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As Drezner puts it, intellectuals are critical, skeptical and tend to be pessimistic. Thought leaders are evangelists for their idea and tend to be optimistic.

The world of Davos-like conferences, TED talks and PopTech rewards thought leaders, not intellectuals

Intellectual life has fallen out of favor for several reasons

When George Orwell, Simone de Beauvoir or even Ralph Waldo Emerson were writing, they were hoping to radically change society, but nobody would confuse them with policy wonks.

In a polarized era, ideologically minded funders like George Soros or the Koch bothers will only pay for certain styles of thought work

In a low-trust era, people no longer have as much faith in grand intellectuals to serve as cultural arbiters.

I’m struck by how people’s relationship to ideas has changed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

public thinkers now conceive of themselves as legislative advisers.

In an unequal era, rich people like to go to Big Idea conferences, and when they do they want to hear ideas that are going to have some immediate impact

there was a greater sense then than now, I think, that the very nature of society was up for grabs

there was a sense that the current fallen order was fragile and that a more just mode of living was out there to be imagined.

intellectual life was just seen as more central to progress. Intellectuals establish the criteria by which things are measured and goals are set. Intellectuals create the frameworks within which politicians operate

Doing that sort of work meant leading the sort of exceptional life that allowed you to emerge from the cave — to see truth squarely and to be fully committed to the cause. Creating a just society was the same thing as transforming yourself into a moral person.

Previously, the official narrative was an essay written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which he argued that deep distrust between the court and the educated elite along with German meddling brought about catastrophe.

The latter fits the Kremlin narrative that Russia has long been besieged by foreign aggressors and that the West strives to implant friendly regimes everywhere by sponsoring “color revolutions.” Columnists have been lumping 1917 among more recent color revolutions in places like Georgia and Ukraine, naturally listing the United States among the suspected agitators.

There is also a damning lack of heroic figures in the revolution. Czar Nicholas II was deposed and thus weak. Alexander F. Kerensky, the central figure in the provisional government, proved ineffective. Lenin fomented appalling bloodshed and destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church, a pillar of Mr. Putin’s support.

“Vladimir Putin cannot compare himself to Nicholas II, nor to Lenin nor to Kerensky, because that is not Russian history to be proud of,” said Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and the author of a best-selling book, “All the Kremlin’s Men,” which details the inner workings of the Putin regime. “In terms of 1917, nothing can be used as a propaganda tool.”

Mr. Putin’s critiques of the revolution contrast markedly with his usual glowing tributes to Russian history. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “We know well the consequences that these great upheavals can bring,” he said in his state of the federation speech in December. “Unfortunately, our country went through many such upheavals and their consequences in the 20th century.”At an earlier public forum, after disparaging Lenin, he said, “We didn’t need the world revolution.”

At one recent forum, Vladimir R. Medinsky, the conservative minister of culture, said the revolution underscored the dangers of letting liberals rule, because they always put self-interest above Russia.

Metropolitan Hilarion of the Russian Orthodox Church, speaking at the same event, lambasted those who destroyed the czarist state rather than seeking compromise.

Liberals retort that a repressive government ignoring vast income disparity and curbing basic rights should be worried about history repeating itself.

“The authorities cannot celebrate 1917,” said Nikita Sokolov, a historian. “Whatever might have happened, the impulse of the revolution was social justice. A country with such inequality can’t celebrate this. Also, the authorities think that any revolution is a color revolution.”

At a recent forum, Leonid Reshetnikov, a historian and retired lieutenant general in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, described trying to explain to his granddaughter why the city of Yekaterinburg had a church dedicated to the czar and his family, who were canonized by the church, as well as a monument to Lenin, the man who ordered them shot there.

“We live in historical schizophrenia, with these monuments to Lenin, to all of them,” he said, going on to denounce any street protesters as potential revolutionaries.

Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy

the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

“The Closing of the American Mind.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.

What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.

One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.

One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.

So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.

Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test

I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens

Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.

