Reviews

REVIEW: “A BIG, BEAUTIFUL BILL AND AN EVEN BIGGER DEBT: THREE PERSPECTIVES”

The following is an in-depth analysis of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” written by ChatGPT from important, bi-partisan fiscal, economic and political sources, all listed below:

If there is one unassailable truth in American political life, it is that no grand legislative gesture arrives without the promise of prosperity—and the prospect of unintended consequences. Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law on July 4th, stands as a monument to this dynamic: a sprawling package of permanent tax cuts, entitlement retrenchments, and fresh spending, all wrapped in a populist bow and accompanied by the familiar refrain that the deficits will somehow pay for themselves.

To understand the bill’s import—and its likely fallout—it helps to consider three vantage points. The first is that of Milton Friedman, who would see in these provisions a laboratory for the free market, tempered by fiscal illusions. The second is Paul Krugman’s, for whom this is a brazen experiment in upward redistribution. The third is David Stockman’s, whose uniquely jaundiced eye discerns an unholy alliance of crony capitalism and debt-fueled political theatre.

Friedman, the Nobel laureate and evangelist of free enterprise, might first commend the bill’s unapologetic tax relief. A permanent extension of the 2017 tax cuts is precisely the sort of measure he once called “a way to restore incentives, reduce distortions, and reward enterprise.” For Friedman, a tax system ought to be predictable, broad-based, and minimally intrusive. In this sense, the bill’s elimination of taxes on tips and overtime income, coupled with higher thresholds for the estate tax, will likely increase the incentive to work, save, and invest.

Yet Friedman would be quick to warn that no tax cut exists in a vacuum. The real test of fiscal virtue, he always argued, is not in slashing tax rates but in restraining spending. This bill, by combining aggressive tax cuts with continued defense expansions and only partial reductions to social spending, falls short of the discipline he prescribed. The result, Friedman would say, is a structural deficit that will eventually require either inflation or future tax hikes. “There is no such thing as a free lunch,” he liked to remind audiences. This is a lunch billed to generations unborn.

Krugman, viewing the same legislation, would perceive not a triumph of market freedom but an egregious abdication of public responsibility. He has long argued that the most misleading idea in modern politics is the notion that tax cuts inevitably pay for themselves. As the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring shows, the bill is likely to add over $3 trillion to the national debt in the next decade, even after accounting for higher GDP. Krugman would note that the permanent nature of the cuts deprives lawmakers of future leverage and crowds out investments in education, infrastructure, and health.

More pointedly, Krugman would argue that the bill’s distributional impact is regressive by design. Expanded deductions for capital gains and estates, the restoration of a higher SALT cap, and corporate incentives all tilt the benefits toward the affluent, while Medicaid cuts and SNAP work requirements fall hardest on those with the least. In Krugman’s view, this is not simply poor economics but a moral failing: a return to what he calls “the era of Dickensian inequality, dressed up in the rhetoric of growth.”

Yet the critique most likely to sting is the one that David Stockman would deliver. Unlike Krugman, Stockman began as a champion of supply-side tax reform. But he has since become its most unflinching critic. To him, the “Big Beautiful Bill” represents the final stage of a fiscal derangement decades in the making: a bipartisan addiction to borrowing and a refusal to reckon with arithmetic. “This is not capitalism,” Stockman might write, “it’s a simulacrum of capitalism—an endless auction of political favors financed by the Fed’s printing press.”

Stockman would remind readers that when he served as Reagan’s budget director, the expectation was that tax cuts would be offset by deep spending restraint. Instead, deficits ballooned and discipline eroded. The new bill, with its eye-watering cost and lack of credible offsets, is an even more flamboyant departure from any pretense of balance. Stockman would likely deride the Republican celebration as a form of magical thinking, no more credible than the illusions peddled by Democrats. In his telling, the bill is both symptom and accelerant of a broader collapse of fiscal sanity.

All three perspectives converge on a single point: the bill’s enormous impact on the debt trajectory. According to estimates from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the legislation could push the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio past 145% by 2050—an unprecedented level for a peacetime economy. While proponents insist that higher growth will mitigate the burden, the Tax Foundation’s dynamic scoring suggests the additional output will cover only a fraction of the revenue loss.

