Americans Are Losing the Long Game

The piece argues that the United States has lost its capacity to play the long game - culturally, politically and strategically - while China methodically builds institutions and infrastructures to shape a decades‑long future. It traces a wider Western temporal disorientation rooted in nostalgia, short electoral and business cycles, and media-driven immediacy, noting how movements like MAGA exemplify a backward-looking posture that offers little coherent vision forward. Drawing on thinkers such as Frederic Jameson and Achille Mbembe, it links this loss of future orientation to weakened national purpose and to two urgent tests - China’s geopolitical ascent and the deep‑time challenge of the Anthropocene - that demand extended temporal thinking rather than perpetual presentism.

The piece contrasts U.S. historical capacity for long-range statecraft - Cold War moonshots, New Deal linkages to international institutions - and recent attempts to reconnect domestic renewal with global leadership, citing the Inflation Reduction Act and the "cobalt corridor" idea, with China’s steady, party-led strategy and its push for an “ecological civilization.” The central claim is that the real contest isn’t tariffs or immediate tech races but whose model of the future becomes dominant; without renewed intergenerational planning and institutional ambition, the United States risks ceding the future to others.