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 might not win. If so I had better publish something before election day while interest in Trumpworld was guaranteed. Trump won. Interest in GOP debates did not abate. I continued to work on the report. As of this week the full thing is out. You can read it, in all its twenty-page glory, over at the FPRI website. What follows are some of its key points:

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 Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades. Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varities”  spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

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 Republicans have spent much of the last year engaged in intensive but open debates over policy.  Ambitious politicians, congressional offices, and think tanks have laid out their preferred plans on almost every issue of importance. These plans often differ from each other in striking ways. Absent endorsement from Trump or his campaign, no one quite knows which of these policy packages will eventually be adopted as the Republican standard. The Republicans involved have thus been free to debate the merits and costs of each. Take China policy.

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: