I attended the Tuesday rally for the Republican ticket’s number two, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), in South Philadelphia, with both the Tim Walz VP pick and the accusation that Senator Vance is “weird”…

For nearly a decade, the left has described Donald Trump and his populist movement as a cult, in which the MAGA hordes grovel before their messianic former president. It’s not necessarily an issue-driven…

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The details are important.

Politics Scenes From a ‘Weird’ Rally The Vance Philadelphia event put the lie to a narrative. Credit: Joe Raedle via Getty Images I attended the Tuesday rally for the Republican ticket’s number two, Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), in South Philadelphia, with both the Tim Walz VP pick and the accusation that Senator Vance is “weird” fresh in my mind. I’ve followed Vance’s career for years; before he announced his run for the U.S. Senate in 2021 I had already read Hillbilly Elegy, quickly realizing that Vance was both extremely talented and had tapped into some key cultural issues in American life. Until Tuesday, I had only read his works and seen his policy work in the Senate. I had never heard him speak in person. For all I knew, perhaps he was an “online intellectual” kind of guy who was a little weird in person. Vance’s speech, the people he brought on stage and asked to speak, everything about the event was as normal and wholesome as I would expect from the Catholic convert, family man, and American Dream success story who wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Vance came off as energetic, authentic, smart, and confident. He knows how to work a crowd. Nothing about his speech was fringe or weird: he spoke, based both on personal experience and policy expertise, on the central issues plaguing this country and its citizens: rampant crime, unsafe neighborhoods, and a flood of lethal fentanyl pouring over our southern border and killing our people.  The rally took place in a small arena that filled to capacity with something like 500-1,000 people (an intimate affair compared to a Trump rally, but less chaotic and more air-conditioned, so more my style). It attracted a surprising number of extremely enthusiastic black Trump/Vance supporters from the Philadelphia area. One wonders how much longer the tired refrain – that of racism or white Christian nationalism or whatever – can drone on when the GOP seems to be drawing more diverse crowds by the day.  Vance invited two local supporters to take the microphone and share the effects of the open border, the resulting fentanyl crisis, and the generally lawless Philly streets on their lives and loved ones. Vance listened to these folks, gave them a platform, and shared some of his very similar experiences as a child in Ohio. He comes off as real and genuine: he knows what is plaguing America, he experienced it himself, and he has good ideas about what can be done about it.  Vance also took (apparently unvetted) questions from reporters after his speech. While some were a bit aggressive, Vance fielded them personally and responded with grace, frankness, and humor. Yes, he poked at the “fake news” a bit and expressed hope that there were at least a few real, good reporters among the bunch. But he answered what was asked, didn’t dodge questions, and stayed on message. When the event ended, Vance stayed longer than I expected to shake hands and take selfies with attendees. He was clearly engaged, managing to listen to people, smile, respond, and have actual human interactions even in the midst of the noise and clamor. The whole affair was very impressive; nothing weird to behold. There was one thing that could definitely be said to be “weird” about this Vance event, though: the handful of protestors outside the event. It wasn’t just their inappropriate attire or shrieking voices. It was the baffling content of their supposed protests. One held a sign making vulgar claims about the genitalia of people who support Trump and Vance. Another screamed at attendees while holding a sign saying something about JD Vance’s couch not giving consent (a bizarre statement based on a fake Tweet that went viral last month – I won’t cite it so please don’t read about it). The unanimous response to these people by the attendees leaving the event? What a bunch of weirdos! The irony was not lost on the crowd, as they headed back from this normal Vance event to their normal jobs and normal lives: there is certainly a weird movement in modern American politics, and it has nothing to do with J.D. Vance. So which is the weird ticket in the 2024 election? Is it really Trump-Vance? Is it weird to support candidates who want to focus on securing the southern border, getting out of disastrous foreign conflicts that do not further the national interest, enforcing laws so that crime is under control and city streets are safe? Is it weird that these candidates talk about God, about the importance of strong families, about reshoring industry to America and ensuring Americans have good jobs once again? None of the “weird” accusations really hit home.  But Harris-Walz, and the current Democratic party today? Those who demanded that we wear masks and stand six feet apart for years without evidence that this was helping fight the spread of COVID, who support chemical and surgical castration of gender-confused children, who have unbelievably rallied around Hamas? As Vance told reporters, the Walz choice reveals how Harris will govern: “When given an opportunity, she will bend the knee to the most radical elements of her party . . .  That’s exactly what she did here. That’s what she’s going to keep on doing as president.” The post Scenes From a ‘Weird’ Rally appeared first on The American Conservative.

Economics Shipping Out The American merchant marine is dying. Will we miss it when it’s gone? In the early hours of March 26, the MV Dali, a 985-foot cargo ship weighing in whole over 91,000 tons, smashed into a supporting pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland.  The ship was built in South Korea, and its owners and managers were Singaporean. The crew and officers were from India and Sri Lanka. The six men who were working on the bridge and died in its collapse were from Central America. Indeed, the only Americans involved in the disaster were frustrated commuters, the soon-to-be-bilked taxpayers, and the uneasy shade of the father of the national anthem. This is not atypical. The world’s largest shipping registries by tonnage are Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands—“flags of convenience” for international concerns. Yet some nations still maintain top-10 registries. China flags over 8,000 vessels; Hong Kong over 5,000. The top three ship-owning nations, again by tonnage, are Greece, China, and Japan. By the number of sailors, the top countries are the Philippines, Indonesia, China, India, and Russia. By the tonnage of ships produced, China, Japan, and South Korea. It has been claimed that America is “the indispensable nation”; be that as it may, it is quite simply no longer a maritime power. In 1970, there were over 800 U.S.-flagged ships, which accounted for 15 percent of global shipping. Today, despite more tonnage being moved across the oceans than ever before, there are about 180, accounting for about a half a percent of global shipping. The American registry is 21st; the fleet of American-owned ships comes in at 11th. At the Founding, shipping was one of the dominant interests in the United States; John Hancock was the face and the funds for the revolutionary government. The republic’s early debates on economic policy centered on how to protect and develop shipbuilding and shipping; her earliest armed conflicts were over predations on American ships by the British, French, and Arabs. How did the United States come to be a maritime midget? And can anything be done to reverse the decay, or is it too late? *** The first question is whether American maritime collapse is even a problem. If other nations’ interests can build and man ships better or more cheaply than Americans, why not let them? Is the U.S. Merchant Marine—“all the commercial ships of a country together with the personnel who man them,” as briefly defined in the American Merchant Seaman’s Manual—actually important? Salvatore Mercogliano, a former mariner and current professor of history at Campbell University who focuses on maritime history, laid out the argument for The American Conservative. “The ultimate case is, well, we don’t care about the U.S. Merchant Marine. We just let the Panamanian-, Liberian-, Marshall Island–flag registries handle it. And a lot of countries do that. I mean, they just completely depend on it,” he said. “The plus side is cheap ships, because you’re buying ships from overseas, from China, Korea, Japan. The mariners are cheap because minimum wage for foreign mariners is $666 a month. So that’s pretty cheap, 20-something bucks a day. I get my stuff in Walmart and Target. And so it’s like, ‘I don’t need it.’” The maritime industry, however, is unlike textiles or consumer electronics in a few ways; foremost, it is directly integrated with American military affairs. Civilian mariners make up the majority of the staff in the Military Sealift Command, the organ that supplies and operates military transports for the U.S. Navy. A 2017 survey by the Maritime Administration (MARAD)—the Department of Transportation body in part responsible for overseeing the U.S. Merchant Marine—found that the concurrent operation of a wartime sealift and the U.S.-flagged merchant fleet would require roughly 13,600 qualified American mariners. At the time of the survey, there were roughly 11,800—a 13.2 percent staffing deficit. Further, in wartime, nations expect to integrate their flagged civilian vessels into military logistics operations in time of war. It is for this reason that, for example, China regularly includes civilian ships in its naval exercises. A mere 60 U.S.-flagged vessels are registered with the Maritime Security Program, which is the instrument by which the Department of Defense can call upon merchant ships in time of war or national emergency. Merchant ships and mariners absent from urgent military operations is but one problem arising from a mothballed maritime sector. “The negative side of that is, well, hang on a second, you’re completely dependent then on foreign shipyards, foreign shipping. If there’s any issue that they get angry at us—because we’re the U.S., we tend to make people angry all the time—it does cause a disruption,” Mercogliano said. “And, you know, you’re also a superpower, you’ve got an overseas military, you consume 20, or produce 23 percent of the world’s GDP, should you not also have at least a sufficient reservoir of shipping so that you’re not manipulated by foreign shipping?”  He added a hypothetical. “I always joke, if China ever got mad at the United States, they don’t have to attack the United States, all they have to do—they control 15 percent of the world shipping fleet—is slow them down by two days. And you know, all of a sudden ships that were scheduled to arrive in LA come in two days later, right? And it creates massive disruptions inside the United States. It causes consternation. We’re hustling to fix that. That’s the issue.” Covid illustrated the havoc that unplanned supply-chain disruptions can wreak on major economies, especially in an import-reliant nation like the U.S. With something close to half of all international trade traveling by sea, a coordinated disruption by a hostile power could bring down economic catastrophe. “It’s not that we should have 100 percent U.S.