When magical thinking shapes security strategy

Earlier this month, the United States quietly released its National Security Strategy 2025 – a short document. On paper, it is meant to define how the world’s most powerful nation conceives its security challenges and responsibilities. But read carefully, and you quickly sense a strange confluence of grand ambition, ideological nostalgia, and selective attention – a kind of geopolitical incantation. For many other countries, especially rising powers like India, the 2025 NSS must seem less like a pragmatic roadmap and more like magical thinking cloaked in policy prose.

It is a case of imagining that Atlas shrugged or the ‘end of global burdens’. The 2025 NSS makes explicit what many in Washington evidently believe: the days when America propped up the entire world order like Atlas are over. This is a big rhetorical shift from earlier post-Cold War doctrines that cast the US as the global policeman, democracy-promoter, and institutional backbone of international order. By signalling a withdrawal from many traditional theatres – from the Middle East to peace-keeping to global governance – the document purports to release the US from burdens forged in earlier eras.

But this retreat is less an honest reappraisal of engagement than an act of magical declamation: it imagines that problems abroad – like wars, humanitarian crises, and instability – can simply be wished away or outsourced. The world, in effect, disappears unless it fits squarely inside the US strategic self-interest. That is not realism: it is a rhetorical spell, a wishful negation of complexity. For India, which has stepped into many of the vacuums left by US disengagement in recent years – in regional security, development, and institution-building – this “Atlas shrug” is not comforting. It risks leaving behind a world receding not in response to real stability, but in response to US indifference.

Perhaps the most striking re-orientation in the 2025 NSS is the prioritisation of the Western Hemisphere. The US now claims the Americas – not Eurasia, not Indo-Pacific – as the locus of its primary security interests. In doing so, Washington revives a 19th-century doctrine – a new Monroe Doctrine with a Trump Corollary – as the backbone of its global posture. This is not just a reallocation of resources; it is a mental re-mapping of global stakes. By turning to its ‘backyard,’ the US implicitly downgrades every other region, including South Asia and the Indian Ocean, to secondary or tertiary importance unless they serve narrow transactional purposes. From New Delhi’s vantage point, this shift feels like a re-definition of geography: a subtle but powerful message that India, and the broader Indo-Pacific, will count only so long as they help Washington manage its economic competition or keep China in check, but not as part of any vision for global public goods, climate, development, or multilateral cooperation.

The consequent realignment suggests transactional rather than substantive partnerships in the Indo-Pacific and with India. To give context to this shift, the NSS document encourages ‘improved commercial (and other) relations with India’ and invites New Delhi to ‘contribute to Indo-Pacific security,’ presumably alongside the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). There is no denying that for India, this explicit mention carries some value. Washington continues to view India as a strategic pivot in deterrence against a rising China, and the NSS reaffirms that partnership. Yet, and here is where the magical thinking shows, the NSS frames such cooperation almost entirely in transactional, utility-based terms: commerce, technology, burden-sharing. The document is silent on values, long-term institution-building, or deeper structural cooperation. Democracy, climate, development – all the dimensions that matter to a rising power with global aspirations – are relegated to the shadows.

For India, this suggests that the US sees New Delhi not as an equal partner shaping a new world order, but as a tool to be deployed when it is convenient. That is a dangerous illusion to accept, because it binds India to a worldview that may shift with Washington’s internal politics, but may not deliver stability or global leadership. When major powers build their strategy around wishful visions – nostalgia rather than evidence, assertion rather than engagement – they risk creating instability masked as control. The 2025 NSS, for all its ambition and rhetoric, is in many respects a document of magical thinking. It conjures up a world simplified for American convenience: geography redrawn, allies redefined, global burdens shrugged off, and the future compressed into convenience.

Strategy is not magic. America’s new security doctrine reads like a spell cast in the hope that disorder will politely disappear. For India, a nation buffeted by climate, commerce, and conflict, there is no refuge in magical thinking. The world will not be wished into order. It will only be steadied by those prepared to face it as it is – unromantic, unruly, and very much awake.

(The writer is a former civil servant, enjoys traversing the myriad spaces of ideas, thinkers, and books)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.