Final Friday, the U.S. Protection Division unceremoniously launched a brand new Nationwide Protection Technique (NDS). After every week of extraordinary tumult in U.S. international coverage, the doc obtained little consideration—nevertheless it’s price a re-examination, if solely as a window into the vapidity and shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s method to nationwide safety.
As is likely to be anticipated, the doc is peppered with Trumpian catchphrases, e.g., “America First,” “making America nice once more,” and restoring “warrior ethos.” The unintended comedy is compounded by its use of inscrutable phrases resembling “versatile realism” in addition to its recurrent sycophancy towards President Donald Trump’s “visionary and real looking method to diplomacy.”
Final Friday, the U.S. Protection Division unceremoniously launched a brand new Nationwide Protection Technique (NDS). After every week of extraordinary tumult in U.S. international coverage, the doc obtained little consideration—nevertheless it’s price a re-examination, if solely as a window into the vapidity and shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s method to nationwide safety.
As is likely to be anticipated, the doc is peppered with Trumpian catchphrases, e.g., “America First,” “making America nice once more,” and restoring “warrior ethos.” The unintended comedy is compounded by its use of inscrutable phrases resembling “versatile realism” in addition to its recurrent sycophancy towards President Donald Trump’s “visionary and real looking method to diplomacy.”
Extra worrisomely, this NDS proceeds from an outright false set of assertions, as when it means that the world was on the “precipice of a world struggle only a yr in the past” or claims that “U.S. entry to key terrain just like the Panama Canal and Greenland was more and more doubtful.” Past the straightforwardly unfaithful, it additionally makes suspect, closely politicized claims, as when it elevates unlawful immigration to the extent of a strategic army menace. Much less tendentious is its emphasis on deterring China within the Indo-Pacific and growing burden-sharing by allies and companions, notably in Europe.
However put apart the dishonesty and cartoonish rhetoric for a second. Our main concern about this new NDS is its slim definition of the challenges dealing with the Pentagon. Not like the 2022 NDS, the brand new doc wholly ignores one of many main stressors within the world safety setting: local weather change. It additionally has nothing to say about power logistics, that are a crucial impediment to the Joint Drive’s capability to mission energy world wide, particularly within the huge Indo-Pacific area.
Each of us beforehand served within the Protection Division, together with within the just lately disbanded Arctic and International Resilience Workplace, which was accountable for addressing the impacts of local weather change and the worldwide power transition on the division. One in all us was the lead for creating the language on local weather and power for the 2022 NDS, which acknowledged that one of many core threats dealing with the U.S. homeland, each by way of the protection of the civilian inhabitants and continuity of operations at key army installations, was local weather change.
The Pentagon’s long-standing, bipartisan concern with climate- and energy-related issues was grounded in clear-eyed serious about strategic dangers, which is in fact the aim of steering paperwork just like the NDS. The inclusion of local weather and power within the 2022 NDS was intentional, and it represented the collective work of a crew of officers and analysts drawn from throughout the division who understood that these points may not be minimized if we needed to maintain the Joint Drive’s capabilities and perceive the rising threats to stability world wide.
We acknowledged that damaging hurricanes prompted tens of billions of {dollars} in injury to Tyndall Air Drive Base, Camp Lejeune, and Offutt Air Drive Base in 2018-19 and that year-round wildfires had elevated calls for on the Nationwide Guard to help civilian authorities by almost 1,200 % between 2016 and 2021. In 2025 alone, the U.S. army deployed domestically 50 instances to handle climate-related hazards, together with activating greater than 1,800 service members to combat California’s wildfires.
With the Trump administration dismantling the Federal Emergency Administration Company, the calls for on the army for “protection help of civil authorities” will proceed to develop. You wouldn’t know that from studying this NDS, which fails to say the problem in any respect.
Local weather change can also be one of many core drivers of the surge in migration about which the Trump administration purports to be so involved. As one among us present in our analysis, drier and warmer than regular situations in Central America within the 2010s have been a key reason behind migration to the US. After all, acknowledging that time would require the doc to maneuver past soothing platitudes about “main our nation into a brand new golden age” and recognizing that not each menace may be bombed away.
