Transcription
There is a question that almost nobody in Western foreign policy circles wants to ask out loud because asking it honestly forces you to confront a reality that is deeply uncomfortable for the entire liberal international order. The question is this.
What happens when the world's most powerful military alliance discovers that its threats no longer frighten the people it is threatening? What happens when the arsenal of coercive tools, sanctions, diplomatic isolation, the credible threat of military force stops working? Not because those tools are weaker than before, but because the targets of those tools have learned through hard and brutal experience that survival lies precisely in refusing to yield.
This is not a hypothetical question. It is the central strategic drama playing out right now across the Middle East, across Europe and across the entire architecture of the postcold war order. And Iran of all countries is the state that has done more than any other to expose the hollowness at the heart of American and European power.
I want you to think carefully about what has actually happened over the past several years, not the version that is reported in Western newspapers, which tends to focus on Iranian provocations, Iranian nuclear ambitions, Iranian-backed militias, all of which are real enough, but the deeper strategic logic underneath all of it. Because most observers focus on Iran's behavior as if it were irrational, as if Iran were simply a rogue state acting out of ideology or religious fanaticism. But that framing is analytically lazy and strategically dangerous.
Iran is not irrational. Iran is in fact one of the most strategically sophisticated states in the contemporary international system. And the proof of that sophistication is that Iran has spent four decades resisting the full weight of American power and European economic pressure. And it is still standing, still expanding its regional influence. And this is the part that should make every Western strategist lose sleep. It is watching the countries that try to isolate it scramble to come back to the negotiating table on terms that are increasingly favorable to Iran.
It had the finest military machine in the ancient world, the deepest treasury, the most sophisticated administrative apparatus. And yet, Parthia, the Iranian plateau civilization of the ancient world, was never conquered. Rome fought Parthia repeatedly. And despite occasional victories, Rome could never decisively break Parthian power. And the reason is not simply military. The reason is geographic, logistical, and civilizational. Parthia understood that it did not need to defeat Rome on Rome's terms. It needed only to make the cost of conquest so high and the benefits so uncertain that Rome would eventually decide that subjugation was not worth the price. That is precisely the strategic model that modern Iran has internalized and refined into something approaching an art form.
It had the finest military machine in the ancient world, the deepest treasury, the most sophisticated administrative apparatus. And yet, Parthia, the Iranian plateau civilization of the ancient world, was never conquered. Rome fought Parthia repeatedly. And despite occasional victories, Rome could never decisively break Parthian power. And the reason is not simply military. The reason is geographic, logistical, and civilizational. Parthia understood that it did not need to defeat Rome on Rome's terms. It needed only to make the cost of conquest so high and the benefit so uncertain that Rome would eventually decide that subjugation was not worth the price. That is precisely the strategic model that modern Iran has internalized and refined into something approaching an art form.
What is often missed in Western analysis of Iranian strategy is the degree to which Iran has deliberately engineered what strategists call strategic depth, but which I would describe more accurately as the architecture of deterrence by exhaustion. Iran has spent decades building a network of allied and proxy forces across Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza. Not because it wants to control those territories in the conventional sense, but because it wants to ensure that any military confrontation with the United States or Israel or any combination of Western powers immediately generates complexity, escalation risk, and cost across multiple theaters simultaneously.
This is not the strategy of a weak state lashing out randomly. This is a strategy of a state that has studied American military history carefully. Notice that the United States wins every conventional battle and loses every prolonged irregular conflict and designed its entire regional posture around exploiting that structural vulnerability.
Think about the incentives involved. Every time the United States threatens Iran, Iran's leadership can point to the string of American military interventions in the region, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and observe that in every single case, the country that was targeted, ended up destroyed, ungoverned, and consumed by chaos. While Iran, which was never directly invaded, grew stronger, expanded its influence and emerged from each American military adventure with more leverage than it had before. Why would any rational Iranian strategist choose to change that playbook?
