The US continues to blames China and Russia as threats despite capabilities remaining the same.

Moreover, the quantitative data reveal that this narrative shift has had less to do with the growing capabilities of Russia/China than their ultimate goal to promote a new global architecture based upon multipolarity. The ability of Russia’s and China’s nuclear programs to end the physical existence of the U.S. has remained virtually the same since the end of the Cold War, and while these states have begun closing the military and technical gap between themselves and the U.S., this new geopolitical narrative more closely corresponds to a notable rise in references to their intentions, rather than capabilities. This is seen most clearly by the fact that Russia’s more overt challenge has resulted in it being singled out as the more significant threat over China, which, based upon raw current and future capabilities, is objectively a far larger danger. This raises important theoretical questions about threat perceptions and securitization processes which seemingly have more to do with perceptions about current and future aggressiveness than capabilities. This invites further study.

Finally, LeGreco and Tracy (2009) noted that an equally important aspect of discourse/narrative tracing is to track what is not said. There was little acknowledgment from the American side that it had a substantive hand in precipitating these changes by either promoting a security dilemma between itself, on the one hand, and China/Russia, on the other, or that it has engaged in a grand strategy which has led to overextension and imperial decline. Therefore, according to this (self-)limited understanding on Washington’s part, there appears little that it can do to ameliorate the situation, and no course correction is seen as necessary except for confronting these states when their actions run contrary to U.S. interests. If the pattern leading up to the 2019 threat assessment is any indication, we are likely to see a closer alignment between this intensified threat narrative and a reinvigorated mission to preserve the status quo, without any self-awareness that this policy may be self-defeating. America appears to be firmly in the “’Try Harder!’” phase of strategic thinking, to use Legro’s (2005, 37) formulation. This is reflected in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), which appears to double down on the strategy of pursuing American primacy, even to the point of direct confrontation (Clarke and Ricketts 2017). By doing so, these officials are neither preparing American foreign policy nor its citizens for a revised geopolitical culture better suited to ensure a soft-landing of unipolarity. Consequently, it is likely that the United States “won’t see [the end] coming until it’s too late,” as Schweller (2011) speculated. Thus, a full accounting of why this broader structural change is occurring will likely elude American policymakers for the foreseeable future, leading to an even weaker United States and more fraught great power relations as the defining features of the international system and America’s place within it.