by Michael Hollister
Published at GlobalBridge on May 11, 2026

4.980 words * 28 minutes readingtime

How Washington Drafted the Blueprint for China Containment

1. Strategic Opening

In the summer of 2016, the RAND Corporation published a study whose title barely hinted at the analytical chill of its contents: “War with China – Thinking Through the Unthinkable.” Over 116 pages, David Gompert, former Acting Director of National Intelligence, and his co-authors modeled four conflict scenarios – low and high intensity, short and long duration – across two comparative points in time: 2015 and 2025. The study was not a threat. It was an inventory. And it contained a finding that has been a fixture of every serious strategy discussion since: by 2025, RAND concluded, a war with China would be “intense, highly destructive and yet protracted” – costly for both sides, with no clear winner, and with manageable losses available only by avoiding it altogether.

By 2025. Written in 2016.

The year is now 2026.

Anyone who has watched American foreign policy over the past eighteen months without keeping the calendar in view has missed what matters. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela, Operation Epic Fury against Iran, the selective Hormuz blockade, the sanctions against Hengli Petrochemical, the constitutional court ruling on CK Hutchison in Panama, the Balikatan exercise on Luzon, the expansion of the Quad and AUKUS, the burden shift through the five-percent target at the NATO summit in The Hague – in day-to-day reporting, all of this looks like a string of isolated events driven by an unpredictable president and his defense secretary.

It is the opposite. It is the execution of a plan laid down in more than thirty studies from twelve leading American think tanks between 2014 and 2026. What the Trump administration has been carrying out since January 2025 is the recommendation list of RAND, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Heritage Foundation, the Atlantic Council, the Center for a New American Security, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment, the Quincy Institute, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the American Enterprise Institute – worked through in an order dictated by the time window Gompert identified in 2016.

This analysis reconstructs how the architects’ collective from the American think tank complex developed the containment strategy against China, which seven recommendations run through every study, and how those recommendations reappear word for word in the Trump administration’s strategy documents – the National Security Strategy of December 2025, the National Defense Strategy of January 2026. It shows where the recommendations have already become operational reality. What Trump will reach for next – and the mechanism guiding the hand that reaches – is the subject of Part 2.

Readers of Operation Pivot from February 1, 2026 already know the thesis. Here is the evidence.

2. The Architects’ Collective: Who Are These Twelve?

Twelve think tanks, more than thirty studies, a span of twelve years. The list is not an arbitrary selection. It comprises the twelve institutions that have dominated Washington’s strategic debate on China since 2014 – measured by circulation, by personnel cycling through the revolving door between Pentagon and research, and by citation frequency in government documents.

At the top stands the RAND Corporation, founded in 1948 as the in-house think tank of the U.S. Air Force, today operating research centers in Santa Monica, Pittsburgh, and Brussels. Between 2015 and 2025, RAND published at least nine studies on the China question – from Eric Heginbotham’s “U.S.-China Military Scorecard” in 2015, through Gompert’s “War with China” in 2016, “Conflict with China Revisited” in 2017, “China’s Quest for Global Primacy” in 2021, to “U.S. Military Theories of Victory for a War with the PRC” in 2024 and “Economic Deterrence in a China Contingency” in 2025. RAND personnel routinely shuttle between research positions and government posts – Gompert himself served as Acting Director of National Intelligence from 2009 to 2010.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) supplied the foundational paper in 2015 with Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis’s “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China” – the document that opened the analytical shift from engagement to containment within the American foreign policy elite. Blackwill, former ambassador to India and deputy national security advisor under Bush, followed up in 2020 with “Implementing Grand Strategy Toward China,” a concrete operational manual.

The Heritage Foundation is the institutional bridge between the conservative policy machine and the Trump administration. The Prioritization Imperative, published in 2024 and co-authored by Alex Velez-Green, articulates the core idea now reflected in the NDS: the American military can no longer fight two major wars simultaneously, so Washington must compel allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Korea to carry the primary burden against Russia, Iran, and North Korea themselves – keeping all U.S. resources available for China. Heritage’s TIDALWAVE chapter from 2026 extends this logic with AI-driven war simulations for a China conflict.

The Atlantic Council delivered the NATO-compatible variant with “Global Strategy 2021: An Allied Strategy for China” – containment as a transatlantic project. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), founded in 2007 as a Democratic-leaning think tank that became a bridge into the Pentagon under Obama advisors, has produced at least five relevant studies between 2014 and 2025 – from “Counterbalance: Red Teaming the Rebalance in the Asia-Pacific” in 2016 to “Rising to the China Challenge” in 2020. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) supplies the Quad architecture with “Defining the Diamond” from 2020 and provides its own verification of Trump’s strategy documents with “The 2026 NDS by the Numbers.”

To this list belongs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), where Andrew Krepinevich’s “Preserving the Balance: A U.S. Eurasia Defense Strategy” from 2017 provided the intellectual template for the logic of “the First Island Chain as a containment barrier.”

Specialized voices round out the core framework. Brookings, traditionally left of center, has produced at least three substantial China studies since 2020 through Lindsey Ford, Ryan Hass, and Michael O’Hanlon. The Carnegie Endowment delivers the critical counter-voices through Michael Swaine’s work on FOIP and Chris Chivvis’s “Legacy or Liability” from 2025. The Quincy Institute, founded in 2019 as a voice of realist restraint, urges moderation through Rachel Esplin Odell’s “Active Denial” of 2022 – but is strategically drawn upon where defensive, restrictive logic is needed. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) provides the annual situation reports through its “Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessments.” The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) contributes the continental American leg through Roger Noriega’s work on hemispheric energy strategy.

What binds these twelve institutions is the revolving door. Eric Heginbotham, the RAND author of the “Scorecard” series, came from the National Bureau of Asian Research and worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in its Net Assessment branch. David Gompert was a RAND Senior Fellow, Senior Advisor for National Security in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and ultimately Acting Director of National Intelligence from 2009 to 2010. Cristina Garafola, co-author of the 2016 RAND study, worked from 2017 to 2019 in the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the implementation of the National Defense Strategy and the Indo-Pacific Strategy.

The most prominent example of this shuttling motion is Elbridge Colby. As a co-author of the “Prioritization Imperative” line and former Pentagon strategy chief during Trump’s first term, Colby spent more than a decade preparing – in studies, essays, and books – the analytical work that now appears as official doctrine in the NDS of January 2026. His 2021 book “The Strategy of Denial” articulates the logic Hegseth is now executing. Reading the NDS, in large stretches, is reading Colby’s language.

Robert Blackwill, the CFR author of the 2015 foundational study, was ambassador to India and deputy national security advisor under Bush. Ashley Tellis, his co-author, was Senior Director on the National Security Council and is now Senior Fellow at Carnegie. Alex Velez-Green, Heritage co-author of “The Prioritization Imperative,” now serves as Senior Advisor in Hegseth’s defense ministry. The list could be extended.

This personnel interlocking is not corruption – it is the operating logic of the American strategy apparatus. What the studies say is often written by the same people who later, in government positions, oversee its implementation. The path from recommendation to doctrine does not run through parliamentary debates or public consultations, but through the career biographies of a relatively small layer of strategy analysts who shuttle between think tank chair and Pentagon desk.

3. The Seven Overlapping Recommendations

Lay more than thirty studies from twelve think tanks side by side and filter out the recurring recommendations, and you arrive at seven categories that appear, identically or near-identically, across the entire body of literature. They form the skeleton of the containment strategy.

First: densify alliance architecture in the Indo-Pacific. RAND (“China’s Quest for Global Primacy,” 2021), CFR (Blackwill/Tellis, 2015), Atlantic Council 2021, CSIS 2020, IISS APRSA 2022/2023 – all recommend building out a dense ring of alliances: the Quad (United States, Japan, Australia, India), AUKUS (United States, United Kingdom, Australia), and deepened bilateral ties with the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. The objective: a militarily usable network along the First and Second Island Chain that constrains China’s regional freedom of movement. The status: in high-intensity operation since 2025, with exercises like Balikatan 2026 (17,000 troops, seven nations) as the most visible evidence.

Second: throttle China technologically. RAND (“U.S.-China Military Scorecard” 2015, “Theories of Victory” 2024), CNAS (“Rising to the China Challenge” 2020), Heritage (“Winning the New Cold War”), Brookings (Hass 2020) – the recommendations range from semiconductor export controls to AI restrictions to quantum and 5G/6G constraints. The status: active. The Bureau of Industry and Security at the Department of Commerce has, since January 2026, imposed a 25-percent surcharge on re-exports of advanced chips such as the H200 and MI325X. Applied Materials paid a 165-million-dollar settlement in February 2026 over re-export violations. Hengli Petrochemical Dalian, along with roughly forty additional ships and shell companies, was sanctioned in April 2026.

