Donald Trump famously promised Americans they would get tired of winning. For sixteen years, the nation of Hungary was run by a man named Urban Winner. On April 12, Hungarians voted that man, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, out of office. But while Hungarian voters may have tired of being winners, they do not seem to have tired of being Magyars. In Hungary’s 199-seat parliament, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party defeated Orbán’s Fidesz party by a margin of eighty-nine seats. Why did Hungarians decide to vote for this man for sixteen years? And why did they stop? How did the qualities that made Orbán popular early in his tenure become liabilities after years in power?…

Like many thoughtful works, West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East, written by Mohammed Soliman, begins with a grievance. Upon his arrival at Georgetown University in his mid-twenties, Soliman did not find the kind of foreign policy thinking he identified with Washington, D.C. “Much of the scholarly work on the Middle East felt outdated, sometimes by a generation or two,” he writes. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, Soliman asks “where is the Middle East, and who defines its boundaries?” This question motivates West Asia…

The Trump administration’s May 2025 executive orders calling for increased nuclear energy output marked a watershed moment for the industry. The results have been nothing short of astounding. In less than a year, the U.S. government has announced multibillion-dollar awards for domestic uranium enrichment projects, unlocked surplus plutonium for reactor use, and launched the reactor pilot…

In the 1950s, the Milwaukee Road’s Olympian Hiawatha carried passengers from Minneapolis to Chicago in roughly seven hours. Today, Amtrak’s Empire Builder covers that same distance in just under eight. The New York Central once ran forty-two daily passenger trains between Buffalo and Cleveland, with the 187-mile trip taking three hours. Today, Amtrak’s Lake Shore…

China’s domestic semiconductor industry has had to respond to the challenge of U.S. export controls by working with industrial ministries in Beijing and key local governments, such as in Shenzhen and Shanghai, to move the entire sector up the innovation curve and value chain on a compressed timetable. It is now clear that the immediate…

On a normal summer day in June, Manny Guerrero, a soft-spoken Vietnam War veteran living in Las Vegas, picked up the phone and was told he had beaten the odds and won. The voice on the other end claimed to be from Publishers Clearing House and quickly painted a vivid picture: a check for $3,500,000,…

We need to operate as if America did not exist. –Rem Koolhaas What happens when the countryside— the global periphery —becomes the center of human progress, and America, once the heartland of modernity, turns into an exceptional, possibly obsolete island? Maybe America pivots, leaving twentieth-century allies behind and reorienting toward the places that will play…