Then it just runs with his idea. It never asks whether NATO’s expansion is really one logic at all, or thirty years of messy, contradictory decisions that only look unified in hindsight. It never asks why a bureaucracy full of people with mortgages and kids should be compared to a piece of software with no body and no clock running out. It takes the metaphor Isackson handed it, breaks it into neat labeled sections, “instrumental convergence,” “the realization problem,” and hands it back looking more official than it did going in.

Which is why none of this is Socratic, whatever Isackson wants to call it. Socrates didn’t compliment people’s questions. He picked at them until they fell apart, because he actually believed something and wanted to test it against the other person’s belief. That friction is the whole method. Kimi has no belief to test. It has no stake in whether the sorcerer’s apprentice line is true or just a good story.

If war is good business, someone has to actually profit. Defense contractors sometimes do. The country waging the war almost never does. Iraq ran north of two trillion dollars with no mineral windfall, no captive market, no return. Afghanistan the same. That’s not investment logic. That’s a two decade losing streak nobody would call genius in any other line of work.

What Isackson is describing isn’t an economic calculation. It’s a sales pitch. Leaders used to justify war as sacrifice; now some justify it as opportunity. But a new pitch isn’t a new motive. Empires have always sold war as profitable, in gold, oil, or “critical minerals.” The pitch doesn’t need to be true. It just needs to hold long enough to get funded.

That’s the real story, and it’s worse than “military Keynesianism”: the promise of profit is doing the job the promise of righteousness used to do, quieting the doubters before the bill lands on people who never got a vote.

On the Socrates bit: Isackson claims AI can catch him when he’s overgeneralizing — “if pushed, it’s much better at that than we are.” Fine. So where does that happen in the piece? Every actual use of AI Isackson describes is the opposite: Gemini supplying a stat that supports his point, Kimi helping him “dig up historical details” for a conclusion he’d already formed. Not one moment where the chatbot tells Isackson he’s wrong. Socrates’ whole method was aporia — walking someone into a contradiction they can’t get out of. Isackson never gets stuck. He forms the thesis, then sends the AI to fetch supporting citations.

If AI genuinely challenged Isackson the way he claims, the piece would have a moment where he changed his mind. It doesn’t.

Ancient India produced thinkers such as Kanada, whose Vaisheshika school articulated an atomistic theory of matter, and mathematician-astronomers like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, whose work on zero, algebra and astronomy profoundly influenced later scientific development. China’s achievements in astronomy, engineering, metallurgy, navigation, papermaking, printing, the compass and gunpowder were equally transformative. If multipolarity means anything, it must include our understanding of intellectual history.

The essay also wanders, moving from Bacon to Jefferson to contemporary politics without a sustained line of argument. And while official secrecy deserves scrutiny, it is hardly a uniquely American phenomenon. Every major power has justified deception in the name of national security. That enduring tension between truth and statecraft is far older—and far more universal—than this essay acknowledges.

That’s what’s happening here. Kimi opens by calling Isackson’s framing “one of the most consequential and under-examined transformations in modern statecraft” before offering a single fact. That’s flattery, not analysis, and Isackson doesn’t seem to notice.

He didn’t write this argument himself. He prompted a chatbot and published the transcript as if hosting it counted as doing the work. The model confidently claims to know what Nitze “understood” or what RAND economists were “deliberately” doing, with no source you could check, and Isackson never checks either.

The argument is shaky too. Saying military Keynesianism explains the death of diplomacy is asserted, not shown. Nixon and Bush walked away from treaties for their own reasons, not budget structure.

“There’s a verdict” isn’t a verdict. It’s a machine telling him he’s right.

The irony is that Isackson criticizes democratic legitimacy while using an epistemic process with the same weakness: his assumptions are reflected back rather than challenged. A real political economist, historian, or editor would push back on claims like “markets run every second, elections every four years” and on whether wealth taxes inevitably cause capital flight. Those are empirical questions, not conclusions that follow from a rhetorical frame.

He also conflates different arguments. Merz’s low approval rating shows unpopularity; it does not prove centrism has lost moral authority or that capitalism’s structural constraints are the cause. Gemini gives the impression of validation by translating his assumptions into more academic language, but it is only reflection.

The broader question — whether democracy can survive a financialized global economy — is legitimate. But Isackson mistakes an AI echo chamber for dialogue. Dialogue requires someone willing to disagree, challenge assumptions, and say: “Peter, that doesn’t follow.”

A better place to look is at immigrants — people from India, Central America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia who risked everything because they believed America offered a better future. For them, the pursuit of happiness is not an abstract idea; it is a decision made with families, livelihoods, and futures at stake. Isackson never asks them. He asks an AI instead.

Positionality matters. Someone who can move to France and critique America from a distance has an exit option. For immigrants chasing a green card, sending money home, or raising children in a new country, there is no such safety net. Their answer carries a cost.

This is not a defense of the Times piece, which may be shallow. But Isackson replaces one shallow perspective with another: a conversation between someone who never had to fight for happiness and a machine that has never experienced it. If you want to know what the phrase still means, ask those who pursued it at real personal risk.

I lived in Philadelphia literally two blocks away from Independence Hall during the 1976 Bicentennial and was really taken back by the spirit of renewal and hope that it transpired over those few days.

So much had changed since 1969.

Watergate hearings and the potential impeachment of Nixon was the most inspiring public participation event of a renewal of democracy at that time. Mesmerizing!

Concurrent were the Sen Church public and private hearings on CIA’s doings and the resulting reforms. Again all in the public. I doubt other nations or institutions would have gone through that process

Even the economy balanced and grew with changes in public policies. There was inflation but it was managed by an independent Federal Reserve with high short term interest rates.

I thought the Carter Presidency was principled. While it has been tarnished by the Iran affair, domestically it led to deregulation of the transport sectors and to a discussion on energy usage and efficiency. Longer term historians will give credit where credit is due.

US has managed to renew its democrstic institution’s every 40-50 years. It will do so again after 2028.

I fully agree that conflict is always avoidable. What concerns me is that in some circumstances and for some people, conflict is seen as profitable, not just in economic but also in political and even psychological terms. There is clearly a pattern in recent history of following an imaginary logic that justifies conflict, and increasingly disproportionate conflict.
The perception of decline is real. So is the denial of it. And uncertaintly aggravates the effects. The fact that there exists even a vague background sentiment of growing disorder increases the odds of new conflict arising.
The curious fact that worries me the most is the trend of multibillionaires building bunkers in remote places in anticipation of Armageddon!

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I share your concern that perceptions of decline can shape national behavior as much as objective reality. My point was not to dismiss those perceptions, but to caution against treating conflict as inevitable. History shows that when both sides assume the worst about each other’s intentions, the risk of miscalculation rises dramatically. 

Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment. You raise an important point. Having worked in Japan during the U.S.–Japan economic tensions of the 1980s and 1990s, I do see important parallels with today’s U.S.–China competition. At the same time, the differences are equally important—the U.S.–Japan rivalry was primarily economic, while the U.S.–China rivalry is also technological, geopolitical, and strategic. I kept this piece focused on its main theme, but the comparison deserves a separate discussion. Thank you for the suggestion—I hope to explore it in a future essay.

So would suicides brought on by others or society be considered murder?

Also, I’m reminded of the character Stephen Norton in Agatha Christie’s book Curtain — Norton does not physically commit the murders himself; instead, he operates as a psychological sadist who manipulates vulnerable people into murdering others.

I’m wondering as well whether there isn’t a STEM bias in this approach. Yes, it does respond to the constitutive rigidity of an evaluation system born in an industrial culture that bases everything on objects called “credits” and “grades”. And yes society (but not necessarily education alone) should find ways to encourage the so-called gifted. But we have a lot of more basic work to do on how we define classes of people, such as gifted and ungifted, social and asocial and other binary distinctions that may be fundamentally misleading.
To say nothing of the question of “gifted at what”, which inevitably means gifted at the things the teachers or the institutions recognize as being valuable.

Alan, I have to thank you as well for providing Bluto’s last name, which I was unaware of even though I was a devoted fan of Popeye growing up. I still love my spinach.

No one knows for sure, but it’s believed perhaps Âœ or more of the massive U.S. trade deficit is simply an accounting artifact due to methods that fail to capture how goods and services are priced and paid for, the tax games being played by corporations.

Moreover, the defining feature of this particular crop of billionaires is there sense that they are somehow persecuted, victims of the society and economy, the regulatory system that has allowed them to accumulate such wealth. They are bitter about their ability to accumulate vast wealth and enormous power and prestige. They feel hard done by
 Think about this? They think something nasty was done to them, that they were screwed
 This is really hard to understand. These are the worlds greatest winners ever, but they feel they were cheated, by who?

Amazon, Amazon Web Services and Blue Origin, his space launch company. All are particularly vulnerable to President Trump’s displeasure – Amazon through antitrust and other enforcement and AWS and Blue Origin to loss of government contracts. Bezos stands to gain a lot from Trump’s favor and lose a lot were he to antagonise him.

Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison are yet another example of – they may be politically right wing, but centrally Larry at least is a show me the money guy. CBS News is less important to him than the commercial position of Oracle and his other businesses, or Paramount.