President Trump’s January 27, 2025 Executive Order, The Iron Dome for America, calls for a versatile U.S. missile defense system to protect America’s citizens, territory, infrastructure, and military forces against all opponents’ “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks.”[1] It also calls for the examination of cooperation with allies to protect their territories, populations and military forces.
This is a sweeping directive for the defense of the United States the likes of which have not been seen since Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative. That research and development program ultimately led to the rudimentary U.S. homeland defense system now deployed to protect against North Korea’s long-range ballistic missiles, but not against Russian or Chinese missiles.
The goal of defending American citizens, infrastructure and nuclear forces may seem self-evidently sensible. That, however, is a naïve view given long-standing U.S. missile defense policy. Since 1976, no Republican or Democratic administration has deployed missile defenses to ease or even challenge the condition of homeland vulnerability to Russian or Chinese strategic missiles. Americans typically react to this harsh reality with shocked disbelief;[2] why else should U.S. taxpayers spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense every year if not—at a minimum—to protect the country from attack?
Washington’s archaic policy against deploying anything beyond a minimalist homeland defense against North Korean missiles is dangerous given the looming nuclear threats of a Russian, Chinese, and North Korean “axis of upheaval” that has the clear goal of overthrowing the liberal world order, by force if necessary. Russia has explicitly lowered its threshold for using nuclear weapons and frequently issues coercive nuclear threats;
China’s leadership has identified 2027 as a possible timeline for taking Taiwan,[3] and has not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons to do so, if necessary. Both have been engaged in an extensive expansion of their nuclear forces for well over a decade.
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