“At least,” a friend sighed, “they didn’t call it the 2026 National War Strategy.” True enough, although if Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claims that he now leads the Department of War, logical consistency would suggest substituting the fiercer war for the feebler defense in the National Defense Strategy.
But logistical consistency, like coherence and gravitas, does not characterize the new NDS. It is a document that supposedly nests within the National Security Strategy, explaining at greater length the implications of overall policy for the armed forces. The 2026 version does not do that. Rather, it restates some of the basic priorities of the Trump administration but for the most part confines itself to flattery of the president, insults, and bombast.
[Thomas Wright: A strategy that ignores the real threats]
In theory, the NDS should be a serious state paper. It should not, as this document does, refer to the president 47 times, and include five pictures of him, one suggestively placed immediately after a reproduction of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Nor should it make the absurd claim that Donald Trump has “rebuilt the American military to be the world’s absolute best” and then insist, with modest adulation, that “it is essential to emphasize how much of an achievement this has been.”
But then again, the kind of authors who insist that “President Trump is leading our nation into a new golden age” are strangers to the pejorative connotation of the word sycophant. The Pentagon’s writers have not yet reached for the honorifics accorded the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, but they might yet do so. After all, if the much shorter though equally well-fed Korean could be known as “Dear Leader,” “Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander,” and “Guiding Star of the 21st Century,” why should the unique 45th and 47th president not get similar accolades?
Distasteful as the genuflections are, the gratuitous insults to all previous administrations are worse. There are the usual tirades about “grandiose nation-building projects and self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order.” There is the customary bellyaching about betrayals of the warrior ethos. There is the standard (and particularly ludicrous) complaint that “America’s foreign policy establishment neglected our nation’s Homeland defenses.” One of the more tiresome qualities of this Department of Defense is the insecurity that causes it to denigrate everything that passed before. This happens often enough when one administration succeeds another, to be sure, with the new team insisting that its predecessors were idiots, but the Hegseth Pentagon carries such insults to a new level.
And then there is the chest-thumping. If Trump said that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated, then the NDS will use that word. It is not enough to express the very creditable truth that the Iranian bomb program took a body blow from which it may take years to recover. Trump policy is not merely successful; it has taken “our nation from the precipice of a world war just a year ago.” And let enemies of the United States beware: As a Pentagon bureaucrat attempting Mafia dialect puts it, “We at the Department of War will be ready if our gracious offer is spurned.”
What about the substance, then? We have 19 pages of text plus the five blank or picture pages. Ignore the sycophancy, slurs, and slop, and there is very little—but still enough to make one wonder. As in the NSS, the administration makes its priorities or, as it terms them, “lines of effort” clear: (1) “Defend the U.S. Homeland”; (2) “Deter China in the Indo-Pacific through strength, not confrontation”; (3) “Increase burden-sharing with U.S. allies and partners”; and (4) “Supercharge the U.S. defense industrial base.”
The first line of effort contains admiring reflections on the Monroe Doctrine and its Roosevelt Corollary without being burdened by an understanding of the historical context of either. It is expansive in its definition of the homeland, referencing Greenland with a predatory leer, although—perhaps in a gesture of reconciliation—it talks about Canada as though it has the right to be an independent country. The NDS, like the NSS, is hemisphere-ist, believing that the United States should dominate pretty much everything from Honolulu to Nuuk, as well as the heavens above.
The China portion of the strategy is remarkable for its modesty, insisting that the United States is focused on “supporting strategic stability and on deconfliction and de-escalation more broadly.” One is surprised to hear this kind of globalist soft soap from a Pentagon whose civilian leaders walk with a warrior’s strut, but there it is. If anything, as it talks about Beijing and its ambitions, the tone is downright meek.
On burden-sharing—read, bashing America’s European allies—it is considerably more robust. The good news is that the NDS does not talk about leaving NATO, but in one simple graphic, it insists that the Europeans are so rich that they do not need us to confront Russia. As for the defense industrial base, there are three paragraphs that call for “nothing short of a mobilization” but say nothing about what that means in practice or what it will cost.
A real national defense strategy would look very different.
It would, for example, give some rough notice of the budgetary choices ahead and the bill to be paid. Golden Dome, a revitalized and expanded Navy, a renovated nuclear arsenal, a much larger defense industrial base—achieving any of these goals, much less all of them, would take serious dollars. The numbers are conspicuous by their absence.
A national defense strategy worthy of the name would discuss the Chinese military buildup, including the rapid growth of its nuclear arsenal, its spectacular naval expansion, its burgeoning space-warfare capabilities, and its hybrid warfare against Taiwan and other U.S. partners. It would refer to China as a global challenge rather than one geographically confined to the Indo-Pacific. It would consider China’s political warfare aimed at the United States and some of its allies.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Trump’s security strategy is incoherent babble]
A serious document would mention the Islamist threat in more than a passing paragraph on Africa. Day in, day out, American planes, drones, and commando teams go out and hunt terrorists across several continents. Has that threat diminished? Is it contained? Are more strikes necessary? It might also say something about the military lessons of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, which are numerous, complex, and relevant to the United States.
Discussion of European security might consist of something more than a ritual sticking-out-of-the-tongue at NATO partners; it might offer thoughtful consideration of how to maintain European security while shifting American resources elsewhere. And it would not dismiss the Ukraine war as solely a European problem.
The 2026 National Defense Strategy appears to have been drafted not by serious people but by Pentagon officials eager to curry favor with an imperious president and terrified of getting their talking points wrong. The obsequiousness, the sneers, the boasting, the vacant generalities, and the hand-waving bespeak fear of departing from the Trumpian orthodoxy of the moment. In a dangerous world, made more dangerous by foolish speeches and a wildly erratic foreign policy, it displays a disturbing lack of seriousness. The armed forces of the United States deserve far better than this.
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