Following the release of the US National Security Strategy in November 2025, the Trump administration—led by the US Department of Defense, now rechristened as the Department of War—unveiled the unclassified 2026 US National Defense Strategy. In characteristically Trumpian fashion, the latest NDS opens with a blunt assault on America’s post-Cold War foreign policy establishment.
“America emerged from the Cold War as the world’s most powerful nation by a wide margin. We were secure in our hemisphere, with a military that was focused on warfighting and far superior to anyone else’s, engaged allies, and powerful industry,” it says. But in the same breath, it contends, “But rather than husband and cultivate these hard-earned advantages, our nation’s post–Cold War leadership and foreign policy establishment squandered them.”
The NDS takes a direct aim at previous administrations for operating under the illusion that the United States could simultaneously deter great powers, stabilise regions, fight terrorism, reassure allies, and uphold a global order.
While both the NDS of 2018 during Trump’s first term and the 2022 NDS of the Biden administration did reflect the mounting strain on America’s resources created by such an expansive agenda, the latest strategy makes a radical break. It openly seeks to end what the Trump administration characterises as persistent free-riding by allies and partners on US global commitments. It signals a deliberate contraction of America’s global ambitions, a sharper prioritisation of interests, and an explicit ranking of threats.
Old threats in a new bottle
The 2018 National Defense Strategy marked a decisive break from the post-9/11 era. It elevated great-power competition over counter-terrorism and explicitly cast China and Russia as “near-peer competitors” challenging US primacy. However, its ambition remained global, reinforcing alliance commitments and sustained US engagement within the existing international order.
The Biden administration’s 2022 NDS carried this shift forward but wrapped it within a more ideological narrative of “democracies vs autocracies”. It emphasised the operationalisation of “integrated deterrence”, solidifying alliance networks, and the defence of a “rules-based order”. It saw the world through a lens of interconnected, universal threats and not prioritisation of specific ones.
The approach outlined in Trump’s second-term NDS breaks decisively from the past by recalibrating how the United States defines clear and present dangers—and, more importantly, what warrants tangible resources and action. It rejects the premise that all threats are equally consequential or that US power should remain globally omnipresent. Instead, it militantly applies a strict hierarchy of priorities, putting “homeland defence” first and “deterring China” second, while relegating all other threats as contingent.
Such a selective engagement grounded in hierarchy, geography and unapologetic realism represents a clear departure in how America views national security and defence posture, irrespective of immediate, mid and long-term consequences.
The shift was foreshadowed earlier in the NSS, which effectively dropped a bombshell by pronouncing a Trump corollary to the 19th century dictum of the Monroe Doctrine centred on hemispheric defence. This was soon followed by the dramatic intervention in Venezuela, raising concerns about precedent, not only in America’s neighbourhood but globally.
Geopolitics, resource competition and counter-narcotics have taken a sharper and more coercive turn than many anticipated. To the north, even a staunch ally like Canada—joined at the hip with the United States for so long on economics and security matters—is seeing fissures that were previously unseen.
Trump’s second term has also ignited new uncertainties and ambiguity over the Indo-Pacific. The region had started acquiring strategic salience by the end of Obama’s presidency and was consolidated by Trump in his first term and then by the Biden administration. China continues to be identified as the pacing threat, which has both the intent and capability to challenge US global primacy.
The latest NDS categorically says, “By any measure, China is already the second most powerful country in the world—behind only the United States—and the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century.” However, the strategic goal now is one of maintaining “a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific” without “dominating, humiliating, or strangling China.”
The NDS contends that America’s “goal is far more scoped and reasonable,” which is “simply to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate” the United States or its allies. The previous NDS in 2022 framed the US-China competition in more expansive and quasi- existential terms, encompassing values, norms and leadership over global governance institutions.
The fissures within the Trump administration’s approach are perhaps most visible in America’s rapidly mounting tensions with its European allies. Reflecting a recurring undercurrent of US foreign policy, the administration has revived an intense focus on burden-sharing and delegating less exigent threats to the regional security architecture led by allies, with the US providing ancillary support.
Moral and ethical commitments to allies have morphed into transactional strategic bargains. The Trump team makes no bones about calling out allies and partners as “free-riders”, while the allies call out the United States for breach of trust and dwindling credibility of strategic commitments.
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Worst of times and best of times
As the Department of War quite literally takes its new name seriously, Trump’s NDS is also distinctive in how it reimagines America’s military edge and places the defence industrial base at the centre of strategic thinking. Whereas the Biden administration’s National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) was anchored in the logic of “integrated deterrence”, the second Trump administration seeks to “re-establish deterrence” through a more blunt and martial logic.
Allies are pressed to shoulder greater responsibility for their own regional defence, as the US military is reframed not as a global policeman but as an instrument of American national power—designed to fight and win wars decisively and swiftly when necessary.
The tangible consequences of this new trajectory in US national security strategy—and in the National Defence Strategy, with a National Military Strategy perhaps follow—will preoccupy analysts for years. Yet the turbulence inherent in this shift is already evident. It reflects a growing tension between American ambition and restraint, a structural departure in how US national security is conceived and operationalised, and a recalibration in how Washington seeks to anticipate and prevent strategic surprises.
Under the current Trump administration, US strategic commitments are increasingly open for transactional renegotiation. Autonomy and independent decision-making by allies and partners are now tolerated only if they align with Washington’s assessment of American interests. Too many variables are being juggled simultaneously. While the NSS and NDS render US priorities more explicit, they do so at the cost of deepening uncertainty about American credibility and reliability.
Allies and partners are thus pushed not only to align strategically but also to invest more heavily in their own security, plus concede to economic and political arrangements shaped by militant interpretations of “Make America Great Again” and putting “America First”. This moment evokes the enduring paradox from Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”
Monish Tourangbam is a Fellow at the Chintan Research Foundation (CRF), New Delhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)