After the US administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS) last year, the US Department of War has now unveiled, one week ago, its 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) outlining the strategic priorities of the American military in the light of the strategic outlook and orientations contained in the NSS 2025.
Like the NSS, the NDS is “hemisphere-ist” and insists that the United States should dominate pretty much everything in the vast geo-strategic zone from Honolulu in the Pacific to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, in the Arctic.
The introduction to the NDS, written by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, criticises previous American administrations for not putting Americans and their concrete interests first. It adds that they squandered America’s military advantages “in grandiose nation-building projects”.
It claims that under the leadership of President Donald Trump the United States has the “world’s strongest, most lethal, and most capable military… the world has ever seen.” In what some readers will probably see as an overstatement, it also says that Trump entered office for his second term with the United States on the “precipice of disastrous wars” for which it was not ready.
According to Hegseth, the United States will now support peace through strength.
In the section of the document called “Strategic Approach,” the NDS identifies what it calls “Lines of Effort,” enumerating four. The first is to “Defend Homeland Security;” the second is to “Deter China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation;” the third is to “Increase Burden-Sharing with United States Allies and Partners;” and the fourth is to “Supercharge the United States Defence Industrial Base.”
It touches upon a pressing question from the standpoint of the limits of the American military in dealing with more than one armed conflict at the same time, a serious question for military planners not only in the United States but also within NATO and the European Union. This is dealt with in a section called “The Simultaneity Problem and Implications for Allied Burden-Sharing,” which is premised on maintaining favourable balances of power in key strategic regions such as the Indo-Pacific and the European theatres, for example.
It says that the American military will focus on Homeland Security and the Indo-Pacific, while America’s allies and partners will be expected to shoulder the primary responsibility for their own defence with “critical but more limited support from American forces.” It rejects the idea that such a strategy amounts to an American retreat into a Fortress America.
The basic objective of the first Line of Effort concerning defending the United States Homeland Security is to secure key terrain, among other objectives, in the Western Hemisphere, with this including Greenland. It states that the United States “will no longer cede access to or influence over key terrain” in this part of the world.
Moreover, the Pentagon is committed to providing the American president with a variety of options, military in nature, in order to guarantee military and commercial access to key areas in the Western Hemisphere from the “Arctic to South America, especially Greenland,” the document says.
What is interesting in this commitment is the pairing of American commercial interests with its military power. In fact, this formulation implies that the United States is prepared to use its military power to gain access to areas that present a commercial interest to the United States in the medium and long term. Greenland and the Arctic are of particular relevance in this regard.
The document promises to restore American “military dominance” in the Western Hemisphere in addition to denying “adversaries” the ability to deploy forces or what it terms “other threatening capabilities” in “our hemisphere”. It describes the above as the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”
I believe that the term “adversaries” here implicitly refers to China, whose role and presence in Latin America has been growing.
The second Line of Effort in the NDS is about how to “Deter China in the Indo-Pacific.” This will be based on a strategy that aims to “erect a strong denial defence along the First Island Chain,” a geo-strategic zone that extends from Japan to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo, coupled with creating conditions that would create a “balance of power” in the Indo-Pacific as a whole.
It is noteworthy that the document says that the objective is to allow “all of us,” meaning the United States, China, and other powers in this region, to “enjoy a decent peace,” whatever that might mean. This should be considered as a significant departure from the previous NDS issued under the Biden administration. In its National Defence Statement Strategy, released in October 2022, this stated that China’s “increasingly provocative rhetoric and coercive activity towards Taiwan are destabilising, and threaten the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait.”
It added that this was part of a “broader pattern of destabilising and coercive behaviour that stretches across the East China Sea [and] the South China Sea.”
The differences in the two NDS, the one from 2022 and the one from 2026, concerning China can be explained by differences in perspective and not in basic American strategy towards the People’s Republic of China (PCR).
Next week, I will write about Europe, Russia, and the Middle East in the 2026 National Defence Strategy and how the American position has changed in their regard compared to the positions and orientations of the 2022 document.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 February, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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