Science & Technology

Stephen Walt analyzes the priority that the United States should place on competing with China by asking and answering five questions.

Why should Washington save Intel? The answer most frequently provided by policymakers is that the U.S. produces no advanced chips, putting it at risk of losing a conflict with China if Taiwan is unable to ship chips across the Pacific. In reality, this is a canard. Peter Wennink, CEO of Dutch lithography giant ASML, dispelled this myth in December, saying that “it is common knowledge that chip technology for purely military applications is usually 10, 15 years old.” America’s warfighting capability is not meaningfully undermined by its lack of production of advanced chips as even platforms like the F-35 fighter jet use only legacy chips.

Stephen Walt offers some brief foreign-policy advice for the newest members of the U.S. legislature.

Ivan Arreguin-Toft analyzes the West's information technology asymmetry of capability, which has given way to asymmetry of vulnerability. While democracies worldwide remain threatened, they also contain the means to restore themselves.

Ivan Arreguin-Toft argues that non-material considerations like cyber power matter just as much as material ones in debates about U.S. retrenchment from the Middle East.

Joseph Nye writes that even at this early stage, there are at least eight lessons— some old, some new— that the world is learning (or relearning) from the war in Ukraine.

High broadband access and adoption rates can significantly improve earnings and net worth. Yet, year after year, Black and Brown Americans are among the most disparately impacted by digital inequities, which only contribute to the structural economic disparities that have tormented them for centuries. This tribute to Black History Month explains why historic investments in digital infrastructure are insufficient without transformational broadband policies that support economic resilience in every household.

Will China succeed in what some call its grand strategy of displacing American power? Whichever scenario emerges also depends on the strategy the US chooses in response, rites Joseph Nye.

The powerful effects of artificial intelligence are already being felt in business, politics, medicine, war, and almost every other domain of twenty-first century life. For all of its positive potential, the technology presents significant risks that are best addressed sooner rather than later.

In the wake of a series of damaging cyber intrusions on private businesses controlling critical pieces of U.S. infrastructure, Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer Juliette Kayyem says that countering the growing threat will require erasing the "legal fiction" that cyberattacks are different than physical attacks on American civilians.