Keen On America

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” Schroeder warns. “If you are not on the ground, you have no sense of nuance. You get caught in a narrative which is much more macro." And that’s exactly what the global investor and entrepreneur did. He got on the ground - talked to young Chinese entrepreneurs, traveled on high speed rail, saw an entire car assembled in twenty seconds. Americans might not want to obsess over the China paradox. But they should probably occasionally spare a thought for this remarkable country before going to bed or waking up in the morning.According to German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China goes to bed and wakes up thinking about China — not America. How does the Washington, DC-based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all Americans, he actually made the effort of visiting China this year and seeing this vast and paradoxical country for himself. “Curiosity has never been more valuable,” he warns. “If you are not on the ground, you have no sense of nuance. You get caught in a narrative which is much more macro.” And that’s exactly what the global investor and entrepreneur did — he talked to young Chinese entrepreneurs, traveled on high-speed rail, saw an entire car assembled in 20 seconds. Americans don’t need to think about China every night or morning. But they would be advised to listen to nuanced and on-the-ground stories of curious travelers like Chris Schroeder. 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

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2025. It's as if the AI revolution is changing the world without us fully noticing. AI has become electricity—ubiquitous and essential, yet barely noticed. So what will happen on the tech front (or not happen) in 2026? Will it be another year in which nothing happened (except everything, everywhere, all at once). Or are we reaching 1789 or 1917 or 1989—a grand historical year where the logjam breaks and tech formally takes over the world? A true end and beginning of history. The first real year of the tech 21st century.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

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