By David C. Lane, Spring 2025 Marcellus Policy Fellow

Since the end of the Cold War and onset of the “unipolar moment,” U.S. strategic doctrine has remained
relatively unchanged. U.S. global primacy has been largely uncontested, but fissures are beginning to show, as American power enters relative decline, with rising global powers like China and other regional powers gaining influence. Criticisms of U.S. power and unipolarity coalesce around several distinct intellectual camps, which some scholars now classify as a community of “restraint.” This community can be further broken down by their specific critiques of U.S. power, and by their analytical framework for conceptualizing global politics and security, with overlapping and complementary perspectives. The restraint community, writ large, is still a minority within policy-making circles, but is gaining influence over some policy areas, and there are few indicators that their presence and influence will diminish as the world enters a period of increasing multipolarity.

To that end, U.S. strategy and policy formulations are inadequate to the current moment, particularly
regarding military policy. Official publications that direct strategy, such as the National Defense Strategy
(NDS) and National Military Strategy (NMS), have become uncritical and sclerotic over the last three
decades, with frameworks that are at odds with strategic realities and power dynamics. The United
States military is overstretched globally, operating on every continent, reinforcing and training over 100
allies and partners, while simultaneously attempting to modernize equipment and doctrine. This scenario
constitutes strategic myopia, wherein recruiting and retention of personnel within the all-volunteer
force is insufficient to meet the demands of securing America’s vast network of security relationships, nor
is the doctrine, force structure, or fielded equipment guaranteed to prevail over declared adversaries in the advent of large-scale combat.

Key to U.S. assumptions of primacy and power projection is its globe-spanning array of allies and
partners. This network both supports and is supported by the United States military but is part and parcel of the unsustainable overextension of American power abroad. To create a more stable security environment, the United States needs to take a hard look its
vital interests, strategic priorities, and its security
relationships.

This paper argues that the conflation of allies and partners, and the continual drive to acquire
new ones, is detrimental to U.S. security and the security of America’s closest allies, and that to
“live within its means” in the medium term will require a reprioritization of resources to treaty allies
at the expense of less formal partnerships. Doing so will provide strategic clarity, reorienting assets
and resources away from regions of less strategic importance, such as the Middle East, and toward areas
of increasing or consistent importance like Asia and Europe. It will also realign values with shared visions
of security, since treaty allies are predominantly more democratic and stable nation-states, whereas mere
partners constitute a wide range of political formations and ideologies.