Project 2025 and the quiet redesign of American Power
John Onyeukwu
Project 2025 and the quiet redesign of American Power
Why the Global South must rethink strategy as U.S. institutional change reshapes geopolitics, geoeconomics, and the prospects for world peace
By John Onyeukwu | Policy & Reform Column | Business a.m.| Published January 12, 2025 | https://businessamlive.com/author/john-onyeukwu/ | Pull out attached
We are living through a moment that is often misread as noise: a sequence of shocking headlines, abrasive policy pronouncements, and seemingly disconnected acts of American power. Trade tariffs here, visa bans there; travel restrictions, visa bonds, “country of particular concern” designations; aggressive posturing toward Venezuela; security actions justified by counterterrorism narratives in parts of Africa. Many observers treat these as episodic excesses of a disruptive presidency. That reading is dangerously shallow.
What we may in fact be witnessing is a quiet but consequential institutional redesign of the United States’ relationship with the world. Project 2025 developed under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation and allied conservative policy networks and publicly released in 2023, is not merely a domestic governance manifesto. It is a blueprint for reconstituting American state power, including how that power is projected beyond U.S. borders. Since President Donald J. Trump’s return to office in January 2025, several early actions suggest that this blueprint is being operationalised with notable fidelity.
For countries like Nigeria and others across the Global South, this matters profoundly. It alters not just diplomatic tone, but the rules governing access, legitimacy, economic exposure, and strategic autonomy.
Analytically, this moment demands more than outrage or reactive diplomacy. It calls for strategic interpretation and urgent recalibration.
At its core, Project 2025 reflects a particular conception of the state: one that privileges executive authority, distrusts bureaucratic mediation, and collapses moral certainty into governance. This worldview has long been articulated by figures such as Stephen Miller, now again central to immigration and domestic security policy, and reinforced by policy thinkers who see the administrative state as an obstacle rather than a safeguard. Institutions, in this framing, are not stabilising mechanisms for plural interests but impediments to decisive action.
The implications are profound. When the state casts itself as the primary custodian of moral order, law becomes an instrument rather than a constraint. Institutions become tools rather than referees. Discretion expands, accountability narrows, and power increasingly answers to conviction rather than process.
Politically, this worldview translates into a preference for unilateral action over multilateral deliberation, loyalty over procedure, and speed over consensus. Economically, it manifests as the weaponisation of interdependence: tariffs as punishment, access as leverage, mobility as privilege. The renewed prominence of advisers such as Peter Navarro in trade policy, alongside early 2025 announcements of expanded tariff regimes tied explicitly to geopolitical behaviour, underscores this logic.
Seen through this lens, recent U.S. actions appear less erratic and more structural.
Trade measures announced in February and March 2025, including tariffs linked to countries importing Venezuelan oil following renewed pressure on the Maduro government, are not merely about balance-of-payments or domestic protection. They function as instruments of geopolitical discipline. The hardline posture toward Venezuela, echoing earlier Trump-era strategies championed by figures such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has culminated in openly coercive language about regime legitimacy and enforcement.
Similarly, expanded visa bans, travel restrictions, and the introduction of visa bond requirements, announced in January 2025 by the Departments of Homeland Security and State, signal a recalibration of mobility as a conditional privilege rather than a neutral right. Under Secretary Marco Rubio’s renewed influence at State, diplomacy increasingly appears framed as an extension of domestic ideological priorities, not a forum for negotiated accommodation.
Each of these measures communicates hierarchy: who is trusted, who is suspect, and who must pay a premium, economically or politically, for access.
Nigeria’s experience in this evolving order is instructive.
The designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act, reaffirmed in late 2024 and operationalised through policy signals in early 2025, is not merely a human-rights statement. It is a geopolitical label with economic, diplomatic, and security consequences. Such designations shape investor perceptions, affect aid architectures, and provide justificatory narratives for pressure.
Likewise, reported U.S. security postures and counterterrorism actions in parts of Northwest Nigeria, framed as responses to transnational threats, raise deeper questions about sovereignty in an age of narrative power. When domestic governance challenges are externally reframed as moral failures or civilisational risks, the space for equal diplomacy narrows sharply.
From a philosophy–politics–economics (PPE) perspective, this is where the stakes become clearer. Moral language in international politics is never neutral. It creates hierarchies, of virtue, legitimacy, and authority. Politics determines who gets to apply those labels, while economics absorbs the consequences through capital flight, restricted access, and asymmetric partnerships.
