America isn’t declining. It’s underperforming, because its institutions can’t match its capabilities.
By Justin Fulcher
I was standing in a Pentagon conference room when a Colonel leaned over the table and said something you never want to hear about the world’s most powerful military:
“We don’t lack technology. We lack tempo.”
Two days later, a veteran I know waited nearly three months for a routine medical scan. In the same week, an American defense startup deployed an autonomous drone that could identify targets faster than their billion-dollar legacy competitors.
That contrast captures America’s moment with uncomfortable clarity:
We are a superpower running on legacy software.
America isn’t declining; it’s underperforming.
We still dominate the frontier. American firms lead in AI, biotech, space, and advanced computing. The ongoing debate over Nvidia’s H200 chips shows that American technology still yields a comparitive advantage so strong it’s viewed as a national security threat. Even China’s chip manufacturing industry – despite heavy government subsidies and intellectual property theft – is years away from our caliber of compute. Our GDP share has held steady for decades. Even the poorest U.S. state’s GDP per capita is on par with Europe’s richest countries.
If America were truly fading, the world would be voting with its wallet and feet. Instead, it is voting for us. Look no further than how many countries raised their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP after the U.S. asked. All while remaining the top landing spot for foreign direct investment, surpassing the second highest destination by over 100 billion dollars.
The issue is not national decline; it’s institutional drag.
Across government, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure, our core systems operate as if it were 1975. We can field autonomous targeting drones, but we can’t process a passport in under 11 weeks. We can design next-generation hypersonic systems, but we can’t build a bridge without a decade of paperwork. Agencies are buried in compliance while their missions fall behind.
The world hasn’t passed America. Our institutions have just slowed us.
And that is a far more solvable problem. Here’s what can and should be done to bring our systems up to the speed of our capabilities.
America’s fundamentals remain unmatched.
Look at the country as an outside strategist would.
No rival combines our technology base, energy capacity, agricultural abundance, financial depth, global alliances, manpower, and influence. The U.S. remains the only nation capable of projecting power, deterring adversaries, driving innovation, and sustaining a global economic system.
These are not the traits of a collapsing nation.
They are the traits of an underutilized one.
A country this strong has no excuse for institutions this slow.
Our challenges are real, but completely fixable.
Institutional stagnation is not destiny. It is the result of outdated processes, siloed agencies, and a lack of mission alignment.
Other nations have rebuilt their state capacity before: Meiji Japan, postwar Germany, early Singapore, and even the U.S. during WWII and the space race. Renewal came from clarity of purpose and streamlined execution.
That same spirit still exists today, except we have tools those eras never did:
AI to accelerate government workflows
edge computing that secures critical infrastructure
reshored manufacturing that strengthens national resilience
digital health systems that widen access
defense innovation that restores deterrence
If we want to restore American strength, modernizing our institutions is nonnegotiable. It is the decisive strategic advantage.
America’s biggest victories in the coming decades will come not from expanding government, but from upgrading it - rapidly.
Our renewal mechanism is stronger than any rival’s.
China can mobilize quickly, but it cannot self-correct.
Europe manages consensus well, but cannot scale innovation.
Russia can coerce, but not compete.
America’s weakness is something far easier to fix: institutional latency.
And unlike our competitors, we possess a civic superpower:
We reinvent ourselves - dramatically, decisively, and often exactly when others think we’re done.
American pessimism has been wrong for 200+ years.
It’s wrong again now.
Where We Go From Here
This is not a left-wing or right-wing project.
It is an American project.
Everyone benefits from:
a government that works,
a healthcare system that delivers,
a military that moves with speed,
secure borders and resilient supply chains,
infrastructure that actually gets built,
institutions that earn public trust.
Competence isn’t partisan. It’s patriotic.
America doesn’t need a miracle. It needs modernization.
If we refactor legacy processes, recruit technical talent into civic service, unleash American energy, accelerate procurement, deploy AI for state capacity, and rebuild our defense industrial base with urgency, the U.S. will enter a new era of national strength.
America is not a nation in twilight. America is a nation between chapters.
And the next chapter begins the moment we choose tempo over drift, capability over complacency, and renewal over resignation.
America still has the talent. America still has the tools. America still has agency.
Now we need the tempo.