“China is the Department’s sole pacing threat, and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.”
That’s a line from the United States’ Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed and distributed throughout the Department of Defense this past March. The interim guidance appeared to bear the fingerprints of the “prioritizer” camp, a faction of national security officials and thinkers who hold that the U.S. should prioritize deterring Beijing at the expense of all else.
The question now — as Hegseth finalizes the more permanent National Defense Strategy — is whether the prioritizers’ worldview, unmatched in its focus on the fate of Taiwan, is losing ground.
The strategy, which Congress has required each new administration to draft since 2005, has long been a crucial instrument for aligning the priorities of senior defense officials. “It does have actual real world, practical implications,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center.
Grieco said she witnessed the impact of the strategy while teaching at Air University during the beginning of the first Trump administration. “It was very clear, even as an academic working for the Air Force, that the service was very much pivoting as a result of the National Defense Strategy, to move away from the global war on terror and really start thinking more seriously about great power threats,” she said.
This time around, the strategy may initiate a different pivot. If it emphasizes controlling the Western Hemisphere as its top priority, as recent reports from Politico and the Military Times suggest it will, the document will be a win for the “restrainers,” a group who think the U.S. should limit its foreign entanglements as much as possible, focusing only on those that immediately impact the homeland.
On Tuesday, Hegseth is convening a meeting of hundreds of the U.S.’s top military officials. President Donald Trump, who said on Sunday that he will attend, has billed the gathering as a pep talk that will focus on promoting what Hegseth sees as the U.S. military’s necessary return to a “warrior ethos.” But there has also been speculation that he will use the meeting to ensure that his generals are aligned on the Pentagon’s pivot to the Western Hemisphere.
The National Defense Strategy is not the first indication that restraint is on the rise during Trump’s second term. The Pentagon’s fiscal year 2026 budget request, of which it released a summary in June, listed four priorities under the “Reestablish Deterrence” heading. “Secure Our Border” and “America’s Golden Dome,” a missile defense system, were listed as the top two priorities. “Deter China” came fourth.
In March, messages published by Atlantic editor and accidental national security group chat member Jeffrey Goldberg showed J.D. Vance disagreeing with colleagues over strikes against the Houthi militant group in the Red Sea. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he wrote. Hegseth responded: “we are the only ones (on our side of the ledger) on the planet who can do this.”
Hegseth’s response was just the sort of justification that restrainers abhor. “In the moment, [restraint] requires actually resisting the temptation to do something to continue to intervene, even though there may be some political cost to not doing so,” said Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a restraint-oriented think tank.
Earlier this month, Kavanagh penned an op-ed in The New York Times which described Trump as “a norm-defying president uniquely positioned to reverse” what she views as a vicious cycle bringing the U.S. and China closer to war. Included in her proposal was a dialing back of U.S. defense buildups in the Indo-Pacific.
Her essay was ridiculed by many who frequent the China- and Taiwan-focused corners of social media. “There’s stupid. There’s really stupid. And then there is this crap from NYT opinion,” wrote Taipei Times columnist Michael Turton on X. Much of the backlash stemmed from the essay’s failure to highlight the role that PRC military buildup has played in recent growing tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
Kavanagh’s specific treatment of the issue aside, the episode illustrates a larger trend: Restraint-based foreign policy ideas have garnered more airtime and column inches during the past year than they have during previous administrations, perhaps going back to the 1930s.
On Saturday, Arta Moeini, managing director at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy and one of the more unapologetic theorists of restraint, published an essay in Unherd arguing that the decline of America’s global hegemony demands a return to a global order based on spheres of influence. “In this context, the Pentagon’s new ‘National Defense Strategy’… offers a much-welcome shift,” he wrote.
The Pentagon is expected to release an unclassified summary of the strategy within the next month. Close reading of the document will be inevitable. Quentin E. Hodgson, lead author of the 2008 National Defense Strategy, recently wrote that after that document was released, he discovered that allies would count how many times their country appeared “to determine where they fall on the list of U.S. priorities.”
But experts point out that every recent National Defense Strategy has named homeland defense in some form as the defense department’s guiding mission. Even if the strategy declares the Western Hemisphere as the Department of Defense’s top priority, they say, that doesn’t necessarily signal a decrease in concern for the Indo-Pacific.
“There’s reason for folks in Taipei to be concerned, but I think they’ll probably be a little less worried when they see whatever is released publicly from the NDS than they are from these initial reports,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, referring to the strategy by its acronym.
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, who also played a key role in crafting Trump’s first term National Defense Strategy, has been leading the development of the draft 2025 National Defense Strategy. Long seen as the archetypal prioritizer, Colby has appeared recently to soften what was once his laser-focus on the defense of Taiwan.
In September 2024, Colby wrote that Taiwan was “very important” but “not essential” for the goal of denying China regional hegemony over Asia. At his Senate confirmation hearing in March, Colby said that the U.S. must “be able to conduct a local defense of Taiwan at a cost and level of risk that the American people are prepared to tolerate.”
Cooper, who worked on the Bush administration’s 2008 National Defense Strategy, speculated that the shift in tone is indicative of the political realities of serving in the second Trump administration rather than a true shift in conviction. He also thinks that drafts of the strategy might not end up reflecting the orientation of the entire defense department. “It was drafted by a very small group of civilians who didn’t do a lot of work to circulate that document within the Pentagon and get agreement on it and buy-in,” he said.
Christian Whiton, who served as a senior advisor in the State Department during the Bush and first Trump administrations, agrees. “Almost by definition, something that is done, produced largely within the confines of the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Policy, is going to be looked down upon by people who didn’t have input into the document,” he said.
“This administration’s top officials, including Bridge, have obviously been more insular because they don’t trust the rest of the bureaucracy,” he continued, referring to Elbridge Colby.
Devoted restrainers also worry about opposition to their project beyond the executive branch. “I definitely would not go so far as to say restraint has ‘supplanted’ interventionists,” Daniel Davis, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and now works at Defense Priorities, wrote in response to an email query. “We have made some inroads at medium-high levels, but you still have the Lindsey Grahams, Jack Keanes, David Patraeuses, [Mike] Pompeos, and other high-profile crews that remain unrepentant war-lusters.”
There is also the question of whether the strategy will translate into a material redistribution of resources on the ground. More specific guidance on that question will come from the Global Posture Review, an internal Pentagon report that is also currently in the works.
“If you say that defending the homeland is the number one priority, and then you pull forces back to the U.S., that would be a really clear signal,” Cooper said. “But if you just say it, but then you shift all the forces to Asia, then I don’t think it matters what’s in the document. What matters is what they actually do.”
Even the most restraint-minded analysts expect more focus on the Western Hemisphere to come at the expense of Europe, not Taiwan. “The U.S. military is enormous. It has an enormous budget. The Western Hemisphere just does not require that. So, you have to wonder, what else are they gonna do with the money? Are they gonna give it back? I don’t think so,” Kavanagh said. “Even if we think about shifting a lot of focus to the Western Hemisphere, the losers are gonna be Europe, not necessarily Asia.”
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