Articles
Drone Swarms Are About to Change the Balance of Military Power
On today’s battlefields, drones are a manageable threat. When hundreds of them can be harnessed to AI technology, they will become a tool of conquest. The Shahed-model drone that killed three U.S. service members at a remote base in Jordan on Jan. 28 cost around $20,000. It was part of a family of drones built by Shahed Aviation Industries…
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The Federal Reserve Deserves a Pat on the Back
John H. Cochrane – Over the past 15 years the Fed has engineered a fundamental advance in monetary policy by paying interest on reserves and supplying “ample” reserves…Banks holding lots of reserves don’t lend less. If the Fed buys Treasury bonds to create reserves, banks hold more in reserves and less in Treasurys. Money available for lending is the same…More deeply, we learned that the Fed can fully control the short-term interest rate by simply varying the rate it pays on reserves without having to ration money.
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America Needs a Middle East Strategy
By Seth Cropsey – The U.S. can bring the Gulf Arabs closer while doing much more to contain the Iran menace. Nearly two months into Israel’s ground campaign, all eyes are on the Gaza Strip. Yet divisions over Gaza point to a disconnect between U.S. policy and strategic reality. The Middle East is headed toward a major war, for which the U.S. needs a strategy well beyond Gaza.
The Enemies of Freedom Are Deadlier Than Ever
By Gerard Baker – But the power of our example would never have been enough without the example of our power. In the absence of sustained military commitments, strategic engagement and repeated sacrifice, there was nothing guaranteed about the victory of our ideas. We need to remember that truth as we survey the world today. Not since the worst days of the Cold War, perhaps not since the 1930s, have we faced such a combination of threats to our freedom and prosperity, to our very existence. A touching faith in the supposed universality of our ideals and the inevitable rightness of our cause won’t save us. A modern de facto alliance of tyrannies—we might call it an axis of evil opportunism—advances across the globe. China, Russia, Iran—
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Henry Kissinger on Power and Morality
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 civilizations, and the human beings who inhabit them, to flourish.
Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America
By John Ellis – Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
Isolationism Makes a Perilous Moment More So
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 do we do about it? The obvious initial answer is to spend more on defense, and soon. But that is the easy part; we know the policy solution. The harder issue is finding the political will to do it, while persuading adversaries that we are credible enough to restore American deterrence. As we have learned in Ukraine and now in the Middle East, U.S. deterrence has faded. And the world’s rogues are on the march.
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Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here
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 place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me, the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.”
How China Could Turn Crisis to Catastrophe
By Walter Russell Mead – A war over Taiwan would devastate the economies of both Asia and the globe….the most important international development on President Biden’s watch has been the erosion of America’s deterrence. The war in Ukraine and the escalating chaos and bloodshed across the Middle East demonstrate the human and economic costs when American power and policy no longer hold revisionist powers in check. Washington’s attention is understandably fixed on the threat of a wider Middle East war…. But if the erosion of America’s deterrent power leads China and North Korea to launch wars in the Far East, it would be a greater catastrophe by orders of magnitude.
A World Without American Deterrence
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.
The Democrats’ Refounding of America
By Christopher Caldwell – …In this view, the civil rights movement wasn’t just a reform but a refounding….The real political legacy of the 1960s comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964….…The new law cut constitutional corners, constraining freedom of association, … drawing the federal government into the running of local elections. It opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits: The U.S. attorney general, for instance, could now file discrimination suits against local school districts. It imposed a degree of federal management on all institutions that received federal money. And it created a vast investigative infrastructure through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission…
Is Lincoln Speaking to us?
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 and unified manner. …they seek to shatter the existing order and bring the world around them under their domination.
100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead
By David Satter – The Bolshevik coup had two consequences. In countries where communism came to hold sway, it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors….The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.… it …would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization.… it hollowed out society’s moral core, degrading the individual and turning him into a cog in the machinery of the state. Communists committed murder on such a scale as to all but eliminate the value of life and to destroy the individual conscience in survivors.… In the West, communism inverted society’s understanding of the source of its values, creating political confusion that persists to this day.,…
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The Scary Math Behind the World’s Safest Assets
By Spencer Jakab – Say you added just 1 percentage point to the average interest rate in the CBO’s forecast …That would result in an additional $3.5 trillion in federal debt by 2033. The government’s annual interest bill alone would then be about $2 trillion. For perspective, individual income taxes are set to bring in only $2.5 trillion this year.
Compound interest has a way of quickly making a bad situation worse—the sort of vicious spiral that has caused investors to flee countries…
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Florida’s Education Triumph
By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.
Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.
So far, Florida has introduced new standards in English, language arts, math, social studies, civics and health education. The English standards, for instance, are knowledge-based, rather than skills-based. They center on the great books of Western civilization
‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil
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.”
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Higher Ed and the Fragmentation of America
By Orrin Hatch – …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…. 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…
Opening Our Borders Would Overwhelm America
By Dave Seminara – Rolling surveys conducted by Gallup … estimated that 640 million people wanted to emigrate, with the U.S. being the desired destination for 150 million.
…If the U.S. loosened visa restrictions… we’d see the largest mass movement in human history. It would be an epic economic and environmental catastrophe.
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For Saner Politics Try Strong Parties
By Gerald F. Seib – Today, the movement to weaken the national party structures that began in 1968 has reached its logical result: The power of the two national party organizations has declined so dramatically that they sometimes appear to be bystanders to a political system in which they were once central actors. This trend… is now contributing to the polarization and dysfunction of America’s political system. The decline of party organizations has opened the way for the rise of more extreme voices and, crucially, turned much of the financing of campaigns over to less-accountable players. The extremes of left and right have been strengthened …
Be Afraid of Nuclear War, Not Climate Change
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 the century.
