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27 August 2024

A Proportional Response? American Strategy and the Red Sea

Samuel Byers

“What is the virtue of a proportional response?” asks President Jed Bartlet of his National Security Council (NSC) in one episode of The West Wing. “They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That’s a proportional response.” Angrily, the president cuts off the aides trying to explain and interjects: “They do that, so we do this—it’s the cost of doing business. It’s been factored in. Am I right or am I missing something here?” Exasperated by the president’s interrogation of the virtues of a proportional response, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reluctantly admits, “It isn’t virtuous, Mr. President. It’s all there is, sir.”

The opening story arc of Aaron Sorkin’s magnum opus is an extended meditation on the limitations of military power and the responsibility of command. Faced with a crisis in the Middle East, a U.S. jet shot down over Syria, which happened to be carrying a member of his staff, the newly minted commander-in-chief struggles to calibrate his response to this affront to American military power. Ultimately, after asking his national security team to devise a “disproportional response” that “doesn’t make me think we are just docking somebody’s damn allowance,” Bartlet orders the original precision strikes to go ahead out of concern for the civilian casualties and diplomatic blowback that might attend a full-bore military incursion. The president’s chief of staff reminds Bartlet—and the viewer—that this is “how you behave if you’re the most powerful nation in the world. It’s proportional, it’s reasonable, it’s responsible—it’s not nothing!”

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