A coming crisis over Taiwan is now popularly treated as a foregone conclusion. China is increasing its military budget, expanding its fleet, and securing regional allies, all the while saber-rattling over its small democratic neighbor. But uncertainty still underpins the…
Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest makes for a fitting final act to this chapter of cryptocurrency history. The internet prodigy-turned-supervillain had been at large for a whole month since the spectacular collapse of his crypto trading platform, FTX. But Sam is no…
Semiconductor manufacturing has become a tale of Americans’ sleepwalking into a crisis. The U.S. currently manufactures 12 percent of the world’s chips, down from 37 percent in 1990. Its leading companies, like Apple, are fantastic at creating cutting-edge chip designs…
The invasion of Ukraine, as with many other wars in modern Russian history, has followed a familiar pattern. First, the much-lauded Russian Armed Forces stumbles into a damaging and humiliating debacle characterized by operational inflexibility and failures of coordination. Then,…
When the dust finally settles and we look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as a matter of history, we may well conclude that the most consequential aspect of the ordeal was not the pandemic itself but rather the explosion in…
The past two years as recorded by the news media have felt like something out of the book of Revelation. First came the pale rider in early 2020, mounted on jetliners and sleeper trains, as coronavirus became a pandemic. His…
The Fed plays a hitherto unprecedented role in the U.S. economy. Growth in the money stock, which had until 2020 remained in the single digits annually, has soared by a remarkable 40 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Yet…
In its invasion, Russia still possesses, for the time being, a multitude of material advantages over Ukraine. Its air force fields more planes and launches more sorties, though it has largely failed to achieve air supremacy. Its navy has blockaded…
For the third time in just over a century, America may emerge as the biggest winner of a war in Europe. The years preceding February 2022 were fraught with uncertainty over the future of American power. Once-stalwart European allies were…
It’s lonely at the top, doubly so when you have the kind of power and responsibility that only an autocrat can attain. Yet Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, arguably the world’s two most powerful men (Joe Biden is barely in…