7 articles

Reviews

Long essays that test the big frames against the data.

AI Investments Are the War Bonds of the New Cold War

The AI buildout is not a bubble. It is a war bond market. $660 billion a year. Four CEOs who say they would rather go bankrupt than lose. War bonds pay off only in victory.

4 Oct 202610 min read

Reviews

$8 Trillion, Three Gulf Wars, and the Ghost of the Athenian Fleet

In 2026, the US opened its third Gulf War in 35 years. Two and a half millennia ago, another maritime superpower made the same bet on a distant, resource-rich region — and lost everything. The mechanism is the same. Only the scale differs.

4 Oct 20268 min read

Reviews

The Containment Trap

The Cold War frame prescribes economic containment: decouple, restrict, isolate. The strategy worked against a Soviet Union that was already closed and technologically backward. Applied to China — the world's largest patent filer, the dominant producer of EVs and drones, a country whose trade-to-GDP ratio peaked at 62% — it is a category error. The US is not fencing China in. It is fencing itself out.

4 Oct 20266 min read

Reviews

The Leadership Gap

The Cold War frame assumes democratic leadership is inherently more adaptive. The data on age, turnover, and skills background of the top 100 figures in both countries suggests the opposite. One leadership is getting younger, more technical, and faster-rotating. The other is not.

4 Oct 20264 min read

Reviews

The Rigidity Trap

The Soviet Union collapsed because its institutions could not adapt. The data on government spending, capital deployment, and infrastructure delivery over the last 20 years suggests the United States is developing the same condition — while China, for all its flaws, is not.

4 Oct 20268 min read

Reviews

AI Is Not the Space Race. A Better Analogy Is Electrification.

The Space Race frame is politically irresistible and intellectually defensible. But it is a narrow bet. AI might be a sprint — or it might not be. What it is for sure is general-purpose technology. The Space Race, in retrospect, was about symbolism. Electrification is the better analogy. The frame determines the strategy. The US is betting on the sprint. China is building the grid.

4 Oct 20267 min read

Reviews

China Is Not the Soviet Union. That Is the Problem.

The Cold War frame says China is the USSR. The data says China is larger, more integrated, more technologically advanced, and more demographically complex than the Soviet Union ever was. The frame is an anchor. It prevents the United States from seeing the problem clearly. And the problem is not that China is the Soviet Union. The problem is that the United States is drifting into the Soviet role.

4 Oct 20263 min read

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