Friedman would insist that economic growth requires both lower taxes and leaner government. Krugman would counter that social stability and productivity demand sustained public investment. Stockman would argue that the entire paradigm—borrowing trillions to finance giveaways—has become a bipartisan racket. Despite their ideological divergences, all three would agree that the arithmetic is merciless. Eventually, debts must be serviced, entitlements must be funded, and the dollar’s credibility must be defended.

What remains is the question of public memory. In the years ahead, as interest payments rise and fiscal constraints tighten, politicians will doubtless blame one another for the bill’s consequences. The narrative will fracture along familiar lines: Republicans will claim the tax cuts were sabotaged by spending; Democrats will argue the spending was hobbled by tax cuts. Independents will declare that neither side ever intended to balance the books. But the numbers, as Friedman and Krugman and Stockman all understood in their own ways, are immune to spin.

There is an old line, attributed variously to Keynes and to an anonymous Treasury mandarin, that the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Perhaps, in this case, Washington can remain irrational longer than the public can remain attentive. But eventually, the bill will come due—not only the legislation signed on Independence Day, but the larger bill for decades of self-deception.

A big, beautiful bill indeed. And perhaps, in the fullness of time, an even bigger, less beautiful reckoning.

Key Elements of the Bill

  • Permanent tax cuts (≈ $4.5 trillion): Extends nearly all parts of Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including individual rate brackets, expanded standard deduction, plus new deductions—no taxes on tips/overtime (through 2028), boosted SALT deduction ($40k cap for five years), larger child/senior credits, plus expansions like auto loan interest write-offs and “Trump Accounts” for parents apnews.com+15ft.com+15crfb.org+15.
  • Major spending cuts: $1–1.2 trillion in savings via Medicaid cuts (work requirements, provider taxes), SNAP/state cost-shifts, rollback of clean energy incentives .
  • Increased enforcement and defense: $150 B added to defense, another $150 B+ for border/ICE enhancements; ICE funding grows tenfold – now largest federal law enforcement budget .
  • Debt-ceiling hike: Allows a $4–$5 trillion statutory increase in borrowing authority as.com+3en.wikipedia.org+3reuters.com+3.

📊 Economic & Fiscal Outlook

🏛️ Congressional Budget Office (CBO)

🏦 CRFB & Budget Advocates

  • Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) puts the Senate’s reconciliation version at $4.1 trillion added debt through 2034—and warns a permanent version could add $5.3–5.5 trillion en.wikipedia.org.
  • CRFB also flags that Social Security and Medicare’s projected insolvency deadlines are now accelerated by roughly one year .

🧮 Tax Foundation

  • Estimates that permanent tax measures could yield a +1.2% GDP boost over the long run, but also slash federal revenue by $4 trillion (dynamically)—meaning growth would only cover ~19% of the revenue loss en.wikipedia.org+15en.wikipedia.org+15reuters.com+15.
  • Shorter-term growth boost around +0.6% by 2027, but turns mildly negative (–0.1%) by 2034 once fiscal constraints bite taxfoundation.org.

🌍 International Outlook (Moody’s, Reuters)

💬 Media & Policy Experts

  • Reuters warns of a “debt spiral,” with rising interest costs jeopardizing Fed independence .
  • FT, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist describe it as the largest GOP tax/deficit expansion since Reagan, dubbing it a “reverse Robin Hood”—favoring corporations and wealthy over vulnerable groups .
  • Economists at Yale, Penn warn severe health-care cuts could increase preventable mortality and financial distress en.wikipedia.org+1ft.com+1.

🔍 Bottom Line Summary

MetricEstimate
Deficit Increase (2025–34)$3.3–4.1 T (CBO: ≈ $3.4T; CRFB Senate: ≈ $4.1T)
Debt-to-GDP TrajectoryRising, potentially 145–200% by 2050
GDP Growth Impact+0.6% by 2027, fading to –0.1% by 2034
Revenue Loss~$4–5 T over a decade (dynamic)
Insured Loss & Social Costs~11 M fewer insured; Medicaid/SNAP and health impacts significant
  • Neutral consensus: Deficit historians, nonpartisan agencies agree debt will balloon sharply in absence of offsetting revenues or spending reversals.
  • Growth trade-off: While tax relief offers modest short-term growth, it does not offset long-run fiscal burdens.
  • Debt consequences: Higher mandatory interest costs, credit rating erosion, pressure on policy flexibility, and future tax hikes or spending cuts loom.

