The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk

<blockquote> Another way to ask that question: are there debates happening today in Russian, German, Japanese, and so forth, that would shake the world if only the world could read them? Or are those conversations mostly internal reactions to intellectual trends pioneered in the Anglophone world (just as the intellectual conversation in China, c. 1911-1949 was mostly a reaction to ideas imported from Europe)? Has the engine of thought really left the Old World behind?</blockquote>

To bite on this: I think it has. Whenever I read academic histories or biographies, I am always struck at the extraordinary rupture that WWII represents in academia history. Before WWII, an American in STEM had to learn another language (typically French or German, particularly German if they had any aspirations in chemistry, and ideally mathematicians would learn both). Fluency in those languages was required for a degree. The influence of Europe was pervasive. As late as 1900, getting a PhD in the USA would have been largely pointless as it was such an intellectual backwater. A good mathematician had to go to Gottingen (look at the biography of Norbert Weiner for an example). Even in the military this was true: Patton, before he became famous for tanks, went to France to study the saber and modernize the US cavalry. Europe was where it was at. If you didn't go there, at least mentally, you were forever a provincial. Not to worry, though, as universities were so tiny and there was so little funding for research to begin with (institutions like the Rockefeller Institute being truly exceptional) that you weren't going to get a job in the USA anyway. Research was rare and aristocratic. (Often of high quality, but certainly not high volume.)

WWI dealt a severe blow to learning German in the USA, and WWII was the deathblow to German science in general: everyone of any talent who could left Germany before, during, or after, with the USA or USSR the typical destination (voluntary or involuntary as the case may be). Think of the Institute for Advanced Studies, or the Manhattan Project, which were lifeboats for expat European physicists. The USA was a beacon of freedom, economic growth, and just not being shattered by war or the USSR.

This combined with the further rise of the USA economically, and then Vannevar Bush's endless frontier, as Faustian a bargain as it may have been, led to the growth of R&D and academia at rates more typically associated with terminal cancer diagnoses, and an era in which obscure grad students could get tenure by lifting up the phone and accepting the offer from a young university needing to build its new CS department or whatever. (I am not exaggerating, that is how some people actually got tenure back then.) This created a vortex sucking in expats from across the world, Russians and Germans and Japanese, all of whom would teach the vast masses of cornfed Midwestern boys plucked out of rural America by standardized testing and the GI Act etc, some of whom turned out to be bona fide geniuses and create the ferment we associate with the Cold War. There are second-order effects too, like the role of translation: if you want to read something in a foreign language, there are more translations into English than any other language, thanks to all the humanities academics with time on their hands needing to justify themselves. English, if there was any doubt in the interwar period, became definitively *the* language of science, and aviation as well incidentally. (It's been a very long time indeed since mathematics or chemistry graduate students were required to prove they were fully fluent before getting a degree; all that is left is vestigial foreign language courses for undergrads.) Now the Germans, French, Japanese etc all learn English in order to do science. There was then another diaspora in the 1990s with the collapse of the USSR meaning all the mathematicians could flee to the USA. (There's an interesting paper analyzing this, showing how many emigrated, and raised the quality of American mathematics but, since the academic job market is now fixed rather than growing exponentially, pushed out a lot of would-be American mathematicians.)

In statistics in particular, it seems like everything we use now was invented or popularized or had its seeds in the post-WWII period, created by all these expat Europeans and their American students. Decision theory, Bayesian statistics, order statistics, behavioral genetics/breeding... So many of the things I am interested in show such a clear pattern of occasional foundational papers before WWII, then an explosion afterwards of far too many papers to keep track.

So, I think there *was* a genuine brain drain which did in fact shatter the European monopoly and transfer it, physically & intellectually, to the USA. This drain has been maintained by US economics and relative openness (all those Chinese grad students people complain about), and the new role of English as the global _lingua franca_.

For strategy, I know less. But if there is any great movement, where is it? Given the role of English in international affairs, many of the participants should have known English and could have written in it, but let's say they all didn't. (Many of the French philosophers you mention did know English and that let them contribute to Anglophone discussions or translate their own work.) The 1960s, say, was a long time ago. What great strategy was being written in the 1960s? Surely there's been more than enough time for it to be translated. Was it in Russia, and none of the Russian expats still have yet to write about it? Or in China, and no Chinese grad student has translated it? There are so many Americans fluent in Japanese and vice-versa, so where is the great Japanese strategic conversation we are missing? All of this is even more true for Europe than Russia/China/Japan... Things like 'hybrid warfare' get translated pretty quickly. Are all the translators just choosing to focus on minor things and pass over the great ones in order to keep us in the dark?

I could believe *recent* great strategy debates are still missing, say, the past decade, but the further back you go, the more this becomes implausible, and the more strategy looks like everything else: yes, all the real action was in the USA.