Productive Capacity

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 […]

Building the Institutions of Strategic Capital

The following insights emerged from a WISC roundtable with senior leaders from government, finance, industry, academia, and think tanks. Held under the Chatham House Rule, they examined how democratic societies can mobilize capital at strategic scale. The old economic playbook in democratic economies drew a strict boundary between public governance and private capital. State intervention […]

Allied Sovereign-Private Partnerships: Aligning Fiduciary Duty with Strategic Competition

The second SPP essay, built around the U.S. government’s transaction with MP Materials, concluded that strategic competition requires a deliberate allied architecture spanning capital, infrastructure, and industrial capacity. This article examines one of the earliest instances of that architecture taking institutional form: the restructuring of Syrah Resources, in which sovereign and allied institutional capital were […]

Input to USTR: USMCA’s Overlooked Value

As submitted November 2, 2025\ One question underpins the last decade of U.S. trade policy: what are trade agreements worth? Common criticisms cite everything from soaring trade deficits and manufacturing job losses to environmental degradation and infringements on national sovereignty. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is no exception. Since its entry into force in 2020, […]

America’s Allies are Essential to Economic Security.

The United States trade policy has overcorrected. In 2015, a bipartisan consensus formed around the idea that America’s trade agreements were too intrusive. Agreements such as the World Trade Organization and NAFTA were seen to overly restrict the U.S.’s ability to defend itself from anti-competitive behaviors, including subsidies and dumping. A new generation of trade […]

Minimum Wage Hikes Accelerate the Robot Revolution

Leverage Wins Headlines; Architecture Wins the Future

Photo: Tower Bridge, London — a symbol of enduring architecture, connecting past and future. True strength lies not in leverage, but in the structures of trust we build together. Reflections after Busan—how America and its partners can transform temporary leverage into lasting architecture, building systems of resilience, reach, and trust that endure beyond any single […]

Sparking an Industrial Reawakening

This essay is part of the Made in Democracy series, exploring how allied nations can rebuild industrial and technological strength to sustain freedom in a more contested world. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________   Across capitals from Washington to Tokyo to Berlin, a quiet consensus is emerging: nations that value openness and transparency cannot secure prosperity or peace if they […]

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 […]

Millions in the U.S. take this drug. Tariffs might complicate their care.