NDAA Breaks Another Funding Record As Trump Masquerades as Peacemaker

This essay appeared in the Dec. 11, 2025 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

There are few things more gratifying in life than making the unlikeliest of discoveries in the most unexpected of places, as I did perusing the White House site for the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy (NSS).

The 33-page document’s release came as an obedient Congress seemingly effortlessly developed and passed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a 3,100-page bill that sets a new record for U.S. military funding. It’s the type of bipartisanship that the hawkish corporate media can’t get enough of. And in the case of this legislation, unlike those related to possibly uplifting the social and economic well-being of Americans, questions about affordability are often shelved.

What’s more, Congress gifted Trump more than even he requested for his hegemonic war games, rewarding a president currently prosecuting a regime change war with Venezuela with an additional $8 billion.

Alas, there’s no comedy to be found there, given that the NDAA serves as the mechanism by which American colonialism is financed.

No, to find levity in an ever-devolving world, you need look no further than the aforementioned NSS, which directly challenges the intelligence of the American people in the most explicit way imaginable.

“President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace,” the document, which effectively serves as the framework for American global dominance, declares.

It continues, apparently in all seriousness: “Stopping regional conflicts before they spiral into global wars that drag down whole continents is worthy of the Commander-in-Chief’s attention, and a priority for this administration. A world on fire, where wars come to our shores, is bad for American interests.”

While the Trump administration is nothing if not shameless, saying out loud that you’re concerned about wars coming “to our shores” is particularly bold for a president who has brought war to our hemisphere, simply so Secretary of State Marco Rubio can live out his dream of toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

And that’s not even the craziest part.

The introduction of the document serves as something of a MAGA manifesto—but one that seems to forget that 2025 actually happened.

Here it is, in all its (unironic?) glory:

“Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest. They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle caps and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.”

Trump wants you to think he’s moved us away from the era of borderless, forever wars, when, in reality, the United States is still heavily involved in the Middle East. We’re only weeks removed from an operation targeting more than 15 ISIS sites in Syria, and days away from the official announcement of the military’s first “one-way-attack drone squadron” in the Middle East. In just the last three months, the military announced the killing of an alleged al Qaeda “attack planner” and took out someone described as a senior ISIS member during a raid in northern Syria. While much of the media has moved away from covering military operations in the Middle East, the war on terror is very much ongoing, despite the revisionist history emanating from the strategy document.

The document paints a portrait of a Trump administration frozen in the campaign cycle. Despite little evidence that Trump would disentangle the United States from foreign entanglements—many of the country’s own making—many Americans voted for him nonetheless based on such promises.

Much in the same way that he’s insisting the economy is fabulous (“A+++++,” according to him), Trump repeatedly invokes the supposed peace he’s brought to the world. This from the same administration that bombed Iran on behalf of Israel and has made Venezuela the new bogeyman. We’ve been told that the military operations—extrajudicial slayings at sea—are about drugs. However, the administration authorized the forced seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker just this week, yet another escalation.

While it’s true that some members of Congress have been outspoken against the strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific and have called for more transparency, they’ve made little effort to address the underlying problem: wresting back war authority from the executive. To be clear, the strikes on survivors of a Sept. 2 boat attack were horrific—but so was the initial strike on the men aboard the vessel.

With all this context, it would appear future military funding would undergo considerably more scrutiny. But quite the opposite happened. The 2026 NDAA passed the House 312-112 (115 Democrats approved it) despite its record-breaking $900 billion price tag. Combined with supplemental funding separately passed this year, military funding for 2026 will top $1 trillion.

Among the provisions in the NDAA: increased funding for Israel, specifically for “anti-tunnel cooperation” and “countering unmanned aerial systems,” designating Israel as a “purchaser with a special designation,” and a measure protecting Israel against arms embargoes. At a time when Trump has been antagonistic toward Ukraine, the NDAA authorizes more than $400 million for the country’s war against Russia. It also funds efforts to increase deterrence of China in the Indo-Pacific and more resources toward Trump’s oft-promised missile defense system for the United States, akin to Israel’s “Iron Dome.”

To understand the Trump administration’s goals, we can simply scrutinize the NDAA. Or you can read his NSS, which offers a very different reality: “President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace.”