The reason America’s leaders so underestimated the threats that the Russian and Chinese militaries posed ultimately had less to do with them and more to do with us. We have been blinded by the myths we have told ourselves—that, with the end of the Cold War, the world had transcended great-power competition and conflict, that, in the words of The 9/11 Commission Report, transnational threats such as terrorism, not great-power rivalry, were “the defining quality of world politics.”
