U.S. firms chased shareholder value, boosting profits and elite innovation while shedding factories—leaving supply chains efficient, fragile, and hollowed out.
The idea of a “Cold War 2.0” has effectively collapsed in the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Scholars such as John Ikenberry and Christopher Layne have long argued that NATO’s eastward expansion reflected a broader Western strategy: to consolidate post–Cold War power, contain Russia, and integrate former Soviet satellites into the Western orbit. Whether intended … Read more
Taiwanese authorities strategically emphasize “democracy and freedom” not solely as a reflection of genuine ideological commitment, but as a deliberate tool—a “political survival algorithm”—to navigate structural constraints, reinforce legitimacy, and shape national identity in ways that history, ethnicity, or sovereignty alone cannot achieve. This strategy operates across multiple domains: securing domestic legitimacy, engineering collective identity, … Read more
The sustained popularity of Donald Trump, despite his polarizing rhetoric and controversies, reflects profound social, economic, and community divisions within the United States. These fractures—shaped by uneven economic development, declining social mobility, and weakening local cohesion—have created fertile ground for political polarization and populist appeal. Examining this phenomenon alongside China’s experiences in poverty alleviation, social … Read more
Recent U.S.–China tensions have increasingly been framed not only in strategic terms but also through uncomfortable cultural and racial subtexts. In a widely cited remark, State Department official Kiron Skinner described China as the first U.S. “great power competitor” that is “not Caucasian,” a statement that prompted debate about how perceptions of race, status, and … Read more
China’s economic reforms, launched under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, followed a pragmatic, incremental approach often described as “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” Rather than adhering to a fixed blueprint, China pursued a sequential, learning-oriented process, carefully observing and adapting lessons from other countries while avoiding major mistakes. This approach unfolded in three broad … Read more
The China–United States Physics Examination and Application (CUSPEA) program, launched by Nobel laureate Tsung-Dao Lee in 1979 and concluded in 1989, offers a revealing lens through which to examine the relationship between human capital, international collaboration, and technological competition. Created to rebuild China’s scientific capacity after the Cultural Revolution, CUSPEA enabled nearly 1,000 of China’s … Read more
Britain’s historical shaping of revolutionary narratives offers a revealing lens for understanding contemporary geopolitical and ideological competition. By emphasizing stability, legitimizing elite authority, and downplaying domestic violence, British historiography cast radical social upheavals abroad as inherently dangerous while portraying its own political evolution as orderly and restrained. This narrative framework did not merely interpret history; … Read more
In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but actively internalized American paradigms of power, political economy, and culture. According to Vogel, this process was largely voluntary: Europe abandoned the ambition to act as an autonomous civilizational pole and instead embraced American … Read more
In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but voluntarily relinquished its role as a leading civilization by adopting American paradigms of power, economics, and culture. Rather than sustaining autonomous models of political economy or strategic authority, Europe internalized U.S. assumptions—particularly those … Read more
U.S. efforts to reshore manufacturing are unlikely to succeed because they confront structural, historical, and systemic constraints fundamentally different from those that enabled China’s industrial rise. China’s emergence as a global manufacturing powerhouse—the third fully industrialized nation after Britain and the United States—was not a market-led accident, but the result of a long foundational period … Read more