In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

This is journalism in defense of liberalism

Our overall goal is that, by around 2030, China will be among the major space powers of the world

China was late to the space race

But in the decades since, China has pumped billions of dollars and other resources into research and training

China has staged a spacewalk, landed a rover on the moon and launched a space lab that it hopes paves the way for a 20-ton space station

He said other plans include sending probes to Jupiter and its moons

China is still studying the possibility of sending a man to the moon, but focusing on robotic lunar missions for now, including making the first soft landing on the far side of the moon around 2018

He also emphasized China's increasing cooperation with other international space agencies -- with NASA being the exception

the U.S. Congress has prohibited NASA from working with China because of national security concerns

NASA should be focused primarily on deep space activities rather than Earth-centric work that is better handled by other agencies," wrote Robert Walker and Peter Navarro

While the American government's space program has suffered from under-investment, both China and Russia continue to move briskly forward with military-focused initiatives," they added. "Each continues to develop weapons explicitly designed... to 'deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt, or destroy' America's eyes and ears in space

Chinese officials on Tuesday reiterated the country's "peaceful motives" behind its space exploration and utilization, but many have pointed to Walker and Navarro's article as a sign that potential U.S.-China collaboration in space would be unlikely

We profess outrage about sexual assault and abuse, the dimensions of which have been rendered even clearer by the galling revelations of the last month and a half. Still we indulge fraternities, which abet that behavior. Persuasive research — along with common sense — tells us that members of all-male fraternities are more likely to have a warped view of permissible sexual contact and that women who frequent fraternity parties are more likely to be assaulted. Additionally, the binge drinking so prevalent at fraternities is the enemy of informed consent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

, we resolve to assemble more heterogeneous campuses. But then we blithely watch and even celebrate the retreat of students into fraternities and sororities, which are in many cases largely homogeneous enclaves antithetical to the broadening of perspective and challenging of ingrained assumptions that higher education should be all about.

“These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection,” Lisa Wade, an Occidental College sociology professor and the author of “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus,” wrote in a Time magazine essay that called for an end to fraternities. “They cannot reform.”

colleges could at least stop promoting and even romanticizing them. Hechinger said that campus websites and tours have presented gauzy propaganda extolling Greek life. Why not provide detailed information about individual fraternities’ disciplinary records instead? And why not put more energy into nurturing other groups and living arrangements that might siphon students away from fraternities?

150 years ago, fraternities were regarded with enormous suspicion by many college presidents, who described them as “un-American,” a “plague” and a force for “greater unkindness and ill feeling than almost anything else in college.”

“Imagine a world,” she said, “in which everything was the same about higher education except there have never been Greek organizations. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says, ‘I want to start an exclusive club on campus that doesn’t allow women and serves mostly white and privileged students and we’re going to throw parties all the time that are illegal, and at these parties, all the bad stuff that happens on campus is going to happen disproportionately. What do you think?’ ”

The introduction of a universal basic income is, he believes, inevitable. This drastic reinvention of the welfare state would see the government pay every single citizen, irrespective of their wealth or employment status, a regular cash sum calculated to cover all their basic needs

Is he worried that the country’s economic woes are leading us towards the threat of civil unrest? “Yes – or certainly just to the rise of politicians who don’t believe in our democracy. I think that’s a genuine risk. I am genuinely fearful for the fabric of what we think of as this nation, if we don’t address these problems.” In his lifetime is this threat unprecedented? “Yes, of course it is. This is the most scary time since the second world war.”

“It is fucking mad for middle class people like us to want anything other than a decent life for our children,” he exclaims. “If you’re on shit wages, it’s completely reasonable to want your children to be better off than you are. Completely reasonable. But the notion that we,” and he gestures around his elegant townhouse kitchen, “should want more [for our children] is shocking and appalling. We shouldn’t think in those terms. We’ve actually got to think, maybe we should make some sacrifices and be a bit poorer. Because if we don’t make those sacrifices and become a bit poorer, so that those lower down the scale have better lives, we may end up facing utter chaos.”

