Trend Washington pursues a composite strategy of burden sharing and restored great-power politics

Summary

The report describes the second Trump administration as showing little interest in sustaining global leadership and as intent on scaling back the dollar's reserve role and America's role as world police. Paradoxically, it still aims to preserve US hegemony by running geopolitical and economic-technology competition on two fronts at once. To do so it combines geopolitics, economics, trade and even science and advanced technology into one composite strategy resembling a complex security concept. The authors see this rooted in elite anxiety that authoritarian states, China above all, could erode US primacy. Rather than Cold War-style blanket containment, Washington mixes blocking in frontier technology with partial cooperation and dialogue elsewhere, while seeking stability by restoring great-power bargaining that tacitly recognizes Russian and Chinese regional roles.