Rejecting reports of a split with the brass, the Department of War says the National Defense Strategy was ‘seamlessly coordinated’ with senior civilian and uniform leaders — and that ‘any narrative to the contrary is false.’

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that multiple senior officers had raised concerns about the forthcoming strategy, pointing to a divide between political leadership.

Deputy Secretary of War Steve Feinberg pushed back on Wednesday, in an on-the-record statement to Fox News Digital.

‘The Department’s National Defense Strategy has been seamlessly coordinated with all senior civilian and military leadership with total collaboration — any narrative to the contrary is false,’ Feinberg said.

A senior War Department official said the strategy was the product of ‘extensive and intensive’ collaboration across the department.

The drafting team included a policy lead, a Joint Staff deputy and representatives from the military services who consulted widely with civilian and uniformed offices.

Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and the acting deputy under-secretary for policy, Austin Dahmer, met with leaders from every group. The official called that level of policy-shop engagement ‘unprecedented.’

Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, provided feedback directly to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Colby, the official said, and both assured him his input would be reflected in the final draft.

The Post report said political appointees in the Pentagon policy office led the drafting and described unusually sharp pushback from some commanders over priorities and tone. 

The War Department disputes that characterization and says the document was coordinated at the principal level and aligned closely with the National Security Strategy.

The pushback comes a day after Hegseth addressed hundreds of commanders at Marine Corps Base Quantico.

In a 45-minute speech, he argued the force needs tougher standards and a tighter focus on warfighting. He has recalled one-star and above officers from around the world to brief in person and has removed several senior general officers as part of a broader overhaul.

Hegseth says new directives will restore rigorous physical, grooming and leadership standards and require combat roles to meet one set of physical benchmarks.

The Washington Post did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. 

Fox News Digital’s Jasmine Baehr and Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.

Recent Russian incursions into NATO airspace have sharpened divisions inside the alliance over how to respond, exposing both the strength and the limits of collective defense.

Secretary General Mark Rutte clashed with Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal last week after Estonia invoked NATO’s Article 4 clause, which triggers consultations when a member feels its security is threatened.

According to three European officials granted anonymity to speak freely, Rutte argued that repeated invocations risked diluting the treaty’s force. One source said he even raised his voice at Michal, warning that NATO must be cautious about how often it signals alarm.

Rutte argued that if Article 4 were invoked every time Russia violated sovereignty — through drone incursions, fighter jets, cyberattacks and more — it would quickly lose impact, according to the officials.  

A NATO spokesperson confirmed Rutte and Michal spoke Friday and said the secretary general ‘has supported Estonia throughout the process.’

Rasmus Ruuda, director of the Government Communication Office of Estonia, told Fox News Digital Rutte ‘expressed support for Estonia and the Prime Minister thanked NATO for its actions.’

‘Article 4 is just a signal that we’re taking note of what happened,’  said Giedrimas Jeglinskas, a Lithuanian member of parliament and former NATO assistant secretary general. ‘We can be invoking Article 4 every week, and I think that only weakens us, because we’re unable to truly respond to that aggression that Russia is sort of throwing at us.’

The tension comes after a series of provocative moves by Moscow. Last month, missile-carrying Russian MiG-29s flew into Estonian territory, following an earlier breach of Polish airspace by 19 drones and repeated incursions over Romania. In Poland, jets scrambled to intercept the drones, shooting some of them down. It marked the first time since World War II that Polish armed forces mobilized to engage an airborne threat over their homeland.

The Russian jets in Estonia were eventually escorted out of its territory by Italian F-35s. Estonia’s Article 4 request followed Poland’s own invocation days earlier, prompting another round of consultations in Brussels.

Since its creation in 1949, Article 4 has been triggered only nine times. NATO’s warning to Russia after the Estonian request was blunt: any further breaches would be met with ‘all means’ of defense. Estonia’s defense minister said his nation was prepared to shoot down Russian planes violating airspace ‘if there is a need.’ 

But Jeglinskas said signaling without consequence risks leaving the alliance trapped.

‘We’re happy to do Article 4 every other day, but so what? What’s next?’ he said. ‘The real question is what happens when the jets actually enter our airspace.’

The debate cuts to a deeper question: what constitutes a ‘need’ to shoot down Russian jets? How can Russia be deterred without stumbling into direct war?

