President Trump's State of the Union address was concluded on February 24th, lasted nearly 2 hours, claimed economic wins, and attacked Democrats while covering immigration and foreign policy. Trump highlighted a "golden age of America" with a booming economy, secure borders, falling inflation, and rising incomes while defending his new tariff after the Supreme Court block. The remark made aligns with a budget environment explicitly orientated toward "peace through strength" and major recapitalisation. The Department of Defence's FY2026 request totals $961.6 billion, a 13.4% increase over FY2025, with headline emphasis on nuclear modernisation and high-end warfighting capacity. Whether or not the budget translates into a contract, the combination of rhetoric and resourcing points to a government posture preparing for a major contingency. The focus is on generating scale in munitions stocks, industrial throughput, and strike capacity consistent with large-scale war rather than limited campaigns.

This posture is enabled by policy architecture designed to move money and matériel faster. The FY2026 National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) authorises a national defence topline of $900.6 billion, framing the current environment as the most dangerous since World War II and tying deterrence to "reindustrialisation". At the appropriations layer, negotiators agreed to an $838.7 billion defence topline, which is $8.4 billion above the Pentagon request, to fund industrial investments like solid rocket motor capacity. In plain terms, Congress and the Department of Defence are not just buying platforms but rewriting processes to turn peacetime procurement into surge logic. By utilising multiyear procurement tools and reducing statutory friction, officials are creating the essential prerequisites for sustaining a large-scale war effort.

A war with Iran is uniquely positioned to spark a wider event because the conflict geometry is inherently multinational and system-shocking, touching energy security, maritime chokepoints, and U.S. basing across the region. Recent reporting describes a massive U.S. military buildup in the Middle East alongside Iranian warnings that regional bases could become targets, dynamics that historically raise the odds of spillover through retaliation cycles and shipping disruption. Politically, such a war would also be fought in the information domain, where it could be framed as Western coercion across many Muslim-majority societies. However, outcomes would not be uniform given deep divisions among these states regarding threat perceptions and relationships with Washington. The most defensible conclusion is conditional: the U.S. is building scalable war capacity, and a conflict with Iran carries an elevated risk of broader regional polarisation, global economic shock, and even nuclear warhead use, though the degree of bloc formation depends on escalation choices and whether diplomacy holds.

Sources: NPR, CBS, Reuters
Photos: Unsplash

Written by: Ariff Azraei Bin Mohammed Kamal