The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) outlines the current administration’s assessment of the threat environment, its prioritization of national interests, and its approach to aligning strategic objectives with defence capabilities and other instruments of power.
The strategy marks a sharp and unapologetic assertion of transactionalism as the primary logic guiding U.S. foreign and security policy – one that treats relationships, commitments, and alliances largely in terms of immediate costs and returns. The document is presented as method-driven, emphasizing a deliberate alignment between national interests and priorities (“wants”) and the assets available to advance them (“means”), and contrasting this approach with what it portrays as the incoherence of previous administrations.
Yet, the NSS reveals a profound misalignment between its stated priorities and the policies it advances. By narrowing the definition of threats, and framing U.S. security through a predominantly state-centric lens focused on regional spheres of influence, the strategy sidelines actorless risks such as climate change and ecosystem loss. However, lacking a single state adversary does not make these transnational challenges any less severe; they still pose serious, long-term threats to both national and global security.
This omission constitutes a strategic blind spot. As a result, many of the NSS’s stated ambitions, ranging from technological and energy leadership to hemispheric influence and burden-sharing expectations, rest on policy prescriptions that neither reflect the full risk environment nor mobilize the level of investment necessary for their realization. It also has significant implications for traditional allies like Canada. By downgrading transnational risks, the NSS deepens the divergence in how security is conceptualized across the Atlantic. Climate change, once an area of strategic convergence between allies, has become a driver of transatlantic decoupling.
Ignoring Systemic Risks: A Strategic Blind Spot
Cross-border risks such as climate change, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and biological threats increasingly intersect, compounding instability and creating risks that no single state can manage alone. Yet, the NSS fails to offer a framework to address these long-term challenges that do not fit within a state-centric vision based on sovereignty and national interests.
The NSS only explicitly mentions climate change once, stating that the current administration rejects “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.” The assessment is at best dismissive and at worst intentionally misleading and contrary to the scientific consensus. Importantly, it reframes climate change not as a strategic risk but as ground for ideological friction.
This conceptualizing marks a sharp reversal of nearly two decades of U.S. leadership in climate-security analysis. For years, the then-U.S. Department of Defence pioneered the understanding of climate change as a “threat multiplier,” shaping operational environments, straining military infrastructure, and interacting with other drivers of instability. The fact that adapting to accelerating systemic risks, of which climate change is a prime example, demands foresight, coordination, investment, and shared approaches, had also been increasingly recognized by previous administrations. The 2025 NSS abandons that legacy, leaving the United States without a strategy for the risks that increasingly define global security.
Energy, Technology and Science: Leadership Without Investment
The NSS asserts that the United States will lead globally in energy, critical technologies, and innovation as both a strategic objective and a tool of geopolitical leverage. Yet these ambitions directly contradict the administration’s policy choices, which have actively rejected the global net-zero transition and cut funding for climate science research, clean-energy development, and climate-security assessments. Meanwhile, competitors such as China are investing at scale to dominate the energy systems, critical minerals, and clean-tech supply chains that will shape geopolitical power in the coming decades.
Energy resilience is increasingly recognized as a central component of strategic leadership. Modern defence capabilities (including advanced sensors and autonomous systems) rely on secure, flexible energy systems. States that control the clean-energy technologies and critical minerals supply chains behind these systems increasingly gain strategic leverage, protect themselves from economic coercion, and strengthen their military readiness. The United States risks ceding this terrain by weakening the scientific and research foundations that enable such leadership.
Burden-Sharing Without Shared Threat Assessment
The NSS also devotes significant attention to burden sharing, reinforcing long-standing U.S. expectations that allies contribute more to collective defence. These expectations were reaffirmed at this year’s NATO Summit in The Hague, where partners, including Canada, renewed commitments to increased defence spending and enhanced readiness.
However, the emphasis on burden-sharing is not accompanied by any framework for managing the transnational risks that allies are confronting together. Climate impacts, water stress, ecosystem degradation and compound food insecurity are reshaping the global security landscape in which allies operate, including across Europe and North America. As Canada and Europe continue integrating these risks more deeply into defence planning while the United States deprioritizes climate as a security concern, a strategic divergence is emerging.
This creates an immediate doctrinal gap: without a shared understanding of emerging threats, the U.S. and its allies risk misalignment within NATO, which relies on common threat assessments and coherent planning. Over time, this divergence could widen into a capability gap, as Canada and European partners continue investing in climate-resilient forces and infrastructure while the United States does not. The risk is allied militaries preparing for different security realities, and diverging policies that strain the cohesion of the transatlantic security architecture.
Implications for Canada
For Canada, the contradictions embedded in the NSS have significant practical and strategic consequences. The zero-sum worldview reflected in the document is paired with a revived Monroe Doctrine and explicit commitment to limit the influence of “non-hemispheric competitors” in the Western Hemisphere. In other words, the NSS frames the hemisphere as a U.S.-led sphere requiring active protection, including ensuring U.S. access to “key strategic regions” and discouraging partners from cooperating with others.
For Canada, a sovereign state with global partnerships, a diversified trade profile, and its own climate and energy priorities, this explicit vision of hemispheric hierarchy is particularly significant. Together with the deprioritization of climate risks, it signals a geopolitical posture that could limit Canadian agency on issues ranging from energy systems to Arctic governance, trade, and climate-security planning.
Canada must also anticipate and fill the gaps left by U.S. absence on systemic risks. This will require strengthening its own policies by keeping climate change and other transnational threats central to national security planning. Priority measures should include investing in climate-resilient infrastructure, powering the Canadian Armed Forces with clean, flexible energy systems, enhancing civil-military disaster response coordination, doubling down on research and innovation to support science and technology programs that anticipate emerging risks, and systematically integrating these risks into threat assessments and intelligence planning.
Lastly, the integration of climate risks remains a powerful vector for cooperation. For Europe and Canada, the path forward lies in maintaining momentum, preserving areas of transatlantic alignment where they still exist, and preparing the ground for future re-engagement should U.S. strategic priorities shift again.
The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s/authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute or its staff.
