Every year has a word that speaks to the political moment. In 2010, amid Europe’s debt crises, it was “austerity.” In 2024, after the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental disasters, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, it was “resilience.” In 2026, another word has come to dominate the language of national security: “self-reliance.”
As war spreads, confidence in the international order erodes, and the United States shuns longtime alliances in favor of a more transactional and militaristic foreign policy under President Donald Trump, leaders around the world are promising to make their countries less dependent on others. Although the paths to self-reliance vary significantly from country to country, they share a common goal: to have enough defense capabilities to be able to survive alone in a time of conflict.
Every year has a word that speaks to the political moment. In 2010, amid Europe’s debt crises, it was “austerity.” In 2024, after the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental disasters, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, it was “resilience.” In 2026, another word has come to dominate the language of national security: “self-reliance.”
As war spreads, confidence in the international order erodes, and the United States shuns longtime alliances in favor of a more transactional and militaristic foreign policy under President Donald Trump, leaders around the world are promising to make their countries less dependent on others. Although the paths to self-reliance vary significantly from country to country, they share a common goal: to have enough defense capabilities to be able to survive alone in a time of conflict.
Major powers such as China and India have historically circled the language of self-reliance, consistent with their positions outside the U.S. security umbrella. What is new is that formal U.S. allies—from Australia to Europe to the Philippines—have begun using the same language, seeking the ability to defend, arm, and equip themselves without relying on an increasingly unpredictable partner.
Rising defense spending is one visible indicator of this shift. At the recent NATO summit, U.S. allies emphasized their commitments to higher defense spending, much of which is intended not simply to purchase more weapons but to scale up domestic defense industries and cultivate indigenous capabilities.
Yet self-reliance does not mean autarky. Building self-reliant defense capabilities is a hazardous, expensive climb that is often beyond the reach of any single country acting alone. Ironically, many countries will find that sustaining a self-reliant defense industry requires heavy reliance on others for technology sharing, industrial production, and markets. Few places illustrate this paradox more clearly than the Korean Peninsula. South Korea’s case demonstrates that achieving self-reliance may ultimately require deeper engagement with the U.S.-led security order rather than a clean break from it.
If one phrase could explain the aspirations of South Korea since its independence, “self-reliance” might be it.
While North Korea made juche—roughly, “self-reliance”—its organizing principle, building its defense industry by cannibalizing the civilian economy and isolating its people, South Korea pursued self-reliance by integrating itself into networks.
South Korea emerged from the Korean War effectively as a client state, dependent on the United States for economic aid, military support, and political recognition, but its early leaders—most notably, dictator Park Chung-hee, who ruled from 1961 to 1979—sought to restore its de facto sovereignty. Though Park framed his agenda in the language of anti-communism, his deeper mission was a South Korea that could survive if the United States ever abandoned it. In a 1970 New Year’s address, he declared that Koreans needed to secure their “own independent self-defense strength,” what he called “the spirit of self-help, self-dependence, and self-reliance.” Yet Park and his successors understood the limits of South Korea’s position. Because the country could not yet challenge its place within the U.S. security order, self-reliance would have to be built from within an alliance rather than outside it.
Recent scholarship by historians Peter Kwon and Patrick Chung has revealed just how much South Korea’s postwar economic miracle revolved around its defense industry and its place within U.S. military networks. South Korea needed talent, technology, and capital, all of which were available through alliance relationships. Educational exchanges were one important channel: As U.S. universities expanded science and engineering programs during the space race, South Korean students enrolled to receive advanced technical training, with many returning home to become leading scientists at companies such as Samsung.
Denied access to blueprints for certain weapons supplied by the United States, South Korean researchers secretly reverse-engineered them to learn how to manufacture spare parts themselves. This allowed South Korea to supply its own troops and laid the foundation for South Korean firms to compete for U.S. military contracts and eventually supply parts and ammunition to other U.S. allies. By embedding themselves in the social, financial, and military networks that connected the United States and its allies, South Korean firms gained the technology and expertise to become global competitors in their own right.
