The Whiplash Doctrine: America’s Signals in a Hot World

By Calder M. Serba

There’s a particular kind of quiet that exists just inside a perimeter fence.

Not peace. Not safety. Something thinner than that, an administrative stillness. A place where the world is close enough to touch, but policy has already decided what you’re allowed to see, what you’re allowed to do, and what you’re supposed to ignore.

Heat shimmers off gravel. Jet fuel and burned trash braid together in your lungs. A drone’s propeller chews the air on takeoff, and somewhere beyond your horizon a camera will find a human being and reduce them to a decision.

I learned the fence-line lesson in the post-9/11 wars. I learned it again later, watching how a country can be both hyper-active and strangely absent, depending on what day it is, who’s watching, and what the memo says the mission is not. As I’ve written before, the public story of American power is usually cleaner than the private mechanics of it: a nation that speaks in ideals while operating under constraints.

That gap isn’t new. What’s new is the speed. The oscillation. The way the signal snaps back and forth hard enough to make your inner ear feel untrustworthy.

Because the world reads us the way insurgents used to read a patrol—not for our speeches, but for our patterns.

And lately our pattern has felt like whiplash.

On the morning Russia crossed into Ukraine, February 24, 2022, there were people in Kyiv who didn’t need a think-tank paper to understand deterrence. They understood it as a sound. The distant thump that doesn’t match construction. The siren that doesn’t match a drill. The phone vibrating with messages from relatives who suddenly wrote like they believed in God again.

Picture a Ukrainian air-defense crew in those first hours. Not a poster. Just tired people with cold coffee and stiff fingers, staring at a screen while the map fills with tracks. They do what soldiers do when history shows up unannounced: inventory their tools, translate fear into procedure, wait for the first real test.

If you want to understand the last few years, don’t start with speeches. Start with sirens.

“Full-scale invasion” is a clean phrase. In reality it means years of industrial violence, and winter turning infrastructure into a weapon. It means the same families learning the same shelters, the same stairwells, the same basement corners. It means a country building a second calendar for air-raid alerts and power cuts.

Then October 7, 2023 arrived and shoved the Middle East into the same brutal time zone.

Hamas attacked Israel. Israel declared war in response. The footage and the reporting turned “regional conflict” into a global moral argument in real time, with every capital forced to pick words carefully while the images stayed impossible.

War compresses distance. A city council meeting in the American interior can feel like a tribunal. A university quad becomes an embassy. A family dinner turns into a referendum on what “ally” even means now.

It isn’t that Americans rediscovered foreign policy—it’s that foreign policy rediscovered Americans.

And while those wars burned, America’s political engine kept lurching: through the pandemic years, through the post-2020 ugliness, through the return of Donald Trump in 2024, a reversal that forced every ally and adversary to recalculate.

Inside the United States, we treat this as domestic drama. Outside the United States, it’s strategic weather.

Allies don’t only ask, What does America want? They ask, Will it still want it in six months?

That question doesn’t come from cynicism. It comes from pattern recognition.

When the White House released its National Security Strategy in December 2025, the document read like a window into that pattern.

You can picture the scene if you’ve ever watched bureaucracy try to sound like history. A staffer late at night, scanning a PDF, deciding which phrases will be repeated on Sunday shows and which will die on the page. The language is polished. The verbs are cautious. The nouns are chosen.

Then one line lands with strange weight: Europe, it warns, faces “civilizational erasure.”

It’s the kind of phrase that sounds profound until you set it beside the largest land war in Europe since World War II. Analysts noted the Strategy’s emphasis on “strategic stability with Russia,” while leaning into cultural framing for Europe’s danger.

Maybe there’s a sliver of truth in that. Societies can rot from within. Nations do die in comfortable chairs.

But language is never just language. It is permission. It is an invitation. It signals what you’re willing to name and what you’re trying to normalize.

Moscow read it as an invitation—according to Reuters, the Kremlin welcomed the Strategy, saying it largely aligned with Russia’s worldview.

That isn’t proof of compromise. It’s proof of alignment in tone at a moment when Russia’s war is still alive and lethal.

Around the same time, Reuters reported the administration had slowed or halted some coordinated efforts to counter Russian sabotage and disinformation.

Put those together and the question becomes unavoidable, even if you ask it carefully:

Why does the administration continue to appear, at best, strategically permissive toward a Russia that has spent decades proving it will redraw borders, weaponize energy, and treat truth as disposable?

Is there a limit, or a clear disadvantage, to a president willing to talk to anyone, anytime, placing himself in the most direct channel possible? A hostile intelligence ecosystem doesn’t need your compliance to influence you. It only needs your access.

Russia does not simply “talk.” Russia shapes. Russia scripts. Russia tests what language works in Western mouths, then feeds it back amplified.

