President Trump’s recent strike on Iran provides a model for America’s future military engagement around the world—balancing strategic interests with industrial capacity and political will.
On June 22nd, the United States Air Force and Navy conducted “Operation Midnight Hammer” against three Iranian nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
President Donald Trump’s bold and successful strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities put America First foreign policy on full display—defending against a specific threat to American national security with precision and restraint. This strike is also a potentially doctrinal defining moment. Indeed, President Trump may have inaugurated a new era in American grand strategy, one characterized by what I am calling “Prioritized Deterrence.”
The strike on Iran was not about nation-building or human rights. It was specific, targeted, time delimited, and dependent on unique American technical capabilities. The result was denying Iran the ability to threaten America and our allies with nuclear weapons, while opening the door to a more stable future for the region. All of these reflect elements of Prioritized Deterrence.
What Is “Prioritized Deterrence”?
So, what is Prioritized Deterrence? Like realism, Prioritized Deterrence is girded by restraint and guided by quantifiable and inherent constraints placed on the nation, its resources, and our people. Acknowledging these realities forces decision makers to prioritize threats and challenges based on urgency and severity. Decision makers then match questions of time and interest to arenas of American technical dominance. America should strike where and when it can deploy overwhelming force, but only at the highest priority targets and without open-ended commitments in terms of time and resources—commitments we cannot afford given the existential threat posed to America by the Chinese Communist Party.
PD thus retains the traditional deterrence model by sustaining a credible threat to an aggressor and an unacceptable cost for aggression against the United States. Prioritization and technical dominance limit the temptation to engage in games of brinkmanship with every agitator nation, a necessary restraint given resource constraints and the ever-looming potential for escalation. Kinetic military action must be credible, should always be a last resort, and always be deployed on America’s timeline and terms.
Returning to Iran, the United States had a clear national interest in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. A regime that chants “Death to America,” funds terrorism throughout the world, took a hit out against Trump’s life, and kills American servicemembers cannot be trusted with long-range missiles carrying a nuclear payload. Further, a nuclear weapon would help Iran deter the United States and our regional allies from retaliating against Iran and its proxies when they engage in acts of terrorism. Concretely, an Iran that can strike the US with long-range weapons carrying nuclear payloads is much harder to stop from holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage.
This is an important interest, but it is not an unlimited interest. A specific, targeted strike was warranted, and Trump made the decision to undertake such an operation. But when voices in the United States and Israel pushed to escalate further, Trump firmly declined. Respecting the president’s leadership, the Israelis listened, and, despite some unsteadiness, have sustained a ceasefire with Tehran. Stability has followed a brief period of dramatic, strategic clarification and rebalancing. In this respect, the strike mirrors President Trump’s 2020 operation against IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, which decisively eliminated a key Iranian target without dragging American forces into a broader conflict. Then, as now, Trump wielded overwhelming strength while managing escalatory risks. Unlike the open-ended interventions of the past, both strikes had clear objectives and defined endpoints—leveraging America’s unmatched military capabilities to accomplish what no other nation could, but without sowing the kind of regional instability that can require open-ended commitments.
This is not to say that there was no risk with the kinetic actions conducted on the three nuclear sites in Iran—or in the strike on Soleimani, for that matter. There is always risk involved when bombs start dropping in the Middle East. But thanks to the skill and professionalism of our forces, and the deterrence capabilities we have established in the region, the United States was able to step off the escalation ladder and allowed Iran to save face internally.
Prioritized Deterrence Is About Managing Escalation
This ability to control the escalation cycle is key to successful PD. Consider the debate over regime change in Tehran, either via direct US action or by assisting an Israeli assassination mission. Killing the Supreme Leader, however justified, would ignite chaos, fracture the region, and dramatically increase the odds of America being drawn into another protracted conflict. Such an outcome lacks the support of the American people and would severely constrain American resources. The Supreme Leader is no friend of the United States, and American policymakers must be clear-eyed about that. But there are plenty of governments around the world who hate the United States. Pursuing regime change would have risked repeating the mistakes of Iraq, where the 2003 invasion unleashed sectarian violence that disproportionately impacted Christians in the region, fueled insurgencies, effectively handed control of the country to Iran, took more than 4,000 U.S. servicemembers’ lives, and cost more than $2 trillion with little to no strategic gain. This administration, in an example of Prioritized Deterrence, chose strategic clarity instead of overreach.
The political foundations for PD are strong, at least within the Republican Party. Few remember that then-Governor George W. Bush ran on a restrained foreign policy platform. In his debate with Vice President Al Gore in October 2000, Bush said, “I don’t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building.” The democracy agenda-driven cycle of nation building, later championed by Bush, stands in stark contrast to this campaign promise. Certainly 9/11 changed some of America’s strategic imperatives. But a quarter century since the attacks, PD, rather than foreign adventurism, has a clear and sustainable political base.
