No matter what the Democrats and Republicans think, reality is fast catching up with the US and its allies. The bottom line: over the next 5 years, perhaps longer, the US will need to use extreme care when picking fights with potential adversaries; at the same time, the American and allied defense industrial base needs significant reform.

Naturally, this means the US approach to Russia, Europe, Asia, and China must adjust, and the US may have to accept accommodations with potential adversaries, things it would not have done only a few years ago.

The US lives with a depleted arsenal, a defense industrial base mostly incapable of mass-producing weapons that have not performed up to expectations, and it faces technological and operational challenges that mostly were not expected.

During the Obama and early Biden administrations, China was not considered much of a problem. Pentagon documents from the Obama period said that it would be twenty years before China was even a near-peer to the United States. Unfortunately, that assessment, if it can be generously called that, was based on prejudices about Chinese abilities (“they just copy everything”) and a failure to understand China’s rapid and well-funded industrialization of defense manufacturing. Today, China is a weapons powerhouse with no end in sight.