President Trump is stuck. Before he authorized a bombing campaign against Iran, his administration failed to plan for the possibility that Iranian forces would close the Strait of Hormuz. With no good options, Trump has been left to hope that the crucial shipping channel will “open up naturally.” Although Iran is far smaller and poorer than the United States, and many of its top officials have been killed in the past month, its remaining leaders are exercising considerable leverage over Trump and, at least publicly, are ignoring his demand for negotiations.
U.S. forces continue to carry out tactically complex operations, such as the rescue of an airman who ejected from a doomed fighter jet over Iranian territory. But far from resulting in a quick victory against an overmatched rival, Trump’s war in Iran is putting America’s strategic and military weaknesses on display for other rival nations—most notably China, the world’s other great military and economic power. Yet by revealing that the United States has not adapted enough to the latest changes in how military conflicts are fought, recent events could well alter Beijing’s risk-benefit calculations about, for instance, seizing Taiwan.
Although—or perhaps because—its armed forces remain the world’s most capable, the U.S. has for some time been downplaying potential threats to its readiness. I argued last fall that if the United States finds itself in an extended war with China anytime soon, it is likely to lose, in part because that country’s superior manufacturing capacity and growing technological mastery would help it outlast even America’s battle-tested military. The early days of Trump’s campaign in Iran revealed a lack of planning on Washington’s part and signs of genuine strain.
[Read: Hegseth’s war on America’s military]
A month into the Iran campaign, the challenges that the U.S. faces have come into even clearer focus. In mid-March, the Trump administration was promising that naval escorts for oil tankers would “happen relatively soon.” In reality, the U.S. has been afraid to send the Navy’s large traditional ships too close to the coast of Iran, because that country can unleash enough simple drones and basic anti-ship missiles to endanger the world’s mightiest naval vessels. Trump’s Plan B has been to try to beg or bully fellow NATO countries, Japan, and even China to step in and take responsibility for reopening the strait.
Trump’s dilemma is no doubt reassuring for China, whose capabilities greatly outstrip Iran’s. China is by far the world’s dominant producer of unmanned aerial vehicles and their components. The Chinese military also has missile systems accurate to 1,000 miles and beyond. And China can produce and deploy these weapons in such numbers that the U.S. Navy would be highly unlikely to intercept them all. If the Navy tried to fight past a barrage of such weaponry all the way to Taiwan, it would likely suffer catastrophic losses.
Some of America’s challenges in the current war result from avoidable mistakes by Trump and his team. Despite having months to prepare for the war with Iran, and despite having initiated hostilities at a time of its choosing, the Trump administration did not make provision for anything but the most basic Iranian response, and it seems to have been caught off guard by the Iranian move to stop trade through the Strait of Hormuz. A different set of leaders might have insisted on better contingency planning.
Yet the war has also revealed more deeply rooted problems, including difficulty in acquiring sufficient quantities of the systems on which America’s high-tech military relies. Stockpiles of certain weapons remain dangerously low. In the first four weeks of Operation Epic Fury, The Washington Post reported late last month, the U.S. fired 850 Tomahawk missiles—about one quarter of all such missiles that it had. The replacement rate for these systems is startlingly slow. In 2025, for instance, the Navy budgeted for only 72 new Tomahawk missiles. A Pentagon spokesperson brushed off the Post’s questions about the adequacy of the missile supply, insisting that the military “has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline,” and said news media are “biased and obsessed with portraying the world’s strongest military as weak.”
In reality, the U.S. has fallen behind in adjusting to new forms of warfare. It does not have a cost-effective system for intercepting Iranian drones, and even military operations far from the front lines of any confrontation are under growing risk of disruption by unmanned aircraft. In a peculiar incident in early March, Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was subject to a shelter-in-place order because the facility—which houses B-52 bombers, a major element of the U.S. nuclear arsenal—was being overflown by unauthorized drones. Whoever was operating the drones may have been testing security responses at the base.
This kind of interference is far from benign. Last June, Ukrainian forces launched a devastating drone attack on Russian strategic bombers in what was called Operation Spiderweb. Ten months later, U.S. airfields seem no better prepared for such an attack than the Russians had been.
On Friday, the Trump administration requested $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon in the next fiscal year, a 40 percent increase over the current year. But the administration has given little indication of how it would address the shortcomings that the Iran war has exposed. For all of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s talk of making the U.S. military more lethal, real problems have gone unaddressed, even as the administration has jeopardized essential components of American global power.
[Read: An army shake-up in the middle of a war]
Trump is presiding over the implosion of the alliance system that the United States put together, to its great strategic benefit, after World War II. First he ignored U.S. allies rather than consulting them about attacking Iran. Then he bullied them to take part in a war they did not want, and berated many when they did not comply. He repeatedly portrays NATO states as ingrates. When the Japanese prime minister visited the Oval Office recently, Trump made a joke about Pearl Harbor. That neither Japan nor anyone else is rushing to solve the Strait of Hormuz problem for Trump is hardly surprising.
Given their recent treatment by the president, traditional allies seem torn about working with the United States these days. If they ever face a choice about whether to get involved in a far more dangerous conflict, such as a war with China over Taiwan, recent events might make them more likely to sit it out.
Decline can happen quietly or loudly, almost imperceptibly or with dramatic changes. What the past several weeks have revealed about America’s capabilities will bring solace to its rivals, not its longtime friends—if indeed it has any friends left.
The post Trump Is Putting America’s Weaknesses on Display appeared first on The Atlantic.
