American Affairs Journal
A quarterly journal of public policy and political thought
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Latest posts
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The Automation Paradox: America’s Hidden Bottleneck to Reindustrialization
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…
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How Ukrainian Drones Are Exploiting Soviet-Era Geography
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…
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Capital and Nomos: The Political Economy of the Interregnum
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…
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Building Bridges: Finding Common Ground on Permitting Reform
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…
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A Difference of Priorities: Surface Transportation Policy in Texas and California
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,…
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Technology as Trojan Horse: The American Roots of European Erasure
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…
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Signs in the Furrows: Rural Resistance to the New Land Grab
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…
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Restoring the American Arsenal: The Case for a Defense-Critical Patent Box in the United States
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…
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Overcoming China’s Supply Chain Leverage
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…
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Unrest in the West: Anger and Aspiration in the Canadian Prairies
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…
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The Man Who Was Friday: Global Islamism after Unipolarity
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…
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Failing Like a State
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…
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The World That Never Was: Liberal Internationalism’s Last Crusade
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…
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The Augmentation-Automation Race
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…
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Don’t Wait for the Crisis: How Markets Can Fund National Resilience
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…
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The Debt-Equity Distinction: A Century of Policy by Accident
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…