December 10, 2020
Finding Strength in Decline
The U.S. Military Needs a Plan to Compete Without the Advantages of the Past
President-elect Joe Biden will enter office at a crucial time for the U.S. military. After decades of focusing on minor powers and substate actors, the United States must prepare for a new era of great-power competition with China and, to a lesser extent, with Russia. That realization makes the new administration’s review of U.S. defense strategy the most important of its kind since the end of the Cold War.
The United States must prepare for a new era of great-power competition with China and, to a lesser extent, with Russia.
Russia is a shadow of its Cold War self, but it retains its nuclear arsenal and has developed formidable cyberwarfare capabilities. Its conventional forces remain more than a match for those of NATO’s frontline states, stretching from Estonia to Bulgaria. China poses a much greater threat as a burgeoning economic, technological, and military superpower. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears intent on constructing an Orwellian state even as it presents its political and economic model as superior to that of the United States. In recent years, it has flexed economic and military muscle in pursuit of its ambitions, expanding territorial claims along its land and maritime borders and seeking to establish a hegemonic position in the western Pacific.
Read the full article in Foreign Affairs.
More from CNAS
-
Hellscape Taiwan: A Porcupine Defense in the Drone Age
Commentary
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks It is 2029. General Secretary Xi Jinping has given the order for the People’s Liberation Army to forcibly take Taiwan...
By Stacie Pettyjohn & Molly Campbell
-
Negotiations With Iran Are Likely 'DOA,' Says Wasser
Video
President Donald Trump is telling Iran it "better get serious" about negotiations, but Becca Wasser, defense lead for Bloomberg Economics and adjunct senior fellow at the Cent...
By Becca Wasser
-
Video
Defense / Middle East Security
CNN: 1,000 Army Paratroopers Deploy to Middle East in DaysBecca Wasser, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security joins CNN to discuss the deployment of troops to Iran and the status of negotiations.Watch the fu...
By Becca Wasser
-
Commentary
Defense / Middle East Security
What It Would Take to Reopen the Strait of HormuzThe strait is about 140 miles (225 kilometers) long and only 25 miles wide at its narrowest point, meaning ships have little room to maneuver and are easy targets for attacks ...
By Becca Wasser