The neglect of local weather change bleeds into different areas of the technique as effectively. The 2026 NDS takes a extra timid line on China than its antecedents, not defining the nation as a core strategic menace, though it nonetheless rightly prioritizes deterring China from dominating the Indo-Pacific. Nonetheless, the doc fails to say that one of many key threats within the area—certainly the menace the US’ would-be companions are most involved with—is local weather change.
Many U.S. army amenities are situated on low-lying and weak islands, so local weather change threatens army posture all through the Indo-Pacific. U.S. army installations on Guam and the Kwajalein Atoll incurred billions of {dollars} in damages from typhoons and excessive waves in 2023 and 2024. The consequences of local weather change additionally pose existential dangers to a number of Pacific island nations. For nations such because the Marshall Islands, which hosts key U.S. property for testing missile protection and satellite tv for pc surveillance pursuant to its Compact of Free Affiliation with the US, sea degree rise is a much more urgent menace than China.
After we served within the division, we advocated that the US wanted to do extra to help its allies and companions in constructing capability to face up to climate-related threats, on the idea that this might make them extra keen and in a position to work with the US on the problems it cared about, specifically countering Chinese language efforts to remodel the area into its personal sphere of affect. Nonetheless, one among Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first acts was to get rid of a small congressionally mandated initiative we oversaw, the Protection Operational Resilience Worldwide Cooperation program, which was meant to ramp up U.S. help for the resilience of allies and companions over time.
Much more curious than the omission of climate-related threats is the absence of any point out of power within the 2026 NDS. The doc does emphasize rebuilding the protection industrial base, however there was no point out of the challenges related to enhancing power resilience, accessing and processing crucial minerals required for contemporary protection platforms, or investing in power storage options that would cut back provide line vulnerability in a Pacific struggle combat. Not like in Afghanistan and Iraq, the place gas could possibly be hauled in over land—albeit at a profound fiscal and human price—a army confrontation within the Pacific would require extra environment friendly operational power use, together with by way of the deployment of drones and hybrid autos at scale.
Whereas the Trump administration is making investments in home mineral manufacturing, and even taking fairness stakes in U.S. mining firms, its total method to securing battery provide chains is incoherent. The Protection Division beforehand sought to align its battery necessities with the civilian manufacturing sector, the place greater than 99 % of battery demand originates , however the administration is destroying home battery demand due to its hostility to electrical autos, which has price the U.S. auto sector greater than $25 billion.
These strikes have undermined a core driver of U.S. industrial resilience and undercut the potential for creating a home supply for the battery parts the army requires. This method leaves the US, but once more, beholden to Beijing, which gained’t be afraid to train this leverage in case of rising tensions.
The failure to acknowledge the safety implications of local weather change is especially surreal with regards to the Arctic. The Trump administration has antagonized long-standing allies by threatening to annex Greenland and Canada, nominally over considerations round Arctic safety. What goes unmentioned within the NDS is that Greenland’s rising strategic significance is a results of local weather change, which is melting sea ice within the Arctic and turning the area right into a zone of rising competitors, with Russia and China more and more jockeying for entry to newly accessible sea lanes and assets.
The brand new NDS exhorts the US’ European allies and companions to chip in for their very own protection even because the Trump administration is pressuring them to desert the local weather and clear power commitments that might improve their safety and self-reliance. As we now have argued elsewhere, with Europe now depending on U.S. liquefied pure fuel, the continent has successfully traded vulnerability to power coercion by Russia for vulnerability to coercion from the US, as final week’s proceedings on the World Financial Discussion board painfully demonstrated.
The administration’s considering, exemplified by Trump aide Stephen Miller’s crass statements about American energy, is that U.S. allies don’t have any choices however to bend to Washington’s will and settle for no matter it calls for of them. The NDS reinforces this message. Traditionally, allies and companions have stood with the US willingly due to shared menace perceptions and pursuits. This NDS affords little by way of a shared imaginative and prescient for collective protection and will drive lots of them nearer to China because of this.
This new NDS purports to be all about “hardnosed realism.” But when ideology drives you to disregard key threats to your targets, then your technique devolves into wishful considering. As one hears so typically when working with the army, hope shouldn’t be a method.
