The Fine Print That Rewrites the World
The Trump National security strategy reveals a zero-sum future where digital sovereignty is the real battlefield
The headlines focused on what they always focus on: the rhetoric about immigrants, the dismissiveness toward European allies, the muscular nationalism that plays well in certain domestic constituencies. But while pundits dissected the predictable provocations of the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy, the document’s most consequential passages slipped past largely unnoticed. The real revolution is buried in the fine print. It concerns not borders or battalions, but bytes and bandwidth.
What the NSS articulates, with remarkable candour for a strategic document, is a fundamental reimagining of the global order. Not the reimagining that critics expected, a retreat from international engagement, but something far more ambitious: the explicit subordination of allied sovereignty to American digital dominance. The document announces the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, positioning the Western Hemisphere as a zone of exclusive American economic and strategic influence. The United States will, it declares, “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”
Read that carefully. “Strategically vital assets” in 2025 no longer means military bases or shipping lanes. It means cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, and the digital arteries through which modern economies flow. The language is aimed primarily at China, but its logic applies universally, extending to any power, including European allies, that might challenge American technological preeminence in Washington’s backyard.
“The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies.”
That sentence, buried in the strategy’s economic provisions, deserves to be read and reread. It is perhaps the most honest articulation of American strategic thinking in decades. Countries within the American sphere (and Canada sits at the very centre of that sphere) are expected not merely to cooperate with American firms but to preference them exclusively. The document pairs this expectation with an instruction to “make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region,” extending explicitly to “cyber communications networks” and technology infrastructure.
Here is where the document’s internal contradictions become not merely philosophical but practically consequential. The NSS premises its entire strategic logic on the primacy of national sovereignty. Nations, it insists, must “put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.” This is the animating principle behind every critique of multilateral institutions, every withdrawal from international agreements, every insistence that America will no longer subordinate its interests to global consensus.
Yet the same document that celebrates sovereignty as the foundational principle of international order proceeds to systematically circumscribe the sovereignty of America’s closest allies. The Hemisphere is defined as an American zone of prerogative. Technology procurement is expected to favour American vendors. Partnership benefits become “contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence,” language elastic enough to encompass European technology partnerships, Asian supply chains, or any collaboration that might dilute American market dominance.
This is not hypocrisy in the conventional sense. It is something more coherent and more troubling: a worldview in which sovereignty exists in concentric circles, with American sovereignty absolute and allied sovereignty conditional. The United States reserves for itself the right to determine which external influences are “adversarial” and which partnerships are permissible. Sovereignty, in this framework, is not a universal principle but a privilege that flows downward from Washington.
For countries like Canada, the implications are stark. Between 64 and 70 percent of Canadian internet traffic already routes through American territory. All thirteen trans-Pacific fibre-optic cables land on the American west coast; none terminate in Canada. Over 61 percent of Canadian businesses store critical data on American cloud services. The digital economy that increasingly defines Canadian prosperity runs on infrastructure neither owned nor controlled domestically. The NSS transforms this dependency from an inconvenience into a lever, a mechanism of influence more effective than any tariff.
But the Canadian case merely illustrates a global dynamic. We are entering a zero-sum world where allies and partners are transient and transactional, where relationships are measured not in shared values but in commercial advantage. The concentration of power within the emerging global digital economy, particularly its commanding heights in AI and cloud infrastructure, means that technological dependency translates directly into political subordination. Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves.
This is, in many ways, more consequential than the NSS’s more inflammatory provisions. The disparagement of immigrants will generate outrage and resistance. European leaders will bristle at their diminished status and find ways to push back. These are visible conflicts that will play out in diplomatic exchanges and newspaper editorials. But the quiet restructuring of digital dependency, the transformation of technological dominance into instruments of statecraft, operates below the threshold of public attention. It reshapes the architecture of power while everyone argues about the furniture.
The question this strategy forces upon America’s allies is not whether to resist American influence (that ship has largely sailed) but whether to accept a future in which sovereignty becomes a formality, a flag to be waved while decisions of consequence are made elsewhere. For countries that have built their prosperity on American-controlled digital infrastructure, the choice may already be constrained. For those with time and foresight to act, the NSS should serve as a clarifying document: a roadmap of the future Washington envisions, and a warning about the costs of dependency in an age when data is power and platforms are territory.
It is always important to read the fine print. In this case, the fine print is not merely important. It is the strategy itself. Everything else is theatre.
Rafal Rohozinski is the founder and CEO of Secdev Group, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and co-chair of the Canadian AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster.