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Fifty years ago, at his inauguration, John F. Kennedy urged his fellow citizens, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” That idea resonated with most of the Americans to whom he spoke because they had personal memories of an era of supreme and successful sacrifice, which earned them the name “the Greatest Generation.”

Unfortunately, today’s challenges differ in an important way from those of the last century. The problems the Greatest Generation faced were inescapable, immediate, and existential: the Great Depression, German and Japanese fascism, and Soviet communism. The enemies they had to confront were terrifying, tangible, and obvious: long unemployment lines, soup kitchens, heartless bankers evicting families from their homes, the twisted wreckage of Pearl Harbor, the maniacal countenance and braying voice of Adolf Hitler, the ballistic missiles decorating the May Day parades in Red Square in Moscow—missiles that one day were dispatched to Cuba, just ninety miles from America’s shores. When the Soviets weren’t putting up a wall topped with barbed wire, slicing through the heart of Berlin like a jagged knife, they were invading Hungary and Czechoslovakia to stomp out a few wildflowers of freedom that had broken through the asphalt layer of communism the Soviet Union had laid down on those two countries. These challenges were impossible to ignore.

Whether or not the public and the politicians all agreed on the strategies for dealing with those challenges—and often they didn’t—they recognized that decisions had to be made, endless wrangling had to stop, and denying the existence of such threats or postponing dealing with them was unthinkable. Most Americans understood the world they were living in. They understood, too, that in confronting these problems they had to pull together—they had to act collectively—in a unified, serious, and determined way. Confronting those challenges meant bringing to bear the full weight and power of the American people. It also meant that leaders could not avoid asking for sacrifice. Kennedy also summoned his countrymen to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.” Everyone had to contribute something—time, money, energy, and, in many cases, lives. Losing was not an option, nor were delay, denial, dithering, or despair.

Today’s major challenges are different. All four—globalization, the IT revolution, out-of-control deficits and debt, and rising energy demand and climate change—are occurring incrementally. Some of their most troubling features are difficult to detect, at least until they have reached crisis proportions. Save for the occasional category-5 hurricane or major oil spill, these challenges offer up no Hitler or Pearl Harbor to shock the nation into action. They provide no Berlin Wall to symbolize the threat to America and the world, no Sputnik circling the Earth proclaiming with every cricket-like chirp of its orbiting signal that we are falling behind in a crucial arena of geopolitical competition. We don’t see the rushing river of dollars we send abroad every month—about $28 billion—to sustain our oil addiction. The carbon dioxide that mankind has been pumping into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and at rising rates over the past two decades, is a gas that cannot be seen, touched, or smelled.

To be sure, the four great challenges have scarcely gone unnoticed. But in the last few years the country was distracted, indeed preoccupied, by the worst economic crisis in eight decades. It is no wonder that Americans became fixated on their immediate economic circumstances. Those circumstances were grim: American households lost an estimated $10 trillion in the crisis. For more than a year the American economy contracted. Unemployment rose to 9 percent (and if people too discouraged to seek jobs were included, the figure would be significantly higher).

There is an important difference between the challenge of the economic