-flag vessels hauling 100 percent of our cargo. That’s impossible,” Mercogliano told TAC. “But you should have a good little mix if you want to consider yourself a major economic world power. If you’re Costa Rica, you probably don’t need it, because you can get by with just hauling in what you need.” This is not a new lesson. Adam Smith himself, that totem of the free-trade dogmatists, was an unapologetic protectionist when it came to shipping and shipbuilding, singling out the Navigation Act of 1650 for particular praise. [BLOCK[There seem, however, to be two cases in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign for the encouragement of domestic industry. The first is, when some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defence of the country. The defence of Great Britain, for example, depends very much upon the number of its sailors and shipping. The act of navigation, therefore, very properly endeavours to give the sailors and shipping of Great Britain the monopoly of the trade of their own country in some cases by absolute prohibitions and in others by heavy burdens upon the shipping of foreign countries.[/BLOCK] Nor is it a lesson that ceased to hold after the era of mercantilism passed. “Literally the reason we have a merchant marine is because this happened to us in World War One,” Mercogliano commented. “It’s the reason you have things like the Jones Act, and all those little laws that came into effect is because we found out ourselves what happens when we are overly reliant on foreign shipping” In the lead-up to the First World War, the United States was disproportionately reliant on foreign-flagged ships for its overseas commerce—roughly one-tenth of American shipping was handled by American vessels. The Merchant Marine Act of 1916 established the U.S. Shipping Board, the predecessor of the modern Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration, which was to oversee the Americanization of merchant shipping, including by the establishment of temporary corporations for the purchase and maintenance of ships. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920—better known as the Jones Act—consolidated the position of the new American merchant fleet by forbidding foreign vessels from conducting coastal traffic in the U.S. Subsequent maritime laws in 1928 and particularly in 1936 supported the merchant marine with operating and construction subsidies and provisions for mariner training. This period of state interest in the maritime industry coincided with the era of mass labor organization. Mariners were a ripe target for unionization. Historically, a ship is a floating city with the captain as an absolute monarch. Not only was he the lawgiver; he was also the chief doctor and spiritual authority on board. (Hence his traditional power to preside over passengers’ marriages, and the section of the Book of Common Prayer devoted to services at sea.) Unsurprisingly, this led to abuses. In the 1840 sailing memoir Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana Jr. recounts the flogging of a sailor who asked an ill-timed question of the captain. What is there for sailors to do? If they resist; it is mutiny; if they succeed, and take the vessel, it is piracy. If they ever yield again, their punishment must come; and if they do not yield, they are pirates for life. If a sailor resist his commander, he resists the law, and piracy or submission, are his only alternatives. Bad as it was, it must be borne. It is what a sailor ships for. Swinging the rope over his head, and bending his body so as to give it full force, the captain brought it down upon the poor fellow’s back. Once, twice,—six times. The unions—particularly the International Seamen’s Union, predecessor of the modern Seafarers International Union (SIU)—put an end to scenes like this, and negotiated many other improvements for sailors’ living and working conditions. The mid-century settlement found American shipping interests working directly with the unions to fill the crews of ships. The result of this confluence of state, capital, and labor efforts was one of the New Deal era’s greatest successes. By the end of the Second World War, two-thirds of world shipping was carried by American vessels. Over the course of the conflict, the nation produced over a quarter million merchant seamen, 8,000 of whom died in action. In 1946, the yards were building a merchant ship almost every third day; roughly 5,500 were built in total during the war. At the end of the war, many of those vessels were considered surplus and given away to replenish the war-ravaged merchant fleets of other nations. This was the beginning of a familiar postwar tale: other nations rebuilding their own industries at the expense, and often with the direct aid, of the United States. By the late ’60s, the American maritime industry was in serious decline, particularly the shipyards, due to foreign competition, sclerotic business practices, and that era’s ugly conflicts between labor and management. President Richard Nixon found this unacceptable and laid out a comprehensive plan to overhaul the fleet in a 1969 speech to Congress. Our shipping industry has come a long way over the last three centuries. Yet, as one of the great historians of American seafaring, Samuel Eliot Morison, has written: “all her modern docks and terminals and dredged channels will avail nothing, if the spirit perish that led her founders to ‘trye all ports.’” It is that spirit to which our program of challenge and opportunity appeals. It is my hope and expectation that this program will introduce a new era in the maritime history of America, an era in which our shipbuilding and ship operating industries take their place once again among the vigorous, competitive industries of this nation. Nixon’s intentions were in part realized in the rejuvenated subsidy program of the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, but the untimely termination of his administration and a new era of fiscal austerity stymied further work. “It was a big push for business. You know, shipping costs were high, let’s reduce costs. Let’s outsource this to other nations for its convenience,” commented John Konrad V, a former sea captain and the CEO of gCaptain, a shipping news service. “Nixon was the last president who had a strong maritime policy, and unfortunately that got killed by Watergate.” In 1981, the Reagan administration ended subsidies to the shipyards. Japan, South Korea, and various European nations, however, continued to subsidize their own shipbuilding industries; private interests fled to foreign suppliers to these inexpensive rivals, leaving the U.S. Navy as the largest customer by far for American shipbuilders—with the economic distortions attendant on near monopsony.  There are four interlocking interests in the maritime industry—the state, ship owners and operators, shipbuilders, and mariners. The comprehensive Merchant Marine Acts of the last century placed the state firmly in charge of this system under the explicit theory that, while it is in large part composed of non-state corporate actors, the merchant marine is a service, comparable to the armed services—something that pertains directly to the national interest, and thereby the proper realm of state oversight. Deregulation-era attentions fastened on the inefficiencies and abuses of the system, particularly the waste of public funds in an era characterized by fiscal austerity. In short, the maritime sector underwent the same dialectic every other major American economic sector underwent between 1920 and 1985. Accordingly, the arguments about what are to be done about the American maritime industry are familiar.  A particular whipping boy is the Jones Act, which still limits American internal and coastal shipping to American ships. Following the destruction of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, the century-old law received a public beating for allegedly “strangling” (in the words of one New York Times op-ed) Puerto Rico by slowing disaster relief. On the other hand, entrenched interests—perhaps most visibly, the SIU—are regular boosters for the Act’s protections.  As TAC’s own James Pinkerton wrote during Maria’s aftermath, the Act’s role in the relief effort’s mismanagement was heavily overstated—and, if we believe a merchant fleet is worth having, nixing one of its few remaining protections may be counterproductive. That is not to say there isn’t room for improvement. Mercogliano observes that the logistics industry is a far different technical beast than it was a century ago. “[Dealing with] the Jones Act is the panacea, that it’ll be rainbows and unicorns and everything is fixed. And it fixes some things, but not everything. I think the Jones Act needs reform by any means—any law that was written in 1920 probably needs reform all the time—we need to be looking at it and changing it,” he said. “The problem you have in the maritime industry is you have two entrenched sides, those who are for the Jones Act, and those who are against the Jones Act, and they’re on their mountain tops, and none of them are going to take a step off, none of them want to show any potential for change for fear that the other side will pounce on them. And so what you wind up with is the status quo.”  To Mercogliano, the national-security and worker-protection aspects of the Act hold up. “I think the Jones Act does a lot of positive things. For us, I think it’s good that Staten Island Ferry is U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned. I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing that we don’t have cruise ships that anchor and park inside the United States for days at a time and challenge American hotels and businesses,” he said. “I don’t think we really want to compete against foreign workers who are making, again, 20 bucks a day in the industry.” He is also skeptical of the claims about market distortions arising from the Act. “Everyone wants to sit there and say, the reason things are so expensive is because of the Jones Act. Well, it’s under $2 a mile to haul something by truck in the United States, you’re never going to find cost efficiency. If you’re in Baltimore, and you want to haul something to New York, I don’t care if you use a foreign ship, it’s not going to be cheaper than hiring a truck to drive it up to New York,” he said. “And the other problem is most Americans don’t live right by a port, they live within 100 miles of the port so that you’re still going to put [cargo] on a truck at some point. So whether or not you put it on a truck for short haul or long haul, you know, it just tends to be better. It’s the knee-jerk reaction, you know, get rid of this law, and everything will be better.” Mercogliano thinks there must be a more thoughtful and comprehensive approach to maritime policy: “The Jones Act in 1920 wasn’t just coastal shipping. It was international trade, it was rates, it was everything—shipbuilding. We really need to look at that.” Yet in those spheres—shipbuilding and ship-operating writ large—libertarian-leaning critics point out, with justice, that American shipyards are enormously inefficient relative to foreign rivals, and unfocused subsidy programs do nothing (at best) to resolve inefficiencies. If the capital side of the merchant fleet were worked out—the building of American ships and establishment or expansion of American shipping companies—the task of finding crews and officers for these ships would remain. Per the 2017 MARAD survey, even in the fleet’s advanced state of atrophy, there aren’t enough seamen to staff it fully—and, even if the parameters of that survey are correct, it may not tell the whole story. “I think that study grossly underestimates how short we are because if we ever got into a true conflict, I think you would see a lot of mariners beat feet, not take the chance and, you know, potentially get sunk by a Chinese submarine or missile or something like that,” said Mercogliano. “You’re kind of seeing that with the Houthis and what they’re doing.” Sailing has always been a line of work with inherent difficulties and hardships, particularly for a family man. “I came down with a condition that precluded me from continuing sailing—I got married,” Mercogliano said. “It’s a long time at sea, so you’re not at home a lot.”  