Understanding Every Principle | #8: Defend Our Freedom
Why Security Is Not a Partisan Issue — It Is a Structural Requirement of Democracy
This is the eighth article in a nine-part series examining the governing principles of the Centercratic Party and the conditions that make American self-government possible. Each article is part of Foundations, the Centercratic Party’s publication. The previous article examined Principle 7: Govern with a Balanced Approach. Today, the series turns to the second principle in the Principled Leadership cluster: Principle 8, which addresses what it means to defend a democracy from threats that do not respect its borders.
Principle 8: Unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.1
In the autumn of 2024, technicians at a major American telecommunications company noticed something unusual in their network traffic. What investigators found, after months of painstaking analysis, was that Chinese government-linked hackers had been sitting inside the core infrastructure of nine U.S. telecommunications companies for more than a year.2 The group, known as Salt Typhoon, had accessed the metadata of over one million Americans’ calls and text messages.3 It had reached the very wiretapping systems that law enforcement agencies use to conduct court-authorized surveillance. In at least one state, it had penetrated the U.S. Army National Guard’s computer network for nine months without detection.4 The breach was not discovered by a government agency monitoring for threats. It was discovered by a private company reviewing ordinary network traffic. No alarm had sounded. No warning had been issued. The people whose private communications were exposed did not know, and many still do not.
Why This Principle Comes Eighth
Principle 8 states: unite with allies to deter aggression and defend free nations against military, cyber, and economic threats.1 It is the second of three principles in the Principled Leadership cluster, and it marks the series’ first sustained turn toward America’s external security environment. The seven principles examined before this one addressed how democracy is built and governed from within: its structural guardrails, its elections, its rule of law, its culture of deliberation, its approach to legislation, and its standards for governing. Principle 8 asks the question that comes next: once that democratic system is built, who defends it from those who would undermine or destroy it from the outside?
The two pillars this principle serves are Pillar 2, Separation of Powers and Institutional Accountability, and Pillar 9, Shared Commitment to Democracy.5 These are not accidental pairings. A democracy that concentrates the decision to use military force in a single executive, without genuine legislative oversight, has already compromised one of its own structural safeguards. And alliances among democracies are not merely strategic conveniences. They are, at their foundation, coalitions of states that have agreed to resolve disputes through institutions rather than through coercion. When the United States strengthens those coalitions, it expands the zone in which democratic governance is viable. When it weakens them, it contracts that zone.
Two Threats, One Principle
The Salt Typhoon breach is the most thoroughly documented example of what modern national security failure looks like in practice. It was not a missile strike. It was not a troop movement. It was patient, methodical access to the communications infrastructure that every American uses every day. The hackers did not destroy anything. They read it. They listened. They waited.2 That patience is itself a strategic posture. Data exfiltrated from telecommunications networks, stored and analyzed over time, can be used to identify intelligence officers, track diplomatic negotiations, anticipate military movements, and generate leverage over officials. It is the kind of advantage that takes years to fully exploit. The response to such a breach therefore matters as much as the breach itself. In early 2025, the Trump administration disbanded the Cyber Safety Review Board, which had been conducting the formal investigation into Salt Typhoon, before it completed its work.2
The damage to American alliance relationships in this same period has been documented with equal specificity. In January 2026, Gallup published its annual survey of U.S. leadership approval across all 31 NATO member states. The overall approval rating had fallen 14 percentage points from the prior year, settling at 21 percent.6 Country-level declines were steep: Germany fell 39 points, Portugal 38, Canada 22, the United Kingdom 16.7 For context, U.S. leadership approval among NATO allies averaged 39 percent during the Biden administration and 45 percent during the Obama years.7 The decline coincided with renewed presidential statements about potentially withdrawing from NATO entirely and about acquiring Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, by force if necessary.6
Both parties carry responsibility for the current state of American security. The Biden administration’s documented slowness in approving weapons transfers to Ukraine during the first months of Russia’s 2022 invasion, and its repeated internal debates about which systems were too “escalatory” to provide, allowed the conflict to widen in ways that a more decisive posture might have deterred. Congress allowed a six-month gap in Ukraine aid funding in 2023 and 2024 that materially affected battlefield outcomes. These were failures of will and process, not of capability, and they belong in any honest account of the period.
