The 2026 US National Defense Strategy (NDS) claims to chart a path toward a “new golden age of America” through renewed strength.
A Strategy Without a Future
The most striking feature of the 2026 NDS is not its focus on China, Russia, or military readiness, but its absence of a positive vision for the international order that the US claims to defend. The document describes a world defined by danger, free-riding, and declining discipline among allies. It does not, however, articulate what kind of political, economic, or institutional future American leadership is meant to sustain.
Instead of outlining how alliances will be renewed or institutions re-legitimized, the NDS frames the international system as an arena of constant contest in which compliance with US interests must be enforced. Allies appear less as stakeholders in a shared order than as variables to be managed. This is not the language of confident leadership. It is the language of strategic anxiety.
That anxiety is evident in the way the strategy treats the erosion of US influence as a problem of insufficient toughness rather than of declining trust. In that sense, the NDS is strategically blinding Washington’s policymakers. Where earlier eras of American strategy sought to bind allies more closely with the US through rules, predictability, and institutional voice, the NDS assumes that leverage and conditionality can substitute for consent. In doing so, it mistakes symptoms for causes and offers a cure that worsens the disease.
Allies as a Liability, not a foundation
Nowhere is this shift clearer than in the strategy’s treatment of US allies. The NDS repeatedly criticises past administrations for encouraging “dependence” rather than responsibility, arguing that allies have weakened American security through free-riding. Burden-sharing is presented not as a negotiated objective but as an obligation to be enforced. It overlooks the fact that the so-called “dependence” of Europe on the US was a key factor sustaining US dominance throughout the Cold War and later.
Therefore, the proposed remedy—making US support selective, conditional, and transactional—undermines the very alliances Washington itself depended on and still depends on for leverage. The message is unmistakable: American protection is no longer a stable guarantee but a revocable privilege. For allies, this is not an incentive to align more closely with Washington; it is a signal to hedge, or diversify, or reduce dependence on the US and become autonomous. This thinking is spreading fast across Europe, both in the public arena and amongst policymakers.
Ultimately, the NDS will only further the breakdown of the US-led alliance of ‘the West.’ The result is already visible. Canada’s diversification of economic and strategic ties, framed as reducing overdependence on the US, is one example. European debates about “strategic autonomy” are another. These are not acts of defiance; they are rational responses to uncertainty created in Washington.
Retrenchment That Empowers Rivals
The NDS also reflects a narrow and ultimately self-defeating approach to retrenchment. By signalling reduced commitment to Europe while concentrating resources on the Indo-Pacific, Washington seeks to manage overextension. Yet it does so without a credible plan for sustaining stability in the regions it deprioritizes.
Power vacuums do not remain empty. As US attention and reassurance recede, others move in. Russia benefits directly from a weaker American role in Europe, especially along NATO’s periphery. Without active US involvement, NATO loses its expansionist agenda. Without active US support, the EU will be more open to engaging with Russia. China, too, benefits more subtly but more broadly, expanding its economic, technological, and diplomatic presence wherever US engagement becomes conditional or unreliable.
Even the EU itself—often portrayed as a dependent actor—emerges as an unintended beneficiary. Faced with an increasingly transactional US, European leaders are accelerating efforts to diversify partnerships and reduce strategic vulnerability. Germany’s deepening industrial ties with China, particularly in electric vehicles and battery supply chains, illustrate this trend. These decisions reflect discomfort with Washington’s unpredictability, not enthusiasm for Beijing, but the outcome still favors China.
Ironically, the NDS itself acknowledges that past US disengagement allowed rivals to gain influence in regions like Latin America. Yet the 2026 strategy repeats the same mistake, assuming that selective retrenchment can occur without systemic consequences.
A Strategy That Undermines Itself
What ultimately unites these elements is a deeper contradiction at the heart of the 2026 NDS. The strategy seeks to preserve American primacy while dismantling the relational foundations that made that primacy durable. This is not a strategy of renewal; it is a strategy of managed decline. By accelerating allied hedging, encouraging rival expansion, and normalizing force as the primary instrument of policy, the NDS weakens US interests in the name of defending them.
If the document is a confession of anything, it is not of strength but of uncertainty. Washington appears unsure of the future it wants to lead and increasingly unable to persuade others to follow. The danger is not only that the US may become more willing to use force abroad, but that it will do so from a position of diminishing legitimacy and shrinking coalitions. In such a world, American power does not stabilise order, even rhetorically, as had been the case since 1945. Rather, it destabilises it. That instability will, going forward, hurt America more than any other state simply because of the global scale of its interests, turning its larger footprint into a very large source of vulnerability.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