And if a leader genuinely believes he is the ultimate dealmaker, if he treats geopolitics as transaction, does hubris become a national vulnerability? Does the belief that a deal is a substitute for leverage weaken the strategic ambiguity we like to claim we still possess?

Strategic ambiguity only works when it’s anchored by consistency—when policy oscillates, ambiguity becomes noise. Noise invites risk.

In the United States, we like to separate foreign policy into neat rooms: war, trade, law enforcement, diplomacy. We pretend they live down different hallways.

The whiplash is what happens when those rooms share the same door and it keeps slamming.

On January 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order initiating the process to designate certain cartels and other organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. By February, the State Department announced designations: eight groups, including major Mexican cartels.

“Terrorist” is not a vibe. It’s a legal architecture. It changes sanctions, banking behavior, prosecution risk, and the way companies operate along entire supply chains. As Reuters reported, lawyers and analysts warned the label could raise prosecution risks for businesses. Mexico bristled. President Claudia Sheinbaum emphasized sovereignty and opposed unilateral action.

Then the kinetic phase arrived, not primarily on land, but at sea.

Public reporting painted the outline: a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean, a strike, survivors on wreckage, and allegations that a second strike killed them.

Reuters reported that video and accounts described those moments after the first strike. In later comments, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon had no plans to release the full, unedited video to the public.

The Washington Post reported detailed scrutiny of decision-making around the second strike and the legal and moral questions it raised. Reuters also tracked broader legal debate, including how rules apply to people who may be considered shipwrecked.

You can write this as policy. You can write it as law. But it lands as a scene.

An operations center in blue glow. A feed on a screen. A chain of people deciding what two figures in the water “are,” and what law applies when the enemy is fentanyl and the battlefield is open ocean. Then a second launch, and the room goes quiet in that particular way that says the decision is now history.

And then, almost in the same breath, the administration pardoned a former president convicted in U.S. court of conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States.

In December 2025, Reuters reported Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, freeing him from a 45-year sentence. A Congressional Research Service brief noted Trump announced the intent November 28, formally granted the pardon December 1, and Hernández was released the same day.

So the signals sit side by side:

Cartels labeled terrorists.
Boats struck, video withheld.
A convicted narco-linked former head of state pardoned.

That isn’t just contradiction. It’s static.

If you’re a partner government trying to cooperate with the United States, what do you believe? If you’re a cartel accountant, what do you predict? If you’re an adversary looking for seams, what do you exploit?

A state that can’t articulate consistent thresholds teaches everyone watching how to game the gaps.

Venezuela made the whiplash feel less theoretical.

In early January 2026, Reuters reported a U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In subsequent reporting, Reuters described elements of the operation and surrounding strikes through sources and internal accounts.

Two days later, Reuters reported Maduro appeared in U.S. court and pleaded not guilty, saying he was “kidnapped.”

It is hard to keep categories intact when a head of state is in handcuffs. This is not merely law enforcement and not merely war. It is coercive statecraft executed with military force, with legal language following behind it like a tow line.

Reuters reported the administration canceled a planned second wave of attacks after Venezuela “cooperated.” The details of what cooperation means are exactly the kind of thing that becomes clear later, when the headlines have moved on and the obligations remain.

That same week, the U.S. Senate advanced a War Powers resolution aimed at limiting further military action in Venezuela without congressional authorization, Reuters reported.

This is where policy becomes a trap.

If you say you are not in the business of regime change, but you remove a head of state and shape the succession environment, what do you call it?

If you say it’s about counter-narcotics, why does it immediately generate tail-risk and congressional restraint?

Reuters reported that in the wake of the capture, Trump said the U.S. would “run Venezuela” until a transition, language that turns a raid into an open-ended custodianship.

Then you’re back inside the oldest American problem: drift. “We’re not going to run the country,” followed by practical statements that assume long-term control of security and political outcomes because someone has to hold the bag.

It’s possible this ends cleaner than skeptics expect. It’s possible it becomes the familiar American middle state: neither occupation nor exit, neither ally nor enemy, just responsibility.

The Whiplash Doctrine doesn’t require bad intent—it only requires events moving faster than purpose, and force becoming the one tool that still feels certain.

The hemisphere blurred into focus next—not through an adversary, but through an ally.

Greenland, almost immediately afterward, sharpened the pattern because it aimed at an ally.

On January 9, 2026, Reuters reported Trump said the United States needs to “own” Greenland to deter Russia and China, raising the prospect of intervention and discussing options that included military involvement and financial incentives. Denmark and European leaders pushed back publicly, emphasizing Greenland’s future is for Greenland and Denmark to decide.

The Guardian reported the rhetoric included “whether they like it or not,” and Greenlandic leaders responded with firm rejection.

It’s tempting to treat this as posture. Leverage. Domestic performance with foreign props.

But alliance language is fragile. You don’t get to threaten “ownership” of allied territory and still expect allies to treat you as a foundation instead of a variable. Even if nothing happens, the threat itself corrodes trust. It teaches smaller states that the United States might behave like the very revisionists it claims to deter.

Then there’s governance, because foreign policy isn’t only what we do abroad. It’s what we do to ourselves.

The administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, was framed as a domestic revolution in how Washington functions. Reuters reported that by late 2025, DOGE had been disbanded early, with an Office of Personnel Management official saying it “doesn’t exist” and that responsibilities were absorbed by OPM.

Whatever you think of DOGE, the arc matters. A high-profile instrument, a burst of disruptive action, a quiet dissolution.

Allies hear volatility. Adversaries hear opportunity. Markets hear short-term leverage over long-term stability. A state that reorganizes itself constantly becomes less legible to everyone watching, and in deterrence legibility is power.

China and chips belong to the same family of signals: policy revised in public, difficult to read from the outside, easy for rivals to adapt to.

In January 2025, the U.S. unveiled a framework designed to restrict access to advanced AI chips and related technologies. In April 2025, Reuters reported the Trump administration was considering changes to that structure. Later, the administration moved to allow exports of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China under a licensing arrangement that included a fee, Reuters reported.

From inside Washington, this can be framed as calibration, negotiation, deal-making.

From the outside, it can read as oscillation: chips, then no chips, then chips again. The logic shifts, the message blurs, and the audience adjusts.

Deterrence isn’t just capability. It’s coherence. If you want a rival to hesitate, your thresholds have to be legible enough to fear. If your thresholds keep changing, your rival stops fearing the threshold and starts studying the room.

The National Security Strategy revived a Monroe Doctrine framing for the hemisphere, explicitly warning about “extra-hemispheric powers” in our backyard and emphasizing Western Hemisphere primacy. That posture makes geographic sense in some ways: proximity, ports, logistics, influence where the map favors you.

But it forces the question that can’t be dodged with slogans: Can we squeeze China through hemispheric military and economic posture alone while the first island chain tightens around Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines? Or do we risk ceding initiative in the Western Pacific by treating the Pacific as negotiable while we flex hardest where geography makes flexing easiest?

You don’t get to compensate for ambiguity in the Pacific with ferocity in the Caribbean—the world doesn’t grade you by effort. It grades you by outcomes it can measure.

The Whiplash Doctrine is not one decision. It’s a rhythm.

Cartels are terrorists, then a convicted narco-linked former head of state is pardoned.
Boats are struck, then the video is withheld.
“End foreign wars,” then a head of state is captured and the U.S. says it will “run” a country.
Allies are asked to align, then “ownership” language is aimed at allied territory.
Russia is waging a major war, then the Strategy emphasizes “strategic stability,” and the Kremlin praises it.

Individually, each act can be rationalized. Collectively, they form a portrait of a state acting with power but not always with discipline. It swings hard, sometimes connects, sometimes hits air, and often broadcasts the swing as the point.

That is why allies hedge. It’s why adversaries probe. It’s why smaller states look for alternatives. It’s why credibility, the quiet cumulative asset that makes deterrence work without firing a shot, starts to feel like something we spend without noticing.

If you’ve ever stood behind a weapon on watch, you know what it feels like when someone spends credibility. You inherit the consequences at the edge first.

As I’ve written before, the last twenty years taught lessons purchased in blood and moral injury. Not all of those lessons deserve preservation. We should discard the reflex to occupy, to remake societies at gunpoint, to confuse activity with strategy, to treat endless deployments as virtue.

But some things are worth preserving because they’re the only reasons power doesn’t rot from the inside.

The instinct to treat human suffering as strategically relevant, not a public-affairs inconvenience.

The discipline to name adversaries plainly when they act like adversaries, without sliding into fatalism or hysteria.

The humility to recognize that alliances are combat multipliers, not subscription services.

The recognition that deals with revisionist states require verification, leverage, and time, not vibes.

The understanding that consistency is not rigidity. It’s credibility.

If we lose those, we may still have the world’s most capable military. We may still execute raids and strikes and sanctions with stunning efficiency.

But we will have a harder time answering the question that matters more than any press briefing:

When the world watches our wake, when it measures the turbulence we leave behind, what story does it learn about America?

Because a nation’s strategic bearing isn’t declared. It’s demonstrated, day after day, in choices that either hold a course or whip it back and forth until everyone on deck stops trusting the compass.

And when the compass stops being trusted, drift stops being a metaphor. It becomes a destination.

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Calder M. Serba is a U.S. Army infantryman and combat veteran whose writing explores the human and strategic costs of modern conflict. His work blends on-the-ground observation with analysis of deterrence, alliances, and the downstream effects of national decisions.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.