Hoover Digest, 2021, No. 3, Summer

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Julie Helen Heyneman, a daughter of
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DENISE ELSON
the terrible Great War, she also shone
SHANA FARLEY
as a humanitarian. In 1916, a world away
JEFFREY M. JONES
from San Francisco, she founded a place COLIN STEWART
in London called California House as a ERYN WITCHER TILLMAN
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Summer 2021
HOOVER D IG E ST
DE M O C RACY A ND HUMAN RI GHTS

9 The Twilight of Human Rights?
Today’s deepest challenge to the values of the West comes
from China, which is moving to sweep away the very idea of
individual rights. By Charles Hill
15 Charles Hill: Grand Strategist

The late Hoover fellow was a genius at weaving “giant ideas”
into analyses of the problems, and the promise, of the world.
By Harrison Smith
19 Exposing the Kleptocrats

Ten steps to combat the mega-corruption that saps national
wealth and smothers democracy. By Larry Diamond
27 Courage, not Cancellation

Free speech means citizens are willing both to question and to
be questioned. By Peter Berkowitz
T HE ECONOM Y
32 We Are the Builders
Politicians will not “build back better” with yet more vast
packages of ineffective centralized programs. They must learn
what communities want and need—and let them fulfill those
wants and needs. By Raghuram G. Rajan
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2021 3
37 The Shape of Recovery
The second half of this year is likely to bring a surge in pent-
up demand, especially in high-value service industries. By
Michael Spence
41 Borrowed Time
The United States was already on a dangerous debt binge
even before the pandemic. More reckless spending will
overwhelm investment, growth, and job creation. By George P.
Shultz, John F. Cogan, and John B. Taylor
47 How to Kill Opportunity

There’s no doubt: the minimum wage deprives low-skilled
workers—especially young people—of an essential foothold on
the job market. By David R. Henderson
C H IN A
53 The High Road
The US-China rivalry represents, above all, a difference in
values. The United States’ strength springs from its support
for an open, multilateral world order. By Elizabeth Economy
64 Better Footing
How to grapple with Chinese ambitions—military, economic,
and ideological. By H. R. McMaster
4 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

72 Taiwan as Trigger
American presidents come and go, but Beijing has never once
taken its eyes off Taiwan, or ceased demanding it. By Niall
Ferguson
85 Freedom’s Struggle
With China increasingly dominant, nations in the Indo-Pacific
seek their own paths between socialism and capitalism. By
Michael R. Auslin
A F R ICA
94 Ethiopia Unravels
Fresh conflict in the Horn of Africa is more than a
humanitarian crisis—it’s a blow to regional security and US
interests. By Jendayi Frazer and Judd Devermont
T HE M IDDL E E AST
98 Studying War No More
The Abraham Accords established at least a nascent Arab-
Israeli amity. Now educational programs can nurture it. By
Peter Berkowitz
N UC L E A R P ROL IFE RAT ION

103 George Shultz’s Vision
The late statesman dreamed of eliminating the danger of
nuclear weapons. His allies continue striving to make that
dream a reality. By William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger,
and Sam Nunn
IM M IGRAT ION
108 Getting It Right
The push for open borders ignores the hard questions. How to
ask—and answer—them. By Richard A. Epstein
113 Predators and Prey
Rising sexual violence in Europe—linked to young immigrant
men—threatens women’s hard-earned rights. It must not be
ignored. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
E DUCAT I ON
120 How Schools Can Turn the Page
At a time of countless programs for reform, Clint Bolick
and Kate J. Hardiman champion reforms that will work. By
Jonathan Movroydis
128 A Republic, if You Can Teach It

A new effort to teach civics education holds real promise—if
our hoary K–12 system can be persuaded to try it. By Chester
E. Finn Jr.
N AT IO N AL SEC UR IT Y
131 This Is No Time to Stumble
The Biden administration gets no honeymoon from
geopolitical dangers. By Victor Davis Hanson
CA L IF ORNIA
138 Tarnished Gold
Yesterday’s state of limitless promise is today’s state of smoke
and mirrors—and broken promises. By Peter Robinson

N AT IV E A M E R ICA NS
146 Hope and Change in Indian Country?
President Biden’s new interior secretary, Deb Haaland, has a
chance to fix the system that leaves many of America’s first
people poor and powerless. But will she take it? By Terry L.
Anderson
IN T E RVIE WS
153 The Road to Selfdom
To Matthew Crawford, author of Why We Drive, the open
road symbolizes the vanishing realm of human autonomy and
skill. By Russ Roberts
164 The Man Who Wouldn’t Be Canceled

The mob came for Laurence Fox, a brilliant British actor,
after he made some mildly controversial remarks on the BBC.
Refusing to apologize and vanish, Fox then launched a quixotic
counterattack: a campaign for mayor of London. By Peter
Robinson
175 “Turning People into Americans”

Hoover fellow Niall Ferguson is optimistic that future
immigrants will find their “kaleidoscopic identity” within
the American experiment, just as so many others have done.
Including him. By Chris Walsh and William McKenzie
182 “Pluralism Is the Lifeblood”

How do healthy democracies embrace both differences
and common values? Hoover fellow Timothy Garton Ash
discusses the crucial balance—and the danger that lies “down
the road of identity politics.” By Chris Walsh and William
McKenzie
VA LU E S
191 Small Kindnesses
Looking back on a year of great tumult and, at times,
reassurance. By Condoleezza Rice
HISTORY A ND C ULT URE

193 Disruptive Strategies
A new military-history book edited by Hoover fellow David
L. Berkey explores the repeated collisions of rising and
established powers. By Jonathan Movroydis
HOOV E R A R C HIVE S
201 Operation Tagil
The Paris archive of the imperial Russian secret police is
among Hoover’s most treasured holdings. How it landed on
the Stanford campus is a cloak-and-dagger tale worthy of the
collection. By Bertrand M. Patenaude
219 Return to Chernobyl

Thirty-five years ago, a nuclear disaster unfolded in Ukraine.
The Soviet empire, too, was about to melt down. Archival
materials illuminate those times of danger and dissolution.
By Anatol Shmelev
224 On the Cover

D E MO CRACY A N D H UM A N R I G H TS
DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN R IG H TS
The Twilight of
Human Rights?
Today’s deepest challenge to the values of the
West comes from China, which is moving to sweep
away the very idea of individual rights.
By Charles Hill
T
he idea of “human rights” is modern. Humanity’s history only
recently has recognized the need for such a category, and a
concomitant need to explain what the category covers and where
it comes from.
Through most of the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first to a
considerable extent, there has been a structural dichotomy between two
regimes: the largely autocratic kind, which declare human rights to be mate-
rial in content: food, clothing, and shelter; and open societies which, while
agreeing to material needs, have given most political weight to ideals of
freedom and justice. All through the Cold War decades the centralized, one-
party regimes of “the East” stressed material necessities while “the West”
valorized political considerations. That dichotomy no longer prevails, but the
concept and its practices as actually carried out have shown “human rights”
as continuing to evolve ever more into “an American thing.”
Charles Hill (1936–2021) was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and
co-chair of Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle East
and the Islamic World. He was a longtime lecturer in International Studies at Yale
University and Yale’s Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy.
The United States has become the heir, the manager, and the defender of
human rights as a global imperative. The modern history of the idea and its
implementation has followed a winding path, but its major milestones can be
located over the past four hundred to five hundred years as marking the road
to a project, or pillar, of world order in the most consequential sense. These
might reveal, significantly yet sparingly, a trajectory of global-scale change
increasingly moving toward an American-defined contribution to universal
betterment for all nations and people.
Among these achievements would be the Mayflower Compact of 1620;
Roger Williams’s Rhode Island idea of liberty of conscience; New England’s
perception of a “natural law” for man created in God’s image and therefore
prior to and above the state; and Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sin-
ners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which would be interpreted as the
foundation stone for each individual’s decisions on the greatest issues of the
human condition—a turning point later referred to as “the first American
Revolution.”
When colonial New England congregational meeting houses began to
evolve into town meeting halls, a new political consciousness began to take
hold. By a process which today might be called “reverse engineering” it could
be argued that if a) an individual person was God-created, then b) all persons
in at least one important sense must be regarded as equal. Equality would
require a political system of democracy, which in return would be legitimized
theologically. This inevitable circularity produced an awareness that in a
world of irrefutable diversity the only irreducible basis for equality would be
“the soul.” No two people could ever be considered “equal” except in the rec-
ognition that every soul had to be equal to all other souls. Here, as in other
dimensions of political life, a theological concept can be located as the origin
of a later political imperative.
This, in an “obvious” extrapolation, would be transformed into the doctrine
of “the equality of the states” (as the former United Nations secretary-general
Boutros Boutros Ghali would repeatedly affirm, “a profound doctrine”). As
with individuals, so also with states: an undeniable differentiation of each “to
all” of the collective would be, in judicial terms, overridden by the need to
make everyone, in some sense, equal.
HOW STATES FIT IN

Much of the modern history of the international diplomatic system can be
explained as a self-organizing effort to gain acceptance of a fundamental
duality: that each state is a basic and individual unit of world affairs, yet

WHICH FUTURE? Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir
Putin tour the Kremlin. Human rights, from Beijing’s point of view, are alien
and unsuited for present and future times. [Russian Presidential Press and Informa-
tion Office]
that taken together, all states in the international system are conceived
in some sense as universal. Thus we accept “the universality of human
rights.” The simplicity of this recognition is founded upon a complex
intellectual and political accommodation. The achievement of this process
across the past two or more centuries should be regarded with admira-
tion by all decision makers of the world order. To put it more directly, the
essence of human rights is to be found in the universality of that concept
and its actualization, and universality itself is a quality that must be stud-
ied, understood, and strengthened. The international state system and the
world order which is its product is comprised of a complex of structures
and ideas which must be understood and administered as a coherent
totality.
Human rights have been recognized at least semi-formally and partially
in established international system agreements. The 1973 Conference on
Security and Cooperation in Europe—CSCE—in Geneva, led to the Hel-
sinki Accords of 1975, a
bitter political struggle
China is convinced of the superiority of that was complicated
its one-party regime and of the West’s and fraught by link-
inevitable loss of world leadership. ing the acceptance of
concepts of freedom
of thought, of conscience, and of religion to a parallel diplomatic recogni-
tion of Soviet influence in accordance with what Moscow regarded as the
national borders of Eastern European countries, all of which were in the
USSR’s “sphere of influence.”
In the same context, and under the United Nations Charter charge to the
UN organization to promote and encourage respect “for human rights and
for fundamental freedom for all,” the UN Human Rights Council’s neglect
and mismanagement of these responsibilities led the United States to with-
draw from the council in 2018, citing its failure to produce reforms and to
oppose human rights abusers discriminating against Israel. As the Ameri-
can ambassador to the council, Kelly Craft, stated, the council had become
“a haven for despots and dictators, hostile to Israel, and ineffectual on the
human rights crises.”
DEFINING RIGHTS
The definition of human rights in our time has somehow been understood or
assumed, yet never quite clearly spelled out. The example of Hannah Arendt
is more than relevant to the need for clarification and simplicity, as her
thoughts, decisions, and commitments go to the heart of the matter. Arendt
left Germany and Europe for the United States to escape the impending
Nazi movement toward further genocidal actions. Two critical concepts are
exemplified by her career as a political philosopher and intellectual model:
her condition as “stateless” and her perception of “the banality of evil.”
Through the experience of her own years as a stateless person, Arendt
understood the necessity for a state entity that would declare and defend
the equality of all its people. The logic that would follow would then require
an open political system, that is, democracy, that would give each person an
equal voting right. And in turn, this would create an imperative for a free,
responsible, and open legal system—the “rule of law”—for law enforcement
and judicial administration.

There then appears, almost as a matter of course, a “ladder” of politically
recognized and/or politically active categories: from the soul to the person
to the state to a national or ethnic culture giving political power beyond the
state to a larger entity, e.g., the Uighur Autonomous Region, to an even larger
yet coherent collective such as Tibet or Mongolia.
This achievement must be assessed anew as individual states may be
observed as gathering—for various reasons—into “spheres of influence.”
There is a China sphere, a Russia sphere, an India sphere, an Iran sphere,
and in various forms a Japan, Saudi, and other such spheres. This emergence
of a sphere-of-influence era is, as they say in Silicon Valley, very nontrivial, as
two differing developments are coming into effect and must be neutralized or
managed.
The first development is that although there is a doctrine of “the equality
of states,” there is no doctrine to recognize an equality of spheres. A second,
related, development is that the international state system’s concept of
universality will not automatically attach itself to an “age of spheres of influ-
ence”—yet these two attributes, equality and universality, will be indispens-
able to the successful working of the world order as we know it now.
With such diversity, can there be anything approaching universal rights?
Yes, if the international
significance given to
CSCE and the Helsinki The United States has become the
Accords is recognized heir, the manager, and the defender of
for the forward-looking
human rights as a global imperative.
measures originally
attached to them. The specific language will be contested, but it can be legit-
imate to claim legitimacy for a short lineup of universal rights on the foun-
dation stones of freedom of speech, of assembly, of religion, of conscience,
and of political action within a nation-state system of the rule of law—all
understood to be available to “the people” under reasonable conditions and
requirements. This amounts to the first ever achievement of a true world
order of universal reach.
IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES
Thus we arrive at a turning point in contemporary history. From President
Xi Jinping’s “thought” and other Chinese documents, it is clear that leaders
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are convinced of the superiority of
their one-party regime and of the West’s and America’s decline and inevi-
table loss of world leadership. China in nearly every dimension is prepared
or preparing to supplant the United States in the pre-eminent role. This, in
Beijing’s terms, is a certainty and already well under way.
The US State Department has officially described the world situation:
Awareness has been growing in the US—and in nations around

the world—that the Chinese Communist Party has triggered a
new era of great-power competition. . . . American statecraft
depends on grasping the mounting challenge that the PRC poses
to free and sovereign nation-states and to the free, open, and
rules-based international order that is essential to their security,
stability, and prosperity.
Official PRC documents have described the present situation in hundred-

year terms, beginning with the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in
the May Fourth Movement (1917–21). This, in PRC terminology, is an “objec-
tive” reality that is now coming to fruition and will end the era of “White”
Western dominance of the international state system.
The key to this global transformation will turn on “universal” human
rights. These, from Beijing’s point of view, are alien and unsuited for present
and future times. Xi Jinping’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” that
is, a world led by autocratic, undemocratic regimes, is said to be the wave of
the future, a wave about to break on the shores of the West.
This contest already has begun in the matter of human rights: are they
“Western,” or are they truly universal in some fundamental way?
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Charles Hill:
Grand Strategist
The late Hoover fellow was a genius at weaving
“giant ideas” into analyses of the problems, and
the promise, of the world.
By Harrison Smith
H
oover research fellow Charles Hill, a Cold War diplomat who
advised two secretaries of state and the head of the United
Nations before reinventing himself as a university professor,
founding Yale’s influential Grand Strategy program to connect
history and literature to the study of statecraft, died March 27 at a hospital
in New Haven, Connecticut. He was 84.
Laconic and soft-spoken, Hill spent nearly his entire government career
working behind the scenes, avoiding photo ops while serving as a speechwrit-
er and aide to secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz. He
was later a policy consultant to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general
of the United Nations, during a tumultuous period in the 1990s that included
the breakup of Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda and civil war in Somalia.
“Attention isn’t something that’s very interesting to me. It seems to use a
lot of time that could be spent on something else,” he told the Hartford Cou-
rant in 2006. “Ronald Reagan had a plaque on his desk which read, ‘There’s
no limit to what you accomplish, as long as you don’t care who gets the
credit.’ ”
Harrison Smith is an obituary writer for the Washington Post.
A self-described “Edmund Burke conservative,” Hill championed what
he described as the liberal world order, arguing in recent years that
Islamism posed a global threat and that the United States “has to stand for
democracy.”
Hill started out in the Foreign Service, with postings in Europe, East Asia,
and South Vietnam, where he was a speechwriter for Ambassador Ellsworth
Bunker. He later advised Bunker on the Panama Canal treaty negotiations
and, in 1974, began working for Kissinger as a speechwriter.
“He reviewed almost everything I wrote,” Kissinger said in a phone inter-
view. “What made him effective was his thoughtfulness, his unselfishness, his
dedication to ideas, his understanding of human beings.” Hill, he added, pos-
sessed an “acute judgment” on issues ranging from the evolution of China to
the Arab-Israeli conflict, which he increasingly focused on during the Carter
administration.
Hill served as political counselor for the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, director
of Arab-Israeli affairs, and deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle
East. In 1985, he was named executive aide to George Shultz, a post that
made him chief of staff to Reagan’s top diplomat during a period that includ-
ed nuclear weapons negotiations with the Soviet Union and efforts to start a
dialogue with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
In part, “his influence lay in his quite extraordinary, relentless note-taking,”
said his former student Molly Worthen, author of The Man on Whom Nothing
Was Lost, a 2006 biogra-
phy of Hill. He produced
“The international world of states about twenty thousand
and their modern system is a literary pages of notes—chroni-
cling everything from a
realm.”
religious ceremony in Fiji
to comments that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, made at din-
ner—resulting in documents that shaped policy discussions.
“I don’t think there was anyone that Shultz trusted more,” Worthen said.
After George H. W. Bush took office as president, Hill resigned from
the Foreign Service and helped Shultz write his 1993 memoir, Turmoil and
Triumph. Three years later he began teaching full-time at Yale, where he was
best known for Studies in Grand Strategy, a yearlong course he created in
2000 with historians John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy. Loosely modeled
after a class at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, the course examined
large-scale issues of statecraft and social change while drawing on classic
works of history and literature.

WORLDLY WISE: Charles Hill’s class was a forum “to talk about giant ideas
and not simply make foreign affairs a matter for the technocrats.” [Eric Dietrich—
US Navy]
“The international world of states and their modern system is a literary

realm; it is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played
out,” he wrote in a 2010 book, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft,
and World Order, which examined the development of the modern state
with help from works by Homer, Thucydides, Franz Kafka, and Salman
Rushdie.
Hill came to embody the Grand Strategy course, which was credited with
inspiring similar classes at schools including Duke and the University of
Texas. Addressing students by their last names, holding open-door office
hours each week, Hill developed a devoted following among undergraduates.
“Charlie’s criticism of the Clinton administration was always that it was
a bunch of very, very smart wonks who can’t see the forest for the trees,”
Worthen said. Hill and his colleagues “were reasserting the need to talk
about giant ideas and not simply make foreign affairs a matter for the
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m er 2021 17
technocrats,” Worthen said. “And then 9/11 happened. I was an undergradu-
ate then, and we were so hungry for someone to explain it to us.”
Morton Charles Hill was born in Bridgeton, New Jersey, on April 28, 1936.
His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker. He received a bachelor’s
degree from Brown
University in 1957 and
“I don’t think there was anyone that studied at the University
Shultz trusted more.” of Pennsylvania, where
he graduated from law
school in 1960 and earned a master’s degree in American studies in 1961,
shortly before joining the Foreign Service.
In an interview, his colleague Gaddis said Hill focused on literature even
more than his Grand Strategy partners, believing that great books offered “a
kind of inner vision of how people’s emotions or minds are working.”
“Yale administrators didn’t know what to do with him, where to put him,”
Gaddis added. “He existed outside of departmental structures. More signifi-
cantly, he existed outside of specialties. I would say his specialty was finding
linkages between specialties. It’s the opposite of siloing, looking for connec-
tions across disciplinary boundaries. And of course, there is almost nobody
else around at Yale who does that now.”
Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2021 Washington Post

