WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s newly released 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) marks a major rhetorical and strategic shift toward an explicit “America First” framework, elevating Homeland defense and Western Hemisphere dominance above other missions while pressing allies to assume primary responsibility for conventional defense in Europe, the Middle East, and on the Korean Peninsula.
n its opening sections, the document frames the current environment as unusually dangerous and argues that the United States must prioritize threats “that matter most” to Americans’ security and prosperity. The strategy lists four “lines of effort,” led by defending the U.S. Homeland and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through “strength, not confrontation.”
On Homeland defense, the NDS explicitly ties the Defense Department to border enforcement—calling border security “national security” and pledging coordination with the Department of Homeland Security to “seal” borders and deport undocumented immigrants. It also highlights the “Golden Dome for America” concept for air and missile defense and places renewed emphasis on countering unmanned aerial threats, cyber defense, and nuclear deterrence.
The document also underscores a Western Hemisphere posture—vowing to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to “key terrain,” including the Panama Canal, the “Gulf of America,” and Greenland, and describing a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.
In the Indo-Pacific, the strategy says the United States will build a “denial defense” along the First Island Chain while expanding military-to-military engagement with China focused on “deconfliction and de-escalation,” describing a goal of strength without seeking to “dominate” or “humiliate” Beijing.
A central logic for the shift, according to the NDS, is the risk of simultaneous crises across theaters. The document warns that adversaries could act in “coordinated or opportunistic” ways in multiple regions—and argues that decades of allied underinvestment made that problem worse.
To address that, the NDS leans heavily on allied burden-sharing, saying U.S. allies should take primary responsibility for “their own defense” in Europe, the Middle East, and Korea with “critical but more limited” U.S. support. It cites a new spending benchmark tied to NATO’s Hague summit—5% of GDP total (3.5% core defense plus 1.5% security-related)—and says Washington will advocate that standard globally, not just in Europe.
In Europe, the strategy argues that NATO’s European members have sufficient latent power—pointing to their economic scale and population relative to Russia—and says the U.S. will remain engaged but must prioritize Homeland defense and China.
News coverage of the release has similarly characterized the blueprint as urging allies to “handle their own security,” while re-centering U.S. defense posture on the Western Hemisphere
