…that answer themselves.
Can the US and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?
Of course we can, and the path to that is in that last bit: spending more on defense (while keeping in mind that a Critical Item for defense is a strong offense) and refurbishing our military-industrial base. Convincing us average Americans to spend more on defense is simpler and more straightforward than it apparently seems to the journalist crowd. It’s necessary and simple to explain the nature and depth of the threat posed by our four primary enemies, listed in my order of risk: Russia and the People’s Republic of China tied at the top; the one as demonstrated by its active shooting war of invasion and steady threats to continue west if its current land grab is successful. The other because of its active invasion and occupation of the South China Sea, seizing territory owned by other nations around the rim of the Sea and controlling sea lines of commerce that are critical to Japan and the Republic of Korea and extremely important to us, its increasing threats to invade and conquer the Republic of China, and the cyber war it’s already inflicting on us.
In third place is Iran, with its near production of nuclear weapons, which it will use promptly to destroy Israel and then shop to its terrorist surrogates and to any others who’ll have the purchase money. This nation already shops its conventional weapons—at heavily discounted prices—to its surrogates attacking Israel and commercial shipping on the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea.
A distant fourth is northern Korea, whose rhetoric makes them worth watching carefully along with shoring up RoK’s and Japan’s defenses and our own in the northern and western Pacific, but not much more than that.
And then it’s necessary and simple, except for those politicians of both parties, to reallocate spending away from the billions of froo-froo already in the budget and toward the defense establishment. The only really hard part (and we all know what “hard” means) is getting rid of the deadwood, both civilian and in uniform, in the Pentagon and streamlining development and acquisition.
For our allies, it’s slightly more complicated (but only slightly). If they don’t want to spend more on defending themselves—especially in Europe and particularly those European NATO members who already are betraying their fellow members with their sloth—then it will be time to stand up a separate mutual defense arrangement among the US, the Three Seas Initiative nations, and Great Britain (for starters), and then walk away from NATO altogether.
And
And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?
There can be no accommodation with enemy nations whose solemn goal, often stated, is to conquer us. This is the goal of Russia and the PRC. Nor can there be an accommodation with an enemy nation whose oft-stated goal is to destroy Israel and then us. An accommodation with northern Korea is almost irrelevant, and wholly unnecessary—just do the watching and regional plussing up.
The cost of accommodating nations with those goals should be obvious—such a step would only be a step closer to their goals for those enemies. Too, that would only be the first step of a short path to our functional destruction: having accommodated our enemies once, they’ll only seek a further accommodation, and then another, then…, until we’re no longer capable of effective self defense.