or an F-35 or a MIG-XX?..................
Everything can beat an F-35. Its only prayer is electronics and stealth, and to try to be somewhat invisible for a very few short years.
But stealth is essentially hopeless outside of a couple more years.
The limits of physical construction hiding tricks can never hope to match the exponential explosion of computers interpreting radar signals. The end is certain.
Even if you had stealth that was utterly perfect and invisible (impossible) radar is already learning to see the hole in the sky where the “nothing” is visible. Its getting weird.
And being married to a 30 year airframe based on a nearly dead technology, and paying big performance prices to achieve it,,,,is nuts.
I still think the F-14 spanks the F-18.