“There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies—and that is to fight without them,” Winston Churchill famously remarked. The key to adequate deterrence in the future, let alone being able to fight and win against China, is not only about building a better military, it is about strengthening our allies and growing new partners—a core tenet of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Allies and partners are an asymmetric advantage of ours that Beijing cannot match. That’s why China and Russia are trying to neuter this edge while they work to build their own sets of partnerships,
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