After the U.S. presidential campaign concludes, either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will need to confront hard truths and tough choices to address an international geopolitical landscape marked by competitors, rivals, and enemies who, sensing a superpower in decline, respect and fear the United States less than at any time in nearly a century.
Indeed, the July 2024 bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission report warns that “the threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
As Washington focuses on reinforcing Ukraine’s defense capabilities against the Russian invader, the Kremlin is expanding its global engagement deeper into mineral-rich African countries, displacing U.S. and French counter-terrorism training in the Sahel region, providing mercenaries and arms to defend juntas and autocratic regimes, extracting gold, uranium, cobalt, and other valuable resources to fund its wartime economy, and expanding diplomatic support in the United Nations and multilateral institutions, where Africa’s 54 nations often constitute the largest voting bloc.
Russia’s growing military presence in eastern Libya offers arms pipelines into Sahel countries where Moscow enjoys closer ties to leaders of recent coups and delivers potential leverage over human trafficking networks that are used to overwhelm and destabilize European societies across the Mediterranean Sea.
In retaliation for Washington’s green light to Kyiv to strike targets inside Russia, U.S. intelligence believes Moscow is weighing providing anti-ship missiles to Iranian-financed Houthi militia in Yemen to attack American and British warships belatedly attempting to restore free and open commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
Iranian proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq assault Israel and attack U.S. regional assets on multiple fronts, despite Washington’s obsessive efforts to re-engage Tehran in the nuclear negotiations that, at best, merely delay Iran’s intended deployment of nuclear weapons. Once that threshold is crossed, nuclear weapons proliferation is expected to spread across the region, most notably Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Egypt.
In the meantime, two U.S. aircraft carriers deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to support Israel in the event of additional direct attacks from the Iranian regime leaving the Navy without any aircraft carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific theater for the first time in more than two decades.
Since the 2012 rise to power of Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping in Beijing, China has shed its prior decades-long “hide your strength, bide your time” global diplomacy strategy launched by Deng Xiaoping. In 2015, Xi lied to then-President Obama when he stated that Beijing was dredging and reclaiming shoals, reefs, and islets in the South China Sea merely for maritime safety purposes.
Today, China enjoys a decisive regional military advantage throughout the vital international waterway based on aircraft hangars and runways that accommodate most of its fighter jets, long-range surface-to-air missiles, and radar stations, to uphold sovereignty claims over 90% of the sea’s 1.3 million square mile area. Reports that China is securing access to a naval base on Cambodia’s Gulf of Thailand coast will further strengthen its power projection capabilities near Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Beijing is rehearsing a naval blockade of Taiwan or a takeover of Kinmen, Matsu, or other small Taiwanese islands just six miles off the Chinese coast, intended to degrade the morale and political will of the people and government to resist Beijing’s growing pressure to unify the free-market democratic island with the Communist mainland. China’s deployment of long-range “carrier killer” missiles, modern aircraft, and submarines are designed to keep the U.S. Navy more than 1,000 miles from Taiwan in the event of a conflict and deny Washington’s ability to defend Taipei, which needs to bolster its own defensive capabilities closer to muscular Polish or Israeli levels to justify a robust American response.
The Pentagon reports that Beijing already possesses about 500 operational missile launchers to sink or disable U.S. carriers with up to 5,000 personnel aboard, potentially neutralizing America’s greatest symbol of military power worldwide. An effective anti-access/area denial strategy in the western Pacific against the United States could eventually persuade Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and other U.S. partners to reach a regional modus vivendi under China’s subjugating terms.
Even the Western Hemisphere is increasingly under threat. Last December marked the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, in which outside powers were warned that “any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere is dangerous to our peace and safety.” In 2024, Beijing’s pernicious influence is ubiquitous in Latin America because of security ties, arms sales, and military presences. Chinese chemical companies export fentanyl precursors to Mexico that cartels subsequently smuggle into the United States, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.
Our political leaders have allowed the defense industrial base to become inordinately dependent on the Chinese Communist Party. According to a Pentagon contractor report, “U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self. Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states.”
The evidence is damning. The number of Chinese suppliers in the U.S. defense-industrial supply chain has quadrupled since 2005, the newest Ford-class aircraft carriers operate using 6,500 semiconductors sourced from China, and many other U.S. ships and aircraft depend on thousands of Chinese semiconductors. In mid-August, Beijing announced export restrictions on antimony, a critical mineral for the U.S. defense industry. As China is the world’s leading antimony producer, accounting for 63% of U.S. imports, anticipated supply chain disruptions will compel an urgent quest for non-Chinese sources, such as Russia and Tajikistan.
Accelerating the lethality and deterrent capacity of American military power will require leaps in technological innovation, to expand U.S. research and development programs that incentivize non-traditional start-up companies, stimulate private capital investment, and scale the deployment of frontier military systems.
American innovation during the Cold War, right until President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative persuaded the Soviet Union that competition against the United States was doomed — and proved pivotal in the West ultimately prevailing. A military technology revolution would include AI-powered autonomous weapons, Mach 20 hypersonic missiles, unmanned submarines, directed-energy weapons, quantum-level drone swarms, and electromagnetic railguns, among other emerging systems. However, a 1980s-level R&D budget amounts to about $60 billion per annum in current dollars.
Like the members of the National Defense Strategy Commission, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is looking to reverse the dangerous trend. In May, he argued that the United States, which last year allocated 3% of GDP to defense, must greatly accelerate spending over the next 10 years until it hits about 5%. On a School of War podcast last month, Wicker stated that he has secured bipartisan support for another $25 billion, even as he seeks a total of $55 billion above the 2023 debt limit deal. However, a massive defense budget increase will need to be accompanied by vigorous reform of the Pentagon procurement process to maximize effectiveness and minimize bloat, as well as modification of industrial regulations to accelerate the restoration of America’s defense industrial production base.
In retrospect, the failure of the American political, diplomatic, and military establishment to foresee, let alone adequately respond to the powerful rise of China, the aggressive resurgence of Russia, and the theocratic militancy of Iran, today amount to a kaleidoscopic series of threats to American primacy, just as fiscal scarcity becomes a more consequential factor in Washington policy-planning and decision-making.
With annual federal interest payments now exceeding the defense budget, and higher interest rates locking in those massive payments for at least the next half-decade, paying for a more robust national security posture will require the next administration to reform the federal budget process, restore the spending baseline to pre-COVID emergency levels, trim the federal workforce by replacing only every second or third departing employee, and freeze all non-defense discretionary spending for at least the next decade.
In late 2009, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer explained that American decline was not "some predetermined, inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces is wrong.”
“Decline is not a condition,” Krauthammer warned. “Decline is a choice.”
Indeed, indecision and lack of grand strategy by policymakers over the past several decades have enabled this increasingly complex and dangerous international security environment that awaits the next administration in 2025. Reversing the decline and restoring American preeminence will require revealing hard truths — and making even tougher choices.
John Sitilides is a geopolitical strategist at Trilogy Advisors LLC and Senior Fellow for National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (@JohnSitilides). Jason Epstein is president of Southfive Strategies LLC, an international public affairs consultancy (@Southfive).
