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AEI's weekly digest of top commentary and scholarship on the issues that matter most

The End of One Era, the Beginning of the Next

The Roberts Court at the Crossroads
July 22, 2023

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision on affirmative action marks the end of an over 40-year struggle for the conservative legal movement. What comes next? Adam J. White surveys four key themes from the Court’s recent decisions and looks to the issues that will shape the Court’s future.

 

 

The Biden administration has placed a renewed emphasis on diplomatic reengagement with China in hopes of minimizing military tensions and international competition. Michael Beckley explains why this “defensive realism” is naively misguided and doomed to fail.

 

What caused the banking crisis that saw Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and other regional banks fail after runs on their deposits? Paul H. Kupiec demonstrates how flawed regulatory oversight and loose monetary policy enabled risky, and otherwise unprofitable, financial strategies.

 

Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, Klon Kitchen explores the national security implications of recent artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs. Large language models and other forms of generative AI could provide the US with a decisive advantage in its strategic competition with China.

 

What can South Korea tell us about our global demographic future? Was monetary and fiscal stimulus truly necessary to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic? These are just a few of the economic questions Jesús Fernández-Villaverde addresses in a wide-ranging conversation on the Macro Musings with David Beckworth podcast.

The Exculpating Myth of Accidental War

The Biden administration’s tentative approach to aiding Ukraine has been driven by fears of provoking accidental conflict with Russia, but how real is that risk? In a new essay for the Kissinger Center Papers, Kori Schake critically examines the historical basis for theories of “accidental war.” Schake finds that the conventional examples of accidental wars, from World War I to the Six-Day War, were instead all the product of deliberate choice and strategy by involved nations’ political leadership. Claims otherwise tend to be efforts to evade culpability by responsible actors. Thus, rather than indulging “unfounded fears of accidental war,” US policy toward Ukraine should be based on clear assessments of our own interests and risk tolerance. With clear strategy and communication, we can shape Russia’s responses to our own actions, rather than letting fears of Russian reaction dictate ours.

 

 
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

My view of 2021 is that anyone with a good freshman introduction to macro will have pretty much forecasted this. This is not a situation where you need a supercomputer with a super complex model to forecast, and I’m a little bit disappointed that a lot of macroeconomists in 2021 didn’t really see this coming. I think they were really a little bit too obsessed with the lack of inflation of 2009–14 and didn’t really understand the fundamental differences between the financial crisis and the COVID crisis.

—Jesús Fernández-Villaverde