Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House has unsettled not only the conduct of American foreign policy but also the conceptual vocabulary used to explain it. Nearly two years into his second term, Washington’s external posture has resisted easy classification: coercive where conventional wisdom expected restraint, transactional where ideological motivations might have otherwise been foreseen, and selectively interventionist even as the administration has questioned longstanding commitments. The resulting pattern has provoked a deceptively simple question for scholars of international relations: are these contradictions evidence of incoherence, or do they reflect an underlying logic that existing theories have yet to adequately capture? This distinction becomes clearer when the administration’s policies are considered in combination rather than in isolation. The “America First” agenda emphasizes protectionism and the primacy of national interests, yet Washington has shown ...
Book Review: Self-Different Fractals and Innovation. Academic Firm and The Entrepreneurial University in Epistemic Governance
Self-Different Fractals and Innovation. Academic Firm and The Entrepreneurial University in Epistemic Governance Campbell, David F. J. / Elias G. Carayannis (2026) Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group Book review written by Jun Kajee Innovation theory has long been preoccupied with dizzying diagrams, acronyms, and predictive models. The Triple, Quadruple, and Quintuple Helix frameworks promise neat categorizations of universities, firms, government, and society—but often leave policymakers wondering what to do with all this abstraction. David F. J. Campbell and Elias G. Carayannis offer a different ambition. They ask not how innovation happens, but how it can be governed—and in doing so, they situate the question in the philosophical realm. At the center of their argument is the idea of self-different fractals. Whereas traditional fractals are “self-similar” across scales, the authors insist that innovation systems are self-different: repeated, but never identical...