This Friday, Dan Wang reports on the ambitious effort to bring Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing expertise to the Arizona desert; Niall Ferguson and Michael McFaul each offer an appraisal of the Trump administration’s foreign policy; and Michael McConnell examines the role of the Supreme Court amid the political controversies of the second Trump term.
Technology, Economics, and Geopolitics
In this extended guest essay for The New York Times, Research Fellow Dan Wang examines the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s growing investments in chipmaking facilities in Arizona. Drawing on observations made during two research trips to the Phoenix area this year, Wang says he has seen “a winning formula for American reindustrialization.” As he writes, “TSMC is doing for America what Apple did for China,” namely, supplying foreign engineering talent and “process knowledge” to train domestic workers to build some of the most sophisticated technologies in the world. The impetus for this largest-ever foreign direct investment in the United States is concern over Taiwan’s vulnerability to attack by forces from mainland, Communist-controlled China; but for many immigrant workers on the project, it’s also a chance to experience American life and culture. Wang spoke with Taiwanese engineers in Arizona, their families, local officials, and community leaders about the successes and challenges of “grafting a Taiwanese engineering community onto the American economy.” What emerges is a fascinating portrait of the human interests, and vulnerability to immigration policy shifts, behind this Southwestern mega project freighted with geopolitical significance. Read more here. [Subscription required.]
Foreign Policy
At The Free Press, Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson offers an explanation of the Trump administration’s foreign policy—marked, as he notes, by shifts that have confused many observers. Trump is not a mad emperor, argues Ferguson. “At heart, Donald Trump is a Nixonian in foreign policy, with the sole difference that personal enrichment and the national interest were never conflated in Nixon’s mind,” he writes. “Like Nixon, Trump takes pleasure in cutting deals with dictators” and “has no patience with European lectures about morality.” Also like Nixon, Ferguson says, Trump “runs the risk that the list of enemies will become so long they will finally be able to undermine him altogether.” Trump’s strategic advantage, in comparison with Nixon, is the economy, the historian concludes, adding that continued American economic dominance relative to the rest of the world—supported by the country’s leadership in AI—“might (I stress might) even help end the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, while deterring China from risking a confrontation in the Far East.” Read more here. [Subscription required.]
Offering a different appraisal of Trump foreign policy, in a piece originally published yesterday in The Dispatch, Senior Fellow Michael McFaul argues at his Substack that Trump’s “approach to negotiations [with Russia over Ukraine] has been fundamentally flawed and ineffective.” McFaul sees American concessions to Russia under Trump, like resuming US purchases of Russian diesel and waiving sanctions and tariffs authorized this year in the Lindsey O. Graham Act, as failing to constrain Russian aggression against Ukraine. McFaul—who served as US ambassador to Russia—argues that Putin fundamentally “sees the United States as his enemy, no matter how many gifts he gets from Trump.” He also sharply criticizes the Trump administration’s decision to temporarily deny Ukraine access to Starlink satellite services, saying this hampered Ukrainian air defense. While expressing concern that concessions to Russia in search of a deal will alienate European allies, McFaul concludes with hope that widespread American public support for Ukraine will translate into another aid package for the beleaguered nation in the next Congress. Read more here.
Constitutional Law
In this lecture recorded during Hoover’s Summer Policy Boot Camp in August, Senior Fellow Michael McConnell explains how the Supreme Court has handled cases involving the executive branch during the second Trump administration. He finds that while the nation’s highest judicial body has struck down some of President Trump’s most consequential policy moves (like his push to curtail birthright citizenship via executive order), it has also upheld other actions (like firing officials of executive agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission) as constitutional exercises of presidential authority. McConnell emphasizes that the judiciary on the whole has “performed remarkably well under extraordinary pressure.” The former federal appellate judge notes that in a historical echo of Presidents Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt, Trump has “tried to destroy the independence of the Court,” accusing it of being “little more than a weaponized and unjust political organization.” But what makes this moment unique in American history, says McConnell, is that the political left is simultaneously “even angrier with the Court.” Against this backdrop, the lecture examines recent Supreme Court decisions to unpack their methods and logic. Watch or listen here.
Economic Policy
With polls showing the public wanting more government oversight of artificial intelligence—and some AI leaders themselves begging Congress and the White House to step in—what’s a sensible path forward at both the federal and state levels? Research Fellow Patrick McLaughlin joins Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen to discuss how to avoid what he calls “the 50-state tollbooth problem” for AI. Also discussed: why regulatory reform and the concept of lowering consumer prices by thinning red tape isn’t part of the election-year conversation; how Idaho, Virginia, and British Columbia made deregulation work in their respective jurisdictions; and what a pair of November ballot initiatives in California (one promising more affordable housing, the other addressing a notorious environmental statute) say about life in America’s most regulated state. Watch or listen here.
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