Xi Knows How Many Patriots We Have Left. Do You?
Here’s the scene. President Trump shakes Xi Jinping’s hand on the marble steps of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing this week. The CEOs of Boeing, Nvidia, Goldman Sachs, and Apple line up like a corporate honor guard. Cameras everywhere. Then Xi opens his mouth and asks, quite calmly, whether the United States and China can avoid the Thucydides Trap.
If you are not steeped in international relations jargon, here is the short version. According to Harvard scholar Graham Allison, who popularized the phrase, the Thucydides Trap describes what happens when a rising power bumps into a ruling one. Allison studied 16 such matchups across history and found, according to his Belfer Center research at the Harvard Kennedy School, that 12 ended in war. The ancient reference is Athens and Sparta, but the modern application Allison had in mind is the one playing out right in front of us. Xi was politely asking Trump if we know how this story usually ends.
Here is why his timing was not random. As Xi was crafting that question, an NBC News report dropped revealing that the Pentagon has not signed any new contracts to replenish the munitions we just emptied into the skies over Iran. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in the first 39 days of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. military burned through nearly half of its stockpiles of several key munitions, including Patriot and THAAD interceptors and Precision Strike Missiles. Sen. Mark Kelly, citing classified briefings on Face the Nation, said it was “shocking how deep we have gone into these magazines.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a Senate hearing on April 30, conceded it would take “months and years” to rebuild.
Months and years. Plural.
According to a piece in The Dispatch by Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute, we fired more than 1,200 Patriot interceptors during the Iran fight. We launched roughly 150 THAAD interceptors during last summer’s earlier conflict, while we only produce somewhere around 36 of those a year. The math is not subtle. Eaglen notes that at current production rates, replacing what we fired in two weeks would take about three and a half years. Military Times reported the broader replenishment timeline at up to four years.
Now picture the Beijing meeting again. Xi knows all this. He reads the same headlines we do. When he raises Thucydides, he is also reminding the room that we just spent a fortune in firepower on a country that was not a peer competitor, while our actual peer competitor sits across the table holding rare earth supply chains and most of the world’s chip packaging. Defense Secretary Hegseth has put the Iran war’s price tag at $29 billion, according to Al Jazeera’s report on his congressional testimony. Inflation hit 3.8 percent in April, its highest in nearly three years, and gas prices are climbing right along with grocery bills.
That is the squeeze. We are paying more at the pump, paying more at the store, and our missile bins are running low, all at the same moment China’s leader floats a polite question about whether we can avoid the kind of war neither of us could really afford.
We are not powerless here. We are voters, taxpayers, and the people whose kids would do the actual fighting if the wrong instinct wins. Ask your senators and representatives whether they have read the briefings Kelly is talking about. Ask what “winning” looks like when the cupboard is bare. Xi already asked his question. Now we should ask ours, loudly, before someone else answers for us.
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