Co. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

Weaver’s Lost Art, by Charles Hill. To order, call (800)
888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Exposing the
Kleptocrats
Ten steps to combat the mega-corruption that
saps national wealth and smothers democracy.
By Larry Diamond
B
eyond the moral imperative, there is an
Key points
overriding reason to make the battle
» Corruption threat-
against kleptocracy a global priority. It ens the legitimacy of
would help revive democratic progress democratic rule.
in the world. » Fighting kleptoc-

racy means closing
Just as widespread corruption threatens the
the loopholes that
legitimacy of democratic rule, its rot undermines allow funds to be
autocracies as well. Predatory corruption is the soft illicitly transferred,
hidden, and used.
underbelly of authoritarian rule. If these dicta-
» A new anticor-
tors’ pillaging of their countries were revealed and ruption court could
internationally prosecuted, the domestic and inter- pursue reforms in
countries where the
national support base for their rule would begin to rule of law is weak.
unravel.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the chair of a
new Hoover research initiative, China’s Global Sharp Power Project. He is also a
senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Bass
University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, where he
is a professor by courtesy of political science and sociology. His latest book is Ill
Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and
American Complacency (Penguin, 2019).
The most important condition for fighting
kleptocracy is political will. Kleptocracy is
not just megacorruption; it is the move-
ment and laundering of stolen money
across national borders. Kleptocracy
thrives not just because the legal and
political systems in the countries of
origin are debased but because powerful
interests in the world’s wealthy democ-
racies—including bankers, real
estate brokers, accountants,
lawyers, wealth manag-
ers, and public rela-
tions agents, not to
mention American
state govern-
ments—want to
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

cash in on this debasement. This complicity is degrading and endangering
our democracies.
The path to reform is not mysterious. It requires closing the loopholes
that permit international criminal actors—whether drug lords, terrorists, or
corrupt politicians—first, to place their illicit funds in legitimate banks and
businesses in the West, using front individuals, anonymous companies, and
sophisticated lawyers; second, to layer the money, concealing its origins by
transferring it “through multiple bank secrecy jurisdictions” or anonymous
shell companies, trusts, and limited partnerships; and third, to circulate the
illicit money in the bloodstream of the legitimate economy through the pur-
chase of assets like real estate. When a former Ukrainian prime minister buys
a $5 million home in Marin County, for example, that should be a red flag.
A ten-step program can close loopholes in the US legal system, strengthen
enforcement mechanisms, and generate broader momentum for an international
war on kleptocracy. While I offer these steps with the United States in mind, they
invoke general principles that all liberal democracies should rally behind. (Many
of these reforms are drawn from the superb work of the Kleptocracy Initiative.)
» End anonymous shell companies. Federal law should require the real
ownership of all US companies and trusts to be disclosed and listed in a
register, which would be accessible at least to law enforcement agencies and
ideally to the public (as is done in the United Kingdom). Deception by owners
or agents to mask real ownership should meet with serious civil or criminal
penalties. Moreover, the United States should encourage other states to
adopt similar laws requiring full transparency in business ownership.
» End anonymous real estate purchases. Washington should require all
real estate purchases in the United States to reveal the true owner behind
the purchase. Real estate agents, lawyers, and other professionals and firms
involved in these transactions should have to undertake serious due dili-
gence to verify the true identity of the purchaser, with biting penalties for
negligence or deliberate noncompliance. And a new law should forbid any US
government agency (especially those conducting sensitive work) from leasing
office space from unknown owners or from any owner or business linked to
an authoritarian or corrupt government.
» Modernize and strengthen the Foreign Agents Registration Act
(FARA). We should close the loophole that enables many agents for foreign
principals to simply register under less onerous reporting requirements as
lobbyists. We need an integrated system for reporting all lobbying and public
relations advocacy on behalf of foreign interests. This line of work has explod-
ed in recent years, with an estimated one thousand US lobbyists working for
foreign principals, but almost no one is ever prosecuted for noncompliance
with the law. The US Justice Department has a staff of only eight people
working to enforce FARA; the department needs more staff, more investiga-
tive powers, and more painful civil or criminal penalties for violations.
» Strengthen prohibitions and monitoring of political contributions by
foreign actors. Foreign political and campaign contributions are forbidden
in the United States (except by permanent residents), but only comprehen-
sively at the federal level, and some foreign contributions could be filter-
ing in through donations made by lobbyists and agents for foreign actors.
Foreign contributions to all candidates and political campaigns, at every level
of government, should be prohibited in the United States, and all political
contributions by foreign agents should be monitored by a well-staffed federal
agency. Other democracies around the world should also ban foreign finan-
cial contributions to their political parties and campaigns.
» Ban former US officials and members of Congress from lobbying for or
representing foreign governments. Soon after entering the White House in
January 2017, President Trump signed an executive order restricting the future
lobbying activities of his political appointees and banning them for life from
lobbying for foreign governments or political parties. This lifetime ban should
be embedded in law and extended to retired members of Congress as well. And
the Justice Department should maintain a list of foreign businesses,
foundations, and organizations that, because of links to
their authoritarian governments, are also
off-limits for representation
by former

US officials. We may even want to go further: do we really want to allow some
future retired American official or member of Congress to work for a company
effectively controlled by the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party?
» Modernize the anti-money-laundering system. The current US sys-
tem has a key flaw: it relies on someone to report suspicious activity, rather
than empowering the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network to conduct its own investigations. As a result, money launderers
“face a less than 5 percent risk of conviction” in the United States, according
to the Financial Action Task Force, an independent intergovernmental body
that fights money laundering. We need a robustly funded and staffed watch-
dog mechanism that applies to financial institutions as well as to the
enablers of money laundering—lawyers, investment advis-
ers, real estate agents, and so on. In addition, the
United States should adopt something
like Britain’s landmark
2017 legislation,
which
holds that if a foreign person with links to crime or public wealth in his home
country makes an extravagant purchase (for example, property or jewels)
that seems to be beyond his explainable means, law enforcement agencies
can investigate the source of
the money. If the source is
found to be corrupt or the
individual cannot account
for his or her wealth, the
assets can be seized.

» Increase the resources that the United States and other rule-of-law
states devote to monitoring, investigating, and prosecuting grand cor-
ruption and money laundering. This should include greater cooperation
among various national intelligence and law enforcement agencies to identify
illicit funds and property and track and disrupt money laundering.
» Strengthen cooperation among democracies in fighting kleptocracy
and ending “golden visas.” Because Russian kleptocracy represents such
a serious common threat, NATO is a logical forum for the Western democ-
racies to share intelligence, upgrade and harmonize their laws and strate-
gies, and cooperate in tracking, sanctioning, and apprehending suspects.
This will prevent kleptocrats from obscuring their wealth by playing off one
jurisdiction against another. More must be done to call out countries with
lax enforcement and help them plug loopholes, perhaps through a new State
Department office to coordinate US anti-kleptocracy efforts. One especially
high priority for standardizing these rules should be closing down the racket
in securing residency and citizenship abroad; it is far too easy for the rich to
buy a pathway to citizenship in major democracies such as the United States,
Britain, Canada, and Australia—and it is easier still in small EU countries
that give kleptocrats a gateway to the rest of the European Union.
» Raise public awareness about kleptocracy in Russia and other offend-
ing states. The people of Russia—and other deeply corrupt states—deserve
to know exactly who is pillaging their wealth, laundering it, and extravagantly
investing it abroad. The Kleptocracy Initiative recommends establishing a
Fund for the Russian People, into which seized assets could be deposited until
such time as they could be returned to “a state governed by the rule of law.”
But why not create such a fund—and publicize the details of known cases of
money laundering and asset seizures—for all of the world’s leading kleptocra-
cies? And why not offer fast-track asylum and financial rewards to whistle-
blowers from all countries who expose colossal government corruption that is
laundered through the United States and other advanced democracies?
» Increase international support for investigative journalism, NGOs,
and official institutions working to monitor and control corruption
around the world. The best lines of defense against kleptocracy are usu-
ally found within the countries where it originates. This demands more than
rewards for a few daring whistleblowers.
We need to do much more to support the front-line defenders of the global
rule of law. Courageous journalists are working at great risk to expose
grand corruption and increase government accountability in their troubled
countries. NGOs like the local chapters of Transparency International are
lobbying to plug loopholes in monitoring and reporting, establish effective
freedom-of-information laws, and give anticorruption agencies more power,
resources, and autonomy. In many corrupt, low-grade democracies, dedicat-
ed civil servants and even some political appointees are trying against great
odds to strengthen their countries’ institutions to fight endemic corruption.
All these efforts need our financial and technical support—as well as our dip-
lomatic backing, to help spare brave anticorruption activists from arrest and
assault. A prime example of the kind of global effort that merits support from
democracy-promotion foundations and private philanthropies is the Inter-
national Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which broke the Panama
Papers story and now draws together more than two hundred and twenty
investigative journalists and more than one hundred media organizations
from some eighty countries to collaborate on in-depth investigative stories.
These ten steps constitute an ambitious but feasible agenda for a serious
assault on global kleptocracy. We might reach for one more distant star in
the future: US District Court judge Mark Wolf has proposed establishing an
international anticorruption court with a global role similar to that of the
International Criminal Court. Where national judicial systems are capable of
investigating and prosecuting grand corruption, they would continue to do
so. But in countries whose judicial systems are too weak, politicized, or cor-
rupt to act, the new court could step in. Such a court might not only punish
global corruption but help return its rotten fruit back to the country of origin
once a more transparent government was in place. Today, the concept is no
more than a gleam in the eye of some farsighted international lawyers. But
many innovations have started audaciously. Quoting a line often attributed to
Nelson Mandela, Judge Wolf says, “It’s always impossible until it happens.”
Excerpted from Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chi-
nese Ambition, and American Complacency, by Larry Diamond. Pub-
lished by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random
House, LLC. © 2019 Larry Diamond.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is China’s

Influence and American Interests: Promoting
Constructive Vigilance, edited by Larry Diamond and
Orville Schell. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
www.hooverpress.org.

Courage, not
Cancellation
Free speech means citizens are willing both to
question and to be questioned.
By Peter Berkowitz
L
iberal democracy—grounded in the “inalienable” rights all human
beings share—protects, and is protected by, free speech. Good
laws alone, though, cannot keep speech free. Also necessary is
a public culture that promotes an accurate understanding of
free speech and fosters the virtues that undergird it. The breakdown in the
United States of that public culture, particularly among the nation’s progres-
sive elites, is of pressing concern.
The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridg-
ing the freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court interprets this provision
to require a broad though not absolute prohibition on government regula-
tion of expression. Even among liberal democracies, Americans enjoy an
unusually extended sphere in which they can speak their minds. Expres-
sion is subject to a few specified legal limitations, including incitement to
imminent lawless action, true threats, classified information, and slander
and libel. This, however, leaves abundant room in which citizens can
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He is a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project and a
member of Hoover’s task forces on foreign policy and grand strategy, and mili-
tary history.
readily encounter unorthodox, dissenting, and, yes, deeply disagreeable
opinions.
While government always poses a major threat to free speech, it never
represents the sole danger. Today, apprehensions about Big Tech regula-
tion—subtle and surreptitious as well as brazen and heavy-handed—of social
network and consumer platforms command center stage. Meanwhile, old
nemeses of free speech—inherited authority, social pressure, and public
opinion—show little sign of abating.
Because of the new and old threats, practicing free speech requires, as
always, moral virtue: courage to present one’s views accurately and subject
them to public scrutiny, patience to consider alternative arguments, and self-
control to tolerate fellow citizens’ seemingly wrong-headed and ill-conceived
notions. Free speech also needs intellectual virtue. To benefit from the
give-and-take that energizes a free society, we must examine our own ideas’
vulnerabilities. That difficult process depends on restating accurately, inter-
preting reasonably, and looking for the kernel—or more—of truth in opinions
and positions that we are inclined to oppose.
A FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND
In “The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness,” New York Times columnist Michelle
Goldberg attempts to defend free speech by exposing conservative hypocrisy.
Because of the propensity to protect one’s own speech while curtailing that of
the other camp, Goldberg could have performed a service by holding conser-
vatives to a standard they profess. She missed the opportunity, as do many
progressives, by conflating criticism and cancellation.
Principled defenses of liberty of thought and discussion from the left
would be particularly welcome in the New York Times. Alas, the venerable
institution has proved a fair-weather friend of free speech. In spring 2020,
for example, many staff
members revolted and
Extreme positions, such as those management forced out
taken by critical race theory, are abso- opinion editor James
lutely fair game. Bennet because the
newspaper published an
op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton arguing—consistent with the views of about
half of Americans—that the president should use his authority to direct the
military to respond to violent rioting in American cities. Earlier this year,
the Times demanded the departure of science and health reporter Donald
McNeil after more than forty years at the newspaper. His principal offense?

In the process of answering a student’s question about a notorious racial
slur, McNeil uttered it himself.
Goldberg, though, does not rise to the moment by providing a ringing
endorsement of a public sphere that welcomes opinions from right and left.
Instead, she provides a textbook case of the failure to understand the prin-
ciples of free speech, and to exercise the moral and intellectual virtues that
bring benefits from it.
Conservatives “don’t like cancel culture,” writes Goldberg, yet they pursue,
she charges, “an ironic quest to cancel the promotion of critical race theory
in public forums.” Her
accusation betrays a
rudimentary misunder- Americans enjoy an unusually
standing of cancel cul- extended sphere where they can
ture, which involves the speak their minds.
shaming, ostracism, and
silencing of individuals and companies for expressing disfavored opinions. In
contrast, conservative criticism of critical race theory (CRT) and opposition
to using government organs to promote its controversial claims about race
and justice are perfectly legitimate activities in a free society.
NO MERE THEORY
CRT is not merely an academic theory. In their 2011 book, Critical Race
Theory: An Introduction, law professors Jean Stefancic and Richard Del-
gado—Goldberg cites Delgado as “a key figure in the movement”—stress that
CRT is simultaneously a form of activism grounded in a radical perspective
that “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality
theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of
constitutional law.”
Such extreme positions are an integral part of the public debate; can-
celing those that propound them would be unconscionable. Yet there are
excellent reasons to criticize CRT ideas and counter efforts by activists to
promulgate CRT views through government training sessions and school
curricula. These include CRT’s blurring of scholarship and politics, its
incoherent rejection of principles of freedom and equality bound up with
the Enlightenment on which it covertly relies, and its failure to grasp accu-
rately and present fairly America’s founding principles and constitutional
traditions.
In the conservative critique of CRT ideas and opposition to entrenching
its doctrines as the nation’s official public philosophy, nevertheless, Goldberg
sees only “outright government censorship” and “attempts to suppress an
entire intellectual movement.” Her evidence shows nothing of the kind.
Last September, Goldberg writes,
Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered

federal agencies to “begin to identify all contracts or other agency
spending related to any training on ‘critical race theory,’ ” which it
described as “un-American propaganda.”
The First Amendment, however, does not guarantee a right to have the
federal government propound your preferred critique of America.
British conservatives, Goldberg argues, are just as bad as American con-
servatives. Again, her reporting misleads. A month after the Trump OMB
directive, according to Goldberg, “the conservative government in Britain
declared some uses of critical race theory in education illegal.” Indeed, Tory
equalities minister Kemi Badenoch indicated in a parliamentary debate that
it would be illegal to use
CRT for propaganda
The First Amendment doesn’t guar- purposes. The very words
antee a right to have the federal gov- that Goldberg quotes
ernment propound your preferred show that Badenoch was
opposing indoctrination,
critique of America.
the teaching of a radical
theory about racial justice as if it were the last word about race and justice.
The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper, emphasized that Badenoch
argued not for the exclusion of views but for schools to remain “politically
impartial.”
Goldberg also deplores developments in France. She cites a Times col-
league: “French politicians, high-profile intellectuals, and journalists are
warning that progressive American ideas—specifically on race, gender, post-
colonialism—are undermining their society.” But a warning is not censorship.
Here, it is a routine exercise of free speech.
Goldberg rightly criticizes misguided conservative proposals in several US
states to ban the teaching of CRT. But she overlooks or ignores news that
doesn’t fit her narrative. While highlighting a pair of bills introduced by an
Arkansas legislator banning the teaching of CRT ideas, she omits that on
February 9—more than two weeks before her column appeared—an Arkan-
sas legislative panel rejected the proposal. State education secretary Johnny
Key, a Republican, explained that curricular matters are “best left to the
local elected boards and administrators and educators.”

Goldberg’s interest in protecting free speech is laudable. But in falsely
accusing conservatives of undertaking a concerted international campaign to
censor CRT, she conflates criticism and cancellation, misrepresents conser-
vative ideas and actions, and assumes that there is only one way to uphold
racial justice.
An effective defense of free speech must embody the principles, and exer-
cise the virtues, of free speech.
Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2021 RealClearHoldings

LLC. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-
Government, and Political Moderation, by Peter
Berkowitz. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
T H E ECONOMY
T H E ECONOMY
We Are the
Builders
Politicians will not “build back better” with yet
more vast packages of ineffective centralized
programs. They must learn what communities
want and need—and let them fulfill those wants
and needs.
By Raghuram G. Rajan
P
resident Biden wants to “build
Key points
back better” after the pandemic.
» Local challenges should be
It’s a widely shared goal. But addressed, first and foremost,
what exactly does it mean, and by local residents.
how should we do it? » The aftermath of the CO-

VID-19 pandemic presents
Clearly, we should build back with more opportunities to rethink local
equality of opportunity. Many communi- economies.
ties in the United States and elsewhere in » Developed countries are

seeking solutions to prob-
the developed world would not look out of lems that have hitherto
place in a poor country: decrepit schools, seemed hopeless.
crumbling infrastructure, and rising levels » Successful initiatives could
be shared with other com-
of social dysfunction, including crime and
munities seeking projects of
substance abuse. These communities have their own.
Raghuram G. Rajan is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Kather-
ine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of
Chicago’s Booth School.

shrunk as people with opportunities elsewhere have left, leaving everyone
else in an even thicker miasma of hopelessness. Some of these communities
have been disadvantaged for a long time, having been hammered by a previ-
ous wave of trade- or technology-induced joblessness. Others have fallen
behind more recently, albeit for similar reasons.
But technology and trade have also created new possibilities for eco-
nomic activity in these communities, and thus the potential for economic
revival. The COVID-19 pandemic forced many to work from home and
connect with colleagues via the Internet, greatly reducing any stigma
previously associated with this arrangement. In the months to come, many
firms will offer their employees the option of coming to the office only
when necessary.
In such cases, a worker’s home need not be in the same county, or even the
same state, as his office. As skilled workers in cities search for cheaper, less
congested places to raise a family, some may want to return to their roots—
to places they left long ago. And with in-person business meetings becoming
more dispensable, entire firms also may relocate. These trends will boost
demand for local goods
and services, creating
more local jobs. “One size fits all” programs born in a
Technology not only national or state capital cannot tackle
helps to spread econom- local challenges.
ic activity geographi-
cally but also can connect remote areas to markets everywhere. As Adam
Davidson points out in his book The Passion Economy: The New Rules for
Thriving in the Twenty-First Century, online platforms allow small enter-
prises to advertise niche products globally and enable specialized poten-
tial buyers to find them. For example, the Wengerds, an Amish family in
Ohio, have built a flourishing business selling state-of-the-art horse-drawn
farm equipment—a niche market if ever there was one—to other Amish
farms across the United States.
Not every community can flourish even under these changed circum-
stances. Years of underinvestment in infrastructure, including broadband,
parks, and schools, may render some communities unattractive to well-
paid professionals and their families. High levels of crime and substance
abuse could keep businesses away. And local workers may need retraining
for new skilled jobs. Communities may need to change to attract economic
activity, but how do they do so without more economic activity in the first
place?

The tempting but wrong answer is to centralize the solution. Massive
one-size-fits-all programs devised in a national or state capital cannot tackle
a local community’s specific challenges. For one community, the biggest prob-
lem may be the absence
of fast and affordable
Grant competitions could pay for
access to transportation
innovative community projects.
networks; for another,
it may be the lack of safe outlets for youthful energy. A community’s inhabit-
ants are in the best position to understand the most pressing needs.
The answer certainly includes more outside funding, including further
tax subsidies to encourage investment in “opportunity zones.” But that is
not enough. Without a committed local leadership devising plans to address
specific local challenges, and an engaged community to aid and monitor their
work, funds are more likely to be wasted than not. Unfortunately, years of
hopelessness can exhaust a community’s leadership and leave its members
apathetic.
What could induce change? One possibility is for the national or
state government (or philanthropic institutions) to create grant
competitions to fund groups with innovative proposals for
projects in their communities. Ideally, a project would
have the backing of the official community leader-
ship (such as the mayor’s office), but that need
not be essential if it can proceed without their
support.
The extent of proposed community
involvement and engagement in the project
would, however, be an important criterion
for funding. So, for example, a public garden
created and maintained by the community
would be preferred to a contractor-built park. Stronger
community leadership and broader local engagement should be important
legacies of funded proposals.
Project leaders would also be given access to professional consultants, who
could help remedy weaknesses in the proposal, as well as to leaders of similar
projects elsewhere so that ad hoc support groups emerge. Not all propos-
als would be funded, of course, but the process of private citizens coming
together to devise a project can create the kernel of a new local leader-
ship if the current one is asleep at the wheel. If the grant competition
can revive or generate broader local energy, it will have worked.
Moreover, unsuccessful applicants could resubmit their project proposals
in subsequent competitions after addressing earlier weaknesses, thereby
sustaining the enthusiasm the initial proposal engendered. Finally, the les-
sons from successful initiatives could be shared with other communities
seeking projects of their own, with the aim of establishing a learning network
that could share ideas, expertise, best practices, and common pitfalls.
This is not idle theorizing. Developed countries like Canada have been cre-
ating such networks to encourage bottom-up remedies to local problems that
have hitherto defied solutions.
Developed countries are spending enormous amounts of money in an
attempt to recover from the pandemic. It would be a shame if this were
wasted on old and tired schemes that have rarely worked. The money should
go to those who desperately need new opportunities and know how to create
them. That may be one of our best hopes for building back better.
Reprinted by permission of Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.

org). © 2021 Project Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Strategies for

Monetary Policy, edited by John H. Cochrane and John
B. Taylor. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

T H E ECON OM Y
TH E ECONOMY
The Shape of
Recovery
The second half of this year is likely to bring a
surge in pent-up demand, especially in high-value
service industries.
By Michael Spence
T
he rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in many advanced economies
has set the stage for rapid recovery in the second half of this
year and into 2022. Although growth in digital and digitally
enabled sectors will level out somewhat, high-employment ser-
vice industries will ride a wave of pent-up demand.
COVID-19 vaccination programs gained momentum as production capacity
ramped up, and as disorganized and tentative distribution and administra-
tion procedures were replaced by more robust systems. A task of such size
will surely encounter additional bumps along the road. But it is now reason-
able to expect that vaccines will have been made available to most people in
North America by summer and to most Europeans by early fall.
As of March 15, Israel had administered more than a hundred doses per
hundred people, compared to thirty-eight in the United Kingdom, thirty-six in
Chile, thirty-two in the United States, and eleven in the European Union—and
those numbers would rise fast. The rates have been relatively lower in Asia and
Michael Spence is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Philip H. Knight
Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford
University, and a professor of economics at the Stern School at New York Univer-
sity. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001.
the Pacific, but these countries already largely contained the virus without mass
vaccination programs and their economies since experienced a rapid recovery.
At the same time, lower-income countries in several continents were lag-
ging, pointing to the need for a more ambitious international effort to provide
them with vaccines. As many have noted, in our interconnected world, no one
is safe until everyone is safe.
Assuming that vaccination continues to pick up globally, we should see
a partial but sharp reversal of the K-shaped growth patterns that have
emerged in pandemic-hit economies.
Specifically, growth in high-flying digital and digitally enabled sectors will
subside, but not dramatically, because the forced adoption of their services
will be tempered by the resumption of in-person activities. At the same time,
the sectors that were partly or completely shut down will revive. Major
service sectors like retail, hospitality, entertainment, sports, and travel will
fully reopen for an eager public. Industries such as cruise lines will probably
institute their own version of a vaccination certificate, with sales rebounding
once customers are confident about safety.
All told, this return to previously closed consumption patterns, turbo-
charged by pent-up demand, will produce a burst of growth in depressed sec-
tors, leading to improved economic performance overall. Unemployment will
almost certainly fall, even if permanent changes in living and work patterns
reduce employment in some areas. (For example, hybrid work models that
lock in pandemic-era remote workplaces may reduce demand for restaurants
in city centers.)
To be sure, while massive government programs have buffered the eco-
nomic shock of the pandemic, hard-hit sectors have nonetheless faced sig-
nificant losses. Between
these transitory reduc-
People who are vaccinated and tions on the supply side
willing to travel will still have to be and the predictable surge
acceptable to the destination country. in demand, a temporary
bout of inflation is pos-
sible and perhaps likely. But that is no cause for great concern.
Financial markets are already anticipating these trends. After struggling
before the pandemic and being hammered in the early stages of the contrac-
tion, many value stocks are staging a comeback. While value stocks will
continue to hover above their previous doldrums, digital growth stocks will
benefit from the powerful long-term trend toward incremental value creation
via intangible assets.

