[Salon] Pentagon’s new defense strategy pulls forces abroad to focus on homeland

The Trump administration issued another warning to European allies that the United States would be pulling back its forces from parts of the globe to prioritize its own interests and defense of the Western Hemisphere.

After a year of saying that an “America First” foreign policy will require Europe to step up its own defense, the Pentagon enshrined that threat in official doctrine.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy, released late Friday, is one of several guiding documents that the military uses to plan and shape its forces around the globe to meet its civilian leaders’ strategic priorities.

In the 34-page unclassified version of the planning document, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the military would be guided by four key priorities: defense of the homeland, to include prioritizing military operations spanning from Greenland to Latin America; deterring China; getting allies to increase spending to reduce their militaries’ dependence on the U.S. and increasing the capacity of the defense industrial base.

Like other key strategic documents released by the Trump administration in the past year, the 2026 National Defense Strategy signals that European allies can no longer depend on the U.S. to deter Russia.Follow

The document, mandated by Congress and released every four years to serve as the Pentagon’s principal guide for weapons systems decisions and force structures, is blunt in messaging that the administration considers U.S. commitment to allies and defense of American interests as two separate entities, with an emphasis that the military will be focused on the latter goal.

The tone is a stark departure from decades of assurance that the U.S. remains committed to NATO and other allies based on the principle of defending democracy worldwide.

Indeed, the word “democracy” does not appear once in the document.

“We recognize that it is neither America’s duty nor in our nation’s interest to act everywhere on our own, nor will we make up for allied security shortfalls from their leaders’ own irresponsible choices. Instead, the Department will prioritize the most important, consequential, and dangerous threats to Americans’ interests,” Hegseth wrote in an introduction accompanying the strategy.

The military will now focus on “fighting, winning, and thereby deterring the wars that really matter to our people,” Hegseth added. The heaviest emphasis will be in the Western Hemisphere, to include the construction of the president’s “Golden Dome” missile defense system for North America and ensuring “military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America, especially Greenland,” the document said.

In regards to Europe, the U.S. will recalibrate its military force posture to “better account for the Russian threat to American interests as well as our allies’ own capabilities.”

The U.S. just concluded two days of trilateral peace negotiations in Abu Dhabi between Russia and Ukraine, the first time the Trump administration has sat with both countries to press for an end to the nearly four-year-old war, a conflict that the administration has repeatedly pressed Europe to take more direct ownership of.

“Although Europe remains important, it has a smaller and decreasing share of global economic power. It follows that, although we are and will remain engaged in Europe, we must — and will — prioritize defending the U.S. Homeland and deterring China,” the strategy states.

In Asia, the Pentagon will continue to bolster its military presence in the Indo-Pacific region, adding more forces and defenses along the first island chain — a strategic swath of allies running from Japan to Taiwan to Indonesia and Malaysia.

The administration’s approach to the Middle East will likewise rely on regional partners doing more — and is largely framed in the context of containment of Iran.

There is no mention of Iraq or Gaza, and the document presses the administration’s goal to reduce its footprint in the Middle East by empowering allies and partners there to take “primary responsibility” for the region’s security, bolstered by U.S. weapons sales.

Pulling back from the Middle East is something that past presidents have attempted for the past 15 years to focus on other theaters, only to surge military assets back to the region to respond to another crisis.

Even as the 2026 strategy was released, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group, with its scores of fighter jets, was sailing back into the Middle East to be ready for a potential new round of strikes against Iran.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy breaks from previous strategies in other ways, reading at times more like a Hegseth stump speech to troops rather than the Pentagon’s core planning document.

Throughout its pages are repeated jabs at previous administrations and numerous photos of Hegseth and President Donald Trump. It lauds recent military operations ordered by Trump in Iran and Venezuela and makes five different references to Hegseth’s goal to restore “warrior ethos.”

The last strategy released in 2022 had not a single image of President Joe Biden or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, nor the combative tone that runs though the 2026 document.