The Semiotics of Power: NSS 2025 as a Tool of Symbolic Hegemony

From its outset, it proclaims that the world is organized around its power, that national identity is a shield and a sword, and that the other, the different, the migrant, is danger, is threat, is a fracture of an order that is considered absolute. In this symbolic-strategic game, there is a bet on the domestication of fear, on the militarization of the social imaginary, on the naturalization of xenophobia, and on the re-semantization of nationalism as a shield against chaos. Force, fear, and identity intertwine in a single code that traverses politics, culture, and the very consciousness of those who observe, fear, and accept. It does not only organize armies or deploy strategies; it organizes imaginaries, builds realities, installs invisible laws of power. American greatness is ideal, myth, and norm; the other is always risk, decline, and threat. It is not a document; it is a lightning bolt. Security is not a policy; it is an act of creation, a semiotics of fear, a choreography of hegemony that forces one to look, fear, and accept. The American is virtue, the other is danger; difference is not wealth, it is fracture; otherness is not plurality, it is threat. The threat is no longer only tangible or physical, but symbolic: the idea is constructed that otherness, difference, and social mobility constitute risks to the continuity of the nation-state, generating a discursive framework that naturalizes policies of exclusion and control. It not only describes a threatening world but configures it, determining how enemies are perceived, how policies are legitimized, and how the very idea of the national is constructed against the external. Violence is naturalized as a method, fear is normalized as a state, and intervention becomes an inherent right of a power that knows it is superior. At the heart of the document beats an obsession with national identity that transcends politics and touches culture itself; the American is virtue, the other is danger; difference is not diversity, it is threat; mixing is not wealth, it is decomposition. In this fabric, it is evident that the true strength of the strategy lies not in its material resources, but in its ability to make sense of the world and to make that sense be perceived as inevitable, just, and necessary. Force is not an option; it is a mandate, and the legitimacy of violence becomes a norm, a guiding principle of security, an unwritten law that organizes the world and redefines it. The strategy does not predict the world; it manufactures it. This narrative reproduces old neocolonial imaginaries, condensed now in the form of a national security policy. The document also operates through the rhetoric of force as a legitimizing medium. In this sense, violence becomes a constituent element of order, while diplomacy and cooperation are relegated to a secondary plane, subordinated to the security imperative understood as the state's monopoly on the protection of its space and its identity. Against the idea of an international community based on cooperation and consensus, the document adopts a semantics of fragmented sovereignties, selective bilateralism, and economic protectionism. The strategy not only predicts the world; it manufactures it. It appeals to the myth of national greatness, to the memory of a 'powerful America,' autonomous, sovereign, self-sufficient; an imagined past of supremacy, cultural vitality, economic and military dominance, no longer as an idealistic global gendarme, but as a power that prioritizes its cultural, economic, territorial integrity. The strategy, in its essence, is a performative act; it produces the reality it proclaims, institutes the order it announces, naturalizes the violence it needs to sustain itself. Finally, the document reveals that contemporary security is not protection or well-being, but hegemony. The symbolic narrative of the document establishes hierarchies, imposes categories of value and threat, and produces a grammar of order that conditions the action and perception of the community. Each enemy named in the text—migrants, rival powers, non-state actors—is not an abstract problem; it is a sign, it is a symbol of chaos, of decadence, of imminent danger. History is selected, the myth is an instrument, memory is a strategic construction: the American is virtue, the other is danger. The document transforms social perception: the threat is not found in objective reality, but in the way it is discursively constructed, in the cadence of its phrases, in the insistence of its images of perpetual crisis and danger. Its military superiority is not an instrument; it is language. Every word of the strategy acts on the reader, on the citizen, on the community, building the feeling that without absolute control and permanent surveillance the nation would succumb. It also unfolds as a choreography of power. The first semantics on which the text stands is that of 'national sovereignty' and 'the primacy of the nation-state.' The text does not describe dangers; it produces them, magnifies them, encodes them in signs that society internalizes, that the citizen accepts as inevitable. Difference is not wealth; it is fracture; otherness is not plurality; it is threat. Its text burns, strikes, dazzles, outrages, and blinds. Every sentence is performative: it produces consensus, disciplines imaginaries, legitimizes decisions that in other contexts would be questioned. This reconfigures the meaning of 'security,' no longer as a guarantee of life, well-being, or democratic promiscuity, but as the maintenance of dominance, preservation of the status quo, imposition of order. Security becomes hegemony, and hegemony becomes spectacle, and the spectacle becomes a truth that everyone recognizes and accepts, while the world turns under a code of fear and power that no one dares question. The document burns in its own cadence, strikes with the speed of lightning, dazzles with the clarity of a power that knows it is absolute. The text also manipulates history and memory: it builds nostalgia, invents greatness, selects narratives of glory and defeat to consolidate a nationalist ethos. Thus, a semiotic code of allies and enemies is established that does not depend on objective facts, but on carefully crafted commercial narratives; Europe must save itself, Latin America must