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The United States, under President Donald Trump, is perceptibly stepping back from its previous level of unconditional support for Ukraine, driven by a realist assessment that Kyiv’s maximalist war aims (like restoring 1991 borders) are unachievable against Russia’s grinding war of attrition.

Despite successes like “Operation Spiderweb,” Ukraine’s missile defense capabilities are described as being at a “breaking point.” With only a handful of Patriot batteries operational (estimated 4-6 out of 8 total) due to repair needs and limited spare parts, and each interceptor missile costing around $4 million (often requiring two per incoming Russian missile), Ukraine faces an unsustainable defense posture.

The formula used by the Trump administration to levy reciprocal tariffs contains a serious math error that over-inflates the impact by about a factor of four, economists at the American Enterprise Institute said. Why it matters: The conservative think tank says the error led to tariff rates massively higher than they should have been to achieve the goals the administration sought.

Khamenei is buried under the rubble of defeat, yet he still plots new schemes to create chaos and incite war, despite no longer having the power or energy to carry them out. On December 11, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered his first speech following Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s fall, broadcast as a pre-recorded message. Its significance rested solely on the propaganda spread by his supporters. During the 51-minute ramble, he offered no ideas, messages, or meaningful content. His speech was riddled with delusions – a chaotic and unsettling display. Khamenei’s arguments came across as childish and riddled with lies...

Robert Pondisco of the American Enterprise Institute responded to a query on Twitter/X yesterday on the question of why academic writing is so awful. His pithy answer: The opacity of academic prose arises from the epistemological imperative to operationalize disciplinary jargon, facilitating intra-specialized discourse while obfuscating heterogenous interpretive accessibility and perpetuating a recursive dialectic of erudition and exclusion. Yup, that pretty much nails it. My young philosopher pal Spencer Case got the wise idea in his head to ask ChatGPT to render the Gettysburg Address as written by postmodern/radical feminist icon Judith Butler, and this is the result: In a...

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will speak at a right-leaning policy group’s event recognizing the adoption of the Constitution next month. Cheney will give the annual Constitution Day Lecture for the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank, on Sept. 19. The Wyoming Republican will speak on why President Lincoln’s call for patriotism grounded in “reverence for the Constitution” is essential for defending “our inheritance of liberty.”

Aprivate, off-the-record gathering of conservative leaders and wealthy donors will convene this week in Sea Island, Georgia, with appearances by a Biden White House official and several critics of former President Donald Trump. snip One of the key speakers at this week's gathering will be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been working behind the scenes to recruit candidates who come from a more traditional Republican mold, in terms of both policy positions and rhetoric, as he works to reclaim the Senate majority later this year in the midterm elections. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who Trump has harshly criticized...

With many businesses and public places still shut down and families forced into constant contact with no where to go, Americans have never experienced such a degree of simultaneous separation and togetherness, the effects of which indicate truths useful for understanding the value and role of families and communities. To further understand the state of American communities, The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted a webinar Monday on “Family and Community Amid the Lockdown.” AEI Resident Fellow and Washington Examiner Senior Political Columnist Timothy P. Carney moderated a discussion between David Brooks of The New York Times and Isabel V. Sawhill...

Renowned Yale computer scientist David Gelernter claims that he is abandoning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Gelernter, who formerly served as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, published a column earlier this year detailing his move away from evolutionary theory. The column, which was titled “Giving Up Darwin,” provides Gelernter’s arguments against Darwinism. Darwin’s theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life. Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out...

In an indication of their growing estrangement with the Bush administration, neoconservatives are slamming the White House for failing to stop what they describe as an antisemitic campaign to marginalize them being conducted by the CIA and the State Department. This view was outlined in a memo circulating among neoconservative foreign policy analysts in Washington. Obtained by the Forward, the memo criticizes the White House for not refuting press reports on the FBI's investigation of Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin that suggest wrongdoing on the part of Jewish officials at the Defense Department. "If there is any truth to any of...

