(Gurjit Singh – Observer Research Foundation) The United States (US) National Security Strategy (NSS) is conventionally read as a policy statement reflecting presidential priorities at a given moment. This paper advances a different claim: the NSS should be understood as a theoretical artefact of grand strategy, one that reveals how the UScognitively maps the international system, ranks regions within it, and assigns them functional roles. In this sense, the NSS is not merely descriptive or programmatic; it is constitutive. It produces a hierarchical ordering of world politics through narrative emphasis, textual allocation, and strategic framing. If grand strategy operates as an ordering logic rather than a checklist of policies, this paper treats the NSS as a discursive mechanism of hierarchy construction. Regions are rendered central or peripheral not only through material commitments but also according to how they are written into the strategic imagination. The paper’s central theoretical claim isthat between 2017 and 2025, the Global South has undergone a profound conceptual reclassification in US strategy: from being a selectively engaged periphery of great-power competition, it has increasingly become a strategic infrastructure upon which US economic security, geopolitical consolidation, and competitive resilience increasingly depend. This shift does not signal a move toward equality, partnership, or multipolar recognition. Rather, it signals a deeper form of instrumental incorporation—where the Global South becomes strategically central as it increasingly is subordinated to US geopolitical imperatives. This argument intervenes in debates on hierarchy, agency, and power in contemporary international relations by demonstrating that centrality and subordination are not opposites but can coexist within modern grand strategy.
The Global South as Strategic Infrastructure in US NSS
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