"What the government didn't reveal is how many zero days it discovered in 2023 that it kept to exploit rather than disclose. Whatever that number, it likely will increase under the Trump administration, which has vowed to ramp up government hacking operations."

This is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. The world would be better off if everyone disclosed every such exploit for obvious reasons. But if government A discloses everything and government B reserves them to exploit later, then government B has a strong advantage over government A.

The only responses then are war, diplomacy, or we do it too and create yet another mutually assured destruction scenario.

War is not going to happen because the cure would be worse than the disease. The major players are all nuclear powers. Diplomacy would be ideal if there were sufficient trust and buy-in, but it seems unlikely the U.S. and Russia could get there. And with nuclear treaties there's an easy verification method since nuclear weapons are big and hard to do on the sly. It'd be hard to come up with a sufficient verification regime here.

So we're left with mutually assured cyber destruction. I'd prefer we weren't, but I don't see the alternative.