As President Joe Biden resists calls to step aside as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, it seems the American people will be forced to choose between a “physically and mentally unfit” candidate and a “psychologically unfit” candidate. Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Director Yuval Levin shows how the institutional deformation of our political parties has created this failure of candidate selection.

The US can ill afford this breakdown of presidential politics. In a new AEI report, Giselle Donnelly, Dalibor Rohac, and coauthors argue that American leadership is needed more than ever to strengthen NATO in order to defeat Russia in Ukraine and defend our vital interests in Europe.

The war in Ukraine has also brought into focus a disturbing global trend—the rise of targeted killing and assassinations as both a wartime tactic and a broader tool of statecraft. While the US has relied on these against terrorists for decades, AEI senior fellow and National Security Council veteran Kenneth M. Pollack and Daniel L. Byman highlight the risks of normalizing this tactic, especially for open societies, against geopolitical rivals capable of retaliating.

In a world where developed countries’ populations are aging, one of the US’s great geopolitical advantages remains its openness to immigration. In new research, AEI adjunct fellow and vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Pia M. Orrenius and coauthors quantify the economic benefits of the current immigration surge.

The US economy has also been bolstered by the rapid decline in price pressures over the past year as supply chains have normalized. In a new AEI Economic Policy Working Paper, Steven B. Kamin and John M. Roberts develop a model to show how the interaction of wages and prices will shape the future course of disinflation.