Shame on all the MUTUs of BRF. For time immemorial BRFities kept highlighting the danger of relying on the US as a military partner. Now here we are...
National Security Strategy
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u ... rategy.pdf
Nov 2025
Summary of the above article in the two tweets below...
https://x.com/Ignis_Rex/status/1996856198851924114?s=20 ---> The American Retreat and the Birth of a Multipolar World: A Eurasian Reading of Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). China is now downgraded to an Economic Competitor!
The United States has just published the most honest national-security document of the past eighty years. In thirty-three sober pages, Washington has admitted what Moscow, Beijing and much of the Global Majority have been saying for two decades: the unipolar era is over, liberal hegemony is dead, and the United States is returning home to its own hemisphere. The rest of the world is now explicitly invited – or rather instructed – to take responsibility for its own security.
This is Buck-Passing on a continental scale.
Buck-passing is a strategy in Offensive Realism where a great power attempts to shift the responsibility for deterring or fighting a dangerous rising state onto another power. The buck-passer avoids the costs and risks of direct confrontation, hoping the "buck-catcher" and the aggressor will weaken each other through bloodletting, thereby maximizing the buck-passer's relative power.
The NSS of November 2025 does not merely downgrade China from “pacing threat” to “economic competitor”; it quietly demotes the entire Indo-Pacific to fourth place, after (1) homeland defence, (2) the Western Hemisphere [the Americas], and (3) economic re-industrialisation [focus on American industrial renewal]. Europe and the Middle East barely merit a subsection each. The message could not be clearer: the American security blanket is being pulled back, and regional powers are expected to step forward.
Why is China downgraded to only an Economic Competitor? See 2/2
East Asia: Japan’s Moment of Truth
In Asia, the beneficiary – and the new buck-catcher – is obviously Japan.
By openly stating that defending Taiwan is merely “a priority” (not a vital interest) and that it is “ideal” to preserve military overmatch but no longer guaranteed as China is too strong militarily), the United States is effectively telling Tokyo: “If you want the First Island Chain to hold, you will have to do much of the holding yourselves.” Which explains PM Takaichi brash statement that a potential Chinese military attack or blockade against Taiwan could constitute a "survival-threatening situation" for Japan – she is trying to step up to say Japan can hold the First Island Chain on its own.
The document repeatedly insists that “our allies must step up and spend – and more importantly do – much more for collective defence.” Translation: the post-war arrangement in which Japan enjoyed security at American expense while remaining constitutionally and politically castrated is finished.
This creates an historic opportunity for Japan to become a fully sovereign great power for the first time since 1945. The grey zones deliberately left in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and the 1972 Okinawa Reversion Agreement – under which Japan regained only administrative control of Okinawa while the United States retained exclusive use of the bases – can now be renegotiated. If Japan is to become the eastern anchor of any serious containment policy toward China, it will need genuine command authority over the 31 U.S. military installations on its soil, especially the strategic hub at Kadena.
Whether Washington will voluntarily surrender these extraterritorial privileges is doubtful. More likely, Tokyo will have to force the issue – and that, in turn, will require the acquiescence of Beijing and Moscow. Why? Because the legal foundation for the original American seizure of Okinawa rests on the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation, both of which promised that all territories “stolen” from China by Japan would be returned to the Republic of China. Russia, as co-signatory to Potsdam and as the successor to the Soviet seat on the Allied Council, retains a theoretical veto over any final settlement of Okinawa’s status. So Taiwan has to be returned to China?
In other words, Japan’s path to full sovereignty over its own territory now runs through Beijing and Moscow, not Washington. The irony is exquisite: the very powers Japan is supposed to help contain may hold the keys to its liberation from the post-war order.
Europe: Abandonment in Slow Motion
Across the Eurasian landmass, the same logic applies. The 2025 NSS mentions Russia exactly twice – once in passing, once to say that Europe must restore its “civilisational self-confidence and Western identity.” There is no mention of NATO’s Article 5 as the cornerstone of American strategy, no pledge to defend every inch of Allied soil, no promise to keep 100,000 troops in Europe indefinitely. The message to Paris, Berlin and Warsaw is unmistakable: if you wish to manage the Russian frontier, you will do it largely with your own money and your own blood.
The Europeans, predictably, are in denial. But the mathematics are brutal. Without the American security subsidy, the combined GDP of the EU plus UK is still larger than Russia’s, but their collective defence spending remains anaemic and their arms industries are decades behind. The coming years will be a frantic, and probably unsuccessful, attempt to create a European pillar capable of deterring Moscow on its own. The more likely outcome is a Finnish-style accommodation with Russia or, in the case of Germany and France, a reluctant drift toward Eurasian economic integration once the American shield is visibly lowered.
The Gulf: An Arab-Israeli Condominium over Energy
In the Middle East, the strategy is equally revealing. The United States will no longer police the region with occupation forces or regime-change adventures. Instead, it will rely on the expanded Abraham Accords framework – effectively an Israeli-Saudi-Emirati-Qatari condominium – to ensure that no single power (i.e., Iran) can close the Strait of Hormuz or Bab el-Mandeb. American naval power will remain over the horizon, ready to intervene only if the regional balance collapses entirely. This explains why Trump sold F-35 to Saudi Arabia as now the Saudi will have to police the Middle East with Israel-Emirati-Qatari. How Iran will react to this is anyone’s guess?
This is classic offshore balancing: let the local heavyweights fight the limited wars, sell them the weapons, secure the insurance policy, but refuse to pay the premium forever.
The New Geometry of Power
What we are witnessing is the orderly (for now) dissolution of the American world order and its replacement by a multipolar system organised around continental spheres of influence:
- The United States consolidates an expanded Monroe Doctrine in the entire Western Hemisphere.
- China dominates mainland East Asia and the South China Sea.
- Russia re-establishes privileged influence in the post-Soviet space and the Arctic.
- India emerges as the swing power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean.
- A reluctant European bloc, possibly led by a Franco-German directorate, tries to find a modus vivendi with Russia while keeping the Americans at arm’s length.
- An Israeli-Arab coalition polices the greater Middle East.
Japan, the eternal outlier, faces the most consequential choice. It can cling to the fading American protectorate and remain a political dwarf with American bases on its soil forever, or it can seize the moment, negotiate with its continental neighbours, and finally become a normal great power – sovereign in Tokyo and sovereign in Naha (capital city of Okinawa)
The 2025 NSS is a plan for American Restraint and Renewal. It is the strategic re-orientation document of a power that has accepted its limits. The age of ideological crusades is over; the age of pragmatic spheres of influence has begun. America will have to invest in itself if it wants to renew its industrial and manufacturing base. The only question left is whether the former hegemon will manage its decline with grace – or whether its former dependents will force the issue themselves.
It will also open the question of the structure of the UN Security Council where you have 3 Western powers – US, France and UK where France and UK are small countries that may have to make way for India, one Muslim and one African country to be UNSC permanent member – but the new members may not have a regular veto power like the original members US, Russia and China.
We are living in interesting time.
https://x.com/Ignis_Rex/status/1996856201649479896?s=20 ----> China’s Scale Is Decisive
China’s 1.41 billion people (vs. America’s 345 million) create an unbridgeable advantage in the 21st-century technology race. By 2050, even if China merely reaches today’s South Korean or Portuguese GDP-per-capita (PPP), its total economy will be $60–75 trillion – roughly double the projected U.S. economy.
Emerging technologies (AI, quantum, biotech, 6G, hypersonics, space industry) are characterised by enormous fixed costs and powerful network effects. The country that spreads those costs across four times the population, trains models on four times the data, and sells into four times the domestic market will set global standards and price everyone else out.
The 2025 NSS tacitly admits this: the tariff war failed, and the U.S. now needs a coalition to achieve the scale it no longer has alone. Yet the coalition partners (ageing Japan, shrinking Europe, still-developing India) cannot close the gap in time.
Result: if the United States does not maintain leadership or co-leadership in the defining technologies, China becomes the global economic hegemon and standard-setter. The U.S. will remain the unchallenged regional hegemon of the entire Western Hemisphere – rich, secure, and powerful – but only a regional superpower in a Eurasian-centred world.
In short, the 2025 NSS is America’s quiet acceptance that, without technological parity at Chinese scale, it faces a future as the Britain of the 21st century: splendid, respected, and peripheral.
., that should settle the tariffs demand , why are we so "not being flexible" with awards
