The National Interest - Trump’s National Security Strategy Needs Bipartisanship - December 16, 2025 By: Brian Chow

 

The  National Interest 

Trump’s National Security Strategy Needs Bipartisanship

December 16, 2025

By: Brian Chow

There is much about Trump’s national security vision that could attract bipartisan support—if the president were willing to extend an olive branch to his opponents.

The severe partisan divide currently embroiling the United States creates unnecessary risks that threaten to undermine President Donald Trump’s new national security strategy. If the Trump administration believes in the strategy and wants it to last beyond the 47th president’s tenure—and to project unity to America’s adversaries and enable stronger collective defense with its allies and partners—it must try a new, somewhat unfamiliar approach: bipartisanship.

Fortunately, a practical path exists for both parties to work together, so that the United States and the free world are ready for war and capable of maintaining peace amid escalating threats globally.

Extreme Partisanship Is Weakening US National Security

Since Trump’s second term began in January, he has issued an executive order to build a “Golden Dome for America,” a multi-layered missile defense shield against “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” He has issued another order to rename the Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” its name until 1947, projecting a “peace through strength” approach to international relations. Moreover, under Trump’s repeated prodding, NATO finally agreed for each member to commit 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) annually to defense by 2035—a commitment that, once completed, will nearly double the alliance’s annual defense contribution.

These are all defensible steps that, in Trump’s view, strengthen US national security. Yet the president has persistently been pessimistic about the possibility of bipartisan support for his initiatives. Accordingly, he has implemented them through brute force: using presidential authority to issue executive orders without waiting for Congress to pass laws supporting his agenda, and relying on the Republican majority in both chambers to shoot down prospective challenges.

Likewise, the Democratic Party believes the best way to save the United States and the free world from Trump’s initiatives and actions is to capitalize on Pew Research Center’s data that American adults affiliating with or leaning toward the Democratic Party is only one percentage point behind those for the Republican Party. If Democrats campaign aggressively, emphasizing their strengths and exploiting Republican vulnerabilities—instead of helping to repair them—they can likely gain a few additional percentage points of support, theoretically enough to win back Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028. Thus, both parties’ view toward national security policy is not primarily about how it affects national security, but how it will affect the outcomes of the upcoming elections.

In short, both parties are behaving like two boxers in a political ring, each seeking to knock the other down and hoping that the voters at the margin will lean toward the winner. America’s adversaries—having been proactively uniting—are only too happy to cheer on this fight, since they gain the advantage of a weaker enemy as a result.

America needs a better way forward. If the United States continues its political polarization—without cross-pollination to capture both parties’ strengths and constructive debate to eliminate their weaknesses, we will be fighting with one hand tied behind our back against a united enemy.

The Path Back to Bipartisanship

The path to bipartisanship—and a consistent long-term national security strategy, regardless of which party is in power—should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. A revolutionary shift, given the parties’ current entrenched political positions, demands an unattainable level of compromise in a few drastic steps. By contrast, the evolutionary approach allows each party to maintain the loyalty of its core base by preserving most of the status quo, while leveraging the marginal change in its policy position (the “delta”) to attract swing voters—either by winning their support or by neutralizing the opponent’s potential gains originating from a shifted policy position it initiated. This competitive political pressure motivates both sides toward a new policy position that is better than their original, polarized ones, eventually resulting in a stronger national security strategy for the entire country.

The practical result is that evolution allows both parties to make incremental policy adjustments and secure easy successes early on, building incentives and momentum toward further cooperation. Accordingly, this article focuses on a handful of the most promising early evolutionary changes that would lead both parties to quick and significant benefits to our country, and thus enthuse them to collaborate further.

Furthermore, to maximize the chance of success, this approach should be tailored to the strategic purpose of each of the three pillars: the Golden Dome for seizing future opportunities; the restored “Department of War” for addressing legacy institutional problems; and the 5 percent NATO defense commitment for securing adequate funding for these needed innovations. Once designed, all three can be executed simultaneously to save time.

Pillar 1: The Golden Dome Executive Order

Let’s start with the Golden Dome Executive Order. The olive branch should be offered by the party in power, because it would have a better chance of acceptance by the other side. Moreover, because President Trump has been setting up the goal for the Golden Dome too high and too likely to fail, it is thus to his political interest to offer a more realistic path, regardless of whether the Democratic Party accepts it.

The current Republican approach aims for a spectacular, high-visibility achievement, but this ambition carries a massive price tag and significant risk of failure. As Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, Chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, wrote on December 3, “By independent estimates, Golden Dome alone could cost upward of $3.5 trillion over the next 20 years,” far exceeding Trump’s estimate of $175 billion and the Congressional Budget Office’s range between $161 billion and $542 billion.

If Democrats’ repeated criticism of Golden Dome’s sky-high cost, crowding out other projects, do not make Trump worry, he should now heed the same concern from authoritative figures within his own party. He should also realize that this highly complex technological accomplishment—which will likely require far more than three years for development—is currently designed to prioritize short-term political display over long-term financial stability.

To secure the bipartisan support to this program’s longevity and stability, Trump should lower the near-term target to a more practical but still impressive demonstration of one to five successful intercepts by 2028 at a reasonable cost, along with a stable path for continued Golden Dome development for at least the next decade, regardless of which party controls the White House. In turn, this approach offers the Democratic Party a meaningful role in collaboration for the Golden Dome’s continued development and oversight. If the Democrats accept this offer, Trump’s national security strategy would effectively become bipartisan on the issue of missile defense—demonstrating to America’s adversaries that we can fight with both hands, a united mind, and a sensible long-term program. Conversely, if the Democrats reject this opportunity for cooperation, the voters are likely to see them as placing narrow partisan politics above the good of the country, and they could suffer electorally as a result.

Pillar 2: The “Department of War” and Communications Reform

Next, consider the executive order restoring the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War, its historical moniker. The US military has a centuries-old tradition of keeping secrets, but it also provides unclassified policies and weaponry data that allow the public to judge which party is doing a better job protecting them.

The issue lies in the fact that more and more technologies can be used for both peaceful and hostile purposes. Many recent rivals’ weapons—satellites, drones, lasers, and software—are derived from similar dual-use systems. The duality allows analysts to infer the offensive capabilities of these systems from commercial data that must remain unclassified so as for America’s enemies to facilitate their commercial negotiations and transactions. As a result, these opponents have given up hiding such information.

Yet the US military still routinely classifies these dual-use data that our rivals no longer hide—a practice that serves no national security purpose and keeps voters uninformed. Without such informative data, citizens ended up casting their votes based on party marketing rather than substantive policy. Ending this secrecy abuse should be a bipartisan priority. When the public is informed again, both parties can and should conduct constructive debate to resolve the many deficiencies persisting in America’s readiness against dual-use threats, including those that are urgent and consequential.

Pillar 3: The 5 Percent NATO Defense Commitment

Among the 32 NATO members, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Germany, and Sweden have the most encouraging plans to meet the full 5 percent target significantly earlier than 2035. However, these countries together currently only account for about 8 percent of NATO’s total annual defense budget. Should this anemic trend continue, there will be a major problem. If the other 26 members do not increase their commitment until 2035, it will be politically infeasible for them to suddenly increase their annual budget by about 90 percent in the single year between 2034 and 2035. Given this likely failure in the final year, Trump’s hard-fought GDP commitment will vaporize after a decade of waiting. Crucially, doing so would be a disaster for both political parties, which have been united in exhorting European nations to pay more for their own defense.

I have suggested in the past that NATO require every member to make an annual increase resulting in the alliance’s total annual defense budget being increased by $115 billion every year for ten years. These normalized annual increases would allow the 2034 budget to transition smoothly into 2035 by increasing NATO’s total annual budget by a far more manageable $115 billion, as opposed to nearly $1.15 trillion in a single jump. Moreover, the accumulated $115 billion annual increases would generate an additional $6.3 trillion over the next decade to counter adversaries. Both the Republicans and the Democrats should push the United States to agree to this and lead its NATO allies to adopt it. With this pool of money, NATO members can now pursue, rather than waiting a decade for adequate funding, far more defense projects to meet their own needs, as well as collective defense such as a Golden Dome for NATO.

American Voters Must Prioritize Results over Rhetoric

This path to bipartisanship directs both parties to focus not on partisan marketing but on substantive national security issues, thereby enabling voters to judge which party demonstrates a superior policy and is truly committed to cross-pollination to capture both parties’ strengths and to constructive debate to eliminate their weaknesses. By working together across party lines, the United States can signal unity to adversaries, strengthen alliances, and ensure its national security strategy endures at least over the next dozen years, even if control of the White House changes. With productive debate and collaborative resolution, America will lead the free world to be ready for war—the most reliable way to preserve peace and prosperity.

About the Author: Brian Chow

Brian G. Chow is an independent policy analyst with more than 190 publications, including numerous monographs, on space and other national security issues. He is a former senior physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, a role he held for 25 years. In addition to providing routine consulting services to government agencies through RAND, he was independently appointed—separate from his RAND work—as a consultant to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, the President’s Science Advisor, and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at different times, advising them on specific high-level initiatives. He holds a Ph.D. in physics, an MBA with distinction, and a Ph.D. in finance. He can be reached on X at @briangchow.