United States of America (U.S.)

The geopolitical landscape has entered a critical and highly volatile inflection point, defined by deepening transatlantic divisions and an unprecedented destabilisation of the global security architecture. The outbreak of intense military confrontation in the Middle East has accelerated this fragmentation, as the United States initiated pre-emptive operations against Iran, prompting Tehran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Given the Strait’s pivotal role as a strategic artery for global energy supplies, the administration of President Donald Trump called on European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to deploy naval units and provide military support to secure the passage. European capitals, however, rejected the request in a unified stance.   This refusal triggered a marked escalation in diplomatic tensions with the US administration. The European position rested on the absence of prior consultation and on a strategic assessment that classified the conflict as a discretionary war, falling outside the Alliance’s geographic remit and exceeding its defined defensive mandate. In response, the United States administration intensified its rhetoric, openly threatening withdrawal from NATO, describing the Alliance as a "paper tiger", and casting doubt on its military and political effectiveness.   This confrontation has transformed the prospect of a retrenchment in US security commitments from a theoretical possibility into a scenario under active strategic evaluation. Consequently, transatlantic relations have shifted from a framework of fixed commitments to one increasingly governed by transactional, interest-driven engagement. Assessing the likelihood of a US withdrawal, therefore, necessitates a comprehensive review of the governing international frameworks, the domestic constitutional constraints limiting executive authority, the military ramifications of withdrawal, and the potential future trajectories of Europe’s defence architecture.

A defence economy comprises the fiscal, industrial, and budgetary systems through which a state finances, maintains, and adjusts its military capacity. During peacetime, these systems tend to remain stable; in wartime, they become the main mechanism through which conflict transforms a nation’s economic structure. The escalation of Israeli military operations since October 2023 and the broader confrontation with Iran and its regional proxies have caused a defence-economy shift, leading to significant realignments in how the conflicting sides allocate public resources, incur debt, and prioritise expenditure.   This analysis examines how sustained military escalation has reshaped the defence economies of its three key actors: Israel, Iran and the United States. It assesses both short-term fiscal responses and longer-term budget trajectories, arguing that the conflict has not produced a temporary spending spike but a structural transformation, one that has widened deficits, crowded out civilian services, mobilised domestic defence industries, accelerated sovereign credit deterioration, and embedded elevated military spending into national budgets in ways that will persist well beyond any ceasefire. Across the Middle East, the boundaries between battlefield expenditure and national economic health have become increasingly difficult to separate.

The concept of “America First” is not a new one in the realm of US foreign policy. The term was first made popular during World War 2 when the America First Committee was formed by Yale student Robert Douglas Stuart Jr. and US Veteran General Robert E. Wood which advocated for American neutrality and building up strength through the American people, military, and economy. The idea of reducing the US active engagement in conflict to focus on its own interests caught the attention of Donald Trump, who pursued his own version of “America First” with varying results over the course of his two nonconsecutive terms as US President.   President Trump’s application of “America First” has been inconsistent since resuming office in 2025. This past year saw a series of deviations from the concept of “America First” including assisting Israel in the 12-day war with Iran, the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and threats towards Iran regarding regime change amid protests. These threats became realized when the US and Israel carried out an unprovoked aerial offensive against Iran, which resulted in the deaths of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several Iranian military officials. With the conflict still ongoing and regime change seeming to be the desired outcome, the conclusion can be made that this conflict signals a shift in President Trump’s “America First” policy. This shift will be explored through redefining “America First”, the Israel factor, and domestic support to get involved in a confrontation with Iran during a consequential election year.

The fundamental character of modern aerospace warfare has undergone an irreversible paradigm shift, transitioning abruptly from the deployment of exquisite, highly survivable platforms to the brutal arithmetic of industrial attrition and affordable mass. This operational reality was starkly illuminated in late February 2026, with the commencement of Operation Epic Fury by the United States Armed Forces and the parallel Operation Roaring Lion executed by the Israel Defence Forces.   Following the collapse of nuclear negotiations, the allied coalition launched a massive preemptive military campaign. Deploying an overwhelming concentration of aerospace assets, the coalition struck over one thousand strategic targets deep within Iranian territory during the opening twenty-four hours. United States forces executed over nine hundred individual precision strikes in the first twelve hours alone, utilising stealth bombers, naval fighters, and cruise missiles, escalating to more than one thousand, two hundred, and fifty targeted strikes within forty-eight hours. Simultaneously, the Israeli Air Force conducted over seven hundred sorties on the first day, dropping more than one thousand two hundred munitions to achieve immediate tactical successes and air superiority.   However, the immediate and sustained retaliation by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, designated Operation True Promise IV, has placed an unprecedented and mathematically gruelling strain on the allied integrated air and missile defence architecture. Within the first forty-eight hours of the conflict, the adversary entente launched roughly four hundred and twenty medium-range ballistic missiles targeting many countries in the region. This barrage was accompanied by massive swarms of loitering munitions. The staggering depletion rates of multimillion-dollar interceptors and precision strike munitions against high-volume, low-cost adversary threats have exposed a profound mathematical vulnerability in contemporary military logistics. As the global defence industrial base proves incapable of replenishing these exquisite arsenals at the speed of combat consumption, both the allied coalition and the adversary entente are confronting a rapidly approaching logistical exhaustion horizon. To continue the war and secure a decisive strategic victory, it is an absolute strategic imperative for both sides to aggressively substitute these high-end, legacy assets with scalable, cost-asymmetric alternatives, pivoting their operational doctrines toward deployable mass and continuous attritional endurance.

