Stephen K. Mack.
Jun 13, 2026
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a private nonprofit American institution of research founded in 1943 by American industrialist Lewis H. Brown. One of the oldest and most-influential think tanks in the United States, it supports limited government, private enterprise, and democratic capitalism. Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
AEI originally consisted of 12 resident thinkers who set up the institute to serve as an advocate for big business and the promotion of free enterprise. It became a major research organization and think tank in the 1970s, under the leadership of William Baroody, Sr., who served as president of the institute until 1978. During his presidency the AEI expanded to 145 resident scholars, 80 adjunct scholars, and a large support staff.
From its founding the AEI played a prominent role in politics in the United States, and people affiliated with the organization have served in influential government positions. Its influence grew stronger during the administration of Pres. George W. Bush, in which Dick Cheney, an AEI member, served as vice president of the United States. Also, because most of the AEI’s board of directors are typically CEOs of major U.S. companies, the organization can also exercise considerable influence through its connections in the business world.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-Enterprise-Institute
Editor: Does Mr. Brands 4012 word essay move any reader to pay close attention to this political monstorsity, as it evolves in the telling? Reader the only course open to the reader is Selective Quotation from this exercise in __________? Or should that Reader think of The Age Of Feacture? as a possible or even an attemp at considerations beyond his ken?
Posted on November 30, 2025 by stephenkmacksd
Editor: My comment from October 20, 2017.
Nov 20, 2025
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
Perry Anderson
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
Headline: After Catalans, Italian regions step up autonomy call
Sub-headline:Northern League uses Lombardy and Veneto referendums to push for special status
Its not just the European Project that is under threat from the dreaded Populist Monster , but the Nation State, the very foundation of Monnet’s Coal and Steel cartel, that suffers from the pretensions of Democracy, as it has evolved. First the long historical evolution of Catalan, and now the lukewarm votes in Lombardy and Veneto for ‘more autonomy’, approved by the Italian Constitutional Court.
This ambiguous position is reflected in Sunday’s referendums, which are consultative and non-binding. They are carefully phrased to ask voters if they want more “autonomy” without threatening “national unity”. Unlike the Catalan vote they have been approved by the Italian constitutional court.
As informative as this news story by Rachel Sanderson is, as to the political actors in the Italian politics of the present, should the reader look to Daniel T. Rogers’ book ‘Age of Fracture‘, written in an American political/historical/economic context, for a telling simile/metaphor for the evolving European crisis? That describes both the EU and the Nation State, caught in the rip tide of history, exacerbated by the utterly failed Neo-Liberal Dispensation?
A link to Prof. Rogers book:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064362
Philosophical Apprentice
https://www.ft.com/content/c2712ffa-acd9-11e7-beba-5521c713abf4
By Hal Brands
Foreign Policy is a global affairs magazine offering diverse perspectives on issues shaping nations and the world.
The war in the Persian Gulf has created global shock waves—by roiling the world economy, unsettling U.S. alliances, creating epic disruptions to freedom of navigation, and bringing the nuclear nonproliferation order to a tipping point. But one of the most important and potentially destabilizing implications of this conflict has been to throw U.S. strategic insolvency into harsh relief.
The war has featured impressive tactical feats by the United States and Israel, such as the killing of dozens of high-ranking Iranian officials in the opening hours of the fight. The capabilities on display over Tehran—and U.S. President Donald Trump’s penchant for military risk-taking—have surely been sobering for Washington’s adversaries in Moscow and Beijing. Yet the war has had more ambiguous, sometimes damaging, strategic outcomes. It has also caused an alarming depletion of key U.S. weapons stockpiles while ripping capabilities away from other dangerous theaters. In short, the conflict has badly strained a military that has been trying to do too much with too little for far too long.
There’s a saying in the Defense Department that every U.S. war plan is an existential threat to all the other war plans. A draining conflict in the Middle East may make it harder for Washington to deter a far more devastating fight in the Western Pacific—and usher in a dangerous period in which an overtaxed U.S. military struggles to respond to surging global risks.
Danger doesn’t have to bring disaster: It’s possible that the United States will navigate the coming years without a catastrophic failure of deterrence. Crises can have silver linings: If this crisis catalyzes greater, sustained urgency in closing the gap between the Pentagon’s sprawling commitments and its all-too-finite capabilities, it may have a salutary strategic effect. But the period immediately ahead looks menacing. The world is getting more violent and more disordered—just as Trump’s war has made Washington’s chronic overstretch more acute.
Trump didn’t create the problem of U.S. military and strategic overstretch. It has been building across multiple presidencies.
Over the past two decades, the global threat environment has gotten uglier and more crowded. A country that once towered over adversaries now faces challenges from revisionist great powers, angry rogue states, and tenacious nonstate foes. Looming above all other dangers is a new cold war—with the risk of a catastrophic hot war—against a relentlessly arming China. Yet the United States has sought to handle what increasingly looks like a perilous prewar situation with a post-Cold War approach to military spending. U.S. defense budgets, typically between 3 and 4 percent of GDP, have remained low by historical standards. Fatigue from long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 made the politics of defense more difficult. The predictable result has been a growing mismatch between Washington’s global commitments and its military resources—a mismatch that one nonpartisan expert commission after another has identified and that one administration after another has tried and failed to fix.
The seemingly perpetual pattern is one in which each new administration promises to better apportion scarce resources through stricter prioritization—only to end up intervening in precisely those places it aimed to avoid. Barack Obama promised a pivot to the Pacific but ended up mired back in the Middle East. The first Trump administration touted the return of great-power rivalry but was then consumed by crises with North Korea and Iran. Joe Biden sought to stabilize relations with Moscow and Tehran so that the Pentagon could finally gear up for China. But then Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the Middle East exploded a year later. The desire for focus and the divestment of lesser problems has consistently collided with the realities of a messy world in which Washington still has global interests. Trump’s second term was supposed to fix this problem but made it much worse.
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Stephen K. Mack
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