PROTECTED: A Palestinian man is inoculated against COVID-19 at a clinic in
the West Bank city of Jenin. Israel is among the countries that pushed ahead
with mass vaccinations against the disease. [Raneen Sawafta—Reuters]
One matter of considerable importance is international travel. Businesses

can function on digital platforms for a while, but eventually in-person contact
will become essential. Moreover, many economies are heavily dependent on
travel and especially tourism, which accounts for 10–11 percent of GDP in
Spain and Italy and as much as 18 percent of GDP in Greece (and probably
more if one counts multipliers).
Compared to many other sectors, travel faces additional headwinds,
because it is nonlocal. The rapid recovery pattern that local service indus-
tries can expect once the virus is under control does not strictly apply
to travel, especially at the international level. To allow for more travel
between countries, both—origin and destination—will need to have made
progress in vaccinating their populations and containing the virus. Those
who are vaccinated and willing to travel will have to be acceptable to the
destination country, perhaps by presenting some kind of certification or
vaccine passport.
Complicating matters further, international travel is subject to multi-
jurisdictional and somewhat uncoordinated regulation. This, together with
imperfect cross-border knowledge about external conditions, will make
adjusting to new realities more difficult.
The trajectory of vaccination indicates that the global rollout will take
considerably longer than the programs in advanced economies. The hope is
that once these first movers are done, their leaders will turn their attention
to bolstering international cooperation and accelerating vaccine production
and deployment in developing countries and some emerging markets.
By that point, the advanced economies will be experiencing a brisk recov-
ery, like China and the other Asian economies that contained the virus early
on. The return of high-employment service sectors will fuel a broad-based
comeback, producing
market shifts in relative
In an interconnected world, no one is value across sectors.
safe until everyone is safe. Schools will resume full
in-person learning, armed
with complementary digital tools that may enhance the curriculum and pro-
vide resilience for the next shock.
In the second half of 2021 and into 2022, the K-shaped dynamic of the pan-
demic economy will give way to a multi-speed recovery, with the traditional
high-contact sectors taking the lead. The two lingering areas of uncertainty
for health and economic outcomes are the pace of the vaccine rollout in the
developing world and international cooperation to accelerate the restora-
tion of cross-border travel. But with forward-looking leadership, both issues
should be fully manageable.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Choose

Economic Freedom: Enduring Policy Lessons from
the 1970s and 1980s, by George P. Shultz and John
B. Taylor. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

T H E ECON OM Y
TH E ECONOMY
Borrowed Time
The United States was already on a dangerous
debt binge even before the pandemic. More
reckless spending will overwhelm investment,
growth, and job creation.
By George P. Shultz, John F. Cogan, and John B. Taylor
M
any in Wash-
ington seem to Key points
think that the » Profligate government spending al-
ways has damaging consequences.
federal gov-
» Previous periods of excessive debt
ernment can spend a limitless
have been followed by sharp increases
amount of money without any in inflation, rapidly rising interest rates,
harmful economic consequenc- and financial crises.
es. They are wrong. Excessive » The US government’s careless spend-

ing is jeopardizing a critical asset. The
federal spending is creating borrowing well will dry up sooner or
grave economic and national later.
security risks. America’s fiscal » In fiscal year 2020, the national debt
rose to 100 percent of national income.
recklessness must stop.
George P. Shultz (1920–2021) was the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distin-
guished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. John F. Cogan is the Leonard and
Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and participates in Hoover’s
Human Prosperity Project and its task forces on energy policy, economic policy,
and health care policy. John B. Taylor is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in
Economics at the Hoover Institution, chairman of Hoover’s Working Group on
Economic Policy, and a participant in the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on En-
ergy Policy and the Human Prosperity Project. He is also the Mary and Robert
Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and directs Stanford’s
Introductory Economics Center.
42 H O O V ER DI GEST • Summer 2021

The COVID-19 crisis provided
the latest impetus for government
spending, even to the point of steer-
ing the American mindset toward
socialism—a doctrine that has
always harmed people’s well-
being. But some say there is no
need to worry about excessive
spending. After all, they argue,
record-low interest rates
apparently show no sign of
increasing. The economy was
humming along just fine until
the pandemic hit, and will no
doubt rebound strongly afterward. And is there even a whiff of inflation in
the air?
Such thinking is dangerously shortsighted. The fundamental laws of eco-
nomics have not been repealed. As one of us (John Cogan) demonstrated in
his book The High Cost of Good Intentions (Stanford University Press, 2017),
profligate government spending invariably has damaging consequences.
High and rising US national debt will eventually crowd out private invest-
ment, thereby slowing economic growth and job creation. The Federal
Reserve’s continued
accommodation of
Since the New Deal, deficit spending deficit spending will
has become a way of life in Washington. inevitably lead to ris-
ing inflation. Financial
markets will become more prone to turmoil, increasing the chance of another
big economic downturn.
Financial markets’ relative calm and low consumer-price inflation are no
cause for comfort. Previous periods of sharp increases in inflation, rapidly
rising interest rates, and financial crises have followed periods of excessive
debt like a sudden wind, without warning.
George Shultz and John Taylor’s book Choose Economic Freedom (Hoover
Institution Press, 2020) shows that economic indicators in the United States
gave no hint in the late 1960s of the subsequent rapid rise in inflation and
interest rates in the early 1970s. Likewise, financial markets during the years
immediately preceding the 2007–9 Great Recession provided little indication
of the calamity that would ensue.
So, what should today’s US policy makers do? Higher tax rates are not the
answer. Even before the pandemic, every federal tax rate would have had
to be increased by one-third to finance the current level of federal spending
without adding to the national debt. Such an increase would have harmful
effects—similar to those of mounting public debt—on economic growth and
job creation.
Congress may be tempted to reduce defense spending to help close the
deficit, as it often has in the past. But these previous efforts demonstrably
failed. Rather than reduce the budget deficit, Congress instead used the sav-
ings from lower defense outlays to finance additional domestic spending.
Unless policy makers abandon their misguided beliefs about budget
deficits, cutting defense spending now would produce the same result. More
important, it would be a grave strategic mistake, weakening US national
security and emboldening the country’s foreign adversaries—particularly

now that China is flexing its muscles in Asia and investing heavily in its
military.
Throughout US history, the federal government’s ability to borrow during
times of international crisis has proven to be an invaluable national security
asset. Two hundred years ago, the ability to borrow was instrumental in
America maintaining its independence from Britain. During the Civil War,
it was crucial to preserving the Union. And it proved decisive in defeating
totalitarian regimes in the two world wars of the twentieth century.
The US government’s careless spending is jeopardizing this asset. If the
country continues along its current fiscal path, the federal government’s
borrowing well will eventually dry up. When it does, America will be far less
able to counter national security threats. As hostile foreign governments
and terrorist organizations recognize this, the world will become a far more
dangerous place.
US policy makers’ mistaken belief that deficits and debt don’t matter is
the sad culmination of a long downward slide in fiscal responsibility. From
1789 to the 1930s, the federal government adhered to a balanced-budget
norm, incurring fiscal deficits during wartime and economic recessions, and
running modest surpluses during good times to pay down this debt. This
prudent management of the federal finances was instrumental in establish-
ing America’s strong position in world financial markets.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal broke this norm, and deficit
spending has since become a way of life in Washington, with the federal gov-
ernment outspending its available revenues in sixty-three of the years since
the end of World War II. At first, elected officials were deeply concerned
about the adverse conse-
quences of their excess
spending. But over time, High national debt will eventually
this anxiety lessened. crowd out private investment, slow-
Annual deficits grew so ing growth and job creation.
large that by the mid-
1970s the US national debt was growing faster than national income.
During the past decade, any remaining fiscal concerns among either
Democrats or Republicans have seemingly vanished. Freed from a belief that
rising deficits and debt are harmful, policy makers unleashed a torrent of
new spending. By fiscal year 2019, the federal government was spending $1
trillion per year more in inflation-adjusted terms than it had a dozen years
earlier. In fiscal year 2020, the federal government added nearly $2 trillion
more in new spending in response to the pandemic, raising the national debt
to 100 percent of national income. This year huge amounts of new spending
appear to be on the way.
The momentum toward more spending and exploding debt may appear
unstoppable. But sooner or later, people will look at the facts, see the destruc-
tive path fiscal policy is on, and recognize that they and the US economy will
be better off with a different approach. At that point, America’s democratic
system will say the expenditure growth must stop.


Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverse
Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis, by Russ
Roberts. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

T H E ECON OM Y
TH E ECONOMY
How to Kill
Opportunity
There’s no doubt: the minimum wage deprives
low-skilled workers—especially young people—of
an essential foothold on the job market.
By David R. Henderson
T
he Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.” That was the title of a 1987
editorial in a major American newspaper. The editorial stated:
“There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the
minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the
minimum wage would price working poor people out of the job market.” You
might expect the Wall Street Journal editors to have written something like
that. But they didn’t. The article did appear, though, in a prominent New
York newspaper. Which one? The New York Times.
In a 1970 economics textbook, a famous Nobel Prize–winning economist
wrote of 1970’s minimum wage rate of $1.60, “What good does it do a black
youth to know that an employer must pay him $1.60 per hour if the fact that
he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting the job?” Who
wrote that? It must have been free-marketer Milton Friedman, right? Wrong.
The author of that statement was liberal economist Paul Samuelson.
Among non-economists and politicians, the minimum wage is one of the
most misunderstood issues in economic policy. President Biden and almost
David R. Henderson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an emeri-

tus professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
all Democrats and some Republicans in Congress advocate increasing the
federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour
over four years. They argue that many of the workers earning between $7.25
and $15 will get a raise in hourly wage. That’s true. But what they don’t tell
you, and what many of
them probably don’t
Among non-economists and politi- know, is that many work-
cians, the minimum wage is one of ers in that wage range
the most misunderstood issues in will suffer a huge drop in
economic policy. wages—from whatever
they’re earning down to
zero. Other low-wage workers will stay employed but will work fewer hours
a week. Many low-wage workers will find that their nonwage benefits will fall
and that employers will work them harder. Why all those effects? Because an
increase in the minimum wage doesn’t magically make workers more produc-
tive. A minimum wage of $15 an hour will exceed the productivity of many
low-wage workers.
THE SECRET OF PRODUCTIVITY

The reason some workers earn low wages is not that employers are greedy
exploiters. If exploitation were enough to explain low wages, then why would
employers ever pay anyone over $7.25 an hour? Wages are what they are
because they reflect two things: (1) workers’ productivity and (2) competition
among employers.
Employers don’t hire workers as a favor. Instead, employers hire workers
to make money. They hire people only if the wage and other components of
compensation they pay are less than or equal to the value of the worker’s
productivity. If an employer pays $10 an hour to someone whose productiv-
ity is $15 an hour, that situation won’t last long. A competing employer will
offer, say, $12 an hour to lure the worker away from his current job. And then
another employer will compete by offering $13 an hour. Competition among
employers, not government wage-setting, is what protects workers from
exploitation.
We all understand that fact when we see discussions on ESPN about why
one football player makes $20 million a year and another makes “only” $10
million a year. Everyone recognizes the twin facts of player productivity and
competition among NFL teams. The same principles, but with much lower
wages, apply to competition among employers for relatively low-skilled
employees.

Open up almost any economics textbook that discusses the minimum wage
and you’re likely to see a demand-and-supply graph showing that the mini-
mum wage prices some low-wage workers out of the market. For textbooks
published in the past twenty years, though, you might also find a statement
that although some workers will lose their jobs, there’s controversy among
economists about how many jobs will be lost. According to the textbook
writers, some economists think the number will be large and others think it
will be small or even imperceptible. You could easily conclude that there’s no
longer a consensus among economists that an increase in the minimum wage
would cause much job loss.
But that conclusion would be wrong. UC-Irvine economist David Neu-
mark and Peter Shirley, an economist with the West Virginia legislature’s
Joint Committee on Government and Finance, showed that in a Janu-
ary 2021 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Neumark is one of the leading scholars on the economic effects of minimum
wages.
Neumark and Shirley chose a clever methodology. They read every
published study of the effects of the minimum wage on employment in the
United States that was done between 1992 and the present. They identified
for each study the core estimates of the effect of minimum wages on employ-
ment. When that was difficult to do, they contacted the studies’ authors to
ask them what they regarded as their bottom-line estimates. Sixty-six studies
met their criteria and these criteria had nothing to do with the size or direc-
tion of the estimates.
Here’s what they found. The vast majority of studies, 79.3 percent, found
that a higher minimum wage led to less employment. A majority of the stud-
ies, 55.4 percent, found
that the negative effect
of a higher minimum A higher wage doesn’t magically
wage on employment
make workers more productive. A
was significant at the 10
minimum wage of $15 an hour will
percent level. Transla-
tion: for those studies, exceed the productivity of many low-
the probability that wage workers.
there was a negative
effect on jobs was 90 percent. Almost half the studies, 47.9 percent, found a
negative effect on jobs at the 5 percent confidence level. For those studies, in
other words, the probability that there was a negative effect on jobs was 95
percent.
Moreover, found Neumark and Shirley, the evidence “of negative employ-
ment effects is stronger for teens and young adults, and more so for the less
educated.” They concluded that the commonly heard refrain that mini-
mum wages don’t destroy jobs “requires discarding or ignoring most of the
evidence.”
Moreover, virtually all the studies of the effects of minimum wages in the
United States have considered increases in the minimum wage of between 10
and 20 percent. The US government has never raised the minimum wage by
anything close to the 107 percent envisioned in the increase from $7.25 to $15.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Why does that matter? Because the higher the increase as a percent of the
existing minimum wage, the more certain we economists are that it will hurt
job opportunities for unskilled workers. We are sure of that because of the
law of demand, which says that for any good or service, the higher the price,
the less is demanded. That applies whether we’re talking about iPhones,
skateboards, or labor. So raise that price a lot, and the amount demanded
falls more than it would fall if you raised it a little. And what employers don’t
demand, willing workers can’t supply.
The effect of the $15 minimum wage would vary a lot from state to state. In
New York in 2019, the median hourly wage was $22.44 and the average hourly
wage was $30.76. So a $15 minimum would affect a fairly small percent of
New York’s labor force. In Alabama, by contrast, the median hourly wage in
2019 was only $16.73 and the average was only $21.60. So the $15 minimum in
Alabama could hurt a much greater percent of the labor force.
The University of Chicago’s Booth School has an Initiative on Global
Markets (IGM) that occasionally surveys US economists on policy issues.
Possibly because of the surveyors’ understanding that the $15 minimum
wage would hurt some states more than others, the IGM recently made the
following statement and asked forty-three economists to agree or disagree:
“A federal minimum wage of $15 per hour would lower employment for low-
wage workers in many states.” Unfortunately, the question did not specify
what is meant by “many.” Is it ten, twenty, thirty? Some economists surveyed
pointed out that ambiguity. That ambiguity could explain why a number of
the economists answered that they were uncertain. But of those who agreed
or disagreed, nineteen agreed that it would cause job loss in many states and
only six disagreed.
One economist who disagreed, Richard Thaler of the University of Chi-
cago, gave as his explanation this sentence: “The literature suggests minimal

effects on employment.” No, it doesn’t. As noted earlier, the federal govern-
ment has never tried to raise the minimum wage by such a large amount
and so there is no scholarly literature on such an increase. Would Thaler say
that if putting a cat in the oven at a temperature of 72.5 degrees Fahrenheit
doesn’t hurt the cat, then putting a cat in the oven at 150 degrees wouldn’t
hurt the cat either?
While few economists have actually estimated the effects of such a large
increase in the minimum wage, the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
presented its economists’ estimate earlier this month. According to the CBO,
the increase would reduce US employment by 0.9 percent. That might not
sound like much, but 0.9 percent translates into 1.4 million workers put out of
work.
But wouldn’t the increase in the minimum wage also increase wages for a
lot of workers who keep their jobs? Yes, it would, and the CBO estimates that
although the workers who lose their jobs would lose income, their loss over
the years from 2021 to
2031 would be “only” 34
percent of the gain to The common refrain that minimum
the workers who gained
wages don’t destroy jobs “requires
wages.
discarding or ignoring most of the
But the gain in wages
is not an unalloyed ben- evidence.”
efit to those who gain.
The reason is that, as noted above, an increase in wage rates doesn’t auto-
matically make workers more productive. So employers, looking for ways to
avoid paying more to workers than their productivity is worth, would search
out other ways of compensating. They might cut nonwage benefits, work the
employees harder, or reduce training, to name three.
Interestingly, on its website in 2006, when Congress was considering an
increase in the federal minimum wage, the Economic Policy Institute, an
organization funded partly by labor unions, admitted the last two of these
three. It stated, “employers may be able to absorb some of the costs of a
wage increase through higher productivity, lower recruiting and training
costs, decreased absenteeism, and increased worker morale.” How would an
employer make his workers more productive and reduce absenteeism? Prob-
ably by working the employees harder and firing those who miss work. How
would he reduce training costs? By providing less training.
In an article in the winter 2021 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspec-
tives, UC–San Diego economist Jeffrey Clemens noted a negative correlation
between minimum wages and employer-provided health insurance. In the
workplace as in the rest of the world, there’s no free lunch.
AN EARLY LESSON
The late economist Walter Williams has written about how, as a teenager, he
learned many skills on the job that made him more productive and ultimately
higher paid. I wrote recently that he could get those early jobs because the
minimum wage was so low. Low-paid jobs are often crucial for black youths
and other youths who need to build their work skills and work histories.
These skills might be as simple as learning to show up on time.
In 1967, when I was sixteen, I worked in a kitchen at a summer resort in
Minaki, Ontario. The minimum wage at the time was $1 an hour and I was
paid, if I recall correctly, $1.25 an hour. For the first three days of the job, I
showed up about twenty minutes late. On the third day, the chef told me that
if I was late the fourth day, I shouldn’t bother showing up because I would be
fired. I was never late again. I learned the “skill” of punctuality.
We adults take such things for granted. Kids don’t. Raise the minimum
wage enough and a whole lot of young people won’t learn the basics, or won’t
learn them until later in life. That would be tragic.
Special to the Hoover Digest.

