Rebeccah Heinrichs – Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute

The Most Dangerous Geopolitical Moment in Modern History

The relative peace that major economies have enjoyed since World War Two was not accidental. It was the product of American economic and military primacy, a deterrence posture credible enough to make major power conflict more costly than any potential gain. That posture is now under pressure in ways it has not been since the Cold War, and the challenge is structurally different. The United States is no longer deterring one adversary. It is deterring two simultaneously, and those two adversaries are increasingly coordinating with each other and with Iran and North Korea in ways that compound the complexity.

Heinrichs is direct about what this means for the trajectory of global risk. Xi Jinping has stated his intention to make China the preeminent military power by 2027 to 2030, displacing the United States as the dominant force shaping global events. China is not merely a rising economic competitor. Its own strategic literature, military investment patterns, and diplomatic behavior all point toward a country on a deliberate path to replace American leadership of the international order. The country that holds that position, Heinrichs argues, determines the rules of international trade and commerce. For business leaders who operate in global markets, that is not an abstract geopolitical concern. It is a direct question about the rules under which their businesses will operate in the next decade.

Rebooting the Defense Industrial Base: Private Capital Enters the Arena

The defense industrial base that the United States built during the Cold War was optimized for a different era. It produced exquisite, expensive weapons systems in relatively low volumes. The conflicts of the past two decades consumed those systems faster than they could be replenished, and the full-scale war in Ukraine has made the gap between production capacity and operational demand impossible to ignore. The Pentagon is now actively seeking a different model, one where smaller companies can deliver roughly 80 percent of the capability of legacy systems at 30 percent of the cost, at scale, and at speed.

Private equity and venture capital have responded. The defense technology investment community, which historically kept its distance from national security applications, has undergone a significant shift. Technology founders and investors who built careers in commercial markets are now applying those capabilities to defense applications, from anti-drone systems and drone swarms to autonomous platforms and AI-enabled targeting. Heinrichs sees this as both necessary and encouraging, while noting that it comes with its own friction. Companies without security clearances operate on different timelines and in different cultural contexts than traditional defense contractors. The Pentagon is learning to speak tech as while tech is learning to speak Pentagon. Both sides need interpreters, and the companies that can navigate both worlds are the ones winning contracts.

What Boards and CEOs Need to Know About China

For the corporate leaders Heinrichs advises, the China question is the most pressing and the most uncomfortable. Her advice is direct: she would not be investing in China. The risks are not hypothetical. Dozens of executives operating in China have faced sudden detention on national security related charges. Forced technology transfer remains a structural feature of doing business in the country. Compliance with laws around supply chain labor standards is nearly impossible to verify when the Chinese government rejects the relevant legal frameworks. And any capital or technology that flows into China strengthens a country that is on a documented path to supplanting American economic and military leadership.

The conciliatory tone that US officials sometimes adopt in diplomatic contexts should not be confused with a diminished threat assessment, she argues. The strategic logic has not changed. China is the buyer of last resort for Iranian oil, the economic lifeline for Russia’s war economy, and the diplomatic cover that has allowed its partners to act with increasing boldness. Decoupling from that system, or at minimum reducing exposure to it, is not protectionism. It is risk management for any company that depends on a stable, rules-based international order to operate. The alternative, a world in which China sets those rules, is not one that benefits open capitalist societies.

Friendly Shoring, Reshoring, and the Supply Chain Imperative

The supply chain lessons of the pandemic and the Ukraine war have reinforced what strategic analysts like Heinrichs have argued for years: critical materials, components, and production capacity that can be held hostage in adversary territory represent unacceptable national security risk. The path forward is friendly shoring, moving supply chains to democratic allies and stable markets, and reshoring, rebuilding domestic production capacity for the most strategically sensitive categories.

Heinrichs points to South Korea as a particularly promising partner for shipbuilding, a capability the United States has allowed to atrophy while South Korean yards have become among the most capable in the world. India represents another major opportunity, a country that is neither pro-West nor anti-West in its formal positioning but is firmly opposed to Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, creating natural alignment with American strategic interests. The semiconductor situation centered on Taiwan’s TSMC is perhaps the most acute example of the chokehold that concentrated critical production creates. Diversifying that exposure, through domestic investment and friendly shoring to allied democracies, is a multi-administration project that requires sustained political will and consistent public communication about why it matters.

The Personal Reboot: From Arabic Student to Nuclear Strategist

Heinrichs’s path to becoming one of America’s leading voices on strategic deterrence began with 9/11. As a college student watching her peers in national security studies pivot entirely toward counter-terrorism and low-intensity conflict, she felt a pull in a different direction. She studied Arabic at Ohio State University, immersed herself in the literature of the counter-terrorism era, and then had what she describes as an aha moment: while everyone was focused on the new threat, the United States was becoming dangerously unprepared for the return of major power competition. This was years before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and well before China’s military expansion became a mainstream policy concern. She shifted her focus to Cold War lessons, nuclear deterrence, and the conditions necessary to prevent major power conflict. The field validated the bet.

The biggest professional challenge she has navigated since making that shift has not been the substance of the work. It has been the communication of it. Think tank research and government advisory roles can produce rigorous, well-sourced analysis that reaches almost nobody. Learning to translate nuclear deterrence theory, missile defense architecture, and great power competition into language that moves elected officials, business leaders, and ordinary citizens has been its own discipline, one she describes as not just valuable but essential. Her advice to anyone entering the national security field, or any field where technical expertise meets public consequence, is to master the subject first and then invest equally in the ability to explain it to someone who does not share your background. In an era of information warfare and thirty-second news cycles, the analyst who can do both is the one whose work actually shapes outcomes.