Third: shift the burden onto allies. Heritage formulates it most sharply in The Prioritization Imperative of 2024: the U.S. military is now capable of fighting only one major war. So allies in Europe, the Middle East, and on the Korean peninsula must primarily carry the regional burdens themselves, with “critical but limited U.S. support.” This logic appears verbatim in the NDS of January 2026 and in the NSS of December 2025 (“burden-sharing network”). The status: NATO summit in The Hague, June 2025 – five-percent-of-GDP resolution, signed by 31 of 32 member states. The German federal government has scaled up its defense budgets accordingly.

Fourth: the First Island Chain as containment barrier. RAND “Conflict with China Revisited” 2017, CSBA Krepinevich 2017, CSIS 2020, NSS December 2025, NDS January 2026. The phrasing overlaps almost identically. The NSS of December 2025 reads: “We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.” The NDS of January 2026: “we will erect a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain (FIC).” This is direct adoption of RAND/CSBA language. The status: a Mid-Range Capability System permanently in northern Luzon, NMESIS deployed during Balikatan 2026, and base negotiations underway with Vietnam and the Philippines.

Fifth: economic deterrence and sanctions planning. RAND’s “Economic Deterrence in a China Contingency” of 2025 is the central study here. It models how American and allied sanctions could paralyze China in a conflict scenario – oil supplies, semiconductor inputs, SWIFT access, foreign exchange reserves. Heritage and CFR provide the parallel concepts. The status: preparations underway, with the Hengli sanctions of April 24, 2026, as the first visible field tests. The selective Hormuz blockade, beginning in April 2026, hits Chinese oil imports with an additional 15-to-20-percent burden – on top of the five percent already cut off by Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela. The RAND study goes further in its modeling than most secondary accounts grasp. It distinguishes between “Deterrence by Denial” and “Deterrence by Punishment” and concludes that American sanctions only produce significant impact when built up before a conflict and triggered, during conflict, in coordination with allies. Unilateral American sanctions, RAND argues, would merely force China to redirect supply chains – painful, but not decisive. The decisive lever is the EU plus Japan plus South Korea plus Australia plus India. This logic resurfaces almost word for word in the NSS of December 2025, which quantifies the American alliance network as an economic bloc with an additional 35 trillion dollars in economic power – set against China’s roughly 18 trillion. The Hengli sanctions of April 24, 2026, were a test run in this sense: not because Hengli Petrochemical Dalian is existential for China, but because the sanctions were meant to validate, under real conditions, the operational mechanics of coordinated action with European partners.

Sixth: rebuild the U.S. economic and defense industrial base. RAND, Heritage, CSBA, USAWC Press 2024 – all press for the reconstruction of American munitions and shipbuilding production. Heritage calculates that the People’s Liberation Army Navy grew from 271 to 328 ships between 2012 and 2024, while the U.S. Navy stagnated near 290. The NDS of January 2026 names this demand verbatim as its fourth Line of Effort: “Supercharge the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.” The status: the National Defense Authorization Act 2026 with massive budgets for Golden Dome, nuclear modernization, and munitions production.

Seventh: China’s energy dependence as strategic lever. This recommendation is a synthesis from several sources – it does not appear quite this explicitly in any single guiding study, but distributes itself across Heritage TIDALWAVE 2026 (which names China’s oil import dependency as a “core vulnerability” and identifies Iran as the primary supplier), AEI Noriega on hemispheric energy strategy, RAND “Economic Deterrence” 2025, and the logic of several CSIS studies. The “Follow the Oil” series at www.michael-hollister.com worked out this component in Part 1 and Part 2. The status: Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela has cost China roughly five percent of its oil supply, Operation Epic Fury and the selective Hormuz blockade another 15 to 20 percent. China today draws more than 70 percent of its oil by sea – and Washington controls most of the relevant chokepoints. The magnitude of this leverage is precisely quantified in the studies. Heritage TIDALWAVE 2026, as part of its AI-driven simulation project, explicitly evaluated the Iran component: Iran exported roughly 1.5 million barrels of crude oil per day to China in August 2024 – more than a fifth of all Chinese imports from the Persian Gulf. A disruption of these deliveries, Heritage found, would immediately restrict China’s capacity for sustained combat. Operation Epic Fury, with the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities, struck precisely this component – not only as a nuclear nonproliferation measure, but as an energy-policy blow against the Chinese war-industrial complex. Heritage captures the connection in a sentence that lays bare the strategic density of the study: “Disruption of those imports would immediately restrict the PRC’s capacity for sustained combat – an insight that has direct policy implications.” Translated: what looks like Iran policy is China policy by other means. And the Trump administration carried out this translation in February 2026.