Case against the Employee Free Choice Act, by
Richard A. Epstein. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

CHINA
CH I NA
The High Road

The US-China rivalry represents, above all, a
difference in values. The United States’ strength
springs from its support for an open, multilateral
world order.
By Elizabeth Economy
C
hina’s leaders seek to reclaim
Chinese centrality on the global Key points
stage by asserting sovereignty over » China is pursuing a
significantly transformed
contested territory; replacing the international system.
United States as the pre-eminent power in the » Xi Jinping envisions
Indo-Pacific; embedding Chinese economic, China as the pre-eminent
power in Asia, and is
security, technological, and political preferences
building military power
throughout the rest of the world; and shaping to realize that vision.
norms, values, and standards in international » China uses the leverage
institutions to reflect Chinese preferences. In of its market to coerce
others to align their views
such a world, political and economic choice with those of Beijing.
globally will be constrained, and US economic » The United States
and security interests will be compromised. should forge new
relationships with the
For almost a decade, Chinese leaders have
world’s developing econ-
made substantial progress toward their objec- omies while strengthen-
tives. Their success is a function of the lever- ing ties with its allies.
age of the Chinese market, growing military
Elizabeth Economy is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she par-
ticipates in a new Hoover initiative, China’s Global Sharp Power Project, and the
National Security Task Force. She is also the Senior Fellow for China Studies at
the Council on Foreign Relations.
prowess, long-term strategic planning, strong state capacity, and a multi-
actor, multi-domain strategy. At the same time, Beijing’s pursuit of narrow
self-interest and reliance on coercive tactics have engendered popular back-
lashes in many countries and rendered it incapable of exerting true global
leadership. These vulnerabilities afford the United States a new opportunity
to present and gain broad support for an alternative vision of the twenty-
first-century world order.
The United States should begin by reframing the US-China competi-
tion away from the narrative of a bilateral rivalry to one rooted in values. It
should also reassert its presence in global and regional institutions, coor-
dinate with allies and partners, pursue its own multi-actor, multi-domain
strategy, and develop a national consensus around American political and
economic renewal. These are the building blocks of US competitiveness.
Beyond these steps, however, Washington needs a bold strategic initiative
that engages the larger international community, is rooted in US values, and
gives life to its strategic vision.
CHINA’S STRATEGIC VISION

Chinese leaders offer a new vision of world order rooted in concepts such
as “the rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation,” a “community of shared
destiny,” a “new relationship among major powers,” and a “China model.”
Once the rhetoric is stripped away, their vision translates into a significantly
transformed international system. The United States is no longer the global
hegemon with a powerful network of alliances that reinforces much of the
current rules-based order. Instead, a reunified and resurgent China is on par
with, or even more powerful than, the United States. And the international
community and institutions reflect Chinese values and policy preferences.
At the heart of the Chinese leadership’s vision is the reunification of China
itself. Chinese leaders are particularly focused on maintaining control within
their own border regions, including Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and
Hong Kong, and asserting control over areas they consider core interests,
such as Taiwan and a vast swath of the South China Sea. China also has ter-
ritorial disputes with its neighbors, including India, Japan, Nepal, Bhutan,
and South Korea, that it wants resolved in its favor. Several of these disputes
flared up over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, as China sought to gain
advantage while the rest of the world was distracted.
Chinese President Xi Jinping also envisions China as the pre-eminent
power in Asia. China is establishing a network of regional economic and
security arrangements that exclude the United States (some by the choice of

STEADY COURSE: The Chinese guided-missile destroyer Xi’an joins the Rim
of the Pacific Exercise around the Hawaiian islands in 2016. The warship
was one of five Chinese vessels to participate that year. Even amid US-China
competition, there are opportunities to keep the door open to cooperation with
China in areas such as climate change, pandemics, and global disasters. [US
Navy]
the United States itself). In addition, China is rapidly developing the military
capabilities necessary to realize its sovereignty objectives with regard to the
South China Sea and Taiwan.
Beyond its own backyard, China is embedding its technologies, goods,
and values throughout the world via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and
its offshoot, the Digital Silk Road (DSR). The DSR is the infrastructure of
the twenty-first century: the BeiDou satellite system, Huawei Marine fiber
optic cables, e-commerce, and, on the horizon, China’s digital currency and
electronic payment system, which is currently being piloted domestically
in preparation for a fuller rollout by the 2022 Olympics. China’s Health Silk
Road (HSR) includes the provision of Chinese-constructed hospitals, track-
ing systems, doctors, medical devices, and traditional Chinese medicine.
China’s vaccine diplomacy has also become a central element of its HSR.
Finally, Beijing maintains an extensive, well-funded program of student,
journalist, and military officer education and training opportunities in China
for citizens from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East—including
ten thousand full scholarships for students from BRI countries.
As US and other international actors have experienced, China increasingly
uses the leverage of its market to coerce others to align their views with those
of China. While traditionally this coercion has been reserved for issues China
deems “core” interests, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea,
Chinese red lines have proliferated over the past year. Beijing expelled Wall
Street Journal reporters in retaliation for an op-ed titled “China Is the Real
Sick Man of Asia,” threatened countries’ market access in China if they barred
Huawei 5G technology, and launched a boycott against Australian goods after
the country called for an inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
China’s market leverage also provides it the wherewithal to pursue pro-
grams such as the Confucius Institutes and Thousand Talents Program—
which it is rebooting in 2021 to accelerate the process of drawing foreign sci-
entific talent to China—that take advantage of the openness of other countries
to advance Beijing’s economic interests and political narrative. And even as
China pursues technological self-reliance, Xi seeks to use the country’s market
to deepen foreign companies’ reliance on it, asserting: “We will enhance the
global value chain’s dependence on China and develop powerful retaliation
and deterrence capabilities against supply cutoffs by foreign parties.”
Finally, China’s strategy involves transforming global governance institu-
tions by reforming norms and values around human rights and Internet gov-
ernance, setting technology standards, and weaving the BRI into the mission
of more than two dozen UN agencies and programs. In the Fourteenth Five
Year Plan, Chinese officials signaled particular interest in shaping norms
around the Arctic and Antarctica, maritime governance, and space.
PROCESS AND PROGRESS

Chinese leaders advance bold long-term initiatives with targets and time-
tables, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, reunification with Taiwan, and
China Standards 2035. They mobilize and coordinate significant human and
financial resources from all sectors of the Chinese government, military,
business, and society to realize those objectives. And they reinforce a single
initiative in multiple domains.
For example, in their pursuit of becoming the world’s leading innovation
and technology power, Chinese leaders set targets and timetables for control-
ling domestic and then global market share in a wide range of technologies,
rally both private and state-owned firms to realize the objectives, protect

BE PREPARED: Sailors aboard the Chinese vessel Xi’an are welcomed to the
2019 Russian Navy Day Parade in St. Petersburg. President Xi envisions China
as the pre-eminent power in Asia, and China is rapidly developing the military
capabilities to realize its sovereignty objectives regarding the South China Sea
and Taiwan. [Alexander Demianchuk—TASS via ZUMA Press]
Chinese firms with programs such as Made in China 2025, subsidize the
deployment of Chinese technology through the Digital Silk Road, place Chi-
nese citizens at the head of international standard-setting bodies such as the
International Telecommunication Union, and flood those bodies with large
Chinese delegations and scores of proposals.
The Chinese government is also highly opportunistic: for example, when
China headed Interpol, it proposed that China upgrade the organization’s
telecommunications infrastructure; it linked a free-trade deal with the Faroe
Islands with acceptance of Huawei 5G technology; and it implicitly threat-
ened to ban German cars if Germany banned Huawei.
Over the past several years, Beijing has made progress on a number of its
strategic objectives:
» It has realized its sovereignty claim over Hong Kong through the impo-
sition of the National Security Law and expanded its military capabilities and
presence in the South China Sea.
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m er 2021 57
» It also has withstood international opprobrium and targeted economic
sanctions for its violations of human rights in Xinjiang, and it has suc-
cessfully mobilized developing economies, particularly from Africa and the
Middle East, to support its stance on Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the South
China Sea.
» Its trade initiative, RCEP, elevates its economic position within the
Indo-Pacific.
» The BRI has laid the foundation for Chinese technology to provide
much of the world’s next-generation telecommunications, financial, and
health infrastructure.
» Chinese dominance in UN technology-standard-setting bodies and
capacity-building on Internet governance are reinforcing acceptance of both
Chinese technology and the more repressive norms and values it enables.
Yet China’s actions have also created new challenges:
» China’s assertiveness and coercive tactics have contributed to popular
backlashes that threaten its larger strategic objectives. Polls in 2020 and
2021 suggest that citizens in many developed and developing economies do
not trust Xi Jinping or China and favor Japanese, EU, or US leadership over
that of China.
» Rather than undermine the US role in the Asia-Pacific, Chinese actions
have strengthened US relations with members of the Quad and other Asian
partners, such as Vietnam. And the EU has stepped up to enhance its politi-
cal and security engagement in the Asia-Pacific.
» Significant solidarity among advanced democracies has emerged to
protest Chinese policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, to call for an investiga-
tion into the origins of COVID-19, and to ban or limit Huawei 5G technology.
And countries are increasingly scrutinizing and defending against Chinese
behavior that attempts to subvert the principles of international institutions.
» The absolute number of Confucius Institutes has declined over the
past few years to just over five hundred—far short of Beijing’s target of one
thousand worldwide by 2020.
» The Belt and Road has become increasingly bumpy. Approximately 60
percent of BRI projects have been “somewhat” or “seriously” affected by the
coronavirus pandemic; and several European members of China’s 17+1 BRI
construct are considering exiting the arrangement.
THE AMERICAN ADVANTAGE

The Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guid-
ance established a useful set of basic parameters for US strategy in the

twenty-first century: protecting the underlying political and economic
strengths of the United States, promoting a favorable distribution of power,
and leading and sustaining a stable and open international system under-
written by our allies, partners, and multilateral institutions that is capable
of meeting the challenges of this century—cyber, climate, corruption, and
digital authoritarianism. To realize this future, however, will require the
United States not only to lead with a strong vision but also to operate with a
new degree of humility and partnership.
First, the United States must account for shifting structural realities. By
2030, or perhaps earlier, the size of China’s economy will likely surpass that
of the United States. Chi-
na’s population already
exceeds that of the The United States should reframe the
United States by more US-China competition away from the
than four times, provid- narrative of a bilateral rivalry to one
ing it a distinct advan-
rooted in values.
tage in human capital,
whether for advancing innovation, growing a domestic market, or enhancing
global political outreach. And within the Asia-Pacific region, China claims a
distinct military advantage simply by virtue of geography. These factors will
require greater reliance on allies and partners.
Second, the United States needs to integrate American values and ambi-
tions at home with its leadership abroad, while acknowledging that some
of these values are still aspirational. These values include a commitment to
inclusion and equality, free trade and economic opportunity, innovation and
sustainability, openness, human dignity, and the rule of law. Many of these
aims are already embedded but not fully realized in the current rules-based
order. Operating from such a framework enables the United States to assert
a positive and proactive message of leadership that resonates both domesti-
cally and internationally.
Third, and related, the United States should make clear that the central
challenge China poses is a value- and norm-based one and not, as is often
asserted, one defined by a rising power versus an established power. When
competition is framed in a bilateral US-China context, China gains an
important advantage. Every issue is elevated into a signal of relative power
and influence; and as the rising power, any relative Chinese gain becomes
a win. A framework that embraces values and norms also is more likely to
engage US allies and partners. Conflict in the South China Sea becomes a
normative challenge by China to freedom of navigation and international law
rather than a competition for military dominance between the United States
and China in the Asia-Pacific. It is a challenge that speaks not only to the
United States but also to the 168 nations who are already party to the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Fourth, as many in the US policy-making community have acknowledged,
the United States needs to retool at home. The polarized American polity
and chaotic response of
the US government to
Beyond its own backyard, China is the pandemic tarnished
embedding its technologies, goods, the United States’ image
and values throughout the world. and contributed to the
impression of US decline.
Before taking office, Biden administration National Security Council offi-
cials Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi argued that the United States would
need to rebuild and rethink the relationship between the state and the
market in ways that addressed inequality, sustained growth, and ensured
competitiveness with China. The United States needs the same clear objec-
tives and targets for realizing these goals that it adopts for ensuring military
preparedness.
Fifth, the United States must re-engage broadly and deeply in regional
and global organizations. These organizations are a central battleground in
ensuring a “stable and open” international system that reflects US interests
and priorities. The Biden administration has already rejoined a number of
multilateral agreements and organizations and made clear its intention to
seize back the initiative in areas such as human rights, climate change, and
technology. However, it must also remain attuned to new Chinese priorities.
China’s recently released Fourteenth Five Year Plan (2021–2025), for
example, highlighted several priority areas for deeper Chinese engagement
in regional and global
governance: the Arctic
The Chinese government is highly and Antarctica, maritime
opportunistic. governance, regional free
trade, and space. The
United States should be prepared for significant new Chinese initiatives in
these arenas and should ensure that it can operate from a position of relative
strength, for example, by developing a tightly coordinated strategy with allies
around Arctic and space governance.
Sixth, the United States and its allies and partners should create infor-
mal working groups, perhaps within the context of the OECD, to coordinate

and advance shared norms and values as well as to defend against Chinese
coercion. In particular, many US analysts have underscored the need for
such cooperation in setting joint technology standards. Developing consen-
sus candidates for leadership positions in international institutions, ensuring
strong representation by democracies in such bodies, and addressing larger
issues of institutional reform, for example, in the WHO and WTO, should also
be priority areas for policy coordination. And aligning a policy approach to
address ongoing Chinese human rights abuses particularly in Xinjiang, Tibet,
and Hong Kong is essential.
A democratic alliance could also cooperate to combat China’s coercive
economic policies. While campaigns to buy Taiwanese pineapples and
Australian wine in the face of Chinese boycotts are important signals of
allied cohesion, stronger steps are necessary. In cases where China boy-
cotts goods from countries on political grounds, an alliance network could
simultaneously boy-
cott or impose tariffs
on Chinese goods. China should not achieve an advantage
Similarly, when simply because it shows up and listens
China threatens loss and the United States does not.
of market access
for industries, such as hotels and airlines, other countries should respond
by threatening to take away Chinese airlines’ or hotels’ access to their
markets. Reciprocity signals to China that other countries are prepared
to respond with more than rhetorical condemnation and levels the playing
field for future negotiation.
The United States should also encourage deeper European security
engagement in Asia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has called
for NATO to play a larger role in the Asia-Pacific region, coordinating with
Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea to support global rules and
set norms and standards in space and cyberspace in the face of destabiliz-
ing Chinese behavior. Europe could take part in conversations the Quad is
pursuing around supply chain resiliency, the pandemic, and disinformation
campaigns as well. Also, a stronger Europe-Asia security partnership could
play a crucial role in bolstering Taiwan’s security.
Seventh, for the United States to ensure a world order that reflects its
values and normative preferences—and not those of China—and to meet the
challenges of this century requires more than simply cooperation with its
traditional allies and partners. It requires forging a new relationship with the
world’s developing economies that is rooted in new economic opportunities
for those countries, is imbued with US values, and is directed toward meet-
ing the global challenges outlined in the administration’s guidance.
The breadth and depth of China’s engagement with developing economies,
particularly in Africa and the Middle East but also Latin America and South-
east Asia, has provided China with fertile ground for its values, technologies,
and policy preferences to take hold. And it is forging closer military ties with
many of these countries as well. Yet there is an opportunity in many cases to
change this dynamic.
To begin with, the United States should adopt a more inclusive diplomatic
framework and engage a broader range of countries in thinking through
how best to advance a common strategy on cybersecurity and governance,
climate, corruption, and digital authoritarianism. China should not achieve
an advantage simply because it shows up and listens and the United States
does not.
In consultation with the developing economies, the United States and
other large market democracies, such as Germany, France, the United King-
dom, Japan, and Australia, should also pursue a significant new development
initiative—for example, a
sustainable and smart cities
The United States must lead not program in twenty-five to
only with a strong vision but also thirty developing countries.
with a new degree of humility and Such an initiative would
partnership. leverage US strengths and
those of its democratic allies
and address the broader global imperatives identified by the Biden adminis-
tration. It would involve political and economic capacity building around the
rule of law, transparency, sustainability, and innovation and would engage not
only governments but also the private sector, civil society, and international
institutions.
While much of a new development effort would require new financial sup-
port, the United States and its partners could also leverage current initia-
tives to establish resilient supply chains. As multinationals diversify part of
their supply chains away from China to develop regional manufacturing and
distribution centers, for example, these new investment opportunities could
become part of this new development initiative. Development agencies and
NGOs, such as the Asia Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies, that sup-
port grass-roots programs on the rule of law, sustainability, and technological
innovation could also play an important role. They are a force multiplier for
democratic values and should be part of a considered US and allied strategy.

And at the same time, the United States and its allies could reinforce the
political, environmental, and technological standards in UN agencies and
standard-setting bodies. Creating a new path to engage the developing world
is essential to US competitiveness with China, not to mention the future well-
being of the international system.
Finally, even as the bilateral US-China relationship remains overwhelm-
ingly competitive, the United States should keep the door open to coopera-
tion with China. There is legitimate space to elevate the world’s capacity to
respond to climate change, pandemics, and global disasters through US-Chi-
na cooperation. Reconstituting a bilateral dialogue that supports discussion
and negotiation on singular, targeted issues of mutual concern, such as visas
or maritime safety, would also be beneficial. And supporting civil society
exchanges, such as the Fulbright program and Peace Corps, that offer the
opportunity to share US perspectives and values, has little downside for the
United States and significant potential upside.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Adapted from testimony before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on March 17, 2021.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Spin

Wars and Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence
Gathering, by Markos Kounalakis. To order, call (800)
888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
CH I NA
CH I NA
Better Footing
How to grapple with Chinese ambitions—military,
economic, and ideological.
By H. R. McMaster
If we falter in our leadership, we may

endanger the peace of the world—and Key points
we shall surely endanger the welfare of » Some are calling for
this nation. warmer relations with
China as an end in itself.
—President Harry S. Truman, March 12, 1947 » The Chinese Communist
Party’s actions are mani-
festations of its leaders’
F
fears, aspirations, and ide-
or too long the United States clung
ology—not of tensions with
to the assumption that China, the United States.
having been welcomed into the » China actively promotes
international system based on our the false idea that the
United States is trying to
desire for cooperation and engagement, would keep China down.
play by the rules and, as China prospered, its » Resisting Beijing will
leaders would liberalize its economy and its require a high degree of
international cooperation.
form of governance. The 2017 National Secu- Washington must foster this.
rity Strategy and the Indo-Pacific Strategy
H. R. McMaster (US Army, Ret.), a former national security adviser, is the Fouad
and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of
Hoover’s working groups on military history and Islamism and the international
order. He is also a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project, the Bernard
and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and a lecturer at
Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. His latest book is Battle-
grounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World (Harper, 2020).

administered a corrective to that false assumption, recognized the need for
transparent competition with the aggressive policies of the Chinese Commu-
nist Party (CCP), and effected what may be the most significant shift in US
foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.
If any doubt lingered concerning the Chinese Communist Party’s inten-
tion to extend and tighten its exclusive grip on power internally and achieve
“national rejuvenation” at the expense of other nations externally, the party’s
actions amid a global pandemic should have removed them.
Communist leaders continued to speak the language of cooperation and
global governance while repressing human freedom, exporting their authori-
tarian-mercantilist model, and subverting international organizations. Chair-
man Xi Jinping speaks of “rule of law” while he interns millions of people
in concentration camps and wages a campaign of cultural genocide against
the Uighur population in Xinjiang. He vows carbon neutrality by 2060 while
China continues to build scores of coal-fired plants globally per year.
He gives speeches on free trade while engaging in economic aggression,
forced labor, economic coercion, and unfair trade and economic practices. He
suggests a “community of common destiny” while fostering servile relation-
ships with countries vulnerable to his military or economic intimidation. The
Chinese Communist Party’s Orwellian reversal of the truth matters to Ameri-
cans because the party is not only strengthening an internal system that stifles
human freedom and extends its authoritarian control; it is also exporting that
model and advocating for the development of new rules and a new internation-
al order that would make the world less free, less prosperous, and less safe.
Despite an undeniable record of aggression and the dangers that the CCP
poses for international security and prosperity, some continue to call for warm-
er relations with China as an end in itself. Although more countries such as the
United Kingdom, Sweden, and India have joined the United States and Austra-
lia in specific defensive measures such as banning the Chinese telecommunica-
tions company Huawei from developing 5G communications networks, others
appear unconvinced that it is dangerous to surrender their data to China. As
the United States declared the CCP’s attacks on Uighurs a genocide, the Euro-
pean Union agreed in principle to a Comprehensive Agreement on Investment
with China that diverted attention away from China’s atrocities in exchange for
vague promises to adhere to international standards it has consistently ignored
since gaining admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Although the Biden administration did not remove Trump administra-
tion–imposed tariffs, it re-entered international organizations like the World
Health Organization (WHO) and the Human Rights Council without demanding
conditions that might have made it more difficult for China to subvert those
organizations. The US government acted to prevent investment in Chinese
companies connected to the People’s Liberation Army, but Wall Street and other
international investors are pouring money into Chinese equities, undaunted by
the party’s increasing intervention in the private sector or the fact that the com-
panies in which they are investing must, by law, act as extensions of the party.
Chinese Communist leaders are likely recalling the quotation attributed
to Vladimir Lenin as they watch China overtake the United States as the top
destination for new foreign direct investment: “The capitalists will sell us the
rope with which we will hang them.”
TWO MISUNDERSTANDINGS
Two fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of the high-stakes
competition with China have stunted the collective response. It is vital that
US diplomatic efforts correct them.
The first misunderstanding is that Chinese aggression is the result of US-Chi-
na tensions or is a reaction to the Trump administration’s description of China
as a rival in the December 2017 National Security Strategy and the Defense
Strategy that stemmed from it. This misunderstanding derives from the conceit
that the CCP has no volition except in reaction to the United States. But even
the most cursory survey of recent actions reveals that the United States did
not cause Chinese aggression and that China’s promotion of its authoritarian
mercantilist model poses a threat to international security and prosperity.
Consider the party’s deliberate suppression of information about the
COVID-19 outbreak, the persecution of doctors and journalists who tried to
warn the world, and the subversion of the WHO as it excluded Taiwan from
that organization and stifled Taiwan’s instructive example of how to contain
the virus. The CCP has added insult to injury by using diplomacy to obscure
China’s responsibility for the pandemic and portray its response as superior
and magnanimous. The party directed massive cyberattacks globally on medi-
cal research facilities amid the pandemic. In an effort to “kill one to warn one
hundred,” China inflicted economic punishment on Australia for having the
temerity to propose an inquiry into the origins of the virus.
Meanwhile, the party raced to perfect its technologically enabled police
state and extend its repression into Hong Kong. Xi Jinping even boasted of
his intention to expand concentration camps in Xinjiang and extolled the
virtues of slave labor. As the party expelled more international reporters and
imprisoned more Hong Kong rights activists, Xi announced that he would con-
tinue to use hostage taking, such as the unlawful jailing of Canadians Michael

CONTESTED SPACE: Chinese tank crewmen listen to a reviewer at Shenyang
training base. China is using its growing military capability to intimidate
countries and restrict access for US forces. It has already embarked on efforts
to push American forces out of the Indo-Pacific. [Alamy]
Spavor and Michael Kovrig, to coerce others to submit to Chinese demands

and support the CCP’s worldview and violent self-conception as a one-party
nation with no room for ethnic plurality except on its own rigid terms.
Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) bludgeoned Indian soldiers
to death along the Himalayan frontier, rammed vessels in the South China
Sea, gave its coast guard permission to fire on vessels that do not recognize
its baseless claims of control over that strategic maritime area, threatened
Japan’s Senkakus, and menaced Taiwan with its aircraft and naval vessels.
It is past time to jettison the narcissistic belief that the United States
caused Chinese aggression and recognize the party’s actions as manifesta-
tions of its leaders’ fears, aspirations, and ideology. President Biden and his
diplomats might make clear to their counterparts abroad that the choice
they face is not one between Washington and Beijing. The choice is between
sovereignty and servitude.
The second misunderstanding is that competition with China is danger-
ous or even irresponsible because of a “Thucydides trap,” a term coined to
express the likelihood of conflict between a rising power (China) and a status
quo power (the United States). The party promotes this false dilemma, por-
traying efforts to defend against its aggression as simply the United States
trying to keep China and its people down. This trope not only provides cover
for the party’s aggression but rationalizes the views of those who prefer pas-
sive accommodation to competition as they pursue short-term profits.
But the way to avoid stepping into the trap of destructive war is to gravi-
tate toward neither confrontation nor passive accommodation. Transparent
competition as described in the recently declassified Indo-Pacific Strategy
is the best way to prevent unnecessary escalation and enable rather than
foreclose on cooperation with China.
STRENGTHS
If American diplomats correct those misunderstandings and US leaders
resolve to compete alongside like-minded partners, it is possible to turn
what the Chinese Communist Party views as America’s weaknesses (such
as democratic governance, freedom of speech, and rule of law) into competi-
tive advantages. Competing might also generate confidence in those prin-
ciples that distinguish free and open societies from the closed, authoritarian
system China promotes. It is not just an exercise in altruism to help those
abroad who are promoting what Americans regard as inalienable rights and
strengthening institutions vital to representative governance. It is one of the
best ways to counter China’s strategic ambitions.
There is much room for improvement in the effort to prevent China from
using the open nature of free market economies to gain technological advan-
tage, perfect its surveillance
police state, and promote its
China is shaping a new interna- authoritarian capitalist model.
tional order that would make the The integrated nature of the
world less free, less prosperous, Chinese Communist Party’s
military and economic strate-
and less safe.
gies is what makes it particu-
larly dangerous to the United States and other free and open societies. For
example, many universities, research labs, and companies in countries that
value the rule of law and individual rights are unwitting accomplices in the
CCP’s use of technology to repress its people and improve the capabilities
of China’s military. What is needed is an international commitment to do no
harm through research, investment, trade, or other economic relationships
with Chinese companies that must act as extensions of the CCP in three
areas:

