The domestic constraint on strategy and its geopolitical spillovers (01/31/2026).

PROLOGUE – The new National Security Strategy as imperial autobiography and domestic thermometer

There are documents that describe the world, and others that — while pretending to describe it — mostly describe their authors. Trump’s America’s NSS 2025 belongs to the second category: before being a doctrine, it is a self-portrait.¹ Not only does it translate the America First philosophy into official language, but it also stages the decisive nexus of this phase: foreign policy is a two-level game, no longer separable from the domestic social form; and hegemony is no longer sustainable as “architecture” if the society that underwrites it loses trust, a sense of belonging, and the capacity to cooperate.² In other words, NSS 2025 is also a domestic thermometer.

In 2022, the rules-based order was presented as a power multiplier;³ in 2025, order becomes a political cost, and security is redefined as selective sovereignty — borders, industry, energy, and technological supremacy — with a more contractual, conditional grammar and one more permeable to the internal culture war. The shift is both substantive and discursive, altering what America considers its legitimate promises.

This essay’s thesis is that social regression and tribalization — accelerated by Trump’s entry into politics in 2014 — entail a loss of cohesion, understood as a structural constraint on internal and external strategy. They reduce the capacity to translate resources into a coherent line and, therefore, compress the room for maneuver. A superpower can absorb tactical errors; it cannot, for long, absorb a crisis of legitimacy and belonging without the outside becoming identity therapy and the inside a permanent battlefield.

From this angle, 2026 is a threshold year because it combines two dynamics. On the one hand, hegemonic transition accelerates international competition: more theaters, more actors capable of initiative, and more low-cost tools (drones, cyberspace, disinformation). On the other hand, America is undergoing an internal political revolution, reducing the predictability of its external conduct. The consequence is systemic: Washington’s perceived unreliability pushes allies and partners toward explicit hedging, accelerates a less coordinated and more competitive world, and, at the same time, offers rivals and opportunists the ideal terrain for a “stress strategy”: test and wear down, rather than challenge head-on.

1. From architectural hegemony to transactional hegemony: when order becomes a political cost

Between NSS 2022 and NSS 2025, there is no simple alternation between interventionism and retrenchment. The very form of hegemony changes. In 2022, America tries to govern competition by building frameworks: alliances, rules, integrated deterrence, and predictability. In 2025, it declares that trying to govern “everything” was a mistake: without priorities, the empire disperses, fuels allies’ free-riding, weakens the industrial and social base, and produces domestic resentment. It is the diagnosis of a tired hegemon: reduce overstretch and convert primacy into negotiating leverage.

This conversion is possible because the consensus that sustained the order has frayed. For decades, global leadership was framed as a domestic good: external stability as internal prosperity, openness as a social elevator, and primacy as security. When that link breaks — or is perceived as a scam — hegemony becomes contested terrain. Order is no longer an invisible infrastructure: it is a visible cost and therefore a target. Once it becomes a target, foreign policy stops being “America’s policy” and becomes “policy among Americas.”

Hence, the appeal of a contractual grammar: alliances as exchange, security as service, protection with an invoice. This is not only cynicism: it is a response to a political system that must make every external expenditure compatible with a fragmented electorate and a wounded moral economy, where recognition counts as much as income and the dignity of work weighs as much as macroeconomic indicators. The implicit promise is to restore sovereignty by making command tangible (border, tariffs, energy, police, judges) and to turn external relations into transactions that can be sold as “wins.”

Here, the sociological dimension matters. Putnam showed how the loss of social capital makes long-term collective projects harder to sustain and how the erosion of trust and civic networks weakens the capacity to cooperate.⁴ In geopolitics, this translates into lower “imperial patience”: less tolerance for prolonged costs, a demand for quick results, and a temptation to trade stability for performativity. The geopolitical form of social disintegration is therefore not the end of power but its irregularity: shows of force alternating with disengagement, moralism alternating with cynicism, and residual universalism alternating with sphere-of-influence logics. Intermittence becomes structure, not accident: it makes deterrence harder because red lines shift; it makes diplomacy harder because commitments do not scale over time; and it hands adversaries a simple manual: stress until domestic friction turns every cost into a political crisis.

