American Affairs Journal

As an engineer, I ran maintenance for a Fortune 500 pulp and paper company. I was based at a plant in Tennessee and covered nine other facilities across the Southeast and Florida. For anyone unfamiliar with heavy industry, these plants are filled with massive, capital-intensive equipment: three-story machines stretching the length of a football field,… Continue reading The Automation Paradox: America’s Hidden Bottleneck to Reindustrialization on American Affairs Journal.

As Cold War-era geography meets modern warfare, the ironies are striking. For centuries, distance was one of Russia's greatest military assets. Napoleon, Hitler, and NATO all confronted the problem of Russia’s immense landscape. But the overconcentrated and isolated infrastructure established by the Soviets now forces Russia to defend some of the farthest corners of its territory. Continue reading How Ukrainian Drones Are Exploiting Soviet-Era Geography on American Affairs Journal.

The post-Cold War liberal order has come to an end. Every serious analyst across the political spectrum acknowledges this, even if the acknowledgment arrives wrapped in euphemism: “strategic autonomy,” “de-risking,” or “friend-shoring,” i.e., the polite vocabulary of elites who destroyed a world order and cannot quite bring themselves to say so plainly. The neoliberal settlement,… Continue reading Capital and Nomos: The Political Economy of the Interregnum on American Affairs Journal.

We have a rare bipartisan window of alignment to solve this. We already agree on enough to get started. If Congress fails to act, we will fail to deliver for the American people. The market is begging to build. It is time for Congress to stop standing in our own way and get America building again. Continue reading Building Bridges: Finding Common Ground on Permitting Reform on American Affairs Journal.

Texas and California have taken sharply different approaches to surface transportation. Texas has spent decades expanding roadway capacity, building new infrastructure, and moving projects from planning to construction.1 California has pursued a broader set of objectives, including environmental protection, greenhouse gas reduction, land-use planning, transit development, equity, and mobility.2 These differences stem not from geography… Continue reading A Difference of Priorities: Surface Transp

Since joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China has, barely without foreign notice, executed one of the most consequential economic strategies in modern history. When it entered the WTO, roughly 33 percent of Chinese exports were intermediate goods, or the components, chemicals, and parts that go into making final products. By 2025, that figure had risen to 46 percent.1 This did not happen by accident. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a deliberate strategic decision to, as

A wiser national pattern would encourage states to default toward local control with guardrails, such as those outlined above, rather than broad preemption that severs decision-makers from consequences. Where states do retain override mechanisms, they should include strong prime farmland overlays, transparency mandates, and full accounting of long-term costs to neighboring properties and township budgets. This approach respects real infrastructure needs without repeating the moral failure of tre

Civilian companies... defense startups, and traditional defense contractors could all benefit from the creation of a defense-critical patent box while improving U.S. military innovation and diversifying the national defense industrial base. Continue reading Restoring the American Arsenal: The Case for a Defense-Critical Patent Box in the United States on American Affairs Journal.

America has its Promethean vision, which has undoubtedly served as a source of great wealth and vitality. Through technological deployment, however, it risks suffering the same fate as Icarus: burning its wings by seeking growth without meaning. Going higher and faster without knowing where you are going quickly becomes a nihilistic dead end that can lead to your own downfall. Europe still has its specific characteristics to counter this trend: ethical questions, a place given to humans that sho

In October of 2026, Albertans will head to the polls for another referendum on a bundle of proposals that angle toward greater Albertan control over education, health care, the courts, and more power and leverage against the federal government. Five of ten questions relate to immigration restrictions, namely limiting access to public services and voting for noncitizens. But the referendum’s biggest bombshell is a question that reads: “Should Alberta remain a province of Canada, or should the Gov

What is the relationship between the rise and fall of U.S. global power and the ebb and flow of radical Islamic terrorism? Our generic notion of Islam is a product of nineteenth-century pan-Islamic thinkers more than it is of Orientalists. We could add that it is suited to a modern world in which abstract conceptions of collective agency reflect a global capitalist economy which is itself rooted in highly abstracted categories of capital and labor. It is as a result of modernity that Islam shift

Theories of technological domination are compelling not only because of their critical force but also because of their consolatory effect. They lend a certain heroism and grandeur to the idiocy and messiness of social decline. It is more honorable to imagine oneself as the victim of total surveillance and control than to admit that the disintegration of the social fabric and the deterioration of public discourse may arise from our own capacity for self-ruin. There is, in other words, something f

In 1991, Michael McFaul felt that he was on the edge of utopia. Russia was free of communism, and America was free to usher in a new era of liberal internationalist hegemony. The arc of history had never bent so far toward justice. Over thirty years later, those dreams have crashed back to Earth. And in Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, McFaul seeks to put together how it all went wrong. His answer is unsurprising: an international movement of conserva

The actual effects of AI on the labor market still seem shrouded in deep uncertainty. When it comes to predictions on near-term impacts, we can see two camps emerge. A deep bench of established and renowned labor economists continues to expect “small” effect sizes, at least by the standards of the drastic predictions common in San Francisco. They predict local disruptions, yes, but expect they’ll be offset by broad-based productivity gains and job growth in other fields. Yet in much of Silicon V

The United States is rich in resources and poor in foresight. When Covid-19 arrived, the Strategic National Stockpile lacked a sufficient supply of N95 masks to equip the country’s critical workers through even a mild pandemic, let alone the reusable, pandemic-proof equipment that a more severe outbreak would demand. The available evidence suggests we are no better prepared today. This neglect exacerbates one of our greatest security vulnerabilities, as technology is only making it easier to eng

Our debt-heavy architecture is not a thought-out tenet of academic finance. Instead, it is substantially a function of practical circumstance: the deductibility of interest payments on corporate debt from pretax profits. That simple reality makes debt financing generally cheaper than raising equity. And while there are other reasons why businesses might want to use debt, especially the investment leverage that it provides to equity owners, the tax shield and the resulting lower “cost” of debt of

The American housing debate still appears deceptively familiar: build more homes, loosen zoning restrictions, accelerate permitting, reduce construction costs, and help households qualify for mortgages. These goals remain important, especially in states where housing supply has failed to keep up with population and income growth. But they no longer fully capture what housing affordability now entails. A home must not only be permitted, built, purchased, and financed. It must also be insured. Tha

Americans have been voting with their feet and leaving California for Texas. There are many reasons for these moves, but foremost is that Texas has a lower cost of living, and by far the most important aspect of cost of living is housing. The obvious reason that California homes are more expensive is that the state makes it harder to build. But the question of why it is so much harder to build in California is not as obvious as some may think. In both Texas and California, land-use regulations a

There is a temptation to categorize Texas and California under the two states’ traditional labels: Texas, the land of property rights; California, the land of regulation. But the truth is nearly the reverse. Texas does not actually hold that all property is sacred in the way property is commonly considered. It holds that the productive, extractive use of property outranks the passive holding of it. In California, a neighbor’s right to be heard can stop you from building on your own land; in Texa

When containerization arrived in force through the 1960s and 1970s, Manhattan’s waterfront lost. Its piers became obsolete. The neighborhoods built around dock work hollowed out over a generation. The container didn’t reward proximity to the city or historical primacy or labor skill. We are at an equivalent moment right now, and almost nobody is looking at the land. If overland freight cost approaches zero as a result of autonomous trucking, the premium for proximity to intermodal terminals weak