Americans Are Losing The Long Game

The application of power, especially for Great Powers, is an exercise in time. In an auspicious year — the 250th since its founding — the United States has looked back to its revolutionary past but has shown little indication of developing a clear vision for its future. And with little apparent inclination to do so, rarely has the country seemed more adrift in the flow of history. This comes at a bad time. China’s rise has given the United States a strategic competitor intent on building its own version of tomorrow.

As the Trump administration uses its second term to try to flex the sinews of American might, the sources of American power have never seemed less well understood. The sense of purpose and destiny, and the vision and confidence of previous generations, have been replaced by confusion, division and a loss of moral clarity. Many truths once held to be self-evident are now questioned. Perhaps what has been most keenly lost is the sense that the wellsprings of national strength come from thinking intergenerationally and harnessing the power of the future, both in terms of planning and rhetoric.

But this is the wrong moment to abandon future generations. China has been preparing for decades to rival the United States in shaping the institutions and architecture of international order — first slowly and cautiously, and now increasingly assertively. China has been playing a long geopolitical game; one the United States is currently losing. In fact, it is essentially sitting out the game, trapped in nostalgia and short-termism, as China consciously builds institutions and infrastructures designed to project power across decades.

The real contest between China and the United States is not the surface froth of conflict over tariffs, shifting military capabilities, or even the development of frontier technologies like artificial intelligence or clean energy. It is a deeper and slower contest over who offers the most compelling vision of the future, and who can bring that vision into being.

The Loss Of The Future

One of the most striking features of the contemporary moment in the United States, and in the West more generally, is the sense of temporal disorientation. Once, dreams of building a better tomorrow powered the United States to victory in the Cold War. For the West, a strand of history did end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, just not in the way we expected. From 1989 onward, rather than the unending triumph of a liberal order, the West faced a strange series of crises through which it lost the historical thread altogether.

The Cold War and its most symbolic moments were an intergenerational game. The United States once reached for the stars with state-guided Cold War technological moonshots, built the architecture of a new liberal international order and defended it with a sense of intergenerational collective mission, and shaped cities and infrastructures around the world with the power of its economic model. Today, the U.S. is unmoored from that sense of historical destiny.

Much of this disorientation can be traced to cultural changes in the fabric of American society. Among them is its cultural orientation to time. This temporal disorientation takes multiple forms — but in each the future becomes opaque.

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that swept Donald Trump to power began as a reaction to the failed promises of globalization, and discontent over the priorities of elites and their failures to address the concerns of everyday Americans. But as its name suggests, its orientation to time is deeply nostalgic; a wistful longing for some poorly articulated and mythical past. Part of MAGA’s failure in government stems from its lack of a compelling future-oriented vision for either domestic or international society.

But the roots of America’s problems in articulating a compelling future go far beyond MAGA. It is part of a broader crisis of time that the West has wrestled with throughout modernity. For many decades now, the political and economic culture seems trapped in a perpetual present that emphasizes short-term cycles: two-year midterm electoral cycles, four-year turnarounds in administrations whose legislative achievements are immediately unpicked by the next regime, quarterly business cycles that curtail long-term investment, 24-hour news cycles, even the rapid-fire video reels that characterize social media consumption today are but the latest manifestation of a long trend.

Prior to the end of the Cold War, the cultural critic Frederic Jameson sought to chart and diagnose our more recent confusion in time: the lost threads of historical narrative, the temporal dislocation and stasis of our politics. When Jameson described the cultural condition of postmodernity, he was describing a collective loss of confidence in the futures that modernity once promised; its productive energies now exhausted, history now but a mosaic and collage constructed selectively by the powerful, collective purpose dissolved in an acid of consumerist images and desires, the idea of building a future utopia no longer something that we can believe in without irony. For decades this state of stasis was undisturbed by a significant external threat or real geopolitical competitor, and so its corrosive effects were overlooked. Both time and the rare moment of unipolar power that emerged in the 1990s were squandered.

Now two such challenges disturb this malaise: the rise of China and the existential threat of climate change. And yet the seemingly permanent constraint on the temporal horizon is effectively neutering the West’s ability to meet either challenge.

Cycles Of Decay & Renewal

We needn’t be so hard on Americans. As the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe has noted, the West at large has foreclosed on the idea of any world to come or any imagined future. Exit is impossible, he winks in French; the longue durée is a dead idea. But of course, most Western powers are not great powers, and their roles in geopolitics — even when united in suprajurisdictions like the European Union — don’t rival the world-shaping power of the United States.

But China’s role does. Unlike the United States today, China builds its geopolitical strategies over decades. Its one-party state rolls on in pursuit of an international environment that better reflects its own domestic values and priorities, unperturbed by the political or economic storms of the present, or the vicissitudes of democratic politics. Democracies must find a way to somehow match the ability of China to dictate a geopolitical strategy that unfolds over decades if they are to build new institutions that successfully compete in the long game.

Equally disconcerting has been the eruption, at the margins of our consciousness and culture, of the concept of deep time and the realization that our societies and economies are intrinsically entangled with the systems of the natural world; that the Anthropocene is a reality that any sustainable future must come to terms with, and that untrammeled consumption and growth bring with them their own reckonings.

The deep time of the Anthropocene necessitates stretching our temporal horizon much further into both past and future and thinking about the legacies we leave to future generations around the climate and intergenerational justice. It alerts us to the reality that we must now leave behind nostalgia and expand our temporal imaginations.

China has done so, thinking through these challenges in ways that seek to capture the future. As one pillar of its bid for international leadership, it is developing an “ecological civilization” to bridge long-term geopolitical positioning and the challenge of the Anthropocene by constructing the technologies, infrastructures and cities that might make the concept a reality.

These are the kinds of world-shaping energies and ambitions that the United States once had. The United States is often considered to be a young country, but the fear now is that it is caught in a vortex of self-regarding ennui. This may be the normal trajectory for great powers, whose civilizational energies, once expended, can tail off into decline. Can a new generation of Americans, now quite far removed in time from its founders, recover within themselves and within these foundational principles, the sources of renewal that will allow them to break with the gravitational pull of history’s cycles of decline and fall?

For, if not, then the citizens of the United States, so long in the vanguard of shaping and building the future via their vast productive energies, innovative capacities and institutions, may end up living in somebody else’s future.

Grand Strategy & Scale

The Cold War-era American diplomat George Kennan thought the geography of the United States naturally determined its geopolitics. And while the bicoastal nature of the country has offered advantages and shaped policies, the scope of U.S. influence has scaled well beyond the contours of its geography.

Since World War II, the United States has scaled its influence in notable ways. First, it has linked domestic institutions and international order. A historic example is how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s was woven into the fabric of the United Nations and other nascent international institutions, as the U.S. shouldered the responsibility of crafting a new international order from the ruins of World War II.

It is in vogue now to disparage the Biden Administration’s foreign policy, but attention to Gaza or the Afghanistan exit should not distract from how well the administration understood this linkage between domestic and transnational scale, and implicitly time. The centerpiece of Biden’s domestic and international program — and the hinge between the two — was the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, which sought to kickstart a green energy transition that would bring jobs to the country’s post-industrial heartlands. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former national security adviser, described this aim as turning the Rust Belt into a “cobalt corridor,” while also renewing U.S. leadership abroad by helping to craft solutions to the intractable international challenge of climate change. This initial attempt to build a new connecting bridge between domestic and international renewal stalled and was then decisively reversed in places upon Trump’s return.

One crucial strategic approach among all U.S. administrations since World War II has been nurturing the alliance system, which allowed the United States to achieve its hegemonic position and, until recently, presented a great challenge to China’s ambitions. The Trump Administration’s myopia has made it nearly impossible for the United States to predictably shape events beyond its borders, especially in the long run.

Gone now are two notable long-held U.S. strategic advantages: a linkage between the domestic agenda and foreign policy, which enabled intergenerational strategic investments, and the robust network of allies and institutions that allowed it to project its power and values. To the loss of the future on a temporal scale, we must add the loss on a spatial scale: a failure to think across both time and space.

The resources needed to power success in the 21st century are dispersed around the globe: supply chains of critical minerals and rare earths, sustainable energy resources, pools of talent and expertise. These are the resources required to sustain leadership in the emerging geopolitics of artificial intelligence, the transition to sustainable clean energy and biotechnology.

It has never been enough to be the most innovative, to dominate the frontiers of technological innovation. Jeffrey Ding, a George Washington University scholar whose work has become increasingly influential in debates about U.S.-China competition, argues that technological contests between great powers are ultimately won not by breakthrough inventions but by the patient and long-term work of diffusion. This tracks with the wider histories of technology by scholars like Carolyn Marvin and David Edgerton that focus on uptake or adoption rather than invention.

The societies that prevail are those that can construct infrastructures, train people, build institutions and reorganize production around new technologies. This is the painstaking work of decades, rather than the one-time boost that comes from inventing a new frontier technology. This historical lesson is especially relevant to the geopolitical competition between the United States and China today, where the U.S. holds a lead at the frontier but has thought less about diffusion.

Access to transnational resources requires not just maintaining good international relationships but also constructing and controlling intricate transnational infrastructure. This is exactly what China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been building over the last 13 years. Its new Silk Roads are the filaments of rail, road, maritime commerce, digital systems, energy transmission and smart cities that can generate, shape and carry flows of resources, goods, people and influence. By building infrastructure and shaping cities far beyond its borders, China is working to ensure that momentum is angled toward its own growing center of gravity.

China is putting production, scale and control over key transnational resources at the heart of its foreign policy. It is focusing not on frontier technological innovation, but on diffusing technological benefits throughout society through careful national planning. This model diverges significantly from Washington’s. This is China’s long game.

In the mid-2010s, before becoming one of Washington’s most influential China strategists, Rush Doshi was a doctoral researcher at Harvard University embarking on an unusually painstaking exercise. He sifted through three decades of Chinese-language speeches, policy documents, party communiqués and military writings in search of an answer to a simple question: Did China really have a coherent strategy for challenging American primacy? Rather than a sudden turn under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Doshi found evidence of a remarkably consistent long-term effort to blunt, and eventually displace, U.S. dominance in the post-World War II international order.

Under Xi’s leadership over the last decade and more, this long-term strategy has accelerated. The Belt and Road Initiative is its material infrastructural core, winding its way from ports in the Indian Ocean and rail corridors across Central Asia into Europe to fiber-optic cables reaching down through Pakistan to East Africa, and to ambitions for transcontinental power transmission systems and digital infrastructures.

By building out these material footings, China is constructing infrastructures to carry the leading technological transformations that will shape this century, and perhaps beyond. Artificial intelligence and an alternative internet are enrolling states into China’s enlarging sociotechnical system across Eurasia and Africa. The types of domestic transformations, including the most intense period of urbanization in human history and a radical reinvention of the domestic economy, have changed the nature of Chinese cities and infrastructure, generating cutting-edge modern metropolises such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chongqing, and are now being transmitted to other countries with Chinese labor, expertise and capital.

And because cities reflect the dominant societies that create them, Chinese influence will spread outward, just as new forms of connectivity will place China at the core of a new material and economic order. In its recently unveiled 15th Five-Year Plan, Beijing doubled down on the industrial strategy of using state economic planning to drive investment in technology, infrastructure and dominance of critical supply chains that has underpinned its rise for four decades.

It is not enough for Silicon Valley to be the first to push the frontiers of new technologies. Being first will not alone lead to victory. The United States continues to be a world leader in many frontier technologies, including artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, cloud computing infrastructure, biotechnology platforms, space launch systems and quantum computing research. But the old free market model of cascading benefits from private enterprise and investment that then flow throughout the economy is now being pitted against a very different model: a huge state willing to carefully direct its vast resources to diffuse technology throughout its own society and, via the mechanisms of transnational infrastructure it is building beyond its own borders, to reshape international society.

Although the commanding heights of creativity and innovation may continue to reside in the U.S., China is building the infrastructures of diffusion that may ultimately extract the greatest benefit from those innovations, increasing its soft power, influence and appeal to other states along the way.

The big labs of Silicon Valley are currently gripped by fear that China’s approach to opening its AI models to international partners may undermine the closed-source, proprietary model approach developed by U.S. firms and give China growing global influence in the AI systems race. As Washington well knows, China has already developed significant control over many of the world’s critical supply chains needed for those technologies, including those for processed rare earths vital for building the digital architectures and artificial intelligences of the future, and for batteries and robotics.

As Sullivan has argued, it will be the societies that most successfully capture and deploy resources at scale that win the future, and many of those resources reside far from America’s shores. These are the “nodes of leverage,” as Sullivan describes them. Donald Trump found this out when trying to apply pressure through tariffs on China.

There are challenges to be sure. China has an aging population, a burgeoning debt cloud, an extended property sector crisis and still lacks genuine soft power and allies. Its increasingly centralized political system could yet become a source of weakness. And yet it has realized that successful grand strategy today requires thinking about space and time in ways that register the importance of both transnational scale and the long term. If the U.S. is to compete successfully, it will need to remember how to think in those terms.

In Search Of Time Future

How can the United States rework its political culture and institutions to take these concerns on board and shape its strategic orientation toward a new form of international society fit for the current century?

Although we have come to think that the unfettered free market and capitalism’s unimpeded creative energy led to the Soviet Union’s defeat, this reflects historical forgetfulness. During the Cold War, the federal government invested both at home and abroad to shape the outcome of that hegemonic contest.

Many constituents in the U.S. have forgotten the historical importance of what the Harvard historian Charles Maier called the “Project-State” – states driven by a deep sense of ideological and historical mission that use their resources to generate far-reaching social, political and economic transformation. Such states might be democratic or authoritarian in character and ideological mission. Maier writes of the history of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, but also of the United States under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the restructuring of both domestic and international society that Roosevelt’s project-state enacted.

The project-state, by its very nature, plays a long game. It cannot exist in the culture of short-termism and the diminished temporal horizon of contemporary America. Today, China, with its clear sense of ideological mission and long-term strategic planning, more closely resembles the history-making project-states of the past. Maier, now in his late 80s, has expressed concern that the U.S. — hollowed out by market ideology, rising populism and a loss of national cohesion and democratic mission — has forgotten its sense of itself as a collective, intergenerational history-shaping project.

Success for great powers needs long-term purpose: a shaping vision of how to build a better domestic and international society that can solve the pressing problems of the day without discounting the future. If it is to change direction, future American power would need to consider and build into its strategic planning all of the issues raised here: the relationship between state industrial policy and technological innovation, the way in which innovations are diffused through society, as well as the infrastructures and urban environments needed to shape lives through technological advance — not just domestically but transnationally.

Above all, democracies must transcend their culture of short-termism and treat rebuilding their domestic and shared international societies as a long-term intergenerational project. Rather than simply looking back on its 250th anniversary, the United States must play the long game and consider the next 250 years.

Sullivan’s instinct that the material well-being and economic prospects of the middle and working classes must be the starting point is a good one, as is the deliberate linking of international and domestic society. But more needs to be done to fully conceptualize and forge a new link between them.

Many paths might be taken, but some more interesting and influential debates are underway that could shape a post-Trump and post-MAGA direction. The so-called abundance agenda, for all the attention and subsequent criticism it received, provides a helpful template for moving beyond the now-exhausted laissez-faire of the last half-century.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue for accelerating the latent yet blocked productive potential of American technology and society. They seek to rediscover the lost optimism and long-termism that once defined America — a new socio-technical imaginary of the future — alongside the institutional and state capability needed to realize it.

America’s ability to construct a future better than its past, despite many of the technological building blocks already in place, is, they argue, strangled by red tape, an excessively legalistic culture, increasingly polarized politics, and most crucially, a loss of the state’s capacity to build, coordinate and direct long-term national development.

In many domains like clean energy, scientific and biomedical innovation, technological breakthroughs exist, but the infrastructures of diffusion are absent because of a lack of state-driven investment and fragmented governance. Transmission and grid infrastructure for solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear technologies are lagging. America is a leader in biomedical science, but greater state investment in scientific institutions could drive research into real-world applications and rollouts. America’s problem has never been the frontier, but the failure to deploy and diffuse technologies at scale in areas where markets alone have proven unable to coordinate collective action.

The abundance agenda is animated by the transformative potential of frontier technologies like artificial intelligence, clean energy, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing, but it requires technological innovation to be matched by the institutional ability to deploy it through renewed investment in infrastructure, scientific research, energy transmission and the transition to a sustainable energy system.

At its heart is a politics of building: restoring the state’s capacity not merely to regulate markets, but also to shape them in pursuit of long-term national renewal. One missing policy mechanism is a sovereign infrastructure institution, such as a Strategic Investment Fund, that could unlock private capital reluctant to take on the long-term investment risks required for major national and international infrastructure projects. In this way, vast pools of private capital may be unlocked that could help the United States and its allies match the infrastructure-building scale and strategic reach of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

When the United States constructed the post-World War II architecture, it inevitably brought many elements of its own domestic experience to that task. The ideological underpinnings of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its focus on federal state-led programs of reform and renewal after the Great Depression, also shaped many of the financial and institutional governance structures of the new multilateral order — specifically the United Nations. This established a link between a great power state’s domestic agenda and its ability to craft a wider international order. The New Deal emerged out of the New York context, where Roosevelt cut his teeth politically before becoming president.

