In 19th century America, it was popular to argue that there are four boxes for maintaining political liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and cartridge. There is also a version that has just three boxes, which drops the jury box from the model. The soap box is public speech used to…
Okay, players: jokers are wild, but with a twist: the entire deck is jokers. Since everyone at the table will have five Aces, nobody wins.Welcome to the Trade War Poker Table: nobody wins, as everyone has the same hand of jokers.This is not to say that exploitive, mercantilist “free trade” (no…
“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction…
A U.S. economic ‘re-balancing’ is coming. Putin is right. The post-WWII economic order ‘is gone’ The post-WWII geo-political outcome effectively determined the post-war global economic structure. Both are now undergoing huge change. What remains stuck fast however, is the general (Western) weltanschauung that everything must ‘change’ only for it…
Unifier of Germany and its first Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck once famously said: “The great questions of our time will not be settled by resolutions and by majority votes […] but by blood and iron.” Ever since the days of the ‘Iron Chancellor’, and especially after World War 2, German…
After a flurry of peace talks in Saudi Arabia, the Trump peace initiative regarding the war in Ukraine seems to have run out of steam. The last round of talks stalled over the conditions required to create a Black Sea ceasefire. The Russians laid out the conditions they would…
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has long portrayed itself as America’s humanitarian aid organization, delivering assistance to developing nations. With an annual budget of nearly $40 billion and operations in over 100 countries, it represents one of the largest foreign aid institutions in the world. But…
When Donald Trump entered office, he faced a number of choices that had confronted the last three Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They all had the choice to either shrink government and reduce deficits or slow government growth while cutting taxes. They had the…
New technologies are rapidly transforming society. Are these radical changes good or bad for our emotional and spiritual lives? Are you a tech optimist or pessimist? Do you think our advancing technology—in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and space technology—will make our world better or worse? And…
When I was in graduate school I read all of the literature on how European revolutionary doctrine had destabilized Russia in the late 19th century. This process culminated with the Bolsheviks—animated by the crude doctrine of Marxism-Leninism—unleashing hell on the country. The bibliography is vast, and I suspect that…
