Human Security Centre Human Rights and International Security Research
By Dr Rowan Allport, Deputy Director
25 February, 2026
The release of the nonclassified summary of the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) has prompted headlines that portray it as representing a major shift in the U.S. approach to its military stance, with POLITICO claiming the “Pentagon no longer views China threat as top priority.” Yet by comparing the prioritization of threats to those in the Trump 1.0 2018 and Biden 2022 NDS, it is apparent that despite very real divergences in emphasis and tone between these documents, the through-lines of American defense strategy, including the posture toward China, remain intact. Indeed, there is a remarkable degree of policy consistency going right back to the dawn of the century.
Claims of a renewed focus on domestic defense have drawn the greatest amount of attention from commentators. Yet the 2026 edition’s emphasis on this matter is far less of a drastic departure than claimed, with both previous NDS placing homeland security at the top of their objectives list. Indeed, the War on Terror era brought forth a major homeland defense effort that remains ongoing to this day despite the headlines of the time focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq. But while the 2026 NDS gives broadened attention to perceived threats to the homeland, including migration and “narco-terrorism,” it is a more straightforward military attack against the U.S. that dominates in terms of new resource allocation. Notably, the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system is the most high-profile homeland defense initiative, framed as addressing a full spectrum of threats, including those from Eastern Hemisphere opponents such as China.
There is also a wider emphasis on the homeland-adjacent Western Hemisphere. Yet actions such as those against Venezuela are best understood as parts of efforts to undermine allies of hostile actors across the ocean including Beijing rather than as purely regional matters. Much of the homeland defense component of the new NDS can, therefore, best be seen as an attempt to reduce the scope for coercion by an opponent against domestic U.S. security in order to broaden options for power projection further afield.
Both predecessor NDS editions pointed to China and Russia as the leading threats to the U.S., with the Biden-era document identifying the PRC as the “pacing challenge” while demoting Russia to an “acute threat.” The 2026 NDS’ description of Moscow’s conventional forces as a “persistent but manageable” menace to Eastern European members of NATO (while acknowledging the nuclear threat posed to the U.S. homeland) continues an established trajectory of demotion from great power to regional. China now stands alone as “the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century.”
As I examine in my book War Plan Taiwan: OPLAN 5077 and the U.S. Struggle for the Pacific, warnings about the potential and later real threat posed by Beijing have grown louder in U.S. defense policy documents dating back to the beginning of this century. While the ‘Pivot to Asia’ is most strongly perceived to be the work of the Obama administration, contemporary U.S. rebalancing to the Pacific goes back to the early 2000s. Even during the 1990s, U.S. analysts recognized that the period of unchallenged U.S. dominance would be limited, and that China was an obvious candidate to present the next major threat.
In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, the DoD undertook a series of studies and reviews that came to envisage a shift in emphasis away from Europe and towards the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, existing U.S. contingency planning surrounding the defense of Taiwan – arguably the most volatile flashpoint between Washington and Beijing – was upgraded, and was led by what became Operations Plan (OPLAN) 5077. While the War on Terror raged, initiatives including the deployment of sixty percent of the U.S. attack submarine force to the Pacific were taken forward. Furthermore, the re-development of military facilities on the U.S. territory of Guam proceeded, and additional forces were deployed to the island, with additional enhancements including those to U.S. military posture in Hawaii and Alaska. These moves and other initiatives were in no small part the result of the ability of China to erode the capacity of the U.S. to project power into the Western Pacific and operate in the theater – a concept which became popularly known as anti-access and area denial (A2/AD). The 2018 NDS explicitly pivoted from the post-9/11 focus on counterterrorism to great power competition, and the 2026 NDS continues this trend by painting China as the leading threat.
The fate of the Atlantic Alliance has drawn much attention. While the 2018 and 2022 NDS both retained strong commitments to Europe, the current edition points to a pullback of all but undefined “critical but more limited U.S. support” despite a commitment that the U.S. will continue to play a “vital role” in NATO. Yet from a continuity perspective, this is less important than the reasoning behind it. It is evident from the 2026 NDS that the current U.S. thinking is focused on the risk of having to fight two major conflicts at once – framed as the “Simultaneity Problem.” This is not an ideological posture, but one of empirical reality – if China really is the greatest threat the U.S. has faced since the British Empire, it is not practical to posture in a way that implicitly assumes a major conflict with Russia in Eastern Europe or the Middle East can be fought in parallel to one in the Pacific against Beijing. But this was a realization reached by the U.S. over a decade ago. After attempting to sustain (but slowly watering down) a force planning model intended for simultaneously fighting two regional powers, such as Iraq and North Korea, in the post-Cold War era, in the 2010s, this position was abandoned in favour of a single great power war force model. The explicit statement in the 2026 NDS that “as U.S. forces focus on Homeland defense and the Indo-Pacific, our allies and partners elsewhere will take primary responsibility for their own defense with critical but more limited support from American forces” is not only the most explicit statement of U.S. strategy in the document, but also the natural endpoint of a long-running policy trajectory.
A significant departure from immediate predecessor NDSs is the tone with which the China threat is addressed. “Strategic competition” is out – at least rhetorically. There are calls for a “decent peace”, “deconfliction and de-escalation” and to “deter China in the Pacific through strength, not confrontation”. Yet there are two factors at play that count against this shift being meaningful. Firstly, it is reported that the initial NDS draft was framed more aggressively against China, and was dialed down for reasons of wishing to improve economic relations. Secondly, the modifications to the language used are far less significant than they may appear. Calls “to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate us or our allies” is less reconciliation than it is a demand that the status quo that benefits the U.S. in the Western Pacific be maintained, and the caveat to the offer of a “decent peace” – that it should be “on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept” – does not ring of generosity. Indeed, it has been speculated that what passes for diplomacy may be an attempt to buy time to act on the NDS’s call to “supercharge the defense industrial base” to counter issues such as munitions shortfalls and shipyard capacity constraints in order to put the U.S. in a better position to fight and win.
Central to the reality of the present U.S. posture in the Pacific is the matter of Taiwan. The 2018 NDS does not mention Taiwan by name, but its content left little doubt that preventing forcible unification of Taiwan by China is a critical objective (this was later made explicit in a declassified document on then contemporary U.S. Pacific strategy). In contrast, the 2022 NDS speaks openly about Taiwan, calling out China’s hostile actions and stating “The PRC’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and coercive activity towards Taiwan are destabilizing, risk miscalculation, and threaten the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait” and calls for supporting “Taiwan’s asymmetric self-defense commensurate with the evolving PRC threat.”
Surprisingly, given the explicit calls for “reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible,” in the 2025 National Security Strategy that preceded it, there is no mention of the country in the new NDS. Even more notable is that the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance from March 2025 reportedly states that “China is the Department’s sole pacing threat, and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan – while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.” Yet the NDS’ requirement to “erect a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” is impossible to accomplish without Taiwan’s inclusion. The absence of a specific place name, presumably to sooth Beijing makes little difference to the desired endstate. Recent large U.S. arms sales authorizations by the current administration for Taiwan, most of which are the type of asymmetric systems the U.S. has repeatedly called for Taipei to purchase to fend off invasion as part of a strategy of denial, supports this argument.
While the tonal change in the content of the new NDS compared to its predecessors is undeniable, the substance is far from radical. Although such strategies and similar documents are not prescriptive to administration decisions, they do guide the planning that shapes day-to-day White House policy options and act to signals to allies and parters. In this context, it should be regarded as less of a historical break than some headlines suggest.
