The World Watches as America Votes

Voters wait in line to vote for the 2020 US elections in Norwalk, California on November 3, 2020.  (Frederic Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

America is the world’s biggest billboard, writes Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. Nothing that happens here stays here; everything spreads. For admirers of liberty around the world, the example of America's democracy is all the more compelling because the faults of U.S. society are out in plain view. Voting may not seem like the most heroic of tasks, and patiently accepting a disappointing result even less so. But the regular and peaceful performance of these humdrum duties, so long taken for granted in American life, still has the power to electrify the world.

The Trump Paradox

Cookies representing the presidential candidates for sale at the Oakmont Bakery on November 3, 2020 in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.  (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

The common wisdom is that allies will feel much more comfortable if Joe Biden wins the election, notes Hudson’s John Lee in Australia’s Daily Telegraph. But Australia would not have taken tough strategic decisions if the Trump administration were the hopeless superpower some suggest it is. Donald Trump’s important legacy is that countering China is now a bipartisan mindset in Washington. Indeed, the paradox is that Trump’s unorthodox and disconcerting leadership style has worked to the Australian government’s advantage when it comes to attaining meaningful access to the White House relative to other allied and friendly governments.

America's 2021 Trade Agenda

The Lava mobile phone manufacturing facility on May 12, 2020 in Noida, India. (Getty Images)

In the latest Look Ahead Series essay, Thomas Duesterberg outlines a set of key trade priorities for the U.S. in 2021 and beyond. In the next term, global trade alliances will play an essential role countering China’s efforts to dominate key markets.  It’s time for the U.S. to consider joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership while bringing Southeast Asia into closer alignment with the U.S.-centered economic and political spheres.

Military Readiness in Uncertain Times

Soldiers of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade push a UAV down an airfield during the Saber Junction 20 military exercises on August 10, 2020 near Hohenfels, Germany. (Lennart Preiss/Getty Images)

Representatives Jim Banks (R-Ind) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass) joined Hudson for a bipartisan conversation on how the U.S. can maintain military superiority at a time of fiscal uncertainty and great power competition with China and Russia. As Chairs of the Congressional Future of Defense Task Force, Congressmen Moulton and Banks revealed the results of the Task Force’s years-long study, which recommends that the U.S. military mount a renewed effort to develop emerging operational concepts, strengthen defense equipment supply chains, improve cybersecurity, and advance U.S. alliances and partnerships.

Working with Artificial Intelligence

Workers pack customer orders at an Amazon fulfillment center on August 1, 2017 in Romeoville, Illinois.  (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Inventor, former DARPA scientist, and Hudson Adjunct Fellow Dan Patt offers a new way to look at artificial intelligence in the workplace. As Patt notes in Issues Magazine, AI should not be seen as a challenge of management versus labor, or machines versus humans, but as a problem of mediating the interactions among system components: humans, AI, firms. This viewpoint will change the character of work and the firm as profoundly as industrial automation did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with correspondingly profound implications for individuals, businesses, and policymakers.