‘The last thing we want is to have NATO get drawn into a war with Russia,’ a senior State Department official told Fox News Digital. ‘God knows how that ends.’

‘Almost all wars … they don’t necessarily start with a big bang,’ the official went on. ‘They start with an escalation, and then somebody feels they need to respond to this, and then you just get in a toxic spiral.’

The United States has promised to defend ‘every inch’ of NATO while pressing Europe to bear more of its own defense burden. Washington’s mixed signals have only complicated matters.

Trump administration officials long favored reducing the U.S. troop presence in Europe. But President Donald Trump recently delivered one of the starkest warnings to Moscow, declaring that NATO states should shoot Russian aircraft down if they incur on their territory.

Jeglinskas said the statement resonated across the Baltic States. ‘What was really helpful was that President Trump was very clear,’ he said. ‘That gives us confidence we’re on the right track, and we really appreciate the support.’

Still, allies remain divided on whether to escalate. Some warn that Eastern Europe cannot credibly threaten retaliation without an American security guarantee. Others argue that deterrence depends on showing Russia its incursions carry a cost.

‘If we really want to send a proper message of deterrence to Russia, we need to be prepared to use kinetic force,’ Jeglinskas said. ‘That means neutralizing those jets — shooting them down or finding other ways to impose consequences — so Russia actually feels the cost of its incursions. That hasn’t happened yet, and it leaves us vulnerable.’

The airspace disputes now extend beyond fighter jets. European Union members are meeting in Copenhagen this week to discuss shoring up air defenses after a wave of drone sightings. Denmark briefly shut down its airspace following mysterious drone activity, while Lithuania’s Vilnius airport and Norway’s Oslo airport also reported disruptions. Drones have even been spotted over Germany’s northern state of Schleswig-Holstein.

‘We are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either. We must do much more for our own security,’ German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in Düsseldorf.

NATO jets scrambled to intercept drones over Poland, but the response underscored a growing mismatch: deploying multi-million dollar fighters to counter small, unmanned aircraft is neither efficient nor sustainable.

‘NATO remains the most crucial element of our security equation,’ Jeglinskas said. ‘It’s the backbone through which our security is viewed. There’s really no doubt about NATO’s political will and its capability to defend its territory, but warfare is changing — and the question now is, has NATO adapted to the new way of war that is seeping through the borders of Ukraine?’

Jeglinskas warned that neither NATO nor the Baltic States have done enough. ‘The Polish incursion signified that NATO is not fully ready to counter these threats,’ he said. ‘Scrambling jets is a tremendous economic mismatch. If these kinds of attacks become swarms, it’s not sustainable.’

To address mounting threats, NATO last month launched Operation Eastern Sentry, reinforcing its presence on Europe’s eastern flank. Jeglinskas welcomed the move but said gaps remain.

‘Jets are very important, but more jets don’t mean we’re more secure from low-altitude drones,’ he said. ‘The question is: do we have sensors that can detect what’s happening from the ground up to a kilometer into our airspace? We don’t see that. It’s like a dead space.’

Jeglinskas called for stronger short- and medium-range radar, as well as layered defenses akin to Israel’s Iron Dome, capable of intercepting drones with both kinetic and electronic means.

‘NATO’s response is commendable,’ he said, ‘but it’s not enough. You need technical know-how, the right capabilities, and systems that are truly integrated if you want to make this work.’

For now, NATO remains caught between signaling resolve and acting on it. As Russia continues to test the alliance’s borders, Jeglinskas and other Eastern European officials warn that credibility is at stake. The next incursion, they argue, may demand more than words.

Bipartisan talks on reopening the government began to materialize less than a day into the shutdown, with Republicans and Democrats trying to find a middle ground on expiring Obamacare tax credits.

The federal government entered its first full day of a shutdown on Wednesday, and so far neither side of the aisle is willing to buckle as the hours ticked by.

Still, in the middle of Senate Republicans’ third attempt to pass the House GOP’s short-term funding extension, a group of nearly a dozen senators huddled on the floor in the first public display of negotiations so far.

‘There are glimmers of hope, and I think they’re bipartisan,’ said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who was in the huddle.

