Strategic Adversaries & Authoritarian States
PROPOSED / DRAFT: STRATEGIC ADVERSARIES & AUTHORITARIAN STATES
POSITION
The United States should deter aggression, protect Americans and allies, disrupt terrorism and proliferation, and preserve room for verified diplomacy. Restrictions should target governments, military and intelligence services, criminal networks, controlled entities, and proven conduct rather than ethnicity, nationality, religion, or lawful political belief.
RUSSIA
Maintain credible nuclear and conventional deterrence with NATO allies, with published burden-sharing and readiness measures that do not disclose operational secrets.
Treat state-directed cyberattacks on critical infrastructure as national-security incidents requiring attribution review, defensive action, allied coordination, and a proportionate response authorized by law.
Target sanctions at officials, military suppliers, intelligence networks, sanctions evasion, and assets connected to documented aggression or corruption. Each major sanction must have an objective, humanitarian safeguard, review date, and removal condition.
Investigate covert election activity, illegal foreign financing, espionage, and hacking under neutral laws while protecting lawful speech and journalism.
Pursue arms-control and risk-reduction agreements only with verifiable inspection, compliance reporting, and consequences for material breach.
IRAN
Use verifiable inspections, targeted sanctions, interdiction, and allied diplomacy to prevent nuclear-weapons development and proliferation.
Target terrorism financing, weapons transfers, proxy-command networks, attacks on United States personnel, and material support for qualifying violent operations.
Protect lawful commercial shipping through intelligence sharing, escort or defensive operations when authorized, mine countermeasures, and allied burden sharing.
Sanctions must protect legitimate food, medicine, and humanitarian transactions and must include review and removal conditions tied to the prohibited conduct.
A sustained major war requires constitutional authorization from Congress except for immediate lawful defense.
NORTH KOREA
Maintain deterrence and missile defense with South Korea, Japan, and other allies while preserving military communication intended to prevent miscalculation.
Enforce sanctions against nuclear and missile proliferation, illicit weapons transfers, state-directed cybercrime, money laundering, and evasion networks.
Humanitarian food and medical assistance may continue through monitored channels designed to reduce diversion to military or political elites.
Diplomatic agreements require defined steps, verification, reporting, and proportional relief only after measurable compliance.
Protect United States and allied forces through readiness, hardened infrastructure, resilient communications, and evacuation planning.
SPACE SECURITY
Military and designated critical civilian satellite systems must maintain redundancy, cyber protection, ground-system security, and plans for rapid repair or replacement.
The United States should pursue verifiable norms against debris-producing anti-satellite tests and should attribute and publicly report material hostile actions when security permits.
Commercial satellite operators performing critical national functions should receive clear incident-reporting, information-sharing, and security requirements tied to the service they provide.
Space policy must protect peaceful scientific and commercial use while maintaining lawful defensive capability and civilian oversight.
SANCTIONS, DIPLOMACY, AND WAR POWERS
Every major sanctions program must identify the prohibited conduct, targeted actors, expected objective, humanitarian safeguards, enforcement authority, review schedule, and conditions for modification or removal. Diplomacy remains available when it can produce verified results. The President retains authority for immediate lawful defense, but sustained major hostilities require Congress to exercise its constitutional role.
MEASUREMENT
Public reporting should track allied readiness, proliferation activity, cyber incidents, sanctions evasion, proxy attacks, shipping disruptions, humanitarian effects, diplomatic compliance, enforcement results, costs to Americans, and whether each policy achieved its stated objective.
Related policies: China, Taiwan & Indo-Pacific Strategy; Foreign Affairs; Military; Energy; Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Media & Automated Accounts; Data Centers & Digital Infrastructure.
Status: Proposed / Draft — not yet formally adopted.
Originally published: September 25, 2026.
Last updated: September 25, 2026.
Version: Draft 0.2.