The unclassified version of the US National Defense Strategy quietly dropped a week ago. The world awaits the Pentagon’s Global Posture Review, which will outline where and to what extent the US military will maintain its forward-positioned assets and troops in the coming years.
Like fashion correspondents obsessing over the soft power conveyed by a sculpted blazer at a high-society event, political analysts often parse every sentence of these types of official documents, trying to uncover subtle messaging and potential strains in relationships. But sometimes a tiara is just a tiara: worn to remind everyone else where they stand in the social hierarchy. So is this NDS, at least to a degree, another notice that the US is an overbearing beast and intends to remain so. In that sense, there aren’t many surprises here and probably won’t be in the GPR, either.
According to the most recent figures from the Pentagon’s staffing data, the US military has more than 170,000 active-duty personnel (about 13 percent of the country’s 1.3 million active troops) stationed in some 170 countries. That is up by 3,000 from a year earlier—so there has thus far been no real change of the force posture under this president. Once reservists and civilian staff are included, the figure rises to more than 230,000 “defence” personnel stationed overseas (out of 2.8 million total). These numbers are unlikely to shift much under the Trump administration’s “unlike-anything-you’ve-ever-seen-before” military strategy—which has been seen many times before, by the way, by tens of millions of victims worldwide.
The Global Posture Review will likely lead to troop drawdowns in Europe and the Middle East and to reallocations in the Western Hemisphere—a key feature of the NDS, as in last year’s National Security Strategy, is the regional shoring-up operation. The overall international footprint of the US military might be marginally reduced. But the US is an empire regardless of who occupies the White House, and the empire will continue to look something like this:
The map is deceptive, of course—most places have only a handful or dozens of US operatives stationed in embassies (which also house CIA staff, who aren’t covered by the Pentagon’s numbers). About 90 percent of active-duty personnel outside of the continental United States are in the ten territories hosting more than 1,000 troops:
Deceptive or not, consider row 13 in the table above: for the September quarter, the official data list 8,480 active-duty troops as “unknown” in location. Not knowing the whereabouts of two brigades’ worth of soldiers would be news in most countries. For the Pentagon, it’s a rounding error—an imperial system of measurement, for sure. Perhaps they are “unknown” because they are doing just the sorts of things that the US government usually denies that it does.
At any rate, another key takeaway from the NDS is that US imperialism is not letting go of Asia, regardless of the reorientation the Trump administration claims to be pursuing. There is no evidence of retreat in this region; instead, the US military is going to dig itself in like an Alabama tick:
The Indo-Pacific will soon make up more than half of the global economy. The American people’s security, freedom, and prosperity are therefore directly linked to our ability to trade and engage from a position of strength in the Indo-Pacific. Were China—or anyone else, for that matter—to dominate this broad and crucial region, it would be able to effectively veto Americans’ access to the world’s economic center of gravity, with enduring implications for our nation’s economic prospects, including our ability to reindustrialize. That is why the NSS directs DoW [Department of War] to maintain a favorable balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific ... our goal is to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate us or our allies.
Notably, Western-aligned countries in Asia, like European ones, are being served a half-reheated version of the Nixon Doctrine, accompanied by a side of war preparations. So on one hand, there’s stern talk about everyone fending for themselves, the US demanding all allies worldwide meet the military spending targets set at last year’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit: 3.5 percent of GDP on “core” military plus 1.5 percent on “security-related spending”. That would be a massive reallocation of resources for any country, let alone for the range of South and South-East Asian states that have not yet managed to establish universal social welfare.
On the other hand, US military engineers are deploying across the Western Pacific, revitalising World War Two-era airfields to accommodate fighter jets and launch bombing raids, expanding naval and marine bases, and prepositioning supplies. For example, there’s the new US$9 billion marine base in Guam, the reopening of what was once one of the largest airbases in the world on nearby Tinian Island, along with other upgrades or new bases in Palau, Micronesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. They call all this, and more, “President Trump’s vision for peace through strength”. Spare us.
Australia isn’t mentioned in the NDS, and hosted “only” 314 active-duty US personnel in the September quarter of 2025, according to the Pentagon data. But the integration of this continent into US strategic planning for a major confrontation with China has not abated. Canberra is spending up to $17 billion on bases in northern Australia in 2024-34 (p.134), an area that is now reportedly “the top overseas location for US Air Force and Navy construction spending”. US and British nuclear submarines begin rotations out of Western Australia from next year; air bases in the north have been repurposed to accommodate the largest US nuclear bombers; the marines have their own dedicated and upgraded facilities in Darwin; and prepositioning of US munitions, vehicles and fuel has begun in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory.
Greg Grandin, a Yale University history professor, suggested in a recent segment on Democracy Now! that we’re witnessing a “new form of imperialism … an arrangement with kind of transactional details that we’ve never seen before … [a] kind of technovassal imperialism”. Without wanting to downplay the brazen gangsterism of the Trump regime, some of this talk about unprecedented action is overblown.
The last newsletter quoted Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 remarks at a governors’ conference outlining the rationale for the US backing the French in Indochina. It’s worth revisiting those remarks, made right at the beginning of the “rules-based international order” that now appears to be fracturing as Washington goes rogue:
Now let us assume that we lose Indochina. If Indochina goes, several things happen right away. The Malayan peninsula, the last little bit of the end hanging on down there, would be scarcely defensible—and tin and tungsten that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming. But all India would be outflanked. Burma would certainly, in its weakened condition, be no defence ... All of that weakening position around there is very ominous for the United States, because finally if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire of Indonesia?
Comparing the NDS section on Asia and Eisenhower’s address, there is scarcely any difference between the underlying interests offered to justify US aggression internationally. Eisenhower’s remarks are gilded by a little “free world” cant. But in 1953, as in 2026, naked self-interest was the rule. The devastation unleashed by the US around the world in the 60 years following Eisenhower’s address is incomparable to anything—other than Gaza—more recently. And the Gaza genocide, like the carnage in Vietnam, mostly occurred under a Democratic administration. The devastation in Iraq from the 2003 invasion is another case in point: it was pure gangsterism to try to install a pliant government and impose US hegemony over the entire Middle East. More than 1 million people lost their lives as a result.
The Trump regime may be the crudest expression of imperial hubris and aggression in generations, but it is not a fundamental departure from past US administrations. This is not a “new” type of imperialism; it’s just more naked in its ambitions.