What the 45 Percent Are Saying
The 45 percent of Americans who identify with neither major party have been consistent on national security even when their elected representatives have not.8 The 2025 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that 72 percent of Americans believe security alliances benefit both the United States and its allies, an increase from 64 percent the prior year.9 Support for alliances in Europe reached 68 percent, in Asia 72 percent. These are not partisan numbers. The Chicago Council’s 50-year polling record shows that support for an active American role in the world, and for consulting allies before major foreign policy decisions, has been a durable majority position across party lines for decades.10
Among independent voters specifically, 60 percent said in the 2025 survey that the United States should consult with its major allies before making significant foreign policy decisions, a figure that has risen 10 points since the Council first asked the question in 1974.10 A separate Gallup survey conducted in February 2026 found that 49 percent of Americans want to maintain the current U.S. commitment to NATO, while 28 percent want to increase it, a figure that had risen eight points in a single year as the withdrawal debate intensified.11 Only 7 percent favor complete withdrawal from the alliance.11
What frustrates independent voters on this issue is not disagreement about the importance of national security or the value of alliances. It is the experience of watching security treated as a political instrument: intelligence agencies deployed for domestic political purposes, foreign policy announcements made on social media before allies are notified, and cybersecurity review boards dissolved mid-investigation for reasons never clearly explained to the public. They want the country defended. They do not want the apparatus of defense used for partisan advantage.
The Centercratic Position
Principle 8 commits to a specific, practical approach to national security that is neither isolationist nor reflexively interventionist. It rests on four concrete commitments.
First, alliances are strategic assets, not negotiating chips. The value of NATO, of the Indo-Pacific security architecture, and of bilateral defense relationships is structural, not sentimental. The United States has not fought a major war on its own territory in more than 160 years in part because its alliances have allowed it to address threats far from American shores, with shared costs and shared intelligence. Treating those commitments as a subscription service to be canceled if payments are late destroys the very credibility that makes the alliance a deterrent. The Centercratic position is that commitments made are commitments honored, and that any renegotiation of burden-sharing within alliances is conducted through diplomatic consultation, not public ultimatums issued to allied heads of state.
Second, cybersecurity infrastructure is a national defense obligation, not a private-sector responsibility. The Salt Typhoon breach succeeded in part because the telecommunications companies it targeted were operating under a regulatory framework that treated their networks primarily as commercial assets.3 The Centercratic position is that critical communications infrastructure requires security standards equivalent to those applied to military networks, that the federal government must fund and enforce those standards, and that when a breach of Salt Typhoon’s magnitude occurs, the investigation must run to completion before the investigating body is dissolved.
Third, national security encompasses economic coercion and information operations alongside military threats. China’s current strategy does not rely primarily on the use of military force. It relies on economic dependency, technology transfer, information manipulation, and infrastructure penetration of precisely the kind Salt Typhoon demonstrated. A defense posture adequate to that strategy requires tools beyond military spending: export controls with consistent enforcement, investment screening that is genuinely independent of commercial pressure, and civic literacy programs that equip citizens to identify and resist foreign influence operations.
Fourth, Congress is a co-equal partner in decisions about the use of force. The Constitution assigns the power to declare war to the legislative branch for reasons the framers understood precisely: concentrated executive authority over the use of force is one of the oldest mechanisms through which republics lose their republican character. The Centercratic position is that the War Powers Resolution means what it says, that authorizations for the use of military force must be specific and time-limited rather than open-ended, and that the practice of conducting sustained military operations under emergency authorities never intended to cover them must end.
What Happens When This Fails
The V-Dem Institute’s 2025 data, foundational to this entire series, documents that autocracies now outnumber democracies worldwide for the first time in two decades. Liberal democracies, at just 29, remain the rarest form of governance on earth. Less than 12 percent of the world’s population now lives under what can reasonably be classified as a liberal democracy, while 72 percent live under autocratic rule.5 That ratio is not fixed by history or fate. It responds, directly and measurably, to the choices that existing democracies make about whether to defend themselves and each other.
The historical record on this is not ambiguous. The interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, when the United States retreated into formal isolation and Britain and France concluded that their alliance commitments were too costly to honor, did not produce a generation of peace. It produced a decade of incremental appeasement followed by the most destructive war in human history. The mechanism was not mysterious: authoritarian states expand when the cost of expansion is low, and the cost of expansion is low when democratic states are unwilling to coordinate a response. The lesson is not that the United States should be at war everywhere. It is that the credibility of the deterrent, maintained through consistent and predictable alliance behavior, determines how often the deterrent must actually be tested.
At 21 percent approval among NATO allies, the United States is not projecting strength to the nations it has pledged to defend.6 It is projecting uncertainty. Uncertainty is not a deterrent. It is an invitation.
Tomorrow, this series concludes with Principle 9: Exemplify Global Leadership, and the question of what it means for the United States to lead not only through military and economic power but through the example of its own democratic conduct, and why the two have never been separable.
Paul J. Chapman is the founder and Executive Director of the Centercratic Party and the author of “Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic.” He publishes The Center Voter at centervoter.com.
Notes
1 Centercratic Party. Party Principles, Version 13, 2026. https://centercratic.party/our-principles/
2 Wikipedia. “2024 Global Telecommunications Hack.” Updated 2025. Documents nine confirmed U.S. telecommunications companies breached by Salt Typhoon, access maintained for over a year before detection, and the disbanding of the Cyber Safety Review Board before its investigation concluded.
3 New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. “2024: When China’s Salt Typhoon Made Cyberspace Tidal Waves.” October 22, 2025. Describes the Salt Typhoon campaign as targeting ISP-level infrastructure, enabling data exfiltration affecting over one million users.
4 Scripps News. “Salt Typhoon Hack Targeted National Guard Computer Networks.” July 17, 2025. Reports that Chinese hackers penetrated U.S. Army National Guard networks in at least one state for nine months in 2024 as part of the broader Salt Typhoon campaign.
5 Chapman, Paul J. The Nine Pillars of a Working Democratic Republic. Centercratic Party, 2026. Pillar 2 covers separation of powers and institutional accountability; Pillar 9 covers the shared commitment to democracy as a prerequisite for democratic consolidation. Drawing on: Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Dahl, Robert A. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. Yale University Press, 1971. [Thread attachment: The-Nine-Pillars-of-a-Working-Democratic-Republic.docx]
6 Gallup. “U.S. Leadership Approval Drops Among NATO Allies.” January 14, 2026. Approval of U.S. leadership across 31 NATO member states fell 14 percentage points in 2025 to an overall rating of 21 percent, coinciding with statements about potential NATO withdrawal and the acquisition of Greenland.
7 CTV News. “NATO Members Sour on U.S. Since Trump Returned: Gallup Poll.” January 24, 2026. Documents country-level approval declines: Germany down 39 points, Portugal down 38, Canada down 22, United Kingdom down 16. U.S. approval under Obama averaged 45 percent; under Biden, 39 percent.
8 Chapman, Paul J. “I’m Independent! What Does That Mean?” The Center Voter, January 28, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/im-independent-what-does-that-mean
9 Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “US Public Support for Alliances at All-Time High.” October 13, 2025. Reports 72 percent of Americans believe security alliances benefit the United States and its allies, up from 64 percent the prior year, with support for alliances in Europe at 68 percent and in Asia at 72 percent.
10 Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The American Political Environment, Ripe for a New Foreign Policy.” January 27, 2026. Fifty years of polling data showing 60 percent of independent voters support consulting major allies before significant foreign policy decisions, up from 50 percent when the question was first asked in 1974.
11 Gallup. “Top U.S. Foreign Policy Priority: National Security.” March 4, 2026. Reports 49 percent of Americans support maintaining the current NATO commitment, 28 percent want to increase it (up from 20 percent in 2024), and only 7 percent favor complete withdrawal from the alliance.
12 The Center Voter. “Congress Pushes Back on Trump’s NATO Withdrawal Threat.” April 3, 2026. https://centervoter.com/p/todays-essential-political-news-4minute-b87