US-China Watch

The US government produces two separate overviews of America’s national security and defense policies. The security document, first issued in 1987, intended to provide a broad strategic framework of foreign threat assessment, is signed by the President. The defense document, first published in 2005, is aimed more at the tactical underpinnings of the security strategy and is signed by the Secretary of Defense, who now claims to be the Secretary of War. These two documents are, in effect, intended to be two sides of the same coin.

Not so in Trump 2.0. Following release of its National Security Strategy (NSS) this past November, it has just released the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS). A comparison between these two strategic documents reveals several glaring inconsistencies:

• Threat assessment. The NSS prioritizes security in the Western Hemisphere. Drawing on a modified interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine that has been dubbed the “Donroe” Doctrine,  it emphasizes Latin America and South America. The NDS ranking of foreign threat assessment focuses, in order of threat severity, on China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea; it makes little mention of threat assessment for the Western Hemisphere.
• China. The latest NSS buries its scant mentions of China toward the end of the document; it gets just two pages (pp 19-20 out of a total of 29 pages) versus nearly five pages of higher-priority emphasis on the Western Hemisphere (pp 15-19). The NDS, by contrast, waters down US objectives on China, stressing the need to seek a “decent peace.” This is certainly a more constructive tone than that which was taken in Trump 1.0, where the 2017 NSS stated unequivocally that, “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” Biden’s 2022 NSS was even more pointed, stressing that, “The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do it.”
• Form vs. substance. With the benefit of hindsight, the twin strategy documents of Trump 1.0 were much better developed than those of Trump 2.0. It’s not just page count—55 pages for the NSS in 2017 versus 29 pages for the 2025 NSS and a mere 24 pages for the 2025 NDS. The Trump 1.0  documents provided a far more detailed articulation of the domestic foundations of national security overlayed by the foreign threats to that objective that are likely to come from the dangerous “revisionist powers” of China and Russia. Very little of that strident point of view survived in the strategy documents of 2025-26.
• Trump-centric strategy. The 2026 NDS was basically all about Trump. The Introduction featured a glossy photograph of Secretary Hegseth shaking hands with President Trump in front of a gathering of enlisted soldiers (“warriors” in the new vernacular) set against the backdrop of a huge American flag. The 24-page NDS also featured over 35 direct  references to Trump‘s name and nearly an equal number of third-person references to “The President” both as architect and owner of the military operations undertaken over the past year—namely,  Operations MIDNIGHT HAMMER (bombing Iran’s nuclear weapons production), ROUGH RIDER, (degrading the Houthis’ strike capabilities), SOUTHERN SPEAR (drone attacks on alleged narco-terrorist boats), AND ABSOLUTE RESOLVE (the extraction of President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela). (NOTE: CAPS style as dictated by the Trump Administration).
• Deal fixation. While President Trump’s deal fixation is well known, he has taken it to a new level in his second term in office. Claiming to have resolved some eight wars in 2025, a highly dubious assertion by many accounts, and having just struck a vague “concept of a framework deal” with Europe over Greenland and the Arctic region, he is now aiming for the grand prize of a major deal with China to coincide with his upcoming visit to Beijing this April. The just-released 2026 National Defense Strategy, normally reserved for tactical details, is highly enthusiastic over such a possibility. It goes so far as to stress that Trump “ …is willing to engage President Xi Jinping directly …,” on terms reflecting  “ … the wise premise of President’s Trump’s visionary and realistic approach to diplomacy with Beijing.”   Notwithstanding this self-puffery, the failed “Phase I” trade deal with China struck in early 2020 suggests that there is good reason to question the veracity of this language in the latest defense strategy document as a predictor of how effective Trump will be as a negotiator in 2026.

The recent twin efforts at providing frameworks for national security and defense are strategy-light, at best. They are more aligned with the Trump Administration’s recent geopolitical improvisations than a coherent statement of America’s rules of the road. They are general enough to allow for a wide latitude of actions—including Greenland, Venezuela, and yet another round of anti-China tariffs on Canada. However, unlike past efforts, which have largely been apolitical, the Trump Administrations latest strategy efforts  have been dominated by the President’s strident political message. It’s hard to call that a strategy.

Years ago (actually, 1996), Harvard’s Michael Porter published a seminal article, “What is Strategy?” in the Harvard Business Review. He drew a sharp contrast between long-term strategy and “operational effectiveness”—the latter being short-term tactical adjustments such as cost-cutting, aimed at boosting business profitability and share prices. While Porter’s focus, of course, was on businesses, the lessons should not be lost on the US government. The Trump Administration has failed the Porter test: It claims to have articulated a national security and defense strategy while, in fact, it has done nothing more than provide a rationale for its open-ended, opportunistic projections of geopolitical power. As Porter implied, and as I wrote in the subsequent article in the same issue of the HBR, such short-term tactics are not sustainable—and ultimately, self-defeating.