2. The domestic constraint: social regression, a trust crisis, and the domestication of strategy

“Social regression” here refers to a return to forms of conflict less mediated by legitimate institutions and shared civic capital. It is a double collapse: vertical discrediting of the State and horizontal disintegration among citizens. In geopolitical terms, the relationship is almost mechanical: less trust means less capacity to accept collective sacrifice, and therefore a shorter-sighted, more transactional, more reactive foreign policy.

Two series make the trajectory clear. Trust in the federal government, measured over the long term, remains near historic lows in 2025: about one in five Americans says they trust Washington “always” or “most of the time.”⁵ Interpersonal trust has also declined since the mid-twentieth century and has struggled to recover; comparative measures show a country less inclined to believe that “others” are reliable.⁶ This fracture is not only about politics: it is about coordination capacity, the raw material of organized power.

Regression is also material and perceived: housing costs, squeezed middle-class margins, and job insecurity turn the promise of mobility into trench experience. Onto that fracture, the culture war grafts itself: the demand for protection no longer seeks integration into the world but shielding from it. Tariffs, reshoring, and control of migration flows become both economic and identity policy.

A Durkheimian lens helps hold the whole together. When shared rules weaken, anomie grows: the loss of norms and of a sense of justice makes the abandonment of the social pact plausible.⁷ Anomie produces not only distress but also a search for belonging, impermeable identities, and the moralization of conflict. Regression can be read as a combination of anomie and strain: friction between celebrated goals and the means actually available. In that void, cynicism, resentment, and scapegoating thrive, and the state becomes — for a growing share of the country — not a solution but a battleground.

Add to this the psycho-political dimension: higher anxiety and depression indicators than in 2019, record levels of stress and anger, and the crisis of the American Dream as a collective promise.⁸ Politically, the transformation manifests as negative partisanship: an identity defined more by hatred of the other than by adherence to a project.⁹ When identity is defined as the negation of the other, foreign policy inevitably becomes an extension of the internal war: every dossier is a moral reckoning, every alliance a purity test, and every compromise a capitulation.

2.1 Low-intensity violence: from “affective polarization” to “intermittent civil war”

Political violence does not come from nowhere: it emerges when conflict becomes permanent “boundary work”, the production of moral borders that separate the deserving from the enemies.¹⁰ In this climate, politics ceases to be a regulated conflict and becomes an ontological one: we are not arguing about what to do; we are arguing about who we are. At that point, violence becomes more thinkable and justifiable, even when it remains episodic.

Episodes — attacks, assaults, political assassinations — function as thresholds: not because they alone change the structure, but because they make violence part of the imaginable repertoire. The geopolitical point is that low-intensity violence need not escalate into civil war to have strategic effects: it is enough that it creates chronic insecurity, raises the demand for coercion, and turns every election into a potential legitimacy crisis. The country enters a phase of “manageable” but corrosive instability, in which political energy is consumed preventing symbolic collapse rather than building consensus.

In recent years, polarization has evolved into “affective polarization”: the political opponent is no longer a competitor but an unworthy enemy.¹¹ Often, what matters is not the act itself but the reaction: instant blame is assigned to the “enemy camp”, partisan readings prevail, and the event is converted into a narrative weapon. This narrows the art of domestic compromise while incentivizing the use of the outside world as a compensatory theater. International posture becomes identity language: sanctions, walls, tariffs, missions, and withdrawals are consumed as evidence of belonging rather than as tools of stabilization.

2.2 Ecosystems and leadership: governing a stressed coalition with foreign policy as signal

In this framework, Trumpism is not only a doctrine but also an ecosystem: an archipelago of platforms, donors, think tanks, churches, influencers, and mobilization networks. In the Trumpian ecosystem, foreign policy becomes a loyalty signal and a culture-war instrument. Florida — with Mar-a-Lago as a symbolic and organizational hub — is a condenser where populist rebellion and elite coordination meet.¹²

In a tribalized society, leadership changes. What is demanded is no longer the capacity to integrate divergent interests but rather to prevail over the other America. Government becomes more performative and less administrative: policies are designed to draw a boundary before they solve a problem. This architecture multiplies mobilization but makes coherent coordination harder. You can win with a loose coalition, but governing requires discipline, and discipline is scarce when domestic reputation depends on the intensity of conflict rather than the effectiveness of mediation.

