America’s New Security Doctrine and the Reordering of Global Energy Geopolitics

From Tilak’s Substack

Tilak Doshi

Washington’s newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) has struck Europe with the force of a long-suppressed truth bluntly delivered. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, the United States has published an official doctrine that no longer idealises the post-war transatlantic compact. Instead, it describes an uncomfortable divergence: the United States, still attached to the rough-and-tumble of its First Amendment, democratic accountability and national interest, now sees a Europe that has lost confidence in its own civilisation, abandoning its classical liberal inheritance of free speech and intellectual inquiry. Instead, it chose to pursue utopian projects such as Net Zero, mass immigration and an ever-expanding regulatory state that corrodes its own industrial base.

Atlas No More

The shock in Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London is palpable. European policymakers, long accustomed to assuming their own centrality, now confront an America that openly doubts whether Europe retains the cultural coherence or economic resilience necessary to serve as co-custodian of ‘the West’. The transatlantic relationship was always more than a security pact: it was meant to be a civilisational partnership grounded in a shared understanding of liberty, national sovereignty and free exchange. Washington’s new document coolly observes that these shared assumptions no longer exist. Yet amid the outrage from European elites, who decry this as an abandonment of shared values, lies a deeper rupture with implications far beyond a cultural critique of Western Europe by a conservative US administration.

This, by itself, would be significant. But the deeper rupture concerns energy. The National Security Strategy does not merely state that Europe has lost its way culturally; it implies that the entire post-war energy-monetary architecture — from the petrodollar arrangements forged with Saudi Arabia in 1945 to the US-backed global energy order that kept Europe prosperous for seven decades — must now be reconsidered. The old triangle of American security guarantees, European industrial power and Middle Eastern hydrocarbons no longer fits the world as it is. And under the Trump administration, Washington is no longer willing to pretend otherwise.

Insightful commentators have aptly described this moment as the “erasure of compatible values”. Europe’s ruling classes have embraced ideological projects that Washington now views as antithetical to the preservation of Western civilisation itself. At the same time, the new US strategic posture shows the extent to which Washington has abandoned the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992 – emphasising the country’s role as the sole superpower and advocating unilateral military action to prevent the rise of potential rivals – and returned to the strategic realism of an earlier age.

Trump’s America now defines its interests with far sharper boundaries: the security of the homeland, control of its hemisphere and a global geopolitical view shaped not by crusading universalism but by the pragmatic calculus of costs and benefits.

The shift is unmistakable. This is not retreat; it is triage. The strategy document signals that the United States will no longer police the planet or underwrite the regulatory fantasies of partners who cannot articulate what they stand for beyond carbon accounting exercises, rights of minorities and speech codes. It is, in effect, the end of the ‘Atlas complex’, the era in which America attempted to hold up the ‘rules-based world order’ even as its own society frayed.

The place where this realism bites hardest is Europe. The NSS describes a continent undermining the very political liberties it once advocated — censoring speech, suppressing dissent and dissolving its national identities under the weight of unassimilated migration. It observes that Europe’s industrial base has been hollowed out by Net Zero mandates that render rational energy policies impossible. Washington, in unusually cold language, suggests that Europe must now take responsibility for its own defence and economic survival. The United States will help, but not unconditionally and certainly not uncritically.

A New Global Energy Geopolitics

This is where energy becomes central. Europe has chosen a path of deindustrialisation, betting its future on intermittent renewables while simultaneously seeking to impose carbon border taxes to export the costs of its Net Zero experiment onto the world at large. The result is structurally higher energy prices, loss of strategic industries and dependence on expensive LNG imports — ironically from the very United States whose people and government European elites habitually scorn. In such a context, Washington’s security doctrine reads as an intervention staged by a frustrated partner who has tired of subsidising ideological grandstanding.

The contrast with Eurasia could not be starker. The West effectively ‘snookered itself‘ by driving Russia out of European markets, piling sanctions onto one of the world’s most important hydrocarbon producers, and thereby pushing Moscow into a deepening energy partnership with China, India and the other BRICS countries. This Eurasian realignment – crystallised at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation gatherings and symbolised by projects such as Power of Siberia-2 – has created a vast energy corridor beyond Western influence. India buys discounted Russian crude, refines it and sells products back to Europe. China signs multi-decade contracts for Russian gas and invests heavily in Middle Eastern infrastructure. Russia, far from being isolated, is central to the world’s most dynamic energy zone.

The new US strategy does not pretend it can reverse this. Instead, it marks an adjustment. Washington now sees Eurasia as a complex, interlinked energy space in which the United States competes rather than controls. America’s advantages — the world’s leading oil and gas producer, unmatched LNG capacity, financial depth, advanced technology and security partnerships — remain formidable. But the fantasy that Washington can dominate Eurasian energy flows as it once dominated Europe’s is now discarded. As is the belief that Ukraine can possibly win in its quixotic battle with the far superior military might of Russia, a delusion that the hapless West European political elite continues to entertain.

