The past several years have produced a quiet but consequential shift in how the United States understands, and fails to understand, time. American strategy has gradually weakened through bureaucratic cuts, institutional downgrades, and political incentives that privilege immediacy over endurance and partisanship over long-term statecraft. The temporary elimination of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment last year is particularly emblematic. Established during the Cold War, the Office was designed to provide the Department of Defense with independent, long-term comparative assessments of U.S. and adversary military capabilities. On paper, its dismantling was framed as an exercise in streamlining. In practice, it captured the broader erosion of the mechanisms that once allowed the United States to think in decades rather than election cycles.
The office was eventually restored, but in a diminished and less protected form. That symbolic downgrade echoed across the national security enterprise. Nearly 50 percent cuts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, staff reductions at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — which shrank from roughly 3,400 personnel at the start of last year to about 2,400 by December, the effective defunding of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and the closure of consulates abroad were all justified separately. Each had its own bureaucratic logic. But collectively they point to a country that is trading away the tools of long-term strategy, often without noticing it is doing so.
The erosion of long-term thinking has consequences that extend beyond bureaucratic organization. The weakening of strategic capabilities is an existential liability for Western democracies. Reversing the trend does not require replicating centralized planning but restoring forms of temporal discipline: protecting foresight capacity, stabilizing research investment, and embedding long-term commitments within institutions able to withstand political turnover. In Europe in particular, the challenge is not to abandon value-based ambition, but to reconcile it with foresight, ensuring that long-term objectives are not diluted by institutional constraints that compress effective planning horizons.
China’s Long (But Imperfect) Game
Comparisons to China are unavoidable, but they must be made carefully. General Secretary Xi Jinping and his fellow apparatchiks in the Chinese Communist Party are not master planners executing a flawless grand design. The People’s Republic of China is a political system built to privilege duration, capable of sustaining national priorities over time even as it stumbles, corrects, stumbles again, and often fails. China’s industrial policy, military modernization, and information operations all rest on a foundation of past institutional patience. For the Chinese Communist Party, the long game is not a slogan but rather a method.
It is worth being clear about what that method produces and what it does not. China’s rise in clean technology — solar power, wind power, and battery storage — was not preordained. It was the product of sustained subsidies, intense domestic competition, and a willingness to absorb inefficiencies to secure upstream dominance. Its semiconductor progress is real, but uneven. The People’s Liberation Army has been steadily modernizing since the 1990s and early 2000s, shifting from a manpower-heavy force to a more technologically integrated one, but issues of jointness, logistics, and political reliability persist. The Belt and Road Initiative no longer resembles the megaproject frenzy of a decade ago. It has become a set of “small and beautiful” ventures that continue to produce political leverage despite growing financial strain, while still carrying on some old-style large projects. For example, China’s overseas investments have been moving away from lending for state-owned enterprises in extraction sectors towards the transportation and green energy sector.
Over the past decade, the Chinese Communist Party has fused economic, military, and technological planning into an integrated architecture of power. Each five-year plan operates as a waypoint in a continuous national strategy that stretches decades ahead. The 14th plan, released in 2021, placed science and technology “self-reliance” at the core of China’s modernization agenda, encompassing semiconductors, green energy, and AI. The 15th plan (2026 to 2030), unveiled in March 2026 and currently under review prior to full publication, is expected to further deepen this strategic focus.
This approach has yielded measurable results. In 2014, China produced less than 5 percent of the world’s advanced chips. Today, notwithstanding U.S. export controls, domestic firms such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and Huawei’s HiSilicon have demonstrated the ability to manufacture seven-nanometer chips at scale. At the same time, Beijing’s deliberate nurturing of the electric vehicle sector transformed it from an industrial laggard into the world’s largest auto exporter, outpacing Japan. These shifts were the product of sustained state coordination, long-term subsidies, and institutional patience.
The same pattern extends to the military. Xi’s reorganization of the People’s Liberation Army has sought to integrate cyber, space, and electronic warfare capabilities as part of China’s broader shift toward “informationized warfare.” The creation of the Strategic Support Force in 2015 marked a pivotal moment in this transformation, consolidating intelligence, space, and cyber capabilities within a single command structure. Although the Strategic Support Force was dissolved in 2024, its responsibilities were redistributed among three newly established services — the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force, and Information Support Force, confirming the People’s Liberation Army’s transition from a manpower-heavy institution toward a technology-intensive one. In 2025, China has launched more naval vessels than any other country, fielded operational hypersonic weapons, and established overseas logistics hubs in Djibouti, Pakistan, and Cambodia. This modernization drive was the methodical implementation of a 30-year plan first articulated after the Gulf War. Even if the increasingly systematized purges within the People’s Liberation Army may suggest internal tensions, they do not necessarily indicate systemic instability. Rather, they can be seen as part of a broader effort to consolidate control and reinforce party discipline within the military.
Against this backdrop, China’s chronic assertiveness in its neighborhood appears less as an anomaly than as a strategic extension of its broader posture. Although such behavior may carry diplomatic costs, China’s actions appear deliberate, aimed at projecting resolve and credibility rather than maximizing regional goodwill. In this sense, the objective is less the pursuit of diplomatic gains than the signaling of strength and deterrence. In this respect it has arguably achieved the intended effect.
Beijing’s long horizon is equally visible in the information sphere. China has expanded its narrative infrastructure with disciplined precision. State-owned media such as China Global Television Network now operate in dozens of languages, and platforms like TikTok and WeChat serve as dual instruments of technological experimentation and global influence, a tool of soft power by patience and a slow colonization of attention.
And yet, Beijing’s planning is neither coherent nor costless. The tech crackdown, property crisis, and unpredictable regulatory swings have shaken private capital. China’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with an assertive and self-destructive “wolf warrior” diplomatic posture, has exacted a reputational toll across Europe and Asia. Local government debt has reached levels that complicate long-term investment. Demographic decline erodes the economic assumptions behind many of China’s ambitions. And the political system’s rigidities reduce its ability to adjust course quickly.
The problem is not that China is unbeatable, but rather that the West is unable to make strategic use of time.
A Strategic Horizon Shrinking at Home
Policy in Washington has become reactive. Institutions that once buffered politics from the pressure of immediacy are now politicized, hollowed out, or simply ignored. The shift is visible across various domains. Intelligence units responsible for tracking foreign influence have disappeared just as Russia, China, and Iran grow more sophisticated in exploiting the gray zones of attribution. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has lost critical workforce capacity, including staff focused on AI-related vulnerabilities. Election security coordination has been curtailed. At the State Department, personnel cuts and bureau mergers have reduced America’s ability to shape diplomatic environments before crises emerge.
The academic and research ecosystem that has long underwritten U.S. strategic advantage — from universities to think tanks to federally funded research and development centers — is likewise under growing strain. Lapses in federal funding for core scientific infrastructure, including PubMed, the world’s largest biomedical database, have weakened systems built over decades.
The politicization of academic institutions once designed to operate at arm’s length from partisan power far precedes the Trump administration, albeit in the opposite direction. And yet, what we are now witnessing is not simply an overcorrection — it is a trend that points to a deeper erosion of epistemic and institutional autonomy. This frays the dense contracting and staffing channels through which the U.S. government has historically converted external expertise into state capacity. The timing could hardly be worse, as China continues to expand investment in universities and research and development while strengthening the state’s ability to turn research into power.
The same dynamic appears in economic statecraft. Export controls on advanced AI chips were initially framed as a long-term effort to limit capability diffusion. But successive carve-outs, structured around revenue sharing arrangements, turned a national security tool into a short-term fiscal deal. That is the essence of strategic short-termism: converting a structural question into a transactional one.