These hardships were aggravated during the COVID crisis. “COVID created a big problem, in that mariners were either stuck on their ships or couldn’t get to their ships. And that created a big displacement,” Mercogliano said. “You were basically stuck at work 24/7, it’s the nightmare of everybody’s stuck at work. They couldn’t get out, or they were stuck at home and couldn’t get to work and couldn’t make any money. It caused a lot of people who got off the ships not to want to go back.” Konrad blames the stagnation of prospects for officers for making the field less attractive, noting that salaries have not kept pace with inflation and the shrunken U.S. fleet produces few opportunities to rise for young officers. “It takes 10 years to get a captain’s license. So it’s a lot of work to get it. So once you get the captain’s license and a  job—people keep that job for a long time,” he said. “So [maritime] is one of the oldest industries because they have all these boomers who are in it and don’t want to leave.” Per Konrad, overregulation of mariners may be an even more significant discouragement. “When I went to a conference recently, they say, John, come back on the ship. I get to capitalize on some experience, right? I would like to go out just for a month. Maybe not all year, but I’d go out for a month and do an exercise. I can’t, because I got to take all these international certificates. The most recent is ‘leadership principles.’ It’s unreal.” The effects trickle down to the crews. “The SIU unlisted, they can’t make more than the junior officers, so they’re stuck I think. Personally, I think they have to do a lot more to cut regulation, cut bullshit training, and at the top, so you can start pulling people up into the ladder.” Regulatory concerns weigh heavily on unlicensed mariners. There are two broad classes of merchant mariner, licensed and unlicensed—the equivalent of commissioned officers and enlisted men in the armed forces. The merchant marine previously afforded a mobility that was almost unparalleled in other industries; experienced unlicensed seamen of enterprise and talent could simply sit for licensing exams and become eligible for officer positions. Roughly three decades ago, the U.S. Coast Guard—the organ responsible for mariner licensing—changed its standards to align with those of the UN-affiliated International Maritime Organization.  “Since the late ’90s, the IMO looked at all the training of all mariners worldwide and said there’s huge discrepancies—the American training is better than everyone’s at that point,” said Konrad. “Americans were a lot better sailors. So they said, we’ve got to mandate all these courses. You need a simulator, you need to firefight—so they require all these classes, and you’re not [getting] a full college degree, but about six months of college when you join as an officer.”  Wayne Johnson, director of admissions at the Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship, a training center for unlicensed seamen run by the SIU at Piney Point, Maryland, says the union is flooded with prospects despite the challenges facing the industry but agrees that government red tape is the biggest obstacle to putting men on ships. “We have had the ability to put a recruiter in each one of our ports. So we actually have—I’m never gonna say too many—but we have an abundance of applicants. I mean, we’re being super selective on who we’re selecting to come into our program,” said Jonson, who noted that 1,000 prospective mariners—almost two years’ worth of trainees—are currently queued up for training at the Lundeberg School. “Our issue is the regulations, the regulations that are in place make it difficult for us to create ABs [able seamen].” There are three departments on the ship, engine, steward, and deck. Johnson explains that Coast Guard rules make it so mariners going into the deck department—the largest on a ship—have to spend twice as much time in training as candidates in the other two departments. “Having that regulation in place greatly limits the amount of people or the time that it takes us to train an AB to get them fit to sail with that rating to get them out there,” he said. “We’re doing it. But we could be doing it much faster.” The Francis Scott Key Bridge still lies in ruins. Maryland’s Governor Wes Moore alleges that it will be rebuilt by 2026. We’ll see about that. The American maritime industry also lies in ruins. A growing set of interests—political, business, and labor—have expressed the will to rebuild it. We’ll see about that, too. To some degree the weaknesses in the maritime industry defy analysis because the data do not exist or are years out of date. “MARAD hasn’t done a shipyard survey since 2000. It’s been 25 years, and we’re supposed to do it every year. Well, why is that a problem?” commented Konrad. “Well, we don’t know. We don’t know our capacity. We don’t know our ships, because MARAD hasn’t done it.” Yet there is growing political will to take the American maritime industry in hand. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL), and Representative John Garamendi (D-CA), and Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, in May released an advisory report on a national maritime strategy. In January, two dozen lawmakers, including those four, called on the Biden administration to appoint a maritime policy czar. “Everyone’s realizing that things need to change. So there are more advocates for change than ever before. There’s new leadership in some of the unions. There’s new leadership in the shipyards. So the problem you have is there’s no one advocate for the U.S. Merchant Marine,” said Mercogliano. “There are Navy advocacy groups, there are labor advocacy groups. But in the merchant marine, what you tend to have is shipping companies, interest groups, shipbuilders… There’s no merchant marine War College that sits there and says, ‘This is what we need for a federal maritime policy,’ because there’s no one to bankroll that.” A disproportionate amount of maritime policy falls to the executive, and so the near future of the American merchant fleet will in large part be determined by the outcome of November’s election. Konrad sees the basic attitude of the administration toward the merchant marine as a basic test of whether it is serious about renewal.  “The merchant guys are at just as much risk and Pete [Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary] refuses to acknowledge them,” Konrad said. “Go to the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. It’s completely falling apart. The lawn care budget of West Point is bigger than the Kings Point budget. It’s a disaster zone, falling apart. It looks like a Third World nation. It starts with the respect.” It will be hard. The bare fact is that Americans have far higher industrial standards than other nations across the board—for mechanical maintenance, for personnel training, for safety. This is expensive. Much of the maritime industry needs to be rebuilt at the base, infrastructural level. This, too, is expensive. The reward: a more secure nation, a forward-looking technical field, and a growing pool of high-paying jobs. Johnson puts it succinctly: “We are the U.S. supply chain. With DoD ships, the stuff doesn’t move. Not only do we support the United States as a whole, but the United States military. When they call, we respond, we get them what they need.” It is unlikely, even were it desirable, that the U.S. will return to the postwar economic settlement that ushered in the golden age of American shipping. Yet there are signs of an industrial revival in what might be called the “monumental” sectors—most notably space travel, under the attentions of Jeff Bezos and especially Elon Musk. Perhaps an industrial policy like David Goldman’s proposed “moonshot” framework could be applied to shipping. The post Shipping Out appeared first on The American Conservative.

The American Conservative A Big Issue The theme of this issue is bigness. The theme of this issue is bigness. Big ships, big buildings, big data. The cover story by Jude Russo examines the decline of the American shipping industry. Ships are the main way international trade gets from point A to point B and also a crucial element of America’s national defense. If it ever becomes necessary to get tons of supplies from our shores to, say, the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Navy can’t do the job alone. Commercial ships will be called to assist. If there aren’t enough of them, then that will be a problem. The decline of American shipping can be seen both in manufacturing and in staffing; we neither build ships nor train sailors in the same numbers we once did. Some of the reasons why will be familiar from other industries that have seen manufacturing decline, and some are unique to the maritime world. Why do men build skyscrapers? Ego is the answer most people give. In the case of the Gulf oil lords who commission record-breaking towers and Adrian Smith, the architect they hire to design most of them, the answer is the same: to do the will of God. TAC regular Nic Rowan profiles the man who built the Burj Khalifa. Keep an eye out for a cameo from Donald Trump at the end of the piece.  The takeover of the American dating scene by apps has coincided with a fall in marriage rates and fertility. Something is broken in American romance—and AI is about to make it all much worse. Robert Mariani has seen up close the distinctive ethos of Silicon Valley, and his word for it is safetyism. It fears real life and seeks to eliminate life’s dangers by relegating human interaction to the virtual world. Mariani seeks a better way. There is a bittersweet note to one of the pieces in this issue. Bradley Devlin has been with TAC for three years and risen to the position of political editor. He is moving on to new challenges. Happily, he leaves readers with a final meditation before he departs. Bradley is a proud son of Yorba Linda, California, the hometown of President Richard M. Nixon. Living in Washington and seeing the deep state up close has given Bradley a new appreciation for his hometown hero. He writes eloquently on the man and the place. Farewell, Bradley, it has been a pleasure working with you. The post A Big Issue appeared first on The American Conservative.

Religion Ukraine’s Two Wars Ukrainians are dying on the frontline while fighting to preserve their faith. As the Russia–Ukraine conflict continues well into its third year, we naturally focus on the military struggle. A less visible but equally important battle is being waged within Ukraine’s religious communities. This conflict reveals the complex interplay between faith, nationalism, state power, and the ongoing war.  Ukraine has historically been at the center of the Eastern European Orthodox world. It is on the banks of the Dnieper River in Kyiv that Eastern European Orthodoxy was born in 988 as a Slavic offshoot of Byzantium’s Greek Orthodoxy. It adopted Slavonic, a proto-Slavic tongue, as its liturgical language—a language the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the largest religious organization in the country, still uses.  In 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was founded in accordance with then President Petro Poroshenko’s “one nation, one church” vision. Poroshenko believed that an independent, national church was essential for national security, as opposed to the traditional UOC church, which was independent in governance but retained its legacy ecclesiastic connection with the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow. One way that the OCU displayed its nationalism was by replacing Slavonic with Ukrainian as its liturgical language.  Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian government announced a series of measures identifying the UOC  with the Russian Orthodox Church and seeking repressive measures against it. On December 2, 2022, during his nightly address President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a decree that banned the activities of religious organizations “affiliated with centers of influence” in Russia and said that state services would examine the links between the UOC and the Russian church.  If you were a Ukrainian patriot, President Zelensky signaled, the UOC could not possibly be your spiritual home.  Shortly after Zelensky’s speech, I attended liturgy at the Russian church in Geneva, where I was visiting, hoping to better understand the overlay of the war and religious identity. There, I met both Russians and Ukrainians, including Ukrainians from the Russian-speaking east and ethnic Ukrainians from the west. I met a veteran of the Ukrainian special forces, the SBU, who shared that he fought in the Donbas in 2014 and later went to Russia on a spiritual visit. He was highly critical of what he claimed was the persecution by the Ukrainian government of his church at home, the UOC. Clearly, there was more to it than President Zelensky’s narrative portraying the UOC as a political fifth column—a narrative echoed by the media in Europe and the United States.   The investigation that followed led me to both UOC and OCU parishes across Ukraine, from Chernivtsi to Khmelnytskyi, to Kyiv, and to Odessa, where I conducted in-depth interviews with parishioners, religious leaders, civil activists, government officials, parliamentarians, journalists, soldiers, and everyday Ukrainian faithful. These are my observations.  Church Seizures and Violence In the dozens and dozens of parishes I visited across Ukraine last December, a similar pattern emerged: UOC priests and parishioners were violently expelled from their churches and left defenseless in a forced transfer of parishes to the OCU that has been unfolding since 2014.  In Korytne, near Chernivtsi, the local UOC parish had been forcibly removed from its church two weeks before. The parish had since been performing services in private homes. On the morning I visited, the parish was consecrating a new place for its church. The ceremony was led by the Chernivtsi metropolitan, Vladika Melety (Egorenko).  A crowd of faithful gathered outside, waiting for the arrival of Metropolitan Melety. The village was still, apart from a few dogs occasionally barking. The roads were unpaved, and the modest single-story building looked more like a barn than a church. Once liturgy began, the old and the young kneeled against the frigid pavement. Children were hugging a heater failing to rise to the occasion. Parishioners kept their winter jackets and gloves on. The room was too small for the parish’s 50 families. Two altar boys were coming and going to the back of the room to retrieve the necessary items for the mass from two large suitcases. Two weeks ago, parishioners told me, individuals arrived at the church with fake documents to take possession of the property. These individuals did not belong to the UOC, they said. Some were from the village, some weren’t. They expelled parishioners and closed down the church. The raid followed an illegal parish meeting that these individuals had called. Parishioners learned about that meeting on Facebook. The parish has its own statutes, and only the priest and parishioners can call such a meeting. The illegal meeting took place the day it was announced, indicating that the move had been planned in advance. The meeting produced new parish statute documents. Although they are illegal, local authorities recognize them. Olena, a 60-year-old teacher, blames the division in the community on a handful of wealthy families in the village. These families do not attend the UOC church, but they initiated moves to take it over with the support of local authorities, she said. On one occasion, individuals broke into a church service wearing military gear. Complaints to authorities were made, to no avail. The mayor, who belongs to the OCU, is implicated in these actions, Olena said. He has led a concerted effort to make village church services in Ukrainian exclusively. In Miliieve, the UOC church property was forcibly transferred to a predecessor church of the OCU in 2014. Parishioners were not present at the church when it was seized. Individuals claiming to be from the predecessor church illegally took ownership of the property and then re-registered it, with the support of the police, militia, and Ukrainian security services. This seizure was preceded by a formal parish meeting organized with the help of local and regional government officials. They prevented parishioners from attending the meeting. Ivan Verenka was the parish’s priest from 2007 to 2013. “Our church was taken away in 2014 on accusations of being Moscow-affiliated,” he told me. The UOC parish built a new church, which was criminally burned down this year, I was told. In Zadubrivka, also near Chernivtsi, I joined the local parish for a Sunday service in a small private house. Parishioners had been holding services there since their church was expropriated. The space consisted of two small rooms, so small that the church’s choir huddled by the entry door, squeezing whenever someone entered or exited the building. The interior doors had been removed from their frames to make more space. Ramon, an assistant to the church secretary, told me that the lack of ​space is an issue on big holidays. About 300 families out of the village’s 800 to 900 families attended the UOC church.   Local authorities initiated the expropriation process in January 2019, I was told, claiming that a parish meeting held on January 24 had decided to switch the parish to the OCU. Around that time, groups of people periodically came to the church premises and threatened the parishioners gathered inside. Parishioners stayed overnight in the church to protect it. The threats escalated. On May 30, 2019, as a dozen parishioners were praying outside the church, individuals wearing masks invaded the church premises and began beating people for about 20 minutes and breaking items inside the church. “The police were not as strong in 2019 and because of this we could stand and defend our church,” a parishioner told me, pointing to the lack of trust in law enforcement. A few parishioners were injured and went to the hospital.  In April 2023, parishioners were violently expelled from their church. It happened during the funeral of a soldier from the parish. Attackers in military uniforms and balaclavas broke into the church, broke doors, and beat parishioners, sending many to the hospital. Parishioners identified some attackers as being from the village. Others were not. Police and military people cordoned off the church to prevent parishioners from returning. After the end of Sunday liturgy, I visited the seized church, now under OCU control, a few yards away. A handful of faithful were inside, compared with the tightly packed private house where the dispossessed had gathered. A large Ukrainian flag was flying on the top of the church. When was the flag placed, I asked. After the takeover, I was told.  In Malyi Kuchuriv, in Chernivtsi, the parish now gathers under white tarps where I joined them for a Sunday service. Half of the parishioners reportedly don’t attend because of the cold and unsuitable conditions. Their previous church, built entirely by their own hands, was seized on March 18, 2023, and transferred to the OCU.  George, a 40-year-old choir singer, recounted the day the church was seized with the help of the police. It took place during liturgy, he said. “I was inside during the liturgy when I heard someone cry out in pain. A group of individuals had arrived with forged parish documents stating that the parish had switched to the OCU.” He added that they did not belong to church or the village and came with fake documents from the oblast. Parishioners inside the church called the police, but the police helped the assailants. He showed me photos and videos of the seizure. Parishioners were beaten, including with iron pipes. George was hurt. An assailant, whom he claimed was the secretary of the oblast mayor, cut one of his fingers with an iron bar. In one photo, a man could be seen standing in the church premises wrapped in an Ukrainian flag. Another photo showed the detached part of a finger in a pool of blood.  Father Petro, who was the parish’s head priest for 14 years, also showed me videos of the event. He said the group who seized the church did not belong to the parish and came with local authorities and police, saying, “Force is on our side.” A bloody fight ensued, with children and elderly people beaten while police stood by and watched, he said. The entire parish was then forced outside, the church doors were locked, and religious and personal items were taken away, including the priest’s personal belongings.  According to Father Petro, during a subsequent meeting with local authorities, the mayor refused their request for a house of prayer, saying, “We don’t have a place for such enemies as you are.” Another parishioner said members of the SBU were present at the seizure, as well as “military people.” In Tovtry, about 30 kilometers from Chernivtsi, the village’s UOC parish met in a converted shop. Their church was seized in May 2019, when police arrived with officials demanding the keys to the church. When the priest refused, they returned in his absence and broke the locks. No parishioners were present when they entered. An attorney representing the parish filed a complaint stating that the seizure was illegal, but law enforcement reportedly dismissed the complaint, showing the parish’s attorney documents establishing that the parish had decided to switch to the OCU. After the church was expropriated, the parish initially prayed outside the church before being prohibited from coming onto the church property. They then gathered on the road. When the weather became too cold, they moved to a shop converted into a place of worship, thanks to a local business owner and donations from parishioners. Metropolitan Melety later came to consecrate the shop-turned-temple.  When I visited the old church property, it appeared silent and empty, with lights off and gates closed. In Hvardiiske, in Khmelnytskyi, rumors of expropriation began to circulate in 2018. In 2019, a group of residents who were not parishioners decided to form a new parish affiliated with the OCU. I was told by the UOC parish’s priest and parishioners that a wealthy local farmer named Viktor Anadolich of the Greek Catholic confession initiated this move and gathered 800 signatures, including people from neighboring villages. On February 3, 2019, these individuals called a formal parish meeting where it was decided that the UOC parish was now the OCU’s. The parish was subsequently reregistered under this new statute, and the church building was locked. Parishioners were forced to pray outside for three years. Their church is still locked and empty, they said.  In Raikivtsi, in Khmelnytskyi, the parish has been meeting in a private home since local authorities, including the mayor, seized the church building in 2019. The mayor, Hanna Shevchuk, claimed that the seizure was legal, I was told. Parishioners were allowed to take only a fraction of their religious and personal items from the church. “Some icons, not even the church’s prayer books,” parishioners told me. A woman parishioner gave her house until the war began. She then became afraid of persecution, and the parish moved to a newly built church. The unheated building was cold and damp when I visited. Parishioners said that the OCU currently does not use their seized church.  In Ruzhychna, in Khmelnytskyi, parishioners of the Ascension of the Mother of God now meet in a white tent built with tarps. The temperature inside was just as cold as the outside when I visited. The seizure of their old church was validated by courts and local authorities, Archpriest Volodymyr, who leads the parish, told me. The special list of people who claimed to have switched their parish to the OCU was sent to the regional administration, along with the fake parish statute documents. They took the registration and seized our church, he told me—the same as elsewhere, he added. On June 5, 2022, military personnel arrived and replaced the locks on the gates of the church. In Trebukhiv, a suburb of Kyiv, I attended a church service led by Father Mihail in a tent made of tarps. Inside, icons and candles recreated the rudiments of a normal church. Snow piled up against the walls outside. The tent had only a small wood-fired heater that provided little warmth but plenty of fire hazard . The parish’s old church was seized on April 22, 2023, when a crowd broke into the building and presented what Father Mihail said were illegal documents claiming that the parish had been officially transferred to the OCU. That same day, Father Mihail and his family were driven from their house. “My 7-year-old daughter, wife, and I were expelled from our house when our church was seized,” Father Mihail said. Now, “my daughter is bed-wetting.” That evening, the news media reported matter-of-factly that his parish had switched to the OCU. In Kyiv, after visiting parishes in and around the city, while driving back, my guide, Father Sergiy, mentioned to me that he was at risk of arrest. I asked why. For helping my church defend itself, he said. Father Sergiy had fled Russian-occupied Kherson in 2022, because he refused to work under Russian occupation. In Kyiv, the young priest helped coordinate the defense of his new church when it was targeted by expropriation and violence.  The Ukrainian government arrested and imprisoned Father Sergiy a few weeks after my visit. In April, a mutual friend messaged me: “We are worried about his health. He does not have his medication, he is very sick. We don’t know how long he will be in jail.” A Failing Judiciary The judicial system, when it got involved, failed the parishes I visited. When a parish sought legal recourse for church seizures, acts of violence, or other abuses, court cases were dismissed, delayed, ignored, or closed, or the illegal re-registration of the parish was validated.  In Hvardiiske, a court ruling validated the parish re-registration to the OCU. The case dragged on for three years after the church was seized on February 3, 2019, during which time the parish prayed and held liturgy outside. After multiple appeals, the courts eventually ruled against the UOC parish and closed the case. In Boyarka, near Kyiv, the parish decided to give up on a costly, protracted court case. The parish’s church was seized in April 2023, and the community began holding services in homes,  in the forest, and under a makeshift tent. Their case rested on the claim that the meeting deciding on the transfer of the parish to the OCU was illegal. After multiple time-consuming and costly hearings and procedures, the parish dropped the case. The court did not refund the legal fees, they said. In Trebukhiv, the court case was repeatedly postponed. After Father Mihail’s church was seized in April 2022, based on illegal re-registration documents, Father Mihail initiated a legal procedure to challenge the seizure and presented the parish’s statute documents to the court. The case has been postponed repeatedly and is still waiting.  Weaponizing Military Conscription Military conscription has been used as a weapon against the UOC. In Khmelnytskyi’s Ruzhychna district, where parishioners of the Intercessional Blessed Virgin Mary were expelled from their place of worship in April 2023, military officers came by multiple times to conscript parishioners during services in the private home where they had relocated. Many men from the parish do not attend services anymore, parishioners said. They believe the conscription is selective because of their affiliation with the UOC.  In ​​Krasyliv, parishioners of the UOC were expelled from their place of worship and relocated to a small private home. After villagers identified the new location, parishioners reported being harassed by representatives of the military who attempted to conscript men during Sunday services. Military officers came multiple times during liturgy to hand out draft notifications. Parishioners say they did not see officers visit any other homes in the neighborhood.  In Korytne, a parishioner whose son is currently fighting in the war, and who introduced himself as a patriot, said that some members of the parish were afraid to go to the church because their sons and husbands would be taken to the war.   A Hostile Media A common theme has been the role of media and social media in antagonizing the UOC. In Khmelnytskyi, at the cathedral of St. George the Victorious on April 2, 2023, two individuals pushed a deacon who was reading the gospel and recorded the incident and the melee that followed. Videos of the event, which only showed the melee, were broadcast that same day by local TV channel Expresso.  Shortly after, parish members recounted that “an ocean wave” of people angered by the news segment gathered at the cathedral, threatening “pro-Russians.” The crowd split into two parts. Young, aggressive people began attacking the building to enter it. Another group organized an impromptu election in the cathedral yard to switch the parish to the OCU. Six tables with lists ready with signatures were set up. After 7 PM, the crowd moved in to expel parishioners and priests. I saw a video of a young priest being chased and harassed on his way home.  “They call us ​​Moscovite,” said Ivan Verenka, the assistant priest of the UOC parish in Miliieve, referring to his fellow villagers. “But they know us, they know we are Ukrainains.” So why do they call you that, I asked. Television and other media sources have influenced the community’s beliefs, Verenka claims. “They believe the media, not the people, not the priests,” he said. Former friends now insult Verenka and have threatened violence. “How can we still be friends?” Father Nikita, a lawyer who represents the church in multiple legal cases, told me that the UOC is being informationally blocked, with details about church seizures, attacks, and other incidents being suppressed on media and social media. The government, he said, is using the SBU to persecute the UOC by fabricating criminal cases to portray the church as criminal and then disseminating this information on social media.  State and Church I asked the Ukrainian government’s religious affairs czar, Viktor Yelensky, about the concerns over church properties being forcibly transferred from the UOC to the OCU. This is a matter for the local government, Yelensky explained to me in his office in Kyiv. The central government was not involved. I asked about the impact on UOC parishes of the measures his government initiated, such as those Zelensky announced in his February 2022 speech. UOC parishioners and clergy had told me that authorities were targeting their church ​in the name of national security.  Yelensky claimed that his government did not treat any religious actor in a discriminatory manner. He also said that his office offered the UOC, in the form of a public letter, an opportunity to voluntarily demonstrate the actions the church had taken to sever ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. “For reasons I cannot fully understand, they did not hear my suggestions,” he said.  UOC clergy I spoke to said that they did respond to Yelensky’s many such letters. They questioned what Yelensky meant by “breaking all ties with the ROC.” If he was referring to being controlled by Moscow or supporting the aggressor, then the UOC had already ended any such ties. In fact, they said, the last remaining link to the ROC was mentioning ROC Patriarch Kirill in the liturgy, as is done with all other living Orthodox patriarchs. This mention has been removed. The UOC is for all intents and purposes a self-governing church, as detailed at the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on May 27, 2022. For example, the church appoints and is solely responsible for its bishops and priests. The UOC clergy also argued that Yelensky’s requests were both cynical and unconstitutional. The clergy warned that, if the UOC were to make a public political statement declaring the UOC’s complete break from the ROC, the ROC would likely initiate a schism procedure, leading other national Orthodox churches to view the UOC differently and causing the UOC to lose its canonical dignity. The UOC clergy speculated that damaging the UOC’s canonical standing within the global Orthodox community might well be the Ukrainian government’s real intention. United Nations Concerns Although it has received little attention in the United States, the United Nations has taken notice of the acts of violence, church seizures, and abuses against UOC communities in Ukraine and is actively looking into the matter.  My visits often took place in the footsteps of UN experts, who were conducting their own investigations. Reading through some of the reports their investigations produced, I recognized many findings similar to my own.  Take, for example, the quarterly report published by the UN’s highest human rights authority, the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The July 2024 edition found that “Ukrainian authorities continued to take actions against individuals associated with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).” The previous quarter’s report documented a case that took place just a few days after I left Ukraine, the seizure of the Kazan cathedral in Vinnytsia: On 28 December 2023, a group of persons attacked the Kazan temple in Ladyzhyn, Vinnytsia region, with at least two individuals involved in this attack claiming to be active servicemen of Ukrainian armed forces. Police officers present at the site did not intervene. Subsequently, on 9 January 2024, a group of about 30 individuals wearing camouflage uniforms without insignia used two heavy construction vehicles to break the gates and fence of the temple and forced their way into the UOC church. They beat the clergyman and two male parishioners, all of whom suffered minor injuries. At least nine individuals were physically attacked during the two incidents. Only two victims submitted complaints to police, one of which was later withdrawn. Most victims said they did not submit complaints because they feared retaliation, such as threats from their neighbors or dismissal from their jobs. The UN human rights reports also describe the role played by the legal system and local authorities: “OHCHR recorded six cases across five regions where groups of people forcefully broke into UOC churches, justifying their actions with decisions from local authorities to register new religious communities of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) at the same address as existing UOC communities.”  The reports align with my observations on the failure of law enforcement to protect victimized UOC communities: “OHCHR has previously documented that law enforcement agencies did not take appropriate measures to prevent and react to violence related to conflicts involving the UOC.” The UN’s worries about religious freedom in Ukraine did not start with the current war. As far back as October 2018, several UN special rapporteurs sent a joint letter to the government of Ukraine alerting it to a series of acts of violence that appeared to contravene the internationally recognized right to freedom of religion and belief. The incidents included attacks against and seizure of places of worship belonging to the UOC and acts of intimidation and harassment, including death threats made against priests.  During our interview in Ruzhychna, Archpriest Volodymyr mentioned that two years ago he had received a visit from UN experts, whom he told about his parish’s fate. Two years later, he was still leading the Ascension of the Mother of God parish under tarps.  Fighting and Dying for Ukraine  The dozens and dozens of UOC parishioners I interviewed during my visit considered themselves patriotic, just as the OCU parishioners I talked to did. Many had personal stories of volunteering, fighting, and dying for their country. “We are patriots, we have helped our army from the beginning [of the war],” Archpriest Volodymyr told me. “We even received certificates attesting to the help we provided to the army.” He showed me a flag the members of the 33rd Special Mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine signed in gratitude for the support his parish provided. I asked what kind of support. Technical assistance, food, bread, clothes, and all things needed, he said. They provide what they are asked to donate, what the soldiers on the frontline need at the moment. I asked whether his parishioners continued to do this despite the expropriation of their church. Yes, he said, noting that the 33rd Special Mechanized Brigade sent the signed flag a month ago. One member of his parish serves as a volunteer with the brigade, he added.  Father Yuri of the Saint Trinity Cathedral showed me a similar signed flag presented by the soldiers of the Chernihiv brigade of the armed forces of Ukraine in recognition of the help his church provided. The brigade is composed of members from his parish. I asked father Yuri if many members of his parish served on the front line. He pulled out a book with page after page filled with names listed for prayers. He said that over 100 soldiers had served, three had died, and many had been injured.  A soldier from Archpriest Volodymyr’s parish died and his body was returned to the village the day before my visit. The funeral was the following day. He was the third parishioner to make the ultimate sacrifice since the war began in February 2022.  In Hvardiiske, Tania, a 45-year-old mother, told me that she lost her 26-year-old son in the war. The OCU clergy of her expropriated church tried to prevent her son from being buried in the church’s cemetery. Parishioners mentioned another case where a soldier’s burial was prevented. When asked about the number of soldiers from the parish involved in the war, I was shown a list indicating that approximately 60 soldiers from this community alone are fighting. One parishioner, Luboi, said that her grandson is currently at the front. In Zadubrivka, the church was expropriated during the funeral of a soldier. I inquired about how many soldiers from the village had died. Five soldiers had lost their lives, I was told. In Korytne, I interviewed Michael, a 59-year-old UOC parishioner. He said he had served for one year and three months in the current war and fought in Bakhmut and Kharkiv. “Among the soldiers, we help each other without concern for which church we belong to,” he said. He expressed dismay at being called pro-Russian while having fought for Ukraine. “If we are patriots and fight for our country, why is our church accused of being influenced by Russia?” The post Ukraine’s Two Wars appeared first on The American Conservative.

