America’s Great Enemy Isn’t China or Russia Anymore

Key Points and Summary – America’s most dangerous rival isn’t China or Russia—it’s its own debt.

-Dr. Andrew Latham argues that a federal debt near 100 percent of GDP now acts like “strategic gravity,” pulling resources away from defense and compressing U.S. options before crises even begin.

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-Rising interest costs squeeze the Pentagon, hollow force structure, and weaken the defense-industrial base just as long-term competition with Beijing and Moscow demands stamina and surge capacity.

-Debt also poisons domestic politics, turning foreign policy into a partisan budget fight. The real danger is not sudden collapse, but a slow loss of strategic freedom bought on credit.

America’s Quiet Adversary Is Debt 

Washington is again focused on the usual suspects. China builds ships. Russia updates its nuclear arsenal. Iran makes mischief.

The map gets peppered with arrows; the threat briefing slides write themselves. But the most consequential threat to US power is not marching under a foreign flag.

It is sitting in plain sight, quietly accumulating and compounding, constraining every strategic choice the United States makes before a shot is fired.

America’s debt trajectory—now taking federal debt held by the public to about 100 percent of GDP, total federal debt to more than $38 trillion—will not soon bring the republic to its knees. But it is no longer just an economic problem. It is becoming a structural constraint on US global power.

It is not that debt will “collapse” the United States tomorrow.

Great powers rarely fall that way. But it is that debt will increasingly determine whether, and how, the United States can effectively balance and blunt rivals like China and Russia over the long term.

Strategy, after all, is the art of matching means to ends. Debt corrodes the means.

Debt as Strategic Gravity 

For most of the post–Cold War era, Washington acted as if fiscal reality were optional. It went to war on credit, solved crises with emergency spending, and postponed structural reforms in favor of political convenience. The result is a federal debt burden that is no longer episodic or crisis-driven but permanently baked into the system.

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Debt is, at some level, manageable. The United States issues the world’s reserve currency, its capital markets remain deep and liquid, and there is no imminent bond vigilante apocalypse. But strategy is not about apocalypse. It is about friction.

High debt acts like strategic gravity. It pulls resources inward. Interest payments—now running at just under $1 trillion annually, roughly the same size as the defense budget itself—crowd out discretionary spending. Budget politics become zero-sum: every dollar spent servicing past commitments is a dollar not available for future power, whether that power takes the form of ships or satellites, stockpiles or industrial resilience.

This matters because balancing China and blunting Russia is not a short-term war problem. It is a generational competition problem. Sustained competition requires patience, predictability, and fiscal stamina. Debt corrodes all three.

The Hollowing of Military Choice 

The most apparent effect of debt is pressure on defense spending. Not immediate collapse, but chronic, multi-year strain. Modern militaries are expensive not only to build, but to sustain. Precision weapons, resilient logistics, space architectures, and high-end training all demand steady investment over decades.

Debt changes the political economy of force structure. It encourages the postponement of big-ticket decisions, stretching program timelines and total costs. It incentivizes underinvestment in readiness while preserving headline platforms. It favors symbolic commitments over durable capability. Taken together, over time, this produces a military that looks good on paper but is difficult to regenerate, adapt, or surge.

The United States will not suddenly disarm. But choices will become harsher. Naval recapitalization or missile defense? Forward basing or homeland resilience? Deterrence in Asia or reassurance in Europe? Debt narrows the margin for error and punishes strategic indecision.

Exercise Artemis Strike is a German-led tactical live fire exercise with live Patriot and Stinger missiles at the NATO Missile Firing Installation in Chania, Greece from Oct. 31-Nov. 09. Over 200 U.S. soldiers and approximately 650 German airmen will be participating in the realistic training within a combined construct, exercise the rigors associated with force projection and educate operators on their air missile defense systems. The 10th Army Air Missile Defense Command will deploy, operate and fire live missiles within a tactical scenario, under Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe operational readiness evaluation criteria.

China knows this. Russia exploits it. Neither needs to defeat the US military directly if American leaders defeat themselves through fiscal paralysis.

Debt and the Politics of Restraint 

Debt also reshapes domestic politics in ways that directly bleed into grand strategy. High debt amplifies polarization. It turns every foreign commitment into a domestic culture war, every overseas deployment into a budget line item rather than a strategic instrument.

The result is a paradox. On the one hand, debt strengthens the case for restraint. A state burdened by obligations must prioritize core interests, avoid discretionary wars, and husband resources. On the other hand, debt-fueled dysfunction makes disciplined restraint harder to execute. Instead of strategic pruning, Washington lurches between overextension and abrupt withdrawal.

Rivals thrive in that environment. Russia wagers that Western unity will fracture under the strain of fiscal and political dysfunction. China bets that US attention will be divided, its alliances underfunded, and its promises increasingly hedged.

Debt does not force retreat. It raises the political cost of leadership.

The Industrial Base Problem 

Less visible but equally dangerous is the way debt distorts America’s defense-industrial ecosystem. Competition with China, America’s long-term “pacing challenge“, is as much about production as it is about platforms. It depends on whether the United States can build, repair, and replace at scale under stress.

Debt encourages short-term budget fixes that hollow out that capacity. Production lines slow, workforces age out, and supply chains are stretched thin. The result is a force optimized for peacetime efficiency rather than wartime endurance.

China’s advantage is not simply lower costs. It is the strategic patience of an authoritarian state backed by sustained investment. Russia, despite its economic limitations, has demonstrated that mass and improvisation can offset technological gaps. Debt makes it harder for the United States to respond in kind, even when it knows what must be done.

The Real Enemy Is Time 

It is easy to frame debt as an economic problem with strategic side effects. The truth is closer to the reverse. Debt is a strategic problem with economic symptoms. It shapes time horizons. It compresses options. It rewards adversaries willing to wait.

China does not need to “win” tomorrow. Russia does not need global dominance. Both benefit if the United States becomes a power that reacts rather than shapes, manages decline rather than sets terms.

That is the quiet danger. Not bankruptcy, but a gradual loss of strategic freedom.

A Harder Kind of Strength 

Debt does not doom American power. But it demands a different kind of strength, one rooted in discipline rather than dominance, prioritization rather than promiscuity. It pushes the United States toward a grand strategy that balances and blunts rather than crusades and controls.

The irony is sharp: the same debt that so constrains American power may yet save it—if it forces Washington to distinguish between what is vital and what is merely habitual.

China and Russia are real competitors. They will test US resolve, probe its alliances, and exploit its mistakes. But the most decisive battles will be fought in budget committees and industrial planning offices, in the slow, unglamorous work of aligning means with ends.

Great powers rarely fall to external enemies alone. More often, they are felled by strategic exhaustion bought on credit. The question facing the United States is not whether it can outspend China or intimidate Russia. It is whether it can govern itself well enough to remain a power worth balancing with—and against.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for the National Security Journal.