The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy and the Western Hemisphere: Implications and Challenges
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy and the Western Hemisphere: Implications and Challenges
By: R. Evan Ellis for Legado a las Americas
The 2025 National Security Strategy marks a significant pivot toward “flexible realism” and a prioritization of the Western Hemisphere as a central theater for U.S. interests. Released by the Trump Administration on December 4, 2025, the document advocates for the enforcement of a modern Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This approach moves away from traditional soft power tools like democracy promotion and human rights advocacy. Instead, the strategy focuses on “tolerable stability” through pragmatic partnerships with regional champions. These partners are enlisted to support specific U.S. objectives including migration control, the dismantling of transnational criminal organizations, and the facilitation of economic nearshoring. The document explicitly authorizes the use of military force in non-traditional roles, specifically targeting drug cartels with lethal force and expanding military access within the region to secure strategic interests.
A primary pillar of this new strategy is the systematic resistance to the commercial and military presence of the People’s Republic of China and other extra-hemispheric adversaries. The strategy outlines a National Security Council-led initiative to identify and protect critical infrastructure such as ports and telecommunications from foreign adversarial influence. While the document emphasizes U.S. pre-eminence and the pursuit of sole-source contracts for American companies, it also introduces strategic risks. These include the potential erosion of long-term trust among regional partners and the ceding of the moral high ground in multilateral institutions. The analysis suggests that while the increased attention and resource allocation to the Americas are positive developments, the shift toward a purely self-interested posture may provide rhetorical ammunition to rivals and complicate the pursuit of shared security goals in an interconnected global environment.