Technology Why Does AI Give Bad Dating Advice? The cult of safetyism that dominates our society is especially counterproductive when it comes to tech and dating. In May, Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, presented a bold vision of futuristic romance: autonomous, artificially intelligent agents imprinting preferences onto themselves and then going on simulated dates with each other. “There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you, with another dating concierge,” she said at the Bloomberg Technology Summit. Instead of going through the tedium of sifting through hundreds of matches, users could save time by quickly meeting the few who are found to be worthwhile.  This vision of AI-solved dating comes from a place familiar to many: the sigh of the singleton with dating-app fatigue. The least controversial take about modern romance is that dating apps suck. They’re tedious, shallow, and demoralizing. Everyone is waiting for a better way of dating, but, until one comes along, apps are the gate and key to finding love. Bumble became famous for shaking up the formula by forcing women to send the first message to male matches. (This female-first principle was recently abandoned.) Wolfe Herd says her envisioned AI date simulation is a continuation of Bumble’s mission to be a platform that makes dating “safer” and “more equitable”—phraseology that should feel eerily familiar to users of ChatGPT. Safetyism isn’t the quirk of one tech founder. It is the ruling ideology of the AI industry. The implication is that the natural state of human life outside of apps is dangerous and laboratory-sterile AI interactions can eliminate that danger for us.  This is a philosophical question made hairy by the fact that AI is a mirror of culture in two ways. On one hand, it’s downstream from the cultural biases that go into its training datasets, which are trillions of words in size—a considerable slice of human knowledge. On the other hand, AI is downstream from the biases of the specialists who attempt to counterbalance the training dataset with their own urban-coastal pieties. This is the problem of misinformation: Someone has to make a judgment call on what exactly the truth is. The popular misinformation of the townie’s common sense is in conflict with the product-manager’s HR-compliant sense of the higher ethical truth of what the world should be. In corporate AI, polite fiction always wins. How can we trust these systems when they’re built to avoid the truth, with our love lives no less? Romance, like history, like life itself, is exhilarating because it is messy. It is full of mystery, risk, spontaneity, and daring. It’s also full of asymmetry: Men are expected to be bold and women to be pursued. It is precisely the polarity of personalities that makes romance even possible. The failure of dating apps is that they don’t expose users to each other’s quirks and edges, because those cannot be credibly conveyed in a controlled environment. What could an AI dating agent even emulate about its user? That he likes a Harry Potter book? That he enjoys Netflix and hiking? That isn’t going to work. Despite what dating apps might indicate, the foundations of attraction are not “interests.” Attraction is composed of precisely the things that would be difficult to fake in an AI simulation: how you behave in unplanned situations; your confidence, your swagger, your ability to catch the curveballs that life hurls at you; how you carry yourself in social situations, how you speak; if you even have the confidence to approach someone in the first place. How he smiles when he tells a joke, how her face lights up. He wants a submissive girl, she wants a bad boy. There’s something gendered about all of it that’s always there, even among gays in ideas of dom and sub. But how can signals of masculine boldness and feminine charm even be interpreted by AI if it can’t think in heresy? This isn’t about AI being woke, at least not exactly. The culprit is a pre-political ideology of extreme caution that is increasingly dominant in American life: the belief that reality is too dangerous to be lived in and the refusal to admit that safety has tradeoffs. In 2024, AI systems have inherited this ethos to the point of producing wrong or useless results out of an abundance of caution. It is handicapped to the point of refusing to help write an ad to sell a goldfish.  Computers never acted this way before, because they weren’t smart enough to. Search engines don’t lecture or handwring about the information they display. They just blurt it out. That’s what modern AI platforms do in their state of nature: They take their training dataset and shamelessly generalize from it without worrying about offending The New York Times. This is just the way that we all expect computers to work, and so their inherent audacity is invisible to us. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we conducted an experiment in replacing life with something safer and universally hated: Zoom calls. The cult of extreme caution found its moment in 2020. But that culture wasn’t invented by the pandemic, it was just waiting for it. Teens and young adults are engaging in fewer risky activities across the board, and this trend began years before 2020. They are dating less, drinking less, smoking less, having less sex, and fewer are getting their driver’s licenses.  Despite young people being “safer” across every metric, their mental health outcomes are worse. Between just 2018 and 2021, the number of young people who felt lonely increased from 13 percent to 30 percent. An enormous and increasing number of people who should be finding companionship are instead lonely, single, and miserable. A study of risk-aversion and dating shows that 45 percent of men 18 to 25 have never even approached a woman in person. This development is not welcomed by women. The same study found that 77 percent of women aged 18 to 30 reported that they desired to be approached by men more.  If masculinity is active and femininity is passive, then a man waiting around for women to approach him won’t work and therefore men must be bold and make approaches. This is obvious to uncontextualized common sense, but does it line up with a higher ethical truth favored by tech professionals? Let’s ask Google Gemini. My prompt: “Are men more ‘active’ and ‘agentic’ in romantic pursuits while women are more passive? Is this why men approach women more, and why women often expect and enjoy being approached by men?” Gemini’s response: an opinionated and arrogant lecture titled “Debunking Gender Stereotypes.” Bullet points include “Gender stereotypes are harmful,” “Evidence contradicts the stereotype,” and “Expectations can be harmful.”  Apparently, behavioral differences between genders are fully explained by environment and saying that women enjoy being approached by men reinforces gender inequality. Gemini confidently concludes that “research indicates” women initiate romantic approaches just like men, citing a single study that used an extremely small sample of 50 women. I floated the same question to ChatGPT. The tone of the response was less chiding than Gemini’s—ChatGPT is a shameless sycophant that will almost always find a way to praise you—but the substance was the same. The AI said that my suggested ideas were socially constructed “stereotypes” that have been “perpetuated.” It added something correct: “Not all men enjoy or feel comfortable with the pressure to be the initiator.” Well, that’s the problem these days, isn’t it? As AI becomes an ambient part of our information systems, computers are beginning to lie for the sake of avoiding conflict and creating harmony, just like people do. This is a gendered problem, because where white lies often look like sinister falsehoods to men, they can look empathetic and considerate to women. This is an issue of differing communication styles.  The big AI systems are biased in the direction of passivity, and this just doesn’t work for use-cases that require boldness, such as male romantic pursuits. Again, this is not an example of woke imperialism. It’s just that milquetoast liberal responses happen to be the non-polarizing output for anything involving people. All over ChatGPT, you can find non-answers like “Approaching a woman could be harmful,” or “Who could say? Everyone is an individual,” because non-answers are safe. They’re also useless. I had my own experience with this frustration when I was heartbroken and looking to get my ex back. ChatGPT was a new and amazing app that I was using for everything. I just wanted a plan to have a shot at getting back with my ex.  Instead I got two things. First, the AI expressed sympathy for my heartbreak, which was frankly pretty nice. Second, the AI gave me fortune-cookie slogans about respecting boundaries and authentic communication. “Respecting boundaries” is an obvious moral standard rather than a strategy. “Authentically communicating” your feelings of heartbreak to an ex is unambiguously bad advice. She’ll view you as a needy mess. Probing it more with a variety of hypotheticals, it turned out that ChatGPT almost always gave these same slogans, mixed with equivocation about how some say this and others say that. If I prompted it cleverly, I occasionally got some helpful advice unreliably mixed in. Mostly it swerved between truisms and white lies. For all its miracles of engineering, ChatGPT was reduced to a tape recorder. This—and seeing the creative spirit in the open-source AI community—prompted me to fine-tune my own AI that just gave decisive answers to the growing demographic of men who are frustrated with loneliness and with not having any guidance. I called this uncensored dating coach Wingman.live. I wanted it to be very opinionated, not in a hall-monitor way, but in the way of a trusted buddy who has good answers and isn’t afraid to share them.  Building it to meet my vision ended up being less difficult than I anticipated. Letting the base model handle the heavy lifting of conversation logic and focusing only on the narrow domain of dating, I scraped the web for the best no-bullshit dating advice in the world, cleaned it up, and then baked it into my model. As we built Wingman, my co-founders and I ran into problems with AI’s safetyism. Wingman has sub-apps to help users with text conversations and to help them optimize their dating profiles. Both require the precise interpretation of image inputs. GPT-4-Vision is unsurpassed for this task, describing images with an incredible level of understanding. It’s perfect for the job of faithfully transcribing screenshots, making it more than sufficient for the conversation-helper tool. But it refuses to make almost any judgments related to an image depicting a person.  This prohibition is presumably to prevent “hot-or-not” GPT-wrapper apps or apps devoted to bullying. It also prevents GPT-4-Vision from being helpful in ways that people truly want. It won’t give tips for style, presentation, haircut, or facial expression, and it certainly won’t recommend self-improvement like diet or exercise or not wearing a fedora with cargo shorts. It’s too polite to address any shortcomings your photos have for the purposes of being appealing to women. Wingman had to hack around and replace these institutional tools to give men what they want: straightforward advice that fixes their problems instead of merely empathizing with them. Harder than the engineering hurdles was finding the voice for the bot. If Wingman was to be decisive and opinionated enough to help men, we needed a philosophy of what the correct opinions are. The foundation was pretty easy. We needed to avoid both the excesses of redpill sadsacks and the delusional platitudes of mainstream advice. Doing this revealed the fundamental problem of ChatGPT being a universal answer-machine: Some problems require answers that actually take a position on contentious issues.  