Restoring Strategic Deterrence—How to Prevent America's Enemies from Attacking us and Avert Nuclear Armageddon

Including a copy and video of my much updated national security presentation on how America can avert an unnecessary Third World War as well as an update on America's proxy war with nuclear-armed Iran

Artists rendering of a US Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine firing two of its Trident II SLBMs

Since the war between Israel and Gaza erupted on October 7^th, there have now been at least 166 Iranian proxy attacks on US troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan culminating in the attack on a US military base in Jordan known as Tower 22 that killed three brave US soldiers and injured at least thirty-four more late last month.  Americans have heard a lot from national security professional pundits of late about the need for the US to act to “restore deterrence.” While they are right to highlight the need to do, their ideas for how to do that are often extremely misguided and in some cases self-defeating often more likely to escalate military conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere then to de-escalate them. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Mike Gallagher were among a slew of neoconservative Republicans in Congress who have called for the US to conduct direct air and missile strikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps targets inside Iran itself in retaliation for the Iranian proxy drone attack.

Biden’s bungling military responses to Iranian proxy attacks this past week have underscored the fact that US policy is reactive with no clear objective on how to end the ongoing military conflict in the Middle East on favorable terms to the US. Earlier this weekend, President Biden sent two B-1B bombers to bomb 85 targets including Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force bases followed by more air and missile strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen the following day. Biden reportedly tipped off the Iraqi government letting them know what targets we would be attacking apparently unaware that the Iranian proxy groups that have been attacking US troops are part of the Iraqi military causing them to warn the Iranian proxy groups to evacuate in advance of the attacks. Iraqi government spokesman strongly denounced the US military strikes as a violation of its sovereignty that the consequences of the US attacks on Iraqi territory “will be disastrous for security and stability in Iraq and the region.” Meanwhile, both Iran and Iraq have claimed Iran didn't lose a single Quds Force soldier in the US bombing raids on Iran and Syria, an assertion that has since been confirmed due to the fact that every target the US struck had been evacuated prior to the US bomber strikes.  Iran has stated the attacks would merely accelerate pressure on the US to withdraw all of its troops from Iraq and perhaps Syria and Jordan as well.  

That said, Biden has shown some degree of strategic prudence in refusing to heed neocon calls to attack Iran (or Russia for that matter) directly as it provoke Iran to retaliate by detonating one of their super EMP satellites orbiting over the United States which would cause America to completely collapse. If Biden had any cognitive ability remaining, he would act immediately to pull our troops out of the Middle East and Eastern Europe to ensure we never have to fight Russia or Iran so we can focus on the threat from Communist China. Even so, Americans are becoming increasingly concerned that Biden is taking us into a Third World War with Iran in the Middle East. Furthermore, as COL Douglas Macgregor has stated, Biden has no discernable strategy in the Middle East, just as he has no strategy for success in his proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, claiming it does not want war in the Middle East while it continues to wage one against Iranian proxy groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Biden and the Neocons Repeating the Mistakes of the Roman Empire

Under President Joe Biden, the US is spending $850 billion a year on defense but is doing little to nothing to actually defend itself as the Chinese balloon episode illustrated a year ago but is rather wasting our limited military strength in defending nations half a world away in which we have little to no national security interest. Biden's decision to unilaterally disarm the US military and give vast quantities of our modern weapons and especially precision guided munitions to Ukraine will ensure the US loses the coming war with China and/or Russia. The American Conservative recently published a good article, entitled “How Many Limited Wars Are Enough?” that asks the important question as to why US leaders continue to pursue a morally and strategically bankrupt and potentially suicidal policy of fighting endless no-win wars abroad for no good reason? These wars have served and continue to serve to greatly weaken America's military and economic power while simultaneously creating new enemies and provoking our enemies to target and kill our troops and perhaps even attack the US homeland catastrophically which could bring not only a loss of our liberal empire but could result in the permanent dissolution of the United States of America itself.

US leaders claim virtually the entire world all the way up to the borders of our enemies Russia and China as part of our sphere of influence. They claim it is in our national security interest to defend every nation even countries like Ukraine and Taiwan with which we have no security commitment whatsoever even if doing so led to a Third World War which would most likely end with America's nuclear obliteration. The chorus of irrational neoconservative politicians clamoring for nuclear war over the loss of a drone, or a few US troops can sometimes seem deafening. Anyone who dares criticize America’s self-defeating imperial policy of decline in pushing its liberal empire all the way up to Russia’s and China’s borders and border seas to provoke them to ally with each other and potentially attack us is immediately smeared as an isolationist. This despite the fact that the US has never been isolationist and that America’s foreign policy tradition with the exception of two years during World War One was non-interventionist during the first 165 years of its existence.  It is a more traditional American Foreign policy of non-interventionism that America First conservatives have been championing. As a result, we have too few sane and rational political leaders that have the courage to ask whether risking the deaths and destruction of the US and the deaths of 275 million Americans who would likely perish in a war with Russia, China, North Korea and/or Iran to defend against some border dispute or civil war half a world away is really worth it.

