The challenge for Washington is no longer whether it possesses sufficient capabilities, but whether the political system can align those capabilities behind a coherent long-term priority.
So, to succeed in the trough of graft, a politician must have a profusion of scandals, so many of them all at once such that they would eventually overwhelm the system’s capacity to cope.
During the Cold War, the United States occupied the apex of this triangular dynamic, pitting China and the USSR against each other. Today, it is Beijing that occupies that apex.