This is where the story becomes interesting because it connects directly to what has happened to European credibility in the region over the past several years. Europe spent the better part of three decades positioning itself as the diplomatic alternative to American coercion in the Middle East. The Europeans told themselves and told the world that they represented a more sophisticated, more multilateral, more rule-based approach to international relations. They signed the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, in 2015, not simply as an act of non-proliferation policy, but as a statement of European strategic identity. The message was, "We Europe can solve problems that American unilateralism cannot. We can build frameworks of mutual interest that bring difficult states into the rules-based order through engagement rather than confrontation." That was the self-image. And it was not entirely wrong. The JCPOA was by the technical standards of arms control a genuinely effective agreement. Iran's nuclear program was verifiably constrained. The inspections regime was working.
And then Donald Trump walked away from it in 2018. Now, here's what I want you to think carefully about because this is a second-order consequence that almost nobody in the mainstream Western media discussed with the seriousness it deserved. When the United States unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions, sanctions that specifically targeted any company doing business with Iran, including European companies, Europe faced a fundamental choice. It could stand by its own agreement, its own diplomatic achievement, its own declared principles and tell the United States that European companies would continue to do business with Iran under the terms of the deal. Or it could capitulate to American secondary sanctions pressure and effectively allow Washington to veto European foreign policy from across the Atlantic.
Europe chose capitulation and in doing so it destroyed something that cannot easily be rebuilt: its credibility as an independent strategic actor in the eyes of every non-Western country watching the drama unfold. The deeper strategic issue here is not about Iran at all. It is about what European capitulation on the JCPOA signaled to Beijing, to Moscow, to New Delhi, to Riyadh, to every capital that had been watching Europe claim the mantle of multilateral leadership. What those capitals saw was that when American financial power is brought to bear, Europe folds without exception. No matter what the Europeans have signed, no matter what principles they have declared, no matter what diplomatic architecture they have invested decades in building, when Washington decides to use the dollar system as a weapon, Europe cannot resist. That is an extraordinary revelation and it is one that has had cascading consequences for the entire structure of the post-cold war international order.
History offers another useful parallel here. Think about the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. The Ottomans spent decades trying to position themselves as a legitimate great power deserving of respect and inclusion in the European concert of nations. They modernized their military, reformed their administration, adopted European-style legal codes, opened their markets to European trade. And every time they did so, they discovered that European powers would use their apparent concessions as leverage to extract more concessions while providing less and less in return. The Ottomans called this era the Tanzimat, the reforms. And by the end of it, the Ottoman state was so financially dependent on European creditors, so militarily outclassed by European technology, and so politically compromised by European interference in its internal affairs that it had effectively surrendered its sovereignty while nominally retaining its independence.
The lesson that most non-Western states drew from Ottoman history is simple and brutal: You cannot achieve security through integration into a system controlled by others on terms set by others. You can only achieve security by developing independent capabilities that make you too costly to coerce. Iran drew that lesson early. China drew it later but more comprehensively. Russia, in a different way, drew it after the NATO expansion debates of the 1990s and 2000s.
And what we are watching now in the realignment of relationships between Iran, Russia, and China is a practical crystallization of that shared strategic lesson into something approaching a new coalition of states united. Not by ideology, not by a common vision of domestic governance, but by the shared experience of being on the receiving end of American coercive power and the shared interest in building a world in which that power is constrained.
Russia is providing Iran with advanced military technology. Iran is providing Russia with drones and ammunition that have been used on the battlefield in Ukraine. The two countries are developing payment systems that bypass the dollar. They are coordinating on energy policy within OPEC+ frameworks in ways designed to maximize revenue while minimizing Western influence over global oil prices. This is not ideological solidarity. This is strategic complementarity born of shared adversarial pressure.
Russia is providing Iran with advanced military technology. Iran is providing Russia with drones and ammunition that have been used on the battlefield in Ukraine. The two countries are developing payment systems that bypass the dollar. They are coordinating on energy policy within OPEC+ frameworks in ways designed to maximize revenue while minimizing Western influence over global oil prices. This is not ideological solidarity. This is strategic complementarity born of shared adversarial pressure.
Chinese banks are developing workarounds to the SWIFT financial messaging system that allow Iran to move money internationally without depending on Western-controlled financial infrastructure. And crucially, China has provided Iran with something that neither Russia nor Europe ever could: access to a massive, technologically sophisticated consumer and industrial market that makes comprehensive Western sanctions structurally impossible to sustain. You cannot sanction a country into submission if it has access to a 1.5 billion-person economy that is not participating in your sanctions regime. The math simply does not work.
Chinese banks are developing workarounds to the SWIFT financial messaging system that allow Iran to move money internationally without depending on Western-controlled financial infrastructure. And crucially, China has provided Iran with something that neither Russia nor Europe ever could, access to a massive, technologically sophisticated consumer and industrial market that makes comprehensive Western sanctions structurally impossible to sustain. You cannot sanction a country into submission if it has access to a 1.5 billion-person economy that is not participating in your sanctions regime. The math simply does not work.
This is where the strategic picture becomes genuinely fascinating because it reveals a fundamental miscalculation at the heart of American sanctions policy over the past 20 years. The United States developed its sanctions capability during a period, the 1990s and 2000s, when American financial dominance was so complete that being cut off from dollar-denominated finance and Western markets was essentially equivalent to being cut off from the global economy itself. That was a genuine and formidable coercive capability. But that capability depended on two conditions that no longer fully obtain. First, it depended on the willingness of all major economies to participate in or at least not actively undermine American sanctions regimes. And second, it depended on the targeted states having no alternative economic relationships to fall back on.
Both of those conditions have been steadily eroding. China's rise as an alternative economic pole combined with a growing sophistication of non-dollar payment systems has created exactly the alternative architecture that sanctions policy assumed could never exist. And Iran, by surviving decades of the most comprehensive sanctions regime ever applied to a major economy, has served as a laboratory in which that alternative architecture was tested and refined under real-world conditions.
Think about the incentives involved for the states that are now watching this process unfold from the outside. Saudi Arabia, which spent decades as perhaps America's closest Middle Eastern ally, has been quietly but unmistakably diversifying its strategic relationships. Saudi Arabia joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a dialogue partner. Saudi Arabia negotiated a diplomatic normalization with Iran, mediated not by the United States, but by China, an event that would have been considered impossible to imagine just a few years ago. Saudi Arabia has been discussing the possibility of pricing some of its oil sales in currencies other than the dollar. Each of these steps is individually modest and deniable. Collectively, they represent a fundamental repositioning, a hedging strategy against American reliability that is itself a consequence of the declining credibility of American coercive power.
The real question is why American credibility has declined. And the answer is more complex than simply pointing to the withdrawal from the JCPOA or the chaos of the Trump years or the debacle in Afghanistan. Those events are symptoms, not causes. The deeper cause is structural. American power in the post-cold war period was built on three pillars: military primacy, financial dominance, and the soft power of the American development model. All three of those pillars have weakened simultaneously, and the weakening is not temporary.
American military primacy has not disappeared, but it has been revealed to be far less usable than it appeared in the 1990s. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that the ability to defeat any conventional military force in the world does not translate into the ability to impose a political order on resistant populations. Iran, watching those wars unfold, understood this instinctively. The wars proved that American military power had enormous reach but limited depth. It could destroy but not build, could invade but not govern, could spend trillions of dollars and still leave the strategic situation worse than it found it.
American financial dominance, the dollar system, the SWIFT network, the ability to cut countries off from global finance, has remained more durable, but its durability depends entirely on maintaining the confidence of the countries that choose to hold dollars and use dollar-denominated trade finance. Every time the United States weaponizes the dollar system against Russia, against Iran, against Venezuela, against anyone, it simultaneously demonstrates the power of that system and motivates the rest of the world to develop alternatives to it. This is the central paradox of American financial coercion: the more aggressively you use it, the more you incentivize the creation of systems designed to make it irrelevant. And now, after decades of aggressive sanctions policy, those alternative systems are beginning to reach a level of functionality that was not possible even 10 years ago.
The soft power of the American development model. The idea that liberal democracy and open markets represent not just a political preference, but a universal formula for prosperity and human flourishing, suffered a series of devastating blows from which it has not recovered. The 2008 financial crisis shattered the myth of American financial sophistication. The political dysfunction of the Trump years, culminating in the January 6th assault on the Capitol, shattered the myth of American democratic stability. And the COVID-19 response, in which the world's most powerful and richest country managed its pandemic response less effectively than many developing nations, shattered the myth of American institutional competence. China, watching all of this, made sure that the rest of the world was watching too.
This is where the story becomes interesting because the loss of American soft power has not simply created a vacuum. It has actively created an opportunity for an alternative narrative about development and governance that China, Russia, and increasingly Iran are all working to fill.
History offers a useful parallel in the decline of British imperial authority in the early 20th century. Britain, like America today, was a hegemon that had built its dominance on a combination of military power, financial centrality. The pound sterling was the reserve currency of its era, and the soft power of the idea that British civilization represented a superior model of governance and economic organization. What undermined British hegemony was not a single dramatic defeat, but a gradual accumulation of events that eroded confidence in British power and will. The Boer War revealed the limits of British military capability against determined irregular resistance. The First World War revealed the catastrophic cost of maintaining a European balance of power. The 1929 financial crisis revealed the fragility of British financial architecture. And by the time the Second World War ended, Britain had spent so much of its material and moral capital that the transition to American hegemony was not just inevitable but actively assisted by the British themselves.
America today is living through an analogous process of imperial overextension and credibility erosion. The parallel is not perfect, but the structural dynamics are recognizable.
What does all of this mean for Europe specifically? This is why I want to spend some time, because Europe's position in this changing strategic landscape is both the most analytically interesting and the most consequential for the future. Europe is simultaneously the most exposed to the consequences of American power decline and the least prepared to deal with it.
European strategic culture, built around the assumption of American security guarantees, has atrophied to the point where European states have lost the capacity for independent strategic action, even when they have the nominal will to attempt it. The JCPOA episode revealed this with brutal clarity. But the Ukraine war has revealed it even more dramatically because the Ukraine war has forced Europe into a set of energy, economic, and security dependencies that are actively harming European economies while simultaneously revealing the degree to which European strategic autonomy is largely fictional.
Think about the energy dimension of this picture. When Europe sanctioned Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and cut itself off from Russian natural gas, it was not simply making an economic sacrifice in the name of principle. It was making a permanent structural change to European industrial competitiveness because cheap Russian energy had been subsidizing European manufacturing for decades. German industrial strategy, in particular, was built around the implicit assumption of access to cheap Russian gas. Without that gas, German industry faces energy costs that are structurally higher than its competitors in America, in China, in the Gulf. That is not a temporary problem that resolves itself when the war ends. That is a permanent competitive disadvantage that is already beginning to hollow out the German industrial base.
And the countries that benefit from European industrial weakness are not difficult to identify. American liquefied natural gas exporters are selling gas to Europe at prices that are multiples of what American consumers pay for the same resource. American manufacturers are benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act's subsidies at the same time that European manufacturers are being priced out of their own markets by energy costs. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is an observable economic reality with predictable consequences for European political stability and for the long-term viability of the European project.
The deeper strategic issue here is that Europe's retreat, its loss of independent agency in both the Middle East and in its own neighborhood, is not simply a result of bad decisions made by individual European leaders. It is a product of a structural reality that has been building for decades. Europe chose after 1945 to outsource its security to the United States and to focus its political energy on economic integration and the construction of a rules-based regional order. That was a rational choice given the circumstances of the post-war world. But it came with a hidden cost: the gradual atrophy of the strategic autonomy muscles that you need to function as an independent great power in a competitive international system.
Europe today has the economic weight of a great power. It is the world's largest trading bloc, but it has the strategic reflexes of a protectorate. When crises occur, European leaders look instinctively to Washington for guidance and legitimacy. Even when Washington's interests and European interests diverge, as they increasingly do, most observers focus on the political dimension of its dependency. The debates about NATO burden-sharing, about European defense spending, about strategic autonomy. But the more consequential dimension is financial and technological.
The dollar's role as the world's reserve currency gives the United States an extraordinary and largely invisible form of power over European financial institutions. European banks operate in dollar-denominated markets and therefore are always vulnerable to American regulatory and enforcement actions in ways that make them functionally subservient to American foreign policy, even when American foreign policy contradicts European interests. The JCPOA experience made this concrete and visible. European banks wanted to do business with Iran. European governments wanted them to do business with Iran because the JCPOA required it and because European businesses had genuine commercial interests in the Iranian market. But American secondary sanctions, the threat of being cut off from the dollar system, made it impossible for European financial institutions to take the risk. The dollar, not the bomb, is America's most powerful weapon. And it is a weapon that is pointing as much at Europe as at Iran.