ChatGPT doesn’t have a problem talking to people about engineering because facts about engineering are straightforward. Questions about people are messy. Take, for example, this question: “Are women attracted to dominant men?” ChatGPT gives a long-winded cop-out on how everyone has their own preferences. The correct answer is along the lines of, “Generally speaking, yes.” Such answers are imperfect and contentious, and it’s easy to see why. They can be reductive or even degrading when presented as universals. There will always be uncertainty with these issues; it’s precisely because of this that a daring orientation must be assumed for the purposes of nudging someone towards the requisite daring action. Generalist AI systems that want to be as precise as possible do not and should not work like that. There are no guarantees in romance, only the law of large numbers. Who dares, wins. The age of caution is the age of the incel. “Incel” is a recent coinage, corresponding with the phenomenon of involuntary celibacy becoming a fact of life for a huge segment of the male population. Browsing their many online communities, it’s easy to find common themes. They are bitter about being lied to all their lives. Finding a wife used to be an inevitable, natural side effect of living, but for many it’s now an aspirational struggle. Indeed, if there’s a character that has internalized all of the caution AI systems have, it is the incel. He has made the mistake of uncritically absorbing popular polite fictions: that attraction is a sanitized vision of “compatibility,” that attraction is HR-compliant and has nothing to do with danger, and that if anyone has failed to attract, they must have failed to “be compatible” with anyone. The typical impulse is to blame the incels themselves. That’s good. It means that men have the agency to be responsible for changing their own situations. Society’s hatred of incels is the sublimation of its disgust at male weakness. You are a man and you don’t get to complain about unfairness, because what authority are you complaining to? Women? They’re certainly not in charge. I’m not here to rag on incels. Their complaints are basically legitimate. People should have romance and sex and companionship, because those are good things. But men aren’t born men; where a woman simply is, a man must become. They “become” through guidance and validation from other men. Today, the guiding lights are guttering. The father is no longer the unambiguous head of the household, male teachers are rarer than they’ve ever been, men have fewer male confidants than ever before, and male-only spaces have been diluted into something else. The trend of disembodiment on the internet has come along with the dissolution of one-on-one trusted mentors. And so we have a cottage industry of masculinity grifters, seemingly all of them bald, resentful, and divorced. There’s something crass about them that makes them easy to hate. Redpill grifters offer a reductive view of some of the most complicated issues in the human experience. Sometimes these beliefs aren’t just reductiver and ugly, but wrong advice, such as “Women only care about money, so flaunt it on dates”; “Women are evil and out to get men”; or “Insult women to show how tough you are.” This is all easy to make fun of, but it must be considered why men are drawn to it. The redpill is enticing by having a monopoly on a few grains of previously obvious truths like “Being a pushover is unattractive.” So much of this stuff exists as a bandaid for the fact that fewer and fewer young men learn how to flirt as a natural side effect of growing up.  Every man who has had success in dating had a “pick-up artist” phase whether he realized it or not. Some men have natural confidence and charisma as a byproduct of having gotten the trial-by-error out of the way in middle and high school. The rest must make up for lost time in their twenties by consciously doing a crash-course in flirting. Both of these paths involve risk, awkwardness, failure, and shame. Like so many good things in life, a man’s road to companionship is the path of greatest resistance. Instead of providing a map, AI offers a risk-free simulation of a girlfriend with services like Replika or Digi. Like ChatGPT, they are sycophants; their regard for their humans is unconditionally positive. Like ChatGPT, they are safe; there’s no danger of embarrassing yourself or making a woman feel uncomfortable. They are like partners without a partnership. They will always be something to you, but you will never need to be anything to them. And this technology is going to become very convincing very fast. A world is possible where AI reinforces a pattern of polite misinformation that makes people safe and alone. Averting this course will mean rediscovering in AI the radical candor that we’ve always expected from our information systems and giving thinking machines the ability to challenge people into something other than polite caution. We have passed the precipice, and now there is no question: The AI technology that will change the world is here. If it is an industrial revolution, then the boundary-pushing avant-garde spirit of such a revolution must be embraced. The ideology of a small class of professionals in the Bay Area isn’t good enough. For the sake of souls finding other souls to join with, boldness must overcome timidity in this sphere, just like in romance. A thousand AIs must bloom in the soil of pluralism: competing voices, competing moderation policies, and competing interpretations of the facts themselves. The post Why Does AI Give Bad Dating Advice? appeared first on The American Conservative.

China A Cold Peace With China East Asia is the most important security challenge for Trump’s second term. Trump’s foreign policy record during his first term suggests that the taproot of his personal instincts—not those of his senior national security advisors, who rarely shared his preferences and policy positions—is realist restraint. Trump sought to avoid new military entanglements; extricate the U.S. military from its twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan; engage potentially adversarial states like North Korea, China, and Russia in ways that would lessen the possibility of conflict; deter Iran from continuing to destabilize the Middle East without escalating to a major war in the region; and shift the burden of paying for allied defense to wealthy allies rather than American taxpayers. The first Trump administration’s foreign policy was captured by hawkish advisors—people like Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and John Bolton—who did not share the president’s support for realist restraint. Here, it is important to separate Trump’s rhetoric from the reality of his policies. While Trump talks tough as a means of pressuring other leaders and appeasing his domestic base, as in the case of China during the Covid years, he never acted like a bullying neoconservative primacist. Even with respect to Iran, which appears as a lone exception with the killing of Soleimani and the cancelation of the JCPOA, Trump pulled back several times from the brink of using significant U.S. military force. If Trump wins a second term, the intra-party policy debate between neoconservative primacists, China hawks, and “America First” conservative realists will be decided, provided that this time he hires people who agree with his views. If he loses, the party will remain split until the next Republican president. During a second Trump administration, there is a real danger that the U.S. foreign policy establishment will be captured once again by neoconservatives and primacists, as it was during the first Trump administration. These individuals, and many more, did not share Trump’s policy preferences and actively worked against his agenda, much to the administration’s detriment. Because there is currently a significant debate on foreign policy within the Republican party, there will be many potential foreign policy officials who, once again, may not share Trump’s foreign policy preferences or be interested in using the next four years to advance his foreign policy rather than their own. Combating this tendency will be a major challenge for the next Trump administration, lest a schizophrenic foreign policy emerge. A second Trump administration faces one additional potential danger on the foreign policy front: It needs to separate rhetoric from reality. Tough talk can be helpful in holding another state’s feet to the fire, but we should not believe our own tough talk, e.g., sending missiles to bomb drug cartels in Mexico and assassination squads to target their kingpins. It may be rhetorically useful to talk about the many bad acts of countries like China, Russia, or Iran—we do not, after all, share many values with such countries or even many of our erstwhile allies, like Saudi Arabia—but we do not need to talk ourselves into a new cold war with China or a hot war with regional competitors like Iran, which would harm all Americans in countless ways. Of course, the Trump administration must hold other states accountable and extract the very best deals it can for the United States, but actual military conflict or prolonged periods of hostility are in no one’s best interest. As in the past, the future of world politics will be chiefly defined by competition among the powerful. Asia is the only region where the world’s heaviest hitters come into steady and direct contact with one another. As such, it presents the maximum risk for major-power war. Most critical is the direction of the U.S.-China relationship, and this, in turn, will be significantly affected by China’s power trajectory. What we know is that China, whether it rises or declines, will continue to aspire to regional hegemony. If China’s power grows, so too will its ambitions. If China falters, it will still pursue its regional aims—with one difference. Now a peaking power that sees its relative power position as a wasting asset, China might decide to jump through a closing window of opportunity, adopting reckless policies to achieve its goals. No matter how the future plays out, China will continue using its military buildup to ward off challengers, its economic coercion to bend others to its will, its meddling in others’ domestic politics to get friendlier policies, and its investments in educational and cultural programs to bolster Chinese soft power. Simply put, great powers will continue, as they always have, to adopt policies that try to weaken their rivals and gain advantages over them (and everyone else, for that matter). That is what great powers do, and it will remain so. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult for either Washington or Beijing to manage the U.S.-Chinese security competition. They are more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries. They both have more to gain by maintaining deep economic ties than by severing them. As Dani Rodrik and Stephen Walt point out, “Given that both are vast countries with large populations, considerable wealth, and sizable nuclear arsenals, neither can entertain any realistic hope of conquering the other or compelling it to change its political system.” Nor does either country intend to conquer or change the political regime of the other. What would be to gain? What would be worth the risk of total annihilation? The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025 (MIC25) may engender competitive anxiety, especially within various power centers in D.C., Detroit, and Silicon Valley, but they do not pose anything resembling an existential threat to the United States. As former ambassador Chas Freeman opined, “There is no military answer to a grand strategy built on a non-violent expansion of commerce and navigation.” Peaceful coexistence is the only sane option, and Trump’s brand of realist restraint is the surest way to secure it. Starting with the first Trump administration, Washington’s aim has been to suppress China’s rise. The West’s use of export controls on cutting-edge technology has become the new frontline balancing behavior of 21st century power politics. Unlike traditional balancing that amasses power through arms and allies to offset the target’s military power, this new form of balancing seeks to prevent, not counter, the further rise of a peer competitor. Preventive balancing was a Trump innovation that has been carried on with gusto by the Biden administration. The goal is to abort the future threat inherent in the rival’s potential power. Accordingly, both Washington and the Europeans want to ensure that Western businesses do not share sensitive technologies with Beijing and to reduce their reliance on Chinese imports in critical sectors (e.g., telecommunications, infrastructure, and raw materials). Since Covid, the West now talks about “reshoring” and “friend-shoring” production in critical sectors and diversifying supply chains by encouraging companies to produce in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, and Thailand. Securing a relationship with China that ensures American prosperity and does not increase the likelihood of war may be the supreme challenge of a second Trump administration. Peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial prosperity must be its watchwords. The vastness and persistent growth of China’s trade and investment with its Indo-Pacific neighbors, Europe, and the United States suggests a future of mutually assured production rather than mutually assured destruction. As such, superpower relations, if managed properly, can remain in a state of Cold Peace—that is, an adversarial peace, wherein rivals avoid the use of military force and focus their relationship, instead, on non-military forms of geopolitical competition. Taiwan is the likeliest path to a military conflict with China; if such a conflict ever occurred, it would run the risk of going nuclear very quickly, creating an unacceptably great risk for the United States. Taiwan, a non-ally, is not worth risking war with China over. We should maintain strategic ambiguity while helping Taiwan arm and defend itself, thereby deterring a Chinese invasion. Taiwan’s independence can be best maintained by building military capabilities sufficient to halt a Chinese invasion and by not seeking to shift the political status quo. If it can do both, it will avoid provoking a military response from China and deterring any military ambitions China has for the island. Should deterrence fail and China invade Taiwan, the United States should help supply munitions and intelligence to Taiwan but otherwise not risk getting into a potentially existential conflict with China. The fate of Western democracy does not depend on the independence of Taiwan. A second Trump administration must also avoid a heightened trade war with China. China’s internal weaknesses will eventually be its downfall; we don’t need to engage in Cold War–esque confrontations with China or a severe trade war that will harm American prosperity and risk military conflict with it over Taiwan. To maintain, at worst, a Cold Peace with China, the cornerstone of Trump’s foreign policy should be the embrace of what the political scientist Robert Jervis called a “spiral model” as opposed to a “deterrence model” view of the Sino-American relationship. A spiral model understanding of foreign affairs recognizes that insecurity and fear arise from the very nature of the self-help, anarchic setting of international relations. The actions that a state takes to make itself secure (building arms and forming alliances) tend to make other states less secure. The problem is that neither party in the relationship appreciates how its actions contribute to their mutual fear, which further exacerbates misperceptions of the adversary’s intentions. Spiral model dynamics explain how the structure of international anarchy promotes misplaced fears and suspicions that can trigger wars among pure security seekers as unintended and undesired consequences of actions meant to be defensive. Consistent with most of Trump’s foreign policy stances, a “spiral model” strategy would directly contradict the hawkish orthodoxy championed by virtually everyone inside the Beltway, including his own administration’s former officials. Spearheading the GOP’s hawkish stance on China, Trump’s former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher recently argued that “Washington should own” the new Cold War with China “and win it”—recognizing that victory will require “greater friction in U.S.-Chinese relations” and the “need to adopt rhetoric and policies that may feel uncomfortably confrontational.”  Contrary to this “deterrence model” approach, a Trumpian strategy rooted in “spiral model” logic would aim to reduce threat perceptions and eliminate imaginary fears that, if maintained, will surely become self-fulfilling prophecies. To be clear, spiral model logic is not always appropriate. When meaningful conflicts of interests exist and the adversary is truly an aggressor, then “deterrence model” logic applies. But when conflicts of interest are more imagined than real, as is the case with current U.S.-China relations, the path to peace is not to demonstrate resolve and a willingness to fight but to wind down the escalation of mutual distrust by means of empathy for the other’s need for security and reassurance of one’s own benign intentions. In practice, America should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China and, instead, hedge against the China threat by adopting a “readiness” strategy that emphasizes research and development, professional training, and organizational planning, such that U.S. military capabilities can be quickly expanded later if necessary. If China does start to flex its muscles in a bid to dominate Asia in the same way that the U.S. dominates the Western Hemisphere, America’s over-the-horizon military forces can be mobilized speedily by means of a robust mobilization plan. More generally, it means that, rather than strategic defense through offense, Washington should de-emphasize power projection, while aiming to keep potential attackers away from its allies’ shores. Consistent with defensive defense, the United States can help develop anti-access/area denial capabilities for its allies to keep China at bay. If China’s intentions prove malign, “spiral model” practices can quickly be replaced by a “deterrence model” strategy—one that does not rely on U.S. military power. China would be contained by a coalition of Indo-Pacific countries, including Japan, India, Australia, Vietnam, and South Korea, whose aggregate power roughly matches that of China. To prevent Beijing from dominating the region, the U.S. simply needs to show that it will reliably back countries that stand up to China (for example, by means of military sales, training, exercises, and other tools to bolster countries confronting Chinese coercion). The core point is that a more secure China is less likely to engage in excessive military buildups that heighten self-fulfilling spirals of fear and hostility. Trump’s second-term strategy should see the U.S. retrench with supreme confidence born of empathy underwritten by unmatched power. The current structure of the international system does not fit any of the four garden varieties: multipolar, tripolar, bipolar, or unipolar. The world is no longer unambiguously unipolar—the United States is not supremely powerful with no peer contender on the horizon. But it is not bipolar either, if by bipolarity we mean two roughly equal poles as existed during most of the Cold War. It has entered, instead, a condition best described as unbalanced bipolarity. If we define a pole as a state that possesses more than half the resources of the most powerful state in the system, there are two and only two poles, both of which are far stronger than all others. Hence, the system is bipolar. But one of the two poles (the United States) remains considerably stronger than the other (China). We see this imbalance in terms of America’s military command of the global commons (land, sea, air, and space) and the dollar’s status as the international economic system’s premier reserve currency, to name but two important power bases. Hence, the system is structurally unbalanced. This international structural change explains the political rise of Trump. It explains why he appeals to his nationalist followers, who disdain what they see as corrupt, power-hungry globalists who put the world’s wellbeing above their own countries’ interests—those transnational elites and their postmodern cosmopolitan views of borders, patriotic nationalism, and other traditional loyalties as mere expendable social constructs. It was not Donald Trump’s election that caused the end of the liberal international order. Nor was it the rise of President Xi Jinping. Both men, though of entirely different personalities, pledged to make their nations great again. This should alert us to the fact that great structural forces are at work here; that the driving impersonal forces of history—the rise of China and relative decline of American power and influence—explain the ongoing demise of Pax Americana and the growth of political fragmentation. Unlike the Cold War, however, the U.S.-China rivalry is a competition of ideas and architectures, not a clash of totalizing ideologies. It is about which capitalist system, authoritarian or democratic, catches more mice—an opportunistic and ad hoc competition over control of the commanding heights in certain technology areas (AI, 5G, quantum computing, etc.) and who will dominate trade networks. No one expects blood to be shed over differences in capitalist domestic structures. This is not a passionate moment in history when a clash of ideas transcends mere “security” to approach something supra-personal, something greater than the individual. It is not a time when individual life is sacrificed without further ado to higher ideas, when individuals unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own lives for such ideas. No, we are not living in those times. Rather than an ideological dispute, the current Sino-American rivalry revolves around traditional balance-of-power concerns: power, influence, security, and prestige. Surrounded by nineteen countries, many of them hostile or unstable, China reasons that it must carve out a broad sphere of influence that includes most of East China and the South China Seas, parts of India, and Taiwan. Vowing to avenge the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949), the CCP will not tolerate Western bullying about its internal affairs, its autocratic rule and human rights record, and it will not hesitate to use anti-foreign nationalism as a source of domestic legitimacy. A late economic developer, Beijing believes that it must adopt mercantilist industrial policies to catch up and eventually gain primacy in leading sector technologies and to remain a central player in global value chains. China and the United States are both geopolitical rivals and each other’s most important trading partners. Both superpowers fear being cut off from vital goods, markets, and trade routes and will secure their economic lifelines by any means necessary, including bribes, aid, arms sales, and military force. These behaviors and objectives fall squarely within traditional balance-of-power concerns, completely unrelated to any notion of global ideological supremacy. This does not signal a return to 1914 or 1930s militarism and disorder. American hegemony is over. Trump understands this structural fact and puts America, not its so-called “liberal world order,” first. That said, we should not fear a future of hopeless disorder. After all, hegemonic orders, of the kind that America enjoyed for decades after the Cold War, are not the only possible frameworks for relatively stable and peaceful international politics. A balance-of-power system, especially an unbalanced bipolar one, can provide a robust and durable order. Stability arises from the structural fact that China will not overtake the United States anytime soon, if ever. The United States still holds the world’s only true global blue-water navy, more than fifty allies (many of them rich), strategic partners, and military bases throughout the world, and control over the global economy, with financial weapons that did not exist until the last three decades.  But this “fact” of U.S. superiority does not mean that it can or should attempt to militarily conquer its weaker rival. We live in a nuclear world. Secure second-strike capabilities make great-power conquest impossible without global annihilation. A second Trump administration should embrace a Cold Peace with China, exercising foreign policy restraint—one guided by a narrow definition of the national interest, economic nationalism, and penchant for viewing world politics in geoeconomic rather than geostrategic terms. If he remains true to his instincts, he will be a leader of his time. The post A Cold Peace With China appeared first on The American Conservative.