American Affairs Journal

Infrastructure is part of a broader debate about energy and climate, where commercial, regulatory, legal, and technical factors collide. Because of the long life of these assets, contemporary investment choices can have deeply consequential implications, which only intensifies energy debates. Misallocating investment can lead to long-term financial burdens or chronically fragile physical systems. In addition to policy debates, choices about infrastructure are complicated by extenuating factors, including new technologies, increasing incidence of physical shocks over time, and uncertainty about the timing, magnitude, and location of load growth. With all of these swirling uncertainties, it is imperative that industry and government coalesce around a singularity of vision and purpose in refining and expanding our electricity infrastructure…

It is abundantly clear that America must build more energy projects. Clinging to the ability to slow down and block disliked projects may have short-term political appeal. But in the long run, it only serves to maintain a status quo that is becoming increasingly untenable in the face of challenges such as load growth from AI, decreased reliability from aging infrastructure, and climate change. A better system is possible.

On climate grounds, liberals have generally opposed the expansion of fossil fuels and promoted clean energy alternatives. The conservative response to climate has been both fragmented and shifting. But the emerging reality is deeper than debates over optimal climate policy. Policymakers on either side of the aisle have effectively embraced, to varying degrees, energy obstructionism…

Americans last focused sustained political attention on the trade deficit in the 1980s. A crisis strikingly similar to today’s—a collapsing industrial base, bipartisan fury in Congress, and a soaring dollar—produced the most consequential episode of international currency coordination in modern history. The Plaza Accord of 1985 and the diplomatic campaign that surrounded it succeeded in rapidly reversing the trade deficit. But the success did not last. The political coalition that forced action dissolved, the institutional memory faded, and the structural forces that produced the crisis were left largely intact, setting the stage for the even deeper imbalances we confront today…

The role of Apple’s chief executive still appears deceptively familiar: steward a portfolio of iconic products, manage a sprawling global supply chain, appease Donald Trump, and deliver outsized returns to shareholders. As Apple is poised to transition from Tim Cook to John Ternus, however, that conception no longer reflects the reality of what the position entails. Ternus will inherit a position fundamentally altered by geopolitics, one that now sits uncomfortably closer to questions of national interest, regulatory authority, and public trust in ways few corporate roles ever have…

The pervasive indifference that characterizes America’s overconfident view of its place in the AI race stems from grading the Sino-American AI race against our own preferred rubric: frontier model benchmarks, the scale of the data center buildout, and timelines to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Rarely do we measure American performance against the categories that the Chinese themselves choose to emphasize. The party-state and various Chinese companies are clearly trying to unleash AI capabilities, and Beijing’s desire for international AI leadership is beyond dispute. But their methods and benchmarks of success are different from ours, evincing a fundamentally distinct understanding of the nature of the competition…

The central challenge confronting the United States today is not simply the scale of infrastructure investment required but the institutional architecture through which that investment is organized. Infrastructure is often treated as a category of public spending when it is a balance sheet problem: long-duration assets require long-duration capital structures and institutions capable of mobilizing capital across decades rather than electoral cycles. Markets and the private sector alone cannot address what might be called the trifecta that hit the United States in the last decade: supply chain fragility revealed by the pandemic, growing strategic competition with China, and the capital intensity of the artificial intelligence revolution…

To harness the urgency for strategic industrial investment into a self-sustaining force, public financing infrastructure must be built that enables deployment of private capital toward strategic objectives. The conventional debate frames financialization and industrialization as antagonists; in fact, the former can enable the latter. The public sector’s critical role is not as a substitute for markets but as a coordinator of market infrastructure and a backstop for financial risk that the private sector cannot bear alone. The ultimate purpose of this public role is to make the construction and delivery of strategic assets a well-understood, repeatable practice, one that private financiers can evaluate with confidence, and with a declining scale of public support over time…

The charter of the Export-Import Bank of the United States is set to expire on December 31, 2026. As Congress prepares to draft reauthorization legislation, it has an opportunity to augment and reorient the Bank for a generation. Over time, a legacy design model, bureaucratic calcification, and outdated self-imposed restrictions have left EXIM inadequately prepared to defend U.S. industry in a rapidly changing era of global economic and strategic competition…

Investment should be directed at sectors where American technology and innovation exist but the infrastructure to commercialize them domestically does not—and where the national security case is clear. Among these sectors are rare earth processing, where proven American technology faces predatory state-backed pricing; defense-industrial reconstitution; and advanced shipbuilding techniques and autonomous vessel design. In short, strategic capital must target the start-up and scale-up gap in advanced industries with national security implications…

The United States faces a growing strategic challenge: China has emerged as the world’s dominant energy financier, outpacing the United States nearly ten to one in global markets. China’s growing influence not only directly challenges U.S. strategic interests but also excludes American businesses from immense economic opportunities in the world’s largest foreign markets, such as Brazil and India. The United States should not try to out-subsidize China, but true American energy dominance requires global market leadership…

Bidenomics, especially when viewed from the vantage point of central Ohio, stumbled in two ways that threatened its laudable goals. First, problems endogenous to the Biden White House’s key partner, Intel, frustrated political goals in a way that casts doubt on how policymakers structured their relationship with the private sector. Second, the deployment of federal funds proved sluggish in a way that worked to discredit the whole program…

The passive extraction of land value was the central problem of industrial capitalism. Bird sees that the mechanism is universal and persistent across political systems and centuries. The argument waiting inside The Land Trap, and the one its evidence most powerfully supports, is that democratic capitalism has a structural tendency to convert the aspiration for broad prosperity into an engine of asset price inflation that it cannot, by its own logic, correct…

If we have decided that democracy cannot literally mean the rule of the people and has to be redefined, then there is no particular reason why we must accept democratic elites’ openness, mobility, or adherence to some ideals of historical progress to be the key elements of a redefined democracy today. Democracy, once decoupled from the idea of the people ruling, might rather mean that the inevitable elite rules effectively on the people’s behalf. Once we are no longer bound to narratives that have been consigned to history, or to physical metaphors that equate a good society with fluidity and motion, we might be free to rethink what we want from our elites and how to get it…