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A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China
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.
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Government Policies, Not Low Rates, Are Driving Inflation
By David Malpass – The Fed’s bond purchases make matters worse by enabling Washington’s fiscal irresponsibility.
The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is broken. Normalization of interest rates has been needed for years to allow markets, not regulators, to allocate capital. But with interest rates at 5.5% and the dollar strong, the inflation battle must shift to the problem of government spending and regulation. The Fed’s silence on the fiscal and regulatory roots of this inflation crisis, and its insistence on using an antiquated inflation model that blames growth and jobs for price hikes, risks an even weaker U.S. economy.
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DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America
By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro – … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”….
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Can Politics Get Better When Higher Education Keeps Getting Worse?
By John Ellis – Only a few years ago, several well-established features of the current political landscape were too absurd to be taken seriously. Defunding the police was a ridiculous idea; critical race theory would be a giant step backward in in race relations; leftist radicalism was a fringe element of the Democratic Party. Suddenly all have gone mainstream….Only a short while ago most Americans would have been appalled to find that almost half of voters were foolish enough to want a lawless society, accept the teaching of racial hatred to children, and embrace radical leftist ideology.
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The Rules-Based International Order Is Quietly Disintegrating
It hasn’t been this threatened since the 1930s. The most important fact in world politics is that 19 months after Vladimir Putin challenged the so-called rules-based international order head-on by invading Ukraine, the defense of that order is not going well. The world is less stable today than in February 2022, the enemies of the order hammer…
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The FDIC Has a Proven Way to Avoid Moral Hazard
By William M. Isaac – Instead, the FDIC should have turned to its 1982 innovation: the modified deposit payoff. This would ameliorate the damage a bank failure inflicts on the economy without creating the moral hazard accompanying a 100% guarantee. Uninsured money that would otherwise sit idle for years at the failed bank receivership would be returned promptly to the local marketplace to support economic growth.
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America’s Got Talent, but Not Nearly Enough
By Edward Conard – If innovation is the primary driver of growth, and the most productive workers are the primary drivers of innovation, doubling the number of workers who currently represent the top 5% of America’s talent could double the U.S. growth rate. America has 125 million full-time workers, so the top 5% is just over six million. The U.S. currently issues a million green cards a year. By targeting the most talented would-be immigrants, the U.S. could double its high-productivity pool in short order.
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Identity Politics Could Kill America’s Scientific Edge
By Sadanand Dhume – China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. …. Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding”.
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The New Moral Order Is Already Crumbling
By Gerard Baker – The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them. Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, …. This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration. Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress. Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected…
Biden’s Plan for an Entitlement Society
By John F. Cogan and Daniel L. Heil – The federal government’s system of entitlements is the largest money-shuffling machine in human history, and President Biden intends to make it a lot bigger. His American Families Plan—which he recently attempted to tie to a bipartisan infrastructure deal—proposes to extend the reach of federal entitlements to 21 million additional Americans, the largest expansion since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
For the first time in U.S. history…more than half of working-age households would be on the entitlement rolls if the plan were enacted in its current form. Contrary to Mr. Biden’s assertion that his plan “doesn’t add a single penny to our deficits,” his plan would add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
It’s the Entitlements, Stupid
By The Editorial Board – The Wall Street Journal – Sen. Joe Manchin’s public support Sunday for at least $2 trillion in new spending in a partisan budget bill is a huge win for the political left. This means a giant tax-and-spend bill this year is likely, and the biggest expansion of the entitlement state since the 1960s is now possible.
The entitlements are by far the biggest long-term economic threat from the Biden agenda. Tax increases can be repealed by a future Congress. Spending on infrastructure will slow as funding falls. The courts may block his racial preferences. But entitlements that spend automatically based on eligibility are nearly impossible to repeal, or even reform, and they represent a huge tax-and-spend wedge far into the future.
The media won’t talk about this, and Republicans are so far missing in action. But Americans need to understand the stakes.
Entitlements Always Grow and Grow
By John F. Cogan – The seven-decade-long growth of entitlements and the pandemic response are the product of expansionary forces that operate on Congress regardless of who is in charge. Throughout history, the most potent force has been the equally worthy claim. The claim originates from a well-meaning impulse to treat all similarly situated persons equally under the law. Here’s how it works. When first enacted, entitlement benefits are usually confined to a narrow group of worthy individuals. As time passes, groups of excluded individuals claim that they are no less deserving of aid. Pressure is brought by, or on behalf of, these excluded groups to expand eligibility rules. Eventually, Congress acquiesces. But the broadening of eligibility rules only brings another group of claimants closer to the eligibility boundary lines, and the pressure to relax qualifying rules begins again. The process of liberalization repeats itself until the entitlement program’s original limited goals are no longer recognizable.
Income Equality, Not Inequality, Is the Problem
By Phil Gramm and John Early – Real government transfer payments to the bottom 20% of household earners surged by 269% between 1967 and 2017, while middle-income households saw their real earnings after taxes rise by only 154% during the same period. That has largely equalized the income of the bottom 60% of Americans. This government-created equality has caused the labor-force participation rate to collapse among working-age people in low-income households and unleashed a populist realignment that is unraveling the coalition that has dominated American politics since the 1930s.
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Incredible Shrinking Income Inequality
By Phil Gramm and John Early – The refrain is all too familiar: Widening income inequality is a fatal flaw in capitalism and an “existential” threat to democracy. From 1967 to 2017, income inequality in the U.S. spiked 21.4%, and everyone from U.S. senators to the pope says it’s an urgent problem. Yet the data upon which claims about income inequality are based are profoundly flawed.
We have shown on these pages that Census Bureau income data fail to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments—including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and some 100 other government transfer payments—as income to the recipients. Furthermore, census data fail to count taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. When official government data are used to correct these deficiencies—when income is defined the way people actually define it—“income inequality” is reduced dramatically.
Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government
By The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal – The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.
Rising Crime Rates Are a Policy Choice
By William P. Barr – Progressives can’t solve the problem because they won’t abandon the practices that cause it. The violent crime surge was preventable. It was caused by progressive politicians reverting to the same reckless revolving-door policies that during the 1960s and ’70s produced the greatest tsunami of violent crime in American history. We reversed that earlier crime wave with the tough anticrime measures adopted during the Reagan-Bush era. We can stop this one as well. Studies have repeatedly shown that most predatory crime is committed by a small, hard-core group of habitual offenders. They are a tiny fraction of the population…
The High Cost of Free Money
By Allysia Finley – Researchers gave cash to low-income people. It led them to spend more and work less. Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans? That’s the implication of a new study by social scientists at Harvard and the University of Exeter.
Liberals argue that no-strings-attached handouts encourage better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.
If Western Civilization Dies, Put It Down as a Suicide
By Gerard Baker – As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity. …If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all …
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What the Child Poverty Rate Is Missing
By Phil Gramm and John Early – The Census Bureau fails to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments to households in the income numbers it uses to calculate not only poverty levels but also income inequality and income growth. In addition to not counting refundable tax credits, which are paid by checks from the U.S. Treasury, the official Census Bureau measure doesn’t count food stamps, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, rent subsidies, energy subsidies and health-insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. In total, benefits provided in more than 100 other federal, state and local transfer payments aren’t counted by the Census Bureau as income to the recipients. If the Census Bureau had included the missing $1.9 trillion in transfer payments, child poverty would have been only 3.2% in 2017, compared with the official rate of 17.5%. Government transfer payments that were distributed in 2017 had already cut child poverty by 82%.
Containment Can Work Against China, Too
By Hal Brands – To succeed against a rising China, the U.S. must relearn the lessons of containment. Containment yielded an epochal U.S. victory because it was well-suited to long-term rivalry—the very quality that makes it relevant today.
Outdated Nuclear Treaties Heighten the Risk of Nuclear War
By Franklin C. Miller – U.S. policy makers have lost sight of the crucial link between arms control and deterrence. U.S. nuclear deterrence policy and U.S. nuclear arms-control policy have become dangerously disconnected.
Longstanding deterrence policy requires that the U.S. have sufficient capacity to target what potential enemy leaders value most. Arms control is supposed to augment deterrence by limiting, and if possible reducing, the threats while allowing the U.S. to deploy a force that deters an attack on America or our allies. The policies were tightly linked throughout the closing decades of the Cold War, providing the U.S. and its allies with a credible deterrent …
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Ex-Liberal Fred Siegel Saw New York Fall and Rise – Steven Malanga
By Steven Malanga – As a New Yorker, Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under … a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible…In fact, disorder was a choice. By cutting police and sanitation budgets to boost welfare spending, …The worse things got, the more the city invested in addressing the supposed underlying causes of crime rather than re-establishing order. Siegel … called this “rewarding failure.” …
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The Future of War Has Come in Ukraine: Drone Swarms
By Eric Schmidt – The innovations that have led to Kyiv’s remarkable successes against Russia will change combat dramatically. My most recent trip to Ukraine revealed a burgeoning military reality: The future of war will be dictated and waged by drones.
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The Economic and Human Costs of Protecting Criminals
By Jason L. Riley – A 2021 paper published by the University of Chicago’s Journal of Law and Economics put annual spending on policing and corrections at about $250 billion. Meanwhile, a study released the same year by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation “conservatively estimated” that the yearly cost of personal and property crimes in the U.S. is $2.6 trillion. By that comparison, it’s hard to conclude that we spend too much money on law enforcement. What’s even harder is putting a price on the psychic burden of crime—the constant fear that you or a loved one will become a victim
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Why China Is Winning the War for High Tech
By Arthur Herman – The story told how China’s Zuchongzhi programmable quantum computer had surpassed Google’s best quantum computer in solving the kind of complex problem that would stump even the fastest supercomputers, such as factorizing large numbers. The announcement is one more indication that China is on track to achieve what every cybersecurity expert fears, and every politician outside Beijing should fear: the creation of a large-scale quantum computer that is able to break into every public encryption system currently in existence.
New York Came Back in the ’90s—Then It Fell Again
By Jason L. Riley – The Giuliani administration won wide praise for making the city safe again, but William Bratton, the New York City police commissioner in the mid-1990s, told filmmakers that the dramatic reduction in crime stemmed from the ability of police to focus on maintaining order and not simply on capturing criminals after the fact. “In the 1970s and ’80s, police moved away from dealing with disorder on the streets and instead focused on responding to crime,” he said. “We didn’t deal with quality-of-life crime at all.”
Most people didn’t want cops off the street and sitting in their patrol cars waiting for 911 calls about serious crimes, Mr. Bratton said. Rather, they wanted the police to address things they saw every day: prostitution, graffiti, abandoned cars that weren’t towed away, gangs occupying street corners. The focus on lower-level offenses ultimately led to fewer serious crimes.
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The Coming War Over Taiwan
By Hal Brands and Michael Beckley – The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity.
On Marriage, an Economist Bravely States the Obvious
By Jason L. Riley – George Gilder wrote about the importance of the nuclear family in “Sexual Suicide” (1973) and “Men and Marriage” (1986). Charles Murray, who had touched on it in his landmark study, “Losing Ground” (1984), made similar arguments in “Coming Apart” (2012). In 1994 David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America,” and 1996 brought David Popenoe’s “Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society.”
Other books that cover the same ground as Ms. Kearney include Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially”; James Q. Wilson’s “The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families”; Kay Hymowitz’s “Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age”; and Ralph Richard Banks’s “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.”
