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. overseas coverage, the doc obtained little consideration—nevertheless it’s value a re-evaluation, if solely as a window into the vapidity and shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s method to nationwide safety.
As is perhaps anticipated, the doc is peppered with Trumpian catchphrases, e.g., “America First,” “making America nice once more,” and restoring “warrior ethos.” The unintentional comedy is compounded by its use of inscrutable phrases similar to “versatile realism” in addition to its recurrent sycophancy towards President Donald Trump’s “visionary and life like 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. overseas coverage, the doc obtained little consideration—nevertheless it’s value a re-evaluation, if solely as a window into the vapidity and shortsightedness of the Trump administration’s method to nationwide safety.
As is perhaps anticipated, the doc is peppered with Trumpian catchphrases, e.g., “America First,” “making America nice once more,” and restoring “warrior ethos.” The unintentional comedy is compounded by its use of inscrutable phrases similar to “versatile realism” in addition to its recurrent sycophancy towards President Donald Trump’s “visionary and life like 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 battle only a 12 months 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 navy menace. Much less tendentious is its emphasis on deterring China within the Indo-Pacific and growing burden-sharing by allies and companions, significantly in Europe.
However put apart the dishonesty and cartoonish rhetoric for a second. Our main concern about this new NDS is its slender definition of the challenges going through the Pentagon. In contrast to the 2022 NDS, the brand new doc wholly ignores one of many main stressors within the international safety setting: local weather change. It additionally has nothing to say about power logistics, that are a essential impediment to the Joint Pressure’s capability to undertaking energy around the globe, 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 World Resilience Workplace, which was liable for addressing the impacts of local weather change and the worldwide power transition on the division. One in every of 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 going through the U.S. homeland, each by way of the security of the civilian inhabitants and continuity of operations at key navy installations, was local weather change.
The Pentagon’s long-standing, bipartisan concern with climate- and energy-related issues was grounded in clear-eyed excited about strategic dangers, which is after all 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 staff of officers and analysts drawn from throughout the division who understood that these points may not be minimized if we wished to maintain the Joint Pressure’s capabilities and perceive the rising threats to stability around the globe.
We acknowledged that harmful hurricanes brought on tens of billions of {dollars} in injury to Tyndall Air Pressure Base, Camp Lejeune, and Offutt Air Pressure Base in 2018-19 and that year-round wildfires had elevated calls for on the Nationwide Guard to assist civilian authorities by almost 1,200 p.c between 2016 and 2021. In 2025 alone, the U.S. navy deployed domestically 50 occasions to handle climate-related hazards, together with activating greater than 1,800 service members to battle California’s wildfires.
With the Trump administration dismantling the Federal Emergency Administration Company, the calls for on the navy for “protection assist of civil authorities” will proceed to develop. You wouldn’t know that from studying this NDS, which fails to say the difficulty 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 considered one of us present in our analysis, drier and warmer than regular situations in Central America within the 2010s have been a key reason for 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 could be bombed away.
The neglect of local weather change bleeds into different areas of the technique as properly. 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. navy services are situated on low-lying and weak islands, so local weather change threatens navy posture all through the Indo-Pacific. U.S. navy 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 international locations such because the Marshall Islands, which hosts key U.S. belongings for testing missile protection and satellite tv for pc surveillance pursuant to its Compact of Free Affiliation with the US, sea stage rise is a much more urgent menace than China.
Once we served within the division, we advocated that the US wanted to do extra to assist its allies and companions in constructing capability to resist climate-related threats, on the speculation that this is able to 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, considered one of 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 supposed to ramp up U.S. assist 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 essential minerals required for contemporary protection platforms, or investing in power storage options that would scale back provide line vulnerability in a Pacific battle battle. In contrast to in Afghanistan and Iraq, the place gas may very well be hauled in over land—albeit at a profound fiscal and human price—a navy confrontation within the Pacific would require extra environment friendly operational power use, together with by 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 corporations, its general 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 p.c 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 navy requires. This method leaves the US, but once more, beholden to Beijing, which received’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 on the subject of 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 sources.
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 may improve their safety and self-reliance. As we’ve 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 pondering, 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 provides 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 pondering. As one hears so typically when working with the navy, hope isn’t a technique.
