What is Winning?
2020 told us to build resilience. We chased illusory wins instead. Now we have to ask: Is it worth it?
Year 2020. Covid.
Everyone still remembers what happened.
China locked down a whole province overnight.
People kept working from home.
Masks became mandatory.
Jobs disappeared.
That moment was a “Wake-up call”.
It showed that many governments had outsourced strategic manufacturing, built fragile just-in-time supply chains, and left their societies with almost no buffers.
6 years later, now in 2026.
I wondered what makes all of us asking “What is Winning” today?
Russia: The War with No End in Sight
Russia has started the Ukraine war.
The human cost has been enormous.
Fuel disruptions appear.
Interest rates gone up to 14% to fight inflation, choke industry further.
The state is forced into export bans and subsidies.
Economy tanked.
People are asking “What brought us here?”, and whether “Was it was worth it?”.
My question is simpler:
Should winning mean how successfully we keep a failing project alive?
USA: Unclear objectives, unclear ending
The United States story is clear as mud.
Huge Trade deficit.
Trillion-dollar interest costs on the debt.
Technology Race.
Iran War.
You probably can’t win all these together. Could you?
Look at American technology.
A large share of the talent is imported.
Critical chips and many of the materials are not produced at home at the scale required.
According to the French Treasury’s October 2026 analysis, the US goods trade deficit widened by $22 billion in the first 8 months of 2026 compared with 2024. The entire deterioration came from AI-related imports. Those imports jumped $382 billion, up 129%. Non-AI imports actually fell.
Here is how you can tell the truth:
Imagine if one day the imported talent left and the critical inputs were restricted, what’s the meaningful capacity left in America?
Nothing much. If you build a train, you leave rails behind.
Much of the current technology does not.
UK & Europe: The Cleanest Form of Externalization
Fast forward from 2020, Europe’s carbon and decarbonisation push has given them nothing to win from.
Think about the carbon architecture shows.
The forest is not yours.
The oxygen is not yours.
The credit is.
The system allows countries and companies to claim progress through offsets and accounting mechanisms while much of the physical production (and often the emissions) sits elsewhere.
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And so now CBAM is being challenged at the WTO as a possible industrial tool dressed in climate language.
Dependence was not reduced. It was rearranged.
Their decarbonization program is also basically they rather incentivize other country to make “waste” for them instead of Europe really utilizing their own waste for it.
Are we still rewarding the transfer of claims rather than the building of real capability on our own?
This is “Externalizing Cost” at its purest.
And the UK simply offloaded the burden straight onto households.
On 27 October 2026 the UK government launched its “Be Ready” campaign.
It told every household to stockpile three days of food, water, cash, torches and radios. Right after the announcement, supermarkets saw panic buying. Tinned food and water sold out in many places.
Empty shelves do not make a country more resilient.
It is clear that winning is not about an “unbuffered” system tells an “unprepared” public to get ready.
What Winning Should Mean
We haven’t woken up, in any shape or form, from 2020.
None of these powers used the years since then to build “real” buffers and “owned” capacity.
Instead the pattern looks classic:
1. Externalize cost → 2. Stuck in Projects didn’t work → 3. Too expensive to abolish the old → then we go back to point 1.
Or we simply doing things we can’t win at all.
Winning should mean these 3 things:
- Owning the critical means of production and the skills that make them work.
- Measuring success by whether a country can absorb shocks without pushing the cost downward or outward.
- Reducing, rather than increasing, the number of things that can break you.
Because these build up what could compound with real resilience by time.
The trap is normalizing the idea “externalization” is cheaper.
But then “easy answer” and “cheap win” is not what we want.
Now these are leaking into our technological design.
Part of the society fears technology will take the jobs.
Another part hopes abundance will arrive quickly.
But we cannot build a god-mode AI and simply assume it will serve us.
Or we can’t just run technology in “extraction” mode, until eventually there is no one else left.
Even worse we could have wars that pulling the economy beneath the unbuffered systems, cost of living are rising and so does the cost of doing any real business.
The real winning should be about “Is this worth it”.
It forces a comparison between the continuing cost and the actual destination.
Only everyone willing to step up and stop, slow down and redesign.
We will finally stop mistaking the ability to sustain the unsustainable for victory.
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