The conversations on the floor came as Republicans demanded that Democrats yield and provide the votes to reopen the government, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., doubled down on his position that Democrats wouldn’t budge without ‘serious’ movement on Obamacare premium subsidies.

‘Donald Trump and Republicans have barreled us into a shutdown because they refuse to protect Americans’ healthcare,’ Schumer said. ‘It’s clear that the way out of this shutdown is to sit down and negotiate with Democrats to address the looming healthcare crisis that faces tens of millions of American families.’

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., appears willing to slowly chip away at Senate Democrats through a de facto war of attrition and plans to bring House Republicans’ bill to the floor for a vote again and again.

The Senate will be out on Thursday to observe Yom Kippur but is expected to return Friday and possibly vote into the weekend on the continuing resolution (CR) that would reopen the government until Nov. 21 to give lawmakers more time to finish work on the dozen spending bills needed to fund the government.

Thune told Fox News Digital that he expected to talk to Schumer ‘in the next day or two.’

‘He’s indicated that he’s interested in doing that,’ Thune said. ‘I’m not sure what we’ll achieve by that, but I think there are, I mean, things seem to be moving on their side. We just keep telling them to ‘give us — open up the government, and we’ll get on with regular business.’’

Thune and Senate Republicans have argued that Senate Democrats’ rejection of the GOP’s CR is hypocritical, given that when former President Joe Biden was in office, Schumer and his caucus routinely voted for ‘clean’ extensions — like the GOP’s current proposal.

But the issue for Democrats was multifaceted. 

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., was among the many lawmakers holding a confab on the Senate floor, and while he didn’t divulge full details of the private talks, he said a major issue for him was about ensuring that a ‘deal is a deal.’

‘Anything we agree to, because it’s not a clean CR if the president will tear it up tomorrow,’ he said. ‘In the past, we voted for clean CRs, but the president has shown that he’ll take the money back.’

Among the options tossed around in the huddle were a 10-day funding extension once floated by Schumer, which he quickly shot down earlier this week, or passing the Republican plan to actually give lawmakers time to negotiate a solution to the expiring tax credits.

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said there were no high-level discussions quite yet, but that any path forward had to be ‘enforceable.’

‘The bottom line here is that I sense real concern among my Republican colleagues about what happens to the people they represent if we go off the cliff on the Affordable Care Act,’ he said, referring to Obamacare.

And Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., who helped facilitate the conversation, said it’d be ‘great’ if lawmakers were able to get something figured out before the Nov. 21 deadline in the GOP’s bill, but that he and other Republicans were still pushing Democrats to support their legislation.

‘It’s not like there’s anything that they should be objecting to with regard to what’s in the existing bill,’ he said. ‘This is their hostage, and we’re just telling them, ‘Look, we’ve got support on the other side to fix the issues that you have a concern about, but it’s going to take time to negotiate those through.” 

President Donald Trump is open to talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ‘without any preconditions,’ a White House official said, as South Korea’s unification minister warned Pyongyang’s missiles could reach the U.S. mainland.

‘President Trump in his first term held three historic summits with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un that stabilized the Korean Peninsula. U.S. policy on North Korea has not changed,’ a White House official told Fox News Digital. ‘President Trump remains open to talking with Kim Jong Un, without any preconditions.’

South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young used blunt language in Berlin this week, telling reporters, ‘North Korea has become one of the three countries capable of attacking the U.S. mainland,’ according to the Yonhap News Agency. ‘What needs to be acknowledged should be acknowledged rationally.’

The White House did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on Chung’s claim.

Yonhap also reported that Chung said Pyongyang’s ‘strategic position is different’ than in 2018, when Trump and Kim held their first summit in Singapore. 

‘Acknowledging this reality should be the starting point’ in dealing with the regime, Chung told reporters.

But experts say North Korea has long held the capability to reach the U.S. mainland with intercontinental ballistic missiles. 

‘They’ve tested ICBMs for a long time,’ said Bob Peters, senior research fellow for strategic deterrence at the Heritage Foundation.

‘The question, then, for a long time, is, do they have a warhead that can go underneath a nose cone on an ICBM that goes by definition, exo atmospheric, comes down and then hits a target with some semblance of accuracy and then detonate and produce a nuclear yield,’ Peters added. ‘That’s been the real question — do they have that capability? That’s not what it sounded like the South Korean minister said.’

