The Big Reshuffle and Its First Effects

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America has begun reestablishing an architecture of primacy:
hard power, logistics, and a reconfigured grand strategy.

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Clients of RSB International understand world events in the broader context, forward looking: In Scherlofsky's 2023 white book and the 2025 update, the shift in American grand strategy currently unfolding was predicted as the "most likely scenario". By 2026, the first effects of this Big Reshuffle are visible. The world order is being reset – and we can map it.

 

Whereas, what we recommended then to the elites of Europe and the non-Western world alike was unambiguous:

 

"An outlook [...] that makes it highly advisable to be on America's side. Recommending businesses [...] to consider well where they want to stay during the years and decades ahead."

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That recommendation has not aged. It has hardened. 

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Bottomline and Summary of Our 2026 White Book
"The Big Reshuffle and Its First Effects"

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While daily dynamics and news distract most observers, America is changing the world. By centering a new grand strategy around America's "Rule of the Waves", Washington is gaining dominance over the flows of cheap energy and logistics, while also defending the centrality of the American financial system. Thus, we urge Europeans to look beyond the idea distributed in the EU that the U.S. would be losing in Iran or not know what it is doing, since the opposite can be recognized. Not only by those who invest in the U.S. (The U.S. equity market, driven by estimates about future well-being, is at record highs. With the "war month" April 2026 showing growth rates rare in stock market history.)

 

Currently, many are confused about America’s strategy behind its Iran policy, and others have still not read Venezuela, Panama, or Greenland right. But at the same time these observers are disoriented, Washington has moved further: visiting Morocco and Indonesia to deepen military cooperation directly in front of two of the world’s most critical straits. Now, the major maritime chokepoints in the world – Gibraltar, Malacca, Hormuz, the Red Sea, Panama, and the Greenland passages (incl. its Arctic lane) – are effectively being drawn under American power. Other, less known, chokepoints add to the list. According to our model and its so far confirmed “most likely scenario direction”, all this is a central pillar of America’s renewed grand strategy. One based on an American uniqueness most Europeans forgot about: that the worldwide flow of imports and exports, and the related fate of trade-dependent nations, is based on an enforcing, globally dominant naval power – a force only the U.S. possesses. Unless China can – for many more years – continue building its worldwide infrastructure network and global navy; which it started doing at an armament pace not seen since World War II.

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However, the strategic reason for this major U.S.-led adjustment of the world system – a system the U.S. itself designed and enabled from 1945 onward – goes deeper than naval competition. From the threat perspective of the most influential American strategists, an unchecked Beijing would eventually turn East Asia, Russia, Europe, and Africa into captive markets and dependent political masses for a new, globally dominant Chinese superpower. Europe, in that scenario, would become a deindustrialized and declining former Western pillar, unable to compete with the forces of the future. 

China, then, would hold most of the world's cards in manufacturing, critical raw materials, AI-enabled information control, international logistics, and political influence (influence bought through the immense investment cash a centralized economic superpower provides). Risking such a “Communist Chinese Eurasia” is therefore unacceptable from the perspective of America’s vital national interests, even before considering related effects such as the collapse of the American-led global financial system or a China that vastly outperforms U.S. defense capabilities and global power projection.

And in that very sense, the above mentioned maritime chokepoints are put under the American umbrella. In addition, the targeting system of U.S. sanctions, matched with the renewed naval presence, now lets U.S. Navy boarding parties pick vessels anywhere in the open oceans – be it in the Indian Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico/America. A maritime chokepoint, in effect, is wherever the U.S. Navy is ordered to be. All while Beijing's debt-heavy Belt and Road strategy cannot replace maritime lanes, since to operate economically sound most import and export goods have to be shipped on sea.

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Relatedly, the U.S. has flipped from being dependent on the energy of others to becoming the world's most dominant energy broker and supplier. All while OPEC gets weaker and weaker in its coherence and power to steer supply and prices...

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With this dual strategy "energy & naval dominance" the U.S. ensures that, as the world transitions into the AI-driven industrial future, where nothing goes without cheap energy, cheap critical raw materials, and tons of IT hardware, America will not only remain the most advanced power and economy. But will also be able to decide who rises with it – and who stays in the basket of developing nations. Or worse: Falls back into a basket of declining, deindustrializing, once-developed countries.

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Thereby, this adapted American grand strategy, one rooted in core principles of geopolitical power, does not bet on “controlling all flows.” Global control was the idea behind the strategic program launched in the 1990s, which was centered on the promotion of idealistic “values to change the whole world.” In the end, it failed: unlike during the Cold War prior to this program, the West did not become stronger and more attractive; instead, after success in the 1990s, from the 2000s on non-Western powers and authoritarian models rose despite the defeat of the USSR (a victory that, it seems, was not used well). But global control is neither possible nor necessary. What is necessary – and what the U.S. is achieving in these months and years – is to become the only force in the world that can guarantee secure and affordable global flows for itself and its allies (those being loyal), while retaining the ability to disrupt or deny the flows on which adversaries depend.

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What makes this hard to read from Brussels is that strategists in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow think in the logic of “DIME” power application: They look at Diplomacy, Information/Ideology, Military, and the Economy in terms of power; considering how they and their counterparts could utilize related tools, as well as how to shape the will to deploy them. European institutions, post-1991, have largely traded this strategic thinking for the WTO and believing in “one open world forever”, focusing on "world goals" instead of their own development, wealth, power, and security. Now America tries to bring Europe back to the way powers think: Help yourself and your allies, instead of acting in the name of lofty "ideals" while falling back behind China & Co.

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Trump’s tactically deployed theater compounds this lack of a realism-based perception in today's Europe. Trump often applies a Shake-and-Shape toolkit: provocations to flood and distract in the news zone, outlandish opening positions designed to settle high, or ugly statements to push and trigger actors. (Most important example for the latter: Ugly statements to unlock the necessary European rearmament by allies who could otherwise not justify such costs domestically, since prior to Trump the mantra "the Americans will always help us" stalled all real effort.) This is Trump’s maneuver toolkit and related noise. But what actually shapes the big picture is this: Trump is what we call a "Strategic Disruptor President" (a type of leader occurring every few decades in the U.S.) who deliberately breaks with some pillars of the old order, domestically and geopolitically. And in doing so allows "America’s Strategist Class" to draft and execute a policy pivot needed to adjust America’s grand strategy. For that reason, in our 2023 white book, we recommended watching America’s strategic masterminds. And back then presented for example Elbridge Colby, a Harvard and Yale educated National Security expert and pentagon veteran, as the strategist number one to get familiar with. To most Europeans, Colby was “merely one among thousands" in the U.S. private sector focused on geopolitical thought. For us, however, he was a key player whose deeply grand strategic concepts would become ever more real. And real they become: Now, by 2026, Colby sits at the U.S. Department of War, as Under Secretary of War for Policy. And if one follows Department of War and White House announcements about worldwide defense visits, one can see that Colby is actually very active. However, he is merely one among many American master strategists who insert much more strategic logic into U.S. actions than daily news suggest.​​

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The “2029 Waiting Game” being played by parts of European leadership is therefore a dangerous bet. It rests on hope. Hopeless hope, since the American Strategist Class will still be in the room in 2030 and beyond while the world has changed forever, no matter the name or party of the then U.S. President.

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But let’s dive into each of these critical components, as well as the bigger historical picture linking them...