Seoul also learned to convert its dependence into leverage. When the United States moved to reduce its troop presence on the peninsula in the 1970s, Seoul squeezed Washington for additional military aid and hundreds of millions of dollars in arms sales credits. Likewise, arms purchases from U.S. defense contractors were often accompanied by “offset” deals requiring the sellers to invest in South Korean companies—a policy it maintains to this day.
Working so closely with the United States was a double-edged sword, as Washington often blocked Seoul from exporting certain weapons to third parties. But this also pushed Korea to diversify its partnerships, including technology-sharing agreements with Britain, West Germany, and Israel. These moves did not challenge the U.S. alliance structure; rather, South Korea used its interdependence to accumulate the resources it needed.
Some seven decades after the Korean War, South Korea is now one of the world’s largest defense exporters, capable of producing its own weapons spanning the technological spectrum. Yet this was only possible because Korea worked within the global economy and the alliance networks Washington helped construct.
For U.S. allies seeking self-reliance today, the road ahead will be long and expensive. It might take decades, just as South Korea’s effort did. Because modern defense production requires enormous investments in talent, technology, and capital—and because few U.S. allies can turn to Beijing or Moscow without jeopardizing their relationships with Washington—the most viable strategy is not to reject interdependence but to integrate even more deeply with U.S. alliance networks, with or without Washington. Among the many initiatives now underway, the most successful are likely to be those that can do this while simultaneously carving out a niche within an increasingly saturated global defense industry.
Ukraine offers an early example of this model. Kyiv has rightly celebrated its rapid development of a defense industry in the midst of its war against Russia. In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba lauded his country’s “quiet decoupling” as it developed its own long-range strike capabilities. Yet in the process, Ukraine has become more embedded within European and U.S. defense networks, signing joint production agreements with the European Union and announcing plans to manufacture drones in Ohio and New Hampshire as part of a billion-dollar deal with the United States. Ukraine may no longer depend on U.S. missiles as it once did, but it is betting the long-term viability of its defense industry on becoming indispensable to the United States and its allies with its singular advantage in drones.
South Korea today has adopted a similar strategy. Under President Lee Jae-myung, Seoul has moved aggressively to position itself as the supplier of choice for NATO members and other U.S. allies. In effect, South Korea wants to fill a gap in the defense industrial networks that were once structured by the United States but are now fizzling as it retracts. Even as it strives to supply everything its military needs by itself, South Korea’s defense industry is driven heavily by exports in areas where it enjoys competitive advantages, particularly heavy artillery and ships.
Most countries won’t have the luxury of veteran defense industries and robust state support. Lithuania, for example, is attempting to jump-start its own defense industry, positioning a local electric utility company as the future of homegrown arms manufacturing. But its current efforts are only possible through joint ventures with the German defense giant Rheinmetall, where the Lithuania side will manufacture artillery shells and spare parts. Lithuania’s defense industry, if there will be one, will only survive if it finds a niche and integrates itself into the broader European defense supply chain. Co-production and technology-sharing agreements can help, but governments must also accept the fundamental market logic at play, or their defense industries risk becoming permanent recipients of public subsidies.
Of course, not every joint venture will succeed. Indonesia’s decade-long co-production agreement with South Korea for the KF-21 fighter jet unraveled after years of troubles— including South Korea attempting to prosecute Indonesian engineers for data theft—ending Jakarta’s most ambitious effort to develop an indigenous aerospace industry. France and Germany have likewise struggled to sustain cooperation and recently canceled their high-profile fighter jet program over disagreements on how to share intellectual property, forcing Germany to consider reliance on U.S. fighter jets for the foreseeable future. Countries may view co-production as a short-term measure to buy time to develop homegrown industries, but these arrangements risk keeping countries reliant on others for far longer than they expect.
The lesson, then, is not that countries should pursue defense cooperation for its own sake, nor that they should aspire to produce every weapon system domestically. Instead, U.S. allies need to pursue market opportunities, where they have an advantage, within the old transoceanic networks that the United States has historically anchored. Governments may justify higher defense spending by promising greater independence, but they would be wise not to underestimate the infrastructural legacy of U.S. power.
