LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I published the preview as security: Trump … | Continue reading
THERE ARE DECADES WHEN possibility is constrained in a narrow frame. The terrain has been surveyed, boundaries have been laid, and rules have been established. In such an age there is still room for high drama: The decisive round of a boxing match draws the eye despite the fact—o … | Continue reading
In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too … | Continue reading
MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene … | Continue reading
MANY HAVE TRIED to pin Trump to Heritage’s “Project 2025.” The Trump campaign has not only refused to endorse Project 2025—they have refused to endorse any detailed policy plan whatsoever. Trump prefers to keep his options open. One unanticipated benefit of this approach is that … | Continue reading
IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS a contrast is sometimes made between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Made famous by Nietzsche, this schema was first used to describe the thought and art of Ancient Greece. On the Apollonian end we have all that is rational, intentional, str … | Continue reading
IN 2009 PAUL GRAHAM WROTE A THOUGHTFUL ESSAY titled “Cities and Ambition.” There he proposes that a great city is defined by the sort of ambitions it kindles—or perhaps more accurately, the sort of ambitious it gathers. As Graham puts it: | Continue reading
I often draw a distinction between the political elites of Washington DC and the industrial elites of Silicon Valley with a joke: in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have read, is a matter of high prestige. Not so in Washington DC. In Washington people neve … | Continue reading
Last month Civic Future invited me to join a panel at their annual policy forum. The topic: what the United Kingdom should do about China. As I am neither a British citizen nor an expert in British affairs, I thought it impolitic to lecture my hosts on how they should be governin … | Continue reading
Two items of interest passed through my feeds this week. The first is the podcast Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz released to explain why they are endorsing Trump for president. The second is an evocative and viral internet advertisement for careersbuilttolast.com, a slick recrui … | Continue reading
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and the desperate attempts of many Democrats to replace their candidate before their own … | Continue reading
A few items of interest to my readers: First, at the end of last month I appeared on the German Marshall Fund's China Global podcast to discuss the CPC's current techno-industrial drive. You can listen to the full thing on Simplecast, Apple Podcast, or in the embed below: | Continue reading
Does China have a plan to save its wobbly economy? Last week in Foreign Policy I argued that it does—but not the sort of plan most Western economists are comfortable with. Western analysts blame slowing growth on a variety of factors: a communist bureaucracy paralyzed by purges a … | Continue reading
There is a passage in Democracy in America that has appeared in many of my essays." In the United States,” Tocqueville reports, “there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined power of individuals." Tocqueville contrasts his vision o … | Continue reading
To write of Christmas after December 25th is neither a sin nor a crime, but there is something untoward in my tardiness. We meet the overdue Christmas missive with the same misgiving we reserve for the rooftop that twinkles through February. Even small children know—however much … | Continue reading
A few years back Ross Douthat published an interesting book titled The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success. The thesis of Douthat's book is simple: American society is stagnant. Our blockbusters and our books are remakes from the '80s; our political coaliti … | Continue reading
Can strategic sense be found in "senseless" violence? This is the question I attempt to answer in a column I have out this week for Mosaic, tilted "The Extremist's Gambit Helps Explain Why Hamas Attacked Now." The piece was prompted by the many expressions of shock and puzzlement … | Continue reading
Two years ago I ran a small reading group that met over zoom. Our reading topic: Leninism. Curious about the claims that modern Chinese politics are an outgrowth of Marxist ideas and practice yet feeling insufficiently familiar with the Leninist political tradition to properly ju … | Continue reading
Readers of the Scholar's Stage will be familiar with a thesis I have pursued in multiple essays and posts over the last half decade: America was once a place where institutional capacity was very high. Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of … | Continue reading
Xi Jinping’s decision to openly label the United States the source of China’s ills rolled through the newsletters, wire services, and commentators on China this week. Much has been written about this already; I have nothing to add. Here I call attention to something else that occ … | Continue reading
In an essay published in 2018, Geramie Barme recommends observers of US-China relations read through five pieces that Hu Qiaomu and Mao Zedong published in 1949 under the latter's name. The five pieces were Mao's response to Dean Acheson's China White Paper, a compendium of State … | Continue reading
Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy concludes with a dramatic pronouncement: At this time of an inflection point in history, Japan is finding itself in the midst of the most severe and complex security environment since the end of WWII. In no way can we be optimistic about wh … | Continue reading
My annual list of books arrives a bit later than usual. However, this delay is in some ways fortunate. Now my list will not be seen as an extended comment on the Lex Friedman reading list discourse. Those not on Twitter will have heard little about this. I envy you: we would all … | Continue reading
On January 16th the friends of Cao Zhixin, a 27 year old book editor residing in Beijing, posted a video of Cao onto Youtube.θ The video spread quickly spread across Chinese language Twitter, and from there into newspaper reports in Great Britain, the United States, and Taiwan.θ … | Continue reading
Over at Foreign Affairs, Ryan Haas and Jude Blanchette have published an interesting argument. Hass and Blanchette are worried that the United States and China are needlessly inching towards armed conflict over Taiwan because of the two powers’ shared belief that “the hard questi … | Continue reading
Many readers have wondered at my low writing output this year. This week I am happy to announce the answer to the riddle: the Center for Strategic Translation. The Center for Strategic Translation locates, translates, and annotates documents of historic or strategic value that a … | Continue reading
Or Comments on the Thiel Thesis, Part I Last week Mary Harrington published a long interview with Peter Thiel in the online magazine Unherd. Much of her article centers on Thiel’s conviction that m… | Continue reading
A few months ago Jonathan Haidt made waves with a big think-piece in the Atlantic arguing that most of the ills of the 2010s can be traced back to the invention of the retweet button.θ I read the e… | Continue reading
Over on the Scholar’s Stage forum, one forum member asks why the number of American university students selecting history as their chosen four year degree has been on the decline since the 19… | Continue reading
Readers may remember my stab at a global Great Books list. Recently a reader contacted me asking for guidance: they wanted to read through the books on the “East Asian” section of that … | Continue reading
Image Source.”Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second” –Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancien… | Continue reading
The national security teams of Bush 41 and Bush 43, America’s most accomplished and most reviled set of statesmen officials… were the exact same set of people. The authors of America’s Cold War vic… | Continue reading
Vasily Perov, Portrait of Dostoevsky, 1872.The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro,… | Continue reading
Felix Fenon, At La Revue Blanche (1940)Image source.It is a common observation that internet life and real life don’t really match. Spend a few hours on twitter and you will think America is … | Continue reading
In the aftermath of the First World War, military theorists across the West were desperate to fashion a path around the next war’s trenches. Engineers and tacticians spent that war tinkering away o… | Continue reading
You may remember a piece I wrote last summer. It was a review of Vladislav Zubok's book, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev. Zubok contends that the collapse of the Soviet Union should be understood as a consequence of generational turnover … | Continue reading
Xi Jinping regularly exhorts China’s diplomats, propagandists, journalists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural figures to “tell China’s story well.”The slogan flows naturally from the operating assu… | Continue reading
In all of my reading on Afghanistan, two books stand out. Both were highlighted in my list of the best 10 books I read in 2021: Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan: A History and David Edwards’ Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan. Both … | Continue reading
I have an op-ed out in the New York Times today arguing that we must intentionally ground our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in careful, cost-benefit calculation instead of emotional r… | Continue reading
A few months ago I wrote about Oswald Spengler’s attempt at comparative world history. I expressed severe reservations with Spengler’s methods and conclusions.[1] But for me the most fascinating pa… | Continue reading
Several days ago the U.S.-China Perception Monitor published an essay in both English and Chinese by Hu Wei, a prominent think tanker in Shanghai. It argues that the war in Ukraine is bound to go poorly for Russia and thus China must moderate its support for Putin’s failing regim … | Continue reading
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [a fence] and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If… | Continue reading
The Western response to Russian invasion falls hard and fast. The actions of the E.U., the Anglosphere nations, and Japan are both extraordinary and consequential: multiple NATO states have brazenl… | Continue reading
Approximately three hours ago, the official twitter account of the United States Embassy in Kiev posted this meme. The meme is idiotic at even the surface level: in face of Russian claims that Ukra… | Continue reading
A forum to discuss the intersections of history, behavioral science, and strategic thought, with an emphasis on East and Southeast Asian affairs. | Continue reading
Image SourceSeveral months ago someone on twitter asked the following question: which public thinker did you idolize ten or fifteen years ago but have little intellectual respect for today? [1] A s… | Continue reading
The political project of the “post liberals” is not my own. Many of their critiques of contemporary American life and politics mirror what I have written; many of their suggestions for the future o… | Continue reading
Desmund Shum is a red billionaire. Red Roulette is his memoir, a tell all expose of his family’s climb to the summits of wealth and the foothills of power. The book describes how he and his ex-wife… | Continue reading