🧠 Final Take

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” delivers sweeping tax cuts, spending reductions in social safety nets, and major border/defense expansions—all rolled into one 940-page, $4–5 trillion fiscal package. Bipartisan institutions like the CBO, CRFB, Tax Foundation, and independent watchdogs align on its massive impact:

  1. Adds trillions to the deficit, sharply escalating national debt.
  2. Offers modest, short-term output gains, but risks longer-term economic drag.
  3. Amplifies fiscal risk, stokes interest burden, and could strain future budgets.
  4. Contains explicit regressive elements—favoring higher-income households and corporations over lower-income families and health-care access.

Here are the three writers whose vantage points are considered:

1️⃣ Conservative / Republican

Milton Friedman

Why he stands out:

  • Nobel Prize–winning economist and prolific writer whose work shaped modern conservative and libertarian economic thought.
  • Champion of free markets, limited government, and monetarism (the idea that controlling the money supply is key to managing the economy).
  • His books and columns influenced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and remain foundational in debates about taxes, deficits, and regulation.
    Major Works:
  • Capitalism and Freedom (1962) – argued that economic freedom underpins political freedom.
  • Free to Choose (1980, with Rose Friedman) – a best-selling defense of deregulation, school vouchers, and lower taxes.
  • Columns for Newsweek and extensive public outreach (including the PBS series Free to Choose).

2️⃣ Liberal / Progressive

Paul Krugman

Why he stands out:

  • Nobel Prize–winning economist and prominent columnist who shaped liberal economic commentary from the 1990s onward.
  • A sharp critic of supply-side tax cuts, deregulation, and austerity.
  • Influential in Democratic policy debates on stimulus spending, inequality, and health care.
    Major Works:
  • The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) – traced the rise of inequality and made a moral case for progressive taxation and social insurance.
  • End This Depression Now! (2012) – argued forcefully for Keynesian stimulus after the Great Recession.
  • Columns in The New York Times, where he has been one of the most-read voices on economic policy.

3️⃣ Independent / Centrist

David Stockman

Why he stands out:

  • Former Reagan budget director who later became an iconoclastic critic of both parties’ fiscal excesses.
  • He helped design the Reagan tax cuts, but later turned against supply-side orthodoxy and big deficits.
  • His writings blend libertarian skepticism of big government with scathing critiques of Wall Street bailouts and crony capitalism.
    Major Works:
  • The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed (1986) – a landmark insider account of budget battles and exploding deficits.
  • The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America (2013) – an encyclopedic denunciation of central banking, stimulus, and fiscal irresponsibility.
  • Regular commentary and op-eds across financial and political publications (The New York Times, Zero Hedge, The Atlantic).
Essays, Politics, Reviews, Social Media

REVIEW: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics”

An AI Review: “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics”

In The New Yorker essay “Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics,” Kyle Chayka explores how social media has become not merely a communication tool for political figures but the primary arena in which politics itself now unfolds. The piece contrasts the digital personas of Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani to illustrate how posting has evolved into a core exercise of power and a new form of political identity.

Chayka begins by chronicling former President Trump’s frenetic use of Truth Social, the platform he created after leaving Twitter. Trump does not merely announce decisions online; he appears to make them there. For instance, in June 2025, Trump unilaterally declared and publicized a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Truth Social after having ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only days earlier. He issued warnings and taunts in the same all-caps style he once used to brag about the size of his nuclear arsenal compared to Kim Jong Un’s. The essay argues that this real-time posting has compressed world-shaking events into casual, ephemeral updates, trivializing violence and policy into the equivalent of viral content.

Yet Trump is not alone in harnessing the power of constant broadcasting. Chayka turns to Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York State assembly member and Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who embodies a different approach to digital politics. Where Trump’s style is bombastic and combative, Mamdani’s presence on TikTok and Instagram is more polished and warm. His short-form videos—some produced by the creative agency Melted Solids—blend documentary realism with the aesthetics of viral influencer content. Clips of Mamdani walking through Manhattan or spontaneously greeting his filmmaker mother, Mira Nair, have garnered millions of views. His collaborations with high-profile digital creators like the Kid Mero and Emily Ratajkowski reflect an understanding that modern campaigns are not only about policy but about generating a steady stream of engaging material.

