The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has a plan. Good. The 2025-2026 International Strategic Plan frames the problem correctly: critical infrastructure risk is global, interdependent, and too often invisible until it breaks. The plan’s release makes clear that CISA intends to move beyond ad hoc engagements toward a coordinated international posture. This is a start, not a solution.

What the plan gets right

CISA organizes its international effort around three concrete goals: bolster the resilience of foreign infrastructure on which the United States depends, strengthen integrated cyber defense, and unify agency coordination of international activities. Those are practical priorities. They recognize that U.S. national critical functions can be disrupted by failures abroad and that prevention requires persistent partnership, not episodic outreach.

The plan also sets operational expectations. It prioritizes expanding visibility into supply chain and infrastructure vulnerabilities, accelerating CSIRT-to-CSIRT collaboration, and pushing for adoption of Secure by Design practices, such as software bills of materials and coordinated vulnerability disclosure. Those measures are essential if information sharing and defensive actions are to move faster than exploitation.

Where the plan will be stress-tested

Execution faces known obstacles. First, trust and information sharing take time to build. Many foreign operators face legal, commercial, and political constraints that limit what they can share with a U.S. agency. Second, CISA is not the whole-of-government toolbox. Effective implementation will require sustained coordination with the State Department, DHS components, and allies to deconflict intelligence, foreign policy, and trade sensitivities. The plan acknowledges this need for internal coordination, but the proof will be in joint resource commitments and diplomatic alignment.

Third, standards work is a long game. The plan calls out countering adversarial influence in standards bodies and advancing Secure by Design globally. That is the right direction, but success requires targeted leverage points: procurement policy, export controls, and multilateral standard-setting forums where like-minded states can move quickly. Expect pushback from actors who benefit from weaker standards.

Priority actions CISA should take now

1) Prioritize a small set of bilateral relationships for operational depth. Build a roster of partners where CISA will invest persistent engagement, shared tooling, and train-the-trainer programs. Scale comes after depth.

2) Make CSIRT engagements measurable and operational. Track not only meetings but demonstrable risk reduction: mitigations applied, incidents detected earlier, and mean-time-to-contain improvements across partnered networks. The plan already defines measures of effectiveness; CISA must make them public and tied to funding streams.

3) Link standards advocacy to procurement and assistance. Use U.S. government procurement and capacity-building grants to reward adoption of Secure by Design practices and SBOM transparency. That creates market incentives for better security norms abroad.

4) Harden visibility into supply chains that matter to U.S. national critical functions. Systemic risk is not abstract. Map critical dependencies and run red-team scenarios to surface single points of failure, then push partners to remediate or provide contingency options.

Risks the U.S. must manage

Scaling international engagement raises privacy, sovereignty, and commercial confidentiality concerns. CISA must establish clear data usage guardrails and mutual legal frameworks so partners can share actionable intelligence without exposing sensitive domestic equities. Equally, transparency about goals will reduce suspicion that technical assistance is a cover for intelligence collection. The agency’s stakeholder engagement approach offers a framework for aligning outreach across industry and government, but it requires discipline to avoid mission creep.

Bottom line

CISA’s International Strategic Plan is a necessary pivot from crisis-driven outreach to strategy-driven partnership. The goals and enablers in the plan are sensible. Now comes the harder work: focus resources on high-impact partnerships, measure operational outcomes, use procurement and assistance to push standards, and bind international activity to clear legal and policy guardrails. If CISA can do that, global partnerships will become force multipliers for U.S. resilience. If it cannot, the plan will be another document on a shelf while vulnerabilities across borders continue to threaten domestic critical functions.