After Bob Kagan writing an article on how the U.S. is facing "total defeat" in Iran (see my article yesterday) you now have Max Boot – the very author of "The Case for American Empire" and one of the most vocal advocates for the Iraq war – publishing a Washington Post interview explaining that China has surpassed the U.S. in most military domains.

If anything, Boot's interview is even more devastating than Kagan's piece, because it's not editorial opinion – he's interviewing John Culver, a former top CIA analyst (he was national intelligence officer for East Asia) and one of the world's foremost authorities on the Chinese military which he's been studying since 1985.

This isn't a pundit opining – this is someone who spent decades inside the intelligence community staring at the actual data.

So what is Culver saying?

In case of war with Taiwan, the U.S. will flee the theater

This is undoubtedly the single most stunning revelation in the entire piece. Culver says that – as far as he is aware – the Pentagon's plan in case of war with Taiwan is… flee!

This is the exact quote:

I think some of the thinking in the Pentagon, and it may have evolved since I retired, is that when we think there's going to be a war, we need to get our high-value naval assets out of the theater, and then we would have to fight our way back in. From where, it's not clear. Guam is no bastion either.

Why? Because, as he explains, any high-value U.S. assets would be sitting ducks in the entire area. China can strike U.S. forces deployed to Japan, Australia, or South Korea "in a way that Iran really can't" and, given that Iran has hit at least 228 targets across U.S. bases in the Middle East – forcing the U.S. to evacuate most of them – that's saying something. Also, U.S. aircraft carriers would need to operate within 1,000 miles of the fight to matter, which – given it's well within range of Chinese missiles – they won't.

As Culver bluntly puts it: "There's really no safe spaces."

China leads in most military domains – and it's not even close

Culver says that "it's hard to not be hyperbolic" about China's military capabilities and that, at this stage, "it's hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage."

In some critical areas, such as advanced munitions – which, when it comes to war, is pretty damn relevant – his assessment is that China leads by "magnitudes." As a reminder, an order of magnitude means 10x so, by assuming he meant what he said, "magnitudes" means at least a hundred times more, meaning U.S. capabilities would be less than 1% those of China.

At the same time, Culver also says that "whichever side runs out of bullets first is going to lose." So if China produces "magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce" – as he puts it – then you don't need a PhD in military strategy to put two and two together…

The picture, if anything, is even more damning in shipbuilding capabilities. He reminds that a single shipyard in China – Jiangnan Shipyard, on Changxing Island near Shanghai – "has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined."