Arta Moeini argues the post-1989 unipolar world has ended and the U.S. must shift to "sovereign realism": prioritizing national sovereignty and regional balance over global policing. She blames three decades of liberal and militarized globalism for endless interventions and NATO expansion that weakened American strength.
Chapters
We are living through the end of an era. The unipolar moment that began in 1989 is over. For more than 30 years, Washington pursued a strategy built on globalist illusions. That America could serve as the manager of the world. That we could enlarge NATO endlessly. Extend security guarantees without limits. And launch interventions to remake societies in our image. These projects sold under the rules-based international order have drained our strength while hollowing out the republic. But what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos. It is return to normalcy. The international system is reverting to its natural condition, a multiplex, multinodal, regionalized world where sovereign civilizational powers coexist and balance one another. This is what I call the great transition. It is the reemergence of plurality and particularity after a brief artificial experiment in universalism. If there is a coherence to what we call the Trump Doctrine, it is in recognizing this reality. From the moment he came down that golden escalator, Trump declared war on the foreign policy blob, the bipartisan consensus that treated America as a sucker, paying for others' security, underwriting institutions that constrained us, and intervening in conflicts that made us less secure. Whatever one thinks of his style or execution, his insistence on America First was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American statecraft must be to its own people. But let us be candid. These welcome bouts of realism have not only been interrupted by the expected fervors of moralism, but have also always contended with a deeper, more entrenched force: globalism. And by globalism, I do not mean simply free trade or international cooperation. I mean a cognitive bias so deeply routinized and institutionalized that it pervades our foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even our counter-establishment. It is not a cabal to be purged, but a mentality that saturates the very air of Washington. This mindset manifests in two forms. The first is the liberal universalism of the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, which most of us are familiar with, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organizations, and liberal democracy at gunpoint in pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream. The woke imperium. The second is the militarized globalism of figures like John Bolton, who insist on permanent unipolarity and American unilateralism by grace of US military power, weaponizing a cartoonish idea of Western civilization against a caricatured global barbarism. Both are globalists, both are universalists, and both mortgage our sovereignty and sacrifice our national interests at the altar of ideology. Consider Ukraine. NATO expansion promoted as the defense of liberal order has in fact destabilized Europe and entangled America in an attritional war with no clear endgame. By offering promises we were neither willing nor able to fulfill, Washington walked Ukraine down a primordial path that left it devastated, Russia emboldened, and Europe vassalized. Instead of securing stability, NATO expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into another open-ended commitment far from our vital interests. Or take the Middle East. Just weeks ago, the United States found itself dragged into a 12-day war between Iran and Israel. Despite Israel's heavy bombardment and the successful American strikes on its nuclear facilities, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran's nuclear capacity, technological know-how, or its will to rebuild. Iran emerged bloodied but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Yet Washington reflexively positioned itself as a co-belligerent, risking escalation, draining munitions, and distracting from higher priorities. Here again, globalist reflexes entangle us in conflicts where diplomacy would better serve American interests. These examples reveal the deeper truth. Universalism in all its forms—liberal, militarized, or even theoretical, erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the righteous spirit that undergirds anti-hegemonic movements like America First. It collapses the diversity of civilizations into a single template to be imposed by force or maintained by empire. It multiplies and extends permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its permanent managerial class, not the republic. Even strands of neorealism fall prey to this bias. Portraying international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic Hobbesian race for hegemony everywhere, forever. But this is not realism, it is rationalized universalism yet again. And it has led us, like Athens in Thucydides' history, toward imperial overstretch and decay. A state can be a conservative commonwealth serving its people, or an empire enriching special interest war oligarchs and security rentier class. It cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalist reflex, has chosen empire. Our foreign policy has corrupted and redefined the national interest itself, turning it into a justification for permanent war. That is why, even under an America First presidency, we remain entangled in wars in Europe and the Middle East that do not advance the safety or the prosperity of the American people. These conflicts exhaust our arsenals, They distract us from our real priorities and make us less secure. They also prevent us from developing a cohesive grand strategy for the post-unipolar age. What America needs now is sovereign, or at least a sovereign realism, a radical foreign policy unburdened by ideology, freed from the conceits of universalism, and grounded in the conservation of our own strength. That means privileging sovereignty over universalist crusades. Regional balances over global policing, selective protection over blanket primacy, and renewal at home as the foundation of our strength abroad. It means diplomacy without illusions, talking to adversaries and allies alike based on reciprocity and strategic empathy, not sanctimony or moralism. Above all, it means adapting to the polycentric world at hand rather than resisting it with futile bids for unipolarity. The great transition is not a threat to be conquered, but a reality to be navigated with prudence. In the end, international community was always a projection, a fake projection at that. International law was a polite fiction. Globalization, artificial and contrived. What lies ahead is not disorder, but the world as it truly is, a concert of civilizational powers insisting, as we do, on their sovereignty. Not a managerial empire, run from Washington. The Trump Doctrine, whatever its flaws, at least named this reality, that the globalist ways of the past 30 years have left America weaker and that only by putting America first can we adapt and endure in a competitive century ahead. The danger is that the globalist bias, liberal or realist, neocon or Boltonian, will keep us chained to the illusions of unipolarity. They reduce the world to a battle space, encourage endless intervention, and dogma at that to justify them, and hasten as well the imperial decline. A state can serve its people or it can serve an empire. It cannot do both. But if we shed these illusions, the great transition need not mark our decline. It can be our renewal, the moment when America learns once again to be a formidable republic rather than a declining empire. An America measured in its ambitions, prudent in its use of power, and confident in its place in a multipolar world. America does not need to be everywhere all at once to remain essential. It must be decisive where it matters, resilient where it lives, vigilant over its sphere, and faithful to the republic that it is meant to preserve. That is the discipline of sovereign realism. It is what George Washington taught And rediscovering it is a task of our time. Thank you.
