What Trump’s National Security Strategy means for Canadian business
Late Thursday, the White House quietly dropped the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), a 33-page blueprint for “America First 2.0.” It’s important to think of this document as source code for how the Trump White House, and perhaps a future Republican President, intends to conduct foreign policy. If your project depends on Canada-U.S. trade in any capacity, it is essential reading. It provides a critical new window into what 2026 is going to look like for Canada-U.S. relations, U.S.-E.U. relations, and the important work ahead for Canada. It also sets out a new vernacular that your organization needs to start using in your government and media relations efforts to stay relevant.
Minister of Finance François-Philippe Champagne has pitched Canada’s forthcoming Defence Industrialization Strategy (DIS) as an “engine for growth” and has repeatedly said that “every company should have a defence strategy.” While we await Ottawa’s promised pre-Christmas release of the DIS, we have provided a short analysis of the NSS below, plus guidance on what to do before everyone heads to ski hills and family gatherings.
The Brief: the new Trump Doctrine at a glance
The Monroe Doctrine has been U.S. foreign policy for 200 years. It isn’t new that America wants to dominate the Western Hemisphere. But Washington is making clear it will “reassert and enforce” hemispheric pre-eminence by denying non-regional powers, chiefly China, control of ports, military sites, key infrastructure or any “strategic assets,” broadly defined. Alliances, aid and trade terms will be conditional on partners unwinding “adversarial outside influence.” That means Canada, Mexico, and countries across South America are expected to ditch any Chinese investment that could be deemed strategic.
At the same time, the strategy declares that “the era of mass migration must end” and that border security is now the primary element of national security, a framing that will seep into everything from CUSMA negotiations to how Washington thinks about our shared perimeter. It has certainly influenced Trump’s perspective on Europe, which he believes is on track to migrate itself out of existence. This will be manna to the ears of Europe’s nationalist political parties.
Economic statecraft and re-industrialization sit at the centre of this doctrine. Trump sees the rebalancing trade, re-shoring industrial production, securing critical mineral and technology supply chains, and reviving the defence industrial base at home and in allied countries as essential to its America First strategy. Through this strategy, every U.S. embassy is explicitly tasked to behave like a sales force for American firms, scouting “strategic acquisition and investment opportunities” in the hemisphere and backing them with U.S. financing tools. We are already seeing this with American investors trying to poach Canadian talent and relocate tech start-ups south of the border, a trend that will only deepen in 2026 without aggressive Canadian countermeasures to keep Canada’s best and brightest here.
NATO’s new five per cent of GDP defence benchmark, also known as the “Hague Commitment,” is presented as a Trump-era signature, with allies expected to build combat-credible militaries and rebuild their own defence industrial bases. It is clear that Canada’s forthcoming Defence Industrialization Strategy (DIS) is meant to be a companion of sorts to the U.S. strategy. In practice, these efforts will be treated as a precondition for a better trade deal with the U.S.
The NSS also puts a premium on technological, energy and financial dominance, repeatedly highlighting AI, quantum, autonomous systems, undersea, space and nuclear as decisive domains, alongside “energy dominance” in oil, gas, coal and nuclear. It explicitly rejects net zero as a guiding ideology. While Canada will likely continue to identify its net zero ambitions domestically — potentially at a slowed pace — that will no longer be something we lead with as a selling feature in Washington.
Taken together, this is a Trump-era Monroe Doctrine backed by tariffs, military redeployment to the hemisphere and an aggressive push to crowd out China’s regional influence.
What this means for Canada at 50,000 feet
The NSS doesn’t picture Canada as the “51st state” so much as an economically dependent vassal. We are a neighbour to be leveraged for U.S. security and prosperity. U.S. anxieties about steel, aluminum, autos, ports, grid infrastructure, data and critical minerals now sit squarely inside a hemispheric security frame, and Canada is part of the problem set. Alignment will be both rewarded and enforced, with tariffs, access to U.S. financing, and strings on NORAD, NATO and development programs all used to push Chinese and other adversarial capital out of ports, energy, telecoms and mining across the hemisphere.
The benefit of having this document in public is that it can be gamified. Very little of this is a surprise to anyone who knows the cultural tides the White House swims in. But it broadcasts the kind of language they expect partners and allies to engage with. And as we already knew, defence spending has become a test of seriousness. Canada’s path to five per cent by 2035 is about catching up to a U.S. standard that Washington intends to export. Industrial policy is the new diplomacy, and Ottawa’s forthcoming DIS will be read in Washington through a single lens: does this help or hinder U.S. economic and security primacy in the hemisphere?
Net, net? For Canada to be successful with the U.S., we must speak the same language set out in Trump’s NSS.
Risks, opportunities, and what to do now
Rather than slicing this by sector, it’s more useful to think across three axes: China exposure, North American value, and political story.
Any visible Chinese or other adversarial equity, debt, offtake or JV in “strategic assets” such as mines, ports, grid, subsea, quantum, AI, cyber, data centres, etc., is now a political liability.
Quantum, AI, cyber, space, undersea, autonomy, munitions, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, Arctic and NORAD modernization are exactly the systems where Washington wants non-Chinese, allied suppliers. Here, Canadian firms can present themselves as the “trusted capacity” in that North American stack. Critical minerals and energy projects in Canada and Latin America can be recast as hemispheric security assets that de-risk China and secure supply for allies, with Canadian standards and governance as a differentiator.
Ottawa is about to need real-world examples of firms that embody its DIS, including sovereign capabilities, dual-use deep tech, regional industrial growth, Indigenous partnerships, and Arctic relevance. If you can credibly tick even a few of those boxes, your project could be one that Minister Champagne cites as evidence of defence spending Canadians should be proud of.
What to do before Christmas
Here are five things you can do in the next 10 days to get ready for a new vernacular in 2026:
Write your own briefing: Focus on where your organization or sector intersects with the Trump NSS and Ottawa’s DIS. Assess your own position by writing one page on risk and risk mitigations, including China exposure, border, regulatory, and political, and one page on opportunities, including where you fit in hemispheric security, critical minerals, energy dominance or tech stack.
Refresh your Ottawa and Washington talking points: Swap generic “innovation, sustainability, competitiveness” jargon for: hemispheric security, economic security, re-industrialization, burden-sharing, defence industrial base, critical minerals and energy security, and trusted AI/quantum/cyber for North American defence.
Audit and narrate your China exposure: Don’t wait to be asked. Write a clean, honest, two-paragraph narrative on where you have exposure and how you’re de-risking.
Decide your Q1 footprint: Consider writing a CEO op-ed on Canada’s role in the new Western Hemisphere strategy and making a submission or appearance in House of Commons committee consultations focused on DIS, critical minerals, or the Americas.
Coordinate with your associations: Make sure your sector associations are framing their asks against both the Trump NSS and Canada’s DIS, since Canadian trade with the U.S. will now be very much informed by the priorities and direction set out therein.
