The country’s new defense strategy envisioned a dramatic shakeup. It prioritized the homeland and repositioned forces that had patrolled distant frontiers for nearly a century. It handed the task of securing farther-flung defensive perimeters to allies, many of which appeared unprepared to take on the burden. Establishment experts were appalled. Hawks warned that the new strategy would embolden adversaries and advocated for the old approach of being strong everywhere at once.

The year was 1904, and the country was the United Kingdom. It faced a dilemma broadly similar to the one the United States now confronts. Its empire was the world’s strongest power. Its navy had more warships than the next two largest navies combined. But its strategic situation was deteriorating. Britain’s economic primacy was beginning to slip as rising powers surpassed it in industrial production. Imperial Germany was building a blue-water fleet. France and Russia were mounting fresh challenges to British power in Africa and Asia. The United States and Japan, new rivals, were pursuing dominance over their regions. British leaders had a choice: they could keep trying to outgun all these competitors or try something new.

The country’s top admiral, John “Jacky” Fisher, opted for the latter course. He outlined a strategy to shore up the British position that could be characterized as consolidation. Consolidation is when a state focuses on its foremost interests while ramping up national resources to increase the power at its disposal over time. This was not retrenchment or acquiescence to national decline. Fisher decided that instead of trying to maintain all of the British Empire’s far-flung naval stations, he would prioritize the waters adjacent to the British Isles to deter Germany, the United Kingdom’s top threat. To cover the gaps this created elsewhere, he aimed to rely on regional allies, such as Japan and France, that British diplomats were courting. By doing so, he hoped to buy time for the United Kingdom to mobilize its powerful industries and stay ahead of its rivals in leading technologies.

The strategy was controversial. But it allowed the United Kingdom to achieve what the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz called the “highest and simplest law of strategy”: concentration. By focusing limited military resources on the main theater, the United Kingdom alleviated the multifront pressure on its empire and put itself on a stronger footing for the coming confrontation with imperial Germany.

The United States is at a similar juncture today. For three and a half decades, it has maintained peace and sustained influence in all the world’s major regions without difficult tradeoffs. It continued to assume it can do so even as the country’s relative economic strength decreased and rival military buildups eroded its superiority. As a consequence, the United States now faces a serious misalignment between its national power and the strategic objectives to which it has become accustomed.

As the United Kingdom did in Fisher’s time, the United States needs to embrace a strategy of consolidation. The second Trump administration has taken significant steps in this direction, undertaking ambitious domestic reforms to expand national power with respect to China. The war it launched with Iran in February could advance consolidation if it remains narrowly scoped, but it could undermine the strategy if it becomes protracted. Going forward, Washington must fully commit to the consolidation blueprint; future administrations need to stay the course to ensure the strategy bears fruit. That means not getting sucked into big wars or lulled back into old policy habits that reinforce the U.S. strategic predicament. If it focuses on consolidation, the United States has a historic chance to regain its bearings as a great power and prevail in a sustained competition with China, the most powerful adversary in U.S. history.

American power is overextended. The country’s commitments exceed the financial and military resources at its disposal. This overextension—which is plainly visible to its citizens, its allies, and its adversaries—resulted from shifts in the international balance of power but also from past U.S. policy choices. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States with no peer competitor. Washington reacted by cutting defense spending while expanding its military operations worldwide. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, it launched large, sustained deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and military operations in more than a dozen other countries.

The financial and human costs of these wars are well documented. Less publicly appreciated is the fact that the United States undertook 30 years of continuous expeditionary warfare while allowing the structural foundations of its military power—its defense industrial base, shipbuilding capacity, and nuclear capability—to wither. Peripheral wars neither substantially increased the United States’ access to resources nor even, as their architects hoped, expanded the number of U.S.-aligned democracies. Instead, they depleted U.S. strength in countless ways, including by deferring military modernization, shrinking the Pentagon’s arsenal, and driving long-term sovereign debt so high that it hobbled Washington’s ability to invest in the country’s future.

Economic overextension is another self-inflicted wound. U.S. military operations since 2001 added $8 trillion to the national debt. In that same period, entitlement spending increased by over $2 trillion until, by 2024, it accounted for 51 percent of the federal budget. A string of government bailouts, including the stimulus responses to the 2008–9 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, added a further $7 trillion to the debt—a sum comparable to the total amount that the United States spent during World War II. Already, the United States pays more to service its past borrowing than to fund its defense.

The U.S. military can no longer fight more than one major rival at a time.

A final self-inflicted wound is social in nature. The country’s breathtaking fiscal expansion coincided with a deindustrialization that buoyed stock markets but gutted working-class communities that, for generations, had depended on well-paying manufacturing jobs. Between 2000 and 2015, more than 60,000 U.S. factories closed and a third of the country’s manufacturing jobs were lost. In Rust Belt communities, wages declined, unemployment rose, and, for middle-aged men, life expectancies fell. Drug overdose deaths and suicides rose nationwide.

External factors have also helped spread the United States too thin. As the country grew weaker, its field of competitors was expanding. Thirty years ago, the United States faced no peer adversaries. Today, it faces a full peer, China, and an emboldened Russia, as well as threats from Iran, North Korea, and a bevy of nonstate actors. China’s power has increased spectacularly. In 1991, its GDP was $2 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. In 2024, it was $37 trillion, an increase of 1,500 percent. China has used its growing wealth to mount a historic military buildup. Between 1991 and 2023, it expanded defense spending from $23 billion (in today’s dollars) to more than $300 billion, a 1,300 percent increase. In 2024 alone, a single Chinese shipbuilder produced more ships than the United States has built since 1945.

The three most recent U.S. National Defense Strategies have made it clear that the U.S. military is no longer postured or equipped to fight more than one major rival at a time. Like the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, the United States faces the danger of a war on multiple fronts that would be beyond its immediate ability to handle—what the Pentagon calls the “simultaneity” problem.

In sum, the United States faces more numerous enemies and greater internal constraints than it did either during the Cold War or in the post–Cold War period. It has a military that, until recently, was principally configured for peripheral expeditionary warfare rather than for conflict with a peer opponent and debt overhangs........

© Foreign Affairs