China Is Ready for the Next War. America Is Not.
18th May 2026
Even before war broke out in Iran, the US military was strained. In early March, the Government Accountability Office reported that readiness had diminished over the past two decades. In the recent past, support for Ukraine, the defence of Israel, and air strikes against the Houthis have all depleted critical munitions. The present high-intensity conflict in Iran is only aggravating this already dangerous situation. There is little doubt that the United States, which faces its most consequential military challenge in the Pacific, will need to husband resources more carefully if it is to deter China in the coming years.
Full dress rehearsals for the siege and subjugation of Taiwan have raised the possibility that America may be unprepared for a clash with the world’s strongest authoritarian state. To make matters worse, should a direct confrontation with Beijing be necessary, time may not be on America’s side. In a protracted battle between great powers, as the historian Paul Kennedy put it, “victory has repeatedly gone to the side with the more flourishing industrial base.”
At this precarious historical moment, The American Edge by Seth G. Jones delivers an ominous warning but also a hopeful message. Jones, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wastes no time in laying out the strategic stakes. “The tragedy today,” he writes, “is that the United States is in a wartime environment, but its defence industrial base is operating on a peacetime footing.” To drive home the point, Jones channels the British naval historian Andrew Gordon who believed that policymakers in peacetime needed to act more like rat-catchers (those who effectively cut regulatory corners to win wars) and less like regulators (who tend to be stymied by excessive bureaucracy).