The United States is waking up to our new geopolitical normal—a world of multipolar competition as American power stagnates and others powers rise. We need to discard encrusted foreign policy illusions and go back to basics.

National service is a well-established way for Western democracies to build civic unity. A joint military and diplomatic initiative can spark America’s institutional renewal.

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.

Digital centralization is increasing, and social media networks are now engaging in direct censorship. This is not a violation of the internet’s original spirit, but a necessary feature of its logic.

American social capital is concentrated at the top. The result is gerontocracy and a generational succession failure.

The market society frames transaction as liberation, even renting and selling women’s bodies. But the future lies with those who cultivate non-transactional interdependence.

Socialist Chile’s Project Cybersyn prefigured the cybernetic economic planning now used by capitalist giants like Amazon and Walmart. But the future of cybernetic planning can either empower workers or enslave them.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has failed to build state institutions to guarantee his country’s sovereignty. Now, amid a moment of weakness, Moscow is stepping in.

America has insisted that its allies converge on liberal democratic values. This is increasingly untenable in a world of multipolar competition and faltering confidence in liberalism.

India’s recent TikTok ban is just one part of its digital sovereignty plan. Like the U.S. and China, it is converging on a strategy that uses markets to create national champions.

The most powerful members of our society work in predictable ways. So do those who join them.

Early Singapore’s authoritarian competency is a model invoked by leaders from China to Rwanda. But its rise was complex, messy, and the result of long factional battles. There are hard limits to how far it can be exported.

The Great Steppe of Eurasia has variously been a bridge and battleground between civilizations. But one thing is now certain: it will be China that will shape the Steppe’s future and the future of those living along its vast plain.

Harvard prides itself as the training ground for American elites. But that goal has given way to striving managerialism, myopic career goals, and a stunted appetite for risk.

The consolidation of industrial labor in the 19th century and the rise of the consumer-citizen in the 20th introduced a new moral paradigm of work that has now become fake, leaving workers alienated and loyalties betrayed.

Putin’s Russia is reconciling Stalin, Orthodoxy, and the modern state by crafting a new historical narrative. Beneath the seeming contradictions, the Kremlin is building the first Russian nation-state.

The Apollo Program took an impossible goal and achieved it within a decade. Charles Fishman has written an invaluable history of how social engineers, institution builders, and political deal-brokers made it happen.

The knowledge and practices needed for civilization to flourish are commonly lost. Thinkers in the Late Zhou dynasty of ancient China recognized the decline of their era and attempted to overcome it.