Seven recommendations, twelve think tanks, more than thirty studies. What presents itself as analytical diversity is, at its core, a remarkable intellectual convergence.

4. From Strategy Paper to Doctrine

Strategy documents in Washington have traditionally been compromises. They reflect not the sharpest analysis but the smallest common denominator between the executive office, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence agencies. Set the National Security Strategy of 2017 against the one from 2022 and the balancing act is visible: cautious language, broad definitions, no overly concrete commitments.

The NSS of December 2025 and the NDS of January 2026 break with this tradition. They are not only shorter than their predecessors – the NDS runs 34 pages against 80 under Biden. They are also markedly clearer in their adoption of think tank language. Anyone who has read the studies reads the strategy documents as completion reports.

The clearest example is the First Island Chain. The NSS of December 2025 reads: “We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain. But the American military cannot, and should not have to, do this alone.” The NDS of January 2026 adds: “we will erect a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain (FIC). We will also urge and enable key regional allies and partners to do more for our collective defense.” The vocabulary – “denying aggression,” “denial defense” – matches the RAND language of Heginbotham’s “Scorecard” of 2015 and Krepinevich’s “Preserving the Balance” of 2017. This is not only conceptually the same line; linguistically it is direct adoption.

The Russia formulation is even more telling. The NDS of January 2026 places Russia with the words: “Russia will remain a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members for the foreseeable future.” This phrasing – “persistent but manageable threat” – is the exact linguistic mirror of the Heritage logic from “The Prioritization Imperative” of 2024: Russia is no longer the central military threat the U.S. military must be configured to face. Russia is manageable. The principal task shifts to Asia. Heritage articulated precisely this idea in 2024 as a strategic necessity. The NDS made it doctrine in 2026.

Third, the engagement paradigm. The NSS of December 2025 captures the analytical shift that Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis had formulated in 2015 in “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China” in a single sentence. Earlier administrations, the White House writes, believed that “by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called rules-based international order.” Then follows the punchline in Trump’s own voice: “This did not happen. China got rich and powerful, and used its wealth and power to its considerable advantage.” This is not only the CFR line thematically. It is the linguistic adoption of a diagnosis that, for ten years, was considered too radical for the American China debate – and now stands in the official strategy document of the United States.

Fourth, the simultaneity problem. Heritage in 2024 had stated unambiguously: the American military is no longer capable of fighting multiple major wars simultaneously – and is not even certain to win a single one against its toughest adversary. The NDS of January 2026 dedicates its own chapter to this finding, titled “The Simultaneity Problem and Implications for Allied Burden-Sharing.” It takes up the Heritage logic in its full force: because Washington cannot service all theaters at once, allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Korea must primarily shoulder the regional burdens themselves. Heritage had articulated precisely this argument in 2024 as an analytical imperative. The Pentagon adopted it in 2026 as operational necessity – with the sole modification that Hegseth phrases it more sharply and more politically than the Heritage authors.

Fifth, the energy corridors. The NSS of December 2025 names three chokepoints explicitly in its Middle East section: “that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, that the Red Sea remain navigable” – and adds the Panama Canal in its hemispheric section. These are the three bottlenecks through which a substantial portion of Chinese oil imports flow. RAND’s “Economic Deterrence in a China Contingency” of 2025, Heritage TIDALWAVE 2026, and AEI Noriega’s work on hemispheric energy strategy had identified these chokepoints as central levers. The NSS elevates them to declared American core interests.

The four Lines of Effort of the NDS – “Defend the U.S. Homeland,” “Deter China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation,” “Increase Burden-Sharing with U.S. Allies and Partners,” “Supercharge the U.S. Defense Industrial Base” – track the Heritage scheme almost one-to-one. Heritage in 2024 had demanded: defend the homeland, prioritize China in the Indo-Pacific, make allies responsible for other theaters, rebuild the industrial base. The NDS has made these four points its official architecture.

