(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in RealClearDefense. Deterrence: Peace Through Strength Works)
The United States relies on deterrence to protect our country from all enemies foreign and domestic. The police and border patrol protect our cities and borders by deterring criminals and their associated organized criminal cartels.
The U.S. military, including all five services from the USAF to the Marines and Coast Guard, protects our nation’s interests and sovereignty and our allies overseas through displays of deterrent forces that give pause to our enemies.
However, there are pressures in the U.S. that are deliberately proposing the U.S. stop deterrence both internal to and external to the United States even atop the already serious loss of deterrence to date.
For example, HASC Chairman Mike Rogers explained at a recent hearing on the Mideast and Africa that:
“American deterrence in the Middle East and Africa eroded under the last administration. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened our adversaries. The Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran only made matters worse. After Hamas’ barbaric onslaught, Iran opened a second front—activating the Houthis to strike Israel and disrupt global trade. Since 2023, the Houthis have launched hundreds of attacks on U.S. warships and commercial vessels. Yet, instead of holding the Houthis accountable, the Biden administration pulled them off the terror list.”
Previous administrations said Ukraine was either of no security interest to the United States (2014) or feared (2022) Russian escalation to the nuclear level and therefore reduced weapons provided to Ukraine and failed to develop any strategy to win the war against Putin and Moscow.
These policies in the view of our adversaries were interpreted as a show of weakness and of a limited faith in conventional or nuclear deterrence in 2014 and 2022. America thus sent signals to Moscow that Russia largely remained in a sanctuary free from Ukraine attack. What possible incentive would Moscow then have to negotiate a settlement that restored Ukraine sovereignty?
The same foreign policy mistakes were duplicated with respect to Iran. Taking Iran proxy Hamas off the terror list, providing $100 billion in frozen oil and gas funds back to Iran, and undermining Israel deterrent capability against Iran, collectively again took the U.S. deterrent off the table dealing with Iran proxy terrorism and missile strikes for example, and the Iran objective of exporting its Islamic jihad revolution worldwide.
There is a domestic corollary as well. Leaving the U.S. border largely open to those seeking illegal entry and providing them residency rights by the multiple millions took our border deterrent off the table.
Over 2021-4 ten-twelve million illegal aliens crashed our borders but with approximately 8-10 million given permission to remain in the United States and many to receive Medicaid and food stamps, as well as work permits on top of a free plane ride to the city of their choice.
Multi thousands of these aliens are criminal elements escaping law enforcement in their origin country, while smuggling drugs and engaging in human trafficking to the tune of at least $42 billon each year.
The United States took border deterrence off the table, and as consequence 107,000 Americans dye of drug overdoses annually, escalating crime hits our cities, while the U.S. has lost some 400,000 young unaccompanied migrant children, many of whom are believed to being sexually trafficked.
The Trump administration restored border deterrence quickly as the laws on the books allowed enforcement and return of deterrence. Adding thousands of ICE and border patrol officials plus detention centers are all in the reconciliation budget and will allow the continued enforcement of border security.
Foreign policy deterrent choices have also been correctly identified by the new administration. But no laws on the books are alone adequate to win back deterrence. Both major new investments and strategies are needed.
On Ukraine the administration determined there was no strategy to win and thus a cease fire was superior to turning Ukraine into an extended Verdun.
On Iran the administration correctly laid out the options. A negotiated agreement is possible but only one which ends the fiction that Iran has a right to enrich uranium. Or the United States and Israel either together or separately will take whatever military action necessary to put Iran’s nuclear enrichment technology out of business.
But the most serious threat is to take deterrence off the table involves our extended nuclear deterrent. Writer Annie Sorensen’s book “Nuclear War: A Scenario” called all U.S. nuclear deterrent strategy immoral, unworkable and therefore “mad”! Following suit, global zero and other disarmament groups support doing away with U.S. nuclear deterrent including unilaterally taking down 400/700 of the strategic nuclear delivery vehicles allowed by the New Start treaty. One new book describes the U.S. nuclear deterrent as “temporary.”
U.S. nuclear deterrent strategy holds at risk key enemy leadership, security and military assets, and has done 100% successfully for some 7 decades. It has emphasized having a secure second strike nuclear strike capability. How strange then that abolitionists want to change U.S. policy to “no use” of nuclear weapons even in retaliation to first being attacked by nuclear weapons. This would literally take down the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Unilaterally.
Deterrence has worked because the country has always (but often late) made the necessary investments. Today the new defense budget adds funds for key nuclear assets including the Sentinel ICBM, the Columbia submarine, the B-21 Raider strategic bomber plus the D-5 missile and LRSO. And work is being done to build a sea launch cruise missile, new NC3 and the entire warhead building enterprise. The total modernization investment of $27 billion, out of a total federal nuclear effort of $62 billion, is a modest investment out of a Federal budget of $6.8 trillion or .39%.
Modernization thus comes to a relatively modest $350 billion over the next decade, far less than the projected CBO numbers of over $1 trillion. Proposed FY26 defense spending is $870 billion including DoD and NNSA, and thus with nuclear modernization spending (not sustainment of legacy systems) at a reasonable annual cost of 3.5%.
Nuclear Deterrence has worked extraordinarily well even in the midst of crises. After Berlin in 1961, President Kenndy credited the Polaris submarine small warhead developed by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for giving the U.S. the technological edge to stand down the Soviet threat to attack the U.S. military forces in Berlin. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear Armageddon, but as President Kennedy later said the deployment of the new Minuteman I missile at Malmstrom USAF base was “my ace in the hole” that resolved the crises peacefully.
The U.S. Minuteman deployment was just in time; the very same day the U.S. intelligence community determined the Soviets had employed nuclear armed offensive missiles in Cuba. The Minuteman deployment gave the U.S. the leverage to blockade Soviet trawlers bringing missiles to Cuba and remove the existing missiles as well.
In short, key U.S. nuclear technology development, part of ongoing Eisenhower and Kennedy administration modernization, saved the world from nuclear disaster.
Peace through strength works. It’s called deterrence. And modernization is deterrence, thus the urgent need to deploy as soon as possible the current modernization plan put forward to Congress for FY26 and beyond.
Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.