American Affairs Journal

americanaffairsjournal.org · American English

A quarterly journal of public policy and political thought

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Last post: Sep 10, 2026
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The Automation Paradox: America’s Hidden Bottleneck to Reindustrialization
Sep 10, 2026 · original
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 .
How Ukrainian Drones Are Exploiting Soviet-Era Geography
Sep 10, 2026 · original
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 .
Capital and Nomos: The Political Economy of the Interregnum
Sep 10, 2026 · original
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 .
Building Bridges: Finding Common Ground on Permitting Reform
Sep 5, 2026 · original
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 .
A Difference of Priorities: Surface Transportation Policy in Texas and California
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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. California has pursued a broader set of objectives, including environmental protection, greenhouse gas reduction, land-use planning, transit development, equity, and mobility. These differences stem not from geography or population growth but from how each state structures governance, project review, funding, and the role transportation systems are expected to play. Continue reading A Difference of Priorities: Surface Transportation Policy in Texas and California on American Affairs Journal .
Technology as Trojan Horse: The American Roots of European Erasure
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 should not be the market’s adjustment variable, a greater role given to the collective over the individual compared to the American cultural paradigm. Continue reading Technology as Trojan Horse: The American Roots of European Erasure on American Affairs Journal .
Signs in the Furrows: Rural Resistance to the New Land Grab
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 treating rural communities as blank slates for someone else’s metrics of progress. Continue reading Signs in the Furrows: Rural Resistance to the New Land Grab on American Affairs Journal .
Restoring the American Arsenal: The Case for a Defense-Critical Patent Box in the United States
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 .
Overcoming China’s Supply Chain Leverage
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 it has framed it, make the world dependent on China while making China independent of the world.2 Supply chain supremacy was always intended as a geopolitical weapon. Continue reading Overcoming China’s Supply Chain Leverage on American Affairs Journal .
Unrest in the West: Anger and Aspiration in the Canadian Prairies
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 Government of Alberta commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should separate from Canada?” In other words, Albertans are, for the first time in their history, being tested on whether they wish to secede entirely from Canada. And the question bites hard into a country already on edge about its sovereignty...
The Man Who Was Friday: Global Islamism after Unipolarity
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 shifted from merely describing Muslims’ religious practices to coming to be seen as “an abstract and supposedly self-propelling structure, like capitalism.” While Islam may contain multitudes, it is also a quintessentially globalist idea, and its historic radicalization into Islamism and jihadism flows from the failure of globalism to transcend the profane politics of the nation-state. As we shall see,
Failing Like a State
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 flattering about being oppressed. The fantasy of oppression spares us from confronting the fact that, compared to the history of democratic revolutions and liberation movements, our current predicament is a little embarrassing. The challenge of social criticism in the age of Big Tech may be to resist the allure of oppression narratives and develop ways of thinking through the strange banality of di
The World That Never Was: Liberal Internationalism’s Last Crusade
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 conservatives, led by Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sought to destroy democracy. With President Donald Trump’s election victories, they have nearly succeeded. Hope lies in a vigorous counterattack from the liberal internationalists. It would be very easy for conservatives and nationalists to dismiss his book as a musty last gasp of the post–Cold War liberal elite. His work might well be the litera
The Augmentation-Automation Race
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 Valley, a different view prevails. The creators of the technology, most prominently Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, predict widespread displacement and high unemployment. If there is absorption of the displaced, it will be into worse jobs that might not even be around for long. On that view, AI is markedly abnormal: while past technologies have complemented distinctly human contributions, such as in
Don’t Wait for the Crisis: How Markets Can Fund National Resilience
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 engineer pandemics. But the same preparedness deficit recurs wherever critical goods are expensive to hold, seldom needed, and catastrophic to lack. The causes may seem obvious: markets underprovide public goods, and the state fails to fill the gap because policymakers are discouraged from investing in preparedness for events that probably won’t happen while they’re in office. Yet this clean story ca
The Debt-Equity Distinction: A Century of Policy by Accident
Aug 20, 2026 · original
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 often tip the finance scales in favor of borrowing versus putting in one’s own capital. This bias was not part of the plan. Because there was no plan. Debt’s allure emerged not from careful deliberation about an optimal corporate capital structure at the University of Chicago, but from the exigencies of financing World War I. What began as a hastily adopted wartime measure has hardened through time

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