Missile Defense and Great Power Politics
Op-Ed Response to First, We Will Defend the Homeland: The Case for Homeland Missile Defense (2025) by the Atlantic Council
Missile defense is one of the most complicated aspects of military strategy, particularly due to its promise to provide safety at the expense of international stability. In a recent report by the Atlantic Council, First, We Will Defend the Homeland: The Case for Homeland Missile Defense, the authors argue that the U.S. must abandon its “rogue-state-only” approach to missile defenses to successfully adapt to a new threat environment with two nuclear peer competitors, Russia and China. Building upon the 2022 Missile Defense Review (MDR), the report argues that the Biden Administration has failed to break from an outdated post-Cold War era policy. However, in the process, the report’s conclusions fail to engage with many fateful post-Cold War blunders and Cold War lessons alike.
Although it was published this January, the report is also already O.B.E. -- Overtaken By Events. Mere weeks after its publication, the Trump Administration announced a new homeland missile defense initiative, “The Golden Dome,” which appears likely to vastly overcompensate for many of the insecurities in missile defense strategy the report identifies. In doing so, however, the report and the administration have minimized the political and financial risks of a new defense arms race, while inflating the dangers of a bolt-from-the-blue first strike from Russia and/or China on the American homeland.
The key to Cold War lessons and post-Cold War illusions can be found within the logic of great power competition, as espoused in realist works including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) by Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. It is vital to understand that great powers, such as the United States, Russia, and China today, will continue to strive for global supremacy rather than balance, and will consistently act to enhance their security at the others’ expense. In this op-ed, I will demonstrate how wider lessons from the history of great power politics, the Cold War, and the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) debate can be employed to guide U.S. missile defense strategy in the twenty-first century, while responding directly to the conclusions of the Atlantic Council’s 2025 report.
THE “ROGUE-STATE-ONLY” APPROACH IS OUTDATED -- BUT SO IS “ASSURED SAFETY”
The crux of the Atlantic Council’s report is a rebuke of the “rogue-state-only” approach to missile defense in the United States, but its important to review where this bias in U.S. strategic thinking came from, and the strategic consequences for a full shift to address peer and near-peer adversaries. The United States resumed its deployment of missile defenses after 2002, when the Bush Administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, first signed by Soviet and American diplomats in Moscow in 1972. The ABM Treaty was contracted precisely to prevent a new arms race over BMD, which both superpowers then feared would cost them exorbitant amounts of money while affording only meagre strategic benefits. Homeland missile defenses, in particular, would only be necessary if deterrence failed, and were then considered to be notoriously unreliable in the event the nation was faced with a general nuclear first strike from its superpower adversary.
Missile defense has thus always proved a more attractive strategy when deterring or defending against smaller, weaker powers with limited capabilities, especially those considered likely to launch accidental or irrational attacks. The “rogue state” strategic archetype first entered U.S. strategic thinking during the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 1991, after the Iraqi dictator fired Scud missiles into Israel, a neutral state in the conflict. Rogues’ capacity for “irrational” attack was inflated in subsequent documents like the 1992 Defense Policy Guidance (DPG), colloquially known as the “Wolfowitz Doctrine,” which elevated Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea as the United States’ chief adversaries in the post-Cold War era. It was assumed throughout the 1990s that these rogues were potentially unstable, “undeterrable” actors who had to be preempted before they undertook fatal but destructive attacks. In the early 2000s, they were selectively abused to help justify an illusory imperative to establish a global system of “unchallengeable” American hegemony in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
In many ways the threat posed by North Korea, Iran, and the other remaining rogue states today is even greater than it was in 2002. This is not because rogues are irrational actors, but precisely because over the past two decades, they have pursued a rational and cooperative strategy to subvert American power with the help of Russia and China. Emerging military, technological, economic and political alliances between America’s adversaries, like the “Axis of Upheaval,” are a natural product of great power realpolitik, wherein revisionist powers’ interests align to upset the pursuits of a potential hegemon. Over time, China, Russia, North Korea and Iran have worked together to enhance the credibility of their missile technology specifically to undermine U.S. security guarantees and blur deterrence. In this dimension at least, the report’s emphasis on moving away from the “rogue-states-only” model is fundamentally valid, as rogues are no longer isolated threats but players in a wider security competition waged between great powers.
The problem arises where the report assumes that missile defenses would be just as desirable a means to deter, and potentially defend against, attacks from adversarial great powers themselves. The United States managed to win the Cold War without the “Assured Safety” American presidents since George W. Bush have pursued. But ignoring the reality of great power competition today by fully embracing BMD could easily prove disastrous. And this appears to be the course the United States is already pursuing, and to an even greater degree than reflected in the report.
