"IT'S the Balance of Power, Stupid!" is the main theme of President Donald Trump's new National Security Strategy (NSS) unveiled last week in Washington.

According to Mr Trump, his nationalist foreign policy principles, grounded in a "realist" vision, amount to a clear break with the way his post-Cold War predecessors saw the international system and envisaged the US role in it.

As Mr Trump and his top national security advisers see it, contrary to the notions embraced by Republican president George W Bush and his Democratic successor Barack Obama, the duty of the new administration would not be to secure the foundations of an amorphous globalist order by advancing liberal-democratic values and by promoting free trade and investment. Instead, the Trump administration's main obligation is first and foremost to protect US strategic and economic interests around the world by using American power and not necessarily through multilateral institutions.