American Affairs

1 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006), 351. 2 Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2007), 95. 3 Oona Hathaway, “The Great Unraveling Has Begun,” New York Times, January 27, 2026.

As an engineer, I ran maintenance for a Fortune 500 pulp and paper company. I was based at a plant in Tennessee and covered nine other facilities across the Southeast and Florida. For anyone unfamiliar with heavy industry, these plants are filled with massive, capital-intensive equipment: three-story machines stretching the length of a football field, motors running constantly, and forklifts moving across the floor to keep the plant fed with raw material.

Until recently, Omsk, Russia had been far removed from combat. Roughly 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine’s border (about as far away as London), the Siberian city seemed safely beyond the reach of attacks. Then, on July 6, residents were shocked when explosions rang and a fire broke out at the Omsk oil refinery, Russia’s largest, after Ukrainian drones struck deep inside the country. It was one of the longest-range drone strikes of the war.

We serve in different chambers of Congress, belong to different political parties, and represent different parts of the country—from the energy-producing plains of Oklahoma to the coastal innovation hubs of Southern California. Yet we find ourselves in firm agreement on one of the most pressing problems facing our nation: America has lost its ability to build.

In October 1973, Arab oil-producing nations imposed an export embargo on countries that had supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The consequences—gas lines, recessions, a fundamental reordering of energy policy—are still being felt today. The world learned, painfully, what it means to be dependent on a single source for a critical input; there was no ignoring that embargo.

The dependence of the U.S. military on other countries, including adversaries like China, for critical supply chains, combined with the rapid depletion of U.S. weapons in Ukraine and Iran, has engendered the belated and bipartisan recognition of the inadequacy of America’s post-Cold War industrial base.

Late fall in rural Michigan usually means that the harvest is nearly done, with corn stubble standing in rolling fields while the green of cover crops blankets others.

Throughout the twentieth century, American imperialism has found expression in the forced immersion of Europe in consumer society. The Marshall Plan made it possible to flood the old continent with Hollywood films, cheap food, and machine tools, leading to the end of the peasant world that had been the matrix of French society for centuries. Just as God shaped man in his own image from clay, Europe was to be shaped by the United States according to its will.

The United States has the unfortunate distinction of having some of the highest transportation infrastructure costs in the world.

In late 2024, news spread among the attendees of the World Conference on Lung Cancer in San Diego.