THE REPORT IS O.B.E. -- AND THE “GOLDEN DOME” IS A GROSS OVERCOMPENSATION
Due to its date of publication, the report does not address President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense initiative, unveiled just weeks later on January 27th, 2025. In a presidential memo titled “The Iron Dome for America,” the new Administration pledged to devote $176 billion to deploying a next-generation missile defense shield within four years, capable of defending the American homeland from “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks.” The Atlantic Council report, by comparison, only advocates spending $4-5 billion more on BMD. Like the 2022 MDR its authors reference, however, the White House memo roots its analysis in the view that missile attacks pose “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” The authors of the Atlantic Council report reference Trump’s campaign aspirations regarding BMD, but did not endorse nor critique his advocacy for a next-generation system:
“At least one of the two presidential candidates in the 2024 US presidential election (at the time of writing) proposes a next-generation missile defense system for the protection of the nation. To be sure, nuclear and missile threats are growing—and how to address those threats will be a constant source of evaluation and debate.”
The report’s call for a consistent, rigorous debate over BMD is prescient, but Trump’s “Golden Dome” project is unlikely to bring about the “coherence” its authors argue is needed in missile defense policy amid a plethora of dynamic and diverse threats. The report clarifies, for instance, that the purpose of a homeland BMD system would not be the “absolute protection of the American people,” but rather to enhance deterrence by “creating doubt in the mind of the Russian or Chinese leadership that the purpose of their attacks will succeed.” By comparison, Section 2(b) of the White House memo declares that the purpose of the Golden Dome will be to “deter -- and defend (U.S.) citizens and critical infrastructure against -- any foreign aerial attack on the homeland” (emphasis added). Section 3(a)(i) goes further to call for a “defense of the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries” (emphasis added). In sum, the report’s call for a shift from a “rogue-state-only” rationale for BMD has not only already been embraced by the Trump Administration, but exaggerated into a unilateral, maximalist defense strategy.
This is an impossible overcompensation fully revealed by the wider history of the BMD debate, most notably President Ronald Reagan’s unveiling of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Like the Golden Dome, SDI promised a revolutionary missile shield -- dubbed “Star Wars” by the American media -- that would render nuclear weapons obsolete by intercepting Soviet missiles in space with satellite-guided lasers. While the program spurred technological advances in BMD and may have even helped pressure the Kremlin to concede to vital arms control agreements during the final phase of the Cold War, it was ultimately abandoned due to cost, feasibility, and the inescapable logic of offense-defense dynamics. Between 1983 and 1991, SDI cost $30 billion dollars, or roughly $60 billion today, before it was quietly abandoned after being reorganized into the SDI Organization (SDIO) in 1993 and later the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). Missile defense, when left unchecked in a great power context, can become a bottomless pit: a defender must prepare for every scenario, while the attacker need only exploit a single weakness. This can quickly lead to spirals of strategic insecurity that no shield can stop.
THE OFFENSE-DEFENSE SPIRAL
The Atlantic Council report dismisses concerns that expanding U.S. missile defenses might provoke an “action-reaction” arms race amongst the great powers as “counterfactual.” But this view is deeply ahistorical. While the report notes that U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles have remained numerically stable since the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, it fails to grapple with China’s major quantitative buildup over the same two decades—and the more important qualitative arms race already underway. Both Russia and China have poured resources into hypersonic weapons, space-based capabilities, and other systems specifically designed to circumvent U.S. missile defenses. Cold War history offers an even more sobering view: throughout the nuclear age, whenever one great power has invested in defense, the others have reliably escalated their offensive capabilities to offset the defender’s advantage.
This reality was clearly articulated by Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. Throughout the 1960s, McNamara resisted congressional pressure to deploy missile defenses against the Soviet Union, especially after evidence emerged that the Soviets were constructing their own BMD system around Moscow known as Galosh. McNamara believed such systems undermined deterrence, not enhanced it, and worked tirelessly to prevent the United States from succumbing to what he viewed as the “offense-defense spiral.” At the 1967 Glassboro Summit, McNamara explained to the Soviet Premier, Alexei Kosygin, that no missile shield could guarantee either superpower’s protection against a determined nuclear rival. On the contrary, any serious attempt at homeland defense would almost certainly lead to new offensive innovations by the opposite superpower — such as decoys, MIRVs, or oversaturation tactics. In essence, McNamara correctly predicted that no matter how much money a great power spends on a defensive shield, their adversaries will always be able to devise cheaper methods to undermine it, granting them the decisive advantage, not the defender.
