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A Note On the 2026 US National Defense Strategy and Extended Deterrence

What does the NDS have to say about nuclear weapons and the nuclear environment facing the United States? Turns out, not much.

Ankit Panda, Jan 25, 2026, https://panda.substack.com/p/a-note-on-the-2026-us-national-defense?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=10286&post_id=185656884&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The Trump administration’s unclassified summary of the National Defense Strategy (notably, they can’t call it a National “War” Strategy, by statute) is here (PDF). It released on a Friday evening, after 5 p.m.. My understanding is that the classified version has been complete for about a couple months now and this unclassified summary was going through reframing after the release of last month’s much-discussed National Security Strategy. Anyway, it’s here now, so let’s talk about it.

Much ink will be spilled elsewhere on what this document tells us about the United States’ defense priorities as the Trump administration continues to take a sledgehammer to longstanding principles of U.S. grand strategy. I want to focus on how nuclear policy-minded readers should approach this document.

If you haven’t heard, this administration is not planning on publishing a Nuclear Posture Review, which is not currently required by law, unlike the NDS. The 2026 NDS itself has very little to say on nuclear weapons. Page 17 contains this bullet, which sums up nearly the totality of what this document has to say about U.S. nuclear forces and policy:

“Modernise and adapt U.S forces: The United States requires a strong, secure and effective nuclear arsenal adapted to the nation’s overall and defense strategies. We will modernise and adapt our nuclear forces accordingly with focussed attention on deterrence and escalation management amidst the changing global nuclear landscape. The United State should never – will never- be left vulnerable to nuclear blackmail.”

Note the lack of any mention of the role of U.S. nuclear weapons or declaratory policy. Insofar as the role of U.S. nuclear forces is discussed, it is done so in a single sentence on page 3: “We will maintain a robust and modern nuclear deterrent capable of addressing the strategic threats to our country…”

There’s also no nod to allies here, either. In many of my conversations in Europe and Asia over the last year, there’s been quite a bit of interest in what the Trump NDS would have to say about alliances and extended deterrence. Silence, I suppose, is not the worst outcome, especially given the spotlighting of active U.S. hostility toward European allies in the last few weeks amid the Greenland imbroglio. Some allies took solace in the fact that the NSS did include a sentence on nuclear weapons that did allude to some role in their defense: “We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies” (emphasis added, NSS, pp. 3).

Close allied readers of the NDS, however, might find that the document does appear to have something to say about how the United States views their security interests. Page 8 of the NDS observes that what makes the Trump administration’s strategy “fundamentally different from the grandiose strategies” of the past is that this document is apparently tethered to “Americans’ practical interests.” The document continues:

‘It does not conflate Americans’ interests with those of the rest of the world—that a threat to a person halfway around the world is the same as to an American.”

Part of the very premise of extended deterrence is that the United States would treat threats to allied persons (and nations) halfway around the world the same as those to the U.S. homeland. This, naturally, has been a very difficult premise to render credible—hence much of the history of our alliance management efforts over the last seven-ish decades.

It doesn’t seem far-fetched to me that allies will be willing to believe what the Trump administration is telling them here. There’s actually much in this NDS that I find doesn’t correspond all that well to the president’s views of the world (for starters, I don’t think Trump knows what the first island chain is). This bit, however, does correspond to much of what we know about how this president reasons about allies. Here you have the United States, I think, stating rather openly that, actually, it would not be willing to trade “Paris for New York,” as De Gaulle once famously asked of Kennedy. As I’ve written elsewhere, the ripple effects of this will likely be severe.

So, there’s that on extended deterrence.

Through the rest of the document, there’s very little on nuclear matters. There’s considerable attention on Iran’s program, with the expected commitment to denying Tehran the bomb (this also got a lot of attention in the NSS). North Korea is acknowledged as a country “increasingly capable of threatening to the U.S. Homeland” with its nuclear forces (a view that’s hardly controversial now in the United States). Very little else; even China’s historic nuclear build-up is not discussed head on in any detail.

It’s probably the case that the classified NDS has more to say on some of these questions, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of attention to nuclear matters in the unclassified version. Insofar as this document communicates U.S. priorities, it suggests an administration deeply uninterested in nuclear matters and aloof, at best, toward allies.

January 26, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war