2.3 War for reality: culture, knowledge, and democratic procedures as “frontiers”

American regression has an epistemic dimension: the very possibility of shared reality is eroded by antagonistic information ecosystems and by economic incentives that drive polarization. Electoral legitimacy becomes a moral frontier: who belongs to the demos? Who gets to decide? When legitimacy is permanently contested, politics no longer disputes programs; it disputes the referee. Democracy also lives on shared rituals: if the ritual (procedure, certification, acceptance of the outcome) loses credibility, the pact itself does as well.¹³

In tight electoral cycles, this war over the referee becomes procedural conflict: fraud accusations, pressure on local officials, contested certifications, attempts to delay results, and efforts to turn every count into a narrative war. In 2026, the point is not to mechanically replicate the “2020 strategy” but to normalize the idea that procedure is negotiable. When democratic normality is perceived as manipulation, the temptation to “save” the nation by suspending rules becomes plausible.

Under these conditions, managing dissent becomes nearly impossible without sliding into censorship or toxic laissez-faire. Both feed the spiral of distrust: the former for appearing “tyranny”, the latter for appearing “abandonment”. And because cognitive conflict cuts across every dossier, it spills into alliances, science, war, and even the procedures meant to arbitrate it.

Here, gatekeeping is not a technical issue; it is geopolitical. If platforms and media determine what becomes visible and credible, controlling or capturing these channels directly shapes cohesion.¹⁴ When cohesion is a precondition for strategy, information becomes part of the security infrastructure; therefore, a battleground.

In this frame, media consolidation is not neutral: it can be accelerated through lawsuits, regulatory threats, and “aligned” acquisitions, thereby shrinking effective pluralism and narrowing the space for a shared reality. The result is a democracy that is louder yet less verifiable: many narratives, few recognized referees. When even science and statistical agencies become part of the contest, society loses the capacity to produce “operational truths” — data, indicators, diagnoses — and, as a result, the capacity to plan.

2.4 Institutional chaos: total sovereignty, delegitimating checks, a “war on brakes”

When the state is no longer perceived as a referee but as a partisan actor, legal-rational authority loses its grip and charismatic temptation grows: I do not trust procedure; I trust the leader who promises to “give the state back.” This is one motor of Trumpism: it does not ask only for different policies but for a different principle of legitimacy. The vote becomes a personal mandate, an authorization to bend intermediate bodies, and an authorization to bend the bureaucratic apparatus.

Here enters the doctrine of “absolute” sovereignty — unbound by constraints — as a promise of simplification: bringing borders, trade, energy, order, culture, courts, welfare, elections, and alliances under a single imperative: restore command. The shift from doctrine to revolution occurs when symbols become institutions: purges of officials, removal of watchdogs, capture of the power ministries (especially the Justice Department and the FBI), selective use of investigations and administrative sanctions, and a redefinition of the state-society relationship as command and obedience.¹⁵

The outcome is not a sudden collapse but a war of attrition among powers: constitutional hardball, countermeasures, litigation, blockages, and administrative revenge.¹⁶ Procedure becomes the battlefield, and law becomes a tactic: institutions stop restraining and begin striking each other, making paralysis structural. Added to this is antagonistic federalism: states as competing moral regimes, laboratories, and counter-regimes: not secession, but stable divergence that corrodes the very idea of unified national politics.

Social regression also produces a modern vulnerability: the stress strategy. Adversaries need not defeat the United States; they can simply stress it, knowing that stress generates internal political conflict. Cyberwarfare, disinformation, supply-chain shocks, and migration crises: each perturbation becomes an opportunity for internal war. This is the effect of a society that has lost the ability to absorb shocks without delegitimization. Hence, the attraction of a centralized decision core, but in a system designed to be slow and balanced, verticalization produces backlash and, therefore, a new spiral of instability.

2.5 The moral economy of decline: status, territory, work, expectations

Regression is not only about lower well-being; it is the perception that the order distributes respect and humiliation unfairly. Status loss — especially among territories and groups accustomed to centrality — fuels the demand for recognition: a culprit, a narrative, and symbolic reparation. Immigration, offshoring, and even the energy transition become emotional catalysts: real dossiers that are converted into proof of abandonment.

Work is not only income; it is belonging and daily discipline. When it becomes precarious or disappears, the fracture is not only economic; it is moral. In that void, the promise of punishment thrives: tariffs as revenge, the border as purification, deregulation as liberation, repression as order. It is a policy that is both distributive and symbolic: every choice is read as taking from “us” for “them,” every compromise as humiliation, every external expense as betrayal. The State is demanded as a weapon, not an arbiter, and when it becomes one, cohesion erodes further because the other half of the country reads it as proof of usurpation.

2.6 Generations and the future: when the country loses tomorrow

Every great power lives on a credit line drawn against the future: the belief that tomorrow will be better and more orderly, or at least predictable. Regression erodes that credit and shortens political time: it favors immediate, polarizing results because the long term requires institutional trust and compromise. The loss of the future also has an epidemiological dimension: loneliness and isolation have been described as a public health crisis, with effects on well-being, trust, and civic capacity.¹⁷

Among young people, vulnerability signals remain high: the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2023 reports very high shares of students experiencing persistent sadness or hopelessness and significant levels of suicidal ideation.¹⁸ Life expectancy, which fell sharply between 2019 and 2021, has also been read as a symptom of systemic stress and territorial and social fractures.¹⁹ Without a shared tomorrow, external leadership tends to devolve into anxiety management: the outside becomes a surface onto which domestic frustration is projected, and the global order an abstraction unable to compete with immediate needs for recognition.

3. The new strategic lexicon: selective sovereignty, the economy as security, culture as perimeter

Trumpian grammar rests on three pillars: burden shifting (moving costs onto allies), realignment through peace (presidential diplomacy to close dossiers and realign regions), and the economy as security (supply chains, energy, reindustrialization). The novelty is that these criteria become moral as well: those who do not comply are not only inefficient but delinquent. Geopolitics becomes ethical bookkeeping.

When politics is moral-identitarian, words become markers. Hunter, in defining the culture war, insists that politics shifts from a conflict among interests to a conflict among moral worlds.²⁰ In that context, free rider, decadence, porous borders, and betrayal are not arguments; they are identities. This is why NSS 2025 is also a text addressed to a domestic coalition that demands signals. And foreign policy, to stand, must be narratively compatible with the culture war.

In 2026, the link between identity and supply chains becomes clear across energy, electrification, and AI. Competition is not only about models: it is also about infrastructure and the capacity to generate and distribute electricity; it centers on the electric stack (batteries, motors, power electronics) and critical minerals. The AI race, promising primacy, increases dependence on data centers, networks, and components, and thus on domestic decisions about permits, energy, and labor. In a country that debates even empirical evidence through partisan lenses, tech governance risks becoming camp warfare: technology as a weapon against the other, rather than a base for collective prosperity.

4. What the world should expect: external theaters as mirrors of America’s fracture

If social regression is the red thread, external theaters are not separate chapters: they are mirrors and pressure valves. America’s counterparts should not expect linear retrenchment but rather a more conditional and intermittent United States: capable of rapid strikes and economic coercion, yet less capable of sustaining long commitments without turning them into internal identity referenda.

4.1 Europe

Europe should expect an America that is not only more conditional but also more “moral” in the worst sense: not universalist morality, but identity-based morality that measures allies by domestic cultural criteria. The transatlantic relationship oscillates between contract and judgment: pay more, do more, and be compatible with our narrative. This creates pressure on spending and readiness, more negotiated deterrence, and intra-European fractures between those who see the U.S. umbrella as the only insurance and those who build selective autonomies, regional clubs, and a military-industrial policy. As perceived reliability drops, hedging rises, and deterrence thins precisely because the political bond becomes more fragile than the military one.

4.2 Indo-Pacific

The priority remains containing China, but increasingly through geo-economic means: controls, tariffs, chokepoints, and standards. These measures can be effective, but they require continuous coordination and stable direction, precisely what regression erodes. The risk for allies and partners is not “total” abandonment but intermittence: harder demands, tone swings, and contradictory signals. For Beijing, American discontinuity invites threshold-testing and a shift of initiative into gray zones such as economic coercion and psychological pressure, where Washington’s response is more easily politicized.

4.3 Middle East

In a realignment logic, the Middle East becomes a place to close dossiers, reduce bandwidth, and prevent escalation from consuming attention. This yields a more presidential, transactional diplomacy focused on trade and conditional guarantees. But businesslike management legitimizes brokers and backchannels, reinforcing the idea that everything is negotiable and weakening red lines. With more fragile thresholds and low-cost weapons, the risk is an accident spiral. And when accidents generate high-impact images and domestic polarization, regional management becomes hostage to America’s internal war.

4.4 Latin America and the Western Hemisphere

This is the theater where America tends to be more assertive and less ambiguous because foreign policy overlaps with domestic politics: migration, the border, cartels, fentanyl, urban security, social anxiety, and perceived decline. The hemisphere is no longer a “neighborhood”; it is an identity rear area. NSS 2025 codifies this as a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (renamed “Donroe”), compressing migration, narcotrafficking, and Chinese penetration into one frame: the violated frontier. It is securitization: an administrative issue narrated as an existential threat, authorizing exception and verticality.²¹ The border becomes the liturgy of sovereignty, one of the few places where the State can, with an elemental gesture, demonstrate that it commands.

For the region, this means more operational and bilateral pressure, as well as greater friction with crucial partners (above all Mexico), because every crisis can be translated into political blame and demonstrative measures. In parallel, nearshoring can grow because it offers a domestically saleable story (“bring production back to the continent”), but it tends to come with more invasive demands on security, migration, and standards. Economic cooperation thus intertwines with a protective logic in which partnership is subordinated to border control.

4.5 Russia

In the Euro-Atlantic theater, Moscow operates in the gray zone: informational pressure, plausible sabotage, and energy and migration tools. A regressing America may oscillate between deal-driven and punitive approaches; unpredictability incentivizes Moscow to stress the West by betting on U.S. political fatigue and allied fractures. The long war becomes leverage, not so much to win on the ground as to win in perception and to make the political cost of war permanent.

4.6 China

A structural adversary, yet entangled by interdependence: the U.S. needs Chinese raw materials (including processed inputs) and industrial capacity; China needs technology and the U.S. market to absorb part of its production overhang. In this context, American geo-economic toughness can rise, but political fragility makes it harder to sustain a long-term line. For Beijing, American regression is a window of opportunity: no need to win now, just wait, stress, split allies, and make every Washington choice costly.

4.7 The world

Overall, the system should expect an America managing the transition not through a new order but through a governed disorder: multiple tables, compensations, negotiated thresholds, partial deals. But if internal cohesion falls, governed disorder risks becoming improvised disorder: tactical adjustments sold as strategy. Allies respond by increasing hedging and redundancies; adversaries test thresholds and exploit fractures.

Moreover, regression makes international governance of high-impact technology harder. AI, by nature, accentuates the asymmetry between the speed of innovation and regulatory capacity; if State capacity is weakened and public trust is low, every choice about security, work, and information is interpreted as partisan weaponization. Technological competition thus becomes a double race: a race for models and a race for order, the capacity to manage social effects without turning them into an internal war.

5. Domestic scenarios: trajectories, not alternative futures

When imagining future scenarios, it helps to remember that regression is not only decline; it is also a demand for recomposition. Polanyi would call this a “countermove”: when disembedded markets produce insecurity and status loss, society tries to re-embed market and social life within a political order.²² America’s problem is that this countermove unfolds in a hyper-mediated, tribalized democracy; recomposition therefore risks taking the form of a creeping war.

The five scenarios below are not rigid alternative futures; they are trajectories that can overlap depending on three variables: the degree of capture of federal institutions; the ability of states and major metropolitan areas to serve as counter-power; and the quality of the “information field” and the resilience of social cohesion. 2026 is a threshold year in which America’s internal friction becomes, by itself, a primary source of global risk.

