On 23 January 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of Defense (Pentagon) released its new National Defense Strategy, which it emphasized represents a marked departure from previous defense documents, including the strategies adopted during the first Trump administration. When read in conjunction with the 2025 National Security Strategy, the 2026 National Defense Strategy presents, within a holistic framework, the second Trump administration’s perception of the international system, the categories of threats it prioritizes, and the strategic toolkit it adopts to achieve its objectives. Given the fluctuations observed in certain policy areas during the first year of the administration’s term, such a framework document is significant insofar as it functions as a primary reference point that clarifies the administration’s strategic orientation.
The 2026 National Defense Strategy complements the National Security Strategy report published in December 2025. The document offers a critical assessment of the national security policies pursued in the previous period and, within this context, highlights the inadequacies of earlier strategic orientations. In the new strategic framework, issues such as Russia, European security, and climate change are relegated to a secondary position in the hierarchy of priorities. By contrast, a hemisphere-centered understanding of security, the reassertion of a “warrior ethos” within military culture, and the redistribution of burden-sharing among allies emerge as core priorities.[i]
The 2026 National Defense Strategy ranks these priorities as follows: First, the defense of the U.S. homeland is defined as the primary and indispensable mission. Second, it aims to deter China through robust military capabilities without resorting to direct confrontation. The document explicitly identifies the deterrence of China as one of its core strategic objectives. However, it does not provide a clear framework specifying the particular behavior, capability, or contingency against which this deterrence posture is designed. Third, the Strategy envisages increasing burden-sharing with U.S. allies and partners and distributing security responsibilities in a more balanced manner. Finally, it underscores as a fundamental priority the comprehensive strengthening of America’s defense industrial base, even to the extent of restructuring it in line with the requirements of strategic competition.[ii]
In this context, the 2026 National Defense Strategy demonstrates that the United States has redefined its priorities in regional force allocation. The second Trump administration continues to position China as one of the most significant strategic challenges to the United States, both in terms of its military and economic capabilities. In the 2026 National Defense Strategy, China is described as “the most powerful state to emerge relative to the United States since the nineteenth century.”[iii] Within this framework, the United States seeks to induce the leadership in Beijing to accept a peace order shaped under conditions aligned with American interests and to act accordingly within that structure.
This orientation also signals a search for a structural transformation in the U.S. approach to its military presence on the Korean Peninsula. Rather than confining the role of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) solely to countering threats originating from North Korea, the Pentagon appears to aim at redefining these forces in a manner that would enable them to contribute to the deterrence of China in the Taiwan Strait and other critical areas of the Asia-Pacific. Indeed, during his visit to South Korea following his appointment, U.S. Department of Defense official Elbridge Colby alluded to the possibility that U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula could be restructured to focus on the “first island chain,” the geostrategic line extending from Japan to Taiwan and through the Philippines to the South China Sea. Such remarks may be regarded as a concrete indication of the strategic reorientation in question.[iv]
In this context, the document explicitly underscores that the administration in Seoul must henceforth assume primary responsibility for deterrence and defense against North Korea’s conventional threats. Although North Korea continues to be clearly identified as a security threat in the strategic documents, it is evident that the threat perception has been differentiated in both its geographical and operational dimensions. The risk posed by Pyongyang appears to be addressed primarily within the framework of the security of South Korea and Japan, whereas Washington assesses the threat principally in terms of North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities that could target the U.S. homeland.
In a manner that substantiates this approach, the National Defense Strategy makes a striking assessment with potentially significant strategic implications for the Korean Peninsula: it implies that, unless North Korea conducts a seventh nuclear test or operationalizes an intercontinental ballistic missile system capable of targeting the U.S. mainland, Pyongyang will not rank among Washington’s foremost security priorities.[v]his approach demonstrates that threat perception is shaped not on the basis of an absolute definition of enmity, but rather through a threshold assessment grounded in a combination of capability and intent.
Although the National Defense Strategy acknowledges that the United States has historically contributed to the defense of South Korea through a comprehensive and multilayered security architecture, it indicates that future support will be structured within a more limited and functional framework. The Pentagon’s orientation in this regard is predicated on the assumption that South Korea possesses the military capacity necessary to assume leadership in deterring and responding to conventional threats originating from North Korea.[vi]This approach points to a strategic repositioning that encourages Seoul to develop a higher level of conventional self-sufficiency in its defense planning and redefines the division of labor within the alliance.
In the 2026 National Defense Strategy, President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach is not confined to a discourse centered solely on economic protectionism or debates over burden-sharing with allies; rather, it presents a strategic prioritization framework aimed at recalibrating the United States’ global military engagements. This perspective is grounded in preserving capacity for potential high-intensity conflict with a peer competitor such as China by preventing the excessive dispersion of American military resources across regional crisis zones. In this context, the approach signals an effort to restructure the U.S. global deployment model in line with a more selective, threat-oriented security understanding that places great power competition at its core.
In conclusion, the 2026 National Defense Strategy clearly demonstrates that the United States has entered a comprehensive process of reprioritization in its global security approach. The document does not position a potential conventional conflict with Russia or North Korea as the defining axis of U.S. force planning; instead, it structures military preparedness around scenarios of great power competition and high-intensity warfare. This orientation indicates that the Trump administration has reordered its threat hierarchy. Within a security assessment that identifies China as a systemic and long-term rival, North Korea is placed in a more limited and manageable risk category.
Within this framework, policy toward the Korean Peninsula is also undergoing transformation; without entirely abandoning its traditional security commitments, Washington is redefining them on a more functional and burden-sharing-based foundation. The subjection of the “North Korean threat” to a threshold-based assessment and the integration of U.S. forces into a broader strategy of balancing China constitute concrete indicators of this repositioning. Accordingly, the relative downgrading of the Pyongyang file to a secondary issue reflects the transformation in the United States’ global threat perception and its determination to concentrate strategic attention on China-centered great power competition. In this respect, the 2026 National Defense Strategy serves as the strategic document of the second Trump administration’s effort to restructure the global order on the basis of balance of power, deterrence, and selective engagement principles.
[i] “The 2026 National Defense Strategy by the Numbers: Radical Changes, Moderate Changes, and Some Continuities”, CSIS, https://www.csis.org/analysis/2026-national-defense-strategy-numbers-radical-changes-moderate-changes-and-some, (Date of Access: 04.02.2026).
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] “Pentagon eyes expanded role for South Korea-based US forces to help deter China”, South China Morning Post, https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3341991/pentagon-eyes-expanded-role-south-korea-based-us-forces-help-deter-china, (Date of Access: 05.06.2026).
[v] “US Defense Strategy Signals Shift in Korea Defense, Pushing Seoul to Lead”, The Diplomat, https://thediplomat.com/2026/01/us-defense-strategy-signals-shift-in-korea-defense-pushing-seoul-to-lead/, (Date of Access: 04.02.2026).
[vi] Ibid.