This recalibration opens space for possibilities once unthinkable. In a recent essay, I argued that a US-Russia rapprochement — centred on stabilising global oil markets, jointly developing Russia’s vast Arctic and Siberian resources and balancing China’s rising influence — would constitute a geopolitical earthquake. Reports of quiet meetings in Saudi Arabia between US and Russian officials earlier this year suggested that such a shift was no longer outside the realm of strategic imagination. The new NSS, although not explicit, certainly does not foreclose this option. If anything, its emphasis on hemispheric security, its scepticism towards open-ended commitments in Ukraine and its acknowledgment of the limits of American overstretch point towards a posture in which pragmatic engagement with Moscow becomes possible again.

Europe, predictably, recoils at such a prospect. The European globalists continue to insist that an allegedly revanchist Russia must be contained indefinitely, that the thoroughly corrupt Ukraine is the ‘front line of democracy’ and that the partner who has wrecked its own energy system should still dictate the West’s grand strategy. Washington’s doctrine takes a rather different view. It wants stability, not crusades. It recognises that Germany’s industrial decline — worsened by self-inflicted energy scarcity — is now a structural constraint on Europe’s relevance. Washington sees little sense in underwriting a continental strategy that Western Europe is incapable of paying for and cannot execute.

Oil and Money

Meanwhile, the question of the petrodollar looms large. Does the new doctrine imply an end to the dollar’s centrality in energy trade? No, in a word. But the NSS implicitly accepts that we are entering a world in which Middle Eastern producers will diversify. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are exploring non-dollar settlements for trade with China and India, Russia is shifting to roubles and yuan, and the expanded BRICS group has grown into a hydrocarbon-heavy bloc with its own financial mechanisms. The United States is not surrendering dollar dominance. It is hedging against the erosion of its universality.

This hedging is only possible because of America’s own energy revolution. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas and a crucial LNG supplier to both Europe and Asia. Its leverage is no longer tied to military bases in the Persian Gulf but to its ability to redirect cargoes, alter export licensing and deploy selective sanctions or waivers. ‘Fortress America’, far from signalling retreat, is an energy bastion with global reach.

Yet the implications are unmistakable. Washington will no longer exhaust itself defending the global commons to preserve energy flows for Europe. It will anchor its hemisphere, compete with China where necessary, and engage elsewhere on a pragmatic ‘America First’ calculus. Europe’s vision of itself as the normative moral centre of the world no longer figures prominently in this calculation.

What emerges from this doctrinal shift is a map of energy power that looks very different from the one that defined the post-war period. The American hemisphere, blessed with abundant shale reserves, Canadian oil sands and Gulf of Mexico production, becomes the most energy-secure zone in the world. Eurasia, stretching from St Petersburg to Shanghai and Delhi, consolidates into a giant hydrocarbon-integrated space driven by long-term contracts, pipeline and energy-trade oriented diplomacy, and non-Western financial mechanisms. Europe, by contrast, forms a fragile energy cul-de-sac — rich in a plethora of regulatory overreach but poor in the basic inputs required for industrial civilisation.

The NSS does not cause this transformation; it merely recognises it. But recognitions of this sort are rare in American statecraft, and when they occur as in the Trump phenomenon, they reshape the world. The United States is now aligning its strategy with physical and political reality — with the geology of shale, the geography of Eurasian pipelines and the declining cultural vitality of Europe. It is admitting that the West, as a coherent energy and political bloc, no longer exists in the form imagined after 1945 under the Bretton Woods construct.

Whither Western Europe

And so, the real question is not what America will do next. That is clear enough: secure its hemisphere, deploy its energy power strategically and avoid entanglements that serve neither its interests nor its values. This is unless the globalist-Left Democrats overturn the Trumpian revolution at the next elections as Biden did after Trump’s first term. The real question is what Europe will do now that the illusion of transatlantic unity has been dispelled. Will it rediscover the cultural confidence and industrial pragmatism that made it the cradle of the modern world? Or will it continue drifting into regulatory utopianism, civilisational amnesia, identity politics and strategic irrelevance?

America’s new security strategy, for all its starkness, offers Western Europe a mirror: confront the chasm between its utopian delusions and real economic resilience, or fade into the footnotes of history. For the world, it portends a multipolar energy map where abundance, not austerity, lifts billions — provided Western Europe learns humility before the unyielding arithmetic of fossil fuels and markets. In that realism lies not defeat, but deliverance.

Washington has issued what may be its final warning: energy and geopolitical realism or decline. The United States has made its choice. Europe must now decide whether it still has the strength — and the will — to make one of its own. Alas, going by the latest ‘war forever’ meeting of Starmer, Merz and Macron with Zelensky in London, there is little to hope for as long as the unpopular, embattled EU and UK establishment elites remain in charge.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic [https://dailysceptic.org/2025/12/14/americas-new-security-doctrine-and-the-reordering-of-global-energy-geopolitics/]

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.