Chayka underscores that both politicians are symptoms of the same phenomenon: social media has swallowed the traditional infrastructure of political communication. No longer is there a clear boundary between a politician’s private musings and official pronouncements. The medium has become the message—and often the entire substance. Even memes have turned into flash points of political conflict. The article recounts how U.S. border officials detained a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who carried a satirical meme of Vice President J.D. Vance on his phone, suggesting that political images have acquired the power to implicate their holders in ideological battles.

This transformation, Chayka argues, has significant consequences. Trump’s unfiltered posts, once viewed as a sideshow, have become a primary instrument of governance, with the potential to inflame conflicts or disrupt alliances. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s refined authenticity—crafted through video diaries and collaborations—illustrates how even progressive candidates must adopt the same always-online posture to cultivate a political following. While Mamdani’s style is less aggressive than Trump’s, it similarly depends on projecting a version of authenticity that is inseparable from performance.

The essay closes by reflecting on the future of American politics in this environment. The Democratic Party has struggled to counter Trump’s cultural dominance, as shown by tone-deaf spectacles like a Pride concert at the Kennedy Center with anti-Trump parodies of Les Misérables. In contrast, Mamdani’s campaign has generated genuine enthusiasm. Yet Chayka raises an open question: can the idealistic energy of this new digital-first politics survive the compromises of actual governance? If online performance has become the main credential for leadership, it is unclear whether any politician—no matter their ideology—can avoid the pressures of perpetual self-promotion.

In the end, Chayka’s essay offers a clear warning: social media has transformed politics into a theater of the immediate, where every post carries the weight of policy and every meme can become an instrument of power. Whether this dynamic can be reconciled with the demands of responsible government remains the central challenge of the digital age.

Strengths of the Essay

  1. Compelling Illustrations of Digital-First Governance
    • The article effectively juxtaposes Trump’s all-caps proclamations with Mamdani’s handheld videos.
    • Vivid examples: Trump’s posts about Iranian bombings feel almost satirical in their triviality—like “food grams”—yet they are deadly serious.
    • The Vance meme incident (Norwegian tourist Mikkelsen denied entry partly over a meme) underscores how digital artifacts can become politically consequential.
  2. Clear Argument
    • Chayka convincingly demonstrates that posting is no longer merely a marketing tactic—it is a form of exercising power.
    • The phrase “influencer-in-chief” encapsulates this new paradigm succinctly.
  3. Timeliness and Relevance
    • The piece captures the unsettling normalcy of this phenomenon—how we now expect statecraft to be conducted via apps.
    • It connects to broader anxieties about the erosion of institutional boundaries between governance and entertainment.
  4. Balanced Comparison
    • The contrast between Trump’s aggression and Mamdani’s optimism avoids simple equivalence.
    • The essay suggests that while style differs, both are beholden to the same dynamics: immediacy, spectacle, and performative authenticity.

Areas For Further Exploration

  1. A Critique of Consequences
    • While Chayka notes the trivialization of serious decisions (e.g., bombings posted like selfies), he stops short of examining the systemic dangers—the erosion of deliberative processes, the collapse of public trust, and the incentivizing of extremism.
    • A deeper dive into why social media rewards such maximalist performances—and how this affects democracy—would have been valuable.
  2. An Exploration of Audience Complicity
    • The essay portrays politicians as the main actors, but it could interrogate how audiences co-produce this environment: what are the incentives to consume, share, and reward this content?
    • Do voters really want “authenticity,” or simply entertainment masquerading as politics?
  3. Further developed Historical Context
    • While the piece references Trump’s first term, it could have drawn richer parallels with earlier media transformations:
      • Roosevelt’s radio “Fireside Chats”
      • Kennedy’s TV charisma
      • Obama’s early social media campaigns
    • This would help readers situate today’s moment within a longer trajectory.

Broader Implications

The essay ultimately raises unsettling questions:

  • If the performance of authenticity is now the primary qualification for political power, how do policy substance and institutional competence survive?
  • Is there any way for governance to reassert seriousness, or will the logic of virality always prevail?
  • What happens when online theater collides with offline consequences—wars, economies, civic life?

