Friend to all, ally to none: Will the new National Security Strategy bring visible power to Micronesia?

Pacific Reflections By Gabriel McCoard

The scenario I will monitor this year is whether the U.S. will visibly flex more military muscle in the Pacific. Despite years of talk about America abandoning the Pacific Pivot, which I have contributed to, a recent shift in U.S. policy suggests the question is far from settled.

And so, I have found my 2026 guidebook: the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Donald Trump’s America-First vision for a secure and prosperous nation, released in November.

There’s been a pushback, but few surprises, either from its 29 pages or from the reactions to it. A year into Trump 2.0, the world should be on notice about a few things. Trump wants minerals; the rarer the earth, the better. He wants globalism to go away. He wants to rebalance America’s relationship with everyone on everything.

The National Security Strategy is part grandstanding—politically, economically and otherwise—and part attempt to wish away any unwanted reality.

Political theatre is to be expected from any president, but Trump bears a unique gift in this regard. “No administration in history has achieved so dramatic a turnaround in so short a time,” reads his introductory message on the document’s opening page. But once you fight through the red, white and blue pompom-waving, MAGA hat-wearing rhetoric, you begin to acknowledge the world's current landscape.

The U.S. role as the sole superpower is rapidly waning. I would say it’s already over, whether through deliberate design or the inevitable tide of history is an open question.

The West, as an idea, is fracturing; however, it was largely an idea of convenience. Regional powers, including China and Russia, are growing.

Which is why I’ve selected the NSS as my official guide to 2026.

Let’s dredge up some international relations theory and recent history.

The Cold War Classic lasted from 1947 to 1991. It was a comfortable struggle. America versus the Soviet Union. Good versus evil. Capitalism and democracy versus communism and totalitarianism. Being able to walk freely versus masked government agents asking for your papers. I’m not sure who actually won.

 In academic parlance, this was a balance of power. A state survives by preventing an adversary from gaining an advantage. Two more or less equal powers dance through equilibrium. The USSR was never the equal of the U.S. Still, it made up for it through regional control and ideological friendliness in newly independent nations by virtue of not having been the colonizer, one of the hallmarks of exploiting whatever gap you can.

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Part brutal conflict (think Britain and France in the 17^th and 18^th centuries) and part proxy war (like the U.S. in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, not to be confused with the U.S. in Afghanistan), balance also ushers in an uneasy stability. Everyone knows what to expect in economic deals, military postures and how to be friends with either.

Once cracks in one nation’s armor split and the other side prevails, that state gets to become a hegemon. Here’s the theory: a single power, the hegemon, brings with it stability and peace, but the demise of the hegemon shatters that stability.

Think of the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union. About 30 years ago, the U.S. glibly sailed as the hegemon. We told countries to behave themselves and patted ourselves on the back about ending strife in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda. We made the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency, bringing virtually every financial transaction into the U.S. economy.

American hegemony literally crashed on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Since then, we’ve been in a regional-polar world. The still dominant U.S. has cracks in its armor. The American economy, the envy of most countries, is fighting a losing game between the possessed and the dispossessed. Between Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza-the Middle East-Qatar, and whatever China is up to in the Pacific, the U.S. finds itself mired in uncertainty.

Trump is shifting from a “rules-based” to a “deals-based” order. Filled with his characteristic bluster about the perpetual superiority of the U.S. economy, the NSS, nonetheless acknowledges, between the lines, what has long been reality: China is neither friend nor foe, a status that could change in an instant, while the world’s economic center has shifted to the Pacific.

The NSS seeks to prevent conflict by asserting American economic and technological dominance through the one-two punch of American hard and soft power.

Of course, America doesn’t have much soft power left, with the demise of USAID and, well, everything else.

So it was with great fascination that I read an article in the Pacific regional press, “Pacific Islands: Friends to all is no longer pragmatic,” which quoted Singapore’s foreign minister as saying there is no change in the diplomatic weather, but rather “geostrategic climate change.”

But something feels familiar: an arms sale to Taiwan. The three-legged stool—U.S. recognition of China, Taiwan’s non-assertion of independence and China looking the other way, all topped with the U.S. selling enormous amounts of weapons to Taiwan—remains intact despite what some fear is Trump’s neutering of China hawks.

With the NSS in hand, here’s what I’ll be watching for: whether Trump, like any president, can match campaign promises with anything real; if Pacific organizations, like the Pacific Islands Forum, will find relevance; and above all, if the new strategy brings visible power to Micronesia and beyond.  

Gabriel McCoard is an attorney who previously worked in Palau and Chuuk State. Send feedback to gabrieljmccoard@hotmail.com.

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