Melanie W. Sisson
Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program, Brookings Institution
Melanie W. Sisson, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, is co-editor of Military Coercion and US Foreign Policy: The Use of Force Short of War (Routledge, 2020) and author of The United States, China, and the Competition for Control (Routledge, 2024).
Jul 18, 2025
US Vice President J.D. Vance recently tried to cast President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure as a wildly successful example of the “Trump Doctrine.” According to Vance, the doctrine is simple: you identify a problem that threatens US interests, which “you try to aggressively diplomatically solve.” If diplomacy fails, “you use overwhelming military power to solve it and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.”