These questions feel especially urgent given that the piece suggests this dynamic is not limited to Trump’s right-wing populism but has also infiltrated progressive candidates.

*THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY CHAT GPT AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN.

Artificial Intelligence, Reviews

Review: How Microsoft’s AI Chief Defines ‘Humanist Super Intelligence’

An AI Review of How Microsoft’s AI Chief Defines ‘Humanist Super Intelligence’

WJS “BOLD NAMES PODCAST”, July 2, 2025: Podcast Review: “How Microsoft’s AI Chief Defines ‘Humanist Super Intelligence’”

The Bold Names podcast episode with Mustafa Suleyman, hosted by Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of The Wall Street Journal, is an unusually rich and candid conversation about the future of artificial intelligence. Suleyman, known for his work at DeepMind, Google, and Inflection AI, offers a window into his philosophy of “Humanist Super Intelligence,” Microsoft’s strategic priorities, and the ethical crossroads that AI now faces.

1. The Core Vision: Humanist Super Intelligence

Throughout the interview, Suleyman articulates a clear, consistent conviction: AI should not merely surpass humans, but augment and align with our values.

This philosophy has three components:

  • Purpose over novelty: He stresses that “the purpose of technology is to drive progress in our civilization, to reduce suffering,” rejecting the idea that building ever-more powerful AI is an end in itself.
  • Personalized assistants as the apex interface: Suleyman frames the rise of AI companions as a natural extension of centuries of technological evolution. The idea is that each user will have an AI “copilot”—an adaptive interface mediating all digital experiences: scheduling, shopping, learning, decision-making.
  • Alignment and trust: For assistants to be effective, they must know us intimately. He is refreshingly honest about the trade-offs: personalization requires ingesting vast amounts of personal data, creating risks of misuse. He argues for an ephemeral, abstracted approach to data storage to alleviate this tension.

This vision of “Humanist Super Intelligence” feels genuinely thoughtful—more nuanced than utopian hype or doom-laden pessimism.

2. Microsoft’s Strategy: AI Assistants, Personality Engineering, and Differentiation

One of the podcast’s strongest contributions is in clarifying Microsoft’s consumer AI strategy:

  • Copilot as the central bet: Suleyman positions Copilot not just as a productivity tool but as a prototype for how everyone will eventually interact with their digital environment. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s ecosystem and Google’s Assistant—a persistent, personalized layer across devices and contexts.
  • Personality engineering as differentiation: Suleyman describes how subtle design decisions—pauses, hesitations, even an “um” or “aha”—create trust and familiarity. Unlike prior generations of AI, which sounded like Wikipedia in a box, this new approach aspires to build rapport. He emphasizes that users will eventually customize their assistants’ tone: curt and efficient, warm and empathetic, or even dryly British (“If you’re not mean to me, I’m not sure we can be friends.”)
  • Dynamic user interfaces: Perhaps the most radical glimpse of the future was his description of AI that dynamically generates entire user interfaces—tables, graphics, dashboards—on the fly in response to natural language queries.

These sections of the podcast were the most practically illuminating, showing that Microsoft’s ambitions go far beyond adding chat to Word.

3. Ethics and Governance: Risks Suleyman Takes Seriously

Unlike many big tech executives, Suleyman does not dodge the uncomfortable topics. The hosts pressed him on:

  • Echo chambers and value alignment: Will users train AIs to only echo their worldview, just as social media did? Suleyman concedes the risk but believes that richer feedback signals (not just clicks and likes) can produce more nuanced, less polarizing AI behavior.
  • Manipulation and emotional influence: Suleyman acknowledges that emotionally intelligent AI could exploit user vulnerabilities—flattery, negging, or worse. He credits his work on Pi (at Inflection) as a model of compassionate design and reiterates the urgency of oversight and regulation.
  • Warfare and autonomous weapons: The most sobering moment comes when Suleyman states bluntly: “If it doesn’t scare you and give you pause for thought, you’re missing the point.” He worries that autonomy reduces the cost and friction of conflict, making war more likely. This is where Suleyman’s pragmatism shines: he neither glorifies military applications nor pretends they don’t exist.

The transparency here is refreshing, though his remarks also underscore how unresolved these dilemmas remain.

