David J. Trachtenberg
Introduction
Among the more consequential decisions the second Trump Administration must confront is whether to allow America’s continued vulnerability to coercive nuclear threats from China and Russia to remain unchallenged or to take steps to mitigate and alleviate the threats to the U.S. homeland posed by both countries’ growing nuclear arsenals.
Both China and Russia are seeking to overturn the established international order and displace the United States from the position of global dominance it has held since the end of World War II. And the growing entente between Beijing and Moscow, augmented by increasing cooperation and collaboration with the likes of North Korea and Iran, suggest that the United States has entered a period of unprecedented vulnerability to the whims of malignant actors. In this dangerous environment, President Trump must seriously rethink whether it makes sense to continue to leave the American people vulnerable to Chinese and Russian nuclear threats or whether it is time to move forward—deliberately and with all due urgency—to build and deploy defenses that can not only help deter potential aggression against the U.S. homeland but can also help protect Americans from nuclear Armageddon should deterrence fail.
It will take determined leadership and a solid commitment to overturn obsolete Cold War orthodoxy—accompanied by adequate funding to translate policies into programmatic reality—to implement the necessary adjustments to U.S. missile defense posture, and to do so with the urgency required. President Trump has already taken the first step in this direction by issuing an Executive Order on January 27, 2025, calling for an “Iron Dome for America” and the deployment of a “next-generation missile defense shield” to defend the United States against all types of missile attacks from both rogue states and peer and near-peer adversaries.[1] This now must be followed by the allocation of sufficient budgetary resources to implement the president’s direction and to do so with alacrity.
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