In the year of its 250th anniversary, the US is looking back at its revolutionary past but presenting no clear vision of the future, write Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus. The sense of purpose, destiny and self-confidence of earlier generations has been replaced by confusion and division. At the same time, China is playing a long-term geopolitical game, building institutions and infrastructure that project power over decades.
The authors attribute this loss of direction to a cultural relationship with time. Although the MAGA movement emerged in response to the unfulfilled promises of globalization, it remains nostalgic and offers no vision of the future. More broadly, political and economic culture is trapped in short cycles: two-year election cycles, four-year policy reversals, quarterly business results and 24-hour news cycles.
Even before the end of the Cold War, Frederic Jameson described the postmodern cultural condition as a collective loss of faith in the futures promised by modernity. This stagnation went unnoticed as long as there was no real rival. Now, according to the article, two challenges are disrupting this complacency: China's rise and the climate threat, but the shortened time horizon undermines the West's ability to respond.
China, by contrast, plans geopolitically over decades. The Belt and Road Initiative, which has been under construction for 13 years, connects ports, rail corridors, digital systems, energy networks and “smart cities” across Eurasia and Africa. The one-party state is not hampered by the fluctuations of democratic politics. The recent 15th Five-Year Plan reaffirms its industrial strategy of state planning for technology, infrastructure and critical supply chains.
The authors stress that technological competition is decided not only at the cutting edge of innovation, but also by how widely it spreads. The US remains a leader in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, cloud computing, biotechnology, space systems and quantum research. But, as scholars such as Jeffrey Ding argue, the winners are societies that build infrastructure, train people, create institutions and reorganize production around new technologies. China emphasizes precisely this spread, while controlling critical supply chains, including those for processed rare earths.
The Biden administration tried to reconnect domestic renewal with the international order: the Inflation Reduction Act of 2021 aimed to turn the Rust Belt into a clean energy corridor, while the G7 promoted cross-border corridors such as the Lobito Corridor in Angola and the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor. But this shift, which relied mainly on private financing rather than direct state investment, was halted and largely reversed after Trump's return.
To respond, the US needs what historian Charles Maier calls a “project-state”: a state with a sense of historical mission that invests for the long term. The proposals in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's “abundance agenda” seek to restore the state's ability to build, while ideas such as a strategic investment fund could mobilize private capital for infrastructure. In California, Gavin Newsom's progressive supporters are interested in a “New Deal for AI,” while he is considering forms of “universal basic capital” for workers.
The dilemma, the authors conclude, is not only who produces innovation, but who persuades societies to inhabit the future they are building. China feels that time is on its side. The US can still choose between renewal and decline, but to avoid ending up living in someone else's future, it must rethink itself as an intergenerational project with a horizon extending, as the article puts it, over the next 250 years.
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