The twenty-first century has brought challenges to all nations. Climate change may be the most disruptive in the long run but new forms of pandemic illness may be a chronic threat now, along with the effects of overcrowding in habitable places as a result of population growth. But a more traditional kind of challenge is also reemerging, a world of great-power rivalry. Added to this threat will be the continuing spread of dangerous technologies as modernizing nations narrow the technical gap separating them from more advanced nations. Some of these technologies may come within reach of private groups.
These challenges may require the United States and other countries to see the world in different terms. Americans are accustomed to seeing the outside world in terms of two extremes, the short-term and the indefinite long-term. This way of looking at the world is rooted not just in the intervals of four to eight years that define U.S. political life but in American assumptions about the world inherited from the last century.
During the Cold War (1947-1989), Americans thought of their security in terms of commitments that had to be sustained over an indefinite period of time. America continued to think this way after the events of 2001. As a result, there was no sense that goals needed to be achieved in a finite amount of time. The challenges of the 21st century may require an approach that not only sets longer-range goals but requires them to be achieved in a possibly gradual but still defined interval of time.
It will be a departure for Americans to set longer-term goals to secure themselves and other countries that are not open-ended. Unless public opinion begins to think about time in a new way, though, we will continue to stumble into a dangerous future that might have been prevented with greater foresight.