obey, China must be contained, and the international order is redefined by the absolute priority of U.S. interests. Geopolitics is translated into a moral language: it does not only organize armies or deploy troops; it organizes perceptions, codes of fear and obedience that traverse culture, politics, and subjectivity. This symbolic operation is, in essence, a reordering of the meaning of global security, which legitimizes the reduction of multilateralism and the strengthening of unilateral power as a norm of behavior. As such, it must be read as a political-strategic discourse—a narrative of security, threat, identity, sovereignty, and safeguard—whose content reveals much more than military, diplomatic, or economic data. It does not propose security; it imposes order and consent. Every word of the document is a semiotic operation: disciplines bodies, conditions desires, turns perception into obedience and fear into legitimacy. By stating that 'the days of America sustaining the world order as Atlas have ended,' the NSS marks a break with the pretension of universalist exporter of values—democracy, human rights, global liberalism—and, instead, reclaims a hard realism, oriented to its own interests, to internal safeguarding, to border control, to strategic dominance. That semiotic declaration implies a symbolic reconfiguration of the role of the U.S. There is no neutrality; no pause; everything is destined to produce consent, obedience, silent acceptance of the imperative of dominance. From the perspective of our critical semiotics, the NSS 2025 is a device for reality construction; it produces enemies, invents risks, creates consensus through the normalization of fear, and redefines the very idea of the legitimate and the illegal, the self and the other. That discourse not only demonizes migrants; it turns them into signs of disorder, of national decline, of community crisis. Each enemy named—migrants, foreign powers, non-state actors—is not simply a threat; it is a signifier charged with fear, a symbol that condenses chaos, decadence, and danger, an excuse to justify total control and preemptive intervention. The signs of otherness—languages, customs, migration, cultural practices—are re-signified as vectors of insecurity, and that re-signification operates on social perception with the force of a disciplinary machine: it conditions the imaginary, molds behaviors, generates consensus and fear at the same time. Military force is not an instrument, it is language; the economy is not exchange, it is a sign of influence; diplomacy is not dialogue, it is a device of domination. An ethics of 'us first' is legitimized: national identity, control of migrations, preservation of a homogeneous imaginary against the foreign or the other. A semiotic-political regime is instituted that links migration with insecurity, foreignness with danger, diversity with dissolution. Its premise 'peace through force' becomes a conceptual foundation, military supremacy, economic hegemony, border control, selective alliances, commercial pressure—all as symbolic instruments of power. This document does not only organize security; it organizes perception, consciousness, imagination, will. The strategy turns violence into norm and fear into tool, and in that act of political semiotics, the symbolic and the material are confused: what is said builds what is done and conditions what is perceived as inevitable. Every sign is a hammer, every phrase is a spark, every paragraph is a lightning bolt that illuminates and burns perception, reminding that hegemony is sustained not only with material resources, but with the force of the narrative, the force of meaning, and the force of semiotics that traverses the collective consciousness and turns fear, identity, and power into a single indomable current. The strategy does not speak of peace; it speaks of supremacy. The economy is not exchange; it is power that imposes itself and is recognized. From its first line, it proclaims the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state as an inalienable principle, and in that declaration is inscribed a grammar of exclusion: America must not share its destiny, it must defend it as a sacred territory, as a space delimited by invisible borders and ever-looming threats. A new semiotics of the gendarme-state, the fortified border, perpetual antagonism, closed sovereignty, homogeneous identity is instituted. Every decision, every line, every semantic category communicates hierarchy and order: security is understood as supremacy, and supremacy as a moral necessity. It does not limit itself to describing security; it manufactures it. This rhetoric is not only strategic: it is symbolic: it reconstructs Europe as a decadent, impotent, decomposing space, in contrast with the vigorous American national identity. Difference is not cultural wealth; it is fracture. Violence—or its mere possibility—is normalized as a constitutive part of the security regime. It warns of a possible 'civilizational disappearance' of Europe, linked to migration, demographic crisis, economic decline, loss of identity, and dependence on supranational institutions. It does not just identify allies; it establishes moral categories that order the world and define the hierarchy of values. Image of the domination document applied by the USA. By Fernando Buen Abad. Specialist in Philosophy of the Image. teleSURtv.net. What does all this mean? From our critical semiotics perspective, this document cannot be read merely as a military or diplomatic plan; it is a Cognitive War or Bourgeois Cultural Battle over the world economic and symbolic order, it is a new grammar of domination, a reordering of meanings about homeland, sovereignty, threat, identity, power. It constitutes an operation of symbolic hegemony: it redefines what is normal, desirable, legitimate; what is threat, insecurity, decadence; what deserves protection, intervention, coercion. Reading it with critical semiotics is to see the architecture of domination: how enemies are built, how threat is encoded, how obedience is manufactured, how fear becomes aesthetics and hegemony becomes a terrible and luminous beauty. Europe is decadence, Latin America is subordination, Asia is relentless competition, and each geopolitical space receives a moral and strategic value, a sign that positions it on the board of supremacy. That symbolic