The “Supercharge” wording of the fourth Line of Effort is a piece of evidence in itself. It appears in no earlier strategy doctrine. It is a linguistic innovation drawn directly from Trump’s vocabulary – and now sits in an official Pentagon document. Reading the NDS is not reading the work of a neutral Pentagon staff. It is reading the strategy of a political apparatus that has framed the think tank recommendations in Trump’s own language.

The symbolic punchline of this fusion: in September 2025, the Department of Defense was renamed Department of War by presidential executive order. The NDS of January 2026 is the first strategy doctrine of the United States since 1947 to be published under the letterhead of the War Department. Hegseth opens his memorandum on page one with three words in bold: “America First. Peace Through Strength. Common Sense.” This is not the language of a bureaucratic defense apparatus. This is the language of a movement that has its strategy – and is now carrying it out.

5. Mapping: What Is Already Operational Reality

The seven recommendations map onto concrete operations since January 2025. The picture that emerges is not a mosaic of isolated cases. It is the systematic working-through of the recommendation lists.

Indo-Pacific alliance architecture: Quad summit in September 2025 with expanded maritime security format. AUKUS deepening with first submarine-component deliveries to Australia. Balikatan 2026 in April with 17,000 troops and seven participating nations – the scale of a regional major exercise. NMESIS (Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System) was stationed in northern Luzon, a Mid-Range Capability System on permanent footing. Vietnam and the Philippines are negotiating expanded port access. The South Korea agreement on “primary responsibility for deterring North Korea” is enshrined in the NDS. The depth of this densification is readable in the materiel flow. AUKUS Phase One provides for the sale of three to five used Virginia-class submarines to Australia between 2032 and 2035; the first training of Australian crews at U.S. bases began in 2025. EDCA bases in the Philippines were expanded from four to nine, most of them with direct access to the Bashi Strait and the South China Sea. Japan has ordered 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles, delivery by 2027.

Technological brake: semiconductor export controls expanded as of January 15, 2026 – H200 and MI325X with a 25-percent surcharge to the Treasury on re-export. Applied Materials 165-million settlement in February 2026 over unauthorized re-exports. Dutch ASML deliveries further restricted. The Bureau of Industry and Security’s AI chip licensing policy tightened.

Burden-shifting: NATO Hague resolution of June 24–25, 2025 – five-percent-of-GDP standard, of which 3.5 percent for core defense, 1.5 percent for security-related expenditure. 31 of 32 NATO states signed. The Bundeswehr special fund increased, Polish defense spending above five percent. Japan and South Korea were committed by name in the NDS to expanded self-reliance. Saudi Arabia and Israel receive “primary responsibility” for Iran containment in the Middle East section of the NDS.

First Island Chain: Mid-Range Capability System in northern Luzon, NMESIS at Balikatan, Marine Corps Force Design 2030 in implementation. The NDS has elevated the phrase “denial defense along the FIC” to official doctrine. Base negotiations with the Philippines – EDCA expansion – are underway. Japan is reinforcing Aegis Ashore components. Australia has received its first AUKUS submarine trainings.

Economic deterrence: Hengli Petrochemical Dalian and some forty ships and companies sanctioned on April 24, 2026. The selective Hormuz blockade beginning April 13, 2026, hits Chinese oil imports with a 15-to-20-percent burden. Operation Absolute Resolve has reduced Venezuela’s oil exports to China by roughly five percent. Trump tariffs against China running at 145 percent. SWIFT discussions for China exclusion in conflict scenarios are in preparation. The scale of the April 24, 2026, Hengli sanctions deserves precise placement: affected were Hengli Petrochemical Dalian – one of China’s largest integrated refineries with a capacity of roughly 400,000 barrels per day – and 38 additional ships and shell companies active in the Iranian shadow tanker trade. The selective Hormuz blockade hit, in its first two weeks after April 13, 2026, an estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million barrels of daily Chinese imports – magnitudes that fit the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanctions regime against Iran’s central bank, without Washington needing to declare an open full blockade.

