US Vice President JD Vance has announced what he calls a “new era” in military strategy.
“What we are seeing from President Trump is a generational shift in [foreign] policy”, he claimed.
The Donald Trump administration is abandoning the US government’s previous emphasis on soft power, Vance explained, and is instead focusing on “hard power” and “overwhelming force”, in a return to blatant, 19th century-style imperialism.
According to Vance, Washington’s top priority is now “great power competition”, and preparation for potential war with China.
The vice president laid this out in a speech at the commissioning ceremony of the US Naval Academy on 23 May.
The “era of uncontested US dominance is over”
JD Vance lamented the fact that the US empire has lost its unipolar dominance, as the world has become more multipolar.
“In the wake of the Cold War, America enjoyed a mostly unchallenged command of the commons, airspace, sea, space and cyberspace”, Vance recalled.
“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, our policymakers assumed that American primacy on the world stage was guaranteed. For a brief time, we were a superpower without any peer, nor did we believe any foreign nation could possibly rise to compete with the United States of America”, he added.
“But the era of uncontested US dominance is over”, Vance warned. “Today we face serious threats in China, Russia, and other nations, determined to beat us in every single domain”.
Preparing for war on China
The US vice president complained that, in the past, “our leaders traded hard power for soft power”. He argued that this was an error, and that the US empire should have focused on containing China.
“Instead of devoting our energies to responding to the rise of near-peer competitors like China, our leaders pursued what they assumed would be easy jobs for the world’s preeminent superpower”, Vance said.
“Our government took its eye off the ball of great power competition and preparing to take on a peer adversary, and instead, we devoted ourselves to sprawling, amorphous tasks, like searching for new terrorists to take out while building up far away regimes”, he added.
The vice president argued that it was a mistake to think that, by deepening economic integration and trade with China, the US could pressure Beijing to change its socialist system.
“Too many of us believed that economic integration would naturally lead to peace by making countries like the People’s Republic of China more like the United States”, he lamented.
In other words, Vance was acknowledging that many officials in Washington wanted China to become an obedient proxy, like Japan. They thought they could pressure Beijing to subordinate itself to the US, but they ultimately failed.
So now, the Trump administration is redirecting US foreign policy to prepare for potential war on China.
A return to a more blatant form of imperialism
Some Trump supporters have taken Vance’s comments out of context to claim that the Trump administration is supposedly moving away from a hyper-interventionist foreign policy and toward a more restrained, isolationist one. But that is not what is happening.
Vance’s speech made it clear that the Trump administration wants to return to a more overt, traditional form of imperialism.
What is changing is that the Trump administration is dropping the cynical propaganda narrative that US foreign policy is supposedly motivated by “democracy promotion” or “human rights”.
Vance indicated that the US empire will continue to wage wars, and will try to win those wars through the use of “overwhelming force”. However, this will no longer be done in the name of “democracy” or “human rights”.
Vance warned US Naval Academy graduates that they are in a “very dangerous era”, and will have a new “mission”.
The vice president stated openly that US troops will be sent to more wars, and that it is not a matter of if, but rather when.
“We’re returning to a strategy grounded in realism and protecting our core national interests”, Vance said. “Now this doesn’t mean that we ignore threats, but it means that we approach them with discipline, and that when we send you to war, we do it with a very specific set of goals in mind”.
Trump admin’s military strategy: “Overwhelming force” and $1 trillion budget
As an example of the new Trump Doctrine, Vance proudly pointed to the Pentagon’s bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in West Asia.
Vance boasted that the Trump administration used “overwhelming force against Houthi military targets”. This was a reference to the so-called “Houthis”, the armed group officially known as Ansarallah that governs northern Yemen.
Trump’s war on Yemen was “how military power should be used: decisively, with a clear objective”, Vance said.
“We ought to be cautious in deciding to throw a punch, but when we throw a punch, we throw a punch hard, and we do it decisively, and that’s exactly what we may ask you to do“, he told the Naval Academy graduates.
Vance added, “With the Trump administration, our adversaries now know when the United States sets a red line, it will be enforced, and when we engage, we do so with purpose, with superior force, with superior weapons, and with the best people anywhere in the world”.
In fact, instead of promoting isolationism and opposing interventionism, the Trump administration is boosting the US military budget to more than $1 trillion per year.
“I’ll be supporting a record-setting $1 trillion investment in our national defense”, Trump said in a speech at a US military base in April. “We’re going to go $1 trillion, the largest in the world, the largest ever in our country”.
“No other country has invested that much”, Trump bragged. “We have a $1 trillion budget for military this year, and we have tremendous plans”.
US ideological crusades
In one of the most hypocritical parts of his speech at the US Naval Academy graduation ceremony, JD Vance claimed that the Trump administration is carrying out a “shift in thinking, from ideological crusades to a principled foreign policy”.
