American Grand Strategy, Allied Instability, and the Cost of Strategic Primacy
American grand strategy has always leaned on a pretty convenient premise, that whatever gets published in a National Security Strategy document reflects some principled doctrine rather than just an opportunistic playbook for staying on top globally. But once you strip away the language and look at how things actually play out across administration after administration, American foreign policy shows a cold, remarkably consistent pattern. Underneath all the talk of rules based orders, democratic solidarity, and peaceful regional integration sits a permanent instinct, one where Washington regularly sacrifices its allies’ stability, sovereign choices, and economic health just to protect its own strategic position.
You can see this most clearly in how differently Washington handles Europe versus the Middle East. In Europe, American strategy has long focused on prying the continent economically away from Moscow. For decades, American policymakers openly grumbled about Europe’s reliance on Russian energy. Before 2022, Russia supplied roughly 28 percent of the EU’s crude oil, 52 percent of its solid fuels, and over 44 percent of its natural gas. European leaders, especially in Germany and France, understood that this economic integration was actually essential to continental stability. Former French President Emmanuel Macron went as far as calling Russia an inescapable part of the European sphere.
“Washington effectively weaponized European security fears to knock out an economic competitor and lock in European energy dependence for a generation to come.”
American policy pushed in exactly the opposite direction anyway. By doubling down on NATO’s eastward expansion and locking in the 2021 Charter on Strategic Partnership with Kyiv, Washington helped push Europe into a genuinely confrontational trap. The war in Ukraine that followed ended up severing transatlantic energy ties with Russia entirely, forcing European countries to buy expensive American liquefied natural gas while absorbing massive economic disruption, inflation, and industrial decline all at once. European officials now openly describe the fallout as an existential threat to their own union.
A remarkably similar playbook has shown up in the Middle East, just with even more destructive results. Administration after administration, from Obama through Trump, kept publicly announcing a pivot toward Asia while pushing regional partners to shoulder more of their own military burden. But underneath that offshore balancing rhetoric, Washington was systematically dismantling the region’s existing balance of power to enforce a rigid, anti Iran security architecture instead.
The real mechanism behind this transformation was surprisingly bureaucratic, a shift in military command structure. By moving Israel from US European Command over to US Central Command in early 2021, Washington effectively forced Arab states into an integrated military network alongside Israel whether they wanted that or not. Normalization, codified through the Abraham Accords, was explicitly built to sidestep the core issue of Palestinian statehood entirely and forge a unified front against Iran instead. And whenever regional states tried to hedge their bets through independent diplomacy of their own, Washington responded with escalating hostility rather than flexibility.
“The Gulf states, having learned some hard lessons about American reliability after the 2019 attacks on Aramco facilities, made a pretty rational move to rebalance their own foreign policies.”
They deepened trade with China, kept coordinating on energy with Moscow through OPEC+, and finalized a historic, Beijing brokered deal to restore diplomatic ties with Iran back in 2023. That kind of multi aligned posture posed a direct threat to Washington’s preferred monopoly over Middle Eastern security, and it clearly wasn’t welcomed.
Rather than actually accommodating what its regional allies wanted diplomatically, the United States chose escalation instead. The current military conflict involving Iran and the US stands as the disastrous endpoint of that whole approach. Despite clear warnings and vocal pushback from Gulf allies, American strategic calculations still drove the region straight into open war. The economic fallout for regional states has been enormous, given that a potential blockade of the Strait of Hormuz threatens the actual lifeblood of their economies. Once again, local stability got sacrificed to preserve Washington’s regional dominance.
The clearest victim of this whole transactional approach remains the Palestinian people. Over the past decade, Washington’s formal commitments to Palestinian self determination have basically withered down to nothing. Obama’s explicit calls for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state gave way to Biden’s mostly passive lip service toward a two state framework, before finally landing on Trump’s total abandonment of Palestinian rights altogether.
“New governance tools like the recently introduced Board of Peace really show what American policy is ultimately aiming for, replacing recognized international legal frameworks with custom built, corporate style administrative bodies instead.”
By bypassing established UN mechanisms and sidelining Palestinian leadership, Washington is trying to enforce a unilateral, post conflict reality that treats a genuine sovereign struggle like it’s just a real estate or security management problem to be solved on paper. That total disregard for international consensus says a lot about a power that treats international law not as a binding standard, but as a flexible tool to pick up or set down depending on what’s convenient in the moment.
The bigger lesson from all of this is stark and honestly hard to argue with. Washington’s foreign policy runs on an unyielding drive to prevent any alternative regional power center from emerging, regardless of which party or ideology happens to hold the White House at the time. Whether through aggressive diplomatic pressure, military restructuring, or outright war, the United States keeps proving that its partnerships are fundamentally lopsided.
Allies in Europe and the Middle East are consistently expected to absorb the economic, human, and security costs of decisions made entirely in Washington. As European industrial competitiveness erodes under the weight of expensive energy, and the Middle East faces instability on a scale it hasn’t seen in years, the danger of leaning on American security guarantees has become painfully obvious. Real regional security was never going to be built on the strategic priorities of a distant superpower. As long as local powers keep letting their own sovereign interests get subordinated to Washington’s global calculus, they’re going to keep paying the price for American foreign policy, over and over again.