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Over eighty years, the partnership across the Atlantic was anchored in a common promise to collective defense and a shared principles upholding democratic governance, human rights, and the supremacy of law.

That defining era was inaugurated in March 1947 during a brief speech by President Harry Truman, who committed American support to defend Europe from continued aggression by the Soviet Union.

The US spearheaded NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN. It embedded itself into what later became known as the "rules-based international order", a system where nation-states agreed to shared responsibilities designed to defend free nations from adversarial dictatorships.

Currently, the recently released US National Security Strategy (NSS), released in the final month of the year, indicates that, from the administration's perspective, that joint undertaking has ended; much of what the world expected from the US's global function is a thing of the past.

The review refers to the "alleged 'rules-based international order'", putting the latter phrase in inverted commas: a form of dismissal through stylistic choice.

An Ideological Turn

Vice-President JD Vance forewarned America's partners across the Atlantic of this impending shift during a presentation at the Munich Security Conference in early 2025.

"He told them directly that the primary risk to Europe was not originating from Russia but from within - from those censoring free speech, stifling opposition and thereby undermining European democracy," the speech noted. He was highly critical of the "progressive liberal establishment."

A prominent French newspaper described the address as a declaration of "value-based struggle" against Europe.

The recent NSS codifies Vance's observations, transforming them from commentary into official doctrine.

"Certainly America is not anymore the country that championed the global values that have been in place since the end of the Second World War," observes a ex-director from the US State Department and a policy institute. "It is moving to a distinctly new position."

Consequently, if the world is indeed moving away from that established order, what is it moving towards? And what are the implications for the rest of the world, and specifically for Europe?

''The Global Context Has Changed'

"Global bodies, especially the UN, have been plagued by strong anti-US bias, and have been ineffective for our or any other specific interest," argues a analyst at a Washington-based advocacy group.

According to her analysis - a former Deputy National Security Adviser to the former President - transformation to the international order is certain in a changing world.

"The other issue we face is that when that aforementioned global rules system was formed after the Second World War, 80 short years ago, Chinese power was not a significant issue. We are living in a new reality."

This system of international law, built in the wake the global conflict, was the creation of a generation that had experienced the devastation of Great Power geopolitics and was determined to stop its recurrence.

That international system, blemished and partial though it undoubtedly was, was the product of that collective experience.

Yet, the NSS contends that US foreign policy became misguided in the years that followed - and it criticizes what it calls "the foreign policy bureaucracy."

"They lashed American policy to a network of global organizations, some of which are fueled by outright anti-Americanism and many by a globalist ideology that consciously attempts to dissolve the power of nation-states," it says.

It implies that going forward, the US will seek to curtail the influence of supranational bodies.

The Primacy of the Nation-State

"The basic building block of global politics is and will remain the independent state… We stand for the sovereign rights of nations, against the power-diluting interventions of the most invasive global bodies…"

Elsewhere in the document, discussing the "distribution of global influence", it states: "The outsized influence of major powers is a enduring reality of international relations."

Russian leadership commented on the review with approval, stating that much of it matched Moscow's own thinking.

"I believe these powerful figures and their supportive regimes are seeking to return us to an era of spheres of influence," observes a former head of the British military.

Yet, a prominent scholar in strategic studies believes the new Security Strategy is not as radical a break with the past as it may appear.

"We need to be careful about the term, which is a concept that came into general use in the recent past," he contends. "Examine history and you find plenty of violations of the rules, Vietnam for example. So there's a tendency to romanticize about the past at times and everyone should be cautious regarding longing for what was a complex past."

A Muscular Reassertion of Sovereign Power

America's military operation in the city of Caracas that led to the detention of the country's leader Maduro is an initial instance of this more muscular assertion of sovereign unilateralism.

Several international law experts have challenged the legitimacy of the US intervention, arguing it may have contravened global laws governing the use of force.

American officials argue its actions were within its rights.

"According to US statute it certainly was [legal]," a ex-defense department figure has stated. "He - most of our European friends have not accepted his authority so he is an usurper. Because of that he is stripped of the standard safeguards that national leaders would have...given constitutional provisions that exist in the United States, that would take precedence over anything the UN says."

The NSS claims, for the United States, the right to be the dominant force in the Western Hemisphere, and to persuade its Latin American and Caribbean neighbours into alignment with Washington's interests.

This is a powerful reaffirmation of the