Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the parameters of the next round of global state-on-state security competition are now in full view. Long after history was declared to be at an end and America’s “unipolar moment” was so lyrically heralded, the world today looks nothing like such post-Cold War projections. The rules-based liberal global order has proved to be a chimera while  the fundamentals of economic power as the foundation of military strength have once again been reaffirmed. Despite decades spent cajoling people to believe that they owe a higher allegiance to institutions transcending the nation-state, all too many remain stubbornly unconvinced. This new era of great power competition will likely remain with us for the rest of our lives; rapid escalation and, ultimately, war are no longer merely a theoretical possibility.

This is not to say that the changes wrought during the preceding decades were all for naught. Although the core principles of great power competition are as true today as they have always been, over the past three post-Cold War decades the distribution of power has shifted significantly across the globe, and in some regions quite dramatically. The world has become more complex both in terms of technology and social cleavages, but also more rudimentary: For America and the West more broadly, questions of national power, national sovereignty, and ultimately national survival are now more urgent than they have been since 1945. The lesson here is not that timing is everything, but rather that strategic vision—along with the capacity to expect the unexpected—is what matters most when nations approach systemic inflection points such as those we are at today.

The United States and Europe come to this current round of great power competition burdened by several serious handicaps. The confrontation between the United States and its competitors China and Russia is increasingly global, posing a dilemma akin to that of a two-front war. Even if one does not fall prey to the exaggerations of China’s wealth and technological progress commonly afflicting accounts of that country’s rise, it is nevertheless clear that the United States needs to move beyond the “status quo power” handicap—namely, the reluctance to take risks by pushing back against revisionist states, and the attendant desire to seek accommodation. For almost half a century, analysts have labored under the delusion that China can be brought into the liberal international system through economic development, in the process morphing into an approximation of a Western democracy. The belief that economic access will somehow “domesticate” the Chinese communist regime has always been lacking in empirical foundation. Indeed, the examples invoked by many in political science, such as the political evolution of South Korea  and Taiwan, have been misapplied; in both cases the strategic imperative of remaining close to the United States shaped their domestic politics. The fundamental change in our view of China as a power hostile to the United States, intent on replacing America in the international order, should be the underlying assumption of any debate about U.S. global strategy going forward.

This means that in the near term we must make every effort to “onshore” the critical elements of our supply chain that we have so ill-advisedly farmed out to Asia. We need to recall the Cold War lesson that technological superiority rests not only in design but, more importantly, in processes, alloys, composites, and so on—namely, in our technological culture writ large. During the Cold War the Soviets could steal Western designs for weapons systems, but they had to rely on their own technological culture to produce their versions. In contrast, we have transferred the crown jewels of American technological know-how to China, the devastating consequences of which become clear when we compare the parameters of our systems with theirs, and measure the shift in the balance of power. “If you are in a hole, stop digging,” goes the old American adage. This applies in spades to our decades-long trade policy, which has allowed China to enter the WTO, to claim “developing country” status, and to continue to extort American corporations for their most treasured economic secrets in exchange for market access. Enough already.

Putin’s Russia presents a different challenge to U.S. global supremacy. Russia is a revisionist power intent on creating a sphere of privileged interest along its periphery, including in Europe, but it lacks the resources to mount a frontal challenge to the United States. However, Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated his thorough understanding of full-spectrum statecraft, including the application of military force to achieve clearly defined political objectives. Putin’s ability to selectively invest his country’s limited resources, whether in new military hardware or in campaigns such as in Syria and Ukraine, has yielded outsized results. The key to Russia’s successful challenge to the rules-based order in Europe has been Putin’s ability to anticipate the deeply ingrained risk aversion of key powers in Europe. Hence, despite having kicked over the table on which the leading states in the European Union sought to set the future of the European order, Putin still continues to dangle before them visions of a “grand deal” that would address Russia’s “legitimate security concerns.” His gamble in Ukraine, meanwhile, has polarized the European Union, and especially has widened the rift over differing threat perceptions between countries like Germany and France, on the one hand, and the former Soviet satellites and the Scandinavians on the northeastern flank on the other. The growing discord within the European Union and NATO has yielded a debate over what, during the Cold War, would have been considered a mortal threat to the unity of the West, as seen in today’s rather loose talk about the need for European “strategic autonomy”—as though some of NATO’s most vital European allies were now tracking toward an emancipatory policy that could ultimately leave the United States outside. In short, the challenge to the United States posed by Russia, notwithstanding the country’s relatively weak economic position when compared to China’s, is much more intricate and insidious, for it threatens to undermine and dismantle the foundations of the Transatlantic security system.

The United States is at an inflection point, one in which our choices going forward will have a transformative impact on our security and that of our allies. This is a “late 1940s moment”—one that requires a massive adjustment in how we view and interact with other key players in the international system and what priorities we set going forward. Today Washington appears to have finally awakened to the reality that long-cherished assumptions about what the world would look like after the Cold War were fundamentally flawed. It is almost uncanny that this most profound redefinition of U.S. foreign and security policy has been produced during the Donald J. Trump presidency—at a time when American politics have become polarized to a point few thought possible only a decade ago. And yet, through its National Security Strategy and its National Defense Strategy, the Trump Administration has produced arguably the first coherent articulation since the fall of the Berlin Wall of the world as it is rather than as we wish it to be, free of pious shibboleths and expressing a determination to redress past mistakes. What needs to happen now is the translation of these key strategic documents into guidance that will shape the restoration of our military capabilities and those of our allies. This is our “late 1940s moment,” a latter-day version of the reorientation that yielded our present defense infrastructure and ultimately led to the creation of NATO. The West needs to pull together yet again. The clock is ticking.