This is where Russia and China's strategic position becomes genuinely advantageous in ways that were not visible a decade ago. Both Russia and China have spent the past decade with increasing urgency building the financial and technological infrastructure necessary to reduce their dependence on dollar-denominated systems. Russia developed SPFS, its own alternative to SWIFT. China developed CIPS, the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System. China and Russia have expanded their bilateral trade in yuan and rubles. The Belt and Road Initiative, whatever its failures and controversies, has created a network of infrastructure investments and financial relationships across Asia, Africa, and Latin America that are denominated outside the dollar system.
None of these alternatives is yet capable of replacing the dollar system. But they do not need to replace it completely to be strategically significant. They need only to reach the point where they provide enough of an alternative that countries under American financial pressure can survive and function. That threshold has already been crossed. Iran's survival under sanctions is the proof of concept.
What is often missed is the demographic dimension of the strategic competition, because demographics shape long-term power in ways that most geopolitical analysis underweights. Europe is aging rapidly and irrevocably. The fertility rates across Western and Southern Europe have been below replacement level for decades. And the political consequences of aging populations, rising pension costs, declining labor force participation, slower economic growth, increasing risk aversion in foreign policy, are already visible. An aging society is a conservative society in the literal sense. It has more to lose and less appetite for risk. European strategic timidity is not simply a cultural or political phenomenon. It is partly a demographic one. Countries with median ages in their mid-40s are not going to be enthusiastic about military confrontation or expensive strategic adventures, regardless of what their alliance commitments say.
Iran, by contrast, has a young and increasingly educated population. Despite decades of sanctions and economic mismanagement, Iran has built a genuinely impressive human capital base: one of the highest rates of university enrollment in the Middle East, a large and sophisticated engineering and scientific community, a diaspora that has spread Iranian technical talent across the world's leading research institutions. The sanctions have been economically devastating, but they have also produced a kind of forced self-reliance in certain sectors. Iranian aerospace, Iranian missile technology, Iranian drone manufacturing. These are not imports. They are the product of decades of necessity-driven indigenous innovation, and they are now being exported. Iranian drones are flying over Ukraine. Iranian ballistic missile technology has been studied and in some cases adapted by a range of state and non-state actors across the region. The sanctions designed to prevent Iran from developing these capabilities instead created the conditions under which Iran had no choice but to develop them indigenously, and having developed them indigenously, Iran is now in a position to export them and to profit from them strategically.
Think about the incentives involved for the states that might become customers or partners for Iranian military technology. The Ukraine war has demonstrated in real time the military utility of cheap, mass-producible drones. It has demonstrated that precision-guided munitions can be developed and deployed at a fraction of the cost of traditional sophisticated weapon systems. The Iranian drone industrial base, built under sanctions and necessity, now represents a genuine military-industrial asset that Russia has been among the first to leverage, but is unlikely to be the last. The proliferation of this technology across the Global South is one of the medium-term strategic consequences of the Iran-Russia partnership that almost nobody in Western capitals is discussing with appropriate seriousness.
The civilizational dimension of this competition deserves attention too, because it is increasingly shaping how non-Western elites think about the choices before them. Iran has consistently framed its resistance to American pressure in civilizational terms, as a defense of Iranian sovereignty and Iranian identity against a Western hegemon that seeks to impose its values and its system on a proud, ancient civilization. That framing resonates far beyond Iran's borders because it speaks to a widely shared experience across the non-Western world: the sense that the liberal international order is, in practice, an American-led order that benefits American interests and imposes American values. That sense is not limited to authoritarian states. It is widely felt in democracies across the Global South that have experienced the conditionalities attached to IMF loans, the intellectual property regimes that constrain their access to technology, and the agricultural subsidies of rich countries that undermine their farmers.
Iran's defiance of this order has a symbolic resonance that goes far beyond Iran's own strategic weight. History offers a useful parallel in the way that the American Revolution and the French Revolution functioned not just as political events, but as ideological demonstrations, proof of concept for the idea that the existing dynastic order could be successfully challenged. Iran's survival under the most comprehensive sanctions regime in history functions as a similar proof of concept for the idea that the American financial and diplomatic order can be successfully challenged. Every year that Iran survives, every oil tanker that finds a buyer despite the sanctions, every missile that is launched without triggering a devastating American military response, strengthens the demonstration effect. And the countries most attentively watching that demonstration are precisely the countries that America and Europe most need to keep inside the rules-based order: the major emerging economies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that will determine whether the 21st century is an American century or a multipolar one.
