Power & Security, United States We can’t prevent tomorrow’s catastrophes unless we imagine them today

Perry World House's Director of Communications and Research, John Gans, comments on long-term planning in national security policy in the United States.

The Trump administration may be gone, but Trumpian chaos persists. Which is why, before he took office, Joe Biden repeatedly emphasized his intention to battle multiple crises simultaneously: a “health crisis,” an “economic crisis,” a “racial justice crisis” and a “climate crisis.” In his inaugural address, the president said, “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge.” And if a crisis is a situation that demands immediate action, it is true: We must act immediately on all of these things.

But if an emergency isn’t resolvable in the short term, it can be counterproductive to characterize it as one. It is not — or not only — a crisis. It is a condition.

The distinction is not trivial: We deal with the critical differently than we deal with the chronic. Crises focus us on the present, demanding swift action, while conditions force us to look to the future because they require strategy sustained over time. The pandemic, the economy, the climate and racial strife are both crises and conditions, demanding not just short-term management but long-term rethinking — operations and planning, response and anticipation, acting in the present and thinking of the future...

As John Gans, the author of “White House Warriors,” said, “The Catch-22 is that those who try to focus on the long term risk sacrificing the influence needed to sell any new ideas to their principals by not spending all their time worried about the short term.”

Read more in The Washington Post >>