Add caption One month ago I announced a series that would investigate “the world that China wants,” using Dan Tobin’s recent congressional testimony and Nadege Rolland’s recent research brief as the foundation of this discussion. My original plan was to dissect each of these documents at length. However, I put that aspect of the project […]
Don Trioani, Stand Your Ground, (1976). Captain Levi Preston of Danvers, Massachusetts, interviewed about his participation in the first battle of the American Revolution many years later, at the age of 91, around 1843: “Captain Preston, what made you go to the Concord Fight? [Was it because you] were you oppressed by the Stamp Act?”“I […]
Infographic from the International Gas Union. Two months ago I wrote a post with the title “Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan.” It described how the loss of Taiwan to the PRC would put Japan in a geopolitically untenable position, as the PLA Navy would then be capable of choking Japan into submission if conflict ever […]
Over at the Washington Examiner I have a book review out of Timothy Brook’s The Great State: China and the World. Brook is a well regarded historian whose past work has focused on both the Ming Dynasty and on early 20th century China. This book is a popular history that narrates episodes from the Yuan Dynasty […]
The folks over at Reason magazine have published an essay by Daniel Drezner titled “There is No China Crisis.” The essay is a long and meandering piece of apologia for the old DC model for dealing with China. I’ve written about this model and its failures before (especially see the posts “Give No Heed to […]
Two weeks ago I appeared on Titus Techera’s podcast Post-Modern Conservative to talk with him about my article for the National Review, “Learning the Wrong Lessons From Reform Conservatism” and the blog-post that went with it, “Conservatism’s Generational Civil War.” Our discussion was fruitful and wide ranging: over its course we discussed various intellectual currents […]
There is a school of international relations theory that advocates judging the relations of states absent speculation on the intentions and plans of its statesmen. As leaders have an incentive to lie and their intentions can never really be proved one way or another, it is best for the analyst to refrain from mind-reading altogether. […]
As February turned to March I realized I needed a better understanding of epidemics and disaster response. It was clear to me then that the coronavirus was going to blow up in my own country, that I was going to be voicing opinions about it, and that in consequence I had a responsibility to inform […]
Image Source I have a new essay out in the National Review which extends some of yesterday’s thoughts on the limits and attractions of the “common good” conservatism to a new topic: the generational divide that currently divides thinkers on the American right. The Sanders/Biden primary has drawn attention to the parallel phenomena on the […]
A screenshot of a “Girls Do Porn” video uploaded by a pseudonymous user. An American court charged “Girls Do Porn” with sexual trafficking, but these videos are still uploaded on to Pornhub by anonymous users every day (I found this video after about 30 seconds of googling and took a screen shot of it on […]