MITRE’s model to evaluate and prioritize U.S. engagements overseas delivers specific recommendations to implement the NDS and NDAA’s new guidance now – and offers a tool to dynamically adjust plans based on emerging factors.
It’s Time for a Data-Driven Foreign Policy Reboot
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With a new National Security Strategy (NSS), the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the recently released National Defense Strategy (NDS), U.S. leaders are calling for more disciplined, data-driven engagement that defends the homeland, deters China in the Indo-Pacific, increases burden-sharing, and “mobilizes, renews, and secures” the defense industrial base. To implement this updated guidance, MITRE is introducing a new model to show how a structured approach to prioritizing emerging and middle-income countries (EMICs) can help implement the new NDS and align foreign engagement with U.S. economic and national security interests.
MITRE has developed a quantitative framework that rank-orders roughly 100 EMICs using public data across three equally weighted pillars – economic ties, strategic location, and law enforcement and military ties – to assess strategic value. While the technical details of that model are not published here, this paper draws on its insights in leveraging artificial intelligence and modeling capabilities to illustrate how EMICs matter for resilient supply chains and critical minerals; access, basing, and overflight (ABO); and law enforcement and counterterrorism cooperation, as well as where U.S. engagement is likely to yield limited strategic return. The analysis connects these priorities directly to the NDS lines of effort – mapping EMIC engagement to homeland defense and Western Hemisphere key terrain, deterrence-by-denial in the Indo-Pacific, regional burden-sharing, and the defense industrial base “national mobilization” – and its overarching goal of stability created through a favorable balance of power in which no adversary can impose a hegemony.
EMICs have become decisive terrain for U.S.-China/Russia competition, supply-chain resilience, and operational access. A transparent, tunable prioritization approach can help U.S. leaders decide where to deepen engagement, where to hold steady, and where to divest. The paper highlights, for example, how Indo-Pacific EMICs along key maritime chokepoints support denial-focused deterrence; how Western Hemisphere partners contribute to border security and counter-“narco-terrorist” efforts; and how African EMICs factor into both counterterrorism and critical mineral strategies.
This publication builds on MITRE’s earlier economic security work that underscored the role of integrated deterrence and non-kinetic tools in responding to Chinese aggression. MITRE’s new Strategic Non-Kinetic Effects (SNKE) Mission Center extends that lineage by integrating economic, diplomatic, and other non-kinetic instruments into practical planning tools such as the EMIC prioritization framework – moving from high-level concepts to concrete, country-level choices that return measurable benefits to U.S. national and economic security.