Over the past week, AEI again showed that it is not only the home of America's most important scholars and writers but also the host of thoughtful conversations of historical import.

Some of the nation's most prominent judges and legal scholars visited AEI to discuss the jurisprudence of Justice Samuel Alito. A partnership with Princeton University's James Madison Program, the event featured AEI's Yuval Levin, Adam J. White, and Robert P. George leading panels about the justice's overarching principles and his rulings on criminal law, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment.

Kori Schake analyzes the shortcomings of the Biden administration's defense strategy, which downplays the military's role in national security and "demonstrate[s] that it doesn't understand how to integrate all the elements of national power."

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Dan Blumenthal challenges the conventional wisdom that the Chinese regime miscalculated in supporting Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. Notwithstanding the perceived failures in Russia's military campaign and the relative unity of Western allies, Blumenthal says, China's geopolitical assumptions have already been proven correct.

In The New York Times, Yuval Levin considers why our political parties seem so uninterested in building coalitions and instead appeal only to their bases. The answer, he argues, is that close elections have impaired our democracy's ability to respond to voter pressure.

Two of AEI's scholars offer compelling defenses of free speech. Joshua T. Katz warns, "We live in a dangerous world when legions of supposedly enlightened people . . . decry free speech, when freedom is said to be white, and when speech is considered literal violence." And Frederick M. Hess responds to students at the University of Virginia who have arrived at the "truly bizarre" conclusion "that there is too much free speech and freedom of thought at their institution."