When a system that has organized decades of behavior begins to break down, the first response is rarely strategy. It is something closer to collective grief, not one person’s mourning but a shared, often unstated refusal, distributed across a lab, a faculty, an institution, or an entire alliance system, to reallocate effort and attention away from a story about how things are supposed to work. Grief, sociologists of disaster and large-scale trauma have long argued, is not only an individual experience. Communities grieve. So do institutions, and, it turns out, so do research sectors and alliance systems. Their first response to rupture is often to preserve the assumptions that rupture has undone, and adaptation arrives later than the evidence warrants. Accepting what has changed is the precondition for strategy rather than a byproduct of it.
The framing that made me think about that pattern in different terms came from a conversation about the future of alliances. Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, speaking with Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi on the Foreign Affairs podcast this August, put it in a single sentence. “A lot of what’s happening,” he said, “is more grief management than strategy.” The line stayed with me. He named the dynamic precisely, in the unlikely register of statecraft, where the vocabulary of grief rarely surfaces, and compressed it into a sentence sharp enough to travel.
Grief management defends a story about who an institution used to be. Strategy asks what capacity actually exists now and allocates accordingly. The two can look identical from the outside, plans, statements, spending figures, public commitments. Only one of them is built from an honest accounting of present conditions rather than a longing for prior ones.
I began my career as a historian of Russia studying disoriented intellectuals. As a graduate student, I studied how elites after 1917 struggled to make sense of a fractured economic, social, and cultural landscape in real time, without a rulebook. Fittingly, I did this while living and working in Moscow as the Soviet order collapsed around me and nobody knew what would emerge. Amid dislocation and rapid shifts in the cultural mode, people made sense of what they were seeing through what they already knew. I learned to recognize how people and institutions respond to disruption by holding on to roles that no longer fit. I have since spent my career building partnerships among universities, industry, and philanthropy, and I see the same pattern now in American research leaders.
Many leading American research institutions are living a domestic version of the same structural condition Leonard describes internationally. The postwar order that Leonard, Campbell, and Doshi discussed rested on an assumption few people examined closely for decades, that a dominant power would underwrite a system of rules and relationships indefinitely, freeing everyone else to plan around its permanence. The postwar federal research compact rested on a structurally similar assumption. Universities, research hospitals, and the philanthropic and industry partners built around them organized their operating models, their facilities investments, their faculty pipelines, around a funding relationship with government treated as structural rather than contingent. That assumption is now being renegotiated, and the renegotiation is not a temporary disruption to be waited out. It is a change in the architecture itself.
The evidence is no longer anecdotal. Cuts are proposed, partly reversed, then proposed again, and the resulting uncertainty, university leaders say, makes it nearly impossible to make the kind of multiyear commitment doctoral training requires. Reporting this summer showed what that uncertainty has already produced. The National Science Foundation, created out of the same 1945 blueprint that built the modern federal research compact, is on pace to award roughly 6,100 new grants this year, the fewest since the early 1980s and forty-six percent below its average from 2021 to 2024. Doctoral admissions at more than fifty of the nation’s leading research universities fell fifteen percent this year, on top of an eleven percent drop in new doctoral enrollments the year before. The California Institute of Technology cut new graduate admissions by forty percent. The University of Washington’s astronomy department admitted no new doctoral students this year, its first such pause since at least 2016. At MIT, President Sally Kornbluth has met scientists who received the best peer review scores of their lives on grants that still went unfunded, and she says her institution cannot figure out why the dollars are not flowing.
Travis York of the American Association for the Advancement of Science put the underlying stakes plainly. Developing research talent, he said, “is more like planting an orchard than filling a warehouse.” An orchard planted on a funding horizon that keeps shrinking to a single uncertain year is not being managed. It is being mourned in advance.
The international numbers carry a second echo worth naming directly, because the risk is not only structural but specific. International applications to doctoral programs at these universities fell twenty-one percent even as domestic applications rose three percent. Officials at the Association of American Universities, explaining the drop, pointed to universities abroad intensifying their efforts to recruit the students American uncertainty is turning away. That is, in substance, Doshi’s own warning about how a rival power exploits division among allies. The same dynamic, a competitor gaining ground not through strength but through someone else’s confusion, shows up independently in the alliance system and in the doctoral pipeline. That is not coincidence. It is the same underlying condition, observed twice.
Strategy looks different. It is less unified, and less tidy. Doshi, who insists that he and Campbell are not making the case for restoration, argues that what comes next in the alliance system will not be a ready-made new system but an accumulation of smaller, sectoral agreements, built “iteratively and humbly and modestly.” The same logic holds for an institution facing a changed funding order. It can mean a philanthropic relationship structured to bear real weight, a capital allocator brought in as a genuine partner, an industry partnership designed to survive contact with actual incentives. Individual researchers are already doing this at the smallest scale, courting foundations and private companies directly and restructuring their labs around diversified funding rather than waiting on a restored federal baseline. None of it announces itself as a grand solution. All of it starts from what is actually true rather than what was once assumed. Explaining why MIT has spoken up publicly, Kornbluth put the distinction plainly. “This is not an emotional issue,” she said. “It’s a factual issue.”
A recent book by Meric Gertler, the geographer and former president of the University of Toronto, and Anthony Gray, Recovering the University, sets the decline in public support for universities in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia against very different trajectories in China, Singapore, and the Middle East. That is a relative power shift wearing the costume of a values crisis. Their remedy, notably, is not restoration. It is a return to first principles and an honest account of what universities are actually for.
The harder part, and the part that matters most to anyone allocating capital, sitting on a board, or deciding which institutional partnership is worth the effort, is that grief management and strategy are not always easy to tell apart from a distance. An institution in genuine transition and an institution in denial can produce remarkably similar language. Both will talk about resilience. Both will point to past achievements as evidence of future capacity. The difference surfaces only on closer inspection, in whether the numbers being cited describe present capability or nostalgic aspiration, in whether the partnerships being built are structured for the world as it now is or the one being mourned, in whether leadership can name what has changed without flinching from it.
That is not a small distinction to be able to draw, and it is not a comfortable one either, in a room full of people invested in the previous story. It is, increasingly, the distinction on which good decisions about research partnerships, institutional investment, and governance actually turn.
Grief has its place. It allows people and institutions to recognize what has been lost, and to distinguish what must be preserved from what must be allowed to change. But eventually the question changes. Not how do we restore what was, but what does this moment require us to become? That is where strategy begins.
Sources and further readingKurt Campbell, Rush Doshi, and Mark Leonard, “Is a Post-American World Inevitable?,” The Foreign Affairs Interview, August 20, 2026.
Dan Garisto, “NSF Set to Issue Lowest Number of New Grants in Four Decades,” Nature, August 2026.
Vimal Patel, “Decline of Ph.D. Admissions Could Imperil a ‘Generation of New Talent,’” The New York Times, July 6, 2026.
Association of American Universities, doctoral admissions data, July 2026.
Sally Kornbluth, interviewed by Terry Gerton, “Scientific Breakthroughs Don’t Run on Short Timelines, but Federal Funding Is Starting To,” Federal News Network, June 23, 2026.
Chao Deng, “Scientists Scramble for Private Cash in Response to Fresh Funding Turbulence,” The Wall Street Journal, 2026.
Meric S. Gertler and Anthony Gray, Recovering the University, University of Toronto Press, 2026.