“We will end up with it. We just have to reconcile ourselves to no growth. The natural tendency of the economy at the moment is to widen income and wealth disparities and in those circumstances, and particularly when you layer on top of that the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, it is very, very difficult to think of any alternative but guaranteeing some kind of universal basic income.” Does he assume this will become Labour party policy in the foreseeable future? “Yeah.”

“I think it’s becoming clearer that Labour will end up, as a minimum, signed up to a position where we are a bit like Norway.” In other words, a permanent member of the single market. “But it’s altogether conceivable that they end up being a party that says we have to have another vote on this. They will arrive undoubtedly at one or other of those positions.”

Peston is critical of Corbyn’s view that “the state can solve everything”, but isn’t at all surprised by his popularity. “Younger people think, ‘Fuck it, nobody’s running this place for me. And capitalism is shit, it’s doing nothing for me because when am I ever going to get any capital?’ So, it’s not surprising in those circumstances that they then say, ‘We want a public sector, state-based solution of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn is offering’.”

. “Pod Save America,” by contrast, isn’t afraid to, as Ben Wikler of MoveOn puts it, “actually touch Excalibur.” At the theater in Richmond this month, shortly before bringing Northam and the rest of Virginia’s Democratic ticket onstage, Favreau asked the crowd: “Is everyone registered to vote? Is everyone going to be doing phone-banking and canvassing? Because if not, you have to leave.”

he sees some parallels between the conservative cable channel and Crooked Media. “This was true of Roger: It’s not just a business for these Crooked Media guys, it’s a calling,” he told me. “The real execution challenge is about authenticity. Does it feel authentic to the audience? They certainly have that going for them.”

Then Vietor and Lovett spotted Bill Kristol, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard and a neoconservative boogeyman to liberals during the George W. Bush presidency, who emerged as one of the most forthright conservative critics of Trump in 2016. They introduced themselves and fell into conversation about the 2008 election. “You guys had a good team,” Kristol said. “It seems like another era: Hillary and Obama debating the intricacies of whether you could do health care reform without a mandate or with a mandate.”

Soon, their discussion turned to the Trump administration. “It’s so unbelievable that these guys are trying to run anything,” Kristol lamented. “This level of total insanity is terrible.” 33 Comments “You know what?” Lovett told Kristol. “I like you better lately. It’s like we’re together to fight the aliens.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It’s like we’re all defending the Earth!” Kristol said.“But at some point the aliens will leave,” Lovett reminded him. “And then we’ll just be sitting at the same table being like, ‘Oh, right, we hate each other.’ ”

assuming standard industry rates, Crooked Media is most likely bringing in at least $50,000 in advertising revenue for each episode of “Pod Save America” — which at two episodes a week is about $5 million a year.

Trump continues his war of words and measuring of egos with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While I still find the threat of a nuclear strike remote, it grows less and less remote with every passing day and every insult. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Kim Jong-un is irrational and unhinged, but so is Trump.

Don’t say that we weren’t warned.

“Donald Trump is dangerous. But not in the way you think. Many people think he’s dangerous. They say, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want somebody like that with such a hot head with his fingers on the nuclear codes.’ And yeah, that’s certainly true. That’s not the real danger. The real danger is that ironically Donald Trump could destroy America’s chance to be great again.”

Something about all these warnings, while true, felt of another time, like they were happening during the Cold War, rather than tailored for an election about the culture wars. Still, a Fox News poll conducted a month before the election found that voters overwhelmingly trusted Clinton to do a better job making decisions about using nuclear weapons.But enough Americans looked past these warnings, just as they pushed past so many others, to hand Trump the election. After all, the nuclear question was theoretical and academic, right? No, it wasn’t.In fact, after the election, concern about Trump controlling our nuclear arsenal only congealed.

Plenty of people tried to warn us about this moment, but not enough Americans took heed. To them, this was sky-is-falling hyperbole. The use of nuclear weapons was a thing of history and Hollywood. Write A Comment But it is ever so clear that the threat is urgent and real and that the only thing standing between a nuclear strike and us is a set of short fingers that constantly type out Twitter insults.If all this makes you uneasy, good. It should. Also, welcome to the club.

