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Last Friday, the U.S. Defense Department unceremoniously released a new National Defense Strategy<\/a> (NDS). After a week of extraordinary tumult in U.S. foreign policy, the document received little attention\u2014but it\u2019s worth a second look, if only as a window into the vapidity and shortsightedness of the Trump administration\u2019s approach to national security.<\/p>\n As might be expected, the document is peppered with Trumpian catchphrases, e.g., \u201cAmerica First,\u201d \u201cmaking America great again,\u201d and restoring \u201cwarrior ethos.\u201d The accidental comedy is compounded by its use of inscrutable phrases such as \u201cflexible realism\u201d as well as its recurrent sycophancy toward President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cvisionary and realistic approach to diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Last Friday, the U.S. Defense Department unceremoniously released a new National Defense Strategy<\/a> (NDS). After a week of extraordinary tumult in U.S. foreign policy, the document received little attention\u2014but it\u2019s worth a second look, if only as a window into the vapidity and shortsightedness of the Trump administration\u2019s approach to national security.<\/p>\n As might be expected, the document is peppered with Trumpian catchphrases, e.g., \u201cAmerica First,\u201d \u201cmaking America great again,\u201d and restoring \u201cwarrior ethos.\u201d The accidental comedy is compounded by its use of inscrutable phrases such as \u201cflexible realism\u201d as well as its recurrent sycophancy toward President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cvisionary and realistic approach to diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n More worrisomely, this NDS proceeds from an outright false set of assertions, as when it suggests that the world was on the \u201cprecipice of a world war just a year ago\u201d or claims that \u201cU.S. access to key terrain like the Panama Canal and Greenland was increasingly in doubt.\u201d Beyond the straightforwardly untrue, it also makes suspect, heavily politicized claims, as when it elevates illegal immigration to the level of a strategic military threat. Less tendentious is its emphasis on deterring China in the Indo-Pacific and increasing burden-sharing by allies and partners, particularly in Europe.<\/p>\n But put aside the dishonesty and cartoonish rhetoric for a moment. Our primary concern about this new NDS is its narrow definition of the challenges facing the Pentagon. Unlike the 2022 NDS<\/a>, the new document wholly ignores one of the primary stressors in the global security environment: climate change. It also has nothing to say about energy logistics, which are a critical obstacle to the Joint Force\u2019s capacity to project power around the world, especially in the vast Indo-Pacific region.<\/p>\n Both of us previously served in the Defense Department, including in the recently disbanded<\/a> Arctic and Global Resilience Office<\/a>, which was responsible for addressing the impacts of climate change and the global energy transition on the department. One of us was the lead for developing the language on climate and energy for the 2022 NDS, which recognized that one of the core threats facing the U.S. homeland, both in terms of the safety of the civilian population and continuity of operations at key military installations, was climate change.<\/p>\n The Pentagon\u2019s long-standing, bipartisan concern with climate- and energy-related matters was grounded in clear-eyed thinking about strategic risks, which is of course the purpose of guidance documents like the NDS. The inclusion of climate and energy in the 2022 NDS was intentional, and it represented the collective work of a team of officers and analysts drawn from across the department who understood that these issues could no longer be minimized if we wanted to sustain the Joint Force\u2019s capabilities and understand the growing threats to stability around the world.<\/p>\n We recognized that destructive hurricanes caused<\/a> tens of billions of dollars in damage to Tyndall Air Force Base, Camp Lejeune, and Offutt Air Force Base in 2018-19 and that year-round wildfires had increased demands<\/a> on the National Guard to support civilian authorities by nearly 1,200 percent between 2016 and 2021. In 2025 alone, the U.S. military deployed<\/a> domestically 50 times to address climate-related hazards, including activating<\/a> more than 1,800 service members to fight California\u2019s wildfires.<\/p>\n With the Trump administration dismantling<\/a> the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the demands on the military for \u201cdefense support of civil authorities<\/a>\u201d will continue to grow. You wouldn\u2019t know that from reading this NDS, which fails to mention the issue at all.<\/p>\n Climate change is also one of the core drivers of the surge in migration about which the Trump administration purports to be so concerned. As one of us found in our research<\/a>, drier and hotter than normal conditions in Central America in the 2010s were a key cause of migration to the United States. Of course, acknowledging that point would require the document to move beyond soothing platitudes about \u201cleading our nation into a new golden age\u201d and recognizing that not every threat can be bombed away.