I was watching The American President recently, the 1995 Rob Reiner classic that in many ways foreshadowed Aaron Sorkin’s later political masterpiece, The West Wing.¹ The two works share DNA: moral tension, executive burden, and the lonely weight of power. In fact, Martin Sheen, who would later become President Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing, appears in The American President as A.J. MacInerney, the President’s chief of staff and closest adviser.
There is a scene in the Situation Room that has stayed with me for years.¹
Libya has bombed an American-made short-range missile system outside Tel Aviv. The Joint Chiefs present retaliatory options to President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas. Shepherd turns to A.J. for perspective.¹
A.J. replies calmly, “Sir, it’s immediate, it’s decisive, it’s low-risk, and it’s a proportional response.”¹
Shepherd pauses and answers, “Someday someone’s going to have to explain to me the virtue of a proportional response.”¹
It is one of the most quietly subversive lines in modern political cinema.
In strategic doctrine, proportionality is a virtue. It is meant to constrain escalation, to ensure that retaliation does not exceed the original offense. It is embedded in just war theory and international law. It is the language of restraint.
But Shepherd’s question exposes something deeper. Proportional to what? To the number of casualties? To the scale of insult? To political optics? The word has the effect of turning tragedy into calculus.
The film does not let the moment rest there.¹
Later, in the Oval Office, after the strike is ordered, Shepherd reflects with his aide Leon Kodak:¹
“What I did tonight was not about political gain.”¹
Leon responds, “Yes sir. But it can be, sir. What you did tonight was very Presidential.”¹
Shepherd pushes back.
“Leon, somewhere in Libya right now, a janitor’s working the night shift at Libyan Intelligence headquarters. He’s going about doing his job because he has no idea that in about an hour he’s going to die in a massive explosion. He has no idea that about an hour ago I gave an order to have him killed. You’ve just seen me do the least Presidential thing I do.”¹
That line collapses abstraction into humanity.
National security is discussed in terms of deterrence, escalation ladders, proportional response. But it is executed in human lives. The janitor is not part of the calculus. He is the cost.
This tension between procedural legitimacy and moral gravity is not fictional. It exists in every administration, in every era. And it is becoming newly urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
In a recent piece, When Ethics Competes with National Security: Who Blinks First in the AI Arms Race?, I argued for what I called a Defense-First AI Doctrine. The premise was simple: the most patriotic use of AI in national security is infrastructure protection, not battlefield automation. Cybersecurity, grid resilience, biosecurity, and defensive perimeter protection align with the constitutional mandate of the Department of Defense. Autonomous lethal systems and battlefield escalation tools risk abstracting away the human cost.
The danger of AI in offensive contexts is not only its speed or scale. It is its capacity to optimize proportionality without pausing for moral reckoning.
An algorithm can calculate escalation risk. It can model casualty thresholds. It can simulate strategic balance. But it cannot feel the weight of the janitor.
President Shepherd’s discomfort was not weakness. It was conscience operating within power. It was an acknowledgment that legality and proportionality do not erase tragedy.
If we allow autonomous systems to absorb more of the decision chain in matters of lethal force, we risk removing the Shepherd moment entirely. No pause. No question. No recognition of the least presidential thing one can do.
The virtue of proportional response lies not in its arithmetic, but in the human responsibility that accompanies it.
That responsibility must never be automated away.
Notes
- Rob Reiner, The American President (1995; Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1995), film.
Sources
Reiner, Rob, dir. The American President. 1995. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 1995. Film.
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