Foreign policy, Walter Lippmann wrote, entails “bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power." If a statesman fails to balance ends and means, he added, "he will follow a course that leads to disaster."

Today, America is hurtling toward such a disaster. Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has possessed uncontested military dominance and enjoyed it at bargain-basement prices. Now, however, America confronts military challenges more numerous and severe than at any time in decades—just at the moment its military resources are showing the effects of prolonged disinvestment in defense. American politicians boast that the nation has the finest fighting force in the history of the world. But the brutal truth today is that the United States is slipping into what Samuel Huntington—building on Lippmann's ideas—termed "strategic insolvency." American military power has become dangerously insufficient relative to the grand strategy—and international order—it must support.

From the mid-1930s through the Cold War, Europe was critical to U.S. strategic thinking, which developed around the assumption that foreign domination of Europe was inimical to U.S. national security. With the end of the Cold War, the United States sought to forge a Europe that was “whole and free.” However, since Putin has returned to office, he has launched a determined effort to reassert Moscow’s influence in areas formerly under Soviet control. Russia’s objective is to overturn the European security order that emerged after the end of the Cold War. As Russia continues to invest aggressively in modernizing its military, many NATO countries continue to pursue policies of disarmament, divest themselves of key capabilities, and struggle to meet NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defense spending requirement. Europe’s political disunity, lack of leadership, and absence of appetite for confrontation with Russia, as well as the weakest United States military presence in Europe since World War II, allow the Kremlin to exploit its growing military capabilities along its periphery. The dwindling presence of NATO forces is now running the risk of failing to deter Russian aggression.

Ambassador Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defence who was among those former security officials to write an open letter against Mr Trump’s candidacy, said every administration suffered teething pains. But he said it seemed the situation currently playing out was different. For one thing, he said, it was unclear whether information from the NSC was making it onto Mr Trump’s desk. “It seems that in some of these calls with foreign leaders, he did not get the pre-brief,” he said. “It meant he was not prepared for things that might crop up.

President Obama came into office with a desire to wind down America’s wars overseas. Today the Middle East is a far more volatile place than it was. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports and Judy Woodruff gets an assessment from Gen. David Petraeus, former Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon, and Eric Edelman, former State and Defense Department official.

Of President-elect Trump’s tweets since winning the election, the one drawing the greatest criticism may well be his comment last week that the United States "must strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes." The next day, his critics went downright ballistic when the president-elect reportedly made the off-camera statement: "Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all." The partisans at the Ploughshares Fund and their paid-for "echo-chamber" colleagues across the disarmament community

As President-elect Trump assembles the team of national security leaders and diplomats who will play crucial roles in shaping how the United States will operate in the world and defend itself against our enemies, he is already challenging some of the pillars of both recent Democratic and Republican foreign policy agendas