Conor here: It’s almost as if the US is run by a cabal of war criminals who are the biggest threat to everyone on the planet. Here are some other reactions before the main piece:
🚨BREAKING
The 2026 US National Defense Strategy, released late Friday night
specifically mentions Canada
and seems to suggest that if Canada doesnt do it part for National Defense they could be subject to actions, up to the Maduro treatment
Read it for yourself: pic.twitter.com/04Quzr9jF5
— Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@Tablesalt13) January 24, 2026
The US strategy as outlined in National Defense Strategy 2026 is to not defend Taiwan as that would mean getting into a war with China in the West Pacific and being defeated. Now the strategy instead is to milk Taiwan for what it is worth.https://t.co/4R3RxTZw4J
— Ignis Rex (@Ignis_Rex) January 24, 2026
And then there’s this ongoing narrative that the US is admitting defeat against China, as if trillions in war budgets and trying to kneecap Beijing’s trade partners, control shipping lanes, and topple Beijing’s energy suppliers means that China is “not a priority”:
Three takeaways:
Total Colby L, “Strategy of Denial” in shambles
US is formally admitting defeat against China
Massive daylight between 2025 National Security Strategy & this National Defense Strategy
These guys have no idea what they are doing lmfao https://t.co/wRL9LTiO3s
— Soda (@fredsoda) January 24, 2026
Part of the new national defense strategy discusses “supercharging the U.S. defense industrial base.” Yet despite subsequent US administrations talking about firing up the great “arsenal of democracy,” it’s not happening. A Friday Defence Blog interview with John Borrego, Senior Vice President of Aerospace and Defense at Machina Labs, who has held senior technical and leadership roles at Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, Rocketdyne, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, describes the myriad issues the US is still running into:
Borrego said the most serious bottlenecks are structural, with tooling at the top of the list. Traditional tooling, he noted, can take years to design and qualify, making rapid scale-up or design changes difficult.
“Most legacy manufacturing processes were built for stable, predictable production,” he said. “When requirements shift, the entire system slows down. By removing tooling from the critical path and digitizing production, surge capacity can scale through machines and software, not timelines.”
He also identified persistent constraints in energetics, including propellants, explosives, cast-cure capacity, and strict handling requirements. Seeker and guidance electronics remain limited by microelectronics, radiation-hardened components, specialized sensors, and secure supply chains. Motors, casings, and specialty materials are constrained by long-lead forgings, castings, composites, and integrated structures.
Single-source sub-tier suppliers present another risk, Borrego said, because many have fragile capacity and no business case for maintaining surge readiness.
Testing infrastructure also delays output, particularly in thermal vacuum testing, vibration testing, ordnance trials, non-destructive testing, metrology, and calibration. Workforce shortages add to the problem, with a limited number of cleared and experienced manufacturing engineers, inspectors, NDT technicians, and energetic handlers, and critical knowledge often concentrated in only a few individuals.
By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website.
This final “Line of Effort” underpins the preceding three regarding the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific, and burden-sharing, all of which are being pursued in furtherance of Trump 2.0’s grand strategic goal of restoring the US’ predominant position over the world, including over China and Russia.
Trump 2.0 just released its National Defense Strategy (NDS) two months after its National Security Strategy (NSS), and as could be expected, they each preach the need to prioritize the Western Hemisphere. The “Trump Doctrine” that’s discernable within both, which was analyzed here, aims to restore the US’ predominant position (unipolarity) over the Americas and then the rest of the world. “Flexible, practical realism” will explicitly guide the implementation of this grand strategic goal.
Instead of redundantly pointing out all the similarities between the NDS and the NSS, the present piece will draw attention to how the administration envisages applying the aforesaid realist approach. Four “Lines of Effort” (LOEs) are enumerated: 1) “Defend the U.S. Homeland”; 2) Deter China in the Indo-Pacific Through Strength, Not Confrontation”; 3) Increase Burden-Sharing with U.S. Allies and Partners”; and 4) “Supercharge the U.S. Defense Industrial Base”. They’ll now be briefly described in order.
The Department of War’s (DOW) primary tasks in the Western Hemisphere are defending the US’ borders, countering (Islamic and narco-) terrorists, building the “Golden Dome”, and ensuring military and commercial access to key terrain like Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal. The last-mentioned task is the essence of the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”. The DOW’s explicit goal in this LOE is described as “restor[ing] American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere”.
By way of comparison, its explicit goal in the Indo-Pacific LOE is “peace through strength”, which the DOW plans to pursue through “strong denial defense” in the First Island Chain. This will be carried out together with the US’ regional allies, which can be described as the AUKUS+ network, although that terminology isn’t used in the NDS. The authors expect that this will create a favorable “balance of power” for achieving a “decent peace” that allows for mutually beneficial coexistence with China.
The third LOE embraces the “Lead From Behind” (LFB) concept that was described here in 2015 by incentivizing partners to do more to advance their shared regional interests with the US. The NDS earlier described Russia as a “persistent but manageable threat” in the sense that “European NATO dwarfs Russia in economic scale, population, and, thus, latent military power.” The aforesaid just have to be fully unleashed through US incentives and strategic guidance in order to more effectively contain Russia.
The last LOE underpins the preceding ones. Without “Supercharg[ing] the U.S. Defense Industrial Base”, the US cannot “restore American military dominance in the Western Hemisphere”, practice a “strong denial defense” in the First Island Chain, or LFB to contain shared adversaries like China (described as “the most powerful state relative to us since the 19th century”), Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This part ends with a call for military-industrial production comparable to the two World Wars and Cold War.
Therein lies the top takeaway from the NDS, namely that the US will resume World War-like levels of military-industrial production in furtherance of Trump 2.0’s grand strategic goal of restoring the US’ predominant position (unipolarity) over the world. Although the US will try to avoid Great Power conflict with China and Russia, this will be very difficult to do given its attempt to establish strategic superiority over them through this new undeclared arms race, which risks a war breaking out by miscalculation.