Industrial base: the National Defense Authorization Act 2026 with multi-year funding for munitions production. Golden Dome Missile Defense in contracting. Nuclear triad modernization fully funded. First shipyard capacity expansions in Norfolk and Pascagoula in preparation. Reshoring of semiconductor production with TSMC Arizona and Samsung Texas in implementation – the latter, however, with delays Heritage explicitly criticized in 2024. The NDAA 2026 has committed roughly 25 billion dollars for Golden Dome alone over the first three fiscal years, with additional funds for space-based sensors and interceptors. Nuclear triad modernization – Sentinel ICBM, Columbia-class SSBN, B-21 Raider – remains fully funded despite the cost overruns in the Sentinel program that the Pentagon publicly acknowledged in the summer of 2024. Munitions production: the production rate for 155mm artillery shells was scaled from 14,000 per month in 2022 to roughly 90,000 per month by the end of 2025 – a sixfold increase, driven both by the Ukraine conflict and by the explicit RAND and Heritage demands for munitions reserves for a China conflict.

Energy lever: Operation Epic Fury against Iran beginning February 28, 2026 – Khamenei the Elder killed, nuclear facilities destroyed, Operation Midnight Hammer designating the strikes on nuclear targets. The Iran strike is explicitly acknowledged in the NDS of January 2026: “Now, Iran’s regime is weaker and more vulnerable than it has been in decades.” The selective Hormuz blockade hits Chinese imports. Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela hits Chinese imports. The Panamanian constitutional court ruling on CK Hutchison declares the port concessions unconstitutional – the Suez Canal equivalent for China–Latin America trade is within American reach. The magnitudes are soberly documentable. Venezuela’s oil exports to China stood at roughly 500,000 barrels per day before Operation Absolute Resolve – via Reuters-fishing intermediary structures, since formally sanctioned. With Maduro’s arrest and the takeover of state-owned PDVSA by a transitional administration, that flow has effectively ceased. Iranian oil exports to China ran at roughly 1.5 million barrels daily before Epic Fury. Together, both figures correspond to roughly 12 to 14 percent of total Chinese crude oil imports. When the selective Hormuz blockade brings the second wave – targeted against tankers with Chinese consignees – the pressure adds up to values that Heritage identified in its TIDALWAVE simulation as critical to Chinese warfighting capacity.

Seven categories, dozens of operations, an eighteen-month time frame. Anyone claiming this is improvisation has either not read the studies or not read the documents – or refuses to see the connection.

6. Closing Chord

What is read as Trump improvisation is execution. The architecture has been on paper since 2015, the language has been available since 2017, the operations follow an order dictated by RAND’s time window. The Trump administration did not invent the studies. It is carrying them out.

But the question remains: why now? Why at this speed? Why with the surrender of diplomatic tools that, even under Biden, were at least formally preserved?

The answer does not lie in Trump’s character. It lies in a clock ticking in Washington. RAND modeled the window through 2025 in 2016. The window closed in 2026. What is not prepared by mid-2027 will not be prepared at all. And it lies in a currency that does not yet exist – but whose preparation in Shanghai, Moscow, Brasília, and Riyadh grows more concrete with every BRICS conference.

Which tools still wait in the box – Cuba, Kharg Island, Taiwan – and which mechanism guides the hand that reaches for them is the subject of Part 2.

Michael Hollister is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com, at Substack and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.

Sources

U.S. Government Documents

1. The White House: National Security Strategy of the United States of America, December 2025. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
2. Department of War: 2026 National Defense Strategy, January 23, 2026. https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF

Secondary Analyses of NSS and NDS

3. Ashley Roque, Aaron Mehta: “Pentagon releases National Defense Strategy, with homeland defense as top priority.” Breaking Defense, January 23, 2026. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/national-defense-strategy-hegseth-pentagon-western-hemisphere/
4. Atlas Institute for International Affairs: “The 2026 National Defense Strategy – Decoding the Pentagon’s Priorities.” February 2026. https://atlasinstitute.org/the-2026-national-defense-strategy-decoding-the-pentagons-priorities/
5. Brookings Institution: “Breaking down Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy.” February 2026. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/breaking-down-trumps-2025-national-security-strategy/
6. DefenseScoop: “New U.S. defense strategy ‘barely mentions technology’.” January 26, 2026. https://defensescoop.com/2026/01/26/2026-national-defense-strategy-trump-hegseth-nds/
7. Lawfare: “Trump Administration Releases 2025 National Security Strategy.” December 5, 2025. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-administration-releases-2025-national-security-strategy
8. USNI News: “2025 U.S. National Security Strategy.” December 5, 2025. https://news.usni.org/2025/12/05/2025-u-s-national-security-strategy
9. Small Wars Journal (Arizona State University): “2026 National Defense Strategy.” January 24, 2026. https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/24/2026-national-defense-strategy/
10. The Washington Post: “Pentagon’s new defense strategy pulls forces abroad to focus on homeland.” January 24, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/01/24/pentagon-national-defense-strategy-russia-china-hegseth/
11. Department of War / Military.com: “Department of War Releases National Defense Strategy – Homeland at Forefront.” January 23, 2026. https://www.military.com/feature/2026/01/23/department-of-war-releases-national-defense-strategy-homeland-forefront.html

