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Category: Defense Policy

Disruptive Innovation in America and China

The concept of disruptive innovation arose from the study of innovation in companies, but it can also be applied to nations. In this essay I will use some of the concepts of disruptive innovation to analyze the dynamics of national innovation and growth in America and China.1 The United States is supposed to be the…

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America Needs an Industrial Policy

The phrase “industrial policy” conjures up images of Europe’s dirigiste failures, corruption in African and Latin American econ­omies, and the disastrous 1984 presidential campaign of Walter Mon­dale. In board rooms and think tanks and even university class rooms across the country, the term generates an instinctive revulsion hard­wired by decades of listening to laissez-faire and…

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Reinventing Competitiveness

To many, especially in Washington, these are halcyon days for America’s economy. The stock market is at record highs and recent GDP growth has been robust. But look deeper. There’s evi­dence that the structural foundations of America’s economy may be shakier than at any time in recent memory. While the headline statis­tics look sanguine, we…

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America’s STEM Crisis Threatens Our National Security

On October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed “Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it…

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The Decline of American Science and Engineering

Imagine sitting in front of your television in 1969, watching the Apollo lunar landing, and noting the marvels of modern engineering. The person sitting next to you responds, “Oh yes, but this is a passing fad; soon we will return to premodern engineering. Groping in the dark requires so much less intellect…

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Robert Kaplan’s World

In 1994, five years after the Berlin Wall fell, American businessmen, journalists, and foreign policy intellectuals generally remained under the trance of the “end of history.” Events still shook enlightened consciences—the Rwandan genocide, the Yugoslav Wars, the first World Trade Center attack—but for the most part, the end of the Cold War brought with it a newfound faith in the power of international institutions to resolve these conflicts. Faith in the inexorable trends of democratization and globalization was high. In stepped Robert D. Kaplan…

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Edison’s Legacy: Industrial Laboratories and Innovation

Between 1999 and 2016, the U.S. share of global high technology exports dropped from 18 percent to 7 percent. From one of the world’s leading technology product exporters prior to 2000, the United States has become a net importer since then, and the deficit keeps growing. During this period…

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The Detached Literature of Remote Wars

In the literature of our post-9/11 wars, the circuit between the home and the field of battle has been severed. Because of that fracture, our stories have struggled to convey the novelty of contemporary combat with the depth and significance that literature demands. Most often, recent war fiction ends up collapsing into exhausted and facile…

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Our Policy Agenda

Since the launch of American Affairs three months ago, a favorite topic of commentators has been the inversion of the usual order of policy journals and political movements: this time, a “populist” political movement achieved power before its theoretical contours or specific agenda had been thoroughly defined. Moreover, this journal, although in many ways provoked by the 2016 campaign, arose independently of the new administration. The extent of any affinity between the two remains to be seen. We are as cognizant of these challenges as even our most impatient critics, and we are in fact grateful that there are so many of the latter…

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Reclaiming American Realism

Donald Trump entered the White House, in part, on a wave of voter dissatisfaction with the foreign policy the United States has pursued for the past quarter century. More than any other recent candidate, Trump succeeded by linking domestic problems, such as unemployment and crime, to issues of foreign policy, such as border control, international…

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