The Long Game and the Lessons We Forgot

Taylor Sheridan’s hit CIA thriller Lioness has never shied away from America’s enemies. The show explores threats from the Middle East to cartel-CCP infiltration, but season three is looking a little different.

This season centers on something quieter and potentially more consequential: the “long game” being played inside the United States.

The premise is chillingly simple. America’s adversaries do not have to defeat us on a battlefield if they can weaken us from within.

Communist and authoritarian regimes can spend decades cultivating influence across American society—targeting our institutions, exploiting our divisions, propagandizing our students, shaping our culture, and influencing how the next generation of Americans understands its own country.

The goal isn’t always to plant a bomb or fly airplanes into a building. Sometimes the goal is to reshape a nation so gradually that most citizens never recognize it’s happening.

Sure, it’s television. But the strategy it depicts is not merely fiction.

As America marks 25 years since September 11, 2001, the warning at the heart of Lioness feels especially relevant: As our enemies adapt, so must our vigilance.

Twenty-five years is not that long ago.

It was only twenty-five years ago that Islamist terrorists hijacked commercial airplanes and turned them into weapons, murdering thousands of people right here at home. It was only 25 years ago that Americans watched the Twin Towers fall and realized that an ideology cultivated thousands of miles away could bring unimaginable violence directly into the heart of our nation.

And it was only twenty-five years ago that Americans stood together against it.

On September 12, 2001, Americans understood, with painful clarity, that there are ideologies fundamentally hostile to our nation, our freedoms, and our cherished way of life. Recognizing that fact was not considered hateful or intolerant. We understood that protecting a free society may require having the courage to identify those who seek to undermine it.

A quarter-century later, that clarity has faded.

Too many of my fellow Americans have come to believe that tolerance requires acceptance of almost any ideology or cultural value brought into our society, even when those ideas conflict with the principles that make American pluralism possible in the first place.

We are increasingly expected not simply to respect the rights of those who disagree with us, but to abandon our judgment about the ideas themselves.

It’s a kind of toxic empathy—the idea that being compassionate means we are no longer allowed to call dangerous ideas what they are.

But America does not have to choose between being a welcoming nation and defending what makes this country worth coming to. We can protect the rights and freedoms of every American while still confronting extremism when we see it.

For generations, assimilation was part of the American promise. People came here from every corner of the world, bringing different languages, traditions, and faiths, but becoming a part of something shared.

Becoming American did not require erasing where you came from, but embracing the country you chose to call home and the fundamental values that allow Americans of different backgrounds to live together as one nation.

We should not be afraid to expect that still.

Radicalization does not happen overnight. People are taught what to believe as they are influenced by the people around them, the institutions they trust, and the information they consume. Dangerous ideas take hold slowly, until something that once would have raised alarm barely earns a second look.

And that is where the “long game” matters. The transformation is incremental.

That means the threat is not only the person willing to commit an act of violence. We need to be willing to ask who is influencing them, who is funding them, what ideas are reaching them, and who benefits when those ideas take root here at home. The Trump administration’s 2026 U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy puts into words something Americans need to understand: “the terrorist threat has changed.”

So have the people who want to harm us.

Our enemies adapt and learn. They understand that there are ways to weaken America that do not begin with a bomb or end in a battlefield. They recruit and radicalize. They’ve learned to exploit our freedoms, our openness, and even our instinct to give others the benefit of the doubt.

But that does not mean we abandon those freedoms. It means we protect them fiercely enough to recognize when someone is trying to use them against us.

Our enemies may be playing the long game. But they should never mistake American openness for weakness.

Twenty-five years after September 11, our responsibility is not to live afraid of what might come next, but to remember who we are before we are forced to remember again.

Be vigilant. Defend our freedoms and our values. Teach our children why this country is exceptional.

September 11 showed us what our enemies are capable of.

September 12 showed us what America is capable of.

Twenty-five years later, let us remember both.