U.S. President Donald Trump has been keen to showcase American might—by capturing Venezuela’s president in a stunning nighttime raid, by waging war on Iran, and now by requesting a record-breaking $1.5 trillion defense budget. Amid these displays of hard power, a 2024 essay by Amy Zegart feels newly relevant. In it, she warns that military force does “not determine a country’s success” the way it once did. It is “the ability to innovate and the ability to anticipate” that give countries an advantage in a “knowledge- and technology-driven world,” Zegart argued. And on these fronts, she cautioned, the United States is slipping. Without greater attention to the domestic sources of U.S. power, that power “will grow weaker in the years ahead.”
Until next week, |
