from public view, and with so little meaningful debate in Washington, that its continuation today is treated almost as a bureaucratic inevitability—a policy in search of a justification, defended out of habit rather than necessity. For there is no rational reason for the United States to be bombing Somalia at all. The entire enterprise stands...

In the sweltering heat of a second Trump term, the ghosts of interventionist folly are stirring once more. On October 31, 2025, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to declare Nigeria a "country of particular concern" for religious freedom violations, alleging an "existential threat" to Christianity there. By November 1, the rhetoric had escalated: Trump threatened to halt all U.S. aid to Africa's most populous nation and ordered the Pentagon—now rebranded by the president as the "Department of War"—to prepare for "fast, vicious" military action. "If we attack," he wrote, "it will be...