When United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed restructuring the G-20 into an elite “inner caucus” of powerful states, it should have dominated the week’s geopolitical news. It signalled a major reordering of global economic governance, shifting rule-making to a narrower group and weakening emerging economies. Yet, the proposal barely registered. It was immediately eclipsed by the release of the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), that embodied the same underlying ideological shift. Days later, the Heritage Foundation, the intellectual core of U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA project, issued its own blueprint, Restoring America’s Promise: 2025-26.
The alignment between the G-20 restructuring, the NSS, and Heritage 2026 reveals three simultaneous revolutions in American statecraft: a transformation of political morality, a recasting of foreign policy, and a restructuring of global economic governance. The common thread is the institutionalisation of exclusion and the acceptance of unequal burdens as policy design rather than error. In this sense, cruelty functions as an analytical term, capturing a system in which harm is anticipated, normalised, and strategically deployed.
Shrinking of civic space
The first revolution is internal. Mr. Trump’s political project dismantled the traditional moral architecture of American public life. Norms of restraint, institutional deference and civic responsibility gave way to an ethos where transgression signalled authenticity and the erosion of shame became a political asset. The NSS integrates this shift into formal doctrine by treating internal cultural cohesion, ideological alignment and demographic stability as national security requirements.
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The Heritage document demands bureaucratic remaking, ideological vetting, and mass personnel turnover. The NSS echoes this through sovereign autonomy, institutional suspicion and domestic culture as security treating independent institutions not as correctives but as obstacles to political will.
Cruelty here takes the form of permissive indifference: hardship from administrative purges, narrowing civic space, or punitive regulatory change is not acknowledged as collateral damage but folded seamlessly into the architecture of governance.
Foreign policy around conditionality
The second revolution is external. The U.S. traditionally relied on predictable commitments and institutional stability. Even Mr. Trump’s first-term disruptions occurred within recognisable boundaries. The 2025 NSS departs sharply from this tradition.
Alliances are reframed as conditional transactional contracts with obligations justified continuously. The Western Hemisphere displaces Europe and the Indo-Pacific as the primary theatre, reviving the Monroe Doctrine. Migration, a domestic concern, is elevated into the central security threat, while institutions once amplifying American power are described as constraints on sovereignty.
The Heritage document provides the ideological framework. It frames multilateral bodies as infringements of sovereignty, border control as geopolitics, and allied compliance as contingent on ideological alignment, not shared interest.
The result is neither isolationism nor traditional realism. It is selective dominance: assertion where leverage is high, retreat where obligations are costly, and judging partnerships by conformity not capability. The structural effect is fragile alliances, revisionist adversaries and a fragmentation of global order.
The third revolution is economic. Mr. Rubio’s G-20 proposal is not an administrative adjustment but the formalisation of a tiered global economy, an architecture of privileged rule-makers and peripheral rule-takers. Decision-making on debt relief, trade standards and climate finance will consolidate within a narrower circle of states with the capacity to shape outcomes.
The NSS fits precisely within this trajectory. Its emphasis on reshoring, tariff leverage and industrial sovereignty promoted toward a hemispheric economic model centred on North America. Heritage 2026 expands on the logic: globalisation is treated as a strategic vulnerability and multilateral economic systems as threats to national autonomy.
The consequences will be felt disproportionately by countries with limited negotiation power. Debt restructuring will become more conditional, supply chain diversification more politically selective, and access to global capital more closely tied to geopolitical alignment. The predictable hardship that follows, from inflationary pressures to disrupted export markets, will fall on global and domestic workers.
Cruelty here is systemic: unequal distribution of economic pain is treated as a mechanism for stabilising a more hierarchical global order
A return of imperial logic
Across these three revolutions runs a common thread: the restoration of a colonial-imperial mindset. Not territorial colonialism but a structural world-view built on hierarchy, entitlement, and the presumption that the strong may impose costs while the weak absorb them.
The NSS provides bureaucratic vocabulary; the Heritage supplies the ideological foundations.
The analytical utility of cruelty lies in naming this organising logic. It captures a system where the suffering generated by policy is neither incidental nor unfortunate but integrated into the functioning of the political and economic order.
The G-20 restructuring and the 2025 NSS are manifestations of the same deeper shift. The world is entering an era where the U.S. seeks to protect its sovereignty through contraction, assert influence through hierarchy, and reshape global governance through exclusion.
The final irony is that the victims of this reordering are not confined to distant shores. They live in Maputo and Dhaka, yes, but also in Harlan, Kentucky. The architecture of cruelty is global, but its consequences are intimate. It reaches the world, but it also circles back home.
Anil Raman is Research Fellow, Takshashila Institution and a retired brigadier
Published – December 17, 2025 12:08 am IST
