Today, the GoodFellows discuss the Iranian regime’s deadly response to protests, the possible annexation of Greenland, and the investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Matt Pottinger and Roy Eakin argue that 2026 could prove to be as important a year for geopolitics as 1989. And Andrew B. Hall used AI to extend the results of a 2020 paper he wrote: How did the AI perform? Hall hired a doctoral student to find out.
Determining America’s Role in the World
As the Iranian regime continues to use live ammunition against unarmed protesters in Iran, the GoodFellows turn to what the Trump administration’s abiding interest is in other bad regimes (Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia) and what the possibility of annexation, purchase, or invasion of Greenland says about the American president’s worldview. Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, and H.R. McMaster discuss with Bill Whalen the policy options for Iran now that the reported death toll has reached the thousands; the relative silence from the same campus leftists who fervently protested the war in Gaza; Nixonian echoes in Trump’s foreign policy; plus, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s emergence as a geopolitical jack-of-all-trades. In the second segment, Cochrane weighs in on the significance of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell; McMaster contends America’s designs on Greenland are no laughing matter; and Ferguson previews what to expect from Trump’s appearance at the upcoming World Economic Forum in Davos. Watch or listen to the episode here.
In The Free Press, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Matt Pottinger and coauthor Roy Eakin argue that the world events of early 2026 resemble the rapid collapse of the Warsaw Pact states in 1989, “with a vaster range of possible outcomes for world order.” With the regime in Tehran wobbling, the Trump administration’s pushing to seize Greenland, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro removed from power, and China’s getting ever bolder in its military exercises around Taiwan, Pottinger and Eakin say that Trump’s preference for “raw power over lofty ideas” may get a desirable result, albeit inadvertently. “[Trump] might end up destabilizing several autocracies and [open] the door to greater freedom in Latin America and the Middle East. In that sense, 2026 wears a perfume of irony,” they write. Read more here. [Subscription required.]
The Economy
On the latest episode of Economics, Applied, Vanderbilt University Law School professor and author Rebecca Haw Allensworth joins host Steven J. Davis to discuss her new book on occupational licensing, which covers one-fifth of all American jobs. Job licensing reduces supply, limits competition, raises prices, and harms consumers, benefiting incumbent practitioners at the public's expense, she says. The US approach to licensing is especially prone to conflicts of interest and poor performance. Allensworth offers several proposals to fix the licensing system, and Davis offers his thoughts as well. Watch or listen to the episode here.
Artificial Intelligence
On his Substack, Senior Fellow Andrew B. Hall continues to document his use of AI to extend and elaborate on his existing research. In an earlier post, he chronicled how he used generative AI to extend the findings of a paper he published in 2020 on the impact of voting by mail, to include data and results from the 2022 and 2024 election cycles. “Then I did something that, as far as I know, no one else has done yet,” Hall writes. He hired a UCLA PhD student to audit the now expanded paper about voting by mail. The manual audit found a few mistakes, but the accuracy of most of the paper’s findings was very high. Hall says the AI “made mistakes—missed some races, failed to run calculations it had the inputs for, documented poorly. But it produced, in less than one hour, work that took a trained researcher several days to verify.” Read more here.
Reforming K–12 Education
On the latest episode of The Education Exchange podcast, Senior Fellow Paul E. Peterson speaks with Aaron Garth Smith, director of education reform at the Reason Foundation, about Garth’s new findings showing public school districts are adding more specialized, nonteaching staff, flatlining teaching salaries in the aggregate, and devoting more money to retiree pensions, even as enrollment is flat or declining. Adjusting for inflation, Smith tells Peterson that average teacher salaries nationwide have declined by about 6% over the last several decades. Listen to their conversation here.
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