This analysis provides a comprehensive analysis of the United States economy as of November 2025, addressing the query of whether its current status is one of a "boom" or a "downslide." The principal finding is that the economy is exhibiting clear signs of downsliding in the immediate term. This assessment is substantiated by a pronounced deceleration in the labor market and a pre-emptive, counter-inflationary interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve, which has explicitly prioritized mounting employment risks over persistent inflation.   The 2025 economy is uniquely defined by the simultaneous implementation of two contradictory, multi-trillion-dollar policies. This has created a state of extreme tension and volatility:   A Contractionary Trade Shock: A new, aggressive tariff regime has been implemented, acting as a significant, broad-based tax on imported goods. This policy is demonstrably raising prices, eroding household purchasing power, and creating a drag on economic activity.   An Expansionary Fiscal Stimulus: The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (OBBBA) was passed, enacting a massive, deficit-financed stimulus by extending the 2017 tax cuts. This policy is designed to boost demand and investment.   The current "downsliding" dynamic is a direct result of the tariff shock's immediate contractionary impact, which has, for now, overpowered the stimulus. The Federal Reserve's October 2025 decision to cut interest rates confirms its judgment that "downside risks to employment" constitute the most immediate threat.   This analysisU.S.  forecasts a volatile and unstable path. The 2025 slowdown is expected to give way to a temporary, stimulus-fueled "sugar high" in 2026, as the OBBBA tax cuts take full effect and boost demand. This artificial boom is projected to fade quickly by 2027-2028, revealing an economy structurally strained by a gross national debt exceeding $38 trillion, a persistent $1.8 trillion annual deficit, and a deteriorating net international investment position of -$26.14 trillion. The new policy mix has locked in this structural weakness.  

China has a long-term goal to be a global leader in technology. To achieve such ambition, the country has taken serious steps widening its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) traditional infrastructure projects to incorporate digital infrastructure projects embodied in the Digital Silk Road (DSR). The DSR was initially launched in 2015 by the government as an idea on paper and during the opening ceremony of the First Belt and Road Forum in May 2017, China’s President Xi Jinping, adopted the DSR term officially and it was incorporated in the government’s BRI strategy as the digital dimension.   The DSR initiative focuses on building digital infrastructure and exporting its technology to the beneficiary countries, it includes telecommunications infrastructure, like 5G networks, overland fibre-optic cables, data centres, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), as well as applications that support e-commerce and mobile payments, along with smart cities and surveillance technology.  Additionally, the DSR provides support to Chinese tech companies, like ZTE, Huawei, and Alibaba, to carry on the work with the beneficiaries.   The DSR aims to enhance Beijing's global digital influence as it creates opportunities for a wide range of cooperation and partnerships between Chinses tech companies and other beneficiaries around the world in areas of digitalization and AI. China’s DSR encompass a variety of projects in 5G deployment, e-commerce platforms, and AI applications, such as DeepSeek which is an alternative model to ChatGPT.   China signed DSR cooperation agreements with several countries in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. The cooperation takes place between scientists and engineers from the recipient country and Beijing, like opening a training centre or in research and development (R&D). The areas of cooperation are wide, including smart cities, AI and robotics, clean energy, and surveillance capabilities, like data localization. GCC countries are considered one of the important partners to China’s DSR, where it is closely integrating in the GCC digitalization goals.

On October 1, U.S. reports stated that President Donald Trump gave the green light to provide Ukraine with intelligence information to strike deep into Russia’s energy infrastructure sites, while studying providing Kyiv with long-range weapons that can be used in such strikes. The reports also indicated that Washington is encouraging the NATO allies to take similar actions.   The U.S. has already been providing intelligence to Ukraine since the beginning of the war; however, Trump's signalling to provide more sensitive information could hold different consequences on the outcomes of the war. Since his second-term inauguration, Trump has vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine war, so does this decision come in parallel to the American President's ambition to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv, and how this might implicate the Russian and Ukrainian sides.

The shooting of the right-wing conservative activist Charlie Kirk on September 10 at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, during a question-and-answer debate, reflects the deep divisions in American society and the political landscape and represents a repercussion of the polarised America and increased political violence.   Where Ideological polarisation in the U.S. has been deeply rooted in society, and recent times have witnessed a more divided landscape over the governmental domestic and foreign policy directions, including taxes, immigration, aid to Ukraine, and Israel's war in Gaza. Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, the U.S. government has been providing extensive military, financial, and diplomatic support for Israel. Additionally, the U.S. repeatedly vetoed several UN ceasefire resolutions, widening the gap between the government's direction and the street, especially among younger generations. The American campuses witnessed a wide range of protests against Israel's war in Gaza and in support of Palestine, which were met by violence from the police forces, arrests, and threats of deportation for foreign students. Similarly, Kirk has been a strong supporter of Israel and its actions in Gaza but raised doubts on Israel’s security breaches and how Hamas was able to penetrate Israel's defence system.   Kirk was a symptom of the polarisation in the U.S. His opinions rallied many people around him and often clashed with the Democrats’ views, raising questions about the possibility that his shooting was a manifestation of deep polarisation inside American society and whether divisions over issues such as gender, immigration, and the Gaza war are key incentives for the ongoing polarisation-induced violence in the U.S.   With the mayoral and midterm congressional elections approaching, questions are raised about whether the Republican Party will utilise the political violence fuelled by intense polarisation to secure electoral gains and whether the Democratic Party can overcome internal divisions and capitalise on the concerns about the Trump administration’s heavy-handed response to Kirk’s assassination.

Amid Trump’s meetings with Russian & Ukrainian counterparts to reach a prolonged ceasefire, questions arise about the possibility of a successful peace plan occurring between Moscow & Kyiv with a U.S. mediation. Yet, with Putin’s demands from one side and Trump’s ambiguous promises to Zelensky from the other side, will the Ukraine war come to an end?