The Century the West Mistook for a Battlefield
Military crisis management is crowding out the statecraft needed for climate, technology and economic change. A commentary by Sophia Kalantzakos
For a decade, the West feared China would win the century. Instead, the West is busy losing it. China is nowhere near the fighting.
Asia is not at war. Europe, the United States, and the waters between them are consumed by conflicts that have little to do with the rival everyone was told to watch.
This is not the global confrontation the West imagined. It is the West exhausting itself while the rest of the century moves on.
The strategic community that has long defined the Atlantic order, referred to here as “the West,” has spent the past decade increasingly anxious about whether it could still shape the future.
China’s rise, its scale, its fusion of state direction and private enterprise, and its sheer economic velocity fed a diagnosis that Western commentators repeated until it became reflexive: Europe and the United States were sclerotic, weighed down by history, colonial baggage, and industrial models that had enriched them at the expense of the developing world. That diagnosis was not necessarily wrong, but it was certainly incomplete.
What’s more, it has been used ever since to avoid a harder truth.
The West is not losing because Asia is rising. It is losing because it stopped exercising the muscle of statecraft, and is trying instead to muscle its way through what is really a demand for new power-sharing arrangements in a century defined by climate catastrophe, technological disruption, and the redistribution of wealth and relevance across the globe.
The United States set the pattern first. Watch closely enough and it starts to resemble an American television drama, the kind where every character carries a weapon and force is mistaken for competence.
The defense industry has been anointed as the West’s substitute for statecraft. This is not being presented as a war footing, because no one will call it that. It is being presented as industrial policy, as an investment in security, as a show of resolve. It is not. It is the reflex of a system that can now only react to exogenous shocks, because it has forgotten how to plan for ordinary ones.
Europe, rather than building the independent alternative it has claimed for years it wanted, is doing the same thing, piecemeal and at high cost, and calls it defense.
NATO’s latest figures put the alliance’s spending trajectory near fifty billion dollars in new commitments, even as its own members know the alliance is fraying at the seams.
This is not strategic autonomy. It is imitation without the resources or coherence to sustain it, and it is being financed by governments that have not been honest with their own voters about what they are actually purchasing.
Compare any of this to China’s posture toward its own chronic and asymmetric challenges.
Whatever one thinks of Beijing’s methods, its policymaking apparatus is built for sustained analysis, not perennial crisis management. It is enough to look at where China took the lead: renewables production, the electrification of transport, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.
Military modernization is one part of its preparation for a more volatile world, not the whole of it. The West, by contrast, lurches from emergency to emergency, treating each new flashpoint as an isolated event requiring an isolated response, and mistaking the frequency of its emergencies for the seriousness of its strategy.
Take a hard look at what is actually happening. Russia launched one of the heaviest missile and drone assaults of the war on Kyiv in early July.
Ukraine answered with a sustained campaign against Russia’s shadow fleet in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, striking well over a hundred vessels within days.
The Gulf is back in the headlines, missile exchanges escalating in frequency and intensity. The rest of the Middle East remains as unstable as it has been for a generation.
These are not isolated fires. They are one structural failure wearing different masks, and refusing to see them as connected is itself a form of denial. It is an exercise in hiding behind one’s own finger, pretending that if we do not name the pattern, the pattern does not exist.
The denial does not stop at naming. It extends to what the West quietly hopes will happen next.
Look at how this hope actually operates. Nobody thought Russia’s aggression against Ukraine would last this long, and yet the West has absorbed it as a new reality, a war that burns at a manageable temperature rather than an emergency demanding resolution.
The same “secret” hope is now being extended to the Gulf. The escalation over Hormuz, arriving after weeks of simmering hostilities that were allowed to pass as a pretense of normalcy, is being treated the same way: find the workarounds, reroute the shipping, diversify the energy outlets, and let the conflict continue on low fire with occasional flare-ups, indefinitely. This is a ludicrous bar for what serious policy should be aiming for.
It is not a strategy. It is an abdication dressed as pragmatism, made easier to accept because, in any conflict, every party involved has played some part in making it happen.
None of this is being budgeted honestly, and that is the deeper failure. The forever wars are not budgeted as wars.
The fires and the floods and the heatwaves are not budgeted as the climate catastrophe they are. The water and energy consumed by the AI buildout are not budgeted as the resource strain they represent.
Meanwhile, the problems that actually touch people’s lives, affordability, livelihoods, and the redistribution of work and wealth that technology and financial change are forcing on every economy, go unfunded and largely unnamed.
They are treated as secondary because statecraft has been narrowed to military preparedness, while the forces actually breaking households are left to fester.
The blind leading the blind is not a strategy. It is what happens in the absence of one. Nobody is budgeting for this.
IEP Bocconi does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