» Technology: Do not engage in trade or investment relationships that trans-
fer sensitive technology and allow the PLA and the CCP to gain advantage mili-
tarily or obtain an unfair advantage in the emerging data-driven global economy.
» Investment: Do not invest in Chinese companies or do business in China
in a way that helps the party stifle human freedom and perfect its technologi-
cally enabled police state.
» Intellectual property: Do not transfer intellectual property and com-
promise the long-term viability of companies in exchange for short-term
profits associated with access to the Chinese market.
The US government will continue to play an important role in this competi-
tion, but companies and shareholders must recognize what is at stake and
make decisions consistent with long-term interests. Governments can help
companies insulate them-
selves from the coercive
power of the CCP. For America was, and remains, a force for
example, fast-tracking good in the world.
visas for Chinese employ-
ees of US companies and their families if they are the objects of party coer-
cion would help companies stand up to Beijing while protecting their people.
Tougher screening for Chinese firms listed on US, European, and Japanese
capital markets as well as scrutiny of US investment in Chinese companies
would complement the improved review process for Chinese investment in
US companies. Many Chinese companies directly or indirectly involved in
domestic human rights abuses, development of advanced defense capabili-
ties, and violation of international treaties are listed on American stock
exchanges or benefit from US investment while failing to meet transparency
and reporting requirements.
The Biden administration must continue to expand on the important work
that the intelligence agencies and Departments of State, Defense, and Justice
have done to counter the CCP’s sustained campaign of industrial espionage
while recognizing that defensive measures will prove inadequate. Prevailing
in the tech competition will require more investment in basic and applied
research as well as stronger cooperation across the public and private sec-
tors of like-minded liberal democracies. For important emerging technologies
such as those associated with quantum computing or artificial intelligence, the
private sector should seek new partnerships with countries that share commit-
ments to the free market, representative government, and the rule of law.
Other arenas of competition that require a high degree of international
cooperation include China’s effort to control critical supply chains, financial
technology, digital currency and electronic payments, and global Internet
privacy and data standards. The Communist Party’s efforts to gain pre-
ponderant influence over global logistics infrastructure through strategic
investments and debt traps as well as subsidies for 5G communications
infrastructure require multinational cooperation and economic statecraft.
Governments of free market economies must work together and within
international organizations to ensure access to critical commodities and
products such as rare-earth metals and computer chips, enforce reciprocal
trade practices, and demand recompense for China’s unfair advantages such
as state support for companies like Huawei.
SECURITY AND EDUCATION

Transparent competition with China requires a strong defense to convince
the Chinese Communist Party and China’s army that they cannot accomplish
objectives in the Indo-Pacific region with force. China is using its growing
military capability to intimidate countries and restrict access for US forces.
It has already embarked on efforts to push American forces out as the first
step in establishing hegemonic influence across the Indo-Pacific analogous to
the tributary system of the Qing dynasty. The 2018 National Defense Strat-
egy identified eight critical areas for modernization that remain valid and
relevant. Those priorities require sustained, predictable investment.
Perhaps most important, it is difficult to overstate the need for forward-posi-
tioned joint forces to assure allies and deter adversaries. Both China and Russia
have developed anti-access
and area denial (A2AD)
Chinese aggression is not the result of capabilities to restrict
US-China tensions. US and allied freedom
of movement and action.
Forward-positioned, capable joint forces of sufficient size transform what adver-
saries would like to declare denied space into contested space while ensuring
that if conflict should occur, we do not have to pay the high price of readmission.
Competition does not foreclose on cooperation. If the United States and
like-minded liberal democracies convince Chinese leaders that their cam-
paign of co-option, coercion, and concealment is not working, Beijing may
conclude that it can have enough of its dream without trespassing on the
security, sovereignty, and prosperity of other nations’ citizens. But it will be
important to avoid compromises based on false promises of cooperation in
areas such as climate change or North Korea’s nuclear program. Watching
what Beijing does rather than believing what it says is a best practice.

Perhaps most important, the United States must possess the confidence to
sustain a foreign policy based on the recognition that American security and
prosperity at home depend on engagement abroad. Clearly there is work to
do at home to overcome the traumas of a pandemic, an economic recession,
social divisions, vitriolic partisanship, and the destructive interaction among
identity politics, critical race theory, bigotry, and racism. But our effort to
overcome those traumas should not encourage disengagement from challenges
abroad. Introspection should help clarify what Americans stand for and what
Americans must defend: individual liberty, the rule of law, freedom of expres-
sion, democratic governance, tolerance, and opportunity for all. Schools can
rekindle in our youth an understanding of our history that includes not only
the contradictions and imperfections in our experiment in democracy but also
the great promise of America and its role as a force for good in the world. We
might remember the philosopher Richard Rorty’s observation that “national
pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition
for self-improvement.”
Finally, education may create another way to strengthen our national
defense and our ability to overcome China’s threat to our security and
prosperity. It may be time for an initiative similar to the National Defense
Education Act, passed in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s launching
of Sputnik. Educated citizens start new businesses, create medical break-
throughs like vaccines, ensure the technological prowess of our armed forces,
and solve interconnected problems like climate change and energy, food, and
water security. Educated citizens learn languages and connect with other
societies, foster strategic empathy, and promote peace.
And educated citizens appreciate the great gifts of our free and open soci-
ety as well as what we must do together to defend our nation and improve it.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Adapted from testimony before the Senate
Armed Services Committee on March 2, 2021.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Crosswinds:

The Way of Saudi Arabia, by Fouad Ajami. To order,
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CH I NA
CH I NA
Taiwan as
Trigger
American presidents come and go, but Beijing has
never once taken its eyes off Taiwan, or ceased
demanding it.
By Niall Ferguson
I
n a famous essay, the philosopher
Isaiah Berlin borrowed a distinc- Key points
tion from the ancient Greek poet » Taiwan remains Beijing’s top
priority.
Archilochus: “The fox knows
» The ambiguity of the United
many things, but the hedgehog knows States’ attitude toward Taiwan,
one big thing.” especially the security guar-
antee, remains intolerable to
“There exists,” wrote Berlin, “a great China.
chasm between those, on one side, who » The US commitment to
relate everything to . . . a single, uni- Taiwan has grown verbally
stronger even as it has become
versal, organizing principle in terms of
militarily weaker.
which alone all that they are and say
» Losing—or not even fight-
has significance”—the hedgehogs— ing for—Taiwan would be
“and, on the other side, those who seen all over Asia as the end of
American predominance in the
pursue many ends, often unrelated and region.
even contradictory”—the foxes.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
where he is chairman of the History Working Group and participates in the Human
Prosperity Project and Hoover’s task forces on military history and national secu-
rity. He is also a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard.

Berlin was talking about writers. But the same distinction can be drawn
in the realm of great-power politics. Today, there are two superpowers
in the world, the United States and China. The former is a fox. American
foreign policy is, to borrow Berlin’s terms, “scattered or diffused, moving on
many levels.” China, by contrast, is a hedgehog: it relates everything to “one
unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at
times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”
Fifty years ago this July, the arch-fox of American diplomacy, Henry
Kissinger, flew to Beijing on a secret mission that would fundamentally alter
the global balance of power. The strategic backdrop was the administration
of Richard Nixon’s struggle to extricate the United States from the Vietnam
War with its honor and
credibility so far as pos-
sible intact. The domes- No matter what other issues Kissin
tic context was dissen- ger raised, Zhou steered the conversa-
sion more profound and tion back to Taiwan, “the only ques-
violent than anything
tion between us two.”
we have seen in the past
year. In March 1971, Lieutenant William Calley was found guilty of twenty-
two murders in the My Lai massacre. In April, half a million people marched
through Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. In June, the New York
Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers.
Kissinger’s meetings with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, were perhaps
the most momentous of his career. As a fox, the US national security adviser
had multiple objectives. The principal goal was to secure a public Chinese
invitation for his boss, Nixon, to visit Beijing the following year.
But Kissinger was also seeking Chinese help in getting America out of
Vietnam, as well as hoping to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in a way that would
put pressure on the Soviet Union, America’s principal Cold War adversary,
to slow down the nuclear arms race. In his opening remarks, Kissinger listed
no fewer than six issues for discussion, including the raging conflict in South
Asia that would culminate in the independence of Bangladesh.
Zhou’s response was that of a hedgehog. He had just one issue: Taiwan. “If
this crucial question is not solved,” he told Kissinger at the outset, “then the
whole question [of US-China relations] will be difficult to resolve.”
To an extent that is striking to the modern-day reader of the transcripts
of this and the subsequent meetings, Zhou’s principal goal was to persuade
Kissinger to agree to “recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government
in China” and “Taiwan Province” as “an inalienable part of Chinese territory
which must be restored to the motherland,” from which the United States
must “withdraw all its armed forces and dismantle all its military installa-
tions.” (Since the Communists’ triumph in the Chinese civil war in 1949, the
island of Taiwan had been the last outpost of the nationalist Kuomintang.
And since the Korean War, the United States had defended its autonomy.)
With his eyes on so many prizes, Kissinger was prepared to make the
key concessions the Chinese sought. “We are not advocating a ‘two China’
solution or a ‘one China,
one Taiwan’ solution,”
he told Zhou. “As a
student of history,”
he went on, “one’s
prediction
would

have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which
[the] prime minister . . . indicated to me.” Moreover, “We can settle the major
part of the military question within this term of the president if the war in
Southeast Asia [i.e., Vietnam] is ended.”
Asked by Zhou for his view of the Taiwanese independence movement,
Kissinger dismissed it out of hand. No matter what other issues Kissinger
raised—Vietnam, Korea, the Soviets—Zhou steered the conversation back
to Taiwan, “the only question between us two.” Would the United
States recognize the People’s Republic as the sole
government of China and normalize diplomatic
relations? Yes, after the 1972 election.
Would Taiwan be expelled from the
United Nations and its seat on
the Security Council given to
Beijing? Again, yes.
Fast forward half a
century, and the same
issue—Taiwan—
remains Beijing’s
top priority.
His-
tory did not evolve in quite the way Kissinger had foreseen. True, Nixon went
to China as planned, Taiwan was booted out of the United Nations and, under
President Jimmy Carter, the United States abrogated its 1954 mutual defense
treaty with Taiwan. But the pro-Taiwan lobby in Congress was able to throw
Taipei a lifeline in 1979, the Taiwan Relations Act.
The act states that the United States will consider “any effort to determine
the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or
embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and
of grave concern to the United States.” It also commits the US government
to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and . . . services in such
quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-
defense capacity,” as well as to “maintain the capacity of the United States to
resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the
security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”
AN INTOLERABLE STATE
For the Chinese hedgehog, this ambiguity—whereby the United States does
not recognize Taiwan as an independent state but at the same time under-
writes its security and de facto autonomy—remains an intolerable state of
affairs.
Yet the balance of power has been transformed since 1971—and much more
profoundly than Kissinger could have foreseen. China fifty years ago was dirt
poor: despite its huge population, its economy was a tiny fraction of US gross
domestic product. This year, the International Monetary Fund projects that,
in current dollar terms, Chinese GDP will be three-quarters of US GDP. On a
purchasing power parity basis, China overtook the United States in 2017.
In the same time frame, Taiwan, too, has prospered. Not only has it
emerged as one of Asia’s most advanced economies, with Taiwan Semicon-
ductor Manufacturing Company the world’s top chip manufacturer. Taiwan
has also become living proof that an ethnically Chinese people can thrive
under democracy. The authoritarian regime that ran Taipei in the 1970s is a
distant memory. Today, it is a shining example of how a free society can use
technology to empower its citizens—which explains why its response to the
COVID-19 pandemic was by any measure the most successful in the world.
As Harvard University’s Graham Allison argued in his hugely influential
book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?,
China’s economic rise—at first welcomed by American policy makers—was
bound eventually to look like a threat to the United States. Conflicts between
incumbent powers and rising powers have been a feature of world politics

since 431 BC, when it was the “growth in power of Athens, and the alarm
which this inspired in Sparta” that led to war. The only surprising thing was
that it took President Donald Trump, of all people, to waken Americans up to
the threat posed by the growth in the power of the People’s Republic.
Trump campaigned
against China as a threat
mainly to US manufac- Taiwan has also become living proof
turing jobs. Once in the that an ethnically Chinese people can
White House, he took his
thrive under democracy.
time before acting, but in
2018 began imposing tariffs on Chinese imports. Yet he could not prevent his
preferred trade war from escalating rapidly into something more like Cold
War II—a contest that was at once technological, ideological, and geopoliti-
cal. The foreign policy “blob” picked up the anti-China ball and ran with it.
The public cheered them on, with anti-China sentiment surging among both
Republicans and Democrats.
Trump himself may have been a hedgehog with a one-track mind: tariffs.
But under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, US policy soon reverted to its
foxy norm. Pompeo threw every imaginable issue at Beijing, from the reli-
ance of Huawei Technologies on imported semiconductors, to the suppres-
sion of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, to the murky origins of
COVID-19 in Wuhan.
Inevitably, Taiwan was added to the list, but the increased arms sales and
diplomatic contacts were not given top billing. When Richard Haass, the
grand panjandrum of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued last year for
ending “strategic ambiguity” and wholeheartedly committing the United
States to upholding Taiwan’s autonomy, no one in the Trump administration
said, “Great idea!”
Yet when Pompeo met the director of the Communist Party office of for-
eign affairs, Yang Jiechi, in Hawaii last June, guess where the Chinese side
began? “There is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inalienable
part of China. The one-China principle is the political foundation of China-US
relations.”
THE PATIENT HEDGEHOG

So successful was Trump in leading elite and popular opinion to a more
anti-China stance that President Joe Biden had no alternative but to fall in
line last year. The somewhat surprising outcome is that he is now leading an
administration that is in many ways more hawkish than its predecessor.
Trump was no Cold Warrior. According to former national security adviser
John Bolton’s memoir, the president liked to point to the tip of one of his
Sharpies and say, “This is Taiwan,” then point to the Resolute desk in the
Oval Office and say, “This is China.” “Taiwan is like two feet from China,”
Trump told one Republican senator. “We are eight thousand miles away. If
they invade, there isn’t a f—ing thing we can do about it.”
Unlike others in his national security team, Trump cared little about
human rights issues. On Hong Kong, he said: “I don’t want to get involved,”
and, “We have human rights problems too.” When President Xi Jinping
informed him about the labor camps for the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang in
western China, Trump essentially told him “No problemo.” On the thirtieth
anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Trump asked: “Who
cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal.”
The Biden administration, by contrast, means what it says on such issues.
In every statement since taking over as secretary of state, Antony Blinken has
referred to China not only as a strategic rival but also as a violator of human
rights. In January, he called China’s treatment of the Uighurs “an effort to
commit genocide” and pledged to continue Pompeo’s policy of increasing US
engagement with Taiwan. In February, he gave Yang an earful on Hong Kong,
Xinjiang, Tibet, and even Myanmar, where China backs the recent military
coup. Earlier this year, the administration imposed sanctions on Chinese offi-
cials it holds responsible for sweeping away Hong Kong’s autonomy.
In his last Foreign Affairs magazine article before joining the adminis-
tration as its Asia “czar,” Kurt Campbell argued for “a conscious effort to
deter Chinese adventurism. . . . This means investing in long-range conven-
tional cruise and ballistic missiles, unmanned carrier-based strike aircraft
and underwater vehicles, guided-missile submarines, and high-speed strike
weapons.” He added that Washington needs to work with other states
to disperse US forces across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean and
“to reshore sensitive industries and pursue a ‘managed decoupling’ from
China.”
In many respects, the continuity with the Trump China strategy is star-
tling. The trade war has not been ended, nor the tech war. Aside from actu-
ally meaning the human rights stuff, the only other big difference between
THE ONLY QUESTION: A Chinese propaganda poster from the late 1950s
(opposite) shows mainland troops attacking US and Taiwanese forces over
the slogan “We must liberate Taiwan.” [Alamy]
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m e r 2021 79
ISLAND IN THE STREAM: A boy wearing a shirt imprinted with the flag of
the Republic of China attends a patriotic recruiting event last year in Taipei,
Taiwan. Beijing has always insisted that what it calls “Taiwan Province” is
“an inalienable part of Chinese territory which must be restored to the mother-
land,” in the words of Zhou Enlai. [Ceng Shou Yi—Sipa USA/Newscom]
Biden and Trump is the former’s far stronger emphasis on the importance of
allies in this process of deterring China—in particular, the so-called Quad the
United States has formed with Australia, India, and Japan. As Blinken said in
a keynote speech on March 3, for the United States “to engage China from a
position of strength . . . requires working with allies and partners . . . because
our combined weight is much harder for China to ignore.”
This argument took concrete form when Campbell told the Sydney Morning
Herald that the United States was “not going to leave Australia alone on the
field” if Beijing continued its current economic squeeze on Canberra (retalia-
tion for the Australian government’s call for an independent inquiry into the
origins of the pandemic). National security adviser Jake Sullivan has been
singing from much the same hymnbook. Biden himself hosted a virtual sum-
mit for the Quad’s heads of state on March 12.
The Chinese approach remains that of the hedgehog. Several years ago, I
was told by one of Xi’s economic advisers that bringing Taiwan back under

the mainland’s control was his president’s most cherished objective—and
the reason he had secured an end to the informal rule that had confined
previous Chinese presidents to two terms. It is for this reason, above all oth-
ers, that Xi has presided over a huge expansion of China’s land, sea, and air
forces, including the land-based DF‑21D missiles that could sink American
aircraft carriers.
While America’s multitasking foxes have been adding to their laundry list
of grievances, the Chinese hedgehog has steadily been building its capacity
to take over Taiwan. In the words of Tanner Greer, a journalist who writes
knowledgably on Taiwanese security, the People’s Liberation Army “has par-
ity on just about every system the Taiwanese can field (or buy from us in the
future), and for some systems they simply outclass the Taiwanese altogeth-
er.” More important, China has created what’s known as an “anti-access/area
denial bubble” to keep US forces away from Taiwan. As Lonnie Henley of
George Washington University pointed out in congressional testimony earlier
this year, “if we can disable [China’s integrated air defense system], we can
win militarily. If not, we probably cannot.”
As a student of history, to quote Kissinger, I see a very dangerous situation.
The US commitment to Taiwan has grown verbally stronger even as it has
become militarily weaker. When a commitment is said to be “rock solid” but
in reality has the consistency of fine sand, there is a danger that both sides
miscalculate.
THE PRESSURE OF TIME

