Before its release on 4 December, the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) had been expected to emphasise increased defence burden-sharing among allies and partners; a refresh of US priorities, placing ‘America First’; a more active US role in the Indo-Pacific; and deeper multi-domain interoperability. The strategy, which sets the United States’ security agenda until January 2029, delivers on those expectations, most notably by reconnecting ends and means in pursuit of core national interests.
At its core, this NSS resets US ambition. It rejects what it describes as ‘forever global burdens’ and a model of globalism that saw no connection to the national interest, hallowed out the US middle class, allowed allies and partners to underinvest in their defence, and drew the US into antithetical conflicts. President Donald Trump is driving a corrective foreign policy course that prioritises economic strength, industrial resilience and military power, explicitly tying these focuses to core national interests, principles and priorities across regions.
The strategy asks three foundational questions: What should the US want? What means does it possess to get what it wants? And how should ends connect to means to deliver a viable strategy? The answers include creating the ‘world’s strongest, most dynamic, most innovative, and most advanced economy’; building a resilient national infrastructure; and ‘fielding the world’s most powerful, lethal and technologically advanced military’. Two critical aims dominate the strategy: sustained strategic competition with China and Russia, and focused investment on domestic industrial policy.
For Australia, the content of the NSS matters less than what it demands. The document is not simply descriptive; it is highly prescriptive. It signals clearly where the US will focus its power and where it expects others to carry more weight.
In the section titled ‘What Do We Want In and From the World?’, the western hemisphere is defined as the US’s first vital interest. From there, the strategy turns outward, focusing on halting foreign-actor damage to the US economy while keeping the Indo-Pacific free and open; preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes; and securing supply chains and ensuring access to critical minerals. The message is unambiguous: the Indo-Pacific remains central to US strategy, but Trump now expects the US military presence in the region to be justified not just on defence needs, but on direct economic interests as well. The US now judges the value of its engagement through supply chains, critical minerals, trade routes, industrial security and economic resilience—it’s not about only military competition.
This reinforces what we already see operationally. The US military will remain deeply engaged in our region, and the forthcoming US Force Posture Review may redirect resources from other theatres towards Australia and the region. The NSS’s priorities mean that not only can we expect the US military to stay in our region; we can also expect a persistent increase in air and maritime activity for presence, surveillance and deterrence signalling.
Australia and the US publicly called out the increasing number of unsafe Chinese intercepts in 2024 and 2025. The next Australia–US Ministerial Consultations, scheduled for this week, will likely produce stronger language and announcements on sustained joint presence; promote growth in the defence infrastructure footprint across the country beyond AUKUS; and potentially expand rotational forces from Japan, alongside additional US assets. These efforts would promote stability and security of vital international waterways, including the East and South China seas.
But the central shift in the NSS is not where US forces go, but how the burden of regional security is to be shared.
The strategy clearly states: ‘Our allies must step up and spend—and more importantly do—much more for collective defense.’ The Department of State is directed to press First Island Chain allies and partners to grant greater access to ports and facilities, lift defence spending and prioritise capabilities aimed at deterring aggression.
Australia, while technically part of the wider Second Island Chain, is a first-tier ally and should treat this language as though it is also directed at Canberra. Australia is an important component of the US National Defense Strategy—due for imminent release—because of its geography and military capabilities, which are crucial for force projection, forward positional advantage and multilateral deterrence. Multilateral deterrence is crucial for Australia. A significant majority of Australia’s maritime exports transit through or near the South China Sea, yet Australia has resisted sustained US pressure to shift defence spending toward 3.5 percent of GDP. The NSS makes clear that Washington views this position as increasingly untenable.
This is not simply about spending more; it’s about aligning economic, industrial and military power into a coherent deterrence architecture. The NSS identifies economics as the ‘ultimate stakes’ and calls on allies to harness combined economic power, some US$65 trillion, to prevent strategic domination by any single competitor. The strategy explicitly points to trade realignment, supply chain re-shoring and coordinated export controls as instruments of deterrence. The US has elevated economic alignment as a critical component of the ANZUS alliance and of collective defence and deterrence.
Australia sits between a rock and a hard place of its own making. In 2024, 63 percent of Australia’s export shipping was destined for China, matching a record set in 2019–20. This leaves Australia exposed not only to trade disruption but to economic coercion. It creates the risk of being deterred, but also of self-deterrence through restraint driven by economic vulnerability. The China–Australia trade dispute from 2020 to 2023 was a case in point: when Australia called for an independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19, China imposed wide-ranging trade restrictions on Australian exports—including barley, wine, beef, lobster, coal and timber—that taught Canberra the cost of dissent.
At the same time, Australia’s contribution to deterrence will likely increasingly rest on its ability to see first, decide early and coordinate with partners. Persistent maritime domain awareness across our northern approaches and the South China Sea is now foundational to effective deterrence. Yet with only three MQ-4C Triton uncrewed systems in service—and the fourth not expected until 2028—Australia’s capacity to sustain constant wide-area surveillance is constrained. Tritons can cover vast distances without putting crews at risk, so our limited number of systems will place greater strain on the P-8A fleet, requiring capability gaps to be filled through additional options, potentially through new autonomous systems.
On 1 December, Minister for Defence Richard Marles said that Australia ‘maintains constant maritime domain awareness in our geographic areas of interest—that’s Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, the Northeast Indian Ocean and the Pacific’. That may be the goal, but the scale of those oceans and the increasing tempo of Chinese naval operations demand more scrutiny. After a second Chinese navy task group was found to be operating in the Philippine Sea on 5 December, legitimate questions arose about whether Australia could independently monitor another circumnavigation without relying on New Zealand intelligence or commercial airline pilots for geolocation. Deterrence collapses quickly without credible surveillance and attribution.
The NSS is explicit that denying Chinese control over Taiwan or vital sea lanes of commerce in the First Island Chain is a core US priority. To this end, the US will enhance its military capability, but strongly assert it should not have to do this alone. For Australia, this will likely translate into pressure to not only spend more, but invest differently in surveillance, strike, basing resilience, logistics and industrial sustainment.
These conclusions rest on the NSS’s most consequential assertion: economic power is now the decisive element of strategic competition. The strategy envisions the next decade being about the consolidation of US alliances and partnerships into a more cohesive economic bloc to maintain technological pre-eminence, growth and security of supply. Australia is explicitly named among those expected to adjust trade and investment settings to rebalance China’s economy away from export dependency and to look to household consumption and other markets.
The NSS is another signal that Australia’s separation of economics and security will come under increasing strain, and that the government will be confronted with difficult choices. Australia therefore faces not a question of alignment in principle—we are already aligned—but of depth and cost. The US is no longer prepared to underwrite regional deterrence while allies hedge economically and underinvest militarily. Collective defence, in Washington’s framing, will now demand collective economic and industrial mobilisation.
Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy will land squarely inside this new alliance environment. The question is whether it will do so in a way that clearly connects Australia’s national interests, the threats we face, the forces we are prepared to build, and the resilience we are prepared to invest in.
Australia cannot credibly shape the regional order without increasing defence spending to address current gaps, and it cannot deter what it cannot see. For Australia, the US NSS is a call to contribute more, align more deeply, and understand that economic and military security are inexorably linked by our closest ally and most important strategic partner.