A few years ago, I warned that the US could not hope to win a three-front war with Russia, China and North Korea. However, if the US opts to fight a war with the Sino-Russian military alliance it would certainly expand to a full-scale war with Iran in the Middle East as well. Furthermore, Communist Venezuela would likely take advantage of the US being embroiled in a four-front war with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea to invade Guyana meaning we could have a five-front war on three different continents including in our own hemisphere which US leaders have been neglecting to defend for the past few decades. The grim reality is that even a war between the US and the PRC alone commencing in the Pacific Theater over Taiwan would be fought across the globe with catastrophic cyber and very possibly super-EMP and nuclear attacks against the US homeland.

America is following in the footsteps of the Roman Empire which collapsed suddenly with little warning in the fifth century, pursuing a suicidal policy championed by both neoconservative Republicans and Democrats of fighting endless no-win wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East to secure other nations and defend their borders while refusing to defend our own borders from invasion. Neoconservatives believe that America is not a place or a people but merely an idea and that if the US were destroyed and 300 million Americans were killed and replaced by hundreds of millions of foreigners, the idea of America would survive in their minds, and everything would be great. The neoconservative motto has long been to invade the world while quite literally letting the world invade us with ten million illegal immigrants in the past few years from virtually every Communist and Islamist adversarial nation on earth. Given that Biden has allowed 100,000 Chinese military age men to invade America to potentially enable them to destroy it from within without China having to fire a single missile at us from its territory they would certainly seem to have accomplished their globalist objective of destroying America.

Restoring Strategic Deterrence

This massive increase in international conflicts over the course of the last two years of the Biden Presidency underscore the fact that we live in a more dangerous world than ever before as conflicts are erupting across the globe. America’s nuclear weakness relative to the Sino-Russian military alliance has emboldened Russia, Iran and China to become increasingly aggressive to the point of war as the credibility of our badly undersized and increasingly obsolescent strategic nuclear deterrent continues to falter with every passing year. Meanwhile our suicidal foreign policy of liberal hegemony is causing our nuclear-armed adversaries to ally against us and may provoke them to attack us catastrophically using nation-ending weapons of mass destruction that we have little to no defense against. President Joe Biden himself stated in October 2022 that the chances of nuclear Armageddon have never been greater since the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades earlier at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Neoconservative pundits and politicians, under the mistaken belief that America is the strongest military superpower, are urging Biden to “show strength and resolve” by increasing US military confrontations with our nuclear-armed adversaries around the globe but that is a near-certain recipe for provoking a war of annihilation which will not only bring a swift end to America’s liberal empire but to the United States of America itself. There is a clear and present danger to the US that, if implemented, their call to provoke an unnecessary Third World War with Russia and China would likely serve to be a self-fulfilling prophesy as Sen. Lindsey Graham who essentially declared back in May that the only way to avoid World War Three is to start it over the loss of a few US soldiers in the Middle East or even a drone flying near the Russian naval base of Sevastopol in Crimea.

US troops are spread thinly across the world in numbers far too small to defend against Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran essentially serving as little more than nuclear tripwires in Eastern Europe, South Korea Iraq, Syria and now even Taiwan to ensure US involvement in unwinnable wars against nuclear adversaries in opposition to US national security interests that could quickly escalate to the nuclear or super EMP level. With US foreign policy hopelessly drift as the world continues to burn, the US is desperately in need of a new grand strategy to replace its disastrous failed strategy of liberal hegemony that prioritizes US military commitments to the defense of its vital interests in the Western Hemisphere, Western Europe and Japan rather than bogging us down in peripheral conflicts in regions such as Eastern Europe and the Middle East where the US has little to no discernible national security interests. Restoring strategic deterrence will require both refocusing on strategic and homeland defense but also prioritizing diplomatic solutions to current world conflicts to give us sufficient time to rebuild our defenses.

During a presentation I gave to a group of 100 patriots in northern Utah late last month, I discussed a number of very specific and detailed recommendations for how the US can restore strategic deterrence and prevent our nuclear adversaries from attacking us, which will be the subject of a forthcoming book which I intend to publish with my co-author Cynthia Ayers, who serves as the President and CEO of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security later this month.  My new book is intended to be a blueprint for US leaders to change course, replace Biden’s policy of war through weakness with one of peace through strength, and save our country before it is too late.  Doing so will not just require refocusing US military on rebuilding our strategic deterrent and refocusing on homeland defense but also replacing our grand strategy of liberal hegemony with a strategy of Assured National Survival using diplomacy to avert an unnecessary nuclear war with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran while safeguarding America’s vital national security interests at home and abroad. Most importantly, we must rebalance the international balance of power more in our favor by making Russia a strategic partner and effectively neutralizing Russia’s military alliance with the PRC while mediating a peaceful agreement with the PRC ending the conflict over Taiwan.

Here is a copy of the presentation and the two-hour video of my briefing and subsequent Questions and Answers session: