Americans Are Losing The Long Game

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The sense of purpose and destiny, and the vision and confidence of previous generations, have been replaced by confusion, division and a loss of moral clarity.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