Nineteenth-century Americans stunned outsiders with their capacity for self-organizing. By cultivating the virtues of public usefulness, procedural formality, and agentic hierarchy, they created a powerful set of norms for building institutions.

The American Governance Foundation is launching a new institution to help American decision makers understand China.

Only a powerful modernizing force could overcome the tribal loyalties that divided Afghanistan’s fragile state. That force was the Taliban.

The threat of mass panic lurks behind our mechanisms of political control. What if we were allowed to fear?

In the early 1990s, the UN intervened in Cambodia in a show of liberal democratic state-building. Its failures foreshadowed the hubris which would follow the liberal world order from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan.

Numerous Chinese projects adopted the Belt and Road brand. But its grand strategy propaganda has created new enemies and makes Xi responsible for every failed venture.

Chinese President Xi Jinping believes in inevitable laws of history and makes sure that his government does too. China’s path of peaceful development depends on his continued belief in globalization and the rise of developing economies.

In a newly translated speech, General Secretary Xi Jinping demonstrates the Party’s commitment to presenting its development path as Marxist, rather than allowing “state capitalist” narratives to flourish.