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Defend America’s History—and Retake Its Institutions
By Gerard Baker – Jul 6, 2020- At the end of the 20th century, the U.S. had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of… This article warns of how the effort to distort our history and the domination of the left in higher education….
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Democrats’ Stealth Plan to Enact Universal Basic Income
By Robert Doar and Matt Weidinger – Universal basic income is about to arrive in America. Congressional Democrats’ $1.9 trillion stimulus bill provides for no-strings attached checks, limited only to parents of children under 18. This UBI for parents is billed as pandemic relief, but its real purpose is to put a stake in the heart of work-based welfare reform.
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America’s ‘Window of Maximum Danger’
By Kate Bachelder Odell – Russia has invaded Ukraine and threatens nuclear war, China is eyeing Taiwan, Iran holds regular military exercises with China and Russia, and North Korea just launched a missile over Japan. If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, Mike Gallagher has worse news: The U.S. is increasingly vulnerable to losing a war, “either by sitting the conflict out or through defeat in combat.”
Taiwan is a particular preoccupation. What interest do Americans have in protecting this distant island? If the Chinese subdued it, it would heighten their threat to Japan and the Philippines, which the U.S. is bound by treaty to defend. America’s friends would hedge their bets by cozying up to Beijing. More important, by seizing Taiwan’s semiconductor-manufacturing capability, Xi Jinping would “hold the rest of the world economically hostage,” Mr. Gallagher says. “All this stuff that drives people in the Midwest crazy, when Hollywood or Wall Street bows down” to the Chinese Communist Party, “you can 10-X that if Xi takes Taiwan.”
Four Nuclear States Can Ruin Your Whole Strategy
By Matthew Kroenig – Instead of pursuing 1990s-era fantasies about reducing the role of nuclear weapons, Washington needs to understand that, for the first time since the Cold War, it is entering a long-term strategic-arms competition. This time will be even more dangerous because the U.S. now faces multiple nuclear-armed rivals. America needs to strengthen its strategic forces to provide an adequate deterrent for itself and the more than 30 formal treaty allies that rely on U.S. nuclear weapons for their security. America won the last Cold War in part because it outcompeted the Soviet Union in strategic forces. Washington should remember that lesson if it doesn’t want to lose this one.
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A Homeric Age of Statesmanship
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.
Handing Putin the Nuclear Advantage
By The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal – The latest Pentagon budget request nixes the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, or SLCM-N. This missile is considered a “tactical” nuclear weapon that has a lower yield than “strategic” options and might be used on battlefield targets. The missile could be launched from submarines or destroyers. This weapon is aimed at deterring a known risk: Russia’s up to 2,000 tactical nukes, including weapons “employable by ships, planes, and ground forces,”…
Pivot to the Pacific? That Misses the Point
By Andrew A. Michta – Meantime, over the past 30 years the U.S. defense industry has consolidated from 51 to five aerospace and prime defense contractors. This mismatch has led to multiyear delays for weapons and munitions deliveries to our forces and allies. As a result, our military isn’t positioned to fight simultaneous and potentially uncontrollable conflicts on the horizon—a problem that no amount of strategic finessing, rebalancing between theaters, or technological sophistication can resolve. There’s a way forward, but it will require that we invest in expanding the military and the defense industrial base.
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Restore Reagan’s Military ‘Margin of Safety’
By Roger Zakheim – Today’s challenges are no doubt more complex, in part because China poses economic and security risks. Still, the solutions Reagan offered should be no less compelling. Yet 42 years later, leaders in both parties seem eager to make common cause with the detente-pushing realists, assuming that an aggressive Russia and a rising China are merely the facts of life in the 21st century. Even with a bipartisan consensus that China is America’s pre-eminent security challenge and that Russia is a dangerous adversary, many in both parties wonder whether the U.S. has the economic and political strength to prevail against China while sustaining its security leadership in Europe and the Middle East.
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Ukraine Is No Distraction From Asia
By John P. Walters – Ukraine and Taiwan are on the front lines of the global struggle between freedom and tyranny. Both face larger, wealthier opponents with huge militaries that threaten to extinguish their freedom. Both also depend on America for security. As Mr. Kishida’s and Ms. Tsai’s words suggest, the outcome of the war in Ukraine will shape how the U.S. is perceived far beyond the shores of Europe. Just as America’s feckless withdrawal from Afghanistan reinforced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, so, too, the U.S. performance in Ukraine will affect Beijing’s calculations in the South Pacific.
China’s Alarming Nuclear Breakout
By William Schneider Jr. – Beijing is adding warheads, missiles and subs at an alarming rate. The goal is global dominance. The military threat from Beijing is accelerating at a pace few anticipated. Recently released satellite imagery shows that China is rapidly constructing nearly 300 hardened underground silos in its western desert to house intercontinental ballistic missiles. This indicates that the Chinese have dramatically increased their operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads beyond even what was forecast by the Defense Department a year ago.
The Deep State Is All Too Real
By David Bernhardt – Grade-school civics teaches that Washington is designed to operate under a system of checks and balances, constrained by the Constitution and empowered by the consent of the governed. In practice, however, power has become concentrated in the executive branch and largely wielded by unaccountable career bureaucrats. The notion of a “deep state” isn’t a conspiratorial talking point but a manifest political reality.
The Partisan Bureaucracy
By Kimberly A, Strassel – May 11, 2021- Would the IRS violate your privacy to further Democratic policy objectives?….The lesson is that Republicans must realize that Democrats are no longer their only political foe. They face an equally potent and dangerous federal bureaucracy—committed to destroying GOP officials and propelling a liberal agenda.
To Get Ukraine Air Support Quickly, Try the Boneyard
By Benjamin Jensen – While the West works out how to transfer F-16s to Ukraine by the end of the year and train its pilots, there’s a way America can get Ukrainian air power stocked now: a boneyard air force. For decades the U.S. has kept retired airframes—a mix of jets, turboprop aircraft and helicopters—at the ready to either be brought back into service or used for parts. This inventory offers a simple way to give Ukraine the means to defend itself in the near term without escalating the conflict.
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The Danger of Shrinking American Naval Power
By Seth Cropsey – The implication of Adm. Davidson’s assessment—and a similar one offered this spring by his successor, Adm. John Aquilino —is that any major reduction in U.S. combat strength, particularly naval power, will tempt the Chinese Communist Party to strike. This assessment should inform the Navy’s recently announced “divest to invest” plan. In other words, the Navy is on track to divest by 2024 to 2026—but the investments may not arrive until one to five years later. The U.S. could be very vulnerable in this gap. Will the People’s Liberation Army sit by watching American military modernization before it acts?…The Navy should instead maintain its surface fleet, extending the life of the cruisers and integrating more-advanced, longer-range systems into its missile-launch cells. The Navy can also build—or buy from allies—many small, highly lethal combatants and unmanned platforms.
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The White House Tells the Truth About Climate Change
By Steven E. Koonin – the White House … in March released a paper on climate change’s effect on the U.S. economy. Its findings undermine any claims of an ongoing climate crisis or imminent catastrophe.
The report, produced by the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Management and Budget…shows an economic impact of less than a few percentage points for a few degrees of warming.
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Geopolitical Climate Denialism
By Walter Russell Mead – The global political climate is heating up, and the rising geopolitical temperature is likely to hit faster and could wreak more havoc than anything Greenpeace is worried about. Geopolitical climate denialism is a more urgent danger to national security than melting glaciers in Greenland.
Congress Once Constrained Government Debt
By Judy Shelton – Entitlement programs have accounted for all the growth in federal spending relative to gross domestic product in the past 60 years, causing the persistent budget deficits during that period. Entitlement expenditures are determined differently from so-called discretionary programs. Spending on the latter programs is set by fixed appropriations of money. Entitlement expenditures aren’t fixed in advance but determined by the program’s level of benefits, its eligibility rules and economic factors. Jurisdiction for entitlement legislation is dispersed among more than a dozen committees in each congressional chamber….In this system, no committee is accountable for total spending. Each committee has a reason to expand its programs and resist attempts to restrain them, but none have an incentive to keep overall spending down.
It’s analogous to the classic tragedy of the commons.
How to Stop Politicians From Cooking the Books
By John Steele Gordon – One justification for the Federal Reserve is to keep the power to print money out of the hands of politicians. A Federal Accounting Board would keep the power to cook the books out of their hands as well. Like the Fed, it would be run by a board of seven members, all professional accountants of long experience, serving 14-year terms. They could be removed only for cause. One member would be appointed chairman, serving a four-year term. The board would take over the duties of the Congressional Budget Office, and the White House Office of Management and Budget would be reduced to formulating the annual budget. The board would estimate future revenue and the costs of all legislation. It would also set the rules for how the federal books must be kept (no calling borrowed money “income”), and would determine if they are accurate and complete, as a CPA does for corporate books.
One justification for the Federal Reserve is to keep the power to print money out of the hands of politicians. A Federal Accounting Board would keep the power to cook the books out of their hands as well. Like the Fed, it would be run by a board of seven members, all professional accountants of long experience, serving 14-year terms. They could be removed only for cause. One member would be appointed chairman, serving a four-year term.
The board would take over the duties of the Congressional Budget Office, and the White House Office of Management and Budget would be reduced to formulating the annual budget. The board would estimate future revenue and the costs of all legislation. It would also set the rules for how the federal books must be kept (no calling borrowed money “income”), and would determine if they are accurate and complete, as a CPA does for corporate books.
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Black Mayors in the Four Biggest Cities. Is That a ‘Big Deal’?
By Jason L. Riley – Anyone familiar with the experience of other ethnic groups, such as the Irish, won’t be surprised that black political influence—including the election of a black president—hasn’t translated into more black socioeconomic advancement.
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America Needs a New Civil Rights Act
By Philip Hamburger – The 1964 law targeted racial discrimination. Today’s problem is the suppression of dissent. It is time for a new civil-rights act that addresses the dangers of our time, not merely those of the 1960s.
The threat again comes from discrimination, but now by the federal government as well as states and private organizations. Most worrisome is federal and state encouragement for private entities to discriminate against Americans with dissenting views. Also significant is discrimination that bars Americans from participating in services ordinarily open to the public.
DEI Spells Death for the Idea of a University
By Matthew Spalding – Wherever this agenda is allowed to take root, free expression and academic integrity are doomed…The first object of government, Madison tells us,…is the protection of diversity in … different opinions, to be encouraged to preserve liberty. Equity is an ancient legal concept of justice …, developed over centuries of English common-law practice. …. Yet in true Orwellian fashion, they have been redefined.…Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than character, competence and merit.
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Democrats ‘Charity’ Voter-Registration Scheme
By Kimberley A. Strassel – A 501(c)(3) nonprofit isn’t supposed to engage in partisan activity…A New York Times article this week confirmed a political reality that Republicans have been slow to publicize: Democrats are openly abusing charities to stack voter rolls in their favor. … Read closely and you notice the story is entirely about Democrats, confirming a longstanding scheme by which foundations and private donors funnel tax-exempt dollars into “charities” that microtarget and register Democratic voters.
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‘Not Accountable’ Review: Unelected Legislators
By John Ketcham – Fearful of angering public-employee unions, politicians bend to their will at taxpayer expense. Can this arrangement be challenged in court?
