SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: By the time the next president is sworn in, the American empire will be gone.

https://x.com/policytensor/status/2044195845977903269

By empire, I mean the US military position in the Old World, not the invulnerable position that the US enjoys in the western hemisphere. This does not mean that all US bases out there will be closed. What I am saying is that the US response function and force posture that gives them teeth will be gone. The US will no longer be in the business of trying to control political outcomes through the use of force or the threat thereof outside the western hemisphere.
More precisely, I am predicting that the US will embrace a grand-strategy of hemispheric defense and abandon the policy of preventing the emergence of regional hegemons in the three core regions of Eurasia—Europe, Persian Gulf, East Asia—that it has followed since the Second World War. 
Why am I predicting this? Let me walk you through my line of reasoning.
It has now been established beyond reasonable doubt that the US does not have the military wherewithal to disarm Iran and retake Hormuz. The core intelligence failure of the US military was to simply assume that the problem of disarming Iran could be solved by a large enough interdiction air war. That assumption has proven to be catastrophically wrong and is the fundamental reason why we have to sue for peace and offer Iran a far-reaching rapprochement to get out of this mess.
What explains the great intelligence failure? It has happened because insufficient attention was paid to gaining an accurate picture of Iranian strength; because insufficient attention was paid to the limits of the air weapon; because insufficient attention was paid to the diffusion of precision-strike capabilities and the attendant revolution in the balance of global power. 

What has happened was, in fact, anticipated by the DoD. Specifically, Andrew Krepinevich at the Office of Net Asssessment spelled out very clearly, already in the early-1990s, how the diffusion of what was then a US monopoly far and wide would result in the emergence of ‘a mature precision-strike regime.’ 

He warned in multiple papers over the years, along with the rest of the A2/AD alarmists, that a mature precision-strike regime may severely constrain America’s ability to project power in regions containing a mature precision-strike power. 

The mature precision-strike regime has arrived. And it is by definition multipolar. There are now four great powers in the international system, three of them in a de facto counterbalancing alliance against the United States. 

Beyond the decisive proof of having defeated the United States, Iran is a great power ultimately because of the formidable human resources at its disposal — it produces more engineers every year than the US. 

Beyond that, Iran is a great military power because it is a highly specialized missile power. Iran fired 2,200 SRBMs and MRBMs in the forty days of war. That is as many as the Pentagon told Congress exist in the Chinese arsenal last year. So Iran punches far above its weight because it made long-term investments in the missile weapon, the decisive weapon of the mature precision-strike regime.
In order to understand what defeat in West Asia means for the viability of the global US force posture, we need to pay attention to the fundamental problem of maintaining the American military position anywhere near a great missile power like Iran, Russia or China. The fundamental problem is that of base vulnerability. 
Iran was able to utterly destroy all US bases within the range of its SRBMs. This forced the US to concentrate its high value assets in Saudi bases beyond the reach of Iranian SRBMs. But Iran was able to inflict heavy damage there as well with drones and MRBMs, bagging two E-3 airborne command posts that quarterback the battle and many refueling tankers. Iran was also able to destroy more than a dozen radars, which are some of the least replaceable, most expensive, and most well-defended assets in the whole world. 
The upshot is that base vulnerability proved to be a much more serious problem than the US military had reckoned. The trillion dollar question is what does this imply about the vulnerability of US bases in Asia. This is a question of paramount importance. For if US bases in Asia can survive under Chinese fire, then one could still hope to deter China; if not, deterrence in Asia is gone. This is what I meant to suggest in my brief response
 to @stephenwertheim
 today.
It is really important to understand why base vulnerability is the forcing variable for the viability of deterrence in Asia. The reason has to do with the hard fact that the US cannot even prosecute a war without functioning bases in the region. The surface fleet is just not survivable anywhere within the Second Island Chain, so the US must rely on undersea assets and air power to fight China. But attack submarines must return to naval bases for reloading and retrofitting, and warplanes must return to air bases. Both are fully exposed to Chinese missiles. The US military intelligentsia calls this the end of sanctuary era. 
There are two proposals to solve the problem posed by base vulnerability to the American world position. I will show that neither works. 
Civilian military intellectuals like @tshugart3
, Alan Vick, Mark Ashby, and more recently Anderson and Press (2025, International Security) have argued that hardened aircraft shelters (HAS) may be an effective solution to the problem of airbase vulnerability. In particular, Anderson and Press show that, given China’s missile inventories, US losses in a month-long war can be reduced to tolerable levels (<100 out of 400) with dispersal, HAS, BMD and jamming. 
Anderson and Press (2025)
On the other side of the debate is the chief of US air forces and others in the Pentagon. They argue that HAS can be overwhelmed by missiles and is not worth the candle. Their alternative is called Agile Combat Employment (ACE). The ACE proposal suggests that what we should do is disperse the warplanes to scores of austere air fields, and have them hop around. 
Here is why neither ACE nor HAS works. 
Both rely on the proposition that Chinese missile inventory is scarce. That if you increase the aim points enough (ACE) or make the destruction of aircraft on the ground difficult and expensive enough (HAS), you can purchase sufficient base survivability. 
This assumption is wrong for two reasons. 
The first reason is what I have described as the problem of the strategic defender
. It is China that gets to decide when they call our deterrence bluff. This means that China can — and absolutely will — maximize its war preparedness to peak precisely when it attacks (‘time table war,’ as Max Werner described the German idea in the 1930s). In particular, China can afford to stockpile overwhelmingly large inventories of the required missiles. 
The second reason is that we do not have a good counter to this problem of overmatch because, at the end of the day, there is no way for us to catch up with China’s defense-industrial base now. China can absolutely produce enough missiles to overwhelm all the concrete shelters on all the bases from Singapore to Guam, without breaking much of a sweat. 
Anyone who now wants to propose that we hold the line in Asia and maintain our deterrence posture needs to explain how the problem of base vulnerability can be solved.
In the final analysis, the problem of base vulnerability is a hard problem. There is no good solution to this problem. And therefore deterrence in Asia is dead. The underlying reason for the nonexistence of a solution is the fact that China is now vastly more powerful than the United States. 
The United States will soon reach an accord with Iran that marks Iran’s acceptable as a great power whose interests must be respected. What this means is that the days of playing empire in the gulf region are over. With deterrence in Asia dead, the American position in Asia is also now past is sell-by date. And Europe has already been abandoned. 
So the end of the empire is now in sight. 