<\/p>\n The neglect of climate change bleeds into other areas of the strategy as well. The 2026 NDS takes a more timid line on China than its antecedents, no longer defining the country as a core strategic threat, although it still rightly prioritizes deterring China from dominating the Indo-Pacific. However, the document fails to mention that one of the key threats in the region\u2014indeed the threat the United States\u2019 would-be partners are most concerned<\/a> with\u2014is climate change.<\/p>\n Many U.S. military facilities are located on low-lying and vulnerable islands, so climate change threatens military posture throughout the Indo-Pacific. U.S. military installations on Guam<\/a> and the Kwajalein Atoll<\/a> incurred billions of dollars in damages from typhoons and extreme waves in 2023 and 2024. The effects of climate change also pose existential risks to several Pacific island nations. For countries such as the Marshall Islands, which hosts key U.S. assets for testing missile defense and satellite surveillance pursuant to its Compact of Free Association<\/a> with the United States, sea level rise is a far more pressing threat than China.<\/p>\n When we served in the department, we advocated that the United States needed to do more to support its allies and partners in building capacity to withstand climate-related threats, on the theory that this would make them more willing and able to work with the United States on the issues it cared about, namely countering Chinese efforts to transform the region into its own sphere of influence. However, one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s first acts was to eliminate a small congressionally mandated initiative<\/a> we oversaw, the Defense Operational Resilience International Cooperation<\/a> program, which was intended to ramp up U.S. support for the resilience of allies and partners over time.<\/p>\n Even more curious than the omission of climate-related threats is the absence of any mention of energy in the 2026 NDS. The document does emphasize rebuilding the defense industrial base, but there was no mention of the challenges associated with enhancing energy resilience, accessing and processing critical minerals required for modern defense platforms, or investing in energy storage solutions that would reduce supply line vulnerability in a Pacific war fight. Unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, where fuel could be hauled in over land\u2014albeit at a profound fiscal and human cost\u2014a military confrontation in the Pacific would require more efficient operational energy use, including through the deployment of drones<\/a> and hybrid<\/a> vehicles at scale.<\/p>\n While the Trump administration is making<\/a> investments in domestic mineral production, and even taking equity stakes in U.S. mining companies, its overall approach to securing battery supply chains is incoherent. The Defense Department previously sought to align its battery requirements<\/a> with the civilian manufacturing sector, where more than 99 percent of battery demand<\/a> originates , but the administration is destroying domestic battery demand because of its hostility to electric vehicles, which has cost<\/a> the U.S. auto sector more than $25 billion.<\/p>\n These moves have undermined a core driver of U.S. industrial resilience and undercut the potential for developing a domestic source for the battery components the military requires. This approach leaves the United States, yet again, beholden to Beijing, which won\u2019t be afraid to exercise<\/a> this leverage in case of growing tensions.<\/p>\n The failure to acknowledge the security implications of climate change is particularly surreal when it comes to the Arctic. The Trump administration has antagonized long-standing allies by threatening to annex Greenland<\/a> and Canada<\/a>, nominally over concerns around Arctic security. What goes unmentioned in the NDS is that Greenland\u2019s growing strategic importance is a result of climate change, which is melting sea ice in the Arctic and turning the region into a zone of growing competition, with Russia and China increasingly jockeying for access to newly accessible sea lanes and resources.<\/p>\n The new NDS exhorts the United States\u2019 European allies and partners to chip in for their own defense even as the Trump administration is pressuring them to abandon the climate and clean energy commitments that would enhance their security and self-reliance. As we have argued elsewhere<\/a>, with Europe now dependent on U.S. liquefied natural gas, the continent has effectively traded vulnerability to energy coercion by Russia for vulnerability to coercion from the United States, as last week\u2019s proceedings at the World Economic Forum painfully demonstrated.<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s thinking, exemplified by Trump aide Stephen Miller\u2019s crass statements about American power<\/a>, is that U.S. allies have no options but to bend to Washington\u2019s will and accept whatever it demands of them. The NDS reinforces this message. Historically, allies and partners have stood with the United States willingly because of shared threat perceptions and interests. This NDS offers little in terms of a shared vision for collective defense and may drive many of them<\/a> closer to China as a result.<\/p>\n This new NDS purports to be all about \u201chardnosed realism.\u201d But if ideology drives you to ignore key threats to your objectives, then your strategy devolves into wishful thinking. As one hears so often when working with the military, hope is not a strategy.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n