David Pyne: “Most US leaders are neo-imperialists”
David Pyne. D.R.
Mohsen Abdelmoumen: How exactly do you define your concept of Assured National Survival?
David Pyne: President Trump’s National Security Strategy published in December 2025 and its National Defense Strategy published in January implement many if not most of the recommendations of my Assured National Survival national security strategy in terms of prioritizes the defense of the US itself, the Western Hemisphere and to a lesser extent the Western Pacific and relegating Europe and the Middle East to secondary if not tertiary priorities. That strategy called on the US handing over to Europe primary responsibility for the conventional military defense of Europe against potential Russian aggression and responsibility to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran to Israel with the withdrawal of tens of thousands of US troops from Europe and the Middle East. The Trump administration has prioritized the negotiation of a peace agreement with Russia ending our proxy war against it in Ukraine hand has reportedly been considering giving up the supreme command of NATO as well as pulling the US out of NATO’s military command structure while removing most US ground troops and many air assets from Europe all of which I believe are important steps to ensure peace with Russia. The purpose would be to transform NATO from a US-led military alliance into a European-led alliance to incentivize our EU partners to restore peaceful relations with Russia.
My concept of Assured National Survival postulates that the best way to ensure our national survival is to stop trying to exert overlapping spheres of influence conflicting with Russia’s and China’s to withdraw the vast majority of US military forces from Russia’s and China’s border regions including all US troops from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South Korea. I have been arguing since at least 2003 that it is the US decision to confront Russia and China militarily by surrounding them with US military bases and even fight proxy wars against them that threatens to provoke them to conduct catastrophic attacks against the US homeland with cyber, super Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and even nuclear weapons which could destroy most or even all US critical infrastructure needed to sustain the lives of nearly 290 million American citizens. The US would close half of its overseas military bases in Europe and the Middle East, Africa and even some in the Western Pacific within the Second Island Chain and redeploy over 150,000 troops back to the US.
Under my strategy all US military alliances would become conditional meaning that the US would make clear that it would only come to the defense of an ally attacked by a foreign power if the President and the Congress deemed it to be in the US national security interest to do so and the potential benefits do not outweigh potential catastrophic risks to us by doing so. The US would seek to conclude a mutual security agreement with the Russian Federation, form a geopolitical partnership with Moscow and form a new triple entente with Russia and India to neutralize the Sino-Russian military alliance, persuade them to leave BRICS and join a US-led trade pact and counter China’s attempts to become the new global hegemon.
The US would refrain from bombing, invading, occupying and attempting to overthrow the regimes of other countries and only fight wars if it was directly attacked and would never fight wars of unprovoked aggression as we have done against, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Iran. The US would transform from being a global superpower, as it became after World War Two, to a hemispheric superpower as it was before that terrible war. Under my strategy, we would no longer focus our military spending on conventional power projection such as increasing the size of our US navy surface fleet and increasing our expeditionary capabilities to transport tens of thousands of troops abroad. Instead, the US would focus on strategic defense by building up the size of our strategic nuclear arsenal to match China’s, build a comprehensive, multi-layered national missile defense system capable of shooting down hundreds, if not thousands, of incoming nuclear re-entry vehicles and harden the US electrical grid against super-EMP and cyberattack. We would also prioritize rebuilding our Defense Industrial Base to the maximum possible level to increase our ability to fight and win wars if attacked.
Why do you think a conflict with Iran would deplete U.S. missile reserves in just a few days?
The US war on Iran has depleted approximately 45 percent of our conventional offensive missile arsenal and missile defense interceptors during 38 days of high intensity combat. At that rate, it is very possible that the US would run out of missiles were the war to resume within six to seven weeks. By contrast, Iran retains 70 percent of its prewar stockpile including 5,600 ballistic missiles of all types, thousands of cruise missiles and likely tens of thousands of heavy combat drones. Thus, in any missile and drone war of attrition, Iran is likely to be capable of outlasting the US and Israel and win. It now appears that Trump has declared peace talks with Iran are dead and that he is prepared to restart a full-scale war, but the US military would likely decrease the tempo of our attacks substantially from the level of attacks during the first 38 days of the war to prevent the US missile arsenal too rapidly.
You are an American expert on military strategy and a former U.S. Army officer. In your opinion, why has the United States been unable to achieve a military victory against Iran?
As I predicted before the war, a US war against Iran was always going to be unwinnable. In 2002, one of the most massive US military exercises in history came to the same conclusion. The reason that it is unwinnable is that we have no capability to achieve regime change in Iran without a massive US ground invasion because there is effectively no armed opposition to Iran’s Islamist regime. The US does not have the ground forces needed to stage a full-scale invasion of Iran and ensure success. In addition, Iran likely has nuclear MRBMs and IRBMs in its hardened underground missile silos which cannot be destroyed by conventional air and missile strikes alone but can only be destroyed with US nuclear first strike and I believe that President Trump has no intention of escalating to the nuclear level against Iran despite his three threats to do so. Finally, the US Navy, which is the mightiest conventional naval force on Earth, has repeatedly demonstrated it has no ability to overturn Iran’s control of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.
Does Iran really have nuclear warheads?
While there is no way to be sure that Iran has nuclear warheads. I assess that there is a ninety percent probability that Iran has nuclear warheads. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned back in 1995 that Iran was just a few months away from building nuclear weapons. In 2016, Dr. Peter Pry, former CIA Director James Woolsey warned that Iran likely already had nuclear weapons because they demonstrated they were just a few months away from having nuclear weapons in 2003 based on what we knew about their nuclear weapons research and development program. There were reports that Iran may have acquired three to four Soviet nuclear weapons from Kazakhstan in 1992 and they have likely succeeded in reverse engineering them in the decades since. The CIA issued a report in 2004 estimating that Iran would have operational nuclear weapons by 2010. In 2023, Russia reportedly shared nuclear warhead miniaturization technology which enabled Iran to mount nuclear warheads on its ballistic missiles and its Noor 2 and Noor 3 super EMP satellites which were launched later that same year. I have speculated that Iran likely tested one of its nuclear weapons in North Korea’s underground nuclear test center nearly a decade ago. In 2025., Iran reported that Iran conducted precursor nuclear tests of the type they would conduct just prior to an actual nuclear test detonation. However, Russia has reportedly shared with Iran the technology needed to operationalize nuclear weapons without the need to conduct actual nuclear test detonations.
So essentially, there are three possibilities. The first possibility is that Iran made the decision not to build a nuclear arsenal because they are a peace-loving nation even though they have had the capability to build nuclear weapons for up to 23 years. The second possibility is that at some point during the past couple of decades they have built a small nuclear arsenal with perhaps 15-60 warheads which I assess is the most likely. The third possibility is that they did not have nuclear weapons before the war, but the US-Israeli war of aggression caused them to accelerate their nuclear weapons production program to build a dozen or so nuclear weapons in their deep underground production facilities since the war began. Reports indicate that US and Israeli strikes have left Iran’s nuclear program virtually untouched and US intelligence estimates our attacks on Iran have not succeeded in degrading Iran’s Highly Enriched Uranium stockpile by even one pound.
Former CIA officer Larry Johnson stated early last week that Iran warned that it would leave the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and test a nuclear weapon if the US were to escalate its military strikes on Iran or if Israel were to continue to violate its cease-fire against Lebanon. That story has since been corroborated by other sources. Netanyahu himself announced that Israel’s strikes on Iran earlier this week were conducted to pre-empt what he suggested was a near-imminent Iranian nuclear strike on Israel essentially admitting that Iran does in fact possess operational nuclear weapons.
Is it really conceivable that the United States and NATO are vulnerable to an EMP attack?
Yes, the US and NATO currently have no defense against a comprehensive or regional super EMP attack. While Russia, China, North Korea and Israel have hardened their critical infrastructure against super EMP attack, the US and its NATO allies have not. As a result, most, if not all, of the critical infrastructure in the United States and NATO could be destroyed by just two super-EMP warheads detonating hundreds of kilometers above the United States and Europe. Such a super EMP satellite would cause NATO governments to collapse and their nations to break apart and hundreds of millions to starve to death overtime ending Western civilization in a single day. This would be shocking for most people to realize because Russia has fought its war in Ukraine with one hand tied behind the back of the Russian military but it would fight NATO in a far more devastating and decisive fashion employing a massive comprehensive cyber and counterspace attack within the first twenty four hours of major combat operations to defeat us in the first few days of the war.
You warned that a conflict with Iran could escalate into a global nuclear escalation. Why?
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not an internationally isolated regime. It is a country surrounded by friends and Shanghai Cooperation Organization Treaty allies including Russia, Pakistan, Central Asian republics and the People’s Republic of China. The only way the US and Israel could win their war against Iran is with a nuclear first strike. Iran has signed mutual defense pacts with both Russia and China while North Korea has pledged to nuke Israel if Israel conducts nuclear strikes on Iran and Russia and China have suggested they might do so as well. It’s also possible that Iran could launch a nuclear first strike against Israel which would likely elicit a US nuclear response against Iran which in turn could elicit Russian, Chinese and North Korean nuclear first strikes against the US homeland.
