American Affairs Journal

Cybersecurity has emerged as one of the defining policy challenges of the twenty-first century. From ransomware attacks on businesses and schools to hacks into our critical infrastructure, from virtual political influence operations to large-scale fraud and nefarious data collection by corporations and state actors, cybersecurity has become an indelible concern of contemporary life. Adversarial states… Continue reading Securing the Digital Republic on American Affairs Journal.

The world is increasingly awash with cybersecurity incidents. In 2025, Americans alone lost over $20 billion in cybercrimes.1 Globally, cybersecurity incidents are becoming more common by the year, and attacks targeting civilian infrastructure have become a regular facet of warfare. Since the Maidan Revolution of 2014, Ukraine has been targeted by Russian hackers attempting to… Continue reading How to Safeguard America’s Critical Infrastructure on American Affairs Journal.

With so much money at stake, it is little wonder that the technology and infrastructure responsible for delivering these ads (“adtech”) is stuck in a perpetual arms race for human attention. The world of social media advertising, with which this article is principally concerned, is dominated by Meta, Google, to a lesser extent, X, and the awkwardly bifurcated ByteDance and “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Each of these entities must constantly engineer new ways to keep users glued to their servic

For the past twenty years, attacking industrial systems required years of specialized training, custom tooling, and a nation-state budget. That model is now dead. Today, it takes a laptop and an internet connection. Welcome to “the Infinite Front.” American firms should take note. Continue reading The Factory Floor Is Now the Battlefield on American Affairs Journal.

The United States has 330 million people, compared to China’s 1.3 billion. We cannot offer a larger market. We must offer a better one. Despite what today appears to be a fraying of traditional allies, the allied coalition (Europe, India, Five Eyes, Japan, Southeast Asia) has the population, capital, technology, and market depth to outcompete China on every dimension. The coalition math works in principle. What it requires in practice is the American manufacturing credibility to make the offer r

The availability of energy in America has allowed citizens to use their security, freedom, and formation to advance the social goods of everyday life. Likewise, the future of the country will depend on the addition of large amounts of cheap energy, directed toward the right ends, to: lower the costs of family and individual life; build critical industries, including manufacturing, mineral processing, defense capabilities, and AI; and create the material prosperity needed to finance critical prio

The more strategic move is simpler, dumber even: tariff everything. Create a durable preference for production in the United States, across the whole industrial base, and let entrepreneurs, engineers, and manufacturers discover where the next breakthroughs will come. The scalpel has its place, but the blunt force object is the tool for this job. For those who really want to “rebuild our manufacturing and our resilience,” it’s time to start hammering. Continue reading The Case for Flat Tariffs on

As the United States embarks on the next great buildout of strategic infrastructure in the form of AI data centers, it must ensure that the material supply chain for the interstates that underpin it all remains secure and modern. Continue reading Build Like Ike: How Surface Transportation Reauthorization Can Drive America’s Next Materials Revolution on American Affairs Journal.

The story of the highway system is, in many ways, the story of public infrastructure more broadly. What appears as a transportation challenge is in fact a reflection of a deeper structural issue: governments built vast systems in an era of expansion but have yet to fully adapt to the demands of long-term stewardship. Continue reading The Interstate Imperative: Infrastructure Maintenance as Nation-Building on American Affairs Journal.

Too many seem to think that in a handful of years, Americans will wake up to a technofuturist version of the 1950s, when Uncle Sam’s rolled sleeves, brawny forearms, and dexterous hands peerlessly delivered the world’s goods. A necessary and uplifting vision to be sure, but let Potter pour cold water on it. After all, the United States had decades of process knowledge to build on when it tooled up for World War II, and what do we have now? Continue reading The Long March of Process: Efficiency a

We are not naïve about the political difficulties surrounding immigration, but we nonetheless wish to underscore the plight and wellbeing of disadvantaged native workers, a group that both parties claim to have some affinity for, either now or in the recent past; recognizing labor market security as an essential factor in advancing their economic future should be the way forward for American policymakers of all stripes. Continue reading The Employment Effects of Immigration Enforcement: An Initi

If the United States cannot manufacture what it needs to sustain and defend its critical industries, its ability to maintain its security and independence is put at risk. Ensuring domestic nitrile glove supply is not a matter of industrial nostalgia or protectionism; it is a practical, targeted response to a vulnerability hiding in plain sight. Continue reading America’s Critical Need for Nitrile Glove Supply Security on American Affairs Journal.

MAHA promises a country that is stronger, healthier, and more resilient. Achieving that vision does not require indiscriminate expansion of the public health bureaucracy; it requires a federal government that knows where to act—and where to stop. Indoor air quality is an ideal proving ground for this kind of restrained, evidence-based public health policy. Continue reading Invisible Infrastructure, Visible Results: A Conservative Case for Clean Indoor Air on American Affairs Journal.

Our goal must not be a redux of World Wars I and II, when the United States used its superior industrial might to arm European powers. The goal must not be a wealthy deindustrialized Europe rich enough to buy the products of American industrial might, but a Europe dynamic enough to have its own robust production, with both continents benefiting from the other’s capability. Continue reading Rethinking American Alliances in Europe: From Supranationalism to Nationalism on American Affairs Journal.

The Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 is a survivor of the broad World War II–era powers that once belonged to the executive branch. Based on the War Powers Acts of 1941 and 1942, the DPA “confers upon the President a broad set of authorities to influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense.” Since the opening of the Cold War, however, Congress has clawed back some of the more expansive authorities (e.g., price controls). Only Titles I, III, and VII have survived reauthoriza

If we have decided that democracy cannot literally mean the rule of the people and has to be redefined, then there is no particular reason why we must accept democratic elites’ openness, mobility, or adherence to some ideals of historical progress to be the key elements of a redefined democracy today. Democracy, once decoupled from the idea of the people ruling, might rather mean that the inevitable elite rules effectively on the people’s behalf. Once we are no longer bound to narratives that ha

The passive extraction of land value was the central problem of industrial capitalism. Bird sees that the mechanism is universal and persistent across political systems and centuries. The argument waiting inside The Land Trap, and the one its evidence most powerfully supports, is that democratic capitalism has a structural tendency to convert the aspiration for broad prosperity into an engine of asset price inflation that it cannot, by its own logic, correct... Continue reading The Appreciation

Bidenomics, especially when viewed from the vantage point of central Ohio, stumbled in two ways that threatened its laudable goals. First, problems endogenous to the Biden White House’s key partner, Intel, frustrated political goals in a way that casts doubt on how policymakers structured their relationship with the private sector. Second, the deployment of federal funds proved sluggish in a way that worked to discredit the whole program... Continue reading How Bidenomics Went Bust: A Midwestern

The United States faces a growing strategic challenge: China has emerged as the world’s dominant energy financier, outpacing the United States nearly ten to one in global markets. China’s growing influence not only directly challenges U.S. strategic interests but also excludes American businesses from immense economic opportunities in the world’s largest foreign markets, such as Brazil and India. The United States should not try to out-subsidize China, but true American energy dominance requires

Investment should be directed at sectors where American technology and innovation exist but the infrastructure to commercialize them domestically does not—and where the national security case is clear. Among these sectors are rare earth processing, where proven American technology faces predatory state-backed pricing; defense-industrial reconstitution; and advanced shipbuilding techniques and autonomous vessel design. In short, strategic capital must target the start-up and scale-up gap in advan