We must demand more of our allies, and through trade, integration, and cooperation lead them to ensure that we can maintain the U.S.-led order.

Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from Rebeccah L. Heinrichs’s remarks at National Review Institute’s debate on whether the U.S. should be less engaged with international trade and alliances. Michael Brendan Dougherty’s remarks on the subject can be read here.

T he fundamental purpose of America’s foreign policy is this: to ensure the freedom, security, and prosperity of the American people. Our independence was not merely declared nearly 250 years ago. It remains, actively, our inheritance worth defending.

How we have accomplished this since the birth of the republic has shifted. Ideology must not determine our strategy — prudence must. George Washington cautioned that for America, we must act in our interests but never abandon our principles. Interests guided by justice: that is America’s mantra.

Since the United States secured victory over Nazi imperialism in World War II, it established a system of alliances. Those allies allowed the U.S. to project power abroad, to extend our nuclear deterrent to prevent major war and preclude nuclear proliferation. Since the U.S. dropped the bombs against the imperialist Japanese, the number of global deaths due to war has dramatically fallen.

Human prosperity has exploded, as has ingenuity.

But this reality was not brought to us by a rule-enforcing international governing body — as President Trump said, the U.N. gave him nothing but a broken teleprompter and escalator.

The mightiest nation will be the most influential. This peace and our security were guaranteed by superior American economic and military might and rooted in the principles of self-government that make America exceptional.

We sat at the apex of power at the end of the Cold War, but our policymakers squandered that relative might. Now, the Chinese Communist Party is working with the Russians, Iranians, and North Koreans to supplant the United States. This alliance poses the greatest threat to the United States’ sovereignty — and with it, the American way of life.

Additionally, China now outproduces the U.S. in electric batteries, AI algorithms, ships by hull, chips, and machine tools.

America alone cannot defend the Pax and deter China. But with our allies? Our advantages dwarf China’s.

That means we cannot shrink back, cannot retreat. It means we must, with our allies, take advantage of open societies and pool markets, leverage technology, and boost military production and industrial capacity.

NATO can be stronger and more lethal to stop and deter Russian imperialism.

Japan and South Korea can follow through on pledges to help build American ships, Taiwan can build more semiconductor plants in America, and the United States must export world-class technology to allies.

Finland and Canada can help the U.S. produce Arctic and Polar icebreakers, share intel, and integrate our weapons.

The U.K. and Australia can boost our ability to project power to deter China and to secure supply chains, optimize technology innovation, and leverage it to outmaneuver the CCP.

Not only do allies’ economies, ingenuity, and manufacturing help us rebuild our defense-industrial base, they also help us slow China’s expansion — just consider the first Trump administration’s success in persuading our allies the Netherlands and Japan to eschew exports of chips to China and convincing Europeans to dump Huawei.

The oceans have long stopped offering sanctuary. We need not and must not go abroad searching for monsters to destroy; they are hypersonic missiles that can hit our shipyards, spy balloons that violate our airspace, and drones that spy on our strategic systems. They threaten to throw our satellites off orbit and cut our undersea cables.

We refuse to permit ourselves to be coerced, weakened, and compelled by the CCP, and we insist on passing along to our children the next American century.

For this new era, our interests, guided by justice, require a prudent adaptation: America cannot deter the China-led axis alone. We must demand more of our allies, and through trade, integration, and cooperation lead them to ensure that we can maintain the U.S.-led order, strengthen our relative power against the CCP, and deter our shared enemies.