Americans have grown more comfortable ordering everything on the internet, including bulky wares like canoes and refrigerators. Warehouses, as a result, have become gargantuan, doubling in size since 2010, according to CBRE, a real estate services firm.

A significant chunk of that growth has occurred outside large metropolitan areas, in counties that had relatively little of the picking-and-packing work until recently.

“We are at the very beginning of a rather large transformation, and the humble warehouse is the leading edge of this,” said Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. “These fulfillment center jobs are not being created in the tech hubs that were growing before. We’ve broadened the winner’s circle.”

And while robots have started to intervene in the process, it still takes a lot of bodies to move hundreds of thousands of boxes in and out of these buildings every day. Warehouses serving the largest e-commerce sites typically employ upwards of 2,000 people.

The hubs of this network are far-flung. In Bullitt County, Ky., south of Louisville, warehouse employment surged to 6,000 in 2017 from 1,200 in 2010, according to the Labor Department. In Kenosha, Wis., once a manufacturing hub whose auto plants turned out Nash Ramblers and Plymouth Horizons, warehouse jobs grew to 6,200 from 250 in the same period.

Those places have the advantage of being surrounded by highways and rail lines that lead to some of the nation’s largest cities. They also have an abundance of cheap land and labor, two assets that have become increasingly vital to companies selling online.

Technology’s effects are driven by technology itself, but even more by human choice. Roose warns against treating “technological change as a disembodied natural force that simply happens to us, like gravity or thermodynamics.” Instead we all should realize that “none of this is predetermined. … Regulators, not robots, decide what limits to place on emerging technologies like facial recognition and targeted digital advertising.” The message from both of these books is that the sky is not falling — but it could. There is time to make a choice.

She Was a Star of New Palestinian Music. Then She Played Beside the Mosque.

Yet as the Board of Education is set to vote on the new curriculum this month, it is likelier than before to enthrone ethnic studies, an older relative to critical race theory, into the largest public school system in the United States. This is a big deal in America’s ongoing culture wars. And it’s a bad deal for California’s students, at least for those whose school districts decide to make the curriculum their own.

Ethnic studies is less an academic discipline than it is the recruiting arm of a radical ideological movement masquerading as mainstream pedagogy. From the opening pages of the model curriculum, students are expected not just to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs,” but to “critique empire-building in history” and “connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice.”

The former is education. The latter is indoctrination. The ethnic studies curriculum conceals the difference.

When the main thing left-wing progressives see about America is its allegedly oppressive systems of ethnicity or color, they aren’t seeing America at all. Nor should they be surprised when right-wing reactionaries adopt a perverse version of their views. To treat “whiteness” — conditional or otherwise — not as an accident of pigmentation but as an ethnicity unto itself is what the David Dukes of the world have always wanted.

This is a curriculum that magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological groupthink.

She noted that the report stated the Kargu-2 and “other loitering munitions” attacked convoys and retreating fighters. Loitering munitions, which are simpler autonomous weapons that are designed to hover on their own in an area before crashing into a target, have been used in several other conflicts, Ms. Franke said.

In October, the two warring factions agreed to a cease-fire, raising hopes for an end to years of shifting conflict.

Concentrations of krypton, argon, neon and xenon — the noble gases that do not react with other elements — may provide hints about how Venus and its atmosphere formed. The measurements might also find signs of whether water has escaped from Venus into space and whether oceans ever covered the surface.

The floors of craters on Venus are dark, but no one knows if that is because they are lava flows from recent eruptions or accumulated sand dunes. “That’s a super important question for understanding the history of volcanism,” Dr. Smrekar said.

Also in 2017, for the larger, more expensive New Frontiers competition, NASA considered a Venus mission called Venus In situ Composition Investigations, or Vici, which sought to put two landers on the planet’s surface. It was passed over for Dragonfly, which will send a plutonium-powered drone to fly on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.In addition, planetary scientists are in the middle of putting together their once-a-decade recommendations to NASA about their priorities. NASA usually undertakes only one flagship mission — a big, ambitious, expensive effort — at a time. A Venus flagship mission under consideration would include two balloons that would float in the atmosphere for a month.