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The Big Reshuffle Currently Unfolding Will Outlast Trump’s Presidency
A common European reading of the first phase of Trump's second term is that the United States has been seized by an erratic personality, that the global order is being broken on Trump’s whim, and that 2029 will bring restoration. This is an idealistic hope that will most likely hurt those holding it. An illusion made worse by an inability to grasp the bigger picture, due to daily distractions – from Trump’s tactical “back-and-forth” during dynamic phases, a skill he has developed since the 1980s, to the amusing idea of a “game changer in Hungary” (the young right-wing leader replacing the old one, Orbán, is not a “game changer against Trump"; Magyar and his MAGA-style policies will become a more reliable partner to the U.S. than many other EU nations are – you may bet on it).

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However, the Big Reshuffle is not a Trump phenomenon. We mapped it as our most likely scenario already in 2023, before the 2024 election, because the same structural forces would push any U.S. administration in the same direction. Trump “merely” leads a reshuffle that follows a geopolitical logic – one that is partly externally driven and partly internally driven.

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To better understand this “shift permanence,” it helps to understand Trump through an American historical pattern: Trump is what we call a Strategic Disruptor President – a form of U.S. leader who is voted into power every few decades. One who breaks with the at-the-time “unchangeable rules,” does the “impossible,” and is labeled “immoral” by the political opposition – or worse. This is a real pattern, owed both to America’s geopolitical parameters and to its forward-looking, pragmatic culture:

• 1780s/90s: America was born through strategic disruption. George Washington broke from the British Empire, doing what observers deemed “impossible” and “outrageous.”

• 1820s/30s: Andrew Jackson shattered the early-republic political system and the grip of its elites at the time.

• 1860s: Abraham Lincoln smashed an unsustainable party system and forged a true nation-state while winning the most disruptive war on the American continent in history.

• Last 1800s/first 1900s: The tandem Disruptor Strategic Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt ended the domestic principal of “almost no federal regulation” and broke with the foreign-policy pillar of “non-imperialism”: Deploying force, foreign investment projects, and diplomacy, to replace the Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere.

• 1930s/40s: FDR abandoned the laissez-faire market orthodoxy that so far had defined American capitalism, through the New Deal; and later built a new world order centered on Bretton Woods and the United Nations.

• 1970s/80s: The Nixon/Reagan tandem, interrupted by a tame-and-lame Ford/Carter interlude, shattered the previous financial order and won the Cold War by breaking rules and thinking outside the box. First, Nixon ended the gold standard, turned China from an adversary into a partner against the threat of the time, the USSR, and created the geopolitical-financial petrodollar system. Then Reagan backed a brutal interest-rate hike, radically changed exchange rates through the Plaza Accord to reorder global trade balances, and, through comprehensive pressure, pushed the USSR to the point of implosion. Both Presidents laid the groundwork for globalization. A globalization that, back then, helped the West win the Cold War and thrive – until Western deindustrialization went too far (not just cheap-labor outsourcing but losing high-tech and critical supply) while China became ever stronger.

• 2010s/2020s: We have arrived at the next culmination point of the American Disruptive Cycle under President Trump. He was repeatedly elected not despite, but because he personifies unapologetic, disruptive change of course.

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Once these Strategic Disruptor Presidents have finished, their successors do not try to “rebuild” the prior state. Rather – in a very American display of the above-mentioned pragmatism, mixed with a lack of feasible alternatives – they move on without looking back, no matter which political faction they come from. Just like that.

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The American Strategist Class that Operates Below the News Noise
This deep logic-driven trend was predictable to those reading the right players among the “American Strategist Class” rather than daily news or politically-driven papers.

 

We mentioned already Elbridge Colby as a central figure. Another of these masterminds within the American Strategist Class whom we recommended watching and listening to is Marco Rubio. During his confirmation hearing in early 2025, he publicly put into words what can be seen as the underlying premise that breaks with the canon and gospel of the last 30 years, and partly the last 80:

“The post-war global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us. […] If we don’t change course, we are going to live in a world where much of what matters to us on a daily basis, from our security to our health, will be dependent on whether the Chinese allow us to have it or not.”

