Longer Reads

Jun 26, 2026 Benn Steil

For a brief period after the Cold War, Americans persuaded themselves that the liberal order had become self-sustaining. And yet, any rules-based system elaborate enough to govern and interpret its own operations will eventually confront questions that its rules cannot answer.

NEW YORK—In 1980, Douglas Hofstadter, an obscure young computer science professor at Indiana University, won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Equal parts brain-straining, witty, and epiphanic, “GEB”—as its devotees call it—leveraged math, art, and music to illuminate a remarkable feature of reality. Though systems may appear solid and self-sustaining, they also may contain contradictions that they can never resolve from within.