I am not alone in worrying. Admiral Phil Davidson, the head of US forces in
the Indo-Pacific, warned in February testimony before Congress that China
could invade Taiwan by 2027. In March, my Bloomberg Opinion colleague
Max Hastings noted that “Taiwan evokes the sort of sentiment among [the
Chinese] people that Cuba did among Americans sixty years ago.”
Admiral James Stavridis, also a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, has just
published 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, in which a surprise Chinese
naval encirclement of Taiwan is one of the opening ploys of World War III.
(The United States sustains such heavy naval losses that it is driven to nuke
Zhanjiang, which leads in turn to the obliteration of San Diego and Galves-
ton.) Perhaps the most questionable part of this scenario is its date, thirteen
years hence. My Hoover colleague Misha Auslin has imagined a US-China
naval war as soon as 2025.
In an important new study of the Taiwan question for the Council on For-
eign Relations, Robert D. Blackwill and Philip Zelikow—veteran students and
practitioners of US foreign policy—lay out the four options they see for US
policy, of which their preferred is the last:
The United States should . . . rehearse—at least with Japan

and Taiwan—a parallel plan to challenge any Chinese denial of
international access to Taiwan and prepare, including with pre-
positioned US supplies, including war reserve stocks, shipments
of vitally needed supplies to help Taiwan defend itself. . . . The
United States and its allies would credibly and visibly plan to react
to the attack on their forces by breaking all financial relations with
China, freezing or seizing Chinese assets.
Blackwill and Zelikow are right that the status quo is unsustainable. But
there are three core problems with all arguments to make deterrence more
persuasive. The first is that any steps to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses will
inevitably elicit an angry response from China, increasing the likelihood that
the Cold War turns hot—especially if Japan is explicitly involved. The second
problem is that such steps create a closing window of opportunity for China
to act before the US
upgrade of deterrence is
In many respects, Biden’s continu- complete. The third is the
ity with the Trump China strategy is reluctance of the Taiwan-
startling. ese themselves to treat
their national security
with the same seriousness that Israelis take the survival of their state.
A meeting in Alaska last March of Blinken, Sullivan, Yang, and Chinese For-
eign Minister Wang Yi—following hard on the heels of Blinken’s visits to Japan
and South Korea—was never likely to restart the process of Sino-American
strategic dialogue that characterized the era of “Chimerica” under George W.
Bush and Barack Obama. The days of “win-win” diplomacy are long gone.
During the opening exchanges before the media, Yang illustrated that
hedgehogs not only have one big idea—they are also very prickly. The United
States was being “condescending,” he declared, in remarks that overshot the
prescribed two minutes by a factor of eight; it would do better to address its
own “deep seated” human rights problems, such as racism (a “long history of
killing blacks”), rather than lecture China.
The question that remains is how quickly the Biden administration could
find itself confronted with a Taiwan crisis, whether a light “quarantine,” a
full-scale blockade, or a surprise amphibious invasion. If Hastings is right,
this would be the Cuban missile crisis of Cold War II, but with the roles

reversed, as the contested island is even further from the United States than
Cuba is from Russia. If Stavridis is right, Taiwan would be more like Belgium
in 1914 or Poland in 1939.
But I have another analogy in mind. Perhaps Taiwan will turn out to be
to the American empire what Suez was to the British empire in 1956: the
moment when the impe-
rial lion is exposed as a
paper tiger. When Egyp- The US commitment to Taiwan has
tian President Gamal grown verbally stronger even as it has
Abdel Nasser national- become militarily weaker.
ized the Suez Canal,
Prime Minister Anthony Eden joined forces with France and Israel to try to
take it back by force. American opposition precipitated a run on the pound
and British humiliation.
I, for one, struggle to see the Biden administration responding to a Chinese
attack on Taiwan with the combination of military force and financial sanc-
tions envisaged by Blackwill and Zelikow. Sullivan has written eloquently of
the need for a foreign policy that Middle America can get behind. Getting
torched for Taipei does not seem to fit that bill.
As for Biden himself, would he really be willing to jeopardize the post-
pandemic boom his economic policies are fueling for the sake of an island
Kissinger was once prepared quietly to trade in pursuit of Cold War détente?
Who would be hurt more by the financial crisis Blackwill and Zelikow imag-
ine in the event of war for Taiwan: China, or the United States itself? One of
the two superpowers has a current accounts deficit of 3.5 percent of GDP (Q2
2020) and a net international investment position of nearly minus-$14 trillion,
and it’s not China. The surname of the secretary of state would certainly be
an irresistible temptation to headline writers if the United States blinked in
what would be the fourth and biggest Taiwan crisis since 1954.
Yet think what that
would mean. Losing in
Vietnam five decades Who would be hurt more in a financial
ago turned out not to crisis triggered by a war for Taiwan:
matter much, other
China or the United States?
than to the unfortunate
inhabitants of South Vietnam. There was barely any domino effect in Asia as
a whole, aside from the human catastrophe of Cambodia. Yet losing—or not
even fighting for—Taiwan would be seen all over Asia as the end of American
predominance in the region we now call the “Indo-Pacific.” It would confirm
the long-standing hypothesis of China’s return to primacy in Asia after two
centuries of eclipse and “humiliation.” It would mean a breach of the “first
island chain” that Chi-
nese strategists believe
“Taiwan evokes the sort of sentiment encircles them, as well as
among [the Chinese] people that handing Beijing control
Cuba did among Americans sixty of the microchip mecca
years ago.” that is TSMC (remember,
semiconductors, not data,
are the new oil). It would surely cause a run on the dollar and US Treasuries.
It would be the American Suez.
The fox has had a good run. But the danger of foxy foreign policy is that
you care about so many issues you risk losing focus. The hedgehog, by con-
trast, knows one big thing. That big thing may be that he who rules Taiwan
rules the world.
Reprinted by permission of Bloomberg. © 2021 Bloomberg LP. All rights

reserved.

Struggle across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China
Problem, by Ramon H. Myers and Jialin Zhang. To
org.

CHINA
CH I NA
Freedom’s
Struggle
With China increasingly dominant, nations in
the Indo-Pacific seek their own paths between
socialism and capitalism.
By Michael R. Auslin
T
he world is about to witness a demonstration of whether an
authoritarian state can take over a free society and keep it
economically flourishing while individual rights are increasingly
extinguished. If that sounds like a paradox, it is, given that the
historical record includes no examples of such a transition to authoritarian-
ism where, ultimately, economic growth and development continued while
freedom languished. Indeed, despite appearances to the contrary, there is
little evidence that wealthy or free countries are eager to adopt the repres-
sive systems of illiberal powers.
Despite this, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is relentlessly pushing
its laboratory experiment on Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) has passed a draconian national security law, repudiating its
promises to ensure the former colony’s freedoms.
Michael R. Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Con-

temporary Asia at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of Asia’s New Geopol-
itics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020)
and the co-host of the Hoover Institution podcast The Pacific Century (https://
www.hoover.org/publications/pacific-century).
The organs of CCP control have already been established in Hong Kong,
and the law makes clear that any activities that Beijing considers to be
secessionist, subversive, or terrorist will lead to prosecution. Pro-democra-
cy activists have been arrested, including several attempting to escape to
Taiwan; democracy leaders such as Jimmy Lai have been charged, chilling
free expression. Offenses considered serious enough will be taken out of the
Hong Kong legal system entirely and prosecut-
ed under mainland law after transferral
of the accused to Beijing. Tighter
controls on foreign media and
organizations as well will
reduce the free flow of
information in the
territory;
already

Hong Kong libraries are being
stripped of books by authors the Commu-
nist regime in Beijing considers threatening.
How will the disappearance of Hong Kong’s traditional
freedoms, and the imposition of an authoritarian system of control, affect the
territory’s economic activity? What will remain of civil society in Hong Kong
once the law is fully executed? In short, will Hong Kong retain any of the
qualities of free life that marked it for so many decades?
IS MODERNIZATION A MIRAGE?
These are not academic questions, though as the world watches the disap-
pearance of a free Hong Kong, they lead us to the broader issue of which
socioeconomic system provides a better way of life, socialism or capitalism.
Once discarded as a relic of the Cold War, presumed no longer to matter at
the “end of history,” the question of socialism versus capitalism has returned
with a vengeance, almost solely because of China’s rise.
The extraordinary growth of China since the “reform and opening up” era
was launched by then–paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 has been
taken as the counterpart to the so-called “Washington Consensus.” That
neoliberal argument assumed that free market capitalism and globalization
provide the most successful pathway to economic prosperity and individual
freedom; its heyday was during the Reagan and Clinton administrations in
the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the PRC’s supporters claim that an illiberal
political system can foster a more dynamic economic environment, leading
to a better life for its citizens. Particularly since the 2008 global financial
crisis—and more recently after the COVID-19 global pandemic that began in
Wuhan, China—Beijing has touted the superiority of its approach, boasting
that it avoided the meltdown after the collapse of America’s subprime mort-
gage market and, in 2020, that it was better able to control the coronavirus
outbreak and correspondingly suffered less social and economic disruption.
Until the coronavirus pandemic, the world was increasingly torn between
the Western, liberal model and China’s centralized Leninist model. The PRC’s
seemingly unstoppable rise from 1980 through 2015, when its stock market
faltered and macroeconomic growth began to level off, led many to assume
that it indeed had found a better means of ensuring economic growth and
social development than had the West. Within the space of a generation,
China went through several stages of development, starting from near sub-
sistence (especially in the countryside) to middle-income status around 2010.
The 1980s and 1990s in particular witnessed an expansion of market-orient-
ed mechanisms, starting in coastal special economic zones and expanding to
major inland urban centers.
Since the PRC’s political system was indelibly connected with the econom-
ic model, development also strengthened the state, especially once the CCP
began to reassert Leninist-style control after the 2008 global financial crisis.
Government stimulus packages and increased government control over the
economy led to arguments that political freedom and free market capitalism
were not necessary for robust economic growth. Rather, Chinese officials
asserted that a less
representative political
Once discarded as a Cold War relic, structure run by trained
the question of socialism versus capi- technocrats would avoid
talism has returned with a vengeance. the messiness inherent
in democratic polities,
achieving superior standards of living, not to mention better educational and
scientific outcomes, as well as greater social stability. This last point was reit-
erated by Beijing in light of the summer 2020 civil disturbances that broke
out across the United States.
Such claims oversimplify the complicated patchwork that represents
socioeconomic development in China, America, and the rest of the world.
There are very few pure political and economic regimes, outside of academic
theory. In the Indo-Pacific region in particular, just about every type of politi-
cal and economic system coexists, making a complex tapestry that continues
to evolve as states respond to internal needs and external conditions.
Democratic nations such as Japan and India adopted a form of state
capitalism that gave a powerful role to national government in establishing
a sphere of economic activity that lies somewhere between socialism and
free market capitalism, yet the results have been very different in each. In
Japan, a focus on export industries and manufacturing allowed it to become
the world’s second-largest economy for decades; India, however, found its
neosocialist and autarkic economy falling further behind the rest of the
world, until near collapse forced the adoption of economic reform in the
early 1990s. Other Asian nations, such as South Korea, moved fitfully along

the road of both political and economic liberalization simultaneously in the
1980s, rapidly increasing per-capita GDP while giving birth to a freewheeling
political system; Taiwan largely followed this route as well during the 1990s.
The PRC, as is well known, opened up its southern coastal regions as special
economic zones starting in the late 1970s, giving them freedoms and access
to the global economy that other, interior regions did not share.
In short, there was and remains a spectrum of socioeconomic models
throughout the Indo-Pacific, with most nations occupying positions some-
where short of either
pure free market capital-
ism or socialism. Even In the Indo-Pacific region, just about
North Korea, run by the every type of political and economic
despotic Kim family, has system coexists.
attempted to stabilize its
economy by allowing private markets to operate.
The broader question that this academic debate addresses is, what is the
best balance of political freedom and economic openness? The Western
modernization model, apotheosized in the Washington Consensus, presumes
that political and economic liberalization go hand in hand. In particular, the
post–World War II experience led policy makers in America and Europe to
assume that economic liberalization and globalization would create increas-
ingly strong middle classes that would demand political representation,
thereby assuring ongoing political liberalization. A robust civil society would
ensue once civil rights and individual freedom were protected by democratic
regimes. Human prosperity would be best ensured by this virtuous cycle, a
balanced liberalization among politics, economics, and civil society.
HUMAN RIGHTS DON’T MATTER

China’s growth over the past three decades has fundamentally challenged
the West’s modernization thesis, yet its own experience shows the dangers
in assuming that political repression can coexist beside economic vitality.
As Richard McGregor points out in his book The Party, many of the dazzling
Shanghai and Beijing skyscrapers that observers point to as proof that China
has a market economy were actually built with state support. Conversely,
state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China make up a majority of the economy
but account for the minority of profit. Skewed incentives are pervasive
throughout the Chinese system, leading to malinvestment and its reverbera-
tions, such as massive ghost cities dotting the landscape or zombie SOEs
that are protected by the CCP instead of being allowed to wither away.
To many observers, however, such inefficiencies are unimportant com-
pared to the dramatic change in Chinese standards of living over the past
generation. Once a developing nation of hundreds of millions of bicycle
riders housed in squalid conditions, today’s China appears to foreigners the
exemplar of a modern society, with gleaming buildings, conspicuous displays
of wealth, digital commerce, and a cosmopolitan lifestyle. Yet such surface
manifestations of development cannot capture the enormous disparities
in income that divide Chinese society, especially between the coastal and
interior regions, nor do they account for the baneful effects of corruption and
abuse of power by party officials, leading intelligentsia, and favored economic
elites.
Perhaps most important, measurements of Chinese wealth, as imperfect as
they are, ignore the question of individual rights and civil society. As noted by
historian and Hoover senior fellow Frank Dikötter, the CCP has never been
interested in sharing power with the people, even at the height of the reform
era; sanguinary proof of this was provided by the 1989 Tiananmen Square
massacre. While some level of civil society was allowed to develop after Mao,
particularly during the Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin eras, it was always
tightly controlled, stunt-
ing the ways in which Chi-
Perhaps more than Americans, nese citizens of the post-
Asians are sensitive to the limitations Mao period could develop
of grandiose schemes of utopian their personal interests
social planning. or contacts with the outer
world. Worse, since 2009,
even the small sphere of personal and civic freedom allowed by the CCP has
been eroded, especially after current general secretary Xi Jinping came to
power in late 2012.
The Communist Party is back in full control of Chinese society and state
today, emphasizing Leninist ideology, and the country is under greater
repression than at any time since Mao’s reign of terror (excepting the brief,
brutal suppression of the 1989 democracy movement).
As Chinese society turns inward on the orders of the CCP, and as the
world watches it wither Hong Kong’s democracy, the poverty of life under
authoritarian rule will become more evident. Not only is China’s economy
continuing to slow (and will do so more dramatically thanks to the COVID-
prompted recession), but the lives of its people are becoming narrower and
more brittle. Rampant nationalism in China cannot detract from the manifest
domestic dissatisfaction with the CCP and uncertainty over China’s future.

The widely reported fact that most of China’s elite hold foreign passports
and own property abroad, along with the massive capital outflow since 2015,
are harbingers of a more unstable future. And while the CCP has ensured
that a much wider section of the population has benefited from economic
growth than comparatively did under the Soviet Union, rising expectations
for continued wealth
production and commen-
surate freedom to pursue Many observers fail to account for
economic interests mean the effects of corruption and abuse
that continued sluggish- of power by Chinese party officials,
ness in the economy will leading intelligentsia, and favored
lead to social friction, economic elites.
if not backlash. It is
precisely to forestall such reaction that the CCP has re-emphasized socialist
ideology and clamped down on civil society (while trying to root out corrup-
tion, at least by those opposed to Xi Jinping and his circle). Thus, a vicious
circle ensues, further impoverishing both pocketbook and soul.
CHINA IS NOT THE MODEL

The nations of the Indo-Pacific, as well as those around the world, are warily
watching both China’s travails and the equally serious troubles in the West,
particularly the United States. Asia is suffering a democracy recession, as
argued by Hoover senior fellow Larry Diamond, especially in Thailand and
the Philippines, and there is little likelihood of either democracy or free
market capitalism being adopted in Laos and Cambodia; communist Vietnam
struggles with opening up its society to the global economy while maintain-
ing strict control at home. Bangladesh, to take another example, has an
uneasy mixed-market economy and is ranked as “partly free” by Freedom
House because of its restrictions on the press and human rights issues.
Myanmar (Burma), once a beacon of hope for the transition from military
authoritarianism to representative democracy, has been mired in a reac-
tionary turn under power broker (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Aung San
Suu Kyi. Other nations, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, are democracies
grappling with growing Islamic fundamentalism. Most of these same Asian
countries fear Beijing’s growing power and aggression, and at the same time
covet the aid and trade that have made China so powerful over the past few
decades.
Yet despite the examples above, it is also the case that few countries are
rushing to embrace the type of socialist authoritarianism offered by the
CCP. Moreover, democracy is firmly rooted in Australia, India, Japan, South
Korea, and Taiwan. Rather than seeing the Chinese way as the only path for-
ward, all nations in the region are searching for sustainable ways of achiev-
ing prosperity.
Perhaps an anecdote can help bring life to some of the more abstract
issues under discussion. During nearly a third of a century of regular travel
to the Indo-Pacific, including some four years living in Japan, I never heard
Asians—whether scholars, journalists, business leaders, or the like—talk
about China as their role model. They envied its economic growth, of course,
and warily respected its increasing power, but none ever talked about want-
ing their country to become more like China. Rather, almost all wanted their
country to become like Japan.
They understood that Japan’s democracy could be sclerotic and that
it had lost its commanding economic position after the 1990s, but they
also hungered for its stable society, its undeniable developed economy,
its excellent schools, and its green public spaces (which, to an American,
seemed meager). Some
few, like the Singapor-
China is under greater repression eans, were quite content
than at any time since Mao’s reign of with their own free
terror. market capitalist system,
even if it was married
to a more controlled democracy. But the majority were far more inter-
ested in pursuing the Japanese model, even fully aware of the country’s
shortcomings.
Prosperity, and its connection to socioeconomic and political systems, is
perhaps far better understood in the Indo-Pacific region, given its recent
history of decolonization, war, and nationalist movements, than in the United
States, where no other alternative political or economic system has ever
held sway. Perhaps more than Americans, Asians are sensitive to the limi-
tations of grandiose schemes of utopian social planning and have only to
remember Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot’s genocide to shrink from the
type of radicalism that is popular elsewhere. Whether informed by Buddhist
compassion or Confucian humanism, much philosophizing in Asia is quite
realistic and hardheaded.
Few have discovered the golden mean between individual freedom and
social order, and most are comfortable with some level of socioeconomic
restriction and political control in exchange for social stability and sustain-
able growth. Not all Asian nations have achieved such a balance, but their

citizens understand that fragile are the conditions that create prosperity,
and what seems like the golden egg of authoritarian control and economic
well-being is at best a double-edged sword, and at worst, a short-lived
mirage.
Special to the Hoover Digest. For a deeper look, explore the Hoover Insti-
tution essay series Socialism and Free-Market Capitalism: The Human
Prosperity Project (https://www.hoover.org/publications/socialism-and-
free-market-capitalism-prosperity-project), where a fuller version of this
article appears.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Asia’s New

Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific,
by Michael R. Auslin. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
AF RI CA
AF RI CA
Ethiopia
Unravels
Fresh conflict in the Horn of Africa is more than
a humanitarian crisis—it’s a blow to regional
security and US interests.
By Jendayi Frazer and Judd Devermont
I
t is a grave mistake to frame the Ethiopian conflict narrowly as a
humanitarian and human rights problem. It is a regional crisis that
threatens US security interests. The United States must work, fore-
most with African countries, to stop the fighting before it is too late.
Several months after the outbreak of fighting in the Tigray region, the
continent’s second-most-populous country is unraveling. Ethiopia had been a
linchpin of stability for more than two decades, distinguishing itself as one of
the largest peacekeeping contributors in the world and an engine of economic
growth in East Africa. Its descent into horrific, unconscionable violence—in
Tigray, as well as other parts of the country—threatens the broader region’s
security. It has undercut the effectiveness of Ethiopian forces in Somalia and
South Sudan, and it has contributed to an armed border standoff with Sudan.
If unresolved, it will impose steep costs on the international community as it
struggles to manage the pandemic and complex crises elsewhere.
Jendayi Frazer is the Peter J. and Frances Duignan Distinguished Visiting Fel-
low at the Hoover Institution and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations. She is a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Judd
Devermont is the director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS).

It is imperative to take the following actions to end the war: build an inter-
national consensus, increase the pain for the conflict’s belligerents, establish
credible benchmarks, and support an African-led dialogue.
First, until there is consensus, the Ethiopian government will continue
to deny there are impediments to humanitarian access. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken’s statement asking international partners to address the
crisis in Tigray through action at the United Nations is a step in the right
direction. US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who assumed the UN
Security Council presidency this month, has indicated that she intends to
table the humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia.
Over the past months, Security Council members sidelined discussions on
Ethiopia, relegating them to the informal “any other business” (AOB) agenda
items. The government of Ethiopia has benefited from this bureaucratic
workaround because there is no public record of AOB topics, forestalling
concrete action. The
United States and the
African council mem- Africa’s second-most-populous coun-
bers—Kenya, Niger, and try is coming apart.
Tunisia—should insist on
adding Ethiopia to the agenda. If the African governments stand firm, secu-
rity council consensus can be forged and the international community finally
will be able to tackle this crisis.
Second, international condemnation goes only so far. It won’t change
behavior, and the combatants will continue to rip the country apart short of
real consequences. The international community has to increase the costs
to Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)
for continuing the killing. The recent reports released by Amnesty and the
Ethiopia Human Rights Commission detailing human rights abuses con-
ducted by Eritrean forces should serve as the basis for sanctions on Eritrea.
This measure, echoing an earlier sanction regime on Asmara for its support
of Al-Shabaab and illegal deployment of troops in a neighboring country,
will function as a warning to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. More
importantly, the sanctions will serve as a pressure point to end the war, in
part because Ethiopian operations in Tigray depend on Eritrean forces.
Third, the international community should pause the current International
Monetary Fund (IMF) debt relief negotiations with Ethiopia and the US
International Development Finance Corporation should suspend its up to
$500 million loan in support of Ethio Telecom’s privatization. There is no jus-
tification for a major financial boost when Addis Ababa is refusing to end the
FLEEING: Mibrak Esayus, who says her parents were killed by Eritrean sol-
diers, carries one of her five siblings to safety in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
Recent reports by humanitarian organizations that have detailed human
rights abuses could serve as the basis for sanctions against Eritrea. [Baz Rat-
ner—Reuters]
fighting and denying life-saving assistance to its people. Similarly, French,

Emirati, Kenyan, and South African telecommunication companies may
need to reconsider their bids to operate in Ethiopia until the conflict ends.
Not only are there significant reputational risks involved, but it is hardly a
sound investment when the government imposes communication blackouts
to prosecute its war.
China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), all of which
have substantial investments in and relations with Ethiopia, also should
press the combatants to agree to a cease-fire. Saudi Arabia is especially
important since it previously used its considerable financial largesse to
facilitate rapprochement between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The United States
should not hesitate to expend political capital to nudge these governments
into action.
Finally, it is critical to establish credible benchmarks to move forward.
Humanitarian access is the responsibility of all governments, and it is

unacceptable to reward Addis Ababa for living up to a universal standard. In
addition to the expulsion of Eritrean troops, the Ethiopians should agree to a
“no fly zone” as a confidence-building measure. The government must accept
an international mediator to resolve the dispute between the government
and the TPLF that has metastasized into a regional crisis.
The African Union has appointed a Mauritanian diplomat to address the
Ethiopia-Sudan border dispute, but AU chair (and Democratic Republic of
the Congo president) Félix Tshisekedi needs to go a step further. In past con-
flicts, African leaders, including former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere
and former South African presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki,
waded into the most intractable conflicts to hammer out workable peace
deals. Tshisekedi, as well as Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, have dis-
cussed the conflict with Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden,
respectively, and they should seize the opportunity to show real leadership.
Ethiopians are a proud people who deserve better than to watch their
country unravel while the international community stands by. While fighting
continues in Tigray, security incidents are multiplying in other parts of the
country and it is evident that the calamity in Tigray is only the most severe
and acute example of the forces tearing Ethiopia apart. Achieving sustain-
able peace requires properly framing the conflict as born of Ethiopia’s failed
ethnic federalism model and its lack of inclusivity, resulting in a regional
crisis threatening global security. Abiy should rise to the hallowed status con-
ferred to him by the Nobel Peace Prize, working with the African Union and
other nations to restore Ethiopia’s former standing as a major contributor to
Africa’s progress.
Reprinted by permission of The Hill (www.thehill.com). © 2021 Capitol

