President Donald Trump told reporters at this week’s NATO summit in Ankara that he is “number one on the kill list” for Iran. While Trump was in Turkey, a member of Iran’s parliament publicly proposed missile strikes on his location there. Earlier this year, Iranian state media broadcast the photograph from Butler, Pennsylvania, with a warning that the next shot will not miss, and regime officials have spent months vowing revenge for the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
None of this should be dismissed as regime theater. It should force Washington to confront a question it has never clearly answered: How should the United States treat a foreign state’s attempt to kill the president?
The answer cannot be limited to criminal justice language, crippling sanctions, or another promise of conventional retaliation. A foreign plot to assassinate the president would not simply be an attack on one person — it would be a strategic attack on the U.S.
The president is the commander in chief. He is also the only official authorized to direct U.S. nuclear employment. A successful foreign assassination would strike at the credibility of American deterrence, the confidence of U.S. allies, and the basic assumption that adversaries cannot decapitate American leadership without facing consequences beyond ordinary war.
Public U.S. nuclear policy does not reserve nuclear deterrence only for nuclear attacks. The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review states that the U.S. “continues to rely on nuclear weapons to deter all forms of strategic attack,” including high-consequence attacks of a strategic nature using non-nuclear means.
An attempt by a foreign power to kill the president belongs in that category. It is an attack on the president’s role in the National Command Authority, not merely on the man who holds the office.
This does not mean threatening indiscriminate nuclear war or targeting civilians, nor does it mean confusing the Iranian people with the regime that rules them. Any response would remain bound by the law of armed conflict, distinguishing military, intelligence, command, and regime targets from civilian life.
But it does mean Washington should stop pretending this scenario falls outside America’s strategic deterrence framework.
Critics will point to the U.S. pledge not to use or threaten nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that belong to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and comply with their nonproliferation obligations. Iran would have a weak claim to that assurance. The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly raised concerns about Iran’s safeguards compliance, restricted monitoring access, and unresolved questions surrounding its enriched uranium stockpile. A regime that evades nuclear transparency while its officials call for the assassination of an American president cannot expect Washington to treat it like a state that follows the rules.
A conventional response is not the clean answer many assume. Iran is not a terrorist cell that can be eliminated in a single raid. It is a large state with hardened military facilities, missile forces, intelligence networks, proxy relationships, and a political system designed to survive pressure. Months of conflict have already shown that Iran can absorb punishment and continue operating.
After Iraq and Afghanistan, the American public has little appetite for another open-ended Middle East war. A promise to “degrade” Iranian capabilities over months or years may not restore deterrence after an attempted decapitation of the American presidency. It may look like the same familiar path: escalating deployments, rising costs, and no clear moment when the adversary’s military and political power has actually been broken.
The U.S. would need to reestablish the rule that no foreign power can target the American commander in chief and continue as a functioning strategic actor.
For some adversaries, overwhelming conventional force may be enough to send that message. For Iran, the answer is less obvious.
Nuclear weapons are not merely bigger bombs. They are political weapons, deterrent weapons, and strategic weapons. If killing or attempting to kill the president of the U.S. does not at least raise the possibility of nuclear consequences, adversaries will notice. So will allies.
NATO allies, Israel, Indo-Pacific partners, and Gulf states would watch the U.S. response for one question: Can the U.S. still impose a consequence that changes the adversary’s calculation? If the answer appears to be a slow conventional campaign with uncertain results, the damage will not stop in Tehran. It will spread through every capital that depends on American deterrence.
None of this makes nuclear use automatic. It should not be. Any president facing that decision would have to weigh attribution, escalation risks, allied support, and the consequences of breaking the nuclear threshold against a non-nuclear state.
But automatic restraint would be a mistake, too.
The right message is not that America seeks nuclear war. It is that an attack on the president by a foreign power would be treated as an attack on the strategic command authority of the U.S. No category of response should be publicly removed from the table in advance, because no foreign regime can be allowed to treat presidential assassination as a usable instrument of statecraft.
That strategic ambiguity is not recklessness. It is deterrence.
KHAMENEI IS DEAD. HIS KILL LIST IS ALIVE — AND TRUMP IS STILL AT THE TOP
The best way to avoid the unthinkable is to make the cost clear before the line is crossed. Iran’s leaders, commanders, clerics, and proxies should understand that a state-enabled attempt to kill the president of the U.S. would not produce another cycle of limited retaliation. It would put the survival of the regime’s military and political power at risk.
Washington does not need to promise nuclear retaliation. But it should be clear-eyed enough to say that if a foreign power targets the president, the U.S. will treat it for what it is: a strategic attack on the nation itself.
Colton Overcash is the founder and managing principal of Vertex Strategies, a government relations, public affairs, and strategic advisory firm based in Charlotte with a presence in Washington, D.C. He previously served in a presidential appointment at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration, worked in a sensitive role at the Pentagon, and is a former staffer in the U.S. Congress.