The National Interest

As President Trump returns from traveling to Europe and the Middle East, his administration will continue to rollout related defense and foreign-policy initiatives through multiple departments and agencies. For the purposes of strategic planning: what organizing principle might be useful to inform such initiatives and is consistent with existing statements of presidential intent?

Here is one such principle: conceive and implement strategies of pressure against U.S. competitors overseas.

Consider the bigger picture. As Ted Bromund, Michael Auslin and I suggest in a new American Affairs article, international circumstances have changed considerably over the last ten to fifteen years. The end of history has now ended. The post–Cold War era is definitely over.

For a quarter-century, the United States has had various administrations from both parties that all worked on fairly optimistic assumptions about the trajectory of international relations.

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