Editorial 2: The three revolutions reshaping American power

Context

The unifying thread across internal, external, and economic policies is an architecture of cruelty, in which harm is foreseen, normalised, and deliberately deployed.

Introduction

When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested reshaping the G-20 into an exclusive inner caucus of powerful states, it marked a potential reordering of global economic governance, concentrating rule-making and marginalising emerging economies.

• Overshadowed proposal: The G-20 restructuring idea was quickly eclipsed by the release of the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), which reflected the same ideological shift.
• Ideological reinforcement: Soon after, the Heritage Foundation, central to Trump’s MAGA agenda, unveiled its policy blueprint, Restoring America’s Promise: 2025–26.
• Strategic alignment: Together, the G-20 proposal, NSS, and Heritage 2026 point to a coordinated transformation in American statecraft.
• Three revolutions: This alignment signals changes in political morality, a recasting of foreign policy, and a restructuring of global economic governance.
• Exclusion as design: The shared logic is the institutionalisation of exclusion and acceptance of unequal burdensas deliberate policy choices.
• Cruelty as system: Cruelty operates analytically, describing a framework where harm is anticipated, normalised, and strategically deployed.

Shrinking of civic space

• Internal rupture: Mr. Trump’s political project dismantled the moral foundations of U.S. public life, replacing restraint and civic responsibility with transgression as authenticity and the erosion of shame as a political asset.
• Doctrine shift: The 2025 NSS formalises this change by redefining cultural cohesion, ideological alignment, and demographic stability as national security imperatives.
• Bureaucratic overhaul: The Heritage blueprint calls for institutional remaking, ideological vetting, and large-scale personnel turnover across the state.
• Institutional suspicion: The NSS reinforces this outlook through emphasis on sovereign autonomy, distrust of institutions, and framing domestic culture as security, treating independent bodies as obstacles, not correctives.
• Permissive cruelty: Cruelty manifests as indifference, where hardship from administrative purges, shrinking civic space, and punitive regulation is absorbed into governance rather than recognised as harm.

Foreign policy around conditionality

• External shift: The 2025 NSS marks a sharp break from U.S. traditions of predictable commitments and institutional stability, moving beyond even Trump’s first-term disruptions.
• Transactional alliances: Alliances are redefined as conditional contracts, with obligations constantly reassessed rather than assumed.
• Monroe Doctrine revival: The Western Hemisphere is prioritised over Europe and the Indo-Pacific, signalling a return to regional dominance.
• Migration as security: Migration is elevated from a domestic issue to a core national security threat, reshaping foreign policy priorities.
• Institutional downgrading: International bodies once amplifying U.S. power are recast as constraints on sovereignty.
• Ideological framework: The Heritage blueprint portrays multilateralism as a sovereignty violation, border control as geopolitics, and allied cooperation as conditional on ideological conformity.
• Selective dominance: The strategy reflects neither isolationism nor realism but assertion where leverage is high, retreat where costs rise, and partnerships judged by conformity over capability.
• Systemic impact: The outcome is fragile alliances, emboldened revisionist powers, and a fragmented global order.
• Economic restructuring: Mr. Rubio’s G-20 proposal signals a tiered global economy, dividing rule-makersfrom rule-takers.
• Concentrated governance: Decision-making on debt relief, trade norms, and climate finance narrows to a small group of powerful states.
• Hemispheric economics: The NSS promotes reshoring, tariff leverage, and industrial sovereignty, anchoring growth in North America.
• Anti-globalisation logic: Heritage 2026 treats globalisation as a strategic risk and multilateral economics as threats to autonomy.
• Unequal consequences: Countries with weak bargaining power face harsher debt terms, politicised supply chains, and restricted capital access.
• Social fallout: The burden of inflation, export disruption, and adjustment costs falls on workers, both global and domestic.
• Systemic cruelty: Economic pain is deliberately uneven, functioning as a tool to stabilise a more hierarchical global order.

A return of imperial logic

• Colonial–imperial mindset: All three revolutions reflect a return to a hierarchical world-view, where power confers entitlement and the strong impose costs while the weak absorb them.
• Structural domination: This is not territorial colonialism but a systemic order built on hierarchy, exclusion, and unequal burdens.
• Institutional codification: The 2025 NSS supplies the bureaucratic language, while Heritage 2026 provides the ideological foundations.
• Cruelty as logic: Cruelty names the organising principle—suffering is designed, not accidental, and embedded within policy execution.
• Unified trajectory: G-20 restructuring and the 2025 NSS are expressions of the same strategic shift, not isolated initiatives.
• Emerging order: The U.S. seeks to protect sovereignty through contraction, project power through hierarchy, and reshape global governance through exclusion.

Conclusion

The final irony is that those harmed by this reordering are not only abroad. They are found in Maputo and Dhaka, but also in Harlan, Kentucky. Cruelty’s architecture is global, yet its effects  are deeply personal—extending outward across borders and ultimately returning home.