America Is Listing in a Gathering Storm

Geopolitical storm clouds are gathering at the far reaches of Pax Americana, and yet there is remarkably little sign that the U.S. government or the American people have awoken to the mounting dangers. The threat posed by China and Russia and their rogue nation allies rated only passing mention in last year’s presidential campaign, for instance, which in typical fashion revolved around domestic issues such as the economy and inflation. Asked to choose among five issues in an NBC exit poll, only 4 percent of the voters surveyed during last year’s presidential election named foreign policy as a priority.

President Donald Trump has talked a lot about restoring strong U.S. leadership in an increasingly unstable world, but in its first two months, his administration has mostly sown chaos at home and doubt abroad about the reliability of the United States as an ally.

The administration’s ready-fire-aim approach to national security and world affairs stands in stark contrast to the sense of very real urgency felt at the United States’ geographic military commands, which are positioned forward around the globe.

In essence, these military headquarters are sentries on the far battlements of the U.S.-led, post-World War II international order. From their vantage point, Washington’s military and security forces already find themselves stretched thin by intense combat operations, hybrid and proxy warfare, and tense military standoffs with an increasingly cohesive “axis of autocracies” that is spread out over six time zones that span the globe.

Listen closely to the warnings from these outposts, and you can detect the sound of alarms clanging while the United States continues listing even as geopolitical storm clouds darken.

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From the hillside headquarters of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu, commanders can gaze down on the tranquil waters of Pearl Harbor, where the surface of the water has an oily sheen resulting from persistent leakage from the once mighty battleship USS Arizona, sunk by Japanese bombs more than 80 years ago. The locals refer to the sheen as “black tears,” in memory of the 1,102 U.S. service members still entombed in the wreckage below.

Pearl Harbor is a place for quiet contemplation, and from the nearby vantage point of Indo-Pacific Command, it is impossible not to reflect on the dangers that accumulate when rising powers—such as 1930s-era Japan and Germany—confront status quo powers—such as that era’s Great Britain and the United States.

Today, the Indo-Pacific Command is consumed by the meteoric rise of another superpower in Asia—one whose bullying and provocations toward the United States and its regional allies have increased in rough proportion to a military expansion that recently retired leader of the command Admiral John Aquilino characterized as “the largest military buildup that we’re seeing in history, both conventional and nuclear.”

China’s massive defense manufacturing base now churns out weapons systems at a pace estimated at five to six times as fast as its anemic U.S. counterpart. Beijing already boasts not only the world’s largest navy, but also a shipbuilding capacity roughly 230 times that of the United States, according to Office of Naval Intelligence estimates.

Not coincidentally, in the past year alone, China’s armed forces have held live-fire exercises bracketing Taiwan, a democratic country that the Chinese Communist Party considers a breakaway province. Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army also regularly attacks the ships of the Philippines—a U.S. treaty ally—near contested islands. According to the Pentagon, since the fall of 2021 there have been more than 180 incidents of Chinese warplanes performing “coercive and risky” maneuvers targeting U.S. military aircraft in international airspace.

In congressional testimony in May 2024, Aquilino, then the head of Indo-Pacific Command, said that “all indications point to” the Chinese military meeting leader Xi Jinping’s deadline of being ready for a potential invasion of Taiwan by 2027.

Given that three of China’s standing war plans are built around that Taiwan scenario, the Pentagon has held classified war games testing the U.S. military’s readiness for such a contingency dating back a decade. Many Americans are not even aware that those secret war games consistently indicate that U.S. forces would not only lose that war, but also that they would lose it fast.

Contemplating the growing disparity in defense industrial capacity and Beijing’s aggressive claim of hegemony over the entire South China Sea, then- U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall III summarized conventional wisdom in September 2023 while speaking at a conference: “China is preparing for war, and specifically for a war with the United States.”

Remarkably, the theater-wide view from the village of Mons, Belgium, home to NATO’s sprawling Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), is equally alarming.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 set off the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, is now in its fourth bloody year. During that time, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that Putin has transitioned the Russian economy to a near-total wartime footing, spending an estimated 7.1 percent of the country’s GDP on defense in 2024.

Despite mounting a large military resupply mission to help keep Ukraine in the fight, the United States and its NATO allies have been continually deterred from more decisive support by a level of nuclear weapons saber-rattling and brinkmanship by Moscow that the world has not seen since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. That brinksmanship escalated dramatically in November 2024, after Russia attacked Ukraine for the first time with a new type of intermediate-range ballistic missile that is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as well as conventional ones.

The virulently anti-Western axis of autocracies that has come to Russia’s aid in its aggression against Ukraine and its challenge to the supposed U.S.-led, rules-based international order is increasingly alarming to U.S. security officials. China has lived up to its “no limits” partnership with Russia, which was announced just before the invasion, rescuing it from the isolation of Western sanctions with bilateral trade that soared to a record $240 billion in 2023. Beijing acts as a willing buyer for Russian oil while supplying Moscow with subcomponents such as drone and missile engines as well as the semiconductors that are critical to its burgeoning defense industry.