The deeper strategic issue for Europe specifically is that its retreat, its loss of credibility as an independent diplomatic actor, has not been accompanied by any commensurate strengthening of its position elsewhere. Europe is simultaneously losing influence in the Global South, losing economic competitiveness to the United States and China, losing energy security, and losing the internal political coherence that would be necessary to develop a response to any of these challenges. The rise of nationalist and euroskeptic political movements across the continent is not unconnected to these strategic failures. When populations feel that their governments cannot defend their interests, cannot stand up to American financial pressure, cannot manage migration, cannot secure affordable energy, they turn to political movements that at least promise agency, even if the form that agency takes is problematic.
What Russia and China have gained from this entire dynamic is something more valuable than any specific material asset or territorial acquisition. What they have gained is the gradual erosion of the Western-led order's aura of invincibility. The sense that resistance to that order is not only possible but potentially profitable. The Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 generated an extraordinary and overwhelming demonstration of Western ideological and material superiority. For a generation of political leaders around the world, the lessons seemed clear: the Western model had won, the market democracy formula was universal, and integration into the American order was the only path to development and security.
That consensus is now shattered. It was shattered by the Iraq War, by the 2008 financial crisis, by the dysfunction of American democracy, by the COVID response, and it was shattered most consistently and most persistently by Iran's stubborn, costly, and ultimately successful resistance to the full weight of American and European coercive power.
Most observers frame the current moment as a temporary disruption, a period of turbulence that will eventually resolve into a new equilibrium in which American leadership is restored or replaced by some other form of liberal multilateralism. I think that framing fundamentally misreads the structural nature of the change that is occurring. What we are watching is not a crisis of leadership within a stable system. We are watching the slow dissolution of the systemic assumptions on which the post-cold war order was built. The assumption of American financial omnipotence. The assumption of Western ideological supremacy. The assumption that states facing sufficient external pressure will eventually choose integration over resistance. All those assumptions are being falsified in real time.
And the falsification is cumulative and self-reinforcing. The future that is taking shape is not the world of the 1990s with different leadership at the top. It is a structurally different world in which multiple centers of power maintain competing economic and security architectures. In which the ability to coerce states through financial exclusion is systematically constrained by the existence of alternative economic relationships. And in which the credibility of any single power's threats depends on a history of actually following through that America, in key cases, has failed to establish.
This does not mean that America is finished, or that the dollar will stop being the world's primary reserve currency next year, or that NATO is about to collapse. The transitions of hegemonic power are measured in decades, not years. Britain remained a major power long after its hegemony had passed its peak. But the direction of change is increasingly clear. And the events of the past several years—Iran's survival, Europe's retreat, Russia and China's growing coordination, the fracturing of the Global South's deference to Western-led institutions—are not aberrations. They are the leading indicators of a structural shift in the distribution of international power that will define the strategic landscape for the rest of this century.
And this is the final thought I want to leave you with, because I think it is the most important one and the one that is most consistently absent from mainstream Western analysis. The loss of American aura, the erosion of the sense that American power is irresistible and American will is unbreakable, is not simply a problem for American foreign policy. It is a problem for the entire international order that American power built and sustained. That order, for all its injustices and hypocrisies, provided a degree of predictability and stability that benefited not just Western states but many others.
The alternatives that are now emerging are not necessarily more just, more stable, or more beneficial to the majority of humanity. A world in which multiple great powers maintain competing spheres of influence. In which financial systems are fragmented and weaponized. In which the rules that govern international trade and investment become contested rather than shared. That world is more dangerous, more unpredictable, and more prone to the kind of great power competition that defined the first half of the 20th century and produced its catastrophic wars.
Iran forced Europe to retreat. America lost its aura. Russia and China gained. But the ultimate question, the one that history will ask of this generation of leaders, is whether the world that comes next will be better or worse for the billions of ordinary people who had no say in the strategic choices that brought it into being. That question does not yet have an answer. But the window in which the answer can be shaped in a better direction is closing faster than almost anyone in power is willing to admit.