Article · 6 min read
The first Aspen Security Forum since the Trump-2 administration's intelligence and foreign-policy team took its full shape, sharing a stage with the former officials and allied diplomats who built the post-9/11 consensus they are now revising. The bipartisan convening model meets a moment that is no longer bipartisan.
The Aspen Security Forum convenes July 14 to 17 at Aspen Meadows, an invite-driven room of roughly 136 speakers built around the Aspen Strategy Group, the bipartisan committee that has anchored the program since its 2010 launch as the premier US national-security and foreign-policy forum. It is the year's senior-most national-security venue. Intelligence-community leadership sits in the same room as the former officials who built the post-9/11 consensus they are now publicly revising.
The 2025 forum closed with Jake Sullivan, Condoleezza Rice, and Mark Esper sharing a closing-session stage, a deliberate Biden-Bush-Trump-1 panel that read as a defense of the bipartisan convening model itself. The 2026 edition is the first since the Trump-2 administration's intelligence and foreign-policy team took the field. Aspen Strategy Group's standing posture is bipartisan; the structural test of the week is whether the new principals show up to the same stage as the former principals who are publicly skeptical of them, and what gets said when they do.
ASF's official speaker rolls already list Radmila Shekerinska, in office as NATO Deputy Secretary General since December 2, 2024. The allied side of the room is reliably present and reliably willing to be candid. The American side is the variable, and the headline.
The 2026 speaker list was not yet public when this briefing was written, three weeks out from the program. The four entries below are roles to track, not confirmed bookings. Aspen's program shape has held for several cycles, so the role-level prediction holds with high confidence. The name behind each role is the question.
1. The Director of National Intelligence's interview. Aspen has historically been the venue where the DNI gives the year's longest public sit-down on threat priorities. The signal: a sitting DNI usually walks back at least one element of the annual unclassified threat assessment under follow-up questioning in this format. The question to ask: which adversary's behavior is being explicitly de-prioritized this year, and what does the shift mean for collection allocation downstream.
2. The CIA Director's session. The 2025 program included Robert Gates in the elder-statesman slot. The sitting director typically holds a separate ~45 minute session opposite him. The signal: HUMINT recruiting and cover infrastructure are under unusual public pressure in 2026. The question: what is the Agency telling its officers about the long-term durability of cover under the disclosure environment that has hardened since 2024.
3. NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila Shekerinska. Confirmed on ASF's speaker page per the official site. In role since December 2, 2024, she carries the alliance's adaptation brief: burden-sharing, force structure under the new US posture, and the European pillar conversation. The question: what specific allied force structure is changing in 2026 because of the US administration's posture, and how that is being financed in the budgets actually moving through national parliaments.
4. The closing trifecta panel. Aspen's signature format and the most-watched session of the week. 2025 was Sullivan plus Rice plus Esper; 2026 will be a comparable cross-administration set. The question: which assumption from each one's tenure do they now think was wrong, and what would they tell the current team to read on Monday morning.
1. The Indo-Pacific operational session. Usually small-room, naval-officer-heavy, the room where the conversation moves from grand strategy to actual ship-days. The signal: the gap between what gets said about deterrence on the main stage and what gets said about munitions production in these breakouts has widened for two cycles running.
2. The intelligence-community oversight panel. Hill staff, former Inspectors General, and civil-liberties counsel in a room that decides the doctrine of the next ten years. In 2025 Senator Mark Warner used Aspen as the venue to put Congress's frontier-model regulation posture on the record. 2026's question is which committees retain jurisdiction over that file after the post-election reshuffle.
3. The allied-foreign-policy directors' panel. 2025 featured Tristan Aureau (France, Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs), Alejandro Cainzos, and EU Defence and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius. The signal: what the European side is actually planning while alliance dynamics shift. The corridor afterwards is where the framework conversations actually advance.
4. The Rising Leaders track session. ASG's program for early-career national-security professionals, often a room where the conversation hedges less than the principal sessions. The panelists give an analytic read closer to what they tell each other in private.
Aspen is not an expo floor. The booth equivalent is the partner reception, the sponsor lounge, and the corridor between sessions. The orgs below are the ones whose framing will likely set the corridor agenda for the week.
1. Anduril. What they say they are: a defense technology company building autonomous systems. What they are actually selling at Aspen: a thesis that the prime-contractor model is structurally broken and that the next decade of DoD procurement will route through software-native firms. Chris Brose, their President and Chief Strategy Officer, was on the 2025 ASF agenda. His Aspen presence is a pitch to the policy class, not the procurement class.
2. Intel Government Technologies. Chris George represented Intel Gov on the 2025 program. The pitch is positioning: with domestic semiconductor manufacturing now the explicit national-security file, Intel's government arm wants to be the named answer when the question is where the chips inside national-security systems actually come from.
3. Palantir (expected sponsor). The pitch to allied governments in the corridor sessions is dependency. Switching away from a deployed stack now requires a multi-year rebuild, and the European delegates' body language on this point is worth tracking session-to-session.
4. The Aspen Strategy Group's own publishing track. Each year's ASG fall book sets the national-security reading list for the policy class. The 2026 release will be the first commissioned under the Trump-2 administration's full posture. Watch which contributors are not in it.
5. The defense-focused law firms with senior security partners. Typically present as program partners. What they are actually selling in the hallway is regulatory positioning. Where their partners cluster session-to-session tells you which firms are repositioning around the new export-licensing posture.
Three things that will be debated in the hallway.
One. Whether NATO's burden-sharing math actually adds up under the new US posture, and which capitals are quietly running fallback alliance scenarios with each other.
Two. Whether the disclosure regime around frontier-model exports is closing or opening in 2026. Warner's 2025 framing already pulled in one direction; the new IC leadership's posture on the same file is the unknown.
Three. Whether the post-2024 IC modernization push survives the budget cycle, or whether the cuts hit collection programs that the public briefings have not yet signaled.
One thing nobody is saying.
The bipartisan convening model itself is the question. ASF's institutional brand is built on the assumption that current and former senior officials of opposing administrations will sit on the same stage and exchange candid framings. The 2025 closing trifecta of Sullivan, Rice, and Esper read as a deliberate demonstration that this model still holds. The unspoken 2026 question, the one nobody publicly puts to the Strategy Group, is whether the Trump-2 principals will accept the invitation to that format at all, or whether they will let their predecessors fill the seats. If the latter, Aspen is still a useful room. The room becomes structurally different, and the framing of the post-event coverage will reflect that. ASG would rather not see that question in print, which is why it has stayed off the agenda.
Aspen is the room where one good card matters. The expo-floor math does not apply here. You will leave the Meadows with a small stack of names, the people you actually want to follow up with, and the warm window closes by Monday morning when their inbox resets. Met handles the recall problem on the flight home, before the names compress into one weekend blur of half-remembered coffee-line conversations. Free, iPhone only.
Read by operators heading to Aspen who want the intel before they fly.
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