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........

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