The Confession
America admits what the Global South always knew
A longer version of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy exists. The White House says it does not. Both statements are true in the way that matters. Defense One reviewed the document. The journalists reported its contents. The denial followed. Not to convince anyone. To demonstrate that convincing is no longer the point.
The unpublished version proposes something called the C5. A Core Five of major powers. The United States, China, Russia, India, Japan. They would meet as the G7 does, coordinating on global affairs. The membership requires nothing. Not democracy. Not shared values. Not particular norms of governance. Just power. Just size. The first item on the proposed agenda is Middle East security: normalising relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. This tells you what “values” means in this context.
This is not a leak about hypocrisy. Everyone knew about the hypocrisy. This is a document about the decision to stop pretending.
What the G7 Was Supposed to Mean
The Group of Seven began as a coordination mechanism for wealthy capitalist economies after Bretton Woods collapsed in the early 1970s. By the time the Soviet Union dissolved, it had become something else. The steering committee, so the story went, of a new world order built around liberal democratic capitalism. The members were not simply rich. They were rich and democratic. This conjunction was supposed to matter. It was the proof of concept. Markets and ballots, private property and human rights, all reinforcing each other in a virtuous circle that history itself had blessed.
The G7 became G8 in 1997 when Russia was admitted. A gesture of optimism about where that country was heading. When Russia was expelled in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea, the expulsion was meant to prove that membership meant something. Behaviour could disqualify you. There were standards. The other members, led by the United States, were saying: this is a club with rules, and you have broken them.
The C5 proposal abandons this framework. It does not replace one set of values with another. It removes values as a relevant category. What remains is a table at which large states sit because they are large.
What Bandung Already Knew
In April 1955, representatives from twenty-nine African and Asian nations met in Bandung, Indonesia. The context was decolonisation and Cold War alignment. The subtext was more fundamental: a shared scepticism about the claims Western powers made for themselves.
The leaders at Bandung understood something Western publics were not supposed to notice. The United States spoke of freedom while supporting Syngman Rhee in South Korea and preparing to install the Shah in Iran. Britain and France lectured about self-determination while fighting to keep colonial possessions. The language of universal values was deployed, consistently and systematically, in service of particular interests. The rules were not rules. They were instruments.
Dependency theorists elaborated this analysis through the following decades. So did world-systems analysts. So did anyone watching American foreign policy in practice. When the CIA helped overthrow Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, one year before Bandung, the justification was anti-communism. The beneficiary was the United Fruit Company. When the United States supported Suharto’s massacre of communists in Indonesia in 1965-66, providing kill lists to the Indonesian military, the body count reached somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million. When Pinochet seized power in Chile in 1973, the Nixon administration had prepared the ground and quickly extended recognition and aid. When the Saudis executed dissidents and dismembered journalists, American presidents held their hands and sold them weapons.
None of this was secret. The record was available to anyone who cared to look. But the fiction was maintained. It had to be maintained. It served functions beyond deceiving foreign populations. The fiction of the rules-based international order allowed American allies to participate without acknowledging what they were participating in. It allowed domestic populations to believe their governments acted from principle. It provided a vocabulary for use against adversaries. Human rights for China. Democracy for Venezuela. International law for Russia.
The C5 proposal confesses that this vocabulary has been retired. Not because it was false. Everyone knew it was false. Because it is no longer considered useful.
The Utility of the Lie
This is the part that requires attention. The question is not whether the United States was hypocritical. Everyone knew. The question is why the hypocrisy is being abandoned now.
The fiction of values-based leadership was never merely propaganda for foreign consumption. It was a technology of power. It accomplished specific things. It kept European allies inside an alliance structure by letting them believe, or pretend to believe, that the alliance was about something more than American hegemony. It legitimised interventions by providing a language in which those interventions could be discussed without acknowledging their purposes. It created asymmetries. The United States could invoke international law against its enemies while ignoring it in its own conduct, because the institutional apparatus was structured around assumptions that favoured Western power even when individual cases went against Western interests.
Perhaps most importantly, the fiction generated soft power. Countries aligned with the United States not only because of military and economic pressure but because American dominance came packaged with a story about what that dominance meant. The story was attractive. Liberal democracy, open markets, individual rights, the rule of law. These concepts, however imperfectly realised in practice, offered something raw power could not: a sense of participating in a legitimate order rather than submitting to a stronger force.
The C5 proposal suggests the Trump administration has concluded that this soft power is no longer worth the cost. What cost? Maintaining the fiction requires maintaining the institutions that embody it. NATO. The UN. The network of treaties and agreements that constrain American action even as they extend American influence. It requires treating allies as partners rather than clients. It requires, at minimum, a rhetorical commitment to norms that occasionally has to be honoured in practice.
The calculation appears to be: let China and Russia handle their regions. Let India manage South Asia. Let Japan serve as a subordinate partner in the Pacific. Let the United States extract itself from the obligations liberal hegemony required. The benefits of the fiction no longer outweigh the costs of the performance.
The Shape of the Vacuum
If the C5 represents American foreign policy without its ideological packaging, what does that leave?
Not multipolarity in any classical sense. The nineteenth-century concert of powers operated through shared assumptions about legitimacy, spheres of influence, and the balance of power. The C5 has no such assumptions. It is not a system but the absence of one. A recognition that large states will pursue their interests and smaller states will accommodate them.
This is, in some ways, a more honest description of how international relations have always worked. The honesty does not make it benign. The fiction of a rules-based order, however hypocritical, created space for claims to be made against power. Small states could invoke international law. Social movements could appeal to human rights. The language of universal values was available to anyone. Powerful states could ignore it when convenient, but they could not always ignore it without cost.
The C5 framework eliminates this. If major powers coordinate directly on the basis of interest, where does that leave climate activists trying to hold governments accountable? Where does it leave labour movements seeking transnational solidarity? Where does it leave populations under governments the major powers find convenient to support?
The answer, presumably, is: exactly where they have always been. Largely powerless against the forces that shape the world. But the abandonment of pretence removes even the rhetorical resources movements have used to articulate their claims. When the United States invokes human rights, it can be accused of hypocrisy, and that accusation has purchase because the United States has committed itself to the standard. When the United States stops invoking human rights, there is nothing to be hypocritical about.
The Document That Does Not Exist
The White House says the longer version of the National Security Strategy does not exist. “No alternative, private, or classified version exists,” the spokeswoman said. Then she added that anyone claiming otherwise has “no idea what they are talking about.”
This denial is not meant to be believed. It is meant to be noted. The administration is not trying to convince anyone that Defense One fabricated its reporting. The denial demonstrates something else: we can say what we want, and you will report our denial alongside your reporting of the facts, and nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens.
This is itself a kind of confession. The old order required that lies be at least minimally plausible. A lie nobody believes serves no purpose if the point is to deceive. But if the point is to demonstrate that truth no longer constrains power, then implausibility is the message.
The C5 proposes organising the world without the inconvenience of shared values. The denial demonstrates that even facts can be overwritten by fiat. These are the same gesture in different registers. The assertion that power need no longer justify itself. The performance of legitimacy has concluded. We have entered a period in which what is said and what is done have been formally separated. Everyone understands this. It does not matter.
The confession is complete.