decision time decisions decisions
let me bring you up to speed:
china and russia are all caught up. There is no technology barrier anymore; in fact, if things continue at the current rate, they are surpassing us in military capabilities as we speak.

What happened? I recall one video in particular where some dudes in the navy were test firing an anti-ballistic missile from an air craft carrier, and afterwards they mentioned that each one of those missiles costs 200 grand. What did Russia and China do? They stole the technology, pirated the schematics if you will, and said to themselves "wait a minute, why does this cost them 200 grand a missle? we can make this same exact friggin thing for less than 3500 dollars a pop"
and so they did.
Because, you see, our government has been fiddling the books with our federal budget; and that overwhelmingly large chunk of the budget going to defense has been bloated up by the defense industry so they can make more money.
Russia and China don't do that. All Russia and China want to do is catch up with the united states and western europe. Their government isn't infected with lobbyists and businessmen like the US government is.

So, what we have now, is a superpower thats lost its edge. No more technological advantage (which has been allowing us to police the world since the late 60s); No more towering industry (which made us a contender to begin with when we powered through world war 2 with sheer industrial power) since all our industry is now run by china

That is why russia and china told us to go fuck ourselves when we wanted to slip into syria; they know that they can take us now. But our leaders are still deluded, thinking we can waltz in wherever we want whenever we want with no one being able to stop us. Must have been a slap in the face when the commies sent warships to the Mediterranean - our leaders still think that any war we get in to will be over in a few days after we blows the stone age extremists out of the mountain caves they're hiding in: not the case. Russia, Iran, and China have a fully competent military more or less the same as ours.
You might think our warships have a secret doodad here or there that makes ours technologically superior to theres, but we don't. The technological playing field is more or less level. We however, don't have the resources or the willpower to be able to win a war right now; china and russia do - they'd love to make us look silly. And making us look silly would probably be in all of our best interest to be honest; we need to stop this policing the world crap