By In a sweeping doctrinal break with three decades of bipartisan interventionism, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a room full of lawmakers, senior military brass, and industry leaders that the United States is abandoning the era of “feckless nation-building” and recentering force projection around narrowly defined national interests.
Delivering Saturday’s keynote at the Reagan National Defense Forum—now shadowed by the Trump administration’s renaming of the Pentagon as the War Department—Hegseth cast the coming National Defense Strategy as a repudiation of the post–Cold War consensus. “The War Department will not be distracted by Democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing, and feckless nation-building,” he declared. “We will deter war. We will advance our interests. We will defend our people. Peace is our goal, and in service of that objective, we will always be ready to fight and win decisively when called upon.”
In careful strokes, noted The Federalist, he outlined four pillars of strategy: fortifying the homeland—border security included—underpinned by a proposed “Golden Dome” missile shield; reasserting primacy in the Western Hemisphere through what he described as a “Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”; deterring Chinese aggression without chasing hegemony; and compelling allies to bear materially greater responsibility for their own security.
The speech doubled as an ideological reckoning. Hegseth accused foreign-policy elites across both parties of abandoning Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” and instead birthing endless wars, globalist assumptions, and industrial hollowing. The label “neo-Reaganites,” he argued, disguised dependence-building and free-riding among allies. “We will no longer tolerate freeriding,” he warned, promising consequences for partners coasting on American expenditure.
Where past forums have celebrated defense procurement as an innovation strategy, Hegseth turned his fire on the system itself. He vowed to dismantle the dominance of big “prime” contractors, opening the field to smaller and mid-sized firms. “The bottom line is a historic, generational, and transformational change that we will implement and will move us from the current prime-contractor-dominated system—defined by limited competition, vendor lock, cost-plus contracts, stress budgets, and frustrating protests—to a future powered by dynamic vendor space that accelerates production by combining investment at a commercial pace with uniquely American ability to scale and scale quickly, all at the speed of urgency,” he said.
The address carried sharp personal undertones. Hegseth invoked former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—absent controversially from duty last year—and noted that this forum once awarded Austin its “Peace Through Strength Award,” despite his tenure on Raytheon’s board and subsequent contract windfalls.
Budget politics also surfaced. Hegseth signaled that defense spending—roughly 3 percent of GDP today—could surge toward 5 percent to finance what he called an “American-made arsenal of freedom.” He underscored dependence on manufacturing chains that run through foreign states, including strategic competitors. In a brief exchange following the speech, he added: “I think that number is going up,” while conceding that President Trump will ultimately decide.
The room responded with polite but restrained applause—telling, perhaps, in a venue sponsored heavily by America’s defense establishment. The Reagan Institute had just released polling asserting Americans support greater overseas military engagement—a finding fundamentally at odds with Hegseth’s territorial retrenchment.
Still, Hegseth insisted the administration remains truer to Reagan’s maxim than its critics. “President Trump is dedicated both sides of the ‘peace through strength’ coin, not just using that phrase as a thin veil for warmongering,” he said.
A War Department official later confirmed to reporters that the message served as a preview of the forthcoming National Defense Strategy—one premised not on open-ended deployments but on towering deterrent capability and a more transactional view of alliance burden-sharing.
