Articles

The U.S. Isn’t Ready to Face China on the Battlefield

By Seth G. Jones - Oct. 16, 2022

Principles of Government · November 27, 2022 ·

These challenges highlight an even more serious concern: The U.S. defense industrial base is inadequately prepared for the wartime environment that now exists. It is operating in a peacetime environment. In a major regional conflict—such as a war with China in the Taiwan Strait—U.S. munitions needs likely would exceed Pentagon plans and stockpiles.

In nearly two dozen iterations of a Center for Strategic and International Studies war game that examined a U.S.-China war in the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. expended all its joint air-to-surface standoff missiles and long-range precision-guided antiship missiles within the first week of the conflict. These missiles are critical because of their ability to strike Chinese naval forces from outside Chinese defenses. Read More

Higher Ed and the Fragmentation of America

By Orrin Hatch - Jul 27, 2020

Principles of Government · October 5, 2020 ·

SELECTED PASSAGES …Somewhere between the rise of cable news and social media, our shared sense of reality splintered. We live in an era of endless political narratives, in which the phrase “my truth” is supposed to be taken seriously. .. Americans today cannot agree on the existence of facts, let alone what the facts are…. Read More

This article is included to draw attention to the grave problem of the left’s domination of higher education and its profound influence on our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future.

Higher Education’s Deeper Sickness

By John M. Ellis - Nov. 13, 2017

Principles of Government · June 24, 2022 ·

Colleges need to be accredited; state universities answer to governing boards. Accrediting agencies and governing boards are created through a political process. What if voters were to insist that those agencies demand answers to some elementary questions? For example: How can a department of political science that excludes half the spectrum of viable political ideas be competent to offer degrees in the field? How can a history curriculum be taught competently when only one extremist attitude to social and political questions is present in a department? How can a campus humanities faculty with the same limitation teach competently? How can these extraordinary deficiencies deserve either accreditation, or support by state and federal funds? Read More

The 2022 Midterm Election Endangers Democrats, Not Democracy

By Gerard Baker - Nov. 7, 2022

Principles of Government · November 10, 2022 ·

…This isn’t complacency. We’re all familiar with the role eternal vigilance plays in the defense of liberty. But it is central to understanding how dishonest and hypocritical the closing Democratic argument in these midterm elections is. It is, after all, the Democrats themselves who have become the most insistent evangelists for the idea that the very system that has protected American democracy for two centuries is not fit for its purpose.

It is the progressive left—with the ready endorsement of the top figures in the Democratic Party—that wants to dismantle many of the most important constitutional institutions and principles that protect American democracy: states’ rights, the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, due process and the enforcement of the rule of law.

This isn’t some fringe view or even merely a cynical attempt to remake the system for political advantage. The party is in the grip of an ideology that believes the entire American constitutional construct is illegitimate; that the Constitution itself was founded to preserve a hideous racial tyranny, and therefore that all those quaint ideas enumerated in it that have become synonymous with America’s republican democracy—equal rights and protection, freedom of speech—are all merely instruments of repression…. Read More

Biden and Powell Are at Odds on Inflation

By Judy Shelton - Sept. 1, 2022

Principles of Government · October 24, 2022 ·

Welcome to the era of good-cop, bad-cop tactics from major government institutions. Fiscal and monetary policy are now working at odds to fight inflation. The Fed could crush demand by raising interest rates to stratospheric levels only to have a spendthrift White House and complicit Congress pump up consumer prices through fiscal measures that expand spending power—cash payments, subsidies, rebates, student loan forgiveness. Read More

The ‘Anti-Navy’ the U.S. Needs Against the Chinese Military

By Mike Gallagher - Oct. 25, 2022

Principles of Government · October 28, 2022 ·

Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that Mr. Xi is moving on a “much faster timeline” to take Taiwan, and Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday said he couldn’t rule out an invasion in 2022 or 2023. Domestically, Mr. Xi’s problems—a structural economic slowdown, skyrocketing household debt, and the demographic buzzsaw of the largest group of retirees in human history—will all get worse in the 2030s.

At the same time, Mr. Xi faces an American military that is growing weaker within the decade. As the Heritage Foundation’s recently released 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength makes clear, because of inadequate budgets, truncated modernization and degraded readiness, the U.S. military is set to be weakest when the People’s Liberation Army aims to be strongest. The report, which for the first time rated the overall state of the U.S. military as “weak,” rated the Navy and Air Force—the two priority forces in the Indo-Pacific—as “weak” and “very weak,” respectively. Read More

How to Beat China in the New Space Race

By Arthur Herman - Sept. 11, 2022

Principles of Government · October 25, 2022 ·

Today we are in a new space race, this time with China. And our economic and national security both are at serious risk…

If China becomes the dominant space power in the next two decades, that will put in Beijing’s hands the future of global telecommunications, space exploration and human settlement as well as the application of space satellites and technology for strategic and military use. Read More

The Captive Mind and America’s Resegregation

By Andrew Michta - Jul 31, 2020

Principles of Government · July 31, 2020 ·

SELECTED PASSAGES Czesław Miłosz…wrote, “The Captive Mind… in 1953, to warn the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system. Miłosz knew from experience, having lived through the Communist takeover, how totalitarianism strips men and women of their liberty, transforming them into “affirmative cogs” in service of the state… Read More

This article warns of how the effort to distort our history and the domination of the left in higher education is changing our culture, our politics, and our society.