Los Angeles spent the summer hosting World Cup matches without a promised piece of infrastructure for the occasion. Skylink, an airport train first scheduled to run in 2023, missed its debut after cost overruns of an estimated $500m (€428m). The people mover hardly looks any different from Disneyland’s Monorail, opened in 1971, which is just down the freeway in Anaheim. 

It’s tempting to explain these delays as yet another procurement screw-up but they read to me as symptomatic of a larger illness. California is in a period of managed decline that leadership at state and local levels don’t seem to notice. 

The contrast is sharpest for those of us who remember what the state used to feel like. I grew up in northern California in the early 1980s when things seemed box fresh: sparkling malls, nice lawns and new housing developments. The economy was thriving, technology companies were putting down roots and the future felt as though it was under construction. When I returned in 2020 after about 20 years away, I found the natural grandeur intact – the postcard-perfect mountains and redwoods still standing – but the civic confidence largely absent.

In many of LA’s toniest neighbourhoods, you can now hear the occasional siren or helicopter overhead. Affordable housing is scarce and basic functionality, from public bathrooms to well-maintained streets, is treated as an aspiration rather than the baseline. The population seems to segment itself into those who cashed in during the golden years of tech or Hollywood, workers who make the place run and the influencers performing for the algorithm outside Great White or Verve on Melrose Avenue. The much-mocked exodus of the Joe Rogan set to Austin and Miami gets laughed off in the capital of Sacramento but the reasons underneath it are widely understood. 

For me, the most uncomfortable part is that those early, wondrous feelings evoked by California during my youth are now felt elsewhere. Spend a week in Abu Dhabi or Dubai and the atmosphere is that of an older version of California, transplanted. 

Despite the conflict in the Gulf, entrepreneurs are opening inventive retail concepts in the UAE and the emirates’ infrastructure arrives on schedule. Dubai built a driverless metro network in roughly the time LA has spent not finishing an airport shuttle and the railway connecting Dubai and Abu Dhabi is soon to open. This comparison is not entirely fair, of course. Gulf projects often materialise rapidly as a result of sovereign financing, while in California, developments are largely decentralised and therefore take shape more slowly. What I feel most acutely is a homesickness for an older version of home. 

California has run for 15 years or so on the fiscal equivalent of human growth hormone: the compensation and stock of Big Tech company employees based here. This tax revenue has been treated by state officials as an ever-refilling well that can never run dry. Now come proposals that would tax that base, or the companies’s founders, more aggressively, still on the assumption that they and their workforces are immovable. Recent history suggests otherwise. None of these firms are perhaps the most ethical but their revenues help fund the coffers that everything else depends upon. 

States, like cities, have cycles. And perhaps California has recovered from worse. But a true recovery requires first admitting the diagnosis. Landing recently into a gritty LAX with nary a luggage cart to be seen, from a modern, gleaming terminal in Taipei, it was hard to avoid the thought that the Golden State was losing its sunny shine. It might not be beyond saving but the state that taught the world what the future would look like is currently importing that feeling from the desert – and no one in charge appears to have noticed.

Colin Nagy is a Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
 
Further reading:
- How a Los Angeles local created a Monocle guide to a city with no centre

- Village Green: The leafy Los Angeles neighbourhood that puts communities first

- For the UAE, culture is what binds its diverse population and gives it hope in times of conflict

Foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan once quipped that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus, meaning that the former are attuned to power politics while the latter remain preoccupied with peace and diplomacy (writes Gorana Grgić). It’s a bon mot but it’s worth remembering that a great many of the foundational texts of strategic thought, from Thucydides and Machiavelli to Clausewitz, all hail from the Old Continent. Grand strategy is not an innate American trait but a lost European art.

Decades of outsourcing security to Washington has caused Europe’s strategic muscles to atrophy but, given that this intellectual deficit is partly an educational failure, it’s a fixable problem.

National security pronouncements in the past couple of years have revealed the consequences of this shift, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Scrambling to confront a revanchist Russia and fracturing global order, European capitals churned out documents cluttered with unachievable aspirations that ignored hard realities. Germany’s 2023 strategy listed nine core goals that promised robust territorial defence and preserved social-market spending, entirely ignoring the brutal fiscal trade-offs required to fund a modern military. The EU’s 2022 Strategic Compass, meanwhile, pledged to become a “security provider” without ever defining what the concept would mean in practice.

So how does Europe reclaim its lost art? Click here to find out.

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