The inconsistency became especially visible when the Department of Commerce revised its export control posture on advanced semiconductors and moved away from a presumption of denial toward a case-by-case licensing regime for chips such as Nvidia’s H200 and Advanced Micro Device’s MI325X. The shift introduced uncertainty into the licensing process and generated political controversy and legislative pushback in Washington, even as major Chinese technology firms positioned themselves to secure large volumes of these chips under conditional approval. The episode lays bare the glaring inconsistencies in U.S.–China policy, where the goal of constraining access to advanced hardware repeatedly gives way to the short-term imperatives of trade, industry revenue, and political deal-making.
Europe’s trajectory is different but related. The European Union can legislate for the long term, but its strategic direction is often shaped by short-term political mobilization rather than by a carefully sequenced design, as agenda-setting remains highly sensitive to electoral cycles, coalition politics, and shifts in public sentiment. Despite its perception as cold and distant from public sentiment, decisions by E.U. institutions often reflect ideological trends rather than strategic calculation. The Green Deal with its impossible targets is the perfect example of the way populism can trickle up and accelerate policy, even when the political groundwork for sustained implementation is thin. Europe does not lack ambition: It lacks insulation from its own democratic volatility.
Democracies Are Still Capable Under the Right Conditions
None of this means democracies are incapable of long-term strategy. When political conditions align, they have repeatedly achieved it, despite short electoral cycles and constant pressure to deliver quick wins. America’s Interstate Highway System, launched in the 1950s, was built over decades across multiple administrations. The Apollo program survived changes in party control long enough to put people on the moon because it was framed as a national mission with sustained congressional support. In Europe, the project of integration — moving from post-war cooperation to the single market and ultimately a common currency for many members — required a chain of governments to keep pushing in the same direction for generations. Institutions like Social Security in the United States or the National Health Service in the United Kingdom were created through democratic politics and then maintained, expanded, and reformed over many election cycles. Even major industrial transformations can persist: France’s long nuclear power build-out, for instance, was not a one-term initiative but a state-backed strategy implemented over decades.
Democracies succeed at long-term projects when leaders build coalitions that outlast elections, embed commitments in institutions, and frame strategy as a shared national purpose rather than a partisan possession. Another essential ingredient is a public that can digest and process information with a good degree of rationality. What has changed is the political and technological environment in which democratic strategy operates. Digital communication compresses time. Policy becomes inseparable from real-time reaction. Algorithmic incentives reward outrage, novelty, and speed. Gradual threats or complex collective action problems such as climate risk, cyber hygiene, demographic decline, critical infrastructure fragility, and supply chain vulnerability struggle to command sustained attention. As polarization erodes the bipartisan bargains that long-term projects require and generates short-termism, it creates a political ecosystem hostile to endurance.
The Cost of Shrinking Time Horizons
The strategic consequences accumulate quietly but surely. Technology is one domain where the ability to tackle compounding challenges matters most. By the early 2030s, China’s research and development investment may match or exceed America’s in purchasing power terms. Patent counts do not measure frontier innovation, but they reveal institutional capacity and long-term intent. If the United States continues to swing between industrial activism and laissez-faire, it will struggle to build at the pace required in emerging technologies.
Energy is another: China dominates clean tech supply chains because it spent years building capacity that Western democracies are only now trying to replicate. Permitting bottlenecks, political reversals, and inconsistent subsidies slow the West’s efforts to catch up. Energy transitions reward continuity, not improvisation.
The effect extends to standards and governance. The U.S. retreat from multilateral institutions has ceded procedural ground to China, which now plays a larger role in technical committees that define rules for telecommunications, transport, sustainability, and global health. The U.S. withdrawal from bodies such as the World Health Organization has created space for Beijing to expand its influence not only through funding, but through agenda-setting, personnel networks, and bilateral partnerships. Over time, such absences compound, allowing China to shape standards and norms in precisely the forums where power is exercised quietly and cumulatively. These bodies rarely make headlines, but they shape the operating system of the global economy.
