They have good birds ... always will. But, they lack alot of intangilbles. We have decades of combat experience, from WWII to Korea to Vietnam to the Middle East. Russian and Chinese Air Forces haven’t faced a real air to air enviroment since the early 1950’s. We have grown and learned and adapted based on experience and have developed a complete system of battle management that is combat tested. It isn’t just the pilot and warplane. They have great warplanes ... but we have better everything else from pilots to AWACS to electronic warfare to command and control, etc.
The only thing we are untested in and could cause problems against a major foes (Russia and China) would be facing an enemy with the ability to hit our airbases hard with SSM and cruise missile capability. Operating combat ops under fire with critical infrastructure degraded or destroyed is something we haven’t had to face in a long time. We train for it, but this is an area where our systems are untested.
As for dealing with Syria or Iran ... these would be nice birds in their inventory ... but would be meaningless in the overall balance against us or Israel because of their shortcomings in so many other key areas.
This is good news. I likes me a target-rich environment, I do.
TC