The U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Annual Threat Assessment report, published on March 25, is sobering. Despite a change in government, the strategic threats facing the United States are intensifying. Most concerning, China is enhancing its capabilities across the five domains of warfare, improving its ability to gain coercive leverage against Washington in emerging areas of strategic competition. Deepening military cooperation between Beijing and Moscow is increasingly undermining the United States’ ability to secure its vital interests. Washington must enhance deterrence across the emerging areas of competition to counter the joint threat from China and Russia.
The international security landscape is growing increasingly dangerous. The Federation of American Scientists recently published China’s latest nuclear force estimates. Beijing is now believed to possess 600 nuclear warheads, compared to just 175 in 2010. The Pentagon warns that China will become a nuclear peer of the United States by 2035, when Beijing is projected to deploy 1,500 nuclear warheads across its land, air, and sea-based triad. With increasing cooperation between Beijing and Moscow, Washington’s great power adversaries now possess a combined nuclear force of roughly 6,200 warheads. This figure is nearly double the total force size of the United States’ deployed nuclear forces, which stands at 3,700 warheads.
The current nuclear balance of forces heavily disfavors the United States. Furthermore, the emerging tripolar nuclear landscape is unprecedented. Strategically, the paradigmatic shift in the security landscape presents the United States with novel challenges. While U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking diplomatic inroads with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the relationship with Beijing is worsening. In geopolitics, nothing should be taken for granted. Trump’s efforts to form a strategic partnership with Moscow are not guaranteed success. The unpredictability and uncertainty of the current strategic landscape can ebb and flow in unforeseen ways. If Trump’s strategic gambit with Putin backfires, it could increase distrust between Moscow and Washington.
Meanwhile, the United States’ adversaries, whose enmity toward Washington runs deep and is long-standing, continue their current trajectory of enhancing military and strategic capabilities across the array of threats and domains. A situation that involves a less deterministic China is simply unrealistic. As the DNI report stated, “Beijing will continue to strengthen its conventional military capabilities and strategic forces, intensify competition in space, and sustain its industrial- and technology-intensive economic strategy to compete with U.S. economic power and global leadership.”
Only effective deterrence can contain China’s strategic ambitions. However, Washington is currently ill-equipped to deter in the two-peer landscape. The United States is more vulnerable to a nuclear first strike than it has ever been. This is due to the revolution in emerging military technology and to the sheer force sizes of the U.S. adversaries.
Both China and Russia possess sufficient nuclear forces jointly to credibly target and hold at risk well over 150 of the United States’ largest cities. Indeed, a nuclear first strike against the United States could inflict 130 million American casualties. In 2024, China alone possessed the long-range nuclear ballistic missile capability to hold 72,697,923 American civilians at risk. All it would take for China to inflict unacceptable levels of damage against the United States is for one of its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) to breach U.S. ballistic missile defense.
In space, a domain the United States relies on for critical everyday civilian and military operations, China has now surpassed Russia as Washington’s main competitor. As the DNI report stated, “China has eclipsed Russia as a space leader and is poised to compete with the United States as the world’s leader in space by deploying increasingly capable interconnected multi-sensor systems and working toward ambitious scientific and strategic goals.”
Chinese counterspace capabilities are continually evolving, and Beijing’s space strategy extends beyond intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities and encompasses a range of kinetic assets that can be used to target and strike the United States in orbit, on land, in the air, and at sea. Namely, operational space-based direct ascent capabilities are paired with ground-based space capabilities that can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes. For example, weapons systems such as anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles can destroy low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, striking targets at distances between 800 to 30,000 kilometers above Earth. Furthermore, the diversification and expansion of China’s strategic weapons delivery systems indicates that it will continue to enhance its military power in the space domain. An attack on U.S. space assets would have a crippling effect on several critical areas, from economic to military operations.
In recent years, “the PRC conducted its first fractional orbital launch of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle from China,” stated a Pentagon report from 2023. “This demonstrated the greatest distance flown (~40,000 kilometers) and longest flight time (~100+minutes) of any Chinese land attack weapons system to date.”
According to scholars Caitlin Talmadge and Joshua Rovner, the hypersonic glide vehicle tested was also nuclear-capable. They observed that there is no indication that a nuclear weapon was mounted atop the fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) used. Nevertheless, as Talmadge and Rovner portentously stated: “[While] China did not mount a nuclear weapon on the rocket in this test, it could do so in the future.”
Closer to U.S. soil, China and Russia have conducted joint air and naval patrols along the Alaskan coast. These operations were conducted with nuclear-capable delivery platforms, further demonstrating their ability to target and threaten American vital interests. In July 2024, two Chinese H-6 nuclear-capable bombers operating in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone were intercepted by U.S. and Canadian airmen, suggesting that Chinese incursions into the Arctic are not limited strictly to scientific exploration and economic activities. Accompanied by Russian Tu-95 nuclear-capable bombers, the air patrol was the first time that China and Russia conducted a joint patrol near Alaska.
The DNI report makes clear that the People’s Liberation Army has the capability to conduct long-range precision strikes against the U.S. homeland’s periphery. Last September, Alaskan Senator Dan Sullivan, who also serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “As the world becomes more dangerous, Alaska continues to be on the frontlines of authoritarian aggression. Coordinated activity off Alaska’s shores by the Russians and Chinese is increasing.”
Taken together, the threats the United States now faces from its great power adversaries are unprecedented in their scope, and kinetic attacks against U.S. vital interests across multiple domains can be executed across various levels of warfighting intensity. As the DNI report warned, “cooperation between China and Russia has the greatest potential to pose enduring risks to US interests. Their leaders probably believe they are more capable of countering perceived U.S. aggression together than alone, given the shared belief that the United States is seeking to constrain each adversary.”
In light of the DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment report, Washington must confront the reality that failure to enhance deterrence could incentivize Beijing and Moscow to undertake greater geopolitical risks at the United States’ expense. War in space would have catastrophic consequences, and failure to confront adversarial threats in the United States’ backyard could embolden China and Russia to intensify their challenge to U.S. vital interests.