This was deeply ironic, because Trump’s extremely hawkish secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is a self-declared “crusader”.
In his 2020 book “American Crusade”, Hegseth — a former Fox News host — wrote with pride that the US right wing is waging a “holy war” against China, the international left, and Islam.
Hegseth, an ardent hawk, has sought to rebrand US soldiers as “warfighters”, constantly using the term in his public remarks.
In his speech at the Naval Academy, Vance did the same, repeatedly praising US soldiers as “warfighters”.
Marco Rubio: China is the main target of the US government
Top officials in the Trump administration have made it clear that the main target of the US empire is China.
JD Vance conveyed this in his speech at the US Naval Academy.
It has also been repeatedly emphasized by Marco Rubio, a lifelong neoconservative war hawk, who is serving simultaneously as Trump’s secretary of state and national security advisor (making him only the second person in US history to hold both positions at the same time, following Henry Kissinger).
In his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Rubio stressed that this entire century will be built on Washington’s new cold war against China.
Rubio said (emphasis added):
The Communist Party of China, that leads the PRC, is the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted. They have elements that the Soviet Union never possessed. They are a technological adversary and competitor, an industrial competitor, an economic competitor, a geopolitical competitor, a scientific competitor now — in every realm.
It’s an extraordinary challenge. It’s one that I believe will define the 21st century. When they write the book about the 21st century, there’s going to be some chapters in there about Putin; there’s going to be some chapters in there about some of these other places; but the bulk of that book about the 21st century will be not just about China, but about the relationship between China and the United States, and what direction it went.
Eric Arthur Blair
2025-06-04 at 03:43
All the US kakistocrats have to offer are distorted narratives based on FILTHY LIES.
VD Jance uses Orwellian language to distract from the REAL threats to the USA:
An empire collapsing from the weight of its OWN INTERNAL ALL PERVASIVE CORRUPTION, rewarding crooks, grifters an conartists, offshoring essential industries for profit and destroying its own middle class and domestic infrastructure while spending trillions for cowardly murderous military campaigns abroad to enrich the private bankers, vulture capitalists and MIC.
End stage Amoral, Genocidal, Neoliberal CRONY CAPITALISM.
Mr. Inbred Hillbilly externalises fault for the decline of the USA, blaming it on foreign countries that just want their own security, peace and progress.
Mr. white trash peasant offers a “Tonya Harding” solution: to deny China it’s own security, peace and progress as the way for the USA to become top dog again.
He refuses to explain just how confrontation with China will improve the living standards and healthcare of US citizens.
But hey, the majority of USAnians readily swallow such crap because they are stooooooopid, ignorant and nasty. A direct result of defunding education and promoting violent gun culture.
The MAGAs will discover in the next few weeks that the tariff war they started with China will DESTROY the living standards of USAnians.
BTW, China and Russia are NOT “near peer” competitors, they have long far outstripped the capabilities of the USA, a diseased, decrepit empire that can only “wn” with nuclear weapons, in which case EVERYBODY DIES.
My message to VD Jance: look to your own faults, you bent over anal whoreboy of Peter Thiel.
Eric Arthur Blair
2025-06-04 at 13:30
Prof Richard Wolff explains:
https://richardwolffeconomicupdate.libsyn.com/europe-declines-faster-than-the-united-states
The story of the Ames wheelbarrow manufacturing business is but one tiny microcosm example of how greedy, amoral, vulture capitalism has cumulativelty dismantled industry and jobs in the USA. China did not steal any jobs, the US greedy vulture capitalists eagerly sold it all off.
Solution: exterminate the vulture capitalists and their handpuppet figurehead politicians. Peter Thiel’s hand is so far up VD Jance’s rectum, you can see Thiel’s fingers inside Jance’s mouth.
As bad as the USA is, Europe is far worse. You can see the fingers of Blackrock executives sticking out of Friedrich Merz’s mouth.
JonnyJames
2025-06-04 at 15:05
Nicely summed up EAB…And let’s not forget the Crime Minister, Keir Starmer. The UK almost certainly aided Ukraine in the recent attacks on Russia. The US/UK and vassals must have a suicide-death pact or something, provoking a nuclear war with Russia is not a good idea. These nuttahs should be put in a straight-jacket and forced to watch the old classic Dr. Strangelove.
And the historical ironies of Germany supporting Israeli genocide and supporting provocations for war with Russia. Do they realize how pathetically tragic this all is? Polls in Germany have shown that teh vast majority of young folks don’t want to fight in Barbarossa 2.0 on the New Russian Front. All paper tiger Germany can do is send more money and weapons. “the Germans lost WWII, but the Nazis won” (a quote attributed to George Carlin)
Dean Michael Oladimeji
2025-06-06 at 01:37
Foreseeing the worlds ending is a must for most elite in the the West