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- (Foundational) China and the Far East
- (Foundational) Latin America
- (Foundational) Middle East
- (Foundational) Russia and Europe
By Niall Ferguson Feb. 21, 2025 - What I call Ferguson’s Law states that any great power that spends more on debt service than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power. The insight is not mine but originates with the Scottish political theorist Adam Ferguson, whose “Essay on the History of Civil Society” (1767) brilliantly identified the perils of excessive public debt. Read More
By Phil Gramm and Michael Solon Nov. 2, 2025 - Amid all the pessimism and calls for government protection, it’s important to remember that our only window into the future is the past. From the colossal changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution of the last quarter-century, improvements in technology have created an array of jobs that far exceeded—in quantity and quality—the ones eliminated, elevating standards of living. History offers cautionary tales of how special interests and public fear can spawn government policies that delay progress and raise the cost of the transition. Read More
By Yaroslav Trofimov July 7, 2026 - The key feature of the war between Russia and Ukraine, and likely of other major conflicts to come, is that what used to be cutting-edge weapons and technologies becomes outdated within months. “If you have an adaptive adversary, it’s the speed of iteration and the rate of learning that matter, rather than the technology per se,” Mosley added....One example of adaptability is Ukraine’s new procurement system for drones, which account for over 90% of enemy losses, electronic warfare systems and some other key weapons. It is fundamentally different from how Western militaries, with...
By Scott Bessent - June 23, 2026 - Economic security begins with the capacity to build, invent, finance and scale the industries that will define the next century, among them semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, critical minerals and pharmaceuticals. More than economic sectors, these are sources of national power. The U.S. must lead in all of them. Read More
By Paola Sapienza – 10 27 2025 - We can continue leveraging America’s exorbitant privilege in the global talent market, or we can retreat into protectionism that hands our competitive advantages to countries eager to welcome the talent we reject. If the United States wants to remain the world’s innovation leader, it must continue to welcome those willing to take the leap, cross oceans, and devote their lives to discovery. Our edge is selection from a larger global pool. Closing the door shrinks our innovative future. The choice is openness or stagnation. ...In a globally competitive economy, the countries that...
By Gary Saul Morson - Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle.... during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured ... and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine.... In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism ...Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any...
By John Walters – By and large, we do not believe that there are individuals with great ruling talent who “thirst and burn” to shatter the existing order for the sake of dominating others ... a fundamentally different type of human being: animals of prey, a profoundly different human type from the rest of us. ...Is Lincoln's warning grounded in a timeless truth?... We need only think of Stalin, Mao, and, of course, Hitler. Can we learn from this terrible history?...Specifically, are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping just such individuals?....they now largely control the levers of power and use that power in a brutal...
By Robert D. Kaplan - Standing in contrast to these misdeeds are the records of three great Republican secretaries of state who shepherded American diplomacy during the middle and late phases of the Cold War: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Baker III. Their successes were inextricable from their understanding of America as a nation-state, a worldview that put the needs of the U.S. above all else. Read More
By Paul A. Gigot - The relevant questions are: How did we get here? And what to do about it? The answer to the first question is that we forgot the lesson of history. One of my military mentors was Andy Marshall, the legendary Pentagon strategist, who liked to say that peace is best understood as an interlude between wars. Robert Gates issued a similar warning as he retired as defense secretary in 2011 when he said that, when wars end, the U.S. always makes the mistake of drawing down defenses and leaving ourselves vulnerable. We ignored him. So what...
By Gary Saul Morson - How was such evil possible? ... but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains ...had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.” Read More
By Arthur Herman - A Trump revolution is poised to unleash the innovative and productive power of the private sector, transforming the federal government. If it happens, Americans will witness the most significant change in the operation and philosophy of governance in 120 years. Fortunately, the precedent for this kind of transformation occurred more than 70 years ago, when American private industry mobilized to win World War II. Read More
By Walter Russell Meade - Kissinger understood something that too many Americans, on the left and right, find difficult to grasp: Power and morality aren’t opposites. Rather, power is the platform that makes moral action possible for a state. And morality isn’t a set of rules and laws that states are expected to obey. Rather, in international relations, morality involves creating an order that prevents the anarchy and slaughter of great-power warfare. Such an order gains legitimacy not by its perfect adherence to a religious or secular moral code, but by its ability to preserve values and conditions that allow...
By Walter Russell Mead - Why are so many actors challenging American power in so many parts of the world? Because the U.S. is losing its power to deter....the erosion of deterrence usually begins gradually and ends suddenly. Emboldened by American failures to respond effectively (as when Mr. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, when President Obama failed to enforce his “red line” in Syria, or when China built and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea), our adversaries gradually lost their inhibitions and dared to challenge us more directly in more damaging ways. Read More
By Ted Nordhaus and Mark Lynas - Nuclear winter, by contrast, would destroy civilization beyond repair within months or years. Yet unlike climate change, which has preoccupied activists for decades, it is largely ignored. Conflicts between nuclear-armed adversaries remind us that no other risk to human societies remotely rivals nuclear warfare. Read More
By Carl Benedikt Frey July 31, 2026 - How does a country with such casual regard for the rule of law produce so much dynamism?...The answer is that the rule of law, in China ...is not one thing. It has a liberal side—secure property rights, courts that constrain the state... It also has a regulatory side that can wall off competition... America used to be alive to this distinction. It is no longer.......CHINA’S DYNAMISM does not come from the absence of law. It comes from the sequence in which laws are enacted. The Communist Party allows firms to scale in regulatory...
By Bjorn Lomborg - … the global elite has an unhealthy obsession with climate change.... First, it has distracted the Western world from real geopolitical threats. …the United Nations…whose main purpose is ensuring world peace—was focused instead on “climate catastrophe,” ... This at a time when nuclear weapons are posing the biggest risk of literal mutually assured destruction in half a century….Second, the narrow focus on immediate climate objectives undermines future prosperity…the best economic estimates … all show that the total impact of unmitigated climate change—would be ... less than a 4% hit to global GDP by the end of...
By John Bolton - First, Washington and its allies must immediately increase defense budgets to Reagan-era levels relative to gross domestic product and sustain such spending for the foreseeable future. Federal budgets need substantial reductions to eliminate deficits and shrink the national debt, so higher military spending necessitates even greater reductions domestically. So be it. Neither the obese welfare state nor massive income-redistribution schemes protect us from foreign adversaries. Higher levels of economic growth, freed from crushing tax and regulatory burdens, will underlie the necessary military buildup. Read More