5.1 Scenario I – Coercive stability (conflictual verticalization)

Absolute sovereignty becomes a command architecture: domestic deterrence, opposition self-censorship, and higher costs for dissent. Politicization is not an accident but a method: turning power ministries into political arms of the White House and a Supreme Court inclined toward a maximalist conception of presidential power consistent with the unitary executive theory.²³ In the short run, governance may appear faster; in the medium run, it is more fragile. In 2026, this trajectory is dominated by pre-electoral logic: redistricting as a command signal, protection and pardon for aligned transgressors, hollowing out election-defense structures, and pressure on infrastructure and certifications; at the extreme, expansive use of “security” and “emergency” to condition access to the vote. The collateral effect is higher systemic risk: more explicit corruption, investment dependent on political proximity, and therefore greater economic fragility and institutional conflict.

5.2 Scenario II – Federal archipelago (stable divergence)

The fracture institutionalizes: states and metropolitan areas become competing moral regimes. This is not secession but growing incompatibility: one lives in a formally unified yet substantively plural country. Federalism acts as both a brake and a multiplier: Washington can be constrained but can also retaliate financially; in addition, in contested districts, conflict becomes procedural (fraud accusations, pressure on officials, contested certifications). Externally, policy tends to favor short dossiers with high domestic marketability, because any long commitment can be sabotaged by internal dissent.

5.3 Scenario III – Intermittent violence (low intensity, high politicization)

No classic civil war erupts; episodic and symbolic violence grows, often by lone actors or micro-networks, peaking around elections, trials, and mediatized “moral crises.” Institutional response tends toward securitization: more domestic deterrence, more surveillance, and more conflict over the boundary between public order and repression, with distrust feeding back to fuel radicalization. Externally, credibility suffers: adversaries exploit disorder imagery, and allies accelerate hedging, perceiving a country less able to sustain commitments and more prone to oscillation.

5.4 Scenario IV – Imperfect recomposition (pragmatic re-embedding)

Some fractures are softened by material policies: credible reindustrialization, reduced insecurities (in work, housing, and health), and investment in technology and infrastructure that yield visible dividends.

The risk here is the shortcut: re-embedding without recomposing. If reindustrialization is driven more by patronage than efficiency, and if major public tools (subsidies, tariffs, contracts, ownership quotas) become primarily reward-and-punishment devices, “political capitalism” emerges. The economy polarizes like culture: investing becomes choosing a camp. The immediate gain is governability; the cost is loss of dynamism, misallocation, and a new form of distrust, as the State appears partisan even in the economy.

In this scenario, the culture war does not disappear, but it loses centrality as the national promise becomes — partly — workable again. A necessary condition is rebuilding state capacity: replacing experts with loyalists weakens data collection and crisis response. In parallel, the drift toward political capitalism, in which partisan alignment determines economic outcomes, must be contained.

5.5 Scenario V – Shock and re-aggregation (or shock and acceleration)

A major external crisis — war, a large-scale attack, a financial collapse, or a cyber-catastrophe — can trigger a rally effect and reawaken minimal solidarity. But it can also do the opposite: provide a pretext for purges, suspicion, and scapegoating, accelerating the pursuit of absolute sovereignty and the erosion of institutional checks and balances. The critical point is that the shock arrives in an ecosystem already degraded: media consolidation, erosion of state capacity, and the absence of governance over high-impact technologies, especially AI. In both cases, the shock becomes a legitimacy test: if the social pact is already broken, the crisis divides rather than unites; and if institutions are not perceived as neutral referees, emergency management becomes a partisan weapon.

For the international system, the shock scenario is ambivalent: it can produce a return of American leadership (rally, resources, coalitions), but it can also generate the most dangerous form of intermittence, the emotional kind. In an emotional cycle, deterrence becomes reaction, diplomacy collapses into ultimatums, and cost management is offloaded onto allies. In that case, reliability no longer depends on power but on political mood: a crisis can trigger rapid escalation or, conversely, a precipitous exit if domestic symbolic costs rise. The most likely outcome is an acceleration of global adaptation: greater European autonomy, more gray-zone competition in the Pacific, more regional brokers in the Middle East, and a deeper militarization of the hemisphere’s rear area.