The Mechanics of Prioritized Deterrence
Given that American voters want elected leaders to prioritize our own interests, and only to deter direct threats with military force when necessary, and when no other actors can credibly do so independent of US action, policymakers need to prioritize two considerations.
First, the point of the US military is not simply to fight and win wars, but also to deter conflict before it happens. This requires maintaining American technical superiority on a domain-by-domain basis. In some arenas, exquisite platforms like stealth bombers, will be critical to deterrence. In others, a massive advantage in raw materials will be the deterrent.
To build any of these at scale, we need to have a much larger and more diversified industrial base. The saying goes, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” This does not just mean building more ships. It means building national capacity across the industrial sector so that in the event of a major war, the United States can quickly retool civilian manufacturing to drastically ramp up military production. During World War II, Ford and General Motors repurposed their car assembly lines to produce aircraft, but less obvious industries chipped in as well; the Singer Sewing Machine Company converted factories to make precision parts such as cockpit instruments and components, and IBM pivoted factories to producing fire control systems and sights for bombers. America lacks an equivalent latent capacity today, constraining the range of options even a PD driven president can embrace. It is notable that the Chinese understand this concept well: it is noted in the introduction to the “Made in China 2025” plan that, “Without strong manufacturing, there is no national prosperity.” If a country cannot create the goods necessary to fight a war, it cannot possibly challenge those countries that can.
Second, policymakers need to exercise humility about where they commit the United States to act. There are countries that for a litany of reasons—historical, cultural, religious, or otherwise— do not want or cannot become Western-style democracies, at least not on a timeline or at a cost that the American people will bear. Policymakers should be mindful of this reality, and resist the temptation to extend security guarantees around the world. Without robust popular support, American foreign policy cannot be effective.
President Barack Obama’s “red line” in Syria is a case in point. By imprudently threatening that the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Al-Assad would trigger a US response, Obama exposed the United States to a potentially open-ended conflict on someone else’s terms. When push came to shove and Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, Obama was unwilling to face the consequences of meeting his open-ended commitment, and declined to intervene. This was certainly the correct decision. Yet by showing that America’s “red lines” could be crossed with impunity, Obama diminished America’s deterrent credibility and emboldened our adversaries. Russia invaded Crimea less than two years later, initiating the war in the Donbas region that continues today.
Realism and Prioritized Deterrence
Returning to the question of doctrine, how does PD differ from realism? Firstly, PD is sufficiently specific that it can be assessed and debated both prospectively and historically. Did decisionmakers rightly estimate America’s constraints? Did they match time and threat to domains of technical superiority? Was a given intervention successful at resetting the international stage? By contrast, realism can be something of an empty vessel. On the one hand, a kind of runaway realism can provide endless justification for kinetic actions around the globe to disrupt and destroy any threat to the United States—up to and including regime change. Indeed, many neoconservatives do not identify themselves as such, describing themselves as “realists” and finding realist justifications for neoconservative goals. On the other hand, a great number of self-identified realists become fixated on ill-defined obsessions with second-order effects and blowback, such that they wind up suffering from paralysis by analysis. We can roughly assess risks and rewards. Pretending that we cannot is foolish.
Getting these answers right will require an open and honest debate among ideological allies. PD, in other words, relies on a robust mutual commitment to hear out dissenting voices within the movement. Indeed, it provides a series of key questions around which debate could transpire. In contrast to the moralizing and supercilious debate leading to the Iraq War, opposing voices in the debate over prioritization are critical to ensuring prudence, focus, and public support. The days of National Review tarring war skeptics as unpatriotic should be left in the rearview mirror for good.
Our movement and this administration are at a crossroads. None of Iran’s proxies, partners, or allies have come to Tehran’s immediate aid. As a result, the opportunity for peace may have presented itself. With Iran isolated, there is a very small window to provide greater stability in the region. This is not to say America can trust the Iranians—but with negotiations, confidence-building measures, and a serious verification regime in place, we can make significant progress. Crucially, that progress will be backed by a credible threat of massive and overwhelming force.
At the same time, only six months into President Trump’s second term, factions within the Republican Party are already warring over who will take the mantle after his time in office comes to an end. War hawks in the party are actively trying to claim the mantle of an “America First” foreign policy and append it to a reckless neoconservative nation-building agenda. To defeat them, Trump’s would-be successors would do well to model their approach to his successful strike on Iran. American foreign policy should embrace Prioritized Deterrence—a calculation of political will, national interest, deterrent effect, capital capacity, industrial capability, and strategic outcome priority alignment.
source:https://nationalinterest.org/feature/prioritized-deterrence-a-roadmap-for-us-foreign-policy