Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Seven years is the bait; a quarter century is the hook. Charles Foster Bass’s line is doing a familiar political trick: it compresses time to expand urgency. By foregrounding the Cox Committee’s finding that Chinese military acquisitions accelerated "over the past seven years", he invites a voter’s attention span to lock onto a recent, actionable window. Then he widens the frame - "more than a quarter century" - to argue this isn’t a passing flare-up but a long-running strategic campaign the U.S. failed to take seriously.

The intent isn’t just to describe espionage or technology transfer; it’s to assign narrative culpability. If the targeting spans 25 years, the problem stops being about a single breach and becomes about systemic American softness: porous export controls, complacent corporate incentives, naive engagement policy, and under-enforced counterintelligence. Bass’s phrasing also lets him criticize without naming names. "Over the past seven years" quietly points toward a particular set of administrations and policy choices, while the longer timeline implies bipartisan negligence - useful cover when you want outrage without getting pinned to one party’s record.

Context matters: the Cox Committee (late 1990s) emerged from a moment of post-Cold War confusion, when globalization was sold as a one-way street and China’s rise was alternately minimized or monetized. Bass leverages committee authority to launder a political argument as a factual update. The subtext is escalation-ready: if they’ve wanted it for decades and got it quickly once conditions aligned, then the U.S. should assume intent, capability, and patience - and respond with hardened controls, not optimism.