Shape of things to come in US defense strategy

In Pete Hegseth's words, the Trump administration would end what he called 'four years of deferred maintenance under the Biden administration' that led to the world seeing, 'unfortunately, a feckless and weak America.'

- MONISH TOURANGBAM

The Annual Threat Assessment 2025 of the U.S. Intelligence Community contends that "Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—individually and collectively—are challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions, with both asymmetric and conventional hard power tactics, and promoting alternative systems to compete with the United States, primarily in trade, finance, and security." So, the threats and adversaries remain the same, those that the Biden administration intended to confront with "integrated deterrence." Last August, in the last leg of the Biden presidency, his top foreign policy and national security team writing a joint op-ed in the Washington Post lauded Biden's Indo-Pacific legacy for making America's future more secure, while upgrading the "hub and spoke" model to an "integrated, interconnected network of partnerships".

The advent of Trump's second innings at the White House has introduced another catchphrase in U.S. strategic dictionary "re-establishing deterrence", that aims to bring "peace through strength" in a world passing through one of its more profound phases of rapid geopolitical, geo-economic and technological transitions.