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Because these are challenges that the nation as a whole must address, because addressing them will require exertion and sacrifice, and because they have an international dimension, it seems natural to discuss them in the language of international competition and conflict. The challenge that Kennan identified in his Long Telegram really was a war of sorts. The four major challenges the country confronts today have to be understood in a different framework. It seems to us that the appropriate framework is provided by the great engine of change in the natural world, evolution. The driving force of evolution is adaptation. Where Kennan was urging Americans to oppose a new enemy, we are calling on Americans to adapt to a new environment.

Over hundreds of millions of years, many thousands of species (plants and animals, including humans) have survived when their biological features have allowed them to adapt to their environment—that is, allowed them to reproduce successfully and so perpetuate their genes. If gray-colored herons are better disguised from their predators than white ones, more and more grays and fewer and fewer whites will survive and reproduce in every generation until all herons are gray. (The phrase “survival of the fittest” that is often used to describe evolution means survival of the best adapted.)

Adaptation becomes particularly urgent when a species’ environment changes. Birds may fly to an island far from their previous habitat. Whether these birds survive will depend on how well adapted they happen to be to their new home, and whether the species as a whole survives there will depend on how successfully those adaptations are passed down to subsequent generations.

Sixty-five million years ago, scientists believe, a large meteor or a series of them struck the Earth, igniting firestorms and shrouding the planet in a cloud of dust. This caused the extinction of three-quarters of all then existing species, including the creatures that at the time dominated the Earth, the dinosaurs.

The end of the Cold War and the challenges that followed brought on a fundamental change in our environment. Only the individuals, the companies, and the nations that adapt to the new global environment will thrive in the coming decades. The end of the Cold War should have been an occasion not for relaxation and self-congratulation but for collective efforts to adapt to the new world that we invented.

We thought of ourselves as the lion that, having just vanquished the leader of the competing pride of lions on the savanna, reigns as the undisputed king of all he surveys. Instead we were, and are, running the risk of becoming dinosaurs.

The analogy between the effects of evolution on particular species and the impact of social, economic, and political change on sovereign states breaks down in a couple of crucial ways, though. For one, adaptation in biology takes place across hundreds of generations, while the adaptation we are talking about will have to happen within a few years. And whether or not a species is well adapted to its environment is the product of uncontrollable genetic coding. Individuals, groups, and nations, by contrast, can understand their circumstances and deliberately make the adjustments necessary to flourish in them. The dinosaurs could do nothing to avoid extinction. The United States can choose to meet the challenges it faces and adopt the appropriate policies for doing so.

The country is not facing extinction, but the stakes involved are very high indeed.

The Stakes

Our success in meeting the four challenges will determine the rate and the shape of U.S. economic growth, and how widely the benefits of such growth are shared. For most of its history the United States achieved impressive annual increases in GDP, which lifted the incomes of most of its citizens. That economic growth served as the foundation for almost everything we associate with America: its politics, its social life, its role in the world, and its national character. Fifty-five years ago the historian David Potter, in