America’s historic military advantage rested on a simple premise: the weapons that defended the nation were built at home. For decades, that industrial self-reliance underwrote U.S. power. But globalization steadily eroded this foundation, pushing the Pentagon to source parts and components from across the world, including from China.

Today, everything from low-tech, medium-caliber ammunition to highly complex systems like the F-35 depends on sprawling, opaque supply chains that stretch far beyond U.S. borders. The result is an unacceptable level of strategic vulnerability—one that Washington can no longer afford to tolerate.

The urgency is heightened by the speed and coherence with which America’s adversaries are advancing. China, in particular, has moved decisively to consolidate a fully domestic defense supply chain. The People’s Liberation Army is now replacing the engines on its Y-20 military transport aircraft with the more powerful, domestically produced WS-20. That upgrade significantly expands China’s airlift capacity, enabling the transport of heavy platforms, such as the T-99 main battle tank, and other large-scale warfighting systems. It also enhances aerial refueling capabilities for the J-20 and J-35 fighters, undercutting a core pillar of U.S. strategy: maintaining air superiority to blunt a major amphibious assault on Taiwan. One advanced jet engine has materially altered the strategic balance.

By contrast, America’s own efforts to stay ahead in the air are faltering. The prototype for the next-generation adaptive propulsion (NGAP) engine—intended to deliver a step-change in jet propulsion—is reportedly delayed by at least two years due to supply-chain disruptions. These delays are not merely technical setbacks; they reflect deeper failures of industrial strategy and national prioritization.

Each slip gives Beijing reason to believe that it can narrow, or even close, the military gap. Reasserting U.S. advantage will require both reducing exposure to foreign risk and making far wiser use of taxpayer dollars. Access to U.S. markets and disciplined public investment must once again become instruments of power.

States manage competition through a blend of tools often described as the instruments of national power: diplomacy, information, military force, and economics. The Cold War was won not through battlefield victory but through the coordinated application of all four. The United States used diplomacy and information to isolate the Soviet Union economically, starving it of the resources needed to sustain its military ambitions. Henry Kissinger’s embrace of realpolitik in 1972—opening diplomatic relations with China—reoriented global trade patterns and severed Beijing’s economic dependence on Moscow. Deprived of meaningful access to foreign markets, the Soviet Union eventually could not finance its system and collapsed under its own weight.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, Washington has largely abandoned this integrated approach. U.S. leaders leaned heavily on military deployments and blunt economic sanctions, while neglecting the strategic use of diplomacy, information, tariffs, and market access. The result has been incoherence rather than leverage.

Nowhere was this clearer than in America’s approach to China. Policymakers assumed that exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs and nurturing Chinese economic growth would produce a middle class that would, in turn, demand political liberalization. That theory failed. While Washington allowed its own production base to hollow out, Beijing poured state subsidies into domestic defense manufacturing—investing heavily in stealth technology, advanced engines, and artificial intelligence. Revenues from global trade were funneled not toward liberalization but into a more formidable security state, one that is increasingly repressive at home and assertive abroad.

It is time to acknowledge that this strategy did not merely fall short—it backfired. The United States needs a new “Kissinger moment,” one that reshapes the international playing field rather than passively adapting to it. That begins with rebuilding a robust domestic defense-industrial base and ending reliance on a strategic competitor that supplies components embedded throughout America’s military systems. Renewed investment in critical technologies such as NGAP must be paired with sustained support for skilled labor, advanced research, and the systematic removal of Chinese inputs from U.S. defense supply chains.

The first step is reshoring. Every element of the military supply chain should be brought home or relocated to trusted allies and partners. For years, there was little financial incentive for firms to move production out of China. That changed with the 2025 U.S. import tariffs on Chinese-produced goods. Tariffs remain an underused but potent economic lever. When applied strategically, they can push companies to relocate manufacturing to the United States, delivering a double dividend: weakening a competitor’s revenue stream while restoring American industrial capacity and independence.

Second, Washington must spend more intelligently. Taxpayer dollars are finite, and they should not be squandered on bloated civilian staffing levels or obsolete programs sustained by wasteful consulting contracts and grants. Redirecting these funds could fully support mission-critical efforts such as NGAP, which suffered a 23 percent funding cut in the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Trump last December. That reduction risks slowing development, inflating long-term costs, and eroding U.S. technological superiority. The administration’s forthcoming FY27 budget request offers an opportunity to correct course by prioritizing modernization while trimming genuinely unnecessary expenditures.

Reshoring America’s military supply chain and enforcing discipline in research and development spending could together constitute a modern Kissinger moment. Done in concert, these measures would restore supply-chain independence, reinforce technological leadership, and reassert U.S. power in an era of renewed great-power competition.