As I have noted, the US war against Iran has served to deplete the US military’s conventional missile arsenal to critically low levels. Were we to deplete ninety percent or more of our missile stockpile, the US would have no way to effectively deter a Chinese blockade and/or invasion of Taiwan. Furthermore, the US continues to fight a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and Russia could opt to escalate its war against Ukraine by re-invading Kyiv and conquering half or even all of Ukraine with Russian forces advancing to the Polish and Romanian border. The purpose of these Russian and Chinese military moves would be both to take advantage of the US being bogged down in an unwinnable war against Iran but also to aid their Iranian ally by trying to divert US military resources away from the Middle East to Europe and the Western Pacific.
In a multipolar world, how can you define the precise boundaries of the United States’ sphere of influence without giving the impression of an isolationist retreat or weakness in the face of the alliance between China and Russia?
The US sphere of influence should include the Western Hemisphere, NATO member states and the Pacific Ocean to the Second Island Chain. The US would not retain any military bases outside those regions other than Diego Garcia. The US could also retain its nuclear umbrella over its four Pacific allies of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia. However, as I mentioned the US should make all of its security guarantees conditional upon whether the US going to war to defend its allies is adjudged to be in the US national security interest in order to encourage our allies to do more to provide their own self-defense but also to improve relations with our adversaries to help prevent the outbreak of war. The US should concede Taiwan to China’s sphere of influence in exchange for China agreeing to an EU-style confederation agreement with Taiwan which would ensure its continued self-rule and control of its armed forces without the need for Chinese military action. A large-scale strategic withdrawal of US military forces from our military bases abroad would of course be criticized by neo-imperialists in both major US political parties as “isolationists” even though there would be no evidence to indicate that would be the case. However, the most important focus of our strategy should be to pursue a national security strategy that prioritizes homeland and strategic defense to maximize the chances that the US homeland is never catastrophically attacked by nuclear-armed adversaries.
You state that US defense infrastructure and power grid are key targets for cyber-attacks and next-generation electromagnetic pulse weapons. What is the most vulnerable element of this security chain that the Pentagon still refuses to protect for political reasons?
The Pentagon has hardened our nuclear command, control and communications system against EMP including Air Force one, TACAMO aircraft, strategic bombers and nuclear missiles as well as our nuclear ballistic missile submarines. However, most of our military bases remain extremely reliant on the civilian electrical power grid so I think that is one of the biggest vulnerabilities that must be addressed. There is no political reason that prevents the US government from hardening our critical infrastructure from cyber and super-EMP attack other than the fact that it would cost tens of billions of dollars to do so. However, we have likely spent that much already on grid resilience against lesser threats.
You mentioned that Benjamin Netanyahu continues to keep the US administration in a « continuous war trap » in the Middle East. According to your estimates, how far would the Israeli government be able to go to force the United States to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure?
The US does not have the capability to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear production facilities through conventional bombing strikes alone. Despite his repeated threats to destroy Iran with a US nuclear first strike, I do not believe that President Trump is willing to employ nuclear weapons against Iran as that would invite nuclear blowback including the use of Russian, Chinese and North Korean nuclear weapons against our allies and potentially the US itself.
You claim that cutting military aid to Israel is the only effective lever for changing its strategy. What explanation do you give for Israel’s influence on the United States?
There is a mistaken belief in Evangelical Christian churches here in the US that Israel can do no wrong and that all its strikes on its neighbors are justified as a matter of self-defense or to ensure its national existence. After the Jewish Holocaust, there was also an understandable desire to ensure the establishment of a Jewish homeland state to help ensure that the Nazi genocide against the Jews was never repeated. Jewish financiers have historically also been very wealthy so I think there came to be an assumption in US leadership circles that supporting Israel, which is not just the Jewish but also the Christian holy land, was in the US interest under the belief that Israel was the only real democracy in the region and surrounded by Muslim states with which the US has traditionally had less empathy and less close diplomatic ties.
The US media and government entities are largely controlled by Israeli First interests. As a matter of US government policy, we do not spy on Israel even though the DIA has upgraded their threat level to “critical.” The extent of Israeli influence on the US government, media and to a lesser extent our educational institutions is unprecedented in our history. Unfortunately, all of this means that the US leaders fail to show empathy for the victims of Israel’s unprovoked wars of aggression. Most importantly, Netanyahu likely is blackmailing President Trump over his sexual misconduct related to the Epstein Files which he went all out to try and cover up to keep him fighting Israel’s imperial wars in the Middle East in perpetuity.
