Keen On America

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan, these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump’s frenetic demolition-man act, and the rise not just of China but of India and Turkey. As the Pax Americana of the post-World War Two era withers away, the key question is what comes next. “The old is dying and the new cannot be born,” Kupchan quotes the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “In this interregnum,” Gramsci explains, “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” But for all the abundance of symptoms, there’s an acute scarcity of cures in our post-Pax Americana world. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier, Putin isn't interested in ending the war on anything other than complete Russian control over Ukraine. Putin, Goldgeier bleakly concludes, "just doesn't believe Ukraine should be an independent country." So if this is true, what should Trump do? Is sitting down with Putin a classic case study in appeasing tyranny? Is the real "civilizational erasure" happening in Washington rather than Brussels? And will historians one day memorialize this shabby chapter in American foreign policy as "From Munich to Mar-a-Lago"?Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What’s the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy, America-by-the-numbers doesn’t always add up to a pretty picture. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled ideological cleavages that have supposedly splintered America into warring tribes. “We don’t really disagree,” Jones-Rooy says about her fellow Americans, “we just dislike each other.” That’s the rather uncharitable truth that Jones-Rooy extracts from the data. But not all her numbers represent bad news. On immigration, another hot button issue, the data suggests that the undocumented population is actually far smaller than most people think. And Americans mostly agree on immigration, she says, even if those conclusions won’t exactly thrill proponents of a more liberal immigration policy. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Did 2025 mark the formal end of the neoliberal age? Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, has already written neoliberalism’s official obituary, so he’s quite comfortable with a post neoliberal world. But Trump 2.0, Gerstle suggests, marks the formal beginning of America’s place in this new cracked, jagged and leaderless world. What most defines it, Gerstle suggests, is its absence of “flatness” - Tom Friedman’s term to describe a world simultaneously “flat” and yet dominated by singularly American ideas, economics and power. The ironic thing about Trump 2.0 is that, for all his bluster, his America is just another player in this post Pax Americana economic and political system. His “place in the history books is secure,” Gerstle says about Trump. But it may not exactly be the place that the MAGA leader wants to be. Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus’ warnings about AI have been eerily accurate. In fact, 2025 could be described as the year scripted by Gary Marcus in 2024. He warned us about the limitations of LLMs, the bubbly economics of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and the AGI hype. So what does Marcus predict about 2026? Is he really the Cassandra who glimpses the AI future before the rest of Silicon Valley? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe