National Security in 2025

The United States is still strong—but aimed the wrong way.

The United States ends 2025 with formidable national security instruments intact. Our military remains the world’s most capable force; its officer corps includes professionals whose oath is to the Constitution, not to a person; our intelligence agencies have a cadre of objective, apolitical analysts and operators focused on keeping adversaries in check, not delivering assessments that reflect the White House’s definition of reality; and our district and appeals courts are restraining efforts to impose authoritarian controls even as a U.S. Supreme Court majority has widened what measures the administration can claim under “national security.”

However, over the year, national security in many corners of Washington became less a discipline for managing real risk and more a catch-all justification for turning tools designed for foreign threats inward—toward migrants, protesters, and political critics. The result was theatrical, often dehumanizing rhetoric and visible shows of force calibrated for television rather than guided by a serious assessment of threats.

The USS George Washington and the USS Dewey participate in a maneuvering exercise in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 10. (Department of Defense)

At Quantico in September, that inward turn—and the performance culture around it—was made plain. Donald Trump recast the domestic landscape as the new battlefield—an “invasion from within”—and told an auditorium of generals, admirals, and senior enlisted leaders that some of them would play a major part in “straighten[ing]” American cities.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth followed with his familiar—and transparent—brand of command theater. He lectured the battle-tested audience about the “warrior ethos” and told any “fatties” to quit. The point wasn’t readiness; it was humiliation as power—reminding a captive audience that their careers depended on the favor of a man who treats the Pentagon as a prop.

At the Department of Homeland Security, toughness was redefined as volume and budget, not standards. Despite nearly tripling Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s budget and pouring tens of billions more into detention beds and enforcement operations—including a new $140 million contract for six Boeing 737s dedicated to deportation flights—the administration cut ICE training times for new officers and loosened hiring standards, then touted the bigger classes as proof of a tougher line on immigration. What mattered was not whether the forces in uniform were better prepared but that the numbers and the footage could be sold as “strength.”

Months prior to the declarations at Quantico and budget increases, the administration decided that the best way to ensure that the system was ready for its new vision was to fire anyone linked to the past administration or who had offered counsel that countered Trump’s “reality.” This purge started in February and continues, with each announcement of a leadership change filled with vague explanations, never seriously explained as failures of competence. The administration hasn’t needed a formal order to politicize national security; it believes the message will resonate that the surest way to stay in the game is to round off the edges of their own judgment.

The same preference for spectacle has been on display where and how force was used. Cities were flooded with National Guard units under emergency orders and crowd-control missions that swept up people with little or no criminal record. A handful of minor clashes—a sandwich thrown at an officer, a shove at a checkpoint—were turned into symbols of chaos that justified more deployments and more aggressive tactics. The point was less about stopping organized violence than about demonstrating that the government would apply powers designed to fight foreign enemies to quash dissent, now considered a strategic threat.

Abroad and at the border, the pattern was the same. A growing U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean has been sold as a crackdown on “narco-terrorists” and human smugglers, with boat strikes and interdictions packaged into clips for news networks and social media. Along the southern border, public lands were effectively converted into militarized zones, patrolled by armed agents and overflown by drones, with the legal justifications buried under talk of “sovereignty” and “taking our country back.” The same tools that once signaled deterrence abroad became part of a permanent campaign at home.

On paper, the newly released National Security Strategy declares that the proper focus is on defending Americans from a dangerous world. In practice, it fits the same pattern: big, visible moves that look tough from a podium while the less cinematic threats—domestic political violence, crumbling infrastructure, cyber intrusions and disinformation, and a generation struggling with basic affordability and the chance to own a home—fight for space on the agenda.

The human cost of this administration’s version of national security rarely shows up in the speeches, but it has been hiding in plain sight all year. Kilmar Abrego García is one face of it: a lawful U.S. resident wrongfully deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison despite a standing court order, publicly branded a gang member to justify the decision, then brought back and detained again, with the government shuffling through a revolving list of countries as proposed deportation destinations.

Last week, a federal judge ordered Garcia’s release from immigration detention, calling his renewed confinement “without lawful authority” and cataloguing how officials had “serially” played passport roulette with his life. His case is extreme, but it is not unique. It shows how quickly the language of national security can be wrapped around ordinary people to excuse lawless decisions.

Step back from the individual episodes and a starker pattern comes into view: a conception of national security that once tried—imperfectly—to balance external threats, domestic resilience, and constitutional limits has shrunk into guarding a narrowing “us” from an ever-growing “them,” and rewarding leaders who can turn that posture into content. The tools are sharper and more networked than ever; the question now is not whether they work, but whose fears and grievances they are being tasked to serve.

After a year like this, the 2026 mid-term elections won’t be a magic reset button but a chance to redraw what counts as “national security.” Ballots can’t force officials to embrace evidence over fear, but they will show whether politics built on boat-strike videos, roundups, and watchlists still carries the day—or whether the country insists on something more basic: That power be constrained, courts obeyed when they say a policy has no lawful basis, and fear not treated as a standing justification for every new tool.

This is only half the story. National security does not stop at the water’s edge, and neither does the damage. That is the subject of my other end-of-year piece: not just what this administration is doing to our security at home, but how the world is already moving on.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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