“Prioritize” has become an ever-present buzzword in U.S. security policy, featured most prominently as the dominant theme of the new National Defense Strategy (NDS). In response to the overextension of U.S. global commitments prioritization offers a clearer organization of interests from most important to least important.

However, going beyond the buzzword has been a challenge for successive administrations and U.S. Defense Department leadership from both parties. Despite recognizing that some threats are more important than others, modern defense strategies and the administrations they guide still fell prey to the temptations of overextension and parochialism.

“Prioritize” has become an ever-present buzzword in U.S. security policy, featured most prominently as the dominant theme of the new National Defense Strategy (NDS). In response to the overextension of U.S. global commitments prioritization offers a clearer organization of interests from most important to least important.

However, going beyond the buzzword has been a challenge for successive administrations and U.S. Defense Department leadership from both parties. Despite recognizing that some threats are more important than others, modern defense strategies and the administrations they guide still fell prey to the temptations of overextension and parochialism.

The 2026 NDS is different. In fact, it reflects a “third way” among the Republican national security factions: prioritization.

For at least the last two decades, Republican national security thinking was dominated by an indiscriminate fixation on U.S. primacy everywhere. For these primacists, if the United States wasn’t first regionally and institutionally, then it was last.

Primacy sounds strong. No one likes the idea of the United States being second-rate. But by trying to do everything, the United States ultimately achieved little. What’s more, it now faces significant resource constraints and degraded readiness as a result. The NDS put it aptly: “America emerged from the Cold War as the world’s most powerful nation by a wide margin. … But rather than husband and cultivate these hard-earned advantages, our nation’s post-Cold War leadership and foreign policy establishment squandered them.”

In response to this overreach, the restrainer camp emerged as the only source of pushback on the primacists. Restrainers raised the issues of resource scarcity and trade-offs, lack of burden-sharing in U.S. alliances, and fruitless interventionism long before today. But until U.S. President Donald Trump and the “America First” movement emerged on the political scene, restrainers in the Republican Party suffered from limited access to power centers and small coalitions incapable of moving the needle on major reforms. As a result, restraint alone was insufficient as a viable alternative to the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment.

Enter prioritization. Majda Ruge and Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations were the first to plot out the changing tides on national security in the GOP, as well as introduce the term “prioritizer” in a 2022 piece. The prioritizer approach did not emerge simply because of tired tension between primacists and restrainers. It garnered a platform and a following largely in response to the rising risk of military conflict with China and the lack of U.S. preparedness to deter it from coming to blows. Prioritizer concerns were only exacerbated when the United States began providing unprecedented levels of military aid to Ukraine after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.

At the time, the Biden administration and a bipartisan coalition that included Republican primacists supported the swift drawdown of arms direct from U.S. inventories. This consensus rejected the notion that successful peace talks were possible and made the case that rapid armament of Ukraine would decisively shift the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine’s favor and result in a swift end to the conflict.

Prioritizers sought to introduce a missing element of caution: U.S. resources are not immune from scarcity. A neglected, stagnate defense industrial base is in no position to replenish U.S. stocks at the rates required given the unprecedented volume of drawdown for Ukraine. And the United States no longer plans nor is sufficiently resourced for simultaneous conflict, which puts it at risk should conflict break out vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific.

At times, prioritization has been reduced to an “Asia First” policy. But this does not do justice to the factors that make it so strategically and politically potent.

First, prioritizers embrace a more flexible realism that guards against the temptation to enshrine every region, alliance, or conflict as constituting a core national interest to the United States. Republican primacy struggles to downgrade or decrease prioritization of any one region or threat. Prioritizers should have no qualms taking the necessary steps to deprioritize and reset expectations both at home and abroad as a result. Flexible realism also makes for more calibrated responses to the political environment, protecting high-level decision-makers from being perennially pigeonholed into one conception of the United States’ national security priorities.

For example, the 2026 NDS characterized Russia as “a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members,” and a threat to U.S. homeland defense in specific areas such as nuclear, undersea, space, and cyber. This is a significant change from Trump’s NDS in 2018, which put long-term strategic competition with China and Russia as relatively equal U.S. priorities. The prioritizer approach is comfortable reassessing prior assumptions about the strategic environment and recalibrating the level and areas of U.S. engagement as necessary. It does not mean, in this case, that Russia should be ignored or deemed no longer a threat. Rather, it means that the United States’ focus reduces to specific capabilities that threaten the homeland, and the responsibility to maintain deterrence of the conventional threat must shift to those most closely effected, such as European NATO allies.

Second, prioritizers are willing to play hardball in alliance management. Whereas restrainers would shed many alliances and primacists would aim to foster and promote all alliances, prioritizers recognize that decreasing the U.S. alliance network is unrealistic and expanding it for anything less than clear win-wins just exacerbates the free-rider problem.

The United States wants “partners, not dependents,” as U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, where he discussed the Pentagon’s prioritization of burden-sharing across alliances as a strategic imperative. Burden-sharing is not a passive platitude for prioritization. It is, as seen in the NDS, the linchpin that makes prioritization in practice possible. Prioritizers go one layer further and focus on the essential allies in relevant regions that produce the biggest bang for the United States’ buck in terms of time spent. Namely, this means focusing on bilateral engagement with the wealthiest power players in each region—such as Germany, Japan, South Korea, Israel, and the Gulf states—and, by necessity, expending less high-level time and attention on second-tier powers, such as Italy, the Baltics, Thailand, and Iraq. If central allies, in both priority and non-priority theaters, produce more security for themselves (defense spending, combat credible capabilities, etc.), then the United States can better align its own scarce resources to the demands of its core national interests. If the prioritizer approach succeeds in implementing the burden-sharing across U.S. alliances—a huge task requiring a lot of tough love—then the course correction for the United States, after decades of alliance imbalance, will be immense.

Finally, prioritization is best positioned for long-term coalition-building within the GOP. The foreign-policy debate within the Republican Party is still a relatively new phenomenon, and defining the post-Trump national security framework is anyone’s game. The prioritizer framework can work with both camps to varying degrees depending on the issue. This is a luxury that neither primacy nor restraint enjoy, and it is a major advantage during a time of change and restructuring within the GOP.

Prioritization is at play both in the strategic vision and the major policies of the Trump administration thus far. Advancing a new defense spending standard for all allies, limiting engagement in Iran during Operation Midnight Hammer, working toward a peaceful and expeditious end to the war in Ukraine, and spearheading a robust defense industrial base reform effort all exemplify the prioritizer approach. Moreover, primacists and restrainers in the GOP have found something to praise among these efforts.

However, recent incoherence from Trump on Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland threatens the unified gains made when the administration sticks closer to the prioritizer equilibrium point. Over the next three years, Republican thinkers will debate Trump’s implementation of the NDS and the National Security Strategy. It remains to be seen if the White House can successfully execute the prioritizer philosophy laid out in these documents. But the country will certainly be stronger if it does.