Many young American foreign policy elite are drawn to the romantic sentiment of a new great game, but too often this is more about projecting such an image on social media. Few venture beyond comfort or assume risk. They want all of the benefits of hegemony (the polite term for empire) but they also want air conditioning and electricity. Spirits such as Connolly and Orwell—soldiers and freelancers, adventurers and idealists—were not merely exhausted in far off places; many were shunned by foreign policy elites for going beyond the bounds of respectable adventurism, probably because they resented those who had what they did not: skin in the game, authentic experience. There was a divorce between the ruling and the ruled, but also between the globalists and those who actually leave the global footprint. The same thing had, as Orwell noted, happened in Britain, clear signs that imperial limits had been reached. It has now happened in America. The real isolationists were those who wanted global hegemony but also wanted to commute from the Washington suburbs—or simply telework. One is bound to ask: what if there were a Great Game and no one showed up?

A question some of us asked on the State Department’s policy planning staff was whether time will be America’s ally in the era of great power competition. There was no consensus. On the one hand, America has advantages in its geography, natural resources, self-reliance, ability to integrate diverse peoples, and capacity for ingenuity and production. On the other hand, the increasingly ideological and pathological mindsets of managerial elites suggest that this period of “looking inward” will not be a time of reconciliation or healing or anything like normalcy. Rather, it begins to look like a Hobbesian nightmare, with the elites of the public culture on the one hand, pitting the rest of America against each other. The question may not be whether we have time to wait out China, but rather whether we have time to wait out the ideological rot that slowly creeps across the public culture at home.

Great power competition requires visionary spirits, courageous persons who venture into unknown lands on behalf of their country, with confidence in the civilization that produced them. Today, America can scarcely summon people sufficiently courageous to leave their homes. It is simply a different age in American history, a soft age, and it may be that the costs of that competition require a price we are unprepared to pay.

An era that requires masterly inactivity may have arrived in America. Whether the Forward School grasps this is another question. It is likely that America’s great power rivals have.

Andrew Doran served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State (2018-21). He is currently a senior research fellow with the Philos Project.

Image: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (L) and Afghan Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah attend a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, May 16, 2016. Reuters.