RAND Corporation

12. David C. Gompert, Astrid Stuth Cevallos, Cristina L. Garafola: War with China – Thinking Through the Unthinkable. RAND Corporation, RR-1140-A, 2016. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html

Heritage Foundation

13. Alex Velez-Green, Robert Peters et al.: The Prioritization Imperative – A Strategy to Defend America’s Interests in a More Dangerous World. Heritage Foundation Special Report 288, August 2024. https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/SR288_0.pdf
14. Heritage Foundation: “Heritage Unveils Comprehensive Defense Strategy for Incoming Presidential Administration.” Press release, August 2024. https://www.heritage.org/press/heritage-unveils-comprehensive-defense-strategy-incoming-presidential-administration
15. Heritage Foundation: TIDALWAVE – Foreword. January 2026. https://www.heritage.org/tidalwave/introduction/foreword

Think Tanks and Studies

16. RAND Corporation: The U.S.-China Military Scorecard (Heginbotham et al., 2015)
17. RAND Corporation: Conflict with China Revisited (Heginbotham, Heim et al., 2017)
18. RAND Corporation: China’s Quest for Global Primacy (Scobell et al., 2021)
19. RAND Corporation: U.S. Military Theories of Victory for a War with the People’s Republic of China (2024)
20. RAND Corporation: Economic Deterrence in a China Contingency (2025)
21. Council on Foreign Relations: Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China (Blackwill, Tellis, 2015)
22. Council on Foreign Relations: Implementing Grand Strategy Toward China – Twenty-Two U.S. Policy Prescriptions (Blackwill, 2020)
23. Center for a New American Security: Counterbalance – Red Teaming the Rebalance in the Asia-Pacific (Cronin et al., 2016)
24. Center for a New American Security: Rising to the China Challenge (Ratner et al., 2020)
25. Center for Strategic and International Studies: Defining the Diamond – The Past, Present, and Future of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Green et al., 2020)
26. Center for Strategic and International Studies: The 2026 NDS by the Numbers (Cancian, Park, 2026)
27. Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments: Preserving the Balance – A U.S. Eurasia Defense Strategy (Krepinevich, 2017)
28. Atlantic Council: Global Strategy 2021 – An Allied Strategy for China (Kroenig, Cimmino et al., 2020)
29. Brookings Institution: The Future of U.S. Policy Toward China – Recommendations for the Biden Administration (Hass, 2020)
30. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Legacy or Liability – The European Implications of Trump’s Foreign Policy (Chivvis, 2025)
31. Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft: Active Denial – A Roadmap to a More Effective, Stabilizing, and Sustainable U.S. Defense Strategy in Asia (Odell et al., 2022)
32. International Institute for Strategic Studies: Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment (Annual volumes 2022, 2023)
33. American Enterprise Institute: Roger Noriega, hemispheric energy strategy (2023, multiple contributions)

Previous Articles at www.michael-hollister.com

34. Michael Hollister: “Operation Pivot.” February 1, 2026. https://www.michael-hollister.com/de/2026/02/01/operation-pivot/
35. Michael Hollister: “Folgt dem Öl Teil 1 – Wie Washington Chinas Energieversorgung demontiert.” March 29, 2026. https://www.michael-hollister.com/de/2026/03/29/folgt-dem-oel-wie-washington-chinas-energieversorgung-demontiert/
36. Michael Hollister: “Folgt dem Öl Teil 2 – Europa ohne Öl.” April 12, 2026. https://www.michael-hollister.com/de/2026/04/12/folgt-dem-oel-teil-2-europa-ohne-oel/
37. Michael Hollister: “Folgt dem Öl Teil 3 – Die Golfstaaten zwischen den Fronten.” April 12, 2026. https://www.michael-hollister.com/de/2026/04/12/folgt-dem-oel-teil-3-die-golfstaaten-zwischen-den-fronten/
38. Michael Hollister: “Venezuela-Intervention – Teil 2.” December 5, 2025. https://www.michael-hollister.com/de/2025/12/05/venezuela-intervention-3/

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