A strategic overcorrection has put China at the center of virtually every U.S. national security conversation and consideration. That positioning is at once distracting the United States from appropriately responding to growing trans-regional geopolitical volatility while also failing to achieve outcomes in U.S. China policy.
I warned in a 2019 year-ahead look at risks that uncertainty would rule. Let me double down on that bet.
The winning candidate in 2020 will reveal himself or herself to us over the next 21 months through a basket of qualitative indicators focused on how effective each candidate is in individually appealing to likely voters in a fundamentally changed social environment.
The average American wants choice and personalization, not a bundled, take-it-or-leave-it offering. That has left the market wide open for new entrants willing to break with past business models and orthodoxies, from Netflix to Donald Trump.
It’s bipartisan Washington gospel that America’s private sector will deliver the innovation the country needs. However, at the front-end of an era of rapid, disruptive technological change in which global competition is heating up, such expectation is increasingly a bad idea without a far more strategic, centralized, and White House-driven approach to the challenges ahead.