Meanwhile, Kim has said dialogue with the U.S. is possible, but on his terms. 

‘If the United States drops the absurd obsession with denuclearizing us and accepts reality, and wants genuine peaceful coexistence, there is no reason for us not to sit down with the United States,’ state media quoted Kim as saying.

A meeting with Kim would make Trump’s fourth sit-down with the dictator, at a time when his nation has once again grown increasingly hostile to U.S. interests. 

In July, the White House said Trump ‘remains open to engaging with Leader Kim to achieve a fully denuclearized North Korea.’ But North Korea asserted it would not meet the U.S. president if he was going to demand denuclearization. 

On Monday, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Son Gyong told the United Nations General Assembly that his country will never give up its nuclear program, Reuters reported.

Trump is scheduled to travel to Asia later this month for an economic leaders’ summit with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. A senior U.S. official said no Demilitarized Zone meeting with Kim is currently on the agenda.

Reports have suggested Trump may meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Oct. 30-Nov. 1, though plans are still being finalized. 

In a call last month, Xi invited Trump and first lady Melania Trump to visit China. Trump returned the invitation. 

The same official said progress on nuclear talks depends on China. 

‘The first thing that would need to happen is for the Chinese to acknowledge and be more transparent about its own programs,’ the official said.

U.S. estimates put China’s nuclear arsenal at about 600 warheads in 2024, with projections of 1,000 by 2030. North Korea is believed to possess roughly 50 warheads, with enough fissile material for up to 90.

Pyongyang last year declared an ‘irreversible hegemonic position’ after test-firing its Hwasong-19 intercontinental ballistic missile, which North Korea has claimed can strike the American mainland.

Trump is strengthening deterrence even as he keeps the option of ‘talks without preconditions’ open.

It was an off-year when it comes to elections, but 2025 was on fire on the campaign trail, as next year’s looming midterm showdowns took shape.

While it was never expected to match the intensity of the tumultuous 2024 battles for the White House and Congress, this year’s off-year elections grabbed outsized national attention and served as a key barometer leading up to the 2026 midterm contests for the House and Senate majorities.

Here are five of the biggest moments that shaped the campaign trail.

5. Trump pushes mid-decade congressional redistricting

Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, President Donald Trump in June first floated the idea of rare but not unheard of mid-decade congressional redistricting.

The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s razor-thin House majority to keep control of the chamber in the 2026 midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.

Trump’s first target: Texas.

A month later, when asked by reporters about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, ‘Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.’

The push by Trump and his political team triggered a high-stakes redistricting showdown with Democrats to shape the 2026 midterm landscape in the fight for the House majority.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.

But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.

Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

California voters earlier this month overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative which will temporarily sidetrack the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and return the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.

That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.

The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.

Right-tilting Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.

Republicans are looking to GOP-controlled Florida, where early redistricting moves are underway in Tallahassee. A new map could possibly produce up to five more right-leaning seats. But conservative Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP legislative leaders don’t see eye-to-eye on how to move forward.

‘We must keep the Majority at all costs,’ Trump wrote on social media this month.

In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge this month rejected a congressional district map drawn up by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

And Republicans in Indiana’s Senate defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House.

But Trump scored a big victory when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court greenlighted Texas’ new map.

Other states that might step into the redistricting wars — Democratic-dominated Illinois and Maryland, and two red states with Democratic governors, Kentucky and Kansas.

4. Jay Jones text messages revealed, rocking Virginia’s elections

Virginia Democrats were cruising toward convincing victories in the commonwealth’s statewide elections when a scandal sent shockwaves up and down the ballot.

Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones instantly went into crisis mode after controversial texts were first reported earlier by the National Review in early October.

Jones acknowledged and apologized for texts he sent in 2022, when he compared then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert to mass murderers Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, adding that if he was given two bullets, he would use both against the GOP lawmaker to shoot him in the head.

But Jones faced a chorus of calls from Republicans to drop out of the race.

And the GOP leveraged the explosive revelations up the ballot, forcing Democratic Party nominee, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, back on defense in a campaign where she was seen as the frontrunner against Republican rival Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

Earle-Sears didn’t waste an opportunity to link Spanberger to Jones. And during October’s chaotic and only gubernatorial debate, where Earle-Sears repeatedly interrupted Spanberger, the GOP gubernatorial nominee called on her Democratic rival to tell Jones to end his attorney general bid.

