American Affairs (2024)

18/06/2024

Faced with American hostility, Chinese leaders see manufacturing as their only way out. In this context, batteries & EVs are just weapons in a war that is not so much between China & America as it is between competing visions of what China is or could be.

It is difficult for Chinese to idealize the United States anymore, perhaps particularly for those Chinese who spend time there or are fluent in English. And yet, China is not anywhere close to “finished,” and so the map is being redrawn in the middle of a voyage. Today, China’s society is like...

17/06/2024

The West failed to understand the internal politics of the Russian Federation. The current state of affairs might have been avoided. Instead, Putin was able to bridge the internal Russian political divide before the West realized it even existed...

For centuries, the internal workings of successive Russian states have been a mystery to the West. The Russian Empire was seen as a strange place, an “other.” The Soviet Union was so opaque that American intelligence agencies were reduced to analyzing who was standing next to whom in photos to...

13/06/2024

Academic researchers engaged in a great deal of ideological sleight-of-hand to organize data and advance claims that extremism among active-duty service members and veterans was a significant problem—when, in fact, it was not.

The use of “extremism” is often used to rationalize stepping outside typical constraints on the use of power. Constitutional restraint and governmental accountability can be set aside more easily when “extremism” is the enemy. Likewise, social media, the financial industry, and the media rou...

12/06/2024

Although often unnoticed in the West, Japan has quietly been at the policy avant-garde in adjusting to a new world of geoeconomic and geopolitical competition. As China continues to rise, Japan is once again poised to undergo significant changes.

Just four decades ago, many saw Japan as the successor to the United States as the world’s “number one.” Ezra F. Vogel wrote in his famous 1979 book that “Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of postindustrial society than any other country.” But following the ...

10/06/2024

Americans are familiar with political divisions on issues like race, class, and gender. Perhaps less understood is the gap between elites concentrated in big cities and the rest of the country. In US politics, geography plays an increasingly dominant role.

Disdain for the people inhabiting the periphery has long been embedded in the media and academic worldview, dating back even before the writings of Lewis Mumford. It is also ultimately terrible politics. Demeaning non-city dwellers as racists, homophobes, and fascists may not be the best way to star...

06/06/2024

In an “urban doom loop,” a falling population guts tax revenue, which forces cuts to services, thus reducing livability in a vicious cycle. A key contributor to this death spiral in progressive cities is outsourcing government to unaccountable nonprofits.

What is taking place in America’s most performatively socialist urban areas is that taxes are constantly raised in order to fund public services, resulting in some of the most heavily taxed populations in the country. But this tax revenue is then squandered on private contracts to unaccountable no...

05/06/2024

By every crucial metric—life expectancy, economic inequality, housing, family formation, and municipal infrastructure—the last twenty years have seen the deconsolidation of developmental benchmarks that were once taken for granted in the West.

To the end of his life, Sklar professed to be a socialist and political thinker on the left. Yet he ended up an outspoken defender of both George W. Bush’s neoconservative globalism and the Tea Party movement. These stances emerged from an increasingly idiosyncratic and expansive understanding o...

04/06/2024

Although the DOJ and the FTC aim to address the same issue—growing concentration—they have taken two different approaches. DOJ is taking an expanded consumer welfare approach in its cases. The FTC, by contrast, is challenging those very theories.

In short, if we have learned anything from the competing antitrust approaches of the Biden administration, it appears that an expanded consumer welfare standard, incorporating non-priced harms, is likely to win out. Neo-Brandeisian critiques may be more theoretically exciting for some antitrust advo...

03/06/2024

Will the AI transition let a thousand flowers bloom, or will the returns largely flow to a few tech behemoths and their infrastructure providers? If we’ve learned anything from the social media era, it is that the rules governing AI today have the potential to shape the distribution of economic and cultural power for decades to come. We better get it right.

“What is your moat?” That’s Silicon Valley-speak for “what defends you from the competition.” As investors hunt for the next big AI company, it’s also one question that the hundreds of start-ups launched in the wake of ChatGPT increasingly can’t avoid. How do you profit off intelligenc...

30/05/2024

Haidt’s critique of Big Tech goes far deeper than concern for the mental health of Gen Z. His analysis reveals a more fundamental crisis: these platforms sever the mental tissue that makes embodied relationships and collective action possible.

