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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:
THERE ARE DECADES WHEN possibility is constrained in a narrow frame. The terrain has been surveyed, boundaries have been laid, and rules have been established. In such an age there is still room for high drama: The decisive round of a boxing match draws the eye despite the fact—or perhaps because—the boxers play an antique game. In such times and climes, victory means mastery of existing modes, not the invention of new ones. But nothing human is everlasting. Always there comes a day when spectators search for better games and settlers seek out fresher pastures. That day of change arrives with much confusion and fanfare. Sons dishonor their fathers. Daughters rise against their mothers. Ancestral ideals are cast aside, and possibility staggers forth from its long captivity, ready to wreak vengeance on mankind.
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:
More in history
Mankind has debated since time immemorial what it means to be “good,” encompassing the philosophy of fundamental morality and social conditioning. But does seeking a good person presuppose that we lack the goodness we seek, rendering moral striving an excruciating act of self-loathing? Exploring morality, starting with Carl Rogers’ idea of conditional positive regard, […]
Economics, politics and philosophy for a new era
Have you ever heard of Ulanqab prefecture, a small (by China’s standards) jurisdiction of 1.5 million people lost in the middle of the Inner Mongolian steppe?
Lately I've been reading Orwell's collected work from 1945–1950, which was being deaccessioned from the library. It opens with a short but fascinating essay on , published 19 October 1945. It seems clear that Orwell's thinking about this development led directly to his novel , which was written in late 1948.“You and the Atom Bomb”Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell's initial focus is: This is important, he says, because: Obviously, the atom bomb is in the first category. Then we come to the part that is clearly the road to : Nineteen Eighty-Four By 1945 the three super-states were taking shape. Orwell writes about how in 1941 it had appeared that the Axis powers would win the war (he mentions James Burnham's ) so that Germany (not Russia) might control Europe and Asia, while Japan (not China) might control East Asia, but he said this was just a “miscalculation”:The Managerial Revolution The frozen and oppressive political milieu of is clearly laid out:Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, and Orwell died the following year after a long battle with tuberculosis. His essay on courtesy of the Orwell Foundation and Orwell's estate.Nineteen Eighty-Four“You and the Atom Bomb” is available online The question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?” Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. … A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak. We have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this is the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires …. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. Mr H.G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons…. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. … The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.unconquerable
