Today, Glenn Tiffert speaks to congressional members about the impact of multidomain US-China competition on working American families; Eyck Freymann and coauthors consider how the US and its allies should define and approach “critical” economic dependencies on adversary nations; and a new short video from the Stanford Emerging Technology Review explains how embracing cutting-edge energy technologies promises to bolster the US economy as well as national security.
Confronting and Competing with China
Distinguished Research Fellow Glenn Tiffert served last week as a witness on an official roundtable convened by the House Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs—part of the larger House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The roundtable examined US-China competition across AI, energy, manufacturing, critical minerals, and pharmaceuticals, with a focus on impacts on working families. Tiffert explained in his remarks how China is keen to secure its own destiny across economic and technological domains. He also noted how US energy production has become a critical bottleneck for American AI development, and the importance of addressing America’s energy shortfall in ways that don’t hike prices for residential consumers. Read more here.
The United States and its allies lack a systematic way to identify the kinds of “critical” needs that figure so prominently in the current geopolitical competition with China. Economic dependencies can turn into weapons, write the authors of a new Hoover research paper, excerpted today in Defining Ideas. They have sketched out a four-layered rubric for identifying which commodities, products, and technologies are truly critical. This goes beyond finding chokepoints in world trade, they argue. The paper helps to clarify which chokepoints matter, how likely they are to be “weaponized,” how to involve allies, and how to approach critical needs as quickly and economically as possible. Read more here.
Stanford Emerging Technology Review
Can America solve the energy trilemma that demands affordable, reliable, and clean power all at once? The United States already leads the world in breakthrough energy technologies such as small modular reactors, advanced batteries, carbon capture, and green hydrogen. By embracing these technologies nationwide, the United States can meet evolving energy needs and simultaneously strengthen America’s national security, drive economic growth, and outpace strategic competitors in the race for energy dominance. Watch here.
Freedom Frequency
Most people know Social Security is facing insolvency before long, but the costs of Medicare will hit even harder over the next decade, according to a new Plot Points analysis in Freedom Frequency. Policy Fellow Tom Church shows how Medicare’s share of the deficit is climbing steeply, to the point where subsidies and interest will account for nearly half of all federal government borrowing during the next 10 years. Payroll taxes do cover most of the hospital benefit, Medicare Part A—for now, at least—but Parts B and D, legally required to be subsidized by taxpayers, are already mostly built on debt, and the costs of those programs are rising faster than consumer inflation. And don’t blame the retiring baby boom cohort for those costs, Church argues: The real culprit is skyrocketing per-person spending. Read more here.
Religion in American Politics
Peter Berkowitz uses his weekly column at RealClearPolitics to evaluate the message of Vice President JD Vance’s new book reflecting on his religious journey, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. Berkowitz credits Vance for expressing “firm convictions while acknowledging his imperfect knowledge and expressing respect for those who see matters differently.” Yet Berkowitz sees some missed opportunities in this religious memoir from a serving VP, chiefly Vance’s neglect of Founding-era arguments from the likes of James Madison concerning religious liberty and the importance of non-establishment. “It is incumbent on an American vice president who wades into matters of religion and politics,” Berkowitz concludes, “to state clearly that however much America has been a nation of Christians it was not founded as a Christian nation, and promulgating Christianity, however much it may fortify and elevate democracy in America, is the task of the Church and of churches and not of government.” Read more here.
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