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similarities and shared interests are far more important than the differences.
    Russia and China are increasingly expansionist, whatever the short-term weaknesses of their economies. Beyond its incursions into Ukraine, Russia is gaining power in parts of the former Soviet Union, through the Customs Union and its expanded successor, the proposed Eurasian Union, an alternative to the European Union. Russian influence is also growing in Central Asia. China is becomingmore economically dominant in the South and East China Sea and in Asia generally.
    Both Russia and China have increased their military budgets substantially while the United States is dramatically scaling back its military expenditures. Whether in spite of or because of their recently troubled economies, Russia and China have become increasingly nationalistic and aggressive, while America, worn down by a decade-plus of wars, has become inner-directed, even isolationist. Russia and China are pursuing systematic plans to upgrade their militaries and expand their conventional forces; the United States is slashing its defense budget and reducing the size of its conventional forces. Moreover, under President Obama’s often rudderless leadership, the United States not only lacks a clear strategy but also has been forced to implement a series of additional automatic cuts, mandated by the budget sequester, that experts across the board—including the last two defense secretaries, Republican Robert Gates and Democrat Leon Panetta—agree will be profoundly damaging.
    The same story is playing out in the nuclear area. Again, we see the United States reducing its arsenal sharply—and President Obama contemplates doing so even more dramatically—while the Russians and Chinese have, if anything, taken advantage of arms-control agreements and their own technological advances to upgrade their arsenals and expand their capabilities. The U.S. retreat from the nuclear playing field is not just apparent in offensive capabilities; the American missile-defense shield that protects both our homeland and our European allies is gravely deficient as well, as we have described. And our allies don’t even buy missile-defense technology from us anymore: Turkey, a NATO member, purchased its $3 billion missile-defense system from Beijing. 2
    Recent reports of Chinese hackers stealing drone technology to use for offensive weapons and also to globally export underscore thedegree to which cyber crime remains a huge challenge—especially from China, but also from Russia. Despite our apparent success in disabling the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz through the Stuxnet virus, the U.S. shows no sign of having formulated an effective policy that would discourage the Chinese (and the Russians, to some extent) from their huge and ongoing cyber war against us. Put another way, our cyber defenses are not nearly as sophisticated or broad-ranging as the NSA’s capabilities for monitoring and collecting data on our own citizens.
    Economically, America’s decades-long advantage is wearing away. Experts predict that sometime in the next decade, China’s economy will surpass ours as the world’s largest; some suggest that China will take the lead as early as 2016. Domestically, the American economy shows signs of recovery, although it has been a largely jobless recovery thus far. We might be saved yet by an energy boom from horizontal drilling: We must continue production of domestic oil and energy sources, in particular through fracking, which in a short time has brought tremendous hope to the U.S. economy and begun to transform the global energy market (much to Russia’s detriment, if trends hold). An all-out commitment to fracking is critical if we are to break the hold of foreign oil on our domestic economy and compete with Russia and especially China.
    American economic success overseas pales beside the influence the Chinese have been able to gain in the last decade. China has put its incredible