EPILOGUE – The question is not “what will America do,” but “how long will it be able to want it”

NSS 2025 presents itself as a manual for strategic selection: choose theaters, reduce dispersion, and bring power back within a sustainable perimeter. Yet in doing so, it reveals — almost involuntarily — the harshest diagnosis: internal fragility is not background noise; it is the constraint that measures the duration of every commitment. Social regression does not merely “influence” foreign policy; it determines it by defining how much collective patience exists, how much institutional trust remains, and how much political legitimacy sacrifice can still command.

This is why regression is the true lens. It explains why the language of transaction replaces that of community; why alliance becomes contract; why deterrence becomes intermittent; and why foreign policy is “domesticated” until it becomes an extension of the “border” and the culture war. It also explains the greatest risk: once foreign policy becomes a domestic stage, its logic shifts from stability to performativity. What matters is not only the choice that reduces risk in the world but also the choice that produces belonging and punishes the internal enemy.

Allies will respond by increasing hedging and redundancy: more autonomous capabilities, more channels, and more selective autonomy. Adversaries will use the same manual: test thresholds, exploit fractures, and buy time. In the end, it is not enough to understand what Washington wants; one must estimate how long it will be able to want it, and with what social and institutional discipline it can sustain it. When anxiety becomes politics, politics becomes border; when the border becomes identity, the outside becomes home. At that point, power ceases to be leverage and becomes a reaction. Power is a social product, not a natural datum. If society fragments, power fragments too. And when power fragments, the world adapts, accelerating the transition toward a more competitive and less governed order. Geopolitics, in this phase, is the external projection of a crisis of bonds.

NOTES

1. The White House, National Security Strategy, December 2025 (second Trump administration), official document.
2. Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games”, International Organization, 42 (3), 1988.
3. The White House, National Security Strategy, October 2022 (Biden-Harris Administration), official document.
4. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster, 2000; Id., “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”, Journal of Democracy, 1995.
5. Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025”, December 4, 2025 (historical series on trust in the federal government).
6. Our World in Data, “Trust” section (comparative dataset and methodological notes).
7. Émile Durkheim, Le Suicide. Étude de sociologie, 1897, on anomie as the weakening of shared norms.
8. American Psychological Association, Stress in America 2025: A Crisis of Connection, 2025; E.P. Terlizzi et al., Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression Among Adults: United States 2022, NCHS, 2024; Gallup, “U.S. Mental Health Ratings Continue to Worsen”, December 18, 2025.
9. Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven W. Webster, “Negative Partisanship: Why Americans Dislike Parties but Behave Like Rabid Partisans.” Political Psychology, 39 (S1), 119–135, 2018. Yphtach Lelkes, “What Do We Mean by Negative Partisanship?” The Forum 19 (3), 481–497, 2021.
10. Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists”, American Sociological Review, 48, 781–795, 1983.
11. Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization”, Public Opinion Quarterly, 76 (3), 2012; Shanto Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States”, Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146, 2019.
12. Massimo Scattarreggia, “Florida: il nuovo epicentro del conservatorismo americano e del rinnovamento intellettuale repubblicano”, Substack, September 2025; Id., “Florida: fratture interne, cleavages regionali e la geografia sociopolitica del nuovo conservatorismo”, Substack, September 2025.
13. Émile Durkheim, Le Suicide…, cit.; Id., Les Règles de la méthode sociologique, 1895.
14. T. Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media, Yale University Press, 2018.
15. M. Scattarreggia, “Il trumpismo come dottrina della sovranità assoluta e la rivoluzione di Donald J. Trump”, Substack, January 2026.
16. Mark Tushnet, “Constitutional Hardball”, J. Marshall Law Review 37, 523, 2004.
17. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, NIH, 2023.
18. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Survey 2023: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, NCHS, 2024.
19. CDC, Provisional Life Expectancy Estimates for 2021, NCHS, 2022.
20. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Basic Books, 1991.
21. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Lynne Rienner, 1998, on securitization theory.
22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944.
23. Steven G. Calabresi, Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush, Yale University Press, 2008.