Hal Brands and Michael Beckley make a crucial contribution to the ongoing conversation about America's relationship with China. Surveying the history of Chinese military aggression, they see that China tends to initiate military action not when it feels confident or militarily superior but when it feels threatened by outside forces — and that such conditions may be in place today. "A cold war with Beijing is already under way," they warn. "The right question . . .  is whether America can deter China from initiating a hot one."

AEI President Robert Doar describes the unfortunate influence of a flawed report by the National Academy of Sciences. Lawmakers cite the study to argue that the proposed child tax credit would have little impact on employment among its recipients, but the study includes a significant error that vastly understates the impact: "Instead of 150,000 lost jobs," Doar explains, "the total number would reach approximately 1.5 million."

Yuval Levin uses recent developments on the Build Back Better bill and budget reconciliation to contend that both Democrats and Republicans suffer from an inability to prioritize policy ambitions. Levin predicts that the first party to overcome this failure and "engage in traditional politics" could find itself ascendant with voters.

AEI scholars have produced particularly timely work on education policy. W. Bradford Wilcox and Max Eden assess the role that educational issues played in Glenn Youngkin's victory and suggest that Virginia's governor-elect could empower parents through a series of reforms to the commonwealth's educational system. John Yoo considers the many ways "progressive school officials in communities across the United States have declared war on Asian American achievement"; he believes that Asian Americans can defeat this trend by using the constitutional arguments, legal tools, and growing number of allies at their disposal.

Finally, Jenna Silber Storey explains the connection between a liberal education and a liberal democratic republic and argues that a classical model of education can help repair the cracks forming in both.