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The bottom line to grasp, from a European perspective: Even a Democratic successor in 2029 would not unwind this. Should a Democrat win in 2028, he or she would use gentler language and publicly complain about “the damage done”; but silently be thankful that “it was Trump who did the dirty work shaking the world system so America, the West, and capitalism, not China and its authoritarian control system, stays at the top”.​

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America Is in a Long Game Trying to Prevent China from Becoming Eurasia’s Hegemon
The single paramount goal driving every layer of the reshuffle is to prevent China, the structurally determined “Red Player,” from dominating the Eurasian landmass, which American strategic thought has long identified as the geopolitical scenario to avoid at all costs. From this premise, four operational lines follow: 

1. reintegrate the periphery of the American Core Island, from Greenland to Central America;

2. shock the European allies, part of the “Blue Players,” into relearning the cold logic of power, so they are survivable in the new world and become again reliable, relevant allies (as they where during last Cold War); 

3. pull the critical “Green Players” – Russia, Iran, India, and Brazil – away from China, or degrade their value to Beijing; and 

4. position American naval superiority where it can leverage against China’s structural dependence on sea lanes. 

We described all four lines in 2023. By 2026, all four are visibly in motion. Any conciliatory phase or deal between the U.S. and China is for both sides meant to win time: Both China and the U.S. are currently still in the phase of mutual dependence in some key areas. To apply a tough but telling analogy: They talk to each other like two rival clans that have captured family members of the other side. Once the phase of "exchange" (or the hope for it) has ended, the gloves will be off. And this will be reality sooner than later. After all, not least the U.S. has, as part of hereunder described strategy, switched gear to secure critical raw material supply currently dominated by China. Such as via the new U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC, see below).

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From this structural pivot flow concrete operational moves. Washington is not retreating into isolationism. It is re-centering. Instead of being passive and watching China getting ever more powerful over ever more dependent other Eurasian nations, America regains initiative as the organizing power of a reconfigured world.

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Cheap Energy Is No Longer a Cost Factor – It Is Again the Substrate of Power, Wealth, and Development, as During the Last Cold War
At the core of the transformation sits an “Energy Dominance” doctrine, now operational. Cheap and abundant energy is becoming the decisive foundation for the compute-intensive AI sectors that will define the next hegemonic cycle. And the U.S. is turning itself into the world's central exporter and broker of oil, gas, and LNG, building a buffer against global volatility while turning supply leverage into a coercive instrument. Just a few weeks after the Iran war, The Wall Street Journal put it directly: “The Iran War Is Making the American Economy More Dominant Than Ever.” They are right: Insulated by domestic production, Washington can constrain rival suppliers without crippling itself. Macro-analysts like Jim Bianco in mid-April 2026 rightfully noted that supertankers are abandoning the volatile Persian Gulf to secure a share of America’s roughly 5 million barrels per day in exports. A standard 21-day Middle East-to-Asia voyage is being replaced by a 50-plus-day haul from U.S. The power and profits that follow are indisputable.
Venezuela closes the hemispheric circle. Through 2025, Washington stacked maximum-pressure sanctions, a December naval blockade of the Venezuelan shadow fleet, and Operation Southern Spear into a campaign whose strategic purpose was always more than counter-narcotics. On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in Operation Absolute Resolve. By January 20, the first USD 300 million from a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal had landed. By February, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright was in Caracas to redirect its oil policies. The America First Policy Institute’s October 2025 Venezuela Roundtable captured the doctrine in one phrase: Venezuela should become “the Energy Hub of the Americas.” Project 2025’s call to “re-hemisphere” supply chains and Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy directive to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine” are no longer text on a page – they are barrels under contract. Texas LNG controls the Atlantic. Caribbean crude underwrites the AI substrate. Strategic rivals attempting to lock in long-term oil supply now negotiate, in effect, with Washington.

