IN THE COMING WEEKS, the Department of Defense will produce its quadrennial National Defense Strategy (NDS). The legally mandated document is at once an arcane bureaucratic text and one that may determine whether the United States can meet its national security objectives during the most threatening period since World War II.
Last year, we led a bipartisan congressionalcommission—made up of eight experts appointed equally by both parties in Congress—to evaluate the most recent NDS, which was released in 2022. Our key recommendations were unanimous, and many members of Congress from both parties have embraced many of them. But we have grave concerns that the Trump administration’s new NDS will ignore significant threats to U.…
IN THE COMING WEEKS, the Department of Defense will produce its quadrennial National Defense Strategy (NDS). The legally mandated document is at once an arcane bureaucratic text and one that may determine whether the United States can meet its national security objectives during the most threatening period since World War II.
Last year, we led a bipartisan congressionalcommission—made up of eight experts appointed equally by both parties in Congress—to evaluate the most recent NDS, which was released in 2022. Our key recommendations were unanimous, and many members of Congress from both parties have embraced many of them. But we have grave concerns that the Trump administration’s new NDS will ignore significant threats to U.S. security.
The NDS is the definitive guidance for the millions of military and civilian men and women in the Department of Defense. It is read by every U.S. flag and general officer, agency head, procurement official, strategist, and defense contractor; it also has readers across the capitals of our foreign allies and adversaries. The document lays out priorities, signals the direction of acquisition contracts, and guides decisions on where to deploy our forces.
Released during Trump’s first administration, the 2018 NDS rightly emphasized the return of great power conflict. In 2022, the next NDS named China as the “pacing threat” against which the U.S. military should be measured. It urged DoD to downsize its commitments and accept risk in the Middle East and Europe while significantly decreasing its presence in Africa and Latin America, all in order to focus attention on deterring Chinese aggression.
Our national defense strategy commission took issue with that approach, and our concerns continue to be borne out: The world has grown far more dangerous since 2022. America now faces an unprecedented convergence of aligned adversaries: a protracted Russian war in Ukraine, an emboldened Iran and North Korea, and a more coercive China. The 2022 NDS underestimated how quickly these regimes would coordinate and how inadequate a single-theater force was quickly becoming. We argued that the next NDS must replace that model with one ready for simultaneous competition—and possible conflict—across Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.
Yet it is all but certain that the forthcoming 2026 NDS will take a different turn. Some early reports suggested it would establish a strategy focused almost entirely on homeland and hemispheric defense. Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth clarified that it will reaffirm China as a key challenge but also redirect significant attention and resources toward the Western Hemisphere—an approach consistent with the recent “narcoterrorism”-related deployments in the Caribbean and administration rhetoric about focusing “closer to home” and on “internal threats.”
Either of these strategies would be a serious mistake that runs counter to the unanimous bipartisan recommendations of our commission. By narrowing our aperture to this hemisphere, we would fail to resource and posture the United States to properly meet simultaneous challenges in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific—a scenario our commission explicitly warned could become a multi-theater conflict if deterrence fails.
As our commission laid out in its report, the United States faces potential conflict in at least these three theaters from adversaries and competitors who are increasingly aligned. We see a growing departure from our recent past, which was characterized by isolated and lower-level conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans, in extensive new collaborations between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—today in Ukraine, perhaps tomorrow in East Asia. A future conflict with any one of our primary adversaries risks becoming a multi-theater war with many fronts.
A recentanalysis demonstrates that without sustained U.S. involvement Iran might easily have overwhelmed Israel in their twelve-day war earlier this year, and it could have significantly depleted both Israeli and U.S. defensive weapons. It recommends the United States transition its temporary integrated air and missile defense arrangement with Israel into “a formal, permanent network” in the region.
Vladimir Putin has demonstrated time and time again that Russia remains a persistent threat to Europe. It continues to operate on a full wartime mobilization level of effort, producing more munitions, drones, tanks, and other equipment than Ukraine, the United States, and our NATO partners combined. Talk of rewarding Russia with Ukrainian land in the Donbas will not placate Moscow; it will feed Putin’s appetite and increase the threat against NATO’s eastern flank. It will also encourage China and North Korea to conclude that aggression pays.
Keep up with all our articles, newsletters, podcasts, and livestreams—and take control of which ones show up in your inbox:
OUR COMMISSION ALSO CONCLUDED that the U.S. government has failed to integrate all elements of American national power: defense, diplomacy, economic investment, and intelligence, plus leveraging and strengthening our relationships with partners and allies. The Trump administration does not share this conclusion, at least judging from the rapid and devastating cuts it has made to most of these important tools of national security.
More in World
The elimination of USAID as a functional entity and the abdication of our decades-long leadership investing in infrastructure, democracy, and humanitarian aid around the world drains our influence and weakens partnerships. The administration’s devotion to tariffs is straining the alliances we need to fight wars. Its politicization of intelligence will yield worse analysis. The ongoing purge of capable, accomplished leaders across our security establishment means that the Defense Department’s ability to innovate and accelerate adoption of critical technology will be impeded. For all its other flaws, the reconciliation bill (the “One Big Beautiful Bill”) passed by Congress makes important investments in munitions, shipbuilding, critical minerals, and rebuilding the defense industrial base. While it doesn’t provide the necessary level of defense spending over the longer term, it marks a start in addressing the backlog. And unfortunately, the reconciliation bill ignores the warning voiced by our commission and many others over the years about the national security threat from the unsustainable and growing national debt.
The United States faces challenging and complex security threats. The strategic option reportedly being pursued by this administration—a combination of “all-in” on China with a return to hemispheric dominance—will not meet the moment. Having the right National Defense Strategy to position the United States doesn’t guarantee success, but the wrong one guarantees a reduction in U.S. power and a diminishment of its role in the world.
Jane Harman and Eric Edelman served as chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which released a unanimous, bipartisan report in July 2024. Harman, appointed to the commission by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a former nine-term congresswoman from California and former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Edelman, appointed to the commission by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, was previously ambassador to Turkey and Finland and under secretary of defense for policy. He is a cohost of Shield of the Republic, a Bulwark podcast.