Today, Amit Seru, while noting the promise of a public digital dollar, cautions against handing cryptocurrency business interests the keys to the future of the US currency system; H.R. McMaster analyzes President Trump’s speech last week to the UN and shares his experience helping to prepare the president for a similar address eight years ago; and Matthew Turpin highlights a very recent and revealing story showing the consequences of standing up to the Chinese Communist Party.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In a guest opinion column for The New York Times, Senior Fellow Amit Seru examines a piece of cryptocurrency legislation currently before Congress and cautions that it could “punt the future of our monetary system to Silicon Valley.” As Seru notes, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act “would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing or even piloting a government-issued digital currency (in other words, a rival to privately issued stablecoins) without congressional approval.” If passed, the measure would make the US “the only major economy to voluntarily rule out government-issued digital money.” Seru suggests that lawmakers instead seize this opportunity to develop public infrastructure in the digital money space. Seru argues that deploying public digital money “would foster public trust in government, give the less wealthy access to efficient banking, and equip America with a powerful tool to expand its influence globally.” Read more here. [Subscription required.]
Determining America’s Role in the World
In a post for his Substack History We Don’t Know, Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster evaluates President Trump’s speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. McMaster finds that the “speech and Trump’s subsequent Truth Social posting on Russia’s war on Ukraine also revealed the enduring dissonance Trump carries with him in foreign policy and national security: the tension between his belief in ‘pursuing peace through strength’ and his inclination to retrench because the United States shoulders an unfair share of the burden for international security.” McMaster shares an excerpt from his book Battlegrounds discussing how he assisted President Trump’s preparations for a similar speech to the UN eight years ago. The former national security advisor explains how he “tried to help an unconventional and iconoclastic President reconcile his dissonance, clarify his foreign policy agenda, and communicate that agenda to an international audience.” Read more here.
Confronting and Competing with China
Visiting Fellow Matthew Turpin opens his weekly China Articles newsletter with a harrowing and very recent example of the real-world consequences of speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Turpin explains how Nathan Law, the youngest-ever person elected to the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (but prevented from taking office in 2016 by CCP meddling), was denied entry into Singapore last week and detained, despite holding a valid visa. “The most obvious explanation for the detention and deportation from Singapore is that Beijing demanded it,” writes Turpin. “And that should terrify anyone who thought that Singapore would be a bulwark against this sort of intimidation and coercion.” Fortunately, Law was deported to the United States instead of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and was admitted into the country by immigration officials in San Francisco. Turpin notes how Law’s journey “could have ended very differently if Beijing got what it wanted with an extradition to the PRC.” Read more here.
Higher Education
In his weekly column for RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz examines the crisis in American higher education and highlights the recent appointment of William Inboden as executive vice president and provost at UT Austin as a promising model of reform. Berkowitz argues that colleges and universities have "gravely mismanaged" their institutions for decades by fostering intellectual environments where students fear challenging progressive orthodoxy, corrupting curricula to reflect narrow political beliefs, and enforcing illiberal rules selectively. After identifying structural obstacles to reform—including tenure systems that entrench intellectual conformity, administrators drawn from a like-minded professoriate, and funding disconnected from performance—Berkowitz praises Inboden's argument that, despite accepting substantial public benefits, universities have broken their "academic social contract" with American society by failing to provide beneficial research and citizenship education. Berkowitz concludes that systemic reform will require multiple approaches, including expanding alternative programs (like summer courses at think tanks) and founding new institutions. Read more here.
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