Despite its own conflict with Israel, the theocratic regime in Iran has also stepped in with shipments of ballistic missiles and thousands of lethal Shahed drones for Moscow’s war against its democratic neighbor.

The rogue regime in the so-called hermit kingdom of North Korea, a de facto nuclear weapons state and the most insular dictatorship in the world, has likewise provided Russia with short-range ballistic missiles and what South Korean authorities have estimated as 8 million artillery shells. And in a dramatic escalation of the conflict, U.S. intelligence officials revealed in late 2024 that Pyongyang had also sent an estimated 12,000 special forces troops to fight alongside their Russian counterparts against Ukraine. U.S. officials believe that in return, Moscow is sharing advanced air defense systems with Pyongyang.

In response to Western support for Ukraine, Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency has also greatly intensified its hybrid war against Europe, resulting in what Western intelligence officials characterize as a “an unprecedented rise” in acts of sabotage, arson, cyberattacks and attempted assassinations on NATO soil. In an article in Financial Times, the heads of the CIA and Britain’s MI6 described Russian intelligence activity as a “reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe.”

Western efforts to keep Ukraine supplied, even with fundamental war materials such as standard munitions and low-tech drones, have also revealed glaring deficiencies in industrial capacity in the once-vaunted U.S. “arsenal of democracy.” According to NATO intelligence estimates, Russia is on track to annually produce nearly three times as many artillery shells as the United States and its European allies combined (with 3 million shells versus 1.2 million, respectively). Russia has also dramatically increased its production of relatively cheap drones. Its close ally Beijing already dominates the worldwide market for commercial drones, with just one Chinese company accounting for approximately 70 percent of global production.

The view of the Middle East from the U.S. Central Command Forward Headquarters at al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar is no more reassuring. The war against Israel that the Gaza-based Hamas militant group launched to devastating effect on Oct. 7, 2023, quickly revealed itself as a coordinated attack on the United States’ closest ally in the region by Iran-led proxies that constitute Tehran’s so-called axis of resistance, which comprises Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and Houthi rebels in Yemen. The resulting war thus rapidly spread throughout the volatile region, including in the form of rare direct attacks between Israeli and Iran proper.

From the outset of the conflict, the U.S. military surged forces to come to Israel’s defense, with the Biden administration dispatching two aircraft carrier battle groups beginning in fall 2023. As a result, U.S. warships and aircraft were involved in the most intensive combat operations at sea since World War II, helping to protect Israel from missile attacks by Iran and its proxies, responding to attacks on U.S. bases and ships in the region, and engaging with Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen in an attempt to thwart their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

While Iran and its axis of resistance have been seriously weakened by the conflict, the intense strains of recent combat deployments on a historically small and overstretched U.S. military have been exposed for all to see. Defense Department officials have admitted struggling to find sufficient air defense systems to protect their allies in both the Middle East and Europe, and they are running short of key munitions such as surface-to-air missiles.

In late 2024, the Pentagon also announced the withdrawal of the last U.S. aircraft carrier deployed in the region. Asked about the redeployments and the gaps in presence they represent, Gen. Charles Brown Jr., the recently sacked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted that the Defense Department had no choice but to “step back and take a look” at spiking demand and the impact of extended deployments on U.S. forces, “not just in the Middle East, but really around the world.”

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Back home, the Trump administration continues to signal a realignment away from the United States’ traditional role as the so-called leader of the free world, even recently voting with Russia and North Korea at the United Nations against resolutions condemning Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. For its part, Congress continues in its nearly unbroken, decadelong streak of failing to pass a defense budget on time, severely curtailing efforts to stabilize acquisition programs and reorient the Pentagon’s strategic direction to confront rapidly growing threats.

In a report published in December and titled “Restoring Freedom’s Forge,” Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, took note of the urgency of this moment. “Over the last four decades, the defense acquisition system has ground to a virtual halt, buried under a mountain of statutes and regulations from Congress and the Pentagon,” he wrote.

And a congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy (NDS) report released in July 2024 backed that conclusion with its own stark warning: “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,” the report began, noting that the United States has not fought such a global conflict since World War II, nearly 80 years ago, and last prepared for such a contingency during the Cold War, 35 years ago. “It is not prepared today,” the authors added.

Retired Rep. Jane Harman, the former chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee, also served as the chair of the recent NDS Commission review.

In the event of a conflict with China or Russia, Harman noted in a recent interview with the Defense Writers Group, “there will be a major cyberattack on our critical infrastructure. When the lights go out in our cities, and our ports close, and our transportation systems melt down, people will start to pay attention. So maybe we can help them pay attention” ahead of what would surely be a catastrophe.

This article was excerpted from a recent CSPC report titled “The Gathering Storm: A Moonshot for National Defense.”