One of the least discussed but most consequential features of Project 2025 is its hostility to mediation: mediation by career diplomats, by multilateral institutions, and by technocratic norms. This hostility is not accidental. It reflects a belief that mediation dilutes national will.
In foreign affairs, this does not always manifest as formal withdrawal from treaties or institutions. More often, it takes the form of procedural hollowing. Treaties remain, but their spirit erodes. Institutions exist, but their authority is bypassed. International law is acknowledged, but selectively invoked.
The danger here is not simply American dominance. It is precedent. When the most powerful state treats rules as optional, others follow, often without restraint. The global order becomes less rules-based and more power-based, with peace increasingly dependent on deterrence rather than trust.
For the Global South, which has historically relied on multilateralism as a partial shield against raw power, this represents an existential shift.
Economically, the redesign is equally consequential. Tariffs explicitly tied to geopolitical behaviour, the expanding use of secondary sanctions, and conditional access to financial and consumer markets signal a future in which economic policy is no longer even nominally neutral. Trade, investment, and market access are repurposed as instruments of discipline. Integration into global markets is no longer rewarded solely on the basis of competitiveness or reform, but on perceived political reliability and strategic alignment.
Countries like Nigeria therefore face a double bind. On the one hand, they are urged to liberalise, attract foreign capital, and integrate more deeply into global value chains. On the other, that access is rendered fragile, contingent on compliance with shifting geopolitical expectations and externally framed narratives. Strategic autonomy, or even calibrated divergence, carries material costs.
This is not entirely new. What is new is the candour. The apologetic language of free markets has faded. Power is exercised openly through economic levers, and dependence is recast as vulnerability rather than a development pathway.
What, then, should Nigeria and other Global South states do?
First, read the blueprint, not just the headlines. Project 2025 is a signal document. It reveals how influential segments of the American policy establishment conceive the organisation and projection of power in the twenty-first century. Treating it as partisan speculation misses the point. Ignoring it is not neutrality; it is negligence.
Second, reinvest in multilateralism, but with realism. Nigeria must engage the African Union, ECOWAS, the United Nations, and emerging South–South platforms not as reactive participants but as agenda-shapers. This requires coordinated diplomacy, technical depth, and coalition-building around shared vulnerabilities rather than abstract ideals.
Third, anchor diplomacy firmly in international law. Even when law is selectively applied by powerful states, it remains a language of legitimacy, continuity, and collective action. Legal framing slows unilateralism, raises reputational costs, and creates avenues for collective resistance to arbitrariness.
Fourth, protect narrative sovereignty. Countries that do not define themselves will be defined by others, often through moral shortcuts that flatten complexity into convenient binaries.
Finally, build internal resilience. Credible institutions, accountable governance, and social cohesion are not merely domestic aspirations; they are strategic assets. They strengthen bargaining power, reduce exposure to external pressure, and narrow the justifications for intrusive narratives.
World peace has never depended solely on goodwill or moral exhortation. It has rested, imperfectly but meaningfully, on predictable rules, shared constraints, and mutual recognition of limits. These constraints do not eliminate power; they civilise it.
When institutional redesign prioritises dominance over dialogue, speed over deliberation and unilateral discretion over negotiated restraint, peace becomes more fragile. Not because conflict becomes inevitable, but because the habits and institutions of restraint erode. Escalation becomes easier than de-escalation. Coercion is normalised as policy rather than treated as failure.
International law weakens not only when it is violated, but when it is treated as optional. Multilateral forums lose relevance not through abolition, but through neglect. The cumulative effect is a global order in which mistrust deepens, miscalculation multiplies, and smaller states operate under constant strategic uncertainty.
The United States, in this context, is changing, not episodically or temperamentally, but structurally. Administrative power is being reconfigured, executive discretion expanded, and moral certainty fused more tightly to state action. The rest of the world must therefore decide whether it will merely absorb each shock tactically, or respond intelligently by strengthening collective rules, regional solidarity, and strategic autonomy.
History rarely announces its turning points with clarity. But sometimes, if one reads the blueprint carefully enough, the direction of travel becomes unmistakable, and the cost of inattention far exceeds the cost of preparation.
http://www.policy.hu/onyeukwu/
“Let us move forward to fight poverty, to establish equity, and assure peace for the next generation.”
-- James D. Wolfensohn
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