Frontiers of Freedom Blog

Overview

The Frontiers of Freedom blog explores the evolving frontlines of the systems race—where competition now runs through artificial intelligence, infrastructure, productive capacity, and alliances. These fault lines increasingly cut across digital platforms, semiconductor supply chains, energy systems, shipping corridors, and the rules that govern global markets. Each post analyzes where freedom is advancing, where it is under pressure, and how open societies must respond—and scale.

About the Author

Mark R. Kennedy is a first-generation college graduate whose leadership spans public service, higher education, global strategy, and civic renewal. He has served as President of both the University of Colorado and the University of North Dakota, and as a U.S. Congressman from Minnesota.

Learn More about Mark Kennedy here.

Mind The Gap

The “Mind the Gap” series highlights where strategy fails in execution—where ambitions in AI, infrastructure, production, and alliances outpace institutional capacity. These short essays expose the disconnects that determine whether systems scale—or stall.

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Featured

Critical Minerals Need a Full Operating System

Mining and stockpiles are not enough. Mineral security requires a competitive system spanning recovery, extraction, refining, advanced operations and manufacturing. Washington is assembling the pieces of a serious critical-minerals strategy. It is accelerating domestic projects, negotiating supply agreements with allies and supporting new processing capacity. Last Thursday, President Trump extended the Defense Production Act authority […]

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Recalibration: What Europe Is Actually Thinking Right Now

The views reported here are those of European interlocutors (senior government and business leaders, academics, and representatives of think tanks and international organizations) not assessments of the merits of any specific American policy. European perceptions of American reliability will shape technology and security decisions that matter for democratic competitiveness. WISC shares these perspectives so policymakers […]

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Summit Mismatch: China Thinks in Systems. America Thinks in Transactions.

As President Donald Trump prepares to meet Xi Jinping in Beijing, much of the discussion will focus on tariffs, trade balances, and whether the two leaders can stabilize tensions after the Iran conflict. Those issues matter. But they are not the real story. The more important question is whether the United States fully understands the […]

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Building an AI Stack the World Wants to Choose

Over the past several months, as the U.S. government has begun exploring how to structure “tech stacks” for AI exports, one theme has emerged in nearly every conversation I’ve had with innovators: deep anxiety that Washington’s approach might inadvertently advantage one segment of the tech industry over another. You hear it in the voice of the […]

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The AI Systems Race Runs Through India

Strategic competition is no longer decided by who invents the most advanced technology. It is decided by who can assemble, finance, and deploy entire systems—at scale, at speed, and over time. In that contest, India has quietly become the most important proving ground in the world. Not because India is declaring technological leadership. Not because it is aligning […]

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The Nuclear Stack: Why America Needs a Coherent Strategy for the Atomic Age

The United States is racing to build a technology stack for the 21st century—chips, compute, data centers, talent, standards, and alliances to secure leadership in artificial intelligence. But there is a dangerous mismatch between our digital ambition and our physical preparedness. There is no tech stack without an energy stack. And there is no credible energy stack […]

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Made in Democracy

This post launches my Made in Democracy series, part of my broader Mind the Gap effort to expose the distance between what democracies aspire to achieve and the tools they have prepared to achieve it. From Arsenal to Afterthought In the middle of the 20th century, the U.S. was the world’s leading manufacturer. The U.S. produced […]

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Outrunning the Dragon Means Running Together

Author’s Note This essay opens my new series, Toward a Trusted Tech Alliance, exploring how democracies can move from fragmentation to common cause in the digital era. At its core is what I call a Digital Steel Accord — in other words, a foundational agreement on data and AI standards, narrow enough to be practical […]

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