The US military has released a priority-shifting National Defence Strategy that chastised the country's allies in urging them to take control of their own security and reasserted the Trump administration’s focus on dominance in the Western Hemisphere above a longtime goal of countering China.

The new policy document, released late on Friday, views China – which the Biden administration saw as a top adversary – as a settled force in the Indo-Pacific region that only needs to be deterred from dominating the United States or its allies.

The goal “is not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them,” the Pentagon says in the document, later adding that “this does not require regime change or some other existential struggle”.

“President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade and respectful relations with China,” it says, which follows efforts to climb down from a trade war sparked by the administration’s sky-high tariffs. It says it will “open a wider range of military-to-military communications” with China’s army.

In another example of offloading regional security to allies, the document says, “South Korea is capable of taking primary responsibility for deterring [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] with critical but more limited US support.”

The 34-page document, the first since 2022, was highly political for a military blueprint, criticising partners from Europe to Asia for relying on previous US administrations to subsidise their defence.

It called for “a sharp shift – in approach, focus, and tone.” That translated to a blunt assessment that allies would take on more of the burden countering nations from Russia to Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

“For too long, the US Government neglected – even rejected – putting Americans and their concrete interests first,” the document said in its opening sentence.

It capped off a week of animosity between President Donald Trump’s administration and traditional allies like Europe, with Trump threatening to impose tariffs on some European partners to press a bid to acquire Greenland before announcing a deal that lowered the temperature.

As allies confront what some see as a hostile attitude from the United States, they will almost certainly be unhappy to see that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s department will be providing “credible options to guarantee US military and commercial access to key terrain”, especially Greenland and the Panama Canal.

Following a tiff this week at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the strategy at once urges co-operation with Canada and other neighbours while still issuing a stark warning.

“We will engage in good faith with our neighbours, from Canada to our partners in Central and South America, but we will ensure that they respect and do their part to defend our shared interests,” according to the document. “And where they do not, we will stand ready to take focused, decisive action that concretely advances US interests.”

Much like the White House’s National Security Strategy that preceded it, the defence blueprint reinforces Trump’s “America First” philosophy, which favours non-intervention overseas, questions decades of strategic relationships and prioritises US interests. The National Defense Strategy was last published in 2022 under then-president Joe Biden and focused on China as America’s “pacing challenge.”

The strategy simultaneously courts help from partners in America’s backyard while warning them that the United States will “actively and fearlessly defend America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere”.

It specifically points to access to the Panama Canal and Greenland. It came just days after Trump said he reached a “framework of a future deal” on Arctic security with Nato leader Mark Rutte that would offer the United States “total access” to Greenland, a territory of Nato ally Denmark. Danish official sources say formal negotiations have yet to begin.

While saying that “Russia will remain a persistent but manageable threat to Nato’s eastern members for the foreseeable future,” the defence strategy asserts that Nato allies are much more powerful and so are “strongly positioned to take primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense.” (AP)