Today, H.R. McMaster cautions against judging the Trump-Xi summit on promises made rather than ongoing realities in the US-China relationship; Lee Ohanian reflects on the long train of delays and cost overruns that have marred California’s High-Speed Rail project; and Paola Sapienza remembers James Wilson’s impactful contributions to the Constitutional Convention, where he emphasized that government in the United States derives its powers from the people.
Confronting and Competing with China
“The Trump-Xi summit is occurring as China continues to underwrite Russia’s war on Ukraine, support the Islamic Republic of Iran, conduct offensive cyberattacks against the United States, and engage in various forms of economic aggression against Europe, the United States, Japan, and other nations,” Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster writes at his History We Don’t Know Substack. The former national security advisor recalls that the most significant promises Xi Jinping made to President Obama during his last state visit to Washington were lies, so “it is not unreasonable to assume that promises made during this year’s visit to the Trump White House will also result in disappointment and continued aggression against the United States, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and other US allies and partners.” McMaster then shares an excerpt from his 2020 book Battlegrounds explaining the long history of “strategic narcissism” in American policy toward China. Read more here.
California Politics & Policy
A state that once built vast dams and aqueducts has been mired in decades of broken promises and dysfunction over a project that was born with a wholly inadequate funding mechanism, Senior Fellow Lee Ohanian argues at California on Your Mind. “A report released earlier this month by High-Speed Rail’s inspector general documented that nearly 60 percent of California High-Speed Rail consultant travel expenses reimbursed by the state violated contracts and/or state rules, including visits to an escape room . . . nightclubs, and a tiki bar,” Ohanian reports. Ohanian, who has testified before the US House of Representatives on the California High-Speed Rail project, provides a history of incomplete plans, construction delays, and ballooning costs associated with this infamous railway. As of today, he writes, “the project still has yet to lay any track.” Read more here.
In an opinion column for the Orange County Register, Research Fellow David R. Henderson and coauthor Francois Melese consider how the proposed 5% tax on billionaire wealth in California will affect the state’s innovation economy. “California’s economy is substantially built on its startup ecosystem,” the authors write. “Voters should therefore,” in their view, “be especially cautious about policies that target the very mechanism that produced that prosperity.” Using the case of Google as a case study, Henderson and Melese note that “a billionaire tech founder’s wealth is only a small slice of the value he or she created for society,” with most gains flowing to those who benefit from utilizing innovations. Read more here. [Registration required.]
Freedom Frequency
As the Constitution took shape, Founder James Wilson spoke up on many facets of the novel document—notably on naturalization. The views of Wilson, an immigrant himself, about popular sovereignty naturally led him to stress the value of newcomers who would become Americans not through a process of gatekeeping but through their consent to join other free people, writes Senior Fellow Paola Sapienza. That assertion of the value of immigration has faced many challenges in the United States, even up to today, she writes. And Wilson himself was a figure of contradictions, his life ending in a North Carolina tavern where he was hiding out from his creditors. Still, the guiding star that emerged from the constitutional discussions Wilson helped to shape was the tenet that “a nation constituted by consent, and competing for the world’s talent and ambition, would outbuild nations constituted by birth alone,” Sapienza writes. Read more here.
Science and Technology
Writing at Robohub, Senior Fellow Allison Okamura and coauthor Ellen H. Rumley show how beyond public spectacles such as the recent and widely publicized Robot Olympics, China is advancing “a bold agenda for global economic dominance,” with robotics as a “core engine to project power and dictate the future of global supply chains.” The essay shows how China leverages state coercion to orient industry and private capital alike around five-year strategic plans. As the global robotics research community continues to investigate “whether humanoids are the ideal form factor for general-purpose robots,” Beijing has decided to place “a large gamble on humanoids.” They conclude that this state-directed investment in the absence of real market demand may lead to speculation and inflated valuations in the human-shaped robotics space. China’s push for humanoid robots thus “represents a high-risk, high-reward strategy,” Okamura and Rumley write. Read more here.
Related Commentary