Publications

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  Reality Always Wins | Who Russians Really Want in Charge

  In his latest Reality Always Wins post, Paul Saunders digs into a striking recent finding: 55% of economically-active Russians say they’d prefer to be governed by an AI algorithm than by their current corrupt officials. Saunders reads the result less as enthusiasm for machine rule than as a quiet protest vote against Russia’s political system—a

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  Iran: The U.S. Needs to Find an Offramp, Soon

  Ten weeks after the U.S. and Israel began their campaign of military strikes against Iran, a ceasefire remains in place, but negotiations appear deadlocked. In the Center for the National Interest’s latest Policy Brief, CFTNI Senior Fellow Greg Priddy assesses current circumstances and U.S. options in what has become an economic war of attrition. In

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  Reality Always Wins | Has Foreign Intelligence Taken Over Job Web Sites?

  In his latest Reality Always Wins post, Paul Saunders raises a concern he’s been quietly tracking for years: many “geopolitical risk analysis” job postings on major employment sites read suspiciously like foreign intelligence recruitment pitches. Drawing on his own brush with a sketchy “consulting” offer he ultimately reported to the FBI, Saunders walks through the

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  Reality Always Wins | Is Putin in Trouble?

  In his latest Reality Always Wins post, Paul Saunders flags a curious trio of articles he spotted on the front page of Russia’s official government newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Read together—a practical guide to coping with mobile internet outages disrupting Moscow life, a defensive enumeration of Ukrainian ceasefire violations, and a piece musing about whether Donald

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  Reality Always Wins

  A new Substack by Center for the National Interest president Paul Saunders explores how reality inevitably prevails over those who try to ignore, deny, or forcibly reshape it. In his inaugural post, Saunders traces the title back to a 2004 quote from a Bush administration official who dismissed the “reality-based community” and claimed that the

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