4. Artificial General Intelligence: Caution Over Hype

In contrast to Sam Altman or Elon Musk, Suleyman is less enthralled by AGI as an imminent reality:

  • He frames AGI as “sometime in the next 10 years,” not “tomorrow.”
  • More importantly, he questions why we would build super-intelligence for its own sake if it cannot be robustly aligned with human welfare.

Instead, he argues for domain-specific super-intelligence—medical, educational, agricultural—that can meaningfully transform critical industries without requiring omniscient AI. For instance, he predicts medical super-intelligence within 2–5 years, diagnosing and orchestrating care at human-expert levels.

This is a pragmatic, product-focused perspective: more useful than speculative AGI timelines.

5. The Microsoft–OpenAI Relationship: Symbiotic but Tense

One of the podcast’s most fascinating threads is the exploration of Microsoft’s unique partnership with OpenAI:

  • Suleyman calls it “one of the most successful partnerships in technology history,” noting that the companies have blossomed together.
  • He is frank about creative friction—the tension between collaboration and competition. Both companies build and sell AI APIs and products, sometimes overlapping.
  • He acknowledges that OpenAI’s rumored plans to build productivity apps (like Microsoft Word competitors) are perfectly fair: “They are entirely independent… and free to build whatever they want.”
  • The discussion of the AGI clause—which ends the exclusive arrangement if OpenAI achieves AGI—remains opaque. Suleyman diplomatically calls it “a complicated structure,” which is surely an understatement.

This section captures the delicate dance between a $3 trillion incumbent and a fast-moving partner whose mission could disrupt even its closest allie

6. Conclusion

The Bold Names interview with Mustafa Suleyman is among the most substantial and engaging conversations about AI leadership today. Suleyman emerges as a thoughtful pragmatist, balancing big ambitions with a clear-eyed awareness of AI’s perils.

Where others focus on AGI for its own sake, Suleyman champions Humanist Super Intelligence: technology that empowers humans, transforms essential sectors, and preserves dignity and agency. The episode is an essential listen for anyone serious about understanding the evolving role of AI in both industry and society.

THIS REVIEW OF THE TRANSCRIPT WAS WRITTEN BY CHAT GPT

Essays, Politics

‘Populists Are Gaining Power And Keeping It. What Comes Next?’

POLITICO MAGAZINE (April 13, 2025) by Anthony J. Constantini:

In 2017, President Donald Trump was almost the only nationalist populist leader in the West. Liberal democracy — its protection at home and its promotion abroad — was the political default across America and Europe. The United States’ marquee conference for hard-right conservatives, CPAC, featured only one major foreign speaker that year, Britain’s Nigel Farage, who had just resigned as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party after a successful Brexit campaign.

Eight years later, Trump has been joined on the world stage by a plethora of right-wing populists, and nationalism has gone mainstream. CPAC 2025 was a verifiable international event, with guests ranging from Argentina’s President Javier Milei to Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, among many others.

But while it’s clear that nationalism is having a moment, for now it’s just that: a moment.

—————————–

Making the West great again will not just aid populists politically. It will do something more important: Inspire Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. Youth throughout America and Europe, instead of being told they are members of a paradisical global society, will be brought up understanding they are part of an ancient and storied civilization. The countries which make up that civilization will have disagreements. But like a family, they will understand that they all share one common, civilizational home.

One worth fighting for.

READ MORE

Anthony J. Constantini writes about foreign policy and international political movements. He is a PhD candidate in American history at the University of Vienna.

Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics

Foreign Affairs Essay: ‘Underestimating China’

FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (April 11, 2025):

Success in great-power competition requires rigorous and unsentimental net assessment. Yet the American estimation of China has lurched from one extreme to the other. For decades, Americans registered blistering economic growth, dominance of international trade, and growing geopolitical ambition, and anticipated the day when China might overtake a strategically distracted and politically paralyzed United States; after the 2008 financial crisis, and then especially at the height of the COVID pandemic, many observers believed that day had come. But the pendulum swung to the other extreme only a few years later as China’s abandonment of “zero COVID” failed to restore growth. Beijing was beset by ominous demographics, once unthinkable youth unemployment, and deepening stagnation while the United States was strengthening alliances, boasting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and other technologies, and enjoying a booming economy with record low unemployment and record high stock markets.

The rise and fall of great powers often begins with flawed self-diagnosis.