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The Left’s War on the Rule of Law
By Ed Meese and Kelly Shackelford – The left was able for decades to get through the courts, including the Supreme Court, what it couldn’t get through Congress. Today, however, liberals are trying to subvert the legitimacy of the Supreme Court because it contains a majority of justices committed to the Constitution and the rule of law. Suddenly, instead of repeatedly approving the left’s agenda, the federal judiciary has become one of its greatest impediments. Believing they can no longer win at the court, progressives now want to change the rules of the game. Rather than improving their legal arguments and strategy, they are attacking the referees.
The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit
By Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov – The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job candidates may well be evaluated more by their record of supporting “social justice” than by their scientific achievements.
Putin’s War Is America’s Opportunity
By Walter Russell Mead – These concerns are real and have their place, but they miss the main point. Vladimir Putin’s ill-judged, ill-planned and ill-prosecuted war has ignited a national awakening in Ukraine. The country emerging from Putin’s War will be a formidable new force in Europe whose interests and outlook place it firmly in alignment with the U.S.
How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage
By Fred Siegel – But there was another “rights” movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively.
Biden Is Transformational, and Not in a Good Way
By Phil Gramm and Pat Toomey – His regulatory barrage and failed Progressive-era policies imperil …the American economy and our freedom. We face not an errant regulator or an officious bureaucrat, but a sea change in the economy’s regulatory ecosystem. The executive branch and its regulatory agencies are unbound by the laws they are supposed to uphold and hostile to the industries they regulate, undermining the political accountability at the heart of our republican government…
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Russia, China and Iran in America’s Backyard
By – Walter Russell Mead – The news from Latin America is grim. The reaction from the Biden administration is a yawn… China is offering Cuba billions of dollars in exchange for the construction of a sophisticated intelligence facility to be used against the U.S…Washington’s passivity as drug cartels undermined state structures and as hostile foreign powers established beachheads across the hemisphere handed China, Russia and Iran a historic opportunity. Unless Joe Biden learns to channel the spirit of James Monroe, the toxic cocktail of instability and foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere could soon undermine America’s ability to face challenges farther afield.
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The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War
By Seth Cropsey – The reality is that unless the U.S. prepares to win a nuclear war, it risks losing one. Robert C. O’Brien, a former White House national security adviser, proposed a series of conventional responses, which are necessary but not sufficient to deter Russian nuclear escalation. Developing a coherent American strategy requires understanding why Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons and how the U.S. can recalibrate its strategic logic for a nuclear environment.
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The Reagan Lesson for the Trumpian Right on Ukraine and China
Historian William Inboden considers the Cold War’s lessons for today’s Republican Party. Inflation has been running at its highest rate in decades. American society is restive and divided. There’s a public perception that the country’s glory days are over, that democratic capitalism is a spent force. U.S. standing and influence abroad are in decline. America…
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The Military Should Reject DEI and CRT
By Patrick H. Brady and Mike Waltz – The U.S. military faces a self-inflicted threat to its preparedness to deter, fight and win wars. An essential, battle-tested element of military culture—colorblindness—is being undermined. Unless the trend is reversed, our national security will be at increased risk. The reversal could be done at no cost, requiring only a policy decision and the reorientation of relevant training.
What the U.S. Can Do to Prepare for a War With China
By Seth Cropsey – The Chinese aren’t going to wait patiently. They are prepared to capitalize on an apparent shift in their favor. China enjoys a growing advantage in geographic position, fleet size and missile numbers. In Xi Jinping, it also has a leader willing to use force to achieve political objectives. China stands a better chance now than it ever has of defeating the U.S. and its allies in a major war. The U.S. should expect an attack on Taiwan within this decade, perhaps as soon as 2025…The imminence of conflict means the U.S. must consider how it would fight with the military as currently constituted.
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How to Beat China in the New Space Race
By Arthur Herman – 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,…as well as the application of space satellites and technology for strategic and military use.
Preventing Suicide by Higher Education
By Arthur Milikh – Summer 2021 Issue, National Affairs – From the birth of the modern conservative movement, dissidents concerned with civic and liberal education have tried almost everything to reshape America’s universities: … This article outlines the many grave problems of American higher education (with suggestions about how to correct them) and explains how its domination by the left is changing our culture, our politics, and our society in ways that threaten our future…
Why Independence Day Matters
By Michael B. Poliakoff – What these books have in common is an intense commitment to the liberal democracy that gives us the right to participate in it, indeed to criticize it. And, with that, the absolute obligation to instill the values and principles of our free society. Dr. Haass and President Daniels call not only for better K-12 civic education, but, like past president of Harvard University Derek Bok, for a required college course on American history and government….Those in our nation who do not understand the blessing of freedom and the price past generations paid for it are likely to scorn that heritage.
Semiconductor Dependency Imperils American Security
By Graham Allison and Eric Schmidt – TSMC manufactures 92% of the advanced semiconductors necessary for every smartphone, laptop and ballistic missile. U.S. firms such as Nvidia, Qualcomm and Apple outsource almost all their manufacturing to Taiwan. If Taiwan’s chip manufacturing capacity went offline or fell into China’s hands, America’s technology sector would be devastated.
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Biden and Powell Are at Odds on Inflation
By Judy Shelton – 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.
AI Is the Technocratic Elite’s New Excuse for a Power Grab
By Gerard Baker – As warnings about the menace to human existence get louder, and calls for action on a global scale more urgent, it seems increasingly likely that whatever else it may be, the AI menace, like every other supposed extinction-level threat man has faced in the past century or so, will prove a wonderful opportunity for the big-bureaucracy, global-government, all-knowing-regulator crowd to demand more authority over our freedoms, to transfer more sovereignty from individuals and nations to supranational experts and technocrats.
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How Obama Killed Nuclear Nonproliferation
By Walter Russell Mead – History will name Barack Obama as the man on whose watch nonproliferation definitively failed. His waffling response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine not only marked the end of the post-Cold War holiday from history; it also marked the death of the dream that the leaders of the democratic world had the strength and vision to uphold the principles of the rules-based international order in the face of a ruthless opponent. It further taught the world that nuclear weapons are a better defense than American pledges.
From Migrant Busing to Climate Change, Fake Virtue Abounds
By Gerard Baker -… But the scales of virtue must balance, and it isn’t simply a case of administrative incompetence but an act of abject moral failure by a government to fail to secure its borders….There is no higher obligation for a sovereign power to its own people. The reckless toleration of the entry of …millions, of illegal immigrants threatens a nation’s security, undermines its cohesion, interferes with its orderly economic and social functions. It … actively undermines respect for the rule of law….
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What Children Should Be Learning
By Wilfred M. McClay and Kathleen O’Toole – Parents are appalled by the reduction of American history to an endless exercise in identity politics and moral accusation. They fear that the study of the American past — rather than providing the young with a sense of something larger than themselves — has become something deeply negative: a way of separating us from our past and a weapon used to sow shame and resentment, and even hatred and despair, in the hearts of tomorrow’s citizens. This is a recipe for disaster. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Good, honest curriculum is not only possible; it’s come to pass…
Why Is Identity Politics Destroying America
By Robert Stacy McCain – It is expected in politics, as a matter of human nature, that citizens will seek to advance and protect the interests of their own particular social class, ethnic group, or religious community. Attachment to our own “little platoon” — mankind’s tribal instinct, adapted to the forms of civilized society — is not irrational, nor is it harmful to the overall project of national unity. Indeed, scholars of statesmanship have long praised Burke for the insight of seeing this kind of group loyalty as “the first principle … of public affections.” How, then, has this principle of group loyalty become so wickedly warped, and turned into a weapon destructive of all social order, by the contemporary practice of progressive identity politics? Why is tribalism in America now asserting itself in such toxic and ferocious ways?
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The Debt Deal’s Defense Threat
By Roger Zakheim – Sequestration 2.0 would rapidly erode America’s position in the world. Today’s stakes are higher because the threats are greater. Still suffering from the 2011 sequestration hangover, the U.S. military has struggled to reconstitute itself to deter or defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Pentagon is woefully behind in generating the capital necessary to upgrade military platforms and integrate new technology into the force. The war in Ukraine has exposed the shallow capacity of the defense industrial base and the dramatic need to recapitalize defense manufacturing. Combined with ill-defined and underdeveloped operational concepts for how our military ought to fight the People’s Liberation Army, these realities have sowed doubt about whether the U.S. can win a fight in the Indo-Pacific. As the U.S. dithers with defense spending that barely keeps pace with inflation, the PLA’s budget has nearly doubled in the past decade as China has undertaken an unparalleled modernization program.
Western Culture Elites Are Giving Away Lenin’s Rope
By Gerard Baker – The larger truth is that the people who control America’s leading cultural institutions and now its government have been eagerly manufacturing ideological rope for the Chinese hangman….The intellectual movement to which they subscribe has been the force behind the planned destruction—of the principal pillars of America’s authority in the world: the idea that the greatest nation on the planet was founded on universal ideals of human freedom and dignity. …How can a nation prevail in a global ideological struggle when its leaders believe its values are intrinsically evil? …
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The Captive Mind and America’s Resegregation
By Andrew Michta – 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, … how totalitarianism strips men and women of their liberty, transforming them into “affirmative cogs” in service of the state…
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The Left Gets Fascism Backward
By Lance Morrow – Mr. Trump and his followers…are essentially antifascists: They want the state … to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom…. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. …The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit….
A Feckless American Foreign Policy’s Legacy
At the beginning of the 21st century, the world seemed more peaceful and American power more solidly entrenched than ever before. Twenty-two years into the new century, Americans face the most threatening international environment since the darkest days of the Cold War. The war in Ukraine threatens the post-Cold War order in Europe. Iran is well on its way to a nuclear bomb, and China’s shadow looms larger than ever over Taiwan.
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America Needs History and Civics Education to Promote Unity
By Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley and Margaret Spellings – …the world’s oldest constitutional democracy is in grave danger. We stand at a crossroads, called to protect this democracy. …A key part of our task is to reinvigorate teaching and learning of American history and civics in our nation’s schools. A constitutional democracy requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively…
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The American Experiment Is on Life Support
By Andrew A. Michta – … ‘Death to America!” is a common refrain from antifa rioters …. Extremism becomes more entrenched in American politics with each passing day. These acts of violence encapsulate five decades of neo-Marxist indoctrination in American schools,… Neo-Marxists on the street and in institutions want to erase their opponents and deconstruct the country…
Higher Education’s Deeper Sickness
By John M. Ellis – 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? …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 these extraordinary deficiencies deserve either accreditation, or support by state and federal funds?…
Learning for Self-Government – K–12 Civics Report Card
By David Randall – NAS – Longer article – This report, intended primarily for civics reformers considering how best to defend and improve traditional American civics education, surveys a selection of different civics offerings, both the traditional and the radical. Surveyed providers include organizations such as the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, We the People, and Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum. The report assesses both how they approach civics education and their ideological content. The report will also judge each organization’s effectiveness—although no one knows exactly what is being taught in each classroom in America, much less precisely what students take from their education. Finally, it will provide recommendations about how civics reformers should build upon this existing array of civics curriculum resources to work most effectively to reclaim America’s civics education.
