09-07-2025
One Big Beautiful Mistake
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The story of great powers is not only one of conquest and competition. It is also one of self-inflicted decline—of states that once held commanding leads in technology or economic dynamism, only to squander them through complacency, ideology or short-sighted policy.
History is replete with examples. In the 15th century, China deployed fleets that dwarfed anything possessed by European powers, sailing as far as East Africa. But fearing instability and obsessed with internal control, its rulers dismantled their maritime power, ceding the seas—and the future—to Europe. In the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, once a vital transmission mechanism bringing science and medicine to the West, clung to tradition and resisted industrialization. The result was stagnation and irrelevance.
The 20th century offers similar lessons. The Soviet Union launched the first satellite but crushed its nascent internet revolution, fearing the openness that innovation demands. The United States offshored its semiconductor manufacturing capabilities in the name of cost efficiency. Today, Taiwan leads the global chip supply and Washington is scrambling.
President Donald Trump answers questions during a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House on June 27, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
President Donald Trump answers questions during a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House on June 27, 2025, in Washington, with the passage of President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, history threatens to repeat itself—this time through a distinctly American form of self-sabotage.
President Trump's signature legislative achievement is billed as a national renewal project. But in substance, it represents a sweeping repudiation of the very policies that have begun to reorient the United States for long-term strategic competition with China. The bill eliminates more than $180 billion in clean energy tax credits over the next decade—including the 45X advanced manufacturing credit, which was catalyzing domestic battery, solar, and EV supply chains. It slashes over $60 billion earmarked for EV charging infrastructure, and sidelines efforts to modernize an antiquated grid system and scale carbon capture, hydrogen, and storage technologies.
It rescinds over $20 billion from the CHIPS and Science Act's R&D budget, neutering long-term U.S. innovation in semiconductors, and cuts the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) budget by 70 percent , stalling high-risk, high-reward technology programs critical to future global energy competitiveness. Programs to support workforce development in strategic and emerging sectors—including NSF fellowships and community college grants—have been zeroed out.
Rather than investments for global leadership, the legislation diverts funds toward politically symbolic priorities: expanded fossil fuel subsidies, funding for non-productive border infrastructure, and ideologically driven restrictions on ESG-aligned investment programs.
Combined with the Trump administration's broader attacks on flagship research universities and core funding in basic science and research, the message is clear: the U.S. is slowing down just as the global race to define the 21st century reaches a sprint.
This is not how great nations endure. It is how they fall.
And while the United States pulls back, China is gathering momentum. Beijing is investing state capital at scale in clean energy technologies, EVs, advanced batteries, grid storage, and the critical mineral supply chains on which all of these depend. It is not just competing—it is shaping global standards and opening new global markets in Latin America, Africa, and Europe, and securing long-term economic advantage. In 2023 alone, China added over $130 billion in new clean tech manufacturing subsidies, locked in new partnerships for lithium and cobalt supplies across Africa and Latin America, and deployed more EVs domestically than the rest of the world combined.
But the story is broader than China. In Europe and Asia, governments are ramping up public investment and targeted tax incentives in battery manufacturing, clean energy technology, EV supply chains, AI and chips, carbon storage and grid resilience, and next-generation industrial capacity. Even India, once overlooked in the tech race, has pledged $10 billion in production-linked incentives for semiconductors as well as for advanced clean energy manufacturing.
This is not merely a matter of climate policy or economic direction. It is about geopolitical positioning. The nations that lead in new energy, infrastructure, and core technologies will determine global rules and capital flows. Those that fall behind will become dependent on systems they did not design and cannot control.
Some insist that market forces will eventually adjust. But history rarely offers second chances. Great powers rise by investing in the future. They fall when they fight the future and mistake regression for resurgence.
This is not a bold reimagining of American greatness but rather a retreat from responsibility and opportunity. Like China burning their ships. Like Ottomans rejecting the factory. Like Soviet bureaucrats fearing the microchip. The One Big Beautiful Bill may claim to restore American leadership—but, in practice, it dismantles the foundations of U.S. competitiveness.
The bill is now law, but its effects are not yet destiny. There remains time for Congress, states, the private sector and—most importantly—the American people to choose differently. History's lesson is clear: greatness is not a birthright. It is a wager on the future. And it demands the courage to build.
Michael Schiffer, a partner at Scalare Advisors, served as assistant administrator for Asia at USAID in the Biden administration, senior advisor and counselor at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and prior to that, at the Department of Defense in the Obama administration.
Dewardric L. McNeal is managing director and senior policy analyst at Longview Global, LLC, a former Obama administration appointee to the U.S. Department of Defense, and served as assistant director for international programs at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
