This article is an early release from the Summer 2026 print issue: The End of the World as We Know It, available in full next week.

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The war in the Persian Gulf has created global shock waves—by roiling the world economy, unsettling U.S. alliances, creating epic disruptions to freedom of navigation, and bringing the nuclear nonproliferation order to a tipping point. But one of the most important and potentially destabilizing implications of this conflict has been to throw U.S. strategic insolvency into harsh relief.

The war has featured impressive tactical feats by the United States and Israel, such as the killing of dozens of high-ranking Iranian officials in the opening hours of the fight. The capabilities on display over Tehran—and U.S. President Donald Trump’s penchant for military risk-taking—have surely been sobering for Washington’s adversaries in Moscow and Beijing. Yet the war has had more ambiguous, sometimes damaging, strategic outcomes. It has also caused an alarming depletion of key U.S. weapons stockpiles while ripping capabilities away from other dangerous theaters. In short, the conflict has badly strained a military that has been trying to do too much with too little for far too long.

The war in the Persian Gulf has created global shock waves—by roiling the world economy, unsettling U.S. alliances, creating epic disruptions to freedom of navigation, and bringing the nuclear nonproliferation order to a tipping point. But one of the most important and potentially destabilizing implications of this conflict has been to throw U.S. strategic insolvency into harsh relief.

The war has featured impressive tactical feats by the United States and Israel, such as the killing of dozens of high-ranking Iranian officials in the opening hours of the fight. The capabilities on display over Tehran—and U.S. President Donald Trump’s penchant for military risk-taking—have surely been sobering for Washington’s adversaries in Moscow and Beijing. Yet the war has had more ambiguous, sometimes damaging, strategic outcomes. It has also caused an alarming depletion of key U.S. weapons stockpiles while ripping capabilities away from other dangerous theaters. In short, the conflict has badly strained a military that has been trying to do too much with too little for far too long.

There’s a saying in the Defense Department that every U.S. war plan is an existential threat to all the other war plans. A draining conflict in the Middle East may make it harder for Washington to deter a far more devastating fight in the Western Pacific—and usher in a dangerous period in which an overtaxed U.S. military struggles to respond to surging global risks.

Danger doesn’t have to bring disaster: It’s possible that the United States will navigate the coming years without a catastrophic failure of deterrence. Crises can have silver linings: If this crisis catalyzes greater, sustained urgency in closing the gap between the Pentagon’s sprawling commitments and its all-too-finite capabilities, it may have a salutary strategic effect. But the period immediately ahead looks menacing. The world is getting more violent and more disordered—just as Trump’s war has made Washington’s chronic overstretch more acute.

The USS Gerald R. Ford arrives at Souda Bay naval base on the Greek island of Crete on March 23, after taking part in Middle East war operations. Costas Metaxakis/AFP via Getty Images

Trump didn’t create the problem of U.S. military and strategic overstretch. It has been building across multiple presidencies.

Over the past two decades, the global threat environment has gotten uglier and more crowded. A country that once towered over adversaries now faces challenges from revisionist great powers, angry rogue states, and tenacious nonstate foes. Looming above all other dangers is a new cold war—with the risk of a catastrophic hot war—against a relentlessly arming China. Yet the United States has sought to handle what increasingly looks like a perilous prewar situation with a post-Cold War approach to military spending. U.S. defense budgets, typically between 3 and 4 percent of GDP, have remained low by historical standards. Fatigue from long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 made the politics of defense more difficult. The predictable result has been a growing mismatch between Washington’s global commitments and its military resources—a mismatch that one nonpartisan expert commission after another has identified and that one administration after another has tried and failed to fix.

The seemingly perpetual pattern is one in which each new administration promises to better apportion scarce resources through stricter prioritization—only to end up intervening in precisely those places it aimed to avoid. Barack Obama promised a pivot to the Pacific but ended up mired back in the Middle East. The first Trump administration touted the return of great-power rivalry but was then consumed by crises with North Korea and Iran. Joe Biden sought to stabilize relations with Moscow and Tehran so that the Pentagon could finally gear up for China. But then Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the Middle East exploded a year later. The desire for focus and the divestment of lesser problems has consistently collided with the realities of a messy world in which Washington still has global interests. Trump’s second term was supposed to fix this problem but made it much worse.

Trump initially filled the Pentagon with “prioritizers” who wanted to emphasize Asia and “restrainers” who wanted out of the Middle East. His administration pushed European and East Asian allies to take greater responsibility for their own defense. His new National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy proclaimed that the era of costly Middle Eastern wars was over. Trump 2.0 promised discipline after decades of distraction. Instead, it brought omnidirectional, almost hyperactive, intervention.

To wage a short but fierce war against the Houthis in early 2025, Trump surged aircraft carriers, precision-strike capabilities, and other assets into the Middle East. He then struck Iran while sending precious air and missile defense capabilities to protect Israel during the countries’ 12-day war in June. The administration carried out counterterrorism operations in Nigeria, Somalia, and elsewhere, including one of the largest bombing raids in the history of the U.S. Navy. In December 2025 and January 2026, U.S. forces blockaded Venezuela and smashed their way into Caracas to seize President Nicolás Maduro. Washington continued to provide scarce weapons, including Patriot missile interceptors, to Ukraine.

Each of these initiatives served a compelling U.S. interest, including defending freedom of navigation, rolling back Iran’s nuclear........

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