nostalgia functions as a nationalist ethos: it legitimizes the restoration of predominance, the recovery of control, the reaffirmation of identity values in the face of globalization, mixing, dissolution. Migrants are more than bodies in motion; they are otherness coded as threat, a vector of cultural disorder, a risk of erosion of national identity. It is an irrenounceable scenario for the dispute over meaning. It is not a neutral document; it is an operation of power that breathes symbolic violence, that builds realities and legitimizes hegemonies. Diplomacy is not negotiation; it is a maneuver to consolidate hegemony. Hegemony becomes narrative, and narrative becomes collective experience: reading the NSS 2025 is to observe how power turns fear, identity, and force into a single semiotic code that traverses everything, from perception to morality, from politics to consciousness. The NSS 2025 shows us that the nation stands on exclusion, that peace is achieved through force, and that morality is measured by the ability to impose a global unilateral order. Security ceases to be protection and becomes a spectacle of domination, a ritual of imposition, a logic of inevitability. The American is virtue; the other is risk. It does not speak of cooperation; it speaks of domination. Every word, every utterance, disciplines bodies, molds desires, and directs consciousness. 'Mass migrations,' according to the NSS, are described not just as an administrative or demographic problem, but as a factor of social rupture: they erode cohesion, distort labor markets, increase crime, weaken public resources, disturb the 'national identity.' Reading it with critical semiotics is to see beyond the strategy, to recognize a symbolic web that redefines politics, culture, and subjectivity, and that reveals that the weapon of the State and the system is not only armament, but the ability to give meaning to the world and to danger, and to make that meaning be perceived as inevitable. That NSS 2025 is a semiotic operation that re-inscribes global power under new codes, redefines enemies and allies, re-elects values, legitimizes domination strategies, and conditions collective imaginaries. Migrants, transnational mobility, are re-semantized as symbolic threats to the order, to well-being, to the continuity of the 'people-nation.' The NSS 2025 does not only communicate; it devastates and reconstitutes, and whoever reads it not only understands, but faces a horrible landscape of bourgeois power in its crudest form, the act of symbolic creation that disfigures identity, threatens, obedience, and future. Every sign in the text, every utterance, every discursive construction is a tool of power that disciplines bodies, molds imaginaries, creates consent and fear at the same time. It does not limit itself to planning defense; it conditions desire and perception. That selective historical memory and that narrative of decline function as a device of fear, of rejection, of prohibition to 'miscegenation.' Simultaneously, the document promotes a re-latinization of U.S. domination: under the umbrella of a 'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere is reinstated as a priority sphere of influence, as a geostrategic, economic, and military backyard. Power is exercised over perception: every word is a weapon, every phrase is a ritual, every paragraph is a performative act that disciplines, molds, and organizes reality. Military supremacy, economic pressure, and selective intervention are presented not as alternatives, but as strategic imperatives to preserve national integrity. The fear of the other—the immigrant, the foreigner, the different—becomes the moral foundation of internal and external security. Migrants, for example, are re-signified as vectors of insecurity and cultural destabilization. China and Russia are not just strategic competitors; they are representations of challenge, signs of contrariety that the narrative re-semantizes to justify American supremacy. The rhetoric of urgency and decline articulates a crescendo of danger that legitimizes any measure, from the militarization of borders to economic pressure and diplomatic manipulation. It does not speak of international community; it speaks of hierarchy. The normalization of the use of force, even preemptive, constitutes a semiotic sign that imposes stability, authority, and dominance. A logic is constructed in which interdependence is perceived as vulnerability, and strategic autonomy becomes a guiding principle. Every phrase, an act of power: to produce consensus, to fabricate enemies, to normalize force, to make the inevitable seem natural. Every word strikes certainties, every line reconstructs reality under the tyranny of sovereignty. Its force does not appear as a last resort, but as a preferred means of legitimization. Every word is a hammer, every sentence a torrent. It not only calls to action; it imposes it, from perception to obedience, from identity to morality. Security ceases to be protection to become a power spectacle: a visible and invisible order, a code that traverses the political, the social, and the subjective, an instrument that turns the inevitability of domination into moral certainty. That is the semiotics of contemporary hegemony: it is not enough to control borders, deploy armies, or exercise diplomacy. A direct hegemony is legitimized based on geographical proximity, economic dependence, militarization. (Article taken from Iguana tv) It not only describes threat; it invents it. Every word is an act of force, every line a ray that cuts, and every paragraph a fire that illuminates, blinds, and forces one to look at power in all its nakedness. Its narrative not only builds threat; it builds identity. Every sign in the text is a signal: obey or fear. That 'us' implies a construction of the other as a symbolic and existential threat. This revaluation of the 'backyard' carries a strong symbolic charge: Latin America is remade as a zone of buffer, of resource, of control, of strategic subordination. Migration, language, custom, culture: signs coded in panic, vectors of control. Perfect justification for the arms industry. It turns history into a selective myth and its memory into an instrument of power. It does not describe risk; it produces it. America does not defend itself: it erects itself. It does not protect: it imposes. Horrible.