Garrison Moratto
On January 3rd, 2020, President Donald Trump eliminated Iran’s Qassam Soleimani. On January 3rd, 2026, Trump seized Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. These two divergent events, separated by exactly six years, reveal a new dynamic in American foreign and defense policy. With his 2020 strike on Soleimani, President Trump established an approach that has become clearer in his second term with the bombing of Fordow (Operation Midnight Hammer) and the remarkable raid to seize Nicolas Maduro (Operation Absolute Resolve). I call it Precision Deterrence: a dramatic level of force typically reserved for large scale operations, unconventionally constrained to limited aims.
While previous administrations have utilized precision strikes for limited objectives, the small scope was typically intended to restrict collateral damage, avoid large commitments, and was assumed to yield correspondingly limited benefits. The tradeoff was accepted as a means of avoiding war. Yet Trump’s activities on the other hand, are shaped with the severity and express intent to impose an asymmetric, psychological impact on foreign rivals, heightening the perception of unpredictability from America and at the same time amplifying perceptions of vulnerability in the victim. It is a sudden, shocking escalation that ends as soon as it begins. Precision Deterrence bears echoes of Richard Nixon’s famed “Madman Theory,” but with a bravado only made possible by 21st century military technology. Nixon’s theory frequently took the form of bluff, in a sense, it was the applied use of brinkmanship. Trump’s theory becomes readily kinetic, something more akin to a fait accompli.
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