The US has essentially on omnipotent traditional military force that can either engage or assure mutual destruction of any opponent on the earth. Nobody can compete successfully. But humans are crafty, and come up with ways to defeat irresistible force.
As we've seen predicted for 20+ years and demonstrated in the public space for 10, our nation's weakest link is that election system and political finance system, particularly for legislators. The checks and balances that are supposed to prevent egregious behavior are broken (see what happened to most US Attorneys since 2016, the impeachment circus, and 100 other things at the state/local level).
Building dossiers on Americans are a great, obvious way to wield this power and to target and enable espionage/influence activity. Recall that the federal agency that keeps records on background checks was breached a couple of years ago. So now you have a hostile nation state that knows everyone, and all of their background data, with security clearances. You can cross-walk that with Equifax information, health insurance breaches (Recall that Blue Cross was also breached), etc and do all sorts of interesting things.