American Affairs Journal

Much as the South Korean government made investments in the 1970s and 1980s, or as development-oriented sovereign wealth funds do today, the United States should use the South Korean and Japanese investment funds to invest in long-term breakthrough technologies as well as to help critical U.S. industries obtain the financing they need to scale up manufacturing. Against this thesis, the funds’ planned investments in the shipbuilding, energy, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals, and quantum computing sectors, make sense conceptually.

The DPC’s experience offers a roadmap for contemporary efforts to rebuild strategic industries and reduce dependence on adversarial supply chains. America’s reindustrialization challenge today is primarily a capital allocation problem. The question facing policymakers is not whether to use equity, loans, or purchase commitments, but how to design sustainable financing mechanisms that maximize private capital leverage while maintaining fiscal discipline and avoiding the rent-seeking and political capture that has undermined previous industrial policy efforts. The lessons can be distilled into the following principles.

Paradoxically, Western pharmaceutical companies impose persistent price inflation on these medicines, often exceeding general inflation rates, while benefiting simultaneously from reduced production costs through outsourced API manufacturing and intense competition among Chinese suppliers. This dual advantage has made their business models unusually comfortable.

In past decades, American surface transportation policy centered around questions like how much to spend, how much to distribute between roads and transit, and how much each state should get in return for its federal gas tax contribution. Today, surface transportation policy is taking place against the backdrop of multiple technology revolutions in autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, with China potentially poised to dominate the latter—and possibly the former as well.

Demography is not destiny when the pipes are wrong. A credit system that privileges bidding wars over throughput goes against the middle-class and pro-family values that most American politicians and voters profess to hold dear. It turns shelter into a leveraged asset class, converts the cost of living into a financial variable, and pushes younger cohorts into either precarious renting or dangerous leverage.

American reindustrialization will require trillions in investment over decades, retraining an entire generation of skilled labor, and a cultural shift toward patient investment over quarterly gains. The NIC provides a persuasive answer to the question of how to finance American reindustrialization when conventional finance falls short. To be clear, the broader financial sector must play a role in helping industrialists build factories at scale, but the NIC provides an important institutional innovation that addresses a real market gap..

If there is no path to superintelligence by 2028, and there is little prospect of the dramatic product improvements needed to drive major short-term revenue growth (including solutions to inaccuracy and unreliability issues), it will be impossible to sustain either the investment boom or the LLM industry, as currently organized and operated.

Reframed industrial policy strengthens the conditions under which innovation and diffusion occur. A workforce that is secure and rooted is more likely to invest in training and adapt to new processes, while regions trapped in decline experience outmigration, firm exit, and the erosion of the civic and relational infrastructure that supports work.

India is not short of capable indi­viduals or reform ideas. What it lacks is a sufficiently broad and durable coalition that sees institutional transformation—not merely growth or pres­tige—as central to its interests, and that possesses the po­litical leverage to impose costs on those who benefit from stasis. Until such a coalition emerges, India is likely to continue along its current path: resilient, consequential, and incrementally improving, but structur­ally constrained in its ability to convert potential into first-rank power.

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces executed a spectacular raid on Caracas, resulting in the abduction of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, who now faces charges of drug trafficking in the Southern District of New York. Hours later, President Donald Trump proclaimed that his administration intends to “run Venezuela.” But Maduro’s regime has been left largely intact, with the Trump administration sending mixed signals as to what course it intends for Venezuela’s future. the intervention will test the limits of the Trump administration’s new Monroe Doctrine in the Americas. Whether or not Maduro’s ouster is eventually viewed as a strategic success in and outside of the hemisphere will likely depend on the White House’s understanding of the country’s pre-intervention crises.

Under Trump, then, the American state claims to be putting “America First,” especially the interests of U.S. capital, but U.S. capital is clearly disinterested in Trump’s adventures. Trump’s tariffs, opposed by virtually every American business group, is the ultimate illustration of the unrepresentative nature of his policy. Far from the state acting as the ideal collective capitalist, as structuralist Marxist theory supposes, the Trump administration does not even bother to consult the supposed beneficiaries to see if its proposed policies would serve their interests; they are only approached after the fact, when misalignment is revealed.

There is a deeper reason The Scaling Era feels so uncanny as a historical document. If AI turns out to be a useful but unremarkable technology, these conversations will be remembered as indulgent and self-obsessed. If AI proves transformative, these interviews may well read like early nuclear debates. Either way, Patel has preserved a record of elites reasoning in public before it is clear where the scaling laws will take us.

If Christ was the first time in history that gentile society took a dead Jew and turned him into an object of common veneration, stripping away every specifically Jewish attribute and imbuing him instead with a moral and spiritual mission to be shared by all of humanity, then the only other person who can realistically compare to Christ in this regard is Anne Frank. Does that make Anne Frank some kind of secularized or humanist analogue to Christ?