The West Still Talks About Values. Power Now Belongs to Systems That Can Execute
by Jaffa Levy
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The West still describes itself in moral language.
Rules based order. Democratic legitimacy. Rights. Transparency. Those things matter, but they are not power by themselves. Power is the ability to do difficult things on purpose, at scale, repeatedly, and on time. In 2025, the world is quietly redrawing the line between systems that can execute and systems that can only announce.
Western politics remains fluent in values and clumsy with delivery. It can legislate, regulate, consult, and litigate. It struggles to build. It struggles to procure. It struggles to finish.
This is not a sneer at democracy. It is a diagnosis of institutions. If oversight becomes so dense that outcomes disappear, the public stops hearing “rights” and starts hearing “excuses”. That is how legitimacy decays. Not through scandal, but through non delivery.
Execution explained simply
Execution is the boring layer beneath politics: competent procurement, stable budgets, planning systems that do not collapse into endless rework, and institutions that can finish what they start. It is not inspiration. It is repeatability.
Europe’s defence problem is not money. It is throughput.
Start with the arena where failure cannot be disguised: ammunition.
In 2023, the EU set a target to supply Ukraine with one million artillery shells within a year. It missed the deadline. Not by a little, but by structural shortage. The bloc later conceded it would deliver only around half by the original date, with the full target pushed out. This is not about intent. It is about industrial capacity that no longer exists at the necessary scale.
In late 2025, Reuters reported that a Swedish explosives start up won approval to build a TNT plant, with production targeted for 2028. That is the most honest kind of datapoint because it is unglamorous and slow. Europe is now rebuilding the supply chain it allowed to atrophy, and the time horizon is measured in years.
Why “we will spend more” is not the same as “we will be ready”
Defence is not an invoice. Capability depends on factories, skilled labour, raw materials, and production scheduling. If the supply chain is missing, money becomes a promise with no delivery mechanism.
Germany illustrates the paradox. Berlin has moved from underfunding to large procurement approvals and higher spending plans. Yet even German procurement has been hit by the same friction that haunts the rest of Europe: contract award delays, delivery delays, and industrial workshare fights. Rheinmetall has publicly blamed German contract delays for slowing results. Money exists. The machine that turns money into output is still rebuilding.
Germany is relearning that infrastructure is a national security issue
There is a second German failure that is more culturally revealing because it touches everyday life: the rail system.
Germany built a reputation on punctuality. Today, it runs a rail network that has become a national embarrassment. Deutsche Bahn’s own reporting has noted declining long distance punctuality and the need for emergency action plans. Independent reporting in 2025 described the delay crisis as chronic. When a country cannot run trains on time, it is rarely a “train problem”. It is an accumulated maintenance problem, a coordination problem, a budget problem, and a governance problem. In other words, a state capacity problem.
Why trains matter to geopolitics
Rail punctuality is a proxy for institutional health. It reflects maintenance discipline, planning competence, and the ability to coordinate large systems. The same muscles are required for grids, defence manufacturing, ports, and major housing buildouts.
Britain: a system that can announce, then cancel, then write off
If Germany’s failures look like slow decay, Britain’s look like violent churn: ambition, redesign, cancellation, and sunk cost.
HS2 is the cleanest case study because the state has had to document the retreat in public. The National Audit Office set out the consequences of cancelling major phases and the scale of spending already sunk. Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee later noted that even basic planning around Euston remained unresolved, despite repeated commitments and shifting endpoints. This is what non delivery looks like in its purest form: the country pays, the timeline slides, the scope shrinks, and the institutional memory is burned in the process.
Britain’s defence procurement offers another brutal example because it combines cost, delay, and safety.
In December 2025, Reuters reported that the UK paused trials of the Ajax armoured vehicle again, after safety concerns and persistent problems with noise and vibration. The programme was ordered in 2014, originally meant to enter service in 2020, and still cannot reliably complete trials. This is not “bad luck”. It is procurement culture: specification drift, inadequate testing discipline, and a system that struggles to hold contractors and itself to account without breaking delivery altogether.
What failure to deliver actually feels like
It feels like paying twice: once in money, and again in time. Projects slip, costs rise, capabilities arrive late or not at all, and the state becomes dependent on stopgap measures. The public experiences this as decline. The bureaucracy experiences it as normal.
So what is the contrast with China and the United States
China’s space yearender is instructive here, not because one should trust state messaging, but because it advertises a different institutional posture: build, test, fail, fix, repeat. The signal is cadence. China wants the reader to infer that complex projects are now routine outputs of a functioning apparatus. That is the core of industrial sovereignty.
The United States remains capable of extraordinary execution when it chooses to concentrate resources and accept risk. Its advantage is still scale, capital, and a private sector that can move fast in certain domains. Its weakness is political continuity. America can sprint. It struggles to sustain long cycle programmes without domestic political fragmentation turning them into culture war theatre.
This is not “admire China” and it is not “America is finished”
The point is measurement. Values do not build factories. Legitimacy does not fix procurement. The future belongs to systems that can still execute. Democracies can do that, but only if they rebuild the institutions that make delivery possible.
The real risk: values language becomes associated with impotence
Execution politics is coming whether the West likes it or not. Not because the public has become immoral, but because the public has become tired of being managed by announcements that never become reality.
If Western states want to defend their values, they must relearn the habit of building. Planning reform. Procurement discipline. Skills pipelines. Maintenance culture. A tolerance for controlled failure and iteration. A state that cannot deliver ceases to be believed, even when it is right.
The world is not dividing into democracies and autocracies. It is dividing into systems that can still do things and systems that can only talk about what they intended to do.
