Washington’s expanding anti-missile deployments—from the Middle East to the proposed Golden Dome—are transforming defensive technology into a catalyst for offensive risk-taking, eroding strategic stability at a moment when the last nuclear arms control frameworks have collapsed.
The conventional wisdom that missile defense systems deter aggression and reduce the likelihood of conflict is facing a profound challenge. As the Trump administration rushes Patriot and THAAD batteries to the Persian Gulf region while simultaneously pursuing an ambitious homeland shield known as the Golden Dome, recent events suggest these systems are producing a paradoxical effect: rather than discouraging military action, they are emboldening states to launch offensive operations under the assumption that retaliation can be absorbed at an acceptable cost.
From Deterrence to Offensive Enablement
For decades, anti-missile technology was understood primarily through a defensive lens. Ukraine’s devastating vulnerability to Russian cruise and ballistic missile bombardment from 2022 onward illustrated the terrible consequences of lacking protective systems. In the Middle East, Israel’s Iron Dome demonstrated its value during the 2012 Gaza conflict by reducing pressure for a ground invasion, and the near-total interception of Iran’s April 2024 strike—involving roughly 320 missiles and drones—reinforced the narrative that defensive shields preserve restraint. After that success, President Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to “take the win” rather than escalate further.
Yet what followed in 2025 reveals how dramatically defensive confidence can transform into offensive calculation. Israel’s multilayered air defense architecture—Arrow 3, David’s Sling, and Iron Dome—gave Jerusalem’s leadership the assurance that it could strike Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure and weather the inevitable retaliation with manageable consequences. The destruction of Tehran’s Russian-supplied air defense systems further reinforced this asymmetry. The psychological security provided by missile shields did not prevent conflict; it enabled it.
The Twelve-Day War’s Sobering Lessons
The June 2025 Israel-Iran war exposed critical vulnerabilities that the confidence narrative had obscured. Israeli air defenses intercepted approximately 86 percent of incoming Iranian missiles during the twelve-day conflict—a rate that sounds impressive until measured against the human cost. At least 33 Israelis died and over 3,500 sustained injuries. The conflict also depleted roughly 25 percent of America’s total THAAD interceptor stockpile, a startling consumption rate that raised urgent questions about sustainability in any prolonged exchange.
Former Israeli National Security Council head Eyal Hulata warned in December that Israel’s defensive capabilities face a structural mismatch against Iran’s expanding missile production capacity, and nearly a third of Israeli civilians still lack adequate shelter coverage. The lesson is clear: interception rates below 100 percent carry devastating consequences when adversaries can launch volleys of hundreds of projectiles, and the economics of offense dramatically favor the attacker. Each interceptor costs orders of magnitude more than the missiles it targets, creating an attritional imbalance that defense planners struggle to resolve.
Despite these realities, the current American posture suggests the lesson has not been absorbed. The ongoing US military buildup across the Middle East—including additional THAAD and Patriot batteries, carrier strike groups, and expanded fighter deployments—is designed to project an image of impenetrability. For an Iranian regime cornered by economic pressure, military threats, and internal unrest, this perceived shield over American assets and allies may look less like deterrence and more like preparation for another strike, creating powerful incentives to attempt to overwhelm defenses before they solidify.
Golden Dome and the Collapse of Nuclear Arms Control
The destabilizing potential of missile defense extends far beyond the Middle East. Trump’s Golden Dome initiative—envisioned as a comprehensive shield protecting the American homeland against ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile threats—represents the most ambitious national missile defense effort since Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. The Arms Control Center’s assessment of the program highlights its sweeping scope: unlike previous systems designed to counter limited threats from states like North Korea, Golden Dome explicitly aims at universal protection, a framing that Moscow and Beijing interpret as targeting their strategic deterrents.
This triggers a classic security dilemma with potentially catastrophic consequences. When one nuclear power develops the capacity to shield itself from retaliation, its adversaries must assume the worst: that such a shield could enable a disarming first strike. Russia has been transparent about this calculus. Putin has repeatedly framed Moscow’s development of hypersonic glide vehicles and nuclear-armed cruise missiles as a direct response to Washington’s withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. That treaty existed precisely because both superpowers recognized during the Cold War that unrestricted missile defense would spark an uncontrollable offensive arms race, each side building more weapons to guarantee penetration of the other’s shield.
The timing of Golden Dome’s advancement could hardly be worse. The expiration of New START on February 5, 2026 eliminated the last legally binding constraint on US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals—the first time in half a century that no such framework exists. With the ABM Treaty gone since 2002, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty abandoned in 2019, and now New START expired, the entire architecture of nuclear stability built painstakingly over decades has been dismantled. Into this vacuum, the pursuit of comprehensive missile defense injects precisely the kind of uncertainty that arms control was designed to prevent.
The Dangerous Illusion of Invulnerability
The fundamental flaw in the current American approach is the conflation of partial protection with strategic invulnerability. Missile defense systems provide genuine, life-saving value in specific contexts: protecting civilian populations from limited strikes, defending military installations during active operations, and shielding vulnerable nations like Ukraine from nightly Russian bombardment of critical infrastructure. No serious analyst disputes these benefits.
The danger emerges when policymakers extrapolate from tactical success to strategic immunity. The twelve-day war demonstrated that even sophisticated multilayered defenses operating at high interception rates produce significant casualties and unsustainable interceptor consumption. An Iranian regime fighting for survival will invest in quantity, maneuverable warheads, and saturation tactics specifically designed to exploit the mathematical limits of any defense system. Similarly, Russia and China possess the industrial capacity and technological sophistication to develop countermeasures that would render even a fully realized Golden Dome porous against a determined strategic attack.
The convergence of expanded missile defense ambitions with aggressive military posturing creates a combustible environment. When leaders believe their nations are shielded from consequences, the threshold for offensive action drops. When adversaries perceive those shields as preparation for attack, their incentives to strike preemptively or to race ahead in offensive capabilities intensify. The result is not the stability that missile defense advocates promise but an accelerating spiral in which each side’s defensive measures amplify the other’s threat perceptions, making the conflicts these systems were meant to prevent progressively more likely.
Original analysis inspired by Azriel Bermant from Foreign Policy. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