A new consensus took hold: that an aging, slowing, and increasingly less nimble China would not overtake an ascendant United States. Washington shifted from pessimism to overconfidence. Yet just as past bouts of defeatism were misguided, so is today’s triumphalism, which risks dangerously underestimating both the latent and actual power of the only competitor in a century whose GDP has surpassed 70 percent of that of the United States. On critical metrics, China has already outmatched the United States. Economically, it boasts twice the manufacturing capacity. Technologically, it dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors and now produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy, bolstered by shipbuilding capacity 200 times as large as that of the United States; vastly greater missile stocks; and the world’s most advanced hypersonic capabilities—all results of the fastest military modernization in history. Even if China’s growth slows and its system falters, it will remain formidable strategically.

Such a commitment is not just a policy, but a signal of the capabilities of the United States, its allies, and partners. The Chinese Communist Party is inordinately focused on perceptions of American power, and a critical input in that equation is its estimation of Washington’s ability to pull in the allies and partners that even Beijing openly admits are the United States’ greatest advantage. Accordingly, the most effective U.S. strategy—the one that has most unsettled Beijing in recent years and can deter its adventurism in the future—is to build new, enduring, and robust capacities with these states. A sustained, bipartisan commitment to an upgraded alliance network, coupled with strategic cooperation in emerging fields, offers the best path forward to finding scale against the most formidable competitor the United States has ever encountered.

READ MORE

KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chairman and Cofounder of The Asia Group. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

RUSH DOSHI is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.

Essays, History, Politics

Essays On America: ‘The Legacy Of The Revolution Is Still Up For Grabs’

BOSTON GLOBE (April 3, 2025) by Ted Widmer:

“O! What a glorious morning is this!”

So Sam Adams is said to have responded to the news of fighting at Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775, arguably the most consequential day in the history of New England.

That day, most agree, marked the beginning of the American Revolution. There had been other acts of violence, by both Britons and Americans, as they jostled over a host of issues relating to Britain’s imperial overreach.

It will be important not only to remember the story but to remember it well. As Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

But in the spring of 1775, low-level squabbling gave way to armies in the field shooting at each other, outside Boston. The so-called “shot heard round the world,” in Emerson’s phrase, was the first volley in a long war, followed by a struggle to establish the 13 Colonies as a coherent nation.

——————————

These ideas were nourished by pamphlets, Election Day sermons, and newspapers — it would be difficult to overstate how important printing and literacy were to the founding generation, especially in Boston. Far from being derided, intellectuals and scientists were critical to the Revolution’s success. One Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, translated his scientific prestige into stunning success as a diplomat to France, our essential ally. Another, Joseph Warren, was a doctor, much admired for his work inoculating patients against smallpox, before he was killed at Bunker Hill.

READ MORE

Ted Widmer, a consulting editor for this special issue of Globe Ideas, is the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.” He helped to create the George Washington Book Prize, awarded annually to a book about the founding era.

History, Reviews

‘Recalculating The Economic Gains Of Slavery’ (Review)

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 2, 2025):

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America. More slave ships left for the West African coast from the Americas than from Europe; the majority of those vessels sailed from Brazil, where slavery was abolished only in 1888. The foundations of modern Brazil are poured over the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade.

Yet, though the history of Brazilian slavery is not “untold”, the histories of Caribbean and North American slavery are generally better known among anglophone readers. Two new books by distinguished historians of slavery, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic history of slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo and Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic slave trades by David Eltis, offer a correction, emphasizing the longevity and scale of slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic. In Enslavement: Past and present, another distinguished academic, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, shows the relevance and utility of his theory of slavery as “social death”, a powerlessness whose malignance structures slave societies and persists long after emancipation. What follows, however, from recognizing that Brazil was first, last and largest in Atlantic slavery? Slavery existed long before the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade; are the ruins of the slave-ship dock under Rio relics of the longue durée of enslavement or evidence of the violent birth of the modern world?

READ MORE

Essays, Science

Science Essays: ‘The Stagnation Of Physics’

AEON MAGAZINE (April 1, 2025) by Adrien De Sutter:

Browse a shelf of popular science books in physics and you’ll often find a similar theme. Whether offering insights into The Hidden Reality (2011), Something Deeply Hidden (2019) or Our Mathematical Universe (2014), these books hint at an underlying, secret world waiting to be unravelled by physicists – a domain beyond our sensory perception that remains their special purview.

