According to Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors, “technology is a central component” of Xi Jinping’s strategy for winning the long-term competition with the US. In a new report, Blumenthal and Scissors reveal how Xi views technology’s role in gaining strategic advantages and asymmetrically exploiting the US economic system, without competing “in wealth, prosperity, or even broad innovation.”

Leslie Ford explains how the Biden administration will covertly raise food stamp spending by about $200 billion over the next 10 years. This year’s farm bill, Ford says, is lawmakers’ best opportunity to roll back “President Biden’s unprecedented and expensive food-stamp hike.”

Have banking regulators learned the right lessons from the recent failures of Silicon Valley Bank and others? R. Glenn Hubbard warns they haven’t, especially when it comes to anticipating policy risks and weighing the consequences of too much deposit insurance.

Pentagon officials have long called China a “near-peer” competitor, but Mackenzie Eaglen contends the term no longer adequately captures China’s closeness to military parity with the US. “China’s continuous and rapid transformation of its military and strategic capabilities means Washington can safely retire ‘near-peer’ as an accurate classifier,” writes Eaglen.

Ruy Teixeira outlines five reasons Democrats can’t count on the youth vote to carry them to victory in future elections. While Democrats expect to win elections with overwhelming support from younger voters, as they did in 2022, Teixeira cautions that “demographics are not destiny” and “the boring, tedious, difficult task of persuasion is still the key to building electoral majorities.”