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Monday Miscellany 3/2/26

Monday Miscellany 3/2/26

Last updated on: March 2, 2026 at 9:03 am by Gene Veith

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Monday Miscellany 3/2/26 2026-03-02T09:03:35-05:00 Gene Veith

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War in Iran. America’s AI vs. China’s AI. And Trump’s new tariffs aren’t legal either.

War in Iran

President Trump launched what he called “major combat operations” against Iran, as U.S. planes bombed targets throughout the country. Among the dead: Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the 86-year-old ayatollah who led Iran’s theocracy.

Israel is a partner in the attacks. Iran has been launching missiles against Israel and U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.

Some of the earliest targets were homes and offices of Iranian leadership, many of whom in addition to the Ayatollah were killed. President Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and take over their government.

This is to say, the purpose of the attacks, as the president’s statement about them indicates, is regime change.

President Trump campaigned against the U.S. habit of launching wars for the purpose of regime change. He said in 2016, “Our current strategy of nation- building and regime-change is a proven, absolute failure.”

He said he would keep the U.S. out of “endless wars.” Vice President J. D. Vance, perhaps the biggest critic of U.S. involvement in unnecessary foreign wars, seems to be saying that military action may be fine, as long as it is quick and temporary, not “endless.”

Has President Trump become a neo-conservative? Maybe, if things keep going his way, a more lucky neo-conservative than George W. Bush was?

There are reports of Iranians dancing in the streets after hearing of Khameini’s death. This is certainly true of Iranian expatriates across the world. So the question is, what comes next?

Will another Islamic hard-liner succeed Khameini? Will the people install another Shah? Will the people turn to liberal democracy? Will there be a civil war?

And what will the United States do? Hit hard and leave, as in Venezuela? How deeply will we get involved in what happens on the ground? Will this turn into another endless war?

America’s AI vs. China’s AI

We Americans are developing AI that can imitate language; China is developing AI that can do math and science.

So observes Jack D. Hidary in his Wall Street Journal article, America Needs AI That Can Do Math, with the deck, “Language skills won’t be enough to stay ahead of China in the economic sectors that matter.”

While the U.S. is pre-occupied with developing AI that can talk to us, provide companionship, generate pornography, and take-over language-based jobs, China is developing “quantitative AI” that can help them develop weapon systems, quantum technology, pharmaceutical innovations, and other advances.

Says Hidary,

AI models trained on social media and Pinterest images are poorly suited for these applications, which need subatomic-level physics. We need new AI models for the real world—quantitative models trained on lab data and equation-based outputs that let them leapfrog current technology. Hallucinations aren’t an option for mission-critical applications. The country that has the best quantitative AI models and quantum technology will dominate the rest of this century. The Chinese know this and are focused accordingly. . . .

The AI with which American users are familiar is large language models, which can pump out text, songs, images, videos and other digital media. AI for the quantitative world is something else entirely, focusing on creating novel medical treatments, de novo material science, and advanced risk management and portfolio construction. The fields of robotics and autonomous driving are also moving quickly and need quantitative models that help these platforms navigate the world.

Trump’s New Tariffs Aren’t Legal Either

After the Supreme Court threw out President Trump’s tariffs, which he imposed on the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), he imposed across the board 10% tariffs, which he said he’d raise to 15%, on the authority of a different law: Section 122 of the Trade Act.

But that’s not legal either! As Andrew McCarthy explains, quoting the text of the law, “In Section 122, Congress endowed the president with narrow, temporary authority to impose tariffs “to deal with large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.”

Well, you might say, our trade is way out of balance. We import far more than we export. That’s one reason why we need tariffs. People may differ over whether this imbalance is “large and serious,” but surely that’s the president’s call.

But the law deals with “balance of payments.” That’s not the same thing as “balance of trade.” McCarthy goes on to explain:

A trade deficit between the U.S. and a foreign nation occurs, mainly in connection with goods (which is just one aspect of international commerce), when imports are greater than exports. This is not really a problem for a variety of reasons — e.g., a trade deficit results in an investment surplus, the U.S. is a major services economy and often runs exported services surpluses that mitigate the imports deficit in goods, etc.

The balance of payments is a broader concept than the balance of trade. It accounts for all the economic transactions that take place between the United States and the rest of the world. Even without getting into every kind of transaction that entails, suffice it to say that foreign investment in the United States, coupled with the advantages our nation accrues because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, more than make up for the longstanding trade deficit in goods.

Our overall payments are in balance. There is no crisis.

John Puri crunches the numbers and found that The U.S. Balance-of-Payments Deficit Is Essentially Zero.

Doesn’t the White House have lawyers and economists who could have cleared up the president’s confusion between “balance of trade” and “balance of payments”?

American involvement in foreign wars

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Trump's attack on Iran

Trump's tariffs

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