The BMD systems that did emerge in the 1960s—Sentinel under Johnson and Safeguard under Nixon— largely reflected this calculus. Sentinel was a limited system designed to intercept a small number of Chinese missiles, and was specifically curtailed to avoid stoking Soviet fears. Safeguard, a slightly more ambitious system, was secretly rationalized by Nixon and Kissinger as a bargaining chip in the ongoing arms control talks with Moscow, SALT and the ABM Treaty. Both programs reveal a key Cold War insight: great power strategic stability never depended on defensive invulnerability, but always upon mutual vulnerability. When used judiciously, BMD can provide key tactical or political leverage on top of this balance of terror; it can force concessions from adversaries, and enhance deterrence. But when pursued in a maximalist defense doctrine, it invites spirals of escalation. The tendency to ignore this is related to an even greater danger, of which history warns of and the report also overlooks: that when fears of sudden annihilation are unfounded, they can distort national defense priorities catastrophically.
THE PERILS OF “PEARL HARBOR SYNDROME”
As mentioned, the Atlantic Council’s report rightly concedes that no missile defense system can offer “leak-proof” protection from a concerted nuclear first strike. Yet it does not fully address the psychological and historical roots of America’s compulsion to pursue “Assured Safety” anyway. This mentality is related to what Cold War theorists once called Pearl Harbor Syndrome—a strategic anxiety born of sudden attack, in which the specter of catastrophic surprise overrides rational threat assessment. Despite facing mutual vulnerability and rational adversaries, Pentagon defense planners remained haunted by the idea of waking up to a second Pearl Harbor—this time in the form of widespread nuclear devastation. As Daniel Ellsberg reveals in his memoir, The Doomsday Machine, for a time in the 1950s this was the only form of nuclear war the United States was truly prepared for. The irony is that such attacks never came, not because the threat wasn’t real, but because America’s adversaries, however hostile, were not suicidal. The failure of U.S. strategy in the post-9/11 era to distinguish irrational jihadist non-state terrorist groups from rational rogues repeated the same fallacy, confusing capability with intent.
This is where historical memory should inform current policy. Cold War missile defense systems such as Sentinel, Safeguard, and SDI were not primarily devised to guarantee survival or even make the world safer — they were about creating political leverage, shaping diplomatic options, and buttressing deterrence. Even SDI, for all its strategic ambition, primarily functioned as a psychological and diplomatic wedge against the Soviets, who became convinced the United States was determined to pursue such a scheme to attain offensive impunity. In reality, however, missile defense has value not when it promises invulnerability, but when it supports an offensive deterrence posture and complements a rational understanding of great power behavior. The history of successful BMD policy is not one of absolute security, but of limited, calculated use nested within broader offensive strategies that preserve stability.
If the U.S. is to prevail in an era of renewed great power competition, it must recognize that missile defense alone cannot guarantee safety—and may even invite instability if pursued without regard to the offense-defense balance. The United States must be clear-eyed about the rationality of its adversaries and the strategic logic that governs their behavior. Russia and China, like the U.S., seek survivability—hence China’s construction of vast underground missile complexes, or both countries’ investments in mobile and hypersonic systems. But if U.S. defense policy continues to fixate on an impenetrable shield, without enhancing its sword, it will risk falling behind. The report’s insight—that missile defense should enhance deterrence, not replace it—is correct. But that logic must be carried further: the U.S. must invest not only in realistic BMD systems, but also in credible, flexible offensive capabilities that undermine adversaries’ and reinforce the mutual vulnerability upon which international stability still depends.
CONCLUSION
Missile defense can play a valuable role in U.S. strategy—but only when it is pursued with a clear understanding of its limits and its place within the broader offense-defense balance. The pursuit of invulnerability against peer adversaries risks sparking new arms races that degrade, rather than enhance, strategic and international stability. History shows that no missile shield can guarantee safety from a determined nuclear-peer adversary, and that overreliance on such systems only invites such adversaries to invest in more sophisticated offensive capabilities. The Atlantic Council’s report is entirely right to call for a policy shift beyond the rogue-state-only framework, but problematic where it implies that missile defense alone is the key strategy to meet the challenges of contemporary multipolar nuclear competition.
To succeed in this new era, the United States must integrate missile defenses within a rational strategy to preserve its global dominance, while resisting the temptation to pursue total invulnerability. This requires investing in credible offensive forces; avoiding maximalist defense doctrines like the Golden Dome; crafting strategies cognizant of the offense-defense balance; and avoiding excessive planning for wars adversaries are already rationally incentivized to avoid. As McNamara’s example tells us, strategic restraint is not always a weakness and can prove critical to victory in long-term great power competition. But this requires an understanding that U.S. security depends not on fulfilling the impossible task of eliminating all possible threats, but upon strategically managing them through a balance of power to which all adversaries are forced to adhere.
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