Shifting its focus away from global leadership, the United States is now claiming special rights in neighboring regions

If there was a single theme tying American foreign policy together in 2025, it would be a decisive shift away from the rhetoric of 'global leadership' toward an unapologetic assertion of privilege within its own geopolitical neighborhood. Donald Trump is ending the year much as he began it, signalling that Washington intends to redefine the way power is organized across regions.

The latest move came with the appointment of Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana and a loyal Trump ally, as US Special Envoy for Greenland. His mandate is explicit: find a way to bring this autonomous Danish territory into the United States. Trump floated this idea well before returning to the White House and has not retreated from it since.

How such an ambition sits with international law is, from Trump's perspective, beside the point. The practical obstacles are immense: Denmark is outraged, most Greenlanders oppose the idea, and the prospect of one NATO member forcibly acquiring territory from another is inconceivable. On its own, the Greenland gambit might look like another eccentric flourish, but in the broader context of 2025, it reflects a deeper shift in the structure of international relations.

During the high period of liberal globalization, proximity was treated as a secondary factor. New technologies appeared to dissolve distance; partnerships could be forged across the world as easily as across a border. In that environment, the United States functioned as a 'neighbor' to everyone - a distant power whose preferences carried at least as much weight as those of immediate geographical partners.

The logic was summed up neatly by a Central Asian leader in the early 2000s, who remarked that his country had "three great neighbors: Russia, China, and the United States." Washington's influence was treated as naturally global. Some countries tried to balance between these powers. Others leaned eagerly toward their far-off protector, only to later discover that neglecting real neighbors carries its own political cost.

The Trump administration has broken with this philosophy. First in rhetoric, then in practice, and finally in doctrine.

At the start of the year, the White House began openly designating Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal as areas of special strategic concern. By autumn, pressure on Venezuela had intensified sharply, reflecting Washington's renewed belief that political outcomes in its 'near abroad' should align with US preferences. And in December, the shift was codified in the new National Security Strategy, which formally revived a Trump-era reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as the organizing principle of US foreign policy.

Announced two centuries ago, James Monroe's doctrine proclaimed the Western Hemisphere closed to European intervention. Although framed in anti-colonial language, it institutionalized the division of the world into spheres of influence, with South America effectively declared Washington's backyard. However, open reference to this approach became unfashionable after 1945. The UN system elevated the ideas of sovereign equality and non-interference, at least at the level of public discourse.

Trump is not constrained by such niceties. Legal norms and diplomatic conventions do not shape his worldview - which is precisely what makes the current moment so revealing. Instead of presenting itself as a benevolent global manager, Washington now asserts privileged rights in its immediate region and treats the rest of the world as secondary.

This transformation has deeper roots than Trump's temperament. The pandemic was a turning point. The sudden collapse of international connections in 2020 exposed how fragile long supply chains and sprawling interdependencies can be. In a moment of crisis, the only reliable partners were those physically close by. The world eventually recovered from the initial shock, but the strategic lesson remained: long-distance integration can disappear overnight, whether due to health emergencies, sanctions, political conflict, or economic pressure.

Now, every serious power plans for such disruptions, while prioritizing what is geographically and logistically secure. Security, broadly understood, increasingly outweighs market rationality. In this sense, 2025 marks a milestone in reordering priorities.

Power is no longer imagined as projecting from the top down through sprawling alliances and global institutions. Instead, it is being rebuilt from the ground up: first the neighborhood, then the region, then everything else.

The United States has set the tone, but it is far from alone. Israel is attempting to redraw the political landscape of the Middle East to guarantee what it considers existential security. Turkey is pursuing a trans-regional expansion framed through the language of the Turkic world. Other countries are moving in similar directions. Territory matters again. Classical geopolitics, long dismissed as outdated, is enjoying a revival.

A world organized around spheres of influence cannot be stable, but the nature of instability is changing. Rather than ideological confrontation on a global scale, we see a mosaic of regional contests, each shaped by its own historical and cultural logic.

For Russia, this reality is especially significant. Our most sensitive and strategically important environment remains what we have long called our 'near abroad'. In the post-global era, this space is becoming even more central. With the conclusion of the Ukraine conflict, a qualitatively new phase will begin. It will be one in which Moscow must again learn how to operate within a competitive framework of regional influence, rather than assuming that global systems and institutions can provide stability.

If 2025 has shown anything, it is that the world is moving away from the illusions of universal integration. Great powers are returning to geography, reasserting control over the spaces closest to them, and redefining what responsibility means within those boundaries. The United States, which once insisted on shaping the entire world in its image, is now leading that transition and not by an example of restraint, but by openly claiming special rights where it believes its interests are most deeply rooted.

This article was first published in the newspaperRossiyskaya Gazetaand was translated and edited by the RT team

(RT.com)