‘The comments that Jay Jones made are absolutely abhorrent,’ Spanberger said at the debate. But she neither affirmed nor pulled back her support of Jones.

While the scandal grabbed national headlines, in the end it didn’t slow down the Democrats, as Spanberger crushed Earle-Sears by 15 points. Democrats won the separate election for lieutenant governor by 11 points and Jones even pulled off a 6-point victory over Republican incumbent Jason Miyares.

3. Democrats overperform at the ballot box

Just eight days into Trump’s second term in the White House, demoralized Democrats had something to cheer about.

Democrat Mike Zimmer defeated Republican Katie Whittington in a special state Senate election in Iowa, flipping a Republican-controlled vacant seat in a district that Trump had carried by 21 points less than three months earlier.

Zimmer’s victory triggered a wave of Democrats overperforming in special elections and regularly scheduled off-year ballot box contests.

Among the most high profile was the victory by the Democratic candidate in Wisconsin’s high-stakes and expensive state Supreme Court showdown.

With inflation, the issue that severely wounded them in the 2024 elections, persisting, Democrats were laser focused on affordability, and the wins kept coming.

In November’s regularly scheduled elections, they won the nation’s only two gubernatorial showdowns — in New Jersey and Virginia — by double digits. And they scored major victories in less high-profile contests from coast to coast.

The year ended with Democrats winning a mayoral election in Miami, Florida for the first time in a quarter-century, and flipping a state House seat in Georgia.

The Democratic National Committee, in a year-end memo, touted, ‘In 2025 alone, Democrats won or overperformed in 227 out of 255 key elections — nearly 90% of races.’

But Democrats are still staring down a brand that remains in the gutter, with historically low approval and favorable numbers.

Among the most recent to grab headlines: Only 18% of voters questioned in a Quinnipiac University survey this month said they approved of the way congressional Democrats were handling their job, while 73% percent disapproved.

That’s the lowest job approval rating for the Democrats in Congress since the Quinnipiac University Poll began asking this question 16 years ago.

2. Democrats’ primary problem

The Democrats overperformed in this month’s special congressional election in a GOP-dominated seat in Tennessee — losing by nine points in a district that Trump carried by 22 points just a year ago,

But there were plenty of centrist Democrats who argued that state Rep. Aftyn Behn, the Democratic nominee in the race, was too far to the left for the district.

Republicans repeatedly attacked Behn over her paper trail of past comments on defunding the police.

And the U.S. Senate campaign launch this month in red-leaning Texas by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a progressive champion and vocal Trump critic and foil, compounded the argument by centrists.

‘The Democratic Party’s aspirations to win statewide in a red state like Texas simply don’t exist without a centrist Democrat who can build a winning coalition of ideologically diverse voters,’ Liam Kerr, co-founder of the Welcome PAC, a group which advocates for moderate Democratic candidates, argued in a statement to Fox News Digital.

And the center-left Third Way, in a memo following the Tennessee special election, argued that ‘there are two projects going on in the Democratic Party right now. One is winning political power so we can stop Trump’s calamity. The other is turning blue places bluer.’

‘If far-left groups want to help save American democracy, they should stop pushing their candidates in swing districts and costing us flippable seats,’ the memo emphasized.

1. Mamdani wins NYC mayoral primary

It was the story that has dominated campaign politics for the past six months.

Zohran Mamdani‘s convincing June 24 victory in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary was the political earthquake that rocked the nation’s most populous city and sent powerful shockwaves across the country.

The capturing of the Democratic nomination by the now-34-year-old socialist state lawmaker over frontrunner former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and nine other candidates propelled Mamdani to a general election victory.

Mamdani’s primary shocker, and later, his general election victory, energized the left.

But it also handed Republicans instant ammunition as they worked to link the first Muslim New York City mayor with a far-left agenda to Democrats across the country, as the party aimed to paint Democrats as extremists.

But Trump, who had repeatedly called Mamdani a ‘communist,’ appeared to undercut that narrative with a chummy Oval Office meeting with the mayor-elect last month.