For decades, the United States assumed its scientific preeminence made it the natural home for early drug development — an assumption that quietly eroded as China, Australia, and Europe built faster, leaner systems for testing new medicines. The FDA's Operation TrialBlazer represents a formal reckoning with that loss, introducing rolling submissions and consultative pathways to reclaim ground in first-in-human research. Yet the deeper lesson emerging from this effort is one familiar to any institution confronting decline: the most visible authority is rarely the sole source of the problem, and