The subject of this report is K–12 civics education, but the organizations it inventories include several devoted to undergraduate education and national politics. These organizations, and their tactics, form the regulations and the personnel of the educational establishment. They act with great effect on K–12 civics education, even when they do not provide textbooks and lesson plans. The report includes summary judgments of the true academic level of several K–12 civics resources. Most resources that claim to be for high-school students are at best at a ninth-grade level, often a middle-school one. The simplest way to substantiate this judgment is to say that Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum provides lesson plans aimed for intelligent, curious twelfth-grade students, and that no other institution provides curriculum anywhere near Hillsdale’s level.
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Book Summaries
Suicide of the West
By Jonah Goldberg – …Humans have an innate moral sense. How we use it depends on the environment we grow up in and how we define morality. The desire for unity and distrust of strangers are universal human tendencies. Of all systems ever created that actually increases trust and cooperation among strangers none has been as successful as the market. The market lowers the level of distrust by letting very different peoples and cultures find common interest. …ideology flows from human nature… and refining the definition of evil is the very essence of what civilizations do
Why Nations Fail
By Daron Acemoglu and James Ronbinson – “The authors convincingly show that countries escape poverty only when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition….countries are more likely to develop the right institutions when they have an open pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate, and openness to new political leaders. This intimate connection between political and economic institutions is the heart of their major contribution…” – Gary Becker
Balance
Notes on BALANCE by Glenn Hubbard & Tim Kane – The book is a review of the experience of great powers in world history and the political and economic lessons to be learned from studying them. Two thousand years ago, Rome was a stable and prosperous civilization. After 3 centuries of decline from the relentless…
The Breakdown of Higher Education
By John M. Ellis – The preface cites Bloom’s, The Closing Of The American Mind, Kimball’s, Tenured Radicals, D’Souza’s, Illiberal Education, and Ellis’s, Against Deconstruction, all warning about the dangers of a radicalized campus being created by increasingly radical professors. “This book is of a different kind, since now the campus is already radicalized. …its purpose is to explain exactly what happened and what made it possible; to describe the damage done to all levels of education, ..and to our society; …and to suggest what can be done about this educational and societal catastrophe.”
The Plot To Change America
By Mike Gonzalez – Introduction – The political purpose of identity politics is to divide the country into groups as a strategy to change America completely. Identity politics sees people’s beliefs and interests as determined by their membership in specific groups, particularly sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. It is an enemy of reason…
American Marxism
By Mark Levin – American Marxists call themselves progressives, democratic socialists, social activists, community activists, etc….They claim to promote economic justice, environmental justice, racial equity, gender equity…They claim the dominant culture and capitalist system are unjust, inequitable, racist and sexist…The aim is to undermine the citizenry’s confidence in the nation’s institutions and traditions, weakening the nation from within, and destroying American republicanism and capitalism.
They occupy our colleges and universities, newsrooms and social media, entertainment and boardrooms, and their ideas are increasingly influential within the Democratic Party. Their influence pervades teacher training and classroom curriculum throughout America’s public school system. They use propaganda and indoctrination, and demand conformity through cancel culture, etc. to destroy reputations and careers. They censor and ban patriotic and contrary viewpoints on social media. They attack academic freedom and intellectual diversity in higher education.
Unintended Consequences
By Edward Conard – The world of economics is deeply divided and inherently political. Advocates for stronger incentives for risk taking and those for income redistribution each work backward from their conclusions to find a set of indisputable beliefs on which to build their arguments. The economy is so complex that it is impossible to definitively isolate the effect of any one factor. This book attempts to explain how the economy works, why the U.S. has outperformed its high wage rivals, what caused the financial crisis, and what improvements might better protect our economy without damaging its growth
The Smart Society
By Peter Salins – America’s success is heavily dependent on its bedrock of political, social, and economic institutions – a free market democracy with secure personal freedoms and property rights. The real secret to its extraordinary success is human capital. …Given the indispensable role of government in generating human capital it matters a great deal how, specifically, government executes that role. Education, productivity, and immigration are a country’s human capital tripod and government has a key role to play in each. Government support of education and basic research generates enormous benefits
Why Government Fails So Often
By Peter H. Schuck – Among liberal democracies, Americans are by far the most patriotic people and America has the most robust and creative civil society. …A majority now believes that big government is the biggest future threat to the country. In the 1950’s, the vast majority of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing in most instances, today only a tiny minority do. Today the public views the federal government as a chronically clumsy, ineffectual and bloated giant that can’t be counted on to the do the right thing much less do it well
I Citizen
By Tony Woodlief – Two phenomena corroding self-governance and liberty are the unchecked and metastasizing agencies of the executive branch, and the shameful abdication of responsibility by our elected representatives.
The only alternative to Imperial rule from DC is self-governance within the Federalist system.
Restore the Future
By Donald H. Young – Laws are fundamental to the concept of society, and the principal differences among all societies are in the laws by which they function. By the 18th century, concepts of individual rights and laws to protect them were being developed. David Hume wrote A Treatise Of Human Nature in 1739, and John Locke in his Second Treatise On Government said that all men are endowed by a supreme being with natural rights which include life, liberty, and property and that governments are instituted for the purpose of protecting and advancing those rights
Books
Reading the Right Books
Books contain the ideas, make the arguments, and preserve the history necessary for the maintenance and perpetuation of liberty. Reading the Right Books is a practical list of thoughtful and accessible books — not the “classics” but solidly good books — recommended to provide a general framework around which the reader can build a firmer…
Conservative Colleges and Universities
Hillsdale College
Hillsdale College has highly competent scholars teaching all the main academic subjects with particular emphasis on giving its students an honest understanding of American history and its founding principles and how they have influenced its development. Hillsdale has several initiatives in addition to providing an outstanding well-rounded undergraduate college education. They include very comprehensive selection…
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Foreign Affairs