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America's new defence strategy is a document that comes out every four years, and this one, of course, is the one everyone's waiting for under Mr Trump. Jim Mattis, the defence secretary, is going to release it on Friday. I've been speaking to defence officials who tell me that it's going to see a return to great power competition and name China and Russia as part of that. And that continues, really, with the Trump focus on Russia and China at the very top of his national security strategy which came out in December. The Pentagon's response is really the blueprint for defence planning.
Why is the Pentagon worried about Russia and China? The US, after all, is still by far the most powerful military in the world. There's no contest between China, Russia, and America. However, a defence official who is familiar with the document told me that China and Russia have made huge leaps and bounds in the past 10, 15, 20 years and really have been investing in new technology and actually aiming that technology at vulnerabilities on the US side. So for example, the official told me that China's hypersonics works - that is planes and ballistic missiles that fly faster than the speed of sound - are deliberately an effort to puncture a hole, as you will, in America's defences.
Are there risks for this strategy? Well, there are two obvious ones. The first is the Pentagon says it simply doesn't have the budget yet. The Senate is on Trump's side, there's a bipartisan effort to push through a much higher budget, but it all depends on an overall budget deal, and that is still, it seems, really quite far off. The second risk that detractors talk about is really what does anyone gain from an arms race? The more people put effort on the inevitability of some kind of clash between the US and China, the more it's likely to bring that to bear.