Two decades after the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, influenced by the neo-conservative ideology of promoting democracy by force, the failure is clearly evident. « Why do you think the foreign-policy system in Washington, commonly known as the Blob, seems so unfazed by this doctrine, despite its repeated empirical failures?
As I discussed previously, most US leaders are neo-imperialists who view America’s liberal empire and its expansion throughout various regions of the world to be a worthwhile endeavor even if it leads to regime-change wars that go on for years both in Iraq, Ukraine and now Iran. There is no evidence that US regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have made life better for the people of those countries but they still view them more as victories than defeats. They fail to understand that their strategy of liberal hegemony actually serves to weaken the US economically and militarily while making the US homeland much less safe and secure as it threatens to provoke our nuclear armed enemies like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran to engage in catastrophic cyber, super EMP and even nuclear attacks attack us.
According to your point of view, which favors a form of Realpolitik and a limited safeguard of essential interests (Strategic Restraint), what would be the turning point when the American right has abandoned its tradition of measured commitment to adhere to the intervention strategy of the neo-conservatives?
My proposed strategy of strategic restraint would be a mixture of containment and détente for the PRC, a policy of neutrality where we would never again take sides in the Israeli-Iran conflict including the Gaza and Lebanon wars and a détente, if not an entente, strategy for the Russian Federation. Former President Richard Nixon once said the US objective should be to have better relations with Russia than it has with the PRC and better relations with the PRC has with Russia which I think was a wise strategy. He also said that it would be wise for the US to seek accommodations with Russia and China which serve to recognize their vital interests in exchange for them recognizing our own.
That said, I think Nixon’s successors took it too far in granting Most Favored Nation trade status and WTO membership for China and providing them with $165 billion in trade subsidies a year to build them up into the best nuclear superpower enemy trillions in US dollars could buy. Russian leaders are wise enough to realize that Russian security is best achieved by maintaining good relations with all its potential adversaries including the United States. The same is true for the US because good relations with Russia and China serve to greatly decrease the chances of the outbreak of an unnecessary nuclear war with them. Sadly, President Trump and his neocon Cabinet members and members of Congress fail to recognize this basic tenet of foreign policy.
Mr. Pyne, you advocate for a pragmatic view of spheres of influence in order to prevent a global confrontation. However, the current U.S. approach is prompting many countries in the Global South to turn to the BRICS. Doesn’t the Global South demonstrate that the doctrine of Western spheres of influence is obsolete, and how can the United States maintain its influence without alienating these neutral countries?
Yes, the US neo-imperialist strategy of liberal hegemony and fighting endless wars in the Middle East, and elsewhere throughout the world such as Ukraine has been extremely counterproductive in driving our adversaries to ally closer together while driving the nations of the Global South into closer alignment with the Sino-Russian alliance including BRICS. That said, I think the concept of spheres of influence has great promise in ensuring the future peace. The Yalta Agreement which was grossly immoral in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill consigned over 100 million Europeans in eleven countries to be enslaved under Soviet Communism helped keep the nuclear superpower peace for nearly half a century because neither side ever attempted to interfere in each other’s sphere of influence with the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Since 2019, I have been calling for the creation of a tripolar sphere of influence agreement between the three nuclear superpowers of the US, Russia and China to prevent future conflicts in Europe and the Western Pacific. The US should seek to improve its relations with neutral countries and increase trade with them but primarily by ending its policy of engaging in endless imperial wars of aggression and returning to its pre-World War Two policy of championing peace abroad so that we may regain the moral high ground as the leader of the free world.
Interview conducted by Mohsen Abdelmoumen
David T. Pyne is a former U.S. Army combat arms and H.Q. staff officer with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, as Chairman of the Utah Republican Veterans Caucus and as a West Valley Police Honorary Colonel. David previously served as the President of the Task Force and as Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. He previously served as National Security Policy Director for U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), as the founder of Sen. Lee’s Military Advisory Committee, as a Vice President for the Association of the United States Army’s Utah chapter and as 2nd Vice President of the Salt Lake Total Force Chapter of the Military Officers Association of America. He also served as Chairman/Vice Chairman of the Utah State Legislative Compensation Commission from 2009-2017.
Published in French in La Nouvelle République