A longtime foreign policy expert and conservative scholar is re-introducing herself to Washington. Giselle Donnelly is publicly acknowledging her gender identity after a career built as Thomas Donnelly, according to a report in the Washington Post. Donnelly, who spent decades hiding her gender and years in self-reflection, is now living openly as a trans woman. The 65-year-old is a resident fellow in defense and security studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, has been supportive of her transition. AEI executives said that Donnelly is the same person with the same principles that had always made her a...

Despite the antiwar Left's favorite mantra about how Bush lied regarding WMDs in Iraq, the evidence now proves there were WMDs after all. According to recent announcement made by Senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Peter Hoekstra , approximately 500 weapons munitions, containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent, have been discovered in Iraq since 2003. Saddam, therefore, had the means to put WMDs into terrorists' hands. So what is the primary significance of these revelations? And why are these developments not front page news in our media? Where are all of Bush's critics who called him a liar? Where are...

"The first-order, existential challenge to democracy in Eastern Europe is coming from leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — once, incidentally, a recipient of a Soros scholarship — who mistake their substantial popular mandate for a free pass to crack down on dissenting voices. Under Orbán’s leadership, Hungary’s democratic bona fides have declined in recent years, according to Freedom House."

(Skip) Dees also started a nonprofit, which he named the Southern Poverty Law Center...He lives in luxury with his fifth wife and still runs the SPLC, which has used the mail-order model to amass a fortune. Its product line is an unusual one: For the past 47 years, Morris Dees has been selling fear and hate. (Skip) Today, the center boasts a treasury of more than $300 million, the richest civil rights group in the country. But with the Ku Klux Klan literally out of business, how was the SPLC able to frighten people into still donating? That’s where the...

On Friday, May 27, leaders from historically black colleges (HBCUs) and organizations which support them gathered in Washington, DC at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for a panel discussion entitled, "Historically black colleges and the road ahead." AEI Resident Fellow and former President of Black Alliance for Educational Options in the United States, Gerard Robinson, moderated the discussion. Robinson, a Howard University alum, led the panel with a simple question, "…where would America be without HBCUs." Participants on the panel were Lezli Baskerville, President and CEO of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO);Michael Lomax, President of...

There’s nothing like a little violence to focus the mind. I am the Middlebury College professor who ended up with whiplash and a concussion for having the audacity to engage with the ideas of Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Though he is someone with whom I disagree, I welcomed the opportunity to moderate a talk with him on campus on March 2 because several of my students asked me to do so. They know I am a Democrat, but the college courses I teach are nonpartisan. As I wrote on Facebook immediately after the incident, this...

We keep reading in the media that the job market is on fire, that we´re near full employment. But it´s a sad truth that the monthly jobs report doesn´t really reflect what´s going on in our hobbled economy. As everyone knows by now, the jobs data for November show a decline from 4.9% to a 4.6% unemployment rate, as businesses created 178,000 new payroll jobs. What could be better? While we applaud these improvements, they mask deeper problems with the U.S. job market.

The past week has been extraordinary in the most literal sense. As I’ve sat on panels, talked to reporters, and huddled with folks trying to make sense of things, I’ve been struck by how differently things appear to me than to the vast majority of folks in and around education. What’s going on? A couple things, I suspect. But the biggest one is that, when I’m trying to explain the world of education to people who don’t work in or around education, I frequently wind up telling them, “You need to understand that the center in education is two standard...

Should government officials be able to cut off donations to groups because they employ people disparaged as "climate change deniers," even if the group in question is a think tank that studies a wide range of topics, only a few of which relate to climate change at all, and the "denial" in question includes telling politically inconvenient truths about the cost of proposed climate change legislation? Only a single-issue zealot with ideological blinders and a contempt for the First Amendment would think so. But that hasn't stopped New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and California Attorney General Kamala Harris investigating...

Before the election, we reported on the education establishment's befuddlement over the nascent political career of our president-elect. Since the election, we have seen college students acting out in response to the results, mostly in cities that Hillary Clinton carried. Yet if professors and students are still going through various stages of grief, the media which covers them, other than us, is still missing its deadlines. For example, in the issue they put out before the election, The Chronicle of Higher Education featured historians, sociologists and psychologists trying to unravel the Trump phenomenon. They're probably still working on it. "I...