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Defining American Dominance
The United States is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the republic is, in many ways, stronger than ever, the threats to its freedom are acute and diverse. Xi Jinping is determined to subvert US global dominance, and the Chinese Communist Party is pursuing technological advancement and expanding its nuclear weapons program. China’s partners include other authoritarian powers that aim to weaken and undermine the US, including Russia, Iran, North Korea, and communist regimes in the Western Hemisphere.
To defend its global interests and promote its security and sovereignty, the US should maximize its strength over the China-led axis. America’s alliance system supplies Washington with collaborators in deterrence and defense across Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies conduct military exercises, strategize for military contingencies, and assist the US in enforcing sanctions against nations that act aggressively and recklessly threaten international peace. Allies also contribute to global intelligence collection and sharing and offer the US military forward-deployed capabilities.
Thanks to America’s world-class research and development, the US also retains a comparative advantage in key technologies, including artificial intelligence and stealth, where America has unmatched computing power and dominant warfighting platforms that China cannot yet match. Amid intensifying threats, the US should build on our advantages to maintain a competitive edge and maximize the credibility of US deterrence.
“[The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)] is perhaps the greatest scientific and engineering organization in the history of mankind. . . . We can deny our adversaries, whoever they may be or wherever they may be, access to materials that would lead them to produce a nuclear weapon. . . . If you think you can covertly conduct a nuclear strike of any kind against the United States or our allies . . . we have extraordinary forensic capabilities, [and] we can identify those materials, we can know their providence, their source, and tie it directly back to the actor. . . . We make Ferraris. [We are] better than anybody else in the world; we make really exquisite, incredible performance nuclear weapons. . . . Today, I have four of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world [that] are part of NNSA, including number one, El Capitan. We exquisitely model what happens when you take fissile material, surround it with explosives, and compress it. . . . We understand those physics extraordinarily well. . . . The most important thing is that our adversaries have absolutely no question about the efficacy of our weapons and they should not have any doubt that our weapons work as advertised.”
— Brandon M. Williams
Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration
Hudson Highlights
Rebeccah L. Heinrichs | National Review
“No other nation in the world . . . can match America’s stealth technology, let alone sufficiently defend against it. . . . As a drone mothership, the [next generation of stealth bomber] B-21 [Raider]’s unique payload, survivability, and range capacities could make it the ideal delivery system for small, cheap, unmanned drones. . . . The B-21 as a missileer can fight our way into a highly contested Chinese airspace and suppress enemy air defenses to secure and keep air superiority. . . . A war in which the US fights a protracted drone war at sea and refuses to target the Chinese homeland would cede the advantage to the Chinese, with their dominant industrial capacity to produce drones. The United States should be building a force to go on the offensive to destroy Chinese mobile launchers and weapons production facilities in mainland China. This is a perfect mission for the B-21, which has deep range and a mix of conventional and nuclear mass-deliverable options in a single system. The most critical lesson from Ukraine and from our ongoing military campaigns against the Islamic Republic is that we need to lean into our comparative advantages—our warfighting competency and globally unmatched stealth. Chinese academic and military writing predictably indicate worry about the American stealth bomber.”
Michael Doran | Free Press
“Tehran used the post-JCPOA decade to build its integrated deterrence ‘trident’: precision missiles and drones capable of saturating regional defenses, proxy forces from Yemen to Lebanon, and a nuclear program that never stopped. Trump has severely weakened every prong of that trident. . . . For 19 of the past 20 years, Iran enriched uranium without interruption. In stark contrast, Trump and Netanyahu have prohibited Iran from enriching a single gram of uranium for a full year. . . . Trump also is forcing the Iranian regime to confront a daunting reconstruction challenge. Precision strikes devastated nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, setting back Iran’s enrichment capabilities by at least a year. US and Israeli forces destroyed roughly one-third of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, hundreds of launchers, and critical storage sites. Those forces dismantled most Iranian air defenses and obliterated its navy. There is no question that the war halted Iran’s oil exports, shattered petrochemical and steel plants, and left the banking system in disarray. . . . The decapitation strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior officials have sown confusion across a leadership divided into competing factions.”
David Feith | Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
“The US-China competition in AI will be decided by factors including talent, capital, energy, data, and computing power (or ‘compute’). China has real strengths in many of these areas. . . . But the decisive factor is likely to be compute—and there the United States and our allies enjoy a substantial advantage. Today, China’s best AI chips are much less capable than America’s—and, thanks in significant part to US and allied export controls, they are falling further behind. This matters because frontier AI increasingly rewards scale. . . . Publicly available data and roadmaps show that Nvidia’s leading AI chips are five to eight times more powerful than the best offerings from China’s Huawei, and this gap could widen to 17 times by 2027. . . . Huawei is likely to produce only about 1–2 percent as much advanced AI computing capacity as the United States in 2026. . . . Compute is the lifeblood of the AI economy, and China has less of it, at lower quality, than the United States and its allies.”
Key Insights
Marco Rubio | Senate Foreign Relations Committee
“We are a global superpower—the most powerful country on Earth. We have the largest economy and the most formidable military ever known to man. . . . President Trump has taken back control of our hemisphere. . . . We confronted MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and the other evil cartels as the terrorist organizations that they are—and built a transcontinental coalition to defeat and dismantle them. Not just with words, but with actions. Narco-cartel boats ferrying their poison into our borders were not met with strongly worded letters, but with the full weight of American firepower. . . . We brought an anti-American despot in Caracas to justice, in one of the most extraordinary feats of lethal precision in military history. American Special Forces crossed a hemisphere, penetrated one of the most heavily fortified capitals in the region, neutralized the regime's military infrastructure, and removed Nicolás Maduro from power within hours. . . . We have made it clear to every government in this hemisphere that America can either be their greatest friend or their most feared enemy—the choice is theirs.”
Graham Brookie | Atlantic Council
“This year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States and, throughout its history, the US has stood firm at the cutting edge of successive technology revolutions that have shaped the world that we live in today. This is not by chance but by design. We bring together builders and innovators from around the globe. We embrace discovery, creativity, openness, and a willingness to come together, adapt, innovate, and achieve something greater than the sum of our parts. It’s core to who we are as a country.”
Marco Rubio | House Foreign Affairs Committee
“The president was not going to allow [Iran] to build a conventional shield behind which they can develop their nuclear program. Today, the Iranian navy sits at the bottom of the sea. They do not have a navy; it no longer exists. They have no air force either. Their missile launchers have been significantly degraded. Their defense industrial base has suffered upwards of 80–90 percent of attrition. It will take years for them to rebuild it. Those are facts; that is the reality. That was the purpose of Epic Fury. It achieved its purpose in degrading that conventional shield, and it has brought them to the negotiation table. . . . They are unable to form [drone] swarms the way they once did. They are primarily now threatening shipping through the use of one-way attack drones. But their navy—what you would consider a navy with naval vessels that can actually conduct naval operations—is non-existent at this point. . . . They can’t launch as many [drones] as they used to, and they can’t launch them in the swarms they used to launch them in.”
Mark Rutte | Fox News
“What I see in Europe . . . is widespread support for what the [US] president is doing, and also making sure that, when it comes to logistics, access, defending key US interests in Europe and in the region, the Europeans are really stepping up. . . . [Europe] is doing what is necessary to ensure this operation can go ahead and delivering all the enablement necessary. . . . There is no sliver of light between us, the Europeans, Canada, Mark Carney, the United States, the American president. All for one, one for all, because everybody supports, here in Europe, the fact that [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei is gone, that the nuclear capability is gone, that the ballistic missile program has been now degraded—which was a big threat for Europe, for Israel, for the whole region.”
Top Reads
Chinese Perceptions of Stealth: Shaping Defenses Against US Capabilities and Indigenous Developments
Major Derek Ecklebe | China Aerospace Studies Institute
Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security
The White House
Leaving NATO Would Be National Self-Sabotage
Tim Kaine | Time Magazine
Stealth: The Military Technology Russia, China, and America Crave
Harrison Kass | The National Interest
Are America’s Alliances a Source of Strength or a Burden as it Competes with China?
Doug Bandow et al. | Brookings Institution
US and Israel Race to Defeat Iranian Missiles and Drones Following Early Campaign Successes
Cameron McMillan, Justin Leopold-Cohen, and Bradley Bowman | The Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Long War Journal
The West and Ukraine Are Capsizing Russia’s Shadow Fleet
The Economist
Joint Statement of the United States and Israel on the Launch of a Strategic Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, Research, and Critical Technologies
US Department of State
Joint Statement on the US-India AI Opportunity Partnership
US Department of State
The United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea Sign a Trilateral Memorandum of Cooperation on Small Modular Reactor Deployments in Other Countries
US Department of State
Joint Statement of the United States and Japan on Cybersecurity Cooperation
US Department of State
In a Dangerous Region, Israel Remains America’s Most Reliable Return
Pinchas Cohen and Avner Golov | The Jerusalem Post
Budd, Gillibrand Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Strengthen Bilateral Defense Programs Between the US and Israel
Ted Budd and Kirsten Gillibrand | United States Senate
Japanese Destroyer Can Now Fire Tomahawk Missiles, Extending Nation’s Combat Punch
Leilani Chavez | Defense News
