Opinion

BY EMILY ESTELLE Maj. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the commander of US Special Operations Command Africa, gave a sobering assessment of the increasing security threats posed by al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their ilk in Africa in an AEI webinar

BY E.J. McMAHON Forty-five years ago this month, then-Gov. Hugh L. Carey and the state Legislature passed a landmark law, the Financial Emergency Act, designed to rescue Gotham from imminent bankruptcy. The law created the state Financial Control Board as

BY IAN KINGSBURY Education Week released its A-F grades for states on school quality last week. New York earned a B-, appreciably better than the nationwide C average. A closer look at scoring methodology, however, shows grade inflation at work. Education Week raised New

BY PAUL H. KUPIEC Emergency lockdowns have been successful in keeping ICUs from being overwhelmed, but as the economy reopens, virus spread continues, generating recessionary pressure on the economy. There are at least two competing views on how the federal

BY DALIBOR ROHAC After last month’s visit to the United Kingdom and Denmark, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s upcoming trip to Central Europe — specifically, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Austria, and Poland — represents another attempt to align the views of America’s

BY BRET SWANSON One promise of the internet was to lower barriers. It would obliterate the distance limitations of geography and the gatekeeping functions of big media, big business, big academia, and big government. At first, it did this through

BY CLAUDE BARFIELD Last Friday, Michael Auslin, a former AEI colleague, wrote a timely opinion piece in Financial Times in which he urgently called for a latter-day financial or tech giant to “step into JP Morgan’s shoes.” Warning correctly that “historical analogies

BY ALAN D. VIARD On Saturday, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum directing the Treasury Department to allow employers to defer their employees’ Social Security payroll taxes. The administration claims legal authority to take this step under the law that empowers Treasury to defer

BY DAVID DIPIETRO We’ve sacrificed and done what was asked of us by King Cuomo during COVID-19. We’ve dealt with masks, moving phase requirements, lack of direction, loss of contact with friends, family, and loved ones. You can go to

BY BRET SWANSON We’ve recounted the many ways the pandemic revealed the superlative capacity, coverage, and robustness of the American internet. COVID-19 has even spurred accelerations of long-overdue innovations, such as telemedicine. But intense reliance on network connectivity since the start of the pandemic has

BY JAMES PETHOKOUKIS Just before Independence Day, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated 10-year economic forecast. Basically, it shows a 5 percent bump in real GDP next year before settling into 2 percent growth mode for the rest of the

BY BILL HAMMOND A new report from the state Health Department tries to deflect blame for thousands of coronavirus deaths in the state’s nursing homes—but undermines its own case by withholding data and engaging in tendentious analysis. Most glaringly, it

BY E.J. McMAHON The coronavirus pandemic has prompted an unprecedented shutdown of normal human activity and commerce across much of the developed world. New York State and the nation have entered uncharted economic territory, facing what may be the worst

BY SADANAND DHUME Will we look back on 2020 as the year India formally ended its nearly 30-year-long romance with globalisation? With the coronavirus continuing its grim march across the planet, India appears ready to turn once again to “self-reliance”

BY JAMES PETHOKOUKIS In the 2007 book “The World Without Us,” journalist Alan Weisman speculates about life after people. If everyone suddenly vanished, what would happen to all the stuff we’ve built? Take New York City, for instance. With no

BY DAN BLUMENTHAL China’s stunningly reckless response to the coronavirus pandemic has hastened the need for an examination of America’s problematic policy of engagement with China and a determination of what went wrong. The conventional answer has been that Xi

BY BRENT ORRELL Pandemics have not historically been equal-opportunity offenders. Those with resources tend to decamp to country estates while those without bear the brunt of infections and deaths. Two maps from recent editions of the New York Times illustrate how nothing is more constant

BY DANIELLE PLETKA In late May, the Trump administration withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty, a move that prompted the requisite jeremiads about the international order, arms control, and the fecklessness of the Trump team in general. The laments drew