Today, however, technology is likely to be at the core of any renewal of the United States’ social contract, so we must look to California for clues about its development. The transformational impact on society of advances in artificial intelligence will test what type of political economy will shape America and its key allies’ futures.

California’s outgoing governor, Gavin Newsom, who’s also potentially gearing up for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, has had a ringside seat as Silicon Valley has pushed the boundaries of AI in recent years. Newsom has watched this development and tried to think about the way progressives can harness it to improve society. Rather than accepting the current paradigm, his progressive backers have been drawn to the idea of an “AI New Deal,” echoing an earlier time of similar economic instability and rising authoritarian powers. He has also referenced the abundance agenda in state legislation and argued for an “abundant mindset.”

Newsom has expressed concern for the disruptive and potentially harmful effects of AI for American workers, issuing executive orders directing state agencies, academia and industry to think about safety nets for displaced workers, including state subsidies incentivizing companies to retain and upskill employees, as well as exploring the idea of “universal basic capital” providing workers with a stake in asset funds to offset wage losses brought about by AI. Newsom seems aware of the need for a social compact to absorb short-term shocks from the technology.

If Newsom were to gain the Democratic nomination in 2028, then his dispositions may well be an indication of America’s future direction — a subnational model transposed to the larger scale canvas of national and international politics, as well as a new direction in that perennial question of how to link the domestic to the international scale, and thus to the shaping of international order.

Although many pathways may be taken in the post-Trump, post-MAGA world, the ideas being pursued by thinkers, policymakers and politicians such as Newsom, Sullivan, and Klein and Thompson all point to the need to link American domestic renewal with international order. Sullivan’s foreign policy for the middle classes sought to learn from Trump’s appeal to working-class Americans.

But where Trump’s instinctively treats America’s relationship with the rest of the world and its allies as a zero-sum game, Sullivan recognizes that the relationship must be bidirectional and therefore — mutually beneficial. U.S. foreign policy must return to a form of moral leadership. Trump’s approach breaks the symbiotic connection between a beneficial international order and the public goods and advantages that flow from it. Critically, it also threatens to deny the United States the transnational scale and reach to compete effectively with China if its allies turn away.

Here then is a coda, from, of all places, Angola. In December 2024, Biden became the first American president in nearly a decade to visit a sub-Saharan African country. For it was in Angola that one of the flagship transnational infrastructure projects of the U.S.-led G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment (PGII) was to begin — the Lobito Trans-Africa Corridor project — a strategic transport and logistics corridor to connect the port city of Lobito by railway to the interior of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia, areas rich in critical minerals like cobalt, copper and other rare earths for the technological transitions in both clean energy and AI. Angola symbolized a shift in American foreign policy toward long-term investment in transnational infrastructure, driven by a dawning realization of China’s growing influence.

With the Trans-Africa Corridor project and the even more ambitious India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor project under the Biden administration, the U.S. and its allies had started to copy some of China’s playbook: a focus on maritime ports, transport connectivity through corridor development, securing supply chains of critical minerals, and support for digital infrastructure. The big difference was the central role of private-sector finance, rather than direct state investment as in the Chinese model.

Transnational infrastructure as geopolitics had belatedly made its way to the core of U.S. foreign policy; an overdue turn to thinking about the nature of strategic competition on both spatial and temporal scales. With the change in administration, America moved away from this approach.

The Twilight Of Primacy?

Paths to renewal and decline are both on offer. If the wrong path is taken, then the moment of American primacy will have lasted about a century — a familiar historical pattern.

A more exceptional path would be for a Great Power to reforge that link between a compelling renewed domestic social, political and economic model, and a different form of international order that crafts a new future for the United States and others. At the same time, China is also feeling its way toward its own version of such a link. And, as Xi has made clear time and again, China feels that time is on its side.

Great powers are ultimately judged not by the wealth they accumulate or the weapons they possess, but by the futures they can persuade others to inhabit. All of the major challenges that face humanity — the development of artificial intelligence, the transition to clean and sustainable energy, the working out of a new model for the world economy, the relationship of people to their political institutions, the balance of power between ambitious and competitive states — are subsumed by this overarching task of linking a successful domestic paradigm to the architecture of international order.

Can the next generation of U.S. leadership rise to these challenges as their forebears once did? The central question facing this generation of policymakers is whose future they want Americans to live in: the one they build, or somebody else’s.

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