Hill Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is A Hinge of

History: Governance in an Emerging New World,
by George P. Shultz and James Timbie. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
T H E MI DDL E E AST
T H E MI DDL E E AST
Studying War No
More
The Abraham Accords established at least a
nascent Arab-Israeli amity. Now educational
programs can nurture it.
By Peter Berkowitz
L
ast September, energetic Trump administration diplomacy
brought Bahrain’s foreign minister, the United Arab Emirates’
foreign minister, and Israel’s prime minister to the White House to
sign and to celebrate the Abraham Accords. The agreements offer
unprecedented opportunities for the parties to the accords, for the broader
region, and for the international order. During the ensuing months, the focus
has been on cooperation in national security and commerce. That’s under-
standable. More attention now should be given to education initiatives, which
can serve the shared interests of Abraham Accord nations by opening minds
and hearts, promoting mutual understanding, and forging the lasting bonds
that are among the long-term benefits reaped by those who learn together.
The Abraham Accords are not the first agreements establishing normal
relations between Israel and Arab countries. The 1979 peace treaty between
Israel and Egypt brokered by President Jimmy Carter brought dramatic
security gains to the Jewish state by removing the threat posed by the
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution. He is a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project and a member of
Hoover’s task forces on foreign policy and grand strategy, and military history.

region’s most populous country while restoring the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
The 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan—facilitated by the 1993
Oslo Accords signed by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization at
a White House ceremony presided over by President Bill Clinton—formalized
a long-standing working relationship between Jerusalem and Amman.
Advantageous as the 1979 and 1994 treaties have been to the signatories,
the countries have not progressed beyond cold peace. While the formal
agreements took war off the table, established embassies, and instituted
regular diplomatic channels of communication, commerce remains limited
and tourism in both directions, especially from Egypt and Jordan to Israel, is
meager.
NO MERE TRUCE
The Abraham Accords are different. They normalized relations but did not
need to end hostilities, since Israel was never at war with Bahrain or the
UAE. At the same time, like the 1979 and 1994 peace treaties, the Abraham
Accords are grounded in national security calculations. Bahrain, the UAE,
and Israel have long
shared a vital interest in
countering the Islamic Educational outreach can open minds
Republic of Iran’s fund- and hearts, promote mutual under-
ing of terrorism, pursuit standing, and forge lasting bonds.
of nuclear weapons, and
imperial ambitions. Indeed, the Abraham Accords build on years of behind-
the-scenes security cooperation. But in contrast to Israel’s peace treaties
with Egypt and Jordan, the agreements with Bahrain and the UAE have
unleashed a keen desire among the parties to cooperate in the commercial
sphere and to visit one another’s countries.
The excitement is palpable. Governments eagerly prepared for the
exchange of ambassadors and brought friendly relations out into the open.
Entrepreneurs rushed in to invest and strike deals. Israel and Bahrain, and
Israel and the UAE launched commercial air travel between their countries,
and, notwithstanding the pandemic, tourists leapt at the opportunity.
Educators should build on the momentum. By bringing students and
scholars together, cross-cultural education initiatives do more than serve the
high purposes of transmitting knowledge, encouraging the search for truth,
and cultivating independent minds. They also have far-reaching ancillary
effects: fostering the exchange of outlooks and experiences, enriching appre-
ciation of the complex interplay of tradition and common humanity in the
OUR SIDE: Sheikh Mohammed bin Maktoum bin Juma al-Maktoum, the
chairman of UAE rugby, and Israeli player Gal Aviram pose with the Abraham
Accord Friendship Cup trophy in March. The first such “peace match” was
held in Dubai. Israel won the first game, 33–0, but the players then intermin-
gled into mixed teams and played again. [Christopher Pike—Reuters]
formation of peoples and nations, and building networks of life-long friends

and colleagues.
Israel and the UAE have taken the first steps to create what should
become a variety of vibrant student-exchange programs. Much more can be
done. Universities should establish visiting professorships to bring Israeli
scholars to teach in the Gulf, and Bahraini and Emirati scholars to teach
in Israel. And they should provide financial incentives to encourage faculty
members to devise proposals for academic conferences that focus on issues
of special interest to all three Middle East countries as well as to the United
States—from desalination and the environment to comparative religion and
religious freedom.
Universities, however, are not the only source of educational initiatives.
In recent years, the United States has witnessed the growth of a new model
rooted in the private sector. The new model revolves around seminar study

of classic books supplemented by a variety of guest speakers and cultural
excursions. It gathers students—for a few days, a week, a month, or a
summer—to explore big ideas with a small group of peers. Such programs
encourage students to continue classroom discussions on walks, over meals,
and late into the evening. Instead of disseminating a single approved set of
policies, such programs create a community devoted to joint inquiry and the
lively exchange of views based on shared respect for fundamental freedoms
and basic rights.
Over the past decade and in the United States and Israel, I have been
involved in several of these privately financed undertakings through the Tik-
vah Fund, the Hertog Foundation, the George W. Bush Presidential Center,
and the Public Interest Fellowship. The model could easily be adapted for a
variety of educational programs that brought together, say, twenty-five or so
Bahrainis, Emiratis, Israelis, and Americans for intense study and leisurely
conversation.
LIBERAL THINKERS
The first program might be called the Principles of Freedom Seminar.
Intended for promising twentysomethings and thirtysomethings, it would
draw participants from government, business, journalism, security, medicine,
and the academy. It could be easily adapted to students of many ages, from
high school to accomplished senior figures across many professions and dis-
ciplines. Its curriculum would consist of seminal works from the tradition of
modern freedom, featuring renowned thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu,
Smith, Madison, Burke, Tocqueville, and Mill. By setting aside the political
controversies of the moment and instead focusing on pivotal writings on a
topic of abiding importance, such a seminar would enable students to engage
robustly while avoiding the most divisive issues. At the same time, thought-
ful examination of the principles of modern freedom is bound to illuminate
controversies students encounter in their own countries.
The second program could be named the Common Traditions Seminars
(an approach developed by my friend and former colleague Andrew Doran).
It, too, could be designed for students of quite different ages. Its point of
departure is that Jews and Muslims as well as Christians share a common
biblical heritage, and that great philosophers in all three traditions undertook
enduring efforts in the Middle Ages to reconcile their faiths with the wisdom
of Plato and Aristotle. The first half of the seminar would concentrate on
biblical passages of surpassing importance to the three Abrahamic religions.
The second half would explore influential arguments from the outstanding
medieval philosopher of each of the traditions: Al-Farabi, Maimonides, and
Thomas Aquinas.
The third program might be titled the Law, Nation, and Faith Seminar. It
would bring reporters, columnists, editorial writers, and editors together to
undertake deep study of a select aspect of one of the large forces influencing
regional politics. Journal-
ists from the four coun-
Israel and the UAE have taken the first tries would enhance one
steps to create what should become another’s appreciation
a variety of vibrant student-exchange of the issues by sharing
programs. their experiences regard-
ing, and perspectives on,
matters of common concern. They would return home with ideas for stories,
unexpected angles on familiar controversies, and a host of new contacts,
sources, and colleagues.
These three seminars—and variations that could follow—need not remain
restricted to original Abraham Accords signatories. As soon as is practically
possible, citizens from Sudan, Kosovo, and Morocco—which also recently
normalized relations with Israel—should be invited to join. The same goes
for Jordanians, Egyptians, and Palestinians. And why not reach out to the
Republic of Cyprus, a vibrant democracy in the eastern Mediterranean eager
to contribute to regional stability and prosperity?
Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2021 RealClearHoldings

LLC. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Israel

and the Struggle over the International Laws of War,
by Peter Berkowitz. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or

N UCLEA R PR OLI F E RAT I ON
NUCL EAR P R OLIFE RATION
George Shultz’s
Vision
The late statesman dreamed of eliminating the
danger of nuclear weapons. His allies continue
striving to make that dream a reality.
By William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn
F
or the past fifteen years,
the three of us and a Key points
distinguished group of » Leaders must remind themselves
of the incalculable risks of nuclear
American and internation- war.
al former officials and experts have » Nuclear materials must be se-
been deftly and passionately led by cured to deter terrorism.
our late friend and colleague, George » Nuclear-armed nations must

recommit to “fail safe” reviews and
Shultz. Our mission: reversing the cooperate to preclude cyberattacks
world’s reliance on nuclear weapons, on nuclear assets.
to prevent their proliferation into » It is critical to maximize decision
time during moments of extreme
potentially dangerous hands, and
tension.
ultimately ending them as a threat to
William J. Perry is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli
Institute for International Studies. He is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Profes-
sor at Stanford University and a former US secretary of defense. Henry A. Kissinger
is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served as secretary
of state and national security adviser in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Sam
Nunn is an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and
co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
the world. Without a bold vision, practical actions toward that goal won’t be
perceived as fair or urgent. Without action, the vision won’t be perceived as
realistic or possible.
George led this charge with the tenacity of a US Marine and the wisdom
of a man who had held four cabinet positions for two presidents, including
secretary of state for Ronald Reagan. Reagan considered nuclear weapons to
be “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly
destructive of life on earth and civilization.” The president took that view
and his most trusted advocate for it, George Shultz, to a summit with Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986.
Reagan and Gorbachev weren’t able to agree at Reykjavik to get rid of all
nuclear weapons. But they did succeed in turning the nuclear arms race on
its head, initiating steps leading to significant reductions in deployed long-
and intermediate-range nuclear forces, including the elimination of an entire
class of missiles. Twenty years after Reykjavik, George and physicist Sidney
Drell organized a small conference at the Hoover Institution to discuss what
it would take to bring the possibilities envisioned at Reykjavik to fruition.
This effort led to a joint op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in January 2007,
which has been our guide ever since.
During the weeks before George’s death, each of us discussed with him the
world’s direction on nuclear arms. We shared our concerns that progress on
reversing reliance on nuclear weapons is slowing. We discussed how tech-
nology, particularly cyber risks to early-warning and command-and-control
systems, had introduced new dangers of mistaken use. We discussed the
tensions and policy paralysis involving both Russia and China. Characteristi-
cally, George’s approach was not to be discouraged, but instead to get back to
work. In that spirit, we offer five points.
» We need a bold policy to walk back from these increased perils. This
will require a united effort from Washington and US allies on a policy that
reduces nuclear danger while maintaining our values and protecting our vital
interests. Congress must organize itself to play a meaningful role.
» Leaders of countries with nuclear weapons must recognize their
responsibility to work together to prevent catastrophe. For many
decades, memories of a smoldering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fear
generated by the Cuban missile crisis, informed and drove nuclear policy. As
George told Congress three years ago, “I fear people have lost that sense of
dread.”
» We must take action on practical steps that will reduce the risk of
nuclear use today while making the vision possible. Here, there are signs
of progress. A few months ago, Presidents Biden and Vladimir Putin agreed
to extend the New START Treaty for five years, ensuring that US and
Russian nuclear forces remain limited, with verification and transparency.
There is much more work to be done, including securing nuclear materials to
prevent catastrophic terrorism.
» Nuclear-armed states should commit to reviews of their command-
and-control and early-warning systems. These “fail safe” reviews would
identify steps to strengthen protections against cyber threats and unau-
thorized, inadvertent, or accidental use of a nuclear weapon. These reviews
should also include options for establishing agreements between nuclear
powers precluding cyberattacks on nuclear command-and-control or early-
warning assets.
» Robust, accepted methods to maximize decision time during height-
ened tensions and extreme situations should be created. This is especially
important for times leaders fear they may be under threat of attack. This
could become a common conceptual goal that connects both immediate and
longer-term steps for managing instability and building mutual security.
George spoke passionately about how his children, grandchildren, and
great-grandchildren were the motivation for his extraordinary commitment

to nuclear threat reduction. He believed the life we leave to our descendants
is the most important measure of the life we have led. George’s friend Bishop
William Swing has written that “at the end of time, the author of life will
return to this created and loved Earth and demand accountability for what
we did to enhance or destroy it.” George Shultz loved this earth and he spent
his life enhancing it.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2021 Dow Jones &
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The War

that Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear
Deterrence, edited by George P. Shultz and James E.
Goodby. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
I MMI GRATI ON
I MMI GRATI ON
Getting It Right
The push for open borders ignores the hard
questions. How to ask—and answer—them.
By Richard A. Epstein
E
arlier this year, the Biden administration
issued a “fact sheet” on his proposed US Key points
» Immigration
Citizenship Act, a comprehensive plan
brings in new
to expand pathways to citizenship and people whose pres-
otherwise modernize and liberalize this nation’s immi- ence changes the
face of the nation.
gration system. It is very difficult to draw categorical Sensible policies
conclusions about the many facets of immigration law. must follow.
The passion on both sides of this issue suggests that » Open immigra-
tion under current
finding a sensible middle position may be impossible.
conditions would
Even so, a measured and compromising approach is bring great uncer-
the best way forward on immigration reform, with its tainty. A measured
expansion of im-
complex highways and byways. migration seems
One way to think about immigration reform is to wiser.
compare the case for free and open immigration » Some sanctions
have to be imposed
with the parallel case for free trade. Fierce opposi-
on illegal aliens if a
tion to free trade in part propelled Donald Trump system of legal im-
to his 2016 presidential victory. Free trade did not migration is to be
maintained.
take a central role in the 2020 election, in large part
Richard A. Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of the steering committee for Hoover’s Working Group
on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity. He is also the Laurence A.
Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer
at the University of Chicago.

because candidate Biden offered a similar sentiment to bolster trade union
support. This was not merely campaign talk. President Biden recently issued
a protective “buy American” statement, the objective of which is “to support
manufacturers, businesses, and workers to ensure that our future is made
in all of America by all of America’s workers.” A Biden executive order from
January seeks to “use terms and conditions of federal financial assistance
awards and federal procurements to maximize the use of goods, products,
and materials produced in, and services offered in, the United States.”
But the effort to turn the United States inward on matters of economic
activity will force superior foreign products to be substituted with inferior
domestic ones, making domestic production less efficient. These inefficien-
cies will have far-reaching consequences: raising prices and lowering wages
across the board, weakening American exports, and inducing other nations
to take retaliatory measures, which will further contract world trade. The
passage of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff led to an implosion in interna-
tional trade, an outcome no one would want today. But the political risk still
remains.
The issue of free immigration is vastly more complex than the problem of
free trade.
FACE THE CHALLENGE

As a general matter, no one thinks that the United States and other nations
lack the power to exclude foreign individuals from entering and residing
in their countries. But, as with free trade, there is a fierce debate over how
that power to exclude should be exercised, leading to a series of difficult and
hotly contended questions. Do we reunite families, when some members
are abroad and others are in the United States? Do we allow entry into the
United States for political refugees who have suffered under oppressive
regimes? Do we reserve spots for individuals who bring special skills and
talents to the United States? Do we make special allowances for “dreamers”
who came illegally into the United States at a young age and have nowhere
else to call home?
In all these cases, it is possible to offer a sympathetic justification for
expanding the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States.
Indeed, American policy on immigration since the 1960s has become increas-
ingly liberalized on exactly such grounds. Thus the percentage of foreign-
born individuals in the United States has nearly tripled from about 4.8
percent in 1970 to 13.7 percent in 2018. The basic policy that lets individuals
into the country is complemented by a back-end system of deportation of
STEADY STREAM: People wade the Rio Grande along the US-Mexico border
from Ciudad Juárez last spring. In past waves of immigration, the cost of trav-
eling to the United States operated as a sorting mechanism to bring more self-
reliant individuals to US shores. At the same time, absorption of immigrants
into society was made easier by the far smaller state and federal welfare
operations of the time. [Chine Nouvelle/SIPA]
individuals who have entered under false pretenses, have given material sup-
port to terrorist actions in their own country, or who have committed serious
crimes after their arrival to the United States.
Beyond the serious administrative difficulties of the current immigration
system, it may be harder to support free immigration than free trade. Free
trade is largely an economic story, with massive efficiency gains that can be
spread broadly to offset much of the displacement it generates. Immigration,
on the other hand, brings new persons into the United States, the presence
of whom changes the face of the nation. Claims of excessive criminal conduct
by immigrant populations, especially those intemperately made by Trump
during his successful run for the presidency in 2016, are surely mistaken.
Nonetheless, immigration poses heavy challenges in the areas of education,
health care, and housing. The political composition of cities and states can
change with a rise in immigrant power.

Often, these issues are dealt with by sensible policies that help immi-
grants integrate into the economic system, learn English, and participate
more fully in society. Indeed, as the immigration debate rises to a fever
pitch, Ilya Somin of the Scalia Law School at George Mason University has
written a powerful book, Free to Move. Somin, against the grain, urges the
United States to adopt an open-border policy on immigration, noting the
enormous gains for immigrants who reach our shores and the major con-
tributions immigrant populations have made toward overall welfare in the
United States.
Somin’s arguments help to strengthen the case for maintaining current
levels of immigration and point towards some further liberalization of the
system, starting with dreamers, who have already integrated themselves into
American society. Nonetheless, I am uneasy about the more extreme posi-
tion, which may be called open or free immigration.
Even the mass immigration into the United States from 1890 to 1914 was
not entirely free, and it required the resolution of hard policy problems. For
instance, immigrants had to be free of contagious diseases––and if these
could not be eliminated during quarantine, shipping companies were obliged
to return immigrants to their country of origin. That system, moreover,
worked as well as it did in part because the private costs of immigration were
sufficiently high. High costs operated as a sorting mechanism that tended
to bring fitter and more self-reliant individuals to our shores. At the same
time, the absorption of immigrants into society was made easier by the far
smaller state and federal welfare operations of the time. This reduced the
public costs of admitting new residents and left the task of supporting and
integrating newly arrived individuals to successful private organizations like
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), founded in 1881.
Open immigration under current conditions would bring great uncertainty.
Could the United States absorb several million Central American immigrants
coming across the border through Mexico, especially if their arrival gener-
ated political unrest or brought risks of disease? Could an organized effort
by third-party entrepreneurs to ferry thousands of impoverished individuals
from Africa or Asia to our shores place burdens on this nation that it could
not withstand? Would the same rules for deportation apply to such popula-
tions that are imposed today?
It is hard to deal with such issues by experimentation once an open immi-
gration program is implemented, and easy to predict the massive backlash
that would occur if post hoc restrictions were implemented legislatively.
It seems better, then, to adopt safer policies that have a better chance of
leading to a measured expansion of immigration populations while offering
humanitarian aid to regions in or near crisis.
SPEAK THE TRUTH

Candidly confronting illegal immigration is necessary. Some sanctions
have to be imposed on illegal aliens if a system of legal immigration is to be
maintained. In this regard it is instructive to note the recent trend to under-
mine the distinction between legal and illegal immigration for the sake of
generating a more tolerant attitude towards illegal aliens. Take, for instance,
the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,
passed during the Clinton administration, which deployed the term undocu-
mented immigrants in place of illegal aliens. That verbal substitution creates
the linguistic possibility that people could be both undocumented and legal,
even though a legal illegal alien is an oxymoron.
More recently, both the Biden administration and liberal Supreme Court
justices have preferred the term noncitizen, which covers a range of persons,
including those who have never had or desired contact with the United
States. The term leads to such linguistic oddities as permanent noncitizen. It is
now commonly asserted that the term illegal alien is “disparaging,” “deroga-
tory,” or “dehumanizing,” and that a change from “alien” to “noncitizen”
offers a way “to recognize the humanity of non-Americans,” as urged by a
long-time immigration law expert, Professor Kevin R. Johnson.
Unfortunately, these exaggerated claims undermine the very policies that
could help expand legal immigration. Immigration policy requires many
difficult judgments on the proper relationship between citizens and legal
and illegal aliens. Truthful statements about illegal conduct should not be
regarded as wholesale condemnation of any individual. Deliberate obfusca-
tion will not move immigration reform forward for either the proponents or
the opponents of expanded immigration.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is How

Public Policy Became War, by David Davenport and
Gordon Lloyd. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
www.hooverpress.org.