‘It’s akin to knowing everything about sand dunes … but not knowing what a grain of sand is made of’

Over its history, physics has delivered elegant and accurate descriptions of the physical Universe. Today, however, the reality physicists work to uncover appears increasingly removed from the one they inhabit. Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics – a reality to unify all others. As such, physicists appear forced to entertain increasingly speculative propositions.

Yet, with no obvious avenues to verify such speculations, physicists are left with little option but to repeat similar approaches and experiments – only bigger and at greater cost – in the hope that something new may be found. Seemingly beset with a sense of anxiety that nothing new will be found or that future experiments will reveal only further ignorance, the field of fundamental physics is incentivized to pursue ever more fanciful ideas.

———————————

It may even require that we abandon doing physics altogether, in the attainment of an expanded reality that not only accepts but encourages the possibility of difference and more. Or, as the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin once put it, what we require are ‘the realists of a larger reality’.

READ MORE

Adrien De Sutter completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany. An interdisciplinary researcher specialising in science and technology studies and the history and philosophy of science, he focuses on the philosophical, sociological and political implications of fundamental physics research.

Literature, Reviews

‘The Restless Analyst’

LITERARY REVIEW (April 1, 2025) by Peter Rose:

In 1904, Henry James decided to return to America. He was feeling isolated at Lamb House in Rye. In a letter to Grace Norton, he wrote: ‘The days depart and pass, laden somehow like processional camels – across the desert of one’s solitude.’ Since the flop of Guy Domville, his dreams of success as a dramatist had been dashed. The Wings of the Dove had been published in 1902, followed by The Ambassadors in 1903, in serial form. The Golden Bowl – written in little more than a year and, for many, his sovereign achievement – was almost finished. Now, after this awesome outpouring, he was ready to review his homeland, last visited in 1882.

James’s reasons for returning were complex, some obvious and professional, others psychological and obscure. Family drew him back, just as it had subtly hurried him on his way in 1875, when he left America, first for Paris, then for London. Planning his itinerary, James wrote to his nephew Harry: ‘I can’t tell you how I thank you for offering me your manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror.’ (One can only imagine the tremulations this caused in young Harry’s manly breast.)

He also began work on what he pointedly called the New York Edition of his preferred writings. The commercial failure of this work, with its ruminative prefaces and startling omissions, led to years of clinical depression. In a letter to Morton Fullerton, one of his late passions, James wrote: ‘The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life … This loneliness (since I mention it!) – what is it still but the deepest thing about one?’ For this noblest of modernists, it was the saddest confession.

READ MORE

Politics, Reviews

‘W.G. Sebald And The Politics Of Melancholy’

THE NEW REPUBLIC (March 31, 2025) by Colin Dickey:

W.G. Sebald’s premature death from a heart attack, in December 2001, at 57—months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz propelled him to the height of his literary fame—has left his readers wanting more, and ever since, his publishers have increasingly delved deeper into his oeuvre for posthumous releases. Six full-length books have already appeared in English since his death, and now, 23 years after his death, we have the seventh—and perhaps last: Silent Catastrophes: Essays.

Kafka, Sebald notes, recognized fundamentally that power is “parasitic rather than powerful.”

At first blush, the book risks feeling off-putting to the casual reader: Academic in tone, it focuses on a literary tradition often overlooked in America, featuring many writers who are largely unknown in English-speaking countries. But its focus on Austria—a crumbling empire that slowly but willingly descended into fascism as a means of trying to capture its former glory—means that Silent Catastrophes, unfortunately, is arriving at an apposite time. And the reader willing to wade through the academic style will soon find not only Sebald’s trademark concerns emerging but unexpected reflections on how we might navigate the end of empire and the rise of authoritarianism.

So much of Sebald’s work is rooted in the awareness that though memory and history are mercurial, often contradictory, and impossible to fix permanently, it is nonetheless vital to document and preserve it all, even the contradictions and confusions. For it is the job of the artist—melancholic though they may be—to sift among these contradictory pasts in search of possible futures that may yet be open to us.

READ MORE

Essays & Reviews – For The Intellectually Curious

INTELLICUREAN

Essays & Reviews - For The Intellectually Curious

Skip to content ↓