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Maritime Command Is Now an Architecture, Not a Mere List of Chokepoints
Parallel to energy dominance, Washington has moved decisively to dominate the physical chokepoints of global shipping – then expanded the logic well beyond them. 
The Western Hemisphere is locked from the Arctic to Cape Horn. From August 2025, Operation Southern Spear and the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group turned the Caribbean into a U.S. forward operating zone; by early 2026, the corridor was sealed against Venezuelan shadow tankers and the Maduro regime had fallen. At the same time, Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison was forced out of the Panama Canal port concessions; in January 2026, Panama’s Supreme Court ruled the Chinese contracts unconstitutional. The Arctic axis is being prepared next. Trump’s pressure on Denmark over Greenland was a calculated and successful move, paired with a related heavy Maritime Action Plan: To prevent China, which launched its first Arctic shipping route to Europe in September 2025, from building a foothold around Greenland before the Northwest Passage and Transpolar Sea Route become commercial. The maritime perimeter of the two Americas is now an American interior sea.

The Red Sea too, is part of the recognizable playbook. While first operations took place under Biden, Trump's 2025 air and naval campaign that ran until the May 2025 ceasefire with the Houthis set the stage for future operations. And it trained the NATO-plus allies into supporting such efforts: It drew the UK, Bahrain, and a coalition of NATO and Indo-Pacific partners into sustained U.S.-led maritime operations close to the Suez approaches. The EU’s parallel operation keeps a complementary track open. 
And with the Iran-War in 2026 Hormuz is being structurally reshuffled for years to come. Iran’s warships have been sunk (“shaping” the environment), IRGC Navy chief Alireza Tangsiri, who had directed the closure of the Strait, was killed. The U.S. Navy, having spent weeks operating in close-quarters denial, now sits as the structural arbiter of the Strait. Civilian shipping through Hormuz flows when – and only when – Washington consents.
Then the U.S. visited Morocco and Indonesia to agree on increased military cooperation as mentioned before. Preparing the U.S. for a control of Gibraltar and Malacca, as deemed necessary.

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Beyond the chokepoints, Washington now picks vessels anywhere. On April 21, 2026, U.S. forces boarded and seized the M/T Majestic X – a sanctioned VLCC capable of carrying two million barrels – in the open Indian Ocean; at about the same time the Tifani had been detained in the Bay of Bengal. Both interdictions rested on U.S. unilateral sanctions, enforced extraterritorially. The legal architecture is not new. The Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Act of 2010, the NDAA 2012’s secondary-sanctions provisions, and the long build-out of OFAC’s shadow-fleet designations have constructed, over fifteen years, a regime in which non-U.S. persons in non-U.S. waters trading non-U.S. goods can be hauled in by U.S. forces if a dollar, a port call, or a sanctioned counterparty appears anywhere in the chain. What is new is the operational confidence to enforce the regime physically. Since Trump resumed office, more vessels have been sanctioned for moving Iranian petroleum; tankers are now intercepted in oceans far from the Gulf. The chokepoint, in effect, is wherever a U.S. boarding party arrives.

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Pressure on Allies Is a Strategic Necessity, as Without It They Would Not Be Able to Adjust
The architecture is not maintained for free. Tensions with traditional partners are not erratic glitches in this framework; they are a calculated necessity. Under a “Peace through Strength” logic, coercive alignment is the instrument by which adaptation is accelerated and the burden is shifted onto allies who long benefited from American underwriting.

The political dimension of the Hormuz episode was a masterclass of its own. Certain geopolitical strategists argued even that Trump did not delay the reopening of the Strait by accident – and indeed the delay as necessary tactic would fit into the picture: For decades, Western nations had built their economies on the silent assumption that U.S. carriers would unconditionally secure their vital energy flows, which allowed them to underfund NATO while preaching multilateralism. When Trump pulled the security blanket on March 15 and told reliant nations to “take care of that passage” themselves, the initial European response was institutional inertia. EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas dismissed it: “This is not Europe’s war.” The UK and Japan rejected the call.
Then the economic pain arrived. Tanker traffic dropped 70%. One hundred fifty ships were stranded. Oil surged past USD 100 a barrel. The European posture collapsed overnight. By April 2, more than 40 nations had launched a coalition to secure the Strait, visibly led by British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper chairing the talks. By strategically withholding its forces, Washington forced the contradiction to the surface and reset the terms. A classical Trump move. Access to secure oil flows is now explicitly conditional on real financial and military contributions. War Secretary Hegseth codified this transactional reality on April 22: “exemplary allies” who engage – Israel, South Korea, Poland, Germany, and the Baltics – will receive special U.S. favor, while those failing to contribute to collective defense “will have to face consequences.” The new compact is now in writing.

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Business Diplomacy Focused on Strategic Access Is Replacing the NGO Playbook
The framework that delivered American foreign policy through grants, NGOs, and values rhetoric is being dismantled. By March 10, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had already announced the cancellation of 83% of USAID programs – roughly 5,200 contracts. On March 28, he notified Congress that the agency would be dissolved and absorbed into the State Department. On July 1, 2025, USAID formally ceased to exist. The era of the NGO consortium acting as the deniable arm of American foreign policy is over.
What has replaced it is the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, now reauthorized through December 2031 under the bipartisan DFC Modernization and Reauthorization Act of 2025, with a current investment cap of USD 205 billion. Its newly created Chief Strategic Officer position aligns every dollar with foreign-policy and national-security goals; the agency was directed to produce a five-year Strategic Priorities Plan oriented toward critical minerals, supply chains, energy, technology, infrastructure, and explicit competition with China. It too confirms the structural shift we recommended our clients prepare for: moving “soft power vehicles” from aid to investment, focusing capital where China has built leverage, and treating development finance as economic statecraft. DFC CEO Ben Black named the new posture without euphemism: “American Economic Statecraft is Back.”
The strategic logic is sharp and operational. DFC capital flows where China has gained ground and where the Western Hemisphere needs to be reanchored. USD 30 million in equity backs a Brazilian nickel-and-cobalt mining facility; a USD 553 million loan rebuilds 800 miles of railway and a mineral port serving the DRC and Angola, breaking China’s logistical grip on Central African mineral exports. The instrument is no longer a grant with conditions. It is an equity stake, an offtake agreement, a dollar credit line, or a port concession financed and steered. It comes with strategic alignment built in.
The pattern showed itself most starkly when the Iran conflict threatened the Gulf. The United Arab Emirates did not turn to international institutions. U.A.E. Central Bank Governor Khaled Mohamed Balama went directly to Washington. In meetings with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the U.A.E. sought a wartime financial lifeline in the form of a dollar currency-swap line. By serving as the ultimate guarantor of liquidity, Washington trades financial security for absolute geopolitical alignment. Regional balances of power are now managed through bilateral leverage, not through abstract normative commitments.

The connecting thread is one strategic shift, expressed in two registers. The grant-and-values regime asked partner nations to become more like the United States. The capital-and-leverage regime binds them by what they cannot afford to lose.

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Conclusion: Instead of Protecting a Globalization that Started to Make China Ever More Powerful in Resources-Rich Eurasia, America Is Shifting Toward Dominating the World’s Lifelines

Taken together – Venezuelan oil under U.S. contract, supertankers rerouting to American ports, the encirclement of maritime chokepoints from Panama to Hormuz, the Arctic axis brought into preparation, the deliberate withholding of security at Hormuz, the freedom to seize sanctioned vessels in any ocean, and the tightening of financial leverage over the Gulf states – these moves validate a historic structural transformation. The United States is orchestrating a re-centering of the global system.
What emerges is not a continuation of the globalization order businesses got used to. Even though international trade will not only remain important but become vital. Rather, it is a hard-power hybrid system, with the United States operating as the central organizing player. And the American Strategist Class that built this design is not leaving with Trump. It will keep building.

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The book will be available in bookstores starting June 2026