I M M I G RAT I ON
I MMI GRATION
Predators and
Prey
Rising sexual violence in Europe—linked to young
immigrant men—threatens women’s hard-earned
rights. It must not be ignored.
By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
W
e in the West are used to seeing women everywhere
around us. We see them as colleagues in the office, sitting
next to us on the bus, as patrons in restaurants, jogging on
the streets, and working in shops. We are also seeing more
women than ever in leadership positions as prime ministers, politicians,
chancellors, directors, and bosses. Women born in the West in the 1990s
onward take this as a given. They do not consider that walking to school or
sitting in a cafe is a triumph of liberalism. But in some parts of Western cities
and towns these days, you may notice something strange: there are simply no
women around—or very few.
Walking in certain neighborhoods in Brussels, London, Paris, or Stock-
holm, you suddenly notice that only men are visible. The shop assistants,
waiters, and patrons in cafes are all men. In parks nearby, it is only men and
boys playing soccer. In the communal areas of apartment buildings, it is men
talking, laughing, and smoking. On the continent to which millions of tourists
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the founder
of the AHA Foundation. Her latest book is Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the
Erosion of Women’s Rights (Harper, 2021).
travel each year to see the female body as an object of art or wearing the lat-
est fashions, this seems a little strange. What happened to the women? Why
are they no longer sitting at sidewalk cafes or chatting in the streets?
The answer is that some women have removed themselves from those
neighborhoods, others have been hounded out, and still others are at home,
out of sight. As more women erase themselves from public places in such
neighborhoods, the few who remain are exposed, drawing the attention of
men inhabiting the area. There is no formal segregation, but a feeling of
discomfort and vulnerability is enough to make any woman walking alone
shudder and think, “I won’t come this way again.”
Women in such areas are harassed out of the public square. Some men call
out to them, “Hey, baby, give me your number,” or “Nice ass,” or “What are you
doing here?” Whatever
their age or appearance,
The overwhelming majority of these if they are female and
young men come from countries especially if they are alone,
where women are not regarded as they get the same treat-
equals, as they are in Europe. ment. A persistent harass-
er might follow a woman
up the street, touch her, and block her path. If a woman looks vulnerable, some
men will go further: they pick her as a target, they encircle and intimidate her,
groping her, pulling at her clothes, and occasionally doing worse.
Such incidents are becoming more common. Women and girls across
Europe speak of being harassed walking to the shops, at school and uni-
versity, in swimming pools, in nightclub bathrooms, in parks, at festivals, in
parking lots. They say that local streets and public places are no longer safe.
And their assailants have no shame about perpetrating their harassment in
public.
Finding robust data about this phenomenon is notoriously difficult. My
research assistants and I have spent two years combing through the avail-
able sources—crime statistics, court reports, police reports, government
accounts, academic sources—and none of them offers a complete picture.
We know that only a small fraction of women report being sexually assaulted
after they have suffered it and even fewer report sexual harassment, which
most women shrug off as being part of the course of their daily lives. Frus-
tratingly, many of the relevant experiences of ordinary women rarely make it
into the public domain, beyond isolated posts on social media.
In speaking to European women, however, I have come to see that the
problem goes much deeper and wider than the stories that appear in the

news. Their testimony has convinced me that we are living through a quiet
but significant erosion of women’s rights in some neighborhoods in Europe. If
this trend continues, it will affect more and more places in Europe; more and
more streets will become unsafe for women. For now, these neighborhoods
have two things in common: low income and a large number of immigrants
from Muslim-majority countries.
A CHANGE FOR WOMEN IN EUROPE

As a Somali arriving in the Netherlands in 1992, I was shocked to see young
women alone on public transport and in bars and restaurants. I had grown
up knowing that to step outside the house without covering my head and
body, or without a male relative to escort me, would make me a target for
harassment and assault. But in Holland, women freely walked the streets at
night without men to chaperone them, their hair uncovered, wearing what-
ever they pleased.
Of course, there were exceptions. There were assaults, rapes, and occa-
sionally murders of women, even in Holland. But those cases were so excep-
tional that they made national news for weeks. As I acclimated to life in a
Western city, I learned
that the position of
women there was radi- Women are being harassed out of the
cally different from what European public square.
it was in the world I had
come from. Today, two decades later, that can no longer be said with the
same confidence. A growing number of European women are questioning
their safety. Cases of rape, assault, groping, and sexual harassment in public
places seem to have become more numerous.
It is no secret—though it is considered impolite or politically incorrect to
point it out—that the perpetrators are disproportionately young immigrant
men from the Middle East, South Asia, and various parts of Africa. Often
operating in groups, they are making it increasingly unsafe for women to
venture into a growing number of neighborhoods in European cities.
It is a truism to say women have always suffered the threat of sexual vio-
lence. But for at least the past four decades in Europe, it was the exception,
not the rule. In the 1990s, I assumed that developing countries would gradu-
ally become more like Europe. Back then, few people would have predicted
that parts of Europe would begin to take on the attitudes and beliefs of cul-
tures that explicitly downgrade women’s rights. But I believe that is what is
happening. We are witnessing a challenge to the rights that European women
once took for granted. I do not think it is coincidental that this challenge has
followed a significant increase in immigration.
THE LATEST WAVE

Approximately three million people have arrived illegally in Europe since
2009, the majority of whom have applied for asylum. Roughly half arrived
in 2015. Two-thirds of the newcomers were male. Eighty percent of asylum
applicants were under the age of thirty-five. In the most recent years, a third
were (or claimed to be) under eighteen.
The overwhelming majority of these young men have arrived from coun-
tries where women are not regarded as equals or near equals, as they are in
Europe. In some of the countries of origin, for example, boys and girls are
separated in the household from the age of seven. They are discouraged from
mixing, and sex education is taboo. They come from a context that does not
give equal rights to women and discourages them from working, remaining
single, or following their own aspirations.
Of course, this is not an entirely new phenomenon. Migrants from the Muslim
world have been settling in Western Europe since the early 1960s. However,
those earlier periods of settlement were rarely associated in the public mind
with violence against women. That was because few Europeans noticed the way
women and girls were treated inside the immigrant families. People like me
tried to shed light on the “honor” violence, female genital mutilation, and forced
marriage to which many girls and women were subjected. But it was assumed
that within a generation or two those cultural behaviors would go away as the
liberties enjoyed by Western women spread to migrant communities. For too
many women within those communities, that simply has not happened.
My new book, Prey, came about because I was curious to investigate why
women were retreating from the public space in some neighborhoods. My
hunch was that women were ceding their access to public places in a trade-off
for personal safety. That is what life is like for many women in Muslim-majority
countries. It is also how many women in immigrant communities have con-
tinued to live in the West for the past five decades: they are confined to their
homes for a significant part of their lives, and their outside movements are
policed by a network of family and community members. It seemed logical to
ask how far increasing numbers of men from societies where this dynamic
between men and women exists might be imposing their norms on other
women in their proximity.
In the years leading up to Europe’s migrant crisis in 2015, I had noticed
occasional reports of sexual assault in the media. Each instance had been

reported as an isolated, individual case. At first glance, they did not add up
to a bigger picture. Generally, the assault involved a woman attacked by
a stranger on her way home from a night out. It later transpired in some
cases that the perpetrator was an immigrant, or maybe he had been born in
Europe and lived in a poorly integrated immigrant community. But the cases
did not seem numerous enough to constitute a pattern.
Beginning in late 2015, however, this changed. Reports of such sexual
assaults, as well as rapes and cases of harassment, snowballed. As I looked
further into the phenomenon, it became apparent to me that the escalation in
the number of sex crimes was occurring in the Western European countries
that had opened their borders to unprecedented numbers of migrants and
asylum seekers from highly patriarchal, predominantly Muslim societies. In
2015 alone, close to two
million people, mainly
men, arrived in West- Afraid of being called racist, some
ern Europe from Syria, women even apologize for bringing
Afghanistan, Iraq, Paki-
their assailants to justice.
stan, Nigeria, and other
countries with large Muslim populations. However, the language differences
among the various European societies and the parochialism of their media
reporting meant that people in countries as geographically close as Swe-
den, Germany, France, and Austria did not appreciate that what was being
reported by women in their country was also happening elsewhere.
It is important to state unambiguously that there is no racial component
to my argument. A certain proportion of men of all ethnicities will rape and
harass women. According to the World Health Organization, 35 percent of
women worldwide “have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate
partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.” But the rates are markedly
lower in Europe than in other parts of the world. In some societies, men are
brought up to respect women’s physical autonomy, whereas in others preda-
tory behavior is not proscribed with the same severity.
BEFORE YOU OBJECT . . .

Let me state this up front: being Muslim, or being an immigrant from the
Muslim world, does not make you a threat to women. In numerous periods
of upheaval, large-scale population movements have been associated with
increases in sexual violence against women. It would be easy to fill an entire
book with such gruesome episodes, and it would quickly become appar-
ent that they occur in a wide variety of geographical and cultural settings.
Indeed, as I have said elsewhere, nothing that occurred after 2015 can
remotely compare with the horrific campaign of rape waged against German
women by the Red Army at the end of World War II.
The point of Prey is not to demonize migrant men from the Muslim world.
Rather, it is to better understand the nature and significance of the sexual
violence that has occurred in so many parts of Europe in the recent past.
As I was researching for this book, the #MeToo movement shone a light
on sexual abuse and exploitation in the upper echelons of North America. I
found myself wondering why an equally bright light was not being shone on
the often more serious crimes against women in lower-income neighborhoods
in Europe.
Time and again in my career I have come across authorities and commen-
tators—including self-described feminists—who are prepared to look the
other way when it comes to the harassment and abuse of immigrant women
at the hands of their own men. It now looks as if the same people are apply-
ing the same double standard when it comes to the harassment and abuse of
native-born women. In some cases, I have even heard European victims of
sexual assault make excuses for their attackers. Afraid of being called rac-
ist, these women strike an apologetic tone on behalf of those who assaulted
them, some even apologizing for bringing them to justice.
Authorities understate the incidence of assaults and harassment of
women. In the interest
of political expediency,
Nothing so clearly distinguishes politicians play down the
Western societies from Muslim soci- threat and encourage the
eties today than the different ways police to do the same.
they treat women. Excuses are made for
criminal behavior. Judges
hand out light sentences to perpetrators. And the media self-censor their
reporting—all in order, it is said, to avoid stoking racial and religious tensions
or providing ammunition for right-wing populists.
This conspiracy of silence, or at least of understatement, has had predict-
able beneficiaries: none other than the right-wing populists such as the
National Front (now National Rally) in France, the Party for Freedom in the
Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and all the other
parties whose core policy pledge is to restrict immigration, and particularly
Muslim immigration.
I was once an asylum seeker. I am an immigrant twice over, first to the
Netherlands, then to the United States. Fleeing to Holland helped me avoid a

forced marriage and gave me opportunities I would never have enjoyed had I
remained in the Somali society into which I was born. So the last thing I want
to see is more obstacles put in the way of those who seek to escape religious
oppression, civil war, and economic collapse and to make better lives for
themselves, taking advantage of the freedoms of the West. I wrote Prey not
to help the proponents of closed borders but to persuade liberal Europeans
that denial is a self-defeating strategy. If I can also persuade some populists
to give integration a chance, so much the better.
Many authors have written about the clash of cultures between Islam and
the West. They look at
economics, demogra-
phy, language, religion, The media self-censor their report-
values, and geopolitics. ing—in order, it is said, to avoid pro-
Some mention women’s viding ammunition for right-wing
rights as an example. But populists.
I believe women deserve
to be the central focus of discussion. For nothing else so clearly distinguishes
Western societies from Muslim societies today than the different ways they
treat women. In the book I therefore concentrate on how women’s rights are
being harmed by immigration from Muslim societies, what we can expect in
the future if things continue as they are, and what we might do differently to
avoid a dangerous backlash.
The very idea of women being equal to men is a historical anomaly. It has
appeared only in the West and only very recently. (The propaganda claims
about sexual equality in communist regimes belied a reality that was quite
different.) If we zoom out and consider the whole planet, we see that it is still
only a fraction of women who have the wonderful rights and liberties that
have been achieved in the West. But these rights are fragile and are at risk of
being eroded by men who view independent women—women who enjoy the
same rights as men—as prey.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Andrei

Sakharov: The Conscience of Humanity, edited by
Sidney D. Drell and George P. Shultz. To order, call
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How Schools Can

Turn the Page
At a time of countless programs for reform, Clint
Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman champion reforms
that will work.
By Jonathan Movroydis
Jonathan Movroydis: Justice Clint Bolick and education reform advocate

Kate J. Hardiman, co-authors of the new book Unshackled: Freeing America’s
K–12 Education System (Hoover Institution Press, 2021), argue that the public
school system is antiquated, misdirects resources, and fails to meet the
needs of individual students. They call for a systemic, bottom-up reform of
American education centered on what they call the “two Cs,” choice and
competition, and the “two Ds,” deregulation and decentralization. They also
explain that public schools’ failure to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic
might be a catalyst for such reforms.
Please tell us about your backgrounds in education reform and the origins
of this book.
Clint Bolick: My motivation to write Unshackled goes back quite far. I origi-
nally planned to be a schoolteacher, and during student teaching I realized
Clint Bolick is a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court and a research fellow (on
leave) at the Hoover Institution. He teaches constitutional law at the Arizona State
University Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law. Kate J. Hardiman is a Rehnquist
Fellow and a law student at Georgetown University, as well as a former teacher.
Jonathan Movroydis is the senior content writer for the Hoover Institution.

the abysmal state of the public school system. This was forty years ago.
Schools have only gotten worse since then. Thus, I decided to pursue edu-
cation reform through a legal career rather than teaching. As a litigator, I
defended school vouchers, starting in 1990 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where
the first such program was established. I also defended Cleveland’s school
voucher program all the way to the US Supreme Court. Along the way, I
became very radicalized. I saw how horrifically bad school conditions were
for low-income students.
As a member of the Arizona Supreme Court, I have observed this issue
from a different perspective. Pretty much every criminal defendant that we
see is educationally disadvantaged. Of course, a quality education is founda-
tional to individual prosperity. These experiences make me appreciate even
more the systemic reform our country needs.
I had originally focused on private school choice options, which really only
affect a handful of kids.
When I met Kate Hardi-
man, we began to discuss “This middleman is the school dis-
the idea of a book that trict, which has only grown and
would lay out a com- become more ossified over the past
prehensive education century.”
reform plan, a bottom-up
plan rather than a top-down plan, a plan that would really reimagine Ameri-
can public education across the board. There were no such books until ours.
After talking about it for a while, we decided to collaborate, and Kate has
been a very capable partner.
Kate J. Hardiman: After graduating from the University of Notre Dame, I

taught for two years in a Catholic school in Chicago, through the Alliance for
Catholic Education. I had a fabulous experience teaching English and religion
to high schoolers. Then, partially inspired by Clint and my mentor at Notre
Dame, John Schoenig, I decided to pursue a law degree. I currently study at
Georgetown Law School in the evening and work during the day for a consti-
tutional litigation firm in Washington, DC. My plan is to become an advocate
for reform in educational law and policy.
Movroydis: What do you believe is fundamentally broken about the Ameri-

can educational system?
Hardiman: One factor we really focus on in the book is the lack of flexibil-
ity within the educational system. School districts are too large and unable
READY, STEADY: Kindergartners practice social distancing as they return to
their Los Angeles school in April for the first time in a year. Bolick and Hardi-
man argue that schools probably would have been able to respond better to
families’ needs during the COVID-19 pandemic had decisions been decentral-
ized. [Genaro Molina—Los Angeles Times]
to adapt to changing circumstances. This has become even more evident

during the COVID-19 crisis. Clint and I devoted a lot of time on this idea of
eliminating bureaucratic middlemen. In education, this middleman is the
school district, which has only grown and become more ossified over the
past century.
Eliminating the bureaucratic middleman would benefit education in
at least two major ways. First, it would free up about half of the current
education budget. Those funds could be redirected toward students and
teachers rather than being spent on bureaucracy. Second, eliminating the
middleman of the school district would allow individual schools to regain
their autonomy. Principals would once again have the power to hire and
fire, the ability to implement a curriculum that best serves students and
families (rather than a standardized curriculum from the state and dis-
trict), and more flexibility.

During the COVID-19 crisis, it is likely that schools would have been able to
respond better to the needs of families had the decision making been decen-
tralized at the school level. Instead, schools and principals had to abide by
district leaders, who often were making decisions for hundreds, even thou-
sands of schools. (For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has
about 1,000 schools and 600,000 students.)
Bolick: We are essentially stuck with a nineteenth-century education system,

and that’s just breathtaking. If you were to transport from the late 1800s to
today, you would recognize almost nothing else in society, but you would per-
fectly recognize the structure of our public school classrooms. Students are
still learning in rows, for example. As Kate mentioned, it’s really an ossified
system that is very resistant to change.
Movroydis: Older Americans often tell us that they received a first-class

public education when they were young. Is it just that the system has ossi-
fied, or have educational standards fallen?
Bolick: I think the answer to that is really both. In the 1940s and 1950s, most
Americans were getting a very good education, and what today is ancient
was still relatively modern at the time. In addition, to compare what we saw
at that time to today is
to witness the growth of
special-interest influ- “Pretty much every criminal defen-
ence over schools and a dant that we see is educationally
tremendous growth in disadvantaged.”
bureaucracy. Teachers’
salaries have remained fairly constant, but the amount of money that we
spend on administration is just stupendous. Both of these influences really
frustrate any sort of meaningful reform. Any type of technology, for example,
that would increase the student-teacher ratio is fiercely opposed by unions,
who want to keep as many teachers employed as they possibly can.
Hardiman: I agree completely. I would also add, just from the perspective of
someone who has recently taught, schools are wired with a lot of technology.
However, technology can only enrich a student’s education if used properly.
For example, a massive influx of television and computer screens can cer-
tainly supplement learning, but it can also be a huge distraction.
Movroydis: How are American schools falling behind, and which students
are they failing?
Bolick: American schools in general are falling behind in math and sci-
ence and are losing ground to our world competitors, most notably China.
They’re falling behind a number of countries that are not thought of as
economic powerhouses. One of the statistics in the book that was most
sobering to me is that the top 10 percent of American students in math
and science are at the same level as the bottom 10 percent of students in
Shanghai.
China is an existential threat to the United States. In this competition,
our educational system remains adrift, and if we keep going down this path,
China will absolutely clean our clocks in the years ahead. Among students
in the United States,
those who are performing
“Teachers’ salaries have remained
most poorly are low-
fairly constant, but the amount of income children, particu-
money that we spend on administra- larly black and Hispanic
tion is just stupendous.” children. Really nothing
significant has improved
since Brown v. Board of Education [1954], which is extremely depressing
considering the amount of resources that we’ve pumped into urban school
systems. The education gap between white and black students remains very
significant and continues to grow wider.
To this point, the solution to closing this gap has been with band-aids like
affirmative action. The fact of the matter is that we are doing low-income
kids a huge disservice by not providing them essential educational skills,
to prepare them not only for higher education but also for basic jobs in our
economy. It is very difficult to overstate the educational crisis in this country
right now. Even most of the students whose parents consider them to be in
the best schools in the country are really lagging well behind our interna-
tional competitors.
Movroydis: How has the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated

problems of the educational system? Also, does this crisis present any oppor-
tunities for change?
Hardiman: I think one big opportunity is to give families more visibility into
what their schools are doing and how they responded to a challenge like this.
Some parents saw very quickly that their schools were not ready to adapt,
and others were surprised and pleased at how quickly their schools were
able to shift to a virtual environment.

The main trend is that parents are moving their children out of public
school and into private schools, or what are now known as homeschooling
pods. Those pods actually became a phenomenon after we finished the book,
but in many ways they underscore what we argue should be the future of
education: smaller class sizes, power decentralized from bureaucracies, and
funding tailored to each student. Similarly, we advocate for states to promote
ESAs—education savings accounts—where state funding follows the student
to their educational provider of choice.
Bolick: I think a lot of people’s eyes are open for the first time about the
inflexible nature of the school system. I have taken to referring to COVID-19
and its impact on the schools as our Katrina moment. When Hurricane
Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, it physically destroyed the school
system. Education had to be completely reimagined and rebuilt from
scratch, which is exactly what we’re calling for on a national scale in our
book. New Orleans literally made every school in the district a charter
school. The school system went from being one of the worst in the country
to one of the best by virtue of changing the entire approach. I really hope
that we’re able to find the silver lining in this crisis and are willing to find
comprehensive solutions that most people would have rejected out of hand
only a year ago.
Movroydis: You explain in Unshackled that reforms should be geared pri-

marily toward the education of students as opposed to the employment of
teachers. With this end in mind, how do we attract the best people into the
teaching profession?
Bolick: Kate and I believe that teaching should be a much better-paying pro-
fession than it is, but there are so many impediments to reaching this objec-
tive. First of all, regard-
less of performance,
all teachers receive the “Schools are wired with a lot of tech-
exact same pay raises. nology. However, technology can only
Everyone knows who are enrich a student’s education if used
the good and bad teach-
properly.”
ers. Under the current
system, the good teachers cannot be differentially rewarded, and you can’t
get rid of the bad teachers. That fundamentally has to change. In order to
ensure student success, we need a system in which teacher performance is
measured and rewarded.
One of the major reforms that we propose is decentralizing and deregulat-
ing public schools so that each school is semiautonomous. This would enable
schools to hire and fire their own teachers. They would also be able to set dif-
ferential pay rates and provide educational offerings that are geared toward
their student population.
We believe that any single
“The top 10 percent of American stu- one of these educational
dents in math and science are at the reforms would catalyze
same level as the bottom 10 percent educational improvement.
of students in Shanghai.” If you add these reforms
to the elimination or
dramatic downsizing of school districts, we would free up substantial sums
of money for classrooms. One of the statistics we point to in the book is that
if the size of bureaucracy relative to the student population had remained
the same over the past two decades, there would have been funds available
to increase average teacher compensation by $12,000. Taken together, these
reforms could restore teaching to the prized profession it should be.
Movroydis: In Unshackled, you advocate as the key elements of reform “the

two Cs,” expanding choice and competition, and “the two Ds,” deregulation
and decentralization. Do you believe any of these policies can be realistically
achieved, and can teachers’ unions and other special interests be persuaded
to support them?
Hardiman: I would say that in a lot of places we are seeing these reforms.
But what we’ve been missing until now is strong grassroots support. Obvi-
ously, the poor in the inner cities have wanted these reforms for many years,
but I think now we’re gaining more political capital, because there are more
families demanding bet-
ter options as a result of
“I really hope that we’re able to find traditional public schools’
the silver lining in this crisis.” failure to adapt during
the outbreak of COVID-19.
I also believe that we are experiencing a kind of Katrina moment and hope
that it will be a catalyst for more reforms that we discuss in the book.
Bolick: Certainly, the teachers’ unions and the school district bureaucracies
have a very uneasy alliance on many issues, because they both benefit from
more public spending. The fact of the matter is that so much of the funds are
absorbed by the central bureaucracy that we think that we may be able to

persuade teachers that their interests lie in more decentralization and dereg-
ulation. They will have not only greater resources at their disposal but also
greater power to influence the allocation of those resources. That strategy
has really never been tried, and I’m hoping that some of the folks who pick up
our book will try to create nontraditional alliances with teachers. The whole
point of our book is to empower the people who have the greatest stake in the
outcome of the system: students, parents, teachers, and principals, primarily.
If somehow that energy could be mobilized into an alliance toward education
reform, I think we would see some groundbreaking change.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Unