By withholding support for Taiwan, President Trump is less holding on to a negotiating chip than he is playing into Xi’s hands. Read AEI's @DAlexBlumenthal and @bradyafr on why the US should rethink a freeze on Taiwan arms sales. nationalreview.com/2026/10/w…

Two important pieces today, one from AEI’s Leon Aron and one from Senator Mitch McConnell, on US support for our ally Ukraine and the importance of continuing to stand against Russian aggression. Worth the read. aei.org/commentary/putin-wan… wsj.com/opinion/coddling-put…

Predominantly male occupations exist, and employers are hiring. The trouble lies in finding men who are willing and able to take them. AEI's Brent Orrell and Keith Humphreys offer an important perspective on why so many men aren’t working in The Atlantic. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…

The administration’s efforts to reduce costs and combat fraud look promising. Read The Washington Post’s editorial on Medicare Part D subsidies that cites the important work of AEI's @ben_ippolito and James Capretta. washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

The Wall Street Journal editorial board featured a new tracker from AEI's @prestoncooper93 that catalogs graduate schools and programs that have cut prices since OBBBA capped federal loans for advanced degrees. wsj.com/opinion/university-m…

Read the latest Financial Times column from AEI’s @MichaelRStrain, which offers a thoughtful study of Americans’ views on the economy ahead of the midterm elections. ft.com/content/a0a143ac-6a48…

President Trump is right to want peace between Ukraine and Russia. But his actions are making that harder to achieve by emboldening Putin's aggression. Read the latest column from AEI's @HalBrands aei.org/commentary/trump-jus…

I recently spoke with sharp and engaged students from @uaustinorg on AEI’s principles, our scholars’ work, and the major issues facing our country. See my full talk below. piped.video/watch?v=UJrH27ZL…

AEI’s @dcoxpolls new book, Generation Uncoupled, is out today. Join Daniel, Christine Rosen, and @ChristineEmba for a conversation at AEI tomorrow on the book and what a generation loses when connection moves onscreen—and what it would take to rebuild it. aei.org/events/generation-un…

AEI’s @dcoxpolls important new book is out today. Generation Uncoupled explains how Gen Z is being driven apart by a culture that fosters fear, resentment and insecurity, and how a reimagining of our social and civic priorities can help. aei.org/research-products/bo…

"We are at an inflection point, not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization... We must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together." A must-watch, terrific speech from Secretary Rubio this week. state.gov/releases/office-of…

The world is now much richer and far less prone to extreme poverty. AEI's @JesusFerna7026 explains the driving forces behind this extraordinary level of prosperity: technology, markets, and the rules-based international order. washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

DC’s overly generous rates and extensive fraud are caused by a serious lack of oversight by District authorities and their federal counterparts. Read the latest from AEI's @stanveuger on DC's excessively expensive Medicaid program. aei.org/commentary/why-is-dc…

Policymakers should not confuse popularity and good intentions with credible evidence of effectiveness. Read the latest from AEI's @AngelaRachidi on cash payment programs for new mothers. aei.org/commentary/how-helpf…

None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for the decline in replacement fertility, so the authors offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Read AEI's @JesusFerna7026’s latest working paper. aei.org/research-products/wo…

How much do disruptions to U.S.-bound shipping routes matter for the U.S. economy? A lot, and far more than conventional trade models suggest. To make this point, I just circulated a new paper, “Shipping to America,” with my dear coauthors Xiwen Bai, @YiliangLi_, @RicardoVMarto, and Francesco Zanetti: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Shipp… Using satellite vessel-tracking data, we build route-level measures of potential and effective capacity for all U.S.-bound container ships from 2016 to 2025. In recent supply disruptions, utilization losses ran 20 to 40 percentage points, and they began months before port congestion became visible. That is a lot. We then embed these measures in a general equilibrium model in which shipping firms reallocate a common fleet across routes, price above marginal cost, and ignore the congestion they create, while importers shift their sourcing in response to route profitability. The key result is that the reallocation triggered by a disruption has first-order welfare effects, so a route’s Domar weight is not a sufficient statistic for its welfare cost. Here we depart from conventional models, where some form of Hulten’s theorem holds and the welfare costs of supply disruptions are often small. But what I find most interesting is that the model lets us measure the economic value of military operations that keep sea lanes open. The 2023–2024 Red Sea attacks cost 0.35% of US output. Combining data on the cost of the U.S. Navy’s protection of Red Sea shipping with the model, we estimate that the Navy’s intervention delivered benefits of 0.04–0.08% of US output at a fiscal cost of 0.02%. While the Navy did not fully reopen the Red Sea, it cut the losses by a tenth to a quarter. The operation paid for itself two to four times over. The figure shows how we can track these operations: it plots the movements of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107) from AIS data. Because U.S. Navy ships usually switch off AIS during active operations, the data are sparse and cluster around the ship’s departures for operations and its returns to port. The punchline is clear: freedom of navigation is of the utmost strategic importance for the U.S. It has been so for every thalassocracy: Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, Britain, and now the U.S. Let us not forget it.

Academic freedom doesn’t mean freedom from either criticism or transparency. Show the syllabus! Read the latest from AEI’s @MrDanielBuck on a university’s shocking syllabus coverup. aei.org/commentary/ucla-woul…

AEI’s @dcoxpolls new book "Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection" publishes on October 13th. Today, Jessica Grose has written a fantastic piece in The New York Times on key findings from the book. nytimes.com/2026/09/30/opini…

AEI's @DAlexBlumenthal offers five key reasons why rolling out the red carpet for Xi Jinping was the wrong call. aei.org/foreign-and-defense-…

To AEI’s @continetti, America’s best advantage over China is freedom, and taking Xi to the National Archives pressed the point, but we should do a lot more. Thoughtful column by Matt Continetti. wsj.com/opinion/free-express…