Tag: trump
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Dependence and Dominion: A Critical Description of Trump’s Davos Address as an Economy of Security, Tariffs, and Ownership
The event was hybrid: a presidential address staged inside a global business-and-governance convocation, then partially reframed as a conversational “fireside” exchange whose very possibility is jokingly placed in doubt by the speaker. Its central problem-space is the relation between economic narration and sovereign claim: prosperity is asserted as an accomplished fact, then treated as warrant…
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Thermostatic Alliance: Sovereignty, Procedural Reason, and the Re-Coding of Greenland into NATO’s Arctic Grammar
The press briefing staged in Stockholm with Sweden’s foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergård, and Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, constitutes a compact but conceptually saturated instance of public reasoning under alliance pressure. Its central problem concerns how Nordic actors can affirm principled commitments—sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-determination, and the authority of international law—while managing an…
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Cleareyed Partnership in an Age of Force: Friedrich Merz at Davos on Power, Trust, and European Competitiveness
What appears under the title “Special Address by Friedrich Merz, Federal Chancellor of Germany | WEF Annual Meeting 2026” is an event that stages, in compressed form, a particular European self-description under conditions of accelerated geopolitical drift: a self-description that tries to hold together, within a single rhetorical economy, the language of rules and partnerships…
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From Zero to One, and Then to Nowhere Else: Thiel’s Case for Uneven Technological Progress
At Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the Institute of Politics and Harvard’s Program on Constitutional Government convened a public conversation in which historian Niall Ferguson moderated a wide-ranging discussion with technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel. The exchange unfolded as a structured interview followed by audience questions, moving across the near-term condition of Silicon…
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From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
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Stagnation, Founders, and the New Machine Intelligence: Peter Thiel at Aspen on Risk, Power, and the American System
In a wide-ranging conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel presented a composite view of Silicon Valley that joins venture practice, institutional critique, and a set of political and cultural interpretations about the United States’ present trajectory. Interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Thiel framed his central investment thesis around a particular…
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Agency Under Acceleration: Peter Thiel on Risk, Innovation, and the Next Discontinuity
In a wide-ranging onstage conversation at the All-In Summit 2024—later published by the All-In Podcast under the title “Peter Thiel: The Coming Collapse No One Is Prepared For”—technology investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel frames contemporary politics, geopolitics, and technological change through a single organizing preoccupation: the distribution of agency under conditions of accelerating uncertainty. He…