With Anxious Generation, Haidt comes to the very opposite set of conclusions that a reader might expect. Haidt shows that Silicon Valley’s products are, by design, structurally at odds with the developmental needs of human children as members of the species. The only serious solution, then, is for...

29/05/2024

Project states have had various social missions in the past (the new War on Carbon is similar to the War on Drugs & the War on Poverty), but these efforts have either sputtered or been subsumed by "security states"—as will any "New Washington Consensus."

April 2023 marked the emergence of a “New Washington Consensus,” according to President Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, who coined the term in a much discussed speech at the Brookings Institution. His argument in brief: events have forced proponents of the original “Washi...

27/05/2024

It is impossible to understand the U.S. free trade policies of the 1990s without understanding the smaller yet pivotal transformations that occurred in the 1970s, when firms exchanged a focus on foreign sales for a focus on foreign production.

It is impossible to understand the 1990s political landscape without appreciating the smaller yet pivotal transformations that occurred in the 1970s. Throughout the decade, continued changes to U.S. trade law, geopolitical developments in East Asia, and novel shipping technology combined to change t...

23/05/2024

U.S. pharmaceutical supply chains are fragile and opaque. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are largely reliant on India, which is in turn reliant on China—a status quo that is unsustainable. But efforts to address these challenges seem to be lacking urgency.

In 1998, Bill Clinton read a book called The Cobra Event, a dramatic novel about a mad scientist developing a virus for acts of bioterrorism. Clinton was so affected by the book that he launched the Strategic National Stockpile, a collection of supplies and medical countermeasures to be deployed on....

22/05/2024

The U.S. submarine force is unprepared to meet the current threat environment, and there are no quick fixes. It has taken decades to fall into the current state of unpreparedness, and it will take years, as well as significant investments, to recover.

With the potential for a hot war with China looming over America’s strategic future, the minds of U.S. defense planners increasingly turn with calm confidence to the Navy’s submarine force. Submarines—quiet, stealthy, and loaded with lethal combinations of missiles, torpedoes, and mines—...

21/05/2024

National security is no longer conceived solely as a military affair. The confluence of strategic & economic concerns looms large, reviving the Cold War practice of economic statecraft. Recalling the Sputnik moment, the task is grand & the stakes are high.

Can the United States correct its long-neglected deficiencies in advanced manufacturing, replenish the industrial ecosystem’s supply chains that have been depleted after decades of offshoring, deliver a trained workforce, and coax the onshoring of U.S. and allied production? This may or may not be...

20/05/2024

Summer 24 issue out now:
-Reviving economic statecraft
-Crisis in the submarine industrial base
-The next Washington Consensus
-Scrolling alone
-The scramble for AI
-Antitrust: a tale of 2 agencies
-The nonprofit industrial complex
-Bukele, Putin, Xi
& more

Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base By Jerry Hendrix With the potential for a hot war with China looming over America’s strategic future, the minds of U.S. defense planners increasingly turn with calm confidence to the Navy’s submarine force. Submarines—quiet, ...

18/03/2024

Today's culture war might be understood as a war over the future of Christianity, even if the combatants do not recognize it. The irony is that progressives are the new theocrats enforcing a Christian-derived morality, while conservatives abandon churches.

Last year, a cascade of books came off conservative presses, each taking turns striking at the recent phenomenon of “wokeness.” These offerings include polemics and instructional manuals such as Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom, School of Woke: How Critica...

12/03/2024

Of course we all know what a “woman” is, or was. But it might be less painful, in a world where females will never be equal, to imagine that they don’t exist.

At least, the timing of the redefinition of “woman” is convenient. At the exact moment that we are implicitly evaluating the results of a century’s worth of upheaval on sexual roles, the key demographic in question has become almost impossible to describe. Still, I never found the “transgend...

11/03/2024

The more hopeful communitarian discourse of ethnicity can forge a path out of the deadlock between bureaucratic identitarians and proponents of an atomized individualism.

Last October, I made my way down to St. Lucy’s Church in Newark’s North Ward, as I do every year. I waited in a seemingly endless line of cars to cram into a makeshift parking lot, and I looked in my rearview mirror to see a diverse crowd of people under bright decorative lights intertwined…

07/03/2024

As the world is converging toward de Gaulle’s ideas, France is abandoning them altogether. Instead of doubling down on republicanism, France has weakened its conception of citizenship. Instead of judicial restraint, France has empowered judges...

Precisely at this moment when the world is converging toward de Gaulle’s ideas, France is abandoning them altogether. Instead of embracing industrial policy, France has liberalized its economy. Instead of doubling down on republican ideals, France has weakened its conception of citizenship. Inst...

06/03/2024

As modern political movements contemplate how to build multiracial, working-class coalitions, they would do well to study the Readjusters—the unlikely populist movement that reshaped Virginia politics in the 1880s.

Imagine a multiracial populist movement composed of middle- and working-class voters. Now imagine that they sweep into power on a platform of lower taxes, less government debt, and better schools, and once in office, they manage to accomplish this agenda. To many, it sounds like such a movement is t...

05/03/2024

The future of most contemporary societies today depends on the direction of the subjective petty bourgeoisie and on its alliance with a productivist and nationalist counter-elite.

The world remains restless under the yoke of a dictatorship of no alternatives. The last great moment of institutional and ideological refoundation in the rich North Atlantic countries was the institutionally conservative social democracy presaged before the Second World War and fully developed in t...

04/03/2024

The narrow Panama-Colombia border is an obvious point where the United States could work with Panama to stop illegal migration at the source. Instead, the Biden administration has actively worked to make this border less of an obstacle to illegal migrants.

How did illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border become the mess that it is? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encounters with migrants averaged under 600,000 in fiscal years 2010–20, but tripled in fiscal 2021, the year Biden took office, to a record of nearly 1.9 million, and reached ...

29/02/2024

Where Have All the Democrats Gone? fails to ask the question behind the title question. We may live in the co**se of FDR’s America, but Judis and Teixeira do too good a job analyzing its murder to make suggestions for reviving it sound plausible.

Much is said these days about manufacturing, but what about meatpacking? Chicago, the big-shouldered city of Carl Sandburg’s America—before toolmaker or player with railroads—was hog butcher for the world. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note in last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gon...

28/02/2024

Twenty-first-century capitalism continues to be anti-institutional, non-normative, short-termist, and rests on controlling flows more than building. What is the point of a Left that only reflects these dominant characteristics of contemporary society back at it?

In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? Too many of its practices reflected back some of the worst features of the current order: short-termism; a bias against political pro...

27/02/2024

U.S. drug shortages are the result of decades of offshoring, massive failures by the FDA to properly regulate foreign drug manufacturers, and a massive system of subsidies used by foreign governments to shift generic drug production away from the U.S.

The United States is suffering from the worst drug shortage crisis in recent history. Whether it is basic generic drugs, antibiotics, or chemotherapy drugs, patients, doctors, and hospitals are facing shortages that are claiming American lives and straining our nation’s health care system. Accordi...

26/02/2024

When postwar economic theory was being developed, there were little data available which could be used to check the model. When data started to become available, the consensus model became testable. And when tested, the evidence falsified the model.

Well-managed economies grow at a decent pace while keeping unemployment and inflation at low and stable levels. By these criteria, all major developed countries have been run incompetently for the past two decades. They have experienced stagnation of output and incomes, the worst recessions since th...

23/02/2024

The big labs that pioneered many of today's technologies were killed by new foreign competition and changing executive attitudes favoring financial returns over technology leadership. So what do we do now to recreate some of these successful organizations?

The economic success of the United States in creating the digital world owes a great deal to two key factors. The first is the ability to innovate great technologies, and the second is the ability to turn these innovations into major industrial products. This creative success was not the result of a...

22/02/2024

The U.S. approach to export controls—preventing Chinese firms from accessing key U.S. & allied technologies—will founder on the rocks of reality. Chinese firms will find paths that work well enough to continue to innovate.

Since I last wrote in detail on the topic of China’s domestic semiconductor industry in early 2021,1 the landscape has changed considerably. The Biden administration has continued to impose export control restrictions on Chinese firms, and the October 7, 2022, package of controls targeted not only...

American Affairs