Despite advice from wiser heads, US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth swallowed the bait from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and launched a miserably conceived, poorly executed and catastrophic war on Iran earlier this year.

Trump is no FDR and Hegseth is no Carl von Clausewitz; it’s more like Dumb and Dumber Went to War.

These are the same people New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines’ leaders are betting the family farms on.  Weep, my beloved country.

• READ MORE: Is the United States prepared for a war with China?
• US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Other war on Iran reports

The Iran lesson: the practical limits of US power
For people in the Asia-Pacific region, the failure of the US-Israeli war on Iran should seriously bring into question long-standing alignments with the US. If the contest between the US and China ever goes kinetic, it is highly likely the US and its allies will be defeated.

The consequences for all the people of Asia-Pacific, all the way down to New Zealand, will be immense.

If the two behemoths refrain from striking the enemy’s mainland, the heavy blows will fall on allies like the Philippines, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand.  I think that was part of the signalling when China fired a nuclear-capable ICBM into the Pacific last week.

This was immediately after Australia signed a defence pact with Fiji, and New Zealand announced it was joining the US-led Project Arcadia — a Five Eyes programme designed to build an AI-enabled, integrated digital battlespace command system. In other words, much deeper integration with the US war machine.

In December 2025 someone in the US establishment leaked to The New York Times “The Overmatch Brief” — a secret Pentagon summary of years of US war-gaming that showed the Chinese outgunned the US in all the areas that will count in a conventional war.

Whoever that person was, I suspect they were trying to avert war, trying to stop the kind of imbecilic decision Trump made just months later in the attack on Iran.

At the heart of the problem for the US and its allies is the West’s steady decline in manufacturing capacity. Modern wars are, as strategists said in the Second World War, about who can get the most stuff to the battlefield.

China is now the factory of the world and, if faced with a war, it can rapidly ramp up production of all the weapons of war to a level that is beyond the ability of the West to respond.

The leaked Overmatch Brief recognised that America’s preference is for high-value weapon systems like aircraft carriers and the performance-plagued F-35 jets that are likely to be overrun by vast numbers of Chinese weapons systems produced at a fraction of the cost.

Faced with China’s synchronised opening salvos of hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and anti-satellite warfare, US forces could face immediate sensor blindness and possibly a crippling blow to key assets within days.

Dr Andreas Krieg of King’s College London is a leading Gulf expert who I follow closely. He spoke recently on Middle East Eye’s “Unapologetic” about the war on Iran: “I think it has undone the American empire in a way that I don’t think the American empire will bounce back.

“It is probably the most seismic shift in regional power we have seen in the past 30 years or so.”

In all likelihood, the US-Israeli war on Iran has been paused, not ended, but certain home truths are clear.

Thanks to Trump and Hegseth we have seen the practical limits of US power. Short of scaling up and bringing in 500,000 to 1 million troops, and the full weight of the US navy, army and airforce, Iran cannot be defeated.

Success, if possible, would likely take years, by which time global energy would be wrecked for a generation, triggering an economic calamity.

Setting aside the illegality, immorality and depravity of such a campaign, what is clear is we are witnessing the end of US global hegemony and the slow, violent birth of a multipolar world order.

If long-besieged Iran — the world’s 51st-ranked economy — was able to force the Americans to sue for peace, what are the prospects of the US getting an ass-whopping from a China that has the military and the manufacturing power, the home advantage and, above all, the existential need to see off the Western empire?

As with the Gulf states which recently sided with the US, reparations demanded — in this instance by China — for such a war could be staggering for America’s Pacific allies.

A peer-on-peer war is a different beast
There are important differences between the US attack on Iran and a peer-on-peer war with China. The Iranian strategy was to hit US bases, hit Israel and escalate horizontally by attacking US allies in the Gulf.

Iran had to absorb tens of thousands of strikes without replying in kind (say, sinking a warship).  Sinking the US fleets will be the first order of business if war breaks out with China.

Any attack by the US on the Chinese mainland will almost certainly be immediately answered by at least reciprocal strikes on the US mainland. Heaven help any allies (that’s us) who paint a target on their backs and join the Americans.

Empty shelves and the innovation question
New Cold War warriors like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington underscore the importance of technological innovation in winning wars. Fair point. America has impressive capabilities in this space but China is a fast-follower and, increasingly, a leader.

One example: China has built the DF-27, the world’s first intercontinental anti-ship ballistic missile, a carrier-killer that can hunt its prey for 8000km.

In its report  “Is the United States Prepared for a War with China?” (2026), CSIS evaluated US military capacity after the clear overreach of the war on Iran. Along with numerous other military analysts, CSIS highlighted the rapid expenditure of hard-to-replace missiles, interceptors and other munitions that, along with commitments to the Gaza genocide (not their term) and the war in Russia and Ukraine, have left the shelves perilously low on supplies for America’s next war.

The reality is US defence is run first and foremost for the benefit of a private sector that is hugely overpriced and slow-to-deliver. It will take years to get the stockpile of precision cruise missiles (like the SM-6, SM-3 IB, JASSM, and Tomahawk) up to anything like a level to fight a superpower-on-superpower war.

Should this surprise anyone? The military-industrial capacity of China now dwarfs Uncle Sam’s. Guess who can produce the most long-range drones, naval drones, interceptors and whatever weapon of war you could choose?

China today accounts for about half of all global shipping production by tonnage — much of it can quickly be converted to wartime production. The US builds less than 2 percent and is woefully slow. The Americans continue to invest heavily in aircraft carriers (nine more are on the drawing board), each costing in excess of US$10 billion — despite hypersonic missiles ensuring any that are within thousands of kilometres of a war zone will almost certainly be sunk by a swarm of missiles.

China’s deep structural resilience, its mature leadership, and its careful marshalling of its resources, makes it the likely victor in a war no one should start and possibly no one can decisively win. War is madness. Diplomacy and moderation are the cure.

For all the reasons above, the current defence settings in both Australia and New Zealand are wrong-headed and wedded to a world that is rapidly disappearing into the rearview mirror.  The specific perils our leaders are placing us in is the subject of my next article.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He also contributes to Asia Pacific Report and he hosts solidarity.co.nz