USA

Since 2018, the military has shifted to focus on China and Russia after decades fighting insurgencies, but it still faces challenges to produce weapons and come up with new ways of waging war

Clint Hinote returned from a deployment in Baghdad in the spring of 2018 to a new assignment and a staggering realization.

A classified Pentagon wargame simulated a Chinese push to take control of the South China Sea. The Air Force officer, charged with plotting the service’s future, learned that China’s well-stocked missile force had rained down on the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the region, turning American combat aircraft and munitions into smoldering ruins in a matter of days.

“My response was, ‘Holy crap. We are going to lose if we fight like this,’” he recalled

If rival civilizations feel they are ‘second class,’ there’s a reason for that.

The increasingly evident de facto alliance between Russia and China makes the war in Ukraine begin to look a little more like a front in a larger clash of civilizations.

In his famous mid-1990s book of that name, Samuel Huntington briefly contemplated such a partnership: “Russia and China united would decisively tilt the Eurasian balance against the West and arouse all the concerns that existed about the Soviet-Sino relationship in the 1950s.”