The Scholar's Stage

THE CHINESE socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutio

THUS WE BOMB Iran. The administration does not give consistent reasons for the attack on Iran: some say we war to change the behavior of the Iranian regime; others say the aim of the war is to end that regime outright. Many officials, including the presid

LAST MONTH American Affairs published my review of Alexander Karp's The Technological Republic. While I had plenty critical to say about Karp's book, the meat of my essay was a historical survey of the ascendant "Eastern Establishment" of the Gilded Age.

ALEXANDER KARP AND NICHOLAS ZAMISKA'S The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West may not be the worst book I have read this year, but it is by far the most disappointing. Karp is the rare CEO more famous for his intell

I WILL NOT ATTEMPT to eulogize the martyr. Others have done this already-and done so with such skill that anything I write would not measure up. I will do something else here: explain, in sober and measured language, the significance of Kirk's life to the

OVER THE LAST WEEK Christian Whiton's essay "How Taiwan Lost Trump" has ricocheted its way through the Taiwanese media. Ever sensitive to foreign perceptions of Taiwan, the Taiwanese chattering classes have been especially sensitive in the fallout of two

NEITHER THE MALE AUTHORS NOR THE MALE READERS most preoccupied with middle age are inclined to face it cleanly. The male author depicts the mid-life crisis to escape his own. His novels and screenplays are an adolescent retort to the anxieties of ease. Th

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 p