Reminding EU ministers how much of today’s economic malaise and immigration scapegoating arose from American failures doesn’t provide a solution. It disavows the inexpensive power projection of hegemony by imagining American hegemony as nothing more than American domination. The full NSS also spends some time discussing the “failure” of American hegemony, a term that isn’t mentioned in the publicly released version. “Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”I don’t think that’s right at all. I don’t think the person who wrote, “Hegemony is the wrong thing to want” has thought through all the ways that coercion is more likely to backfire.

Source: The Guardian January 19, 2026 22:53 UTC