The recently released US National Security Strategy (NSS) marks a sharp geographic and political turn. It moves the western hemisphere to the top of the agenda and pushes Asia – and with it, visible China-centric “great power competition” – down a notch.
This does not mean China no longer matters. Rather, it means Washington now sees China partly through the lens of what it is doing in the Americas instead of only what it is doing in the Indo-Pacific.
This shift is not accidental. It is a conscious political choice to define security from the border inward. The Trump administration is reorganising US strategy around “America first” at home, with migration, drugs and economic security cast as existential threats that begin at the southern border, not in the Taiwan Strait. The NSS openly states that western hemisphere priorities can be summarised as “enlist and expand”, focused on controlling migration, stopping drug flows, stabilising neighbours and securing nearby supply chains.
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Ideologically, the NSS draws deliberate inspiration from 19th-century hemispheric doctrine. The text introduces what it calls a “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”. In essence, it modernises for the 21st century former US president James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that “the American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European powers”.
Under this revival, the US promises to resist “non‑hemispheric” powers gaining military footholds, strategic infrastructure or dominant influence in Latin America and the Caribbean. From Washington’s perspective, China appears in this section less as a faraway naval rival and more as an extra‑regional actor investing in ports, bases and critical minerals in what the US has long considered its own strategic backyard.
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By framing the western hemisphere as the primary arena, the NSS implies that allowing other actors’ activities in the region would pose a more direct threat to US homeland security than their manoeuvres in Asia.