A Condition Without a Deadline
A target consists of a quantity, a value and a deadline. There is an operation that makes the deadline disappear and leaves everything else standing. It is not a lie, no one orders it, and it costs the one thing that could have been learned from the undertaking.
I. The Deadline
A target consists of three parts: a quantity, a value and a deadline. Without the deadline it is not a target but an indication of direction. This is not hair-splitting; it is the whole difference. Only a deadline creates the moment at which someone has to look.
For some time now we have been observing an operation that makes this moment disappear without abandoning the target. It runs the same way everywhere, across institutions that have nothing politically in common, and no one orders it. It sets in.
The formula for global warming was: a limit of 1.5 degrees. It now reads: keep the overshoot as small, as short and as safe as possible, and return below the line by the end of the century. The target has not been abandoned. It has been translated into a condition for which there is no longer a date of reckoning.
The same translation can be found in quite different contexts. The German Climate Protection Act contained annual targets for individual sectors; missing one obliged the responsible ministry to produce an immediate action programme. After repeated misses, the Act was amended in 2024 so that the annual sector-by-sector check was replaced by a multi-year, cross-sectoral and forward-looking assessment. The Maastricht criteria name a debt-to-GDP ratio of sixty per cent; a number of member states have exceeded it for decades, it remains formally unchanged, and in practice it is filled in by country-specific adjustment paths. And a protest movement whose mobilisation has stalled describes itself not as having failed but as being in a challenging phase of transition — burnt out, but not dead, and just now moving in a new direction.
Four cases, four political camps, one operation.
II. The Operation
It has four steps, and none of them is a lie.
First a target is set, effective precisely because it names a value and a deadline. Then the value is missed. Then — and this is the decisive step — the target is not abandoned. It is expressly reaffirmed, often more solemnly than before. And finally the deadline is replaced by a pathway. A threshold becomes a direction, a date becomes an effort, a result becomes a process.
What is remarkable is how much of it remains true. It is true that every tenth of a degree counts. It is true that an exhausted movement is not the same as a dead one. It is true that a multi-year assessment is methodologically defensible, and that a rigid threshold can act pro-cyclically. Every single statement withstands scrutiny. What no longer withstands scrutiny is the question of whether the target was met — because that question no longer has an addressee or a date.
A denial can be refuted. A reclassification cannot.
III. Not Cynicism
It would be convenient to see calculation at work here. We think that is wrong.
The reclassification is as a rule performed by those who are right on the substance. The meteorologists are not wrong about the temperatures. The movement is not wrong about the urgency. The finance minister is not wrong that a rigid rule forces the wrong thing in a downturn. That is precisely why the operation works: someone who is right on the substance experiences the question about the missed deadline as petty, as a distraction from what matters, possibly as assistance to the other side.
And it serves a function. An organisation that admits its failure loses members, money and access. A movement that declares itself failed dissolves. A body that declares a target missed surrenders its reason to exist. The reclassification preserves the capacity to act. That is no small value, and whoever criticises it should say what is to take its place.
The price is high nonetheless, and it is of a particular kind. What is lost is not credibility — that holds up astonishingly long. What is lost is the learning. For what there is to learn from an undertaking only becomes visible at the point where it is established that it did not work. Whoever circumvents that point keeps his means, his interpretation and his organisational form — and repeats them.
IV. The Missing Office
Why does the operation set in so reliably? Because in none of the institutions involved is anyone responsible for establishing failure.
Whoever would have to deliver the verdict is always the same person who set the target. There is no office whose task consists in saying, at a fixed point in time: this did not work. There are audit offices for money, courts for law, supervisory authorities for procedure — but no body for the plain finding that an undertaking has missed its target and is now to be ended or changed.
As long as that body is missing, the reclassification is not the failing of individual persons but the predictable output of the system. Appeals to honesty will not remove it. Honesty is not the scarce factor here.
V. Why It Spreads
The operation spreads because it teaches.
Every target that survives its own miss instructs the next target-setter that deadlines are not binding. The cost of proclaiming a target falls accordingly — and where costs fall, quantity rises. One can read this off the number of target dates proclaimed over the past two decades, and off the number formally withdrawn afterwards: the first is large, the second is close to zero.
At the end of this development stands the target as a declaration of intent. It is no longer set in order to be reached, but in order to attest to a stance. That is the point at which the operation does its damage — not to those who watch it, but to those who still plan in earnest. They compete with declarations that cost nothing.
VI. The Test
How does one distinguish an honest revision from a reclassification? Three questions suffice.
Does the new formulation name a point in time at which it can be checked whether it was kept? Does it name a result that would count as a miss? And was it made before or after the miss occurred?
A correction made before the result is planning. One made afterwards is bookkeeping. The difference lies not in the content but exclusively in the sequence — and for that reason it is easy to establish from the outside, provided one pays attention.
VII. The Abort Condition
From this follows a proposal that demands no conviction, only a sequence.
Whoever sets a target should at the same time lay down which result would end the undertaking. Not which result is desired — that is already in the target — but which one refutes it. And this must be laid down before the result is known, in a place where it can later be read back.
It costs nothing. It changes only one thing: it makes a target refutable. An undertaking with an abort condition declared in advance can fail, and because it can fail, something can be learned from it. An undertaking without one can only carry on.
It will be objected that no one voluntarily imposes an abort condition on himself. That is probably true. But the question of why someone does not is one that can be put to him — and it is more uncomfortable than any criticism of the content of his target.
Not every target must be reached. But every target must be capable of being missed. A target that cannot be missed is not a target. It is a stance.