Illustration: Katmandu Journal
To understand how American foreign policy is changing, consider two documents separated by eight decades and an ideological chasm. In 1941 Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, laying foundations for a rules-based order of open seas, freer trade and collective security. This week Donald Trump’s administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS). The word “rules” appears once, in reference to bending them. Alliances are assessed by cost. Values are replaced by interests. This is a framework that views the world as an arena for transactional deals between rival powers. Nowhere will its effects be more sharply felt than in Asia, and in the Himalayan buffer state of Nepal.
The NSS replaces what it dismisses as the “old order” with what strategists call “Trumpworld”. This divides nations into a hierarchy: rivals (China, Russia), useful allies (Japan, Israel), burdens (Europe), transaction partners (India) and peripheral states (the rest). The approach blends contradictory ideas. It seeks strength without confrontation and restraint without pacifism. In practice this means maximising America’s freedom to act while minimising its obligations. Alliances become compliance regimes. Partners must spend more on defence, buy American weapons and align against adversaries. In return they receive less certainty about America’s protection. The philosophy echoes 19th-century spheres of influence, where great powers jostle for advantage and smaller states navigate between them.
Asia is the primary arena for this contest. American strategy views the Indo-Pacific as critical for future prosperity. The focus is overwhelmingly economic: rebalancing trade, securing supply chains, winning technology races. Security commitments exist mainly to support these goals. Asian allies are expected to help contain China, take clearer sides and adjust trade policies to American needs. Japan and South Korea must shoulder more frontline defence. Southeast Asian nations become markets and alternative supply-chain hubs; not democracies to nurture. Multilateral bodies like the Asian Development Bank are tools to be shaped for American ends. “We will be” principled but not rigid, implies the NSS, a formulation that grants ample wiggle room.
For Nepal, a nation of 30m people wedged between India and China, this new great-power calculus brings peril as well as possibility. In Trumpworld Nepal is a “peripheral swing state”, valued only as a geopolitical buffer. Its significance is in preventing China from gaining leverage. American officials will increase scrutiny of Chinese projects under the Belt and Road Initiative, loans from Chinese banks and the use of Chinese technology like Huawei. Nepal will face pressure to align with American and Indian positions on supply chains and technology standards. “We cannot allow hostile powers to control critical terrain,” explains a State Department official, referring to the Himalayas.
America’s elevation of India as a strategic counterweight to China directly affects Nepal’s fortunes. Washington now treats India as a regional gatekeeper. American and Indian coordination over Nepal will deepen, increasing the weight of India’s preferences on borders, transit and security. This strengthens India’s hand. At the same time, America’s abandonment of democracy promotion as a foreign-policy goal gives Nepali political elites more room for manoeuvre. Instability, fragile coalitions and inconsistent policymaking will be tolerated so long as Nepal avoids tilting towards Beijing. Values have become strategic luggage, discarded for swifter travel.
The economic implications are unclear. America will not provide major trade concessions to Nepal, whose generalised system of preferences status remains uncertain. China, encouraged to redirect its industrial overcapacity away from America, may flood Nepal’s market with even cheaper goods, squeezing local industry. Yet Nepal may gain access to American-aligned supply-chain initiatives and development-financing alternatives to Chinese loans. The Millennium Challenge Corporation, an American aid agency, is already funding infrastructure projects. Smaller nations can sometimes secure better terms when great powers compete for influence.
Muddling through no more
The greatest risk is that Nepal becomes collateral damage. America’s conditional, transactional approach may embolden China to push its interests more aggressively in South Asia. India, sensing American backing, may become more assertive. Nepal will face pressure from three directions with fewer multilateral institutions to mediate. Its traditional policy of balancing between giants—or “muddling through”, as a Kathmandu diplomat wryly calls it—will become harder.
Yet for a small state, attention from superpowers also brings agency. The Himalayas have long been a frontier of empires. Today they are a testing ground for a new world disorder. ■
