Americans Are Losing the Long Game

How the United States abandoned the future.

Simon Curtis is an associate professor in International Relations at the University of Surrey, and a WISC Global Fellow at the Development Research Institute at New York University.

Ian Klaus is the founding director of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace California Center.

They are co-authors of “The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order” (2024, Yale University Press).

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 The sense of purpose and destiny, and the vision and confidence of previous generations, have been replaced by confusion, division and a loss of moral clarity.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.

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.

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.

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 transitio