The most significant consequences involve alliance management. When partners begin to doubt that the United States can maintain a consistent strategic course, they hedge. Adversaries probe, middle powers diversify. The result is not dramatic collapse but strategic drift, and an erosion of credibility that is visible long before it is admitted.
Recovering Democratic Strategic Time
Reversing this trend does not require democracies to mimic Chinese planning. On the contrary, it requires recovering their own versions of temporal discipline: restoring protected foresight capacity, insulating science and data infrastructure from political churn, stabilizing research investments, making industrial policy coherent, rebuilding election and information resilience, and embedding long-term commitments in institutions that can survive political turnover. In short, it mandates treating slow-moving risks as strategic priorities.
The trans-Atlantic relationship is a key component of this effort. The United States and Europe still form the world’s most powerful economic and technological ecosystem, jointly accounting for nearly 30 percent of global trade in goods and services and roughly 43 percent of global GDP. U.S. and European firms are also deeply embedded in each other’s markets, with stocks of reciprocal investment amounting to roughly $5.4 trillion and supporting millions of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic: U.S. exports to the European Union sustain an estimated 2.3 million American jobs, while European investments in the United States support about 3.4 million positions. Hence, their challenge is coordination, not nostalgia. Mechanisms like the U.S.–E.U. Trade and Technology Council need to evolve from talking shops into implementation engines, aligning standards, supply chains, and security-linked economic policy.
For Europe, the challenge is not to abandon its value-based ambition but to reconcile it with foresight, aligning public mobilization with pragmatic sequencing. This is less a question of creating new institutions than of how existing ones are used. In policy areas where unanimity still applies, long-term objectives are often diluted, delayed, or compressed into lowest common denominator outcomes, shortening effective planning horizons and complicating strategic sequencing. One practical step would be to strengthen institutional mechanisms such as the strategic foresight capacity of the European Commission or to develop a permanent coordination hub between the Commission, member states, and the private sector, partly modelled on existing structures such as the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre and related resilience coordination bodies.
Without such a shift, fragmentation will continue to deepen, and the union will increasingly rely on informal, ad hoc coalitions that bypass common frameworks. This dynamic is already visible: Faced with external shocks and intensifying geopolitical competition, member states are progressively moving towards differentiated forms of cooperation in strategic sectors.
To preserve coherence and strategic capacity, Europe should explicitly organize this trend. A core group of countries willing to share real sovereignty in key domains — including defense, industrial policy, energy security and critical technologies — should be empowered to act through qualified majority decision-making, joint financing and binding common instruments, even when this requires innovative arrangements beyond existing treaty frameworks. This would not undermine the union but rather stabilize a method that has historically enabled integration in times of crisis. The governance of the Eurozone, the evolution of the Schengen Area, and the creation of “NextGenerationEU” all emerged through political acceleration, opt-ins and institutional flexibility before becoming consolidated pillars of the European project. Endeavors such as energy transition, digital sovereignty, and defense integration can only succeed if supported by a more disciplined and politically coherent decision-making architecture — capable of sustaining long-term commitments over electoral cycles and geopolitical shocks — allowing Europe to act as a credible long-term power within the democratic camp.
The deeper issue is whether democracies can adapt to a world where time itself has become contested terrain. Authoritarian systems respond to technological acceleration by centralizing control. Democracies should take a different path, one that protects openness while rebuilding strategic patience. That is not a matter of imitating Beijing but rather of remembering how democracies once governed the long term, deciding they can do so again, and reinventing the conditions for deliberation, patience, and memory in a technological ecosystem that thrives on their erosion.
Beniamino Irdi is a nonresident senior fellow with German Marshall Fund’s Global Power Shifts team. His areas of expertise include the geopolitics of the Mediterranean, great-power competition, democratic resilience, and hybrid threats. He is the founder and chief executive officer of HighGround, a political risk consulting firm based in Milan and Rome. Previously, he spent 17 years in the Italian government working on foreign policy, national security, and strategic affairs.
Image: Gemini
