The Hemispheric Turn in New US National Security Strategy

By Misión Verdad – Dec 9, 2025

The United Stats’ 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), published on December 4, 2025, outlines a US foreign policy centered on the reaffirmation of US sovereignty and on restructuring the Western Hemisphere as a space of exclusive influence for US national interests. The document thus prioritizes concrete goals: border control, reindustrialization, economic security, and selective regional stability.

Its approach is realist—in terms of international relations—functional, and markedly unilateral: the US will act wherever its interests are at stake, including through interventions, when it deems that a concrete threat warrants them.

Key elements of the new strategy:

‘National interest’ as the sole compass
The NSS states clearly that “the affairs of other countries concern us only if their activities directly threaten our interests.” (p. 2)

This premise eliminates generic moral justifications and reorients foreign policy toward measurable and defensible objectives.

Border security as the foundational pillar
Control of migratory flows rises to the level of a strategic priority: “Border security is the primary element of national security.” (p. 11)

The stability of the Western Hemisphere is measured, in large part, by its capacity to contain migration toward the United States.

Reindustrialization as an imperative of power
The document links national production with sovereignty: “Cultivating American industrial strength must become the highest priority of national economic policy” (p. 4), consolidating the end of decades favouring so-called “free” trade.

It promotes reshoring supply chains, investment in critical minerals, and revitalizing the defense industrial base.

Burden-sharing alliances: the Hague commitment
US partners must assume their share of responsibility for protecting US interests: “NATO countries committed to allocating 5% of GDP to defense.” (p. 12)

The US shifts from absolute guarantor to organizer of a shared security and defense network, with commercial and technological incentives for those who comply.

‘Peace’ as a tool of influence
The document highlights peace agreements achieved in eight conflicts in eight months as proof of diplomatic effectiveness. Peace is now a means to stabilize regions, open markets, and reorient alliances.

Economic security equals national security
The document binds the strategic and the productive strata: “Economic security is fundamental to national security.” (p. 13)

Balanced trade, protection of intellectual property, energy dominance, and financial leadership form an indivisible bloc—one clearly weakened by decades of economic policies geared toward the accumulation of fictitious capital rather than value creation.

The hemispheric turn: the Trump corollary
The section on the Western Hemisphere marks a turning point. There, the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” is formally introduced:

• “We will deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our hemisphere” (p. 15).

This formulation establishes a functional exclusion: no country in the hemisphere may align with extra-hemispheric actors without facing consequences. But the document goes further regarding contracting and development:

• “The terms of our agreements—especially with those countries that depend on us the most, and over which we therefore have the greatest influence—must be single-source contracts for our companies.”

• “At the same time, we must do everything possible to expel foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region.” (p. 19)

These directives define a new form of functional sovereignty measured by a country’s capacity to align with US value chains.

Legitimacy, in turn, is built through US offerings in superior technology, open standards, and the absence of “debt traps,” whereas foreign assistance—though seemingly low-cost—comes with “hidden costs.” (p. 18)

All of this refers, obviously, to the principal international actor that rivals the US in economic strength and dynamism.

The expulsion of China
According to the NSS, the US vision of hemispheric competition with China is articulated with strategic clarity, functional realism, and a strong normative charge. It is not an abstract rejection of Chinese influence but a structural response to a concrete fact: China has managed to deeply penetrate the region through investments in infrastructure, energy, mining, and telecommunications, especially in countries where the US had reduced its economic presence or imposed coercive measures.

The document describes this dynamic without euphemisms: “Non-hemispheric competitors have made significant inroads in our hemisphere, both to harm us economically in the present and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future.” (p. 17)

This explicitly recognizes that China is not acting as a “hostile foreign power” in the traditional militarized sense but as a functional competitor: China offers rapid financing, low-apparent-cost infrastructure, and agreements without explicit political conditionality—a decisive advantage over the slow procedures, strict regulations, and demands for structural reform that are presented by Western institutions.

In response, the US proposes a hybrid strategy of selective regional expulsion and active economic substitution:

• The US promotes a campaign to discredit China’s offerings, reframing economic projects as strategic threats: a mine, a port, or a 5G network are not merely commercial ventures but risk nodes if under ‘non-hemispheric’—i.e., non-US—control, with “hidden costs in espionage, cybersecurity, debt traps, and other ways.” (p. 18)

• The NSS orders the acceleration of approval processes in US financing mechanisms to offer competitive timelines: “We will reform our own system to streamline authorizations and licenses, again to become the partner of choice.” (p. 18)

• The NSS breaks with the rhetoric of “free markets”: the US is no longer competing in the market; it is redefining the rules of the market itself to exclude China.

• The NSS reinforces the narrative that the US offers transparency, superior technology, and protection against “subordination,” whereas China offers not cooperation but hidden dependence. The US, by contrast, offers authentic sovereignty—defined as sovereignty aligned with its value chain.

Thus, the NSS shows that the US does not underestimate China’s advance in Latin America. On the contrary: it interprets Chinese engagement in the region as evidence of a historic error—hemispheric neglect—and turns it into the foundation of an active reversal policy.

What is now at stake is control of the means of producing sovereignty: infrastructure, energy, logistics, data, technical standards.

Venezuela, because of its explicit alliance with China in oil, gold, coltan, satellites, and ports, emerges as the critical case—not because it is the largest recipient of Chinese investment (it is not) but because its persistence as a multipolar node legitimizes the viability of that alternative.

For this reason, the US strategy wagers that by expelling China from the region, it not only recovers influence but restores the very conditions that make US hegemony possible: a world where others’ sovereignty is measured by their capacity not to interfere with US interests.

Venezuela as the practical limit of the corollary
Venezuela embodies the maximum challenge to this doctrine:

• It maintains strategic alliances with China, Russia, and Iran.

• Venezuela controls critical resources without ceding their management to foreign or aligned capital.

• It has developed currency exchange mechanisms that bypass the US dollar and hegemonic value chains.

The NSS acknowledges as much: “Some influences will be difficult to reverse given the political alignment between certain Latin American governments and certain foreign actors.” (p. 17)

From the document’s perspective, Venezuela is a functional precedent: it demonstrates that it is possible to sustain an autonomous foreign policy, even under prolonged coercive pressure.

The encirclement seeks regime change but it also seeks to invalidate the model itself: to prove that no country can survive outside the order of selective sovereignty.

As long as Venezuela remains a non-functional—yet persistent—actor, the Trump corollary will retain a blind spot, and as long as that blind spot exists, the hemisphere will not be fully “stable” in the terms defined by the NSS.

The US strategy wagers that the future is built with the United States—or that there is simply no future. Venezuela, conversely, counts ont he future being built with full sovereignty. In this sense, the new NSS formalizes the measures that the US has already been taking in recent months through the militarization of the Caribbean.

First International Day Against Unilateral Coercive Measures

 

 

Featured image: US President Donald Trump. Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo

(Misión Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/CB/SL