Toggle open close
The United States has entered a new era of great-power competition with China. As the country makes this shift, policymakers are forced to reevaluate some lingering assumptions that drove defense policy during the Cold War, the country’s last period of sustained great-power competition. The competition with the Soviet Union was a competition between two spheres that rarely overlapped: The United States had very little commerce with the Soviet Union, and the global economy was essentially divided into East and West, with much more trade within each sphere than between the two.
The competition we face with China today is very different. In the globalized economy, the United States and China are deeply invested in each other’s economies and highly interdependent as a result. The U.S. defense sector is no exception to this, as large multinational defense contractors and their suppliers seek to drive down costs by moving their supply chains overseas, sometimes to countries with whom the United States shares no special security arrangements.