One goal of the Trident mission was to study plumes that could be emitted from a subsurface ocean on Triton, Neptune’s large moon. If hypotheses for how those plumes form are correct, by the time another mission reached Triton, the moon’s activity will have ceased because of its position in orbit relative to the sun. There may not be another opportunity to observe the outbursts for 100 years.

The tragedy, upon other tragedies, is that the world seems to pay attention to Palestinians only when they use violence. Nonviolent activism goes largely ignored.

They don’t see the occupation itself—and what has flowed from it—as the original sin. And because they don’t recognize the centrality of the occupation, they don’t acknowledge what is so obvious to the other side: the basic fact of a lopsided power dynamic, in which Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians are the aggressed

American policy makers, regardless of whether they see Palestinians as fully deserving of rights and dignity, should understand that wildly unequal power and capabilities make peace all but impossible

The Biden administration is acting as if the past several years (or decades) have not happened. It is repeating the same mistakes as its predecessors, while hoping that a cease-fire can bring an end to hostilities and a return to calm. But until fundamental injustices—and Palestinian national aspirations—are addressed by ending an occupation that has lasted longer than my own existence, the calm will prove uneasy.

Where coal’s plentiful energy came at the cost of grueling, dangerous work, early oil culture was even more exuberant. Speculators could strike it rich with minimal investment or work.

And then came oil.

That frontier adventurism soon gave way to what Buell calls “oil-electric-coal capitalism.” John Rockefeller monopolized the oil industry, eliminating the bold speculators but transforming daily life for consumers.

By the time Buell was writing, in 2012, a new cultural regime had begun, one blending exuberance and catastrophe, or so he argues. Robotics, nanotechnology, and the internet promised rapid advances for human culture

Will climate disaster, or intentional self-restraint, create new scarcity, rolling back the material progress of the twentieth century? Will dangerous, highly technical power sources like nuclear plants elevate technocratic authorities? Could distributed renewable energy systems and microgrids promote new kinds of localism and democracy? The history of energy cultures suggests that the implications of following any of these paths will be more complicated than we can predict.

“I guarantee you, Trump supporters would not care,” he said. “I guarantee you, if you got 69 million Trump supporters, and you said, ‘Would you be good with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump as president?’ a lot of people would be 100 percent behind that.”

The Cold War was fought and won pretty much exclusively on military and cultural terms. The economic side was relevant only because the Soviets' doomed model inhibited any real competition. We were neither competitors nor partners in the economic space. A new Cold War between the United States and China would be something else entirely. It is difficult to see how it could be fought effectively, not to mention successfully.

This is by no means to question the need to respond to increasingly aggressive behavior by China. But the U.S. response must be coherent, disciplined and sophisticated. It must balance capabilities and objectives

Reverting to a Cold War mentality will drive us toward belligerent posturing that has little or no chance of changing Chinese behavior and could, on the contrary, provoke overreactions and dangerous miscalculations on both sides.

Above all, we must create a deliberate strategy that is aimed at managing this great-power conflict rather than vanquishing a foe.

This is very hard work, requiring patience, conviction and broad political support. It also requires the full participation of our allies, both in the region and elsewhere. We must undertake these efforts with the imperative of preventing a downward spiral toward armed conflict.

the Chinese are clearly pursuing their foreign policy goals according to a carefully calculated long-term strategy.

China’s strategy also aims to encircle the West technologically, dominating all the advanced systems of data collection and manipulation, including artificial intelligence, robotics, aerospace and quantum computing, always taking into account potential military applications

China has recognized, far earlier and far more clearly than any of the rest of us, that technology is the determining factor in the decisive battle of this moment in history. Beijing is working hard to create an overwhelming Chinese advantage in this battle.

Nearly spontaneous and seemingly unconnected irritations such as closing a consulate, imposing sanctions on a few officials, tweaking tariffs or sanctioning individual companies merely provoke countermeasures that will inhibit real management of this immense and complicated problem.