On February 24, 2026, US President Donald Trump strode into a divided House of Representatives chamber and delivered a record-setting 108-minute State of the Union, declaring a “Golden Age of America” while pitching tariffs, border enforcement, and a parade of made-for-TV moments. It was Trump 2.0 in miniature: volatility as performance, uncertainty as leverage, and foreign strategy reduced to slogans—China, in particular, scarcely featured, writes Hao Nan. The author is a participant of the Valdai – New Generation project.
But beneath the spectacle, something more systematic is taking shape. Since taking office, the administration has rolled out four foundational documents: a National Security Strategy (NSS), a National Defense Strategy (NDS), the Defense Department’s China Military Power Report (CMPR), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment (ATA). Read together, and in comparison with their Trump 1.0 and Biden predecessors, these texts offer the clearest window into how Trump 2.0 thinks about America, the world, rivals, and allies.
If the State of the Union is the show, these documents are the script. They reveal a coherent doctrine: transactional primacy, built around homeland defence, west hemispheric consolidation, and industrial rearmament, with allies treated as essential, but on renegotiated terms. The 2026 ATA sharpens the system by making “Homeland first” an explicit organizing choice and by presenting border and counternarcotics outcomes as measurable security effects.
Axis I: Self-View—Sovereignty as Survival
Trump 1.0 framed “America First” within a familiar four-pillar America First structure. Biden recast the US as organizer of a coalition in a “decisive decade,” with values and institutional shaping central to out-competing rivals. Trump 2.0 shifts the centre of gravity inward. Sovereignty and borders become prerequisites for national survival; reindustrialisation is strategic resilience; homeland defence is literal, with “Golden Dome” ambitions and a more aggressive posture on missile defence.
Axis II: World-View—West Hemisphere First
The 2025 NSS lays down a geographic hierarchy. A “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” places the Western Hemisphere first. Europe should bear “first responsibility” for its conventional defence. The Indo-Pacific matters because it is where the great-power competition is mostly taking place, but engagement is selective rather than universal. The 2026 NDS hardens this logic with operational specificity and alliance demands, including an expectation that NATO members move toward five percent of GDP in defence spending. The 2026 ATA reinforces the same map by treating instability in the Americas, migration pressure, and competitor influence as a front-burner environment, not a peripheral distraction.
Axis III: Threat Hierarchy—The Homeland Lens
The shift in ordering is not subtle. The 2025 ATA opened with cartels, fentanyl, and border-linked instability. The 2026 ATA doubles down: its foreword credits President Trump for “sealing the US–Mexico border” and claims that migrant encounters and fentanyl seizures have fallen sharply since early 2025. It then turns fentanyl into a bargaining file, describing an October 2025 US–China meeting in Busan that produced export-licensing requirements for some precursor chemicals, while warning that traffickers keep adapting.
Homeland framing also reshapes how great-power competition is narrated. The 2026 ATA projects missile threats to the homeland expanding dramatically by 2035 and links adversary planning to US missile defence ambitions; “Golden Dome” becomes a variable in rivals’ escalation calculus and arms-control manoeuvring. It also treats AI and quantum competition as the engine of power, collapsing “national security” into a continuum running from chips and standards to targeting, cyber, and autonomy.
Axis IV: Rivals—Capability Problems, Not Ideological Enemies
Across administrations, the China story is consistent: accelerating capability, systemic competition, industrial scale. What changes is packaging. Trump 1.0-era CMPRs emphasized competition but preserved space for dialogue and risk reduction. Biden’s reports institutionalized China as the pacing challenge and tied timelines (especially 2027) more tightly to planning while highlighting Beijing’s refusal to sustain military-to-military engagement.
Trump 2.0’s 2025 CMPR adopts a different preface: “strength not confrontation”, and a claim that the relationship is “stronger” thanks to restored channels, while the body stays unsparing on Taiwan coercion, grey-zone tactics, cyber threats, and nuclear expansion. The 2026 ATA complements that duality: Beijing prefers unification short of conflict and rejects a fixed invasion timeline, yet the PLA continues to make steady (if uneven) progress and periodically surges operations around Taiwan. Stability is the headline; capacity competition is the body text.
Axis V: Allies—From Community to Contract
Biden treated alliances as the platform for rule-shaping and deterrence. Trump 2.0 treats them as burden-sharing networks. The five percent marker is the cleanest tell: burden-sharing becomes a performance indicator, not an aspiration. Allies are expected to produce capability outputs, align on trade and industry, and assume primary responsibility for their regions. The threat backdrop supplies the pressure logic: a world of proliferating conflicts and technology-driven warfare, where “quality versus quantity” and industrial scaling decide endurance, makes free-riding strategically unaffordable.
Conclusion
The State of the Union supplied the ‘wrapper’, but the documents supply the governing logic, and policy follows. Executive Order 14257 declares large and persistent trade deficits in goods a national emergency and frames reciprocal tariffs as a national security-oriented remedy. A separate executive order on “maritime dominance” elevates shipbuilding and workforce capacity into strategic doctrine, explicitly pointing to China’s shipbuilding scale as the comparator. Together with an arms-transfer posture that treats sales as both leverage and capacity-building, the administration is knitting tariffs, industry, arms production, and alliance demands into a single loop.
Three implications follow. First, volatility is a feature: uncertainty pressures allies, opponents, markets, and bureaucracies to move first, revealing preferences and creating bargaining leverage. Second, America’s grand strategy is narrowing geographically but intensifying instrumentally: hemisphere-first does not mean isolation; it means selective engagement backed by heavy economic and security tools. Third, China policy is shifting from persuasion to capacity competition. The centre of gravity is production: shipbuilding, scalable deterrence, and infrastructure defence, because the rival story, as these reports tell it, is fundamentally about capability accumulation.
The news cycle will keep screaming chaos. These documents suggest something colder: a coherent doctrine of transactional primacy, built around homeland defence, hemispheric consolidation, and industrial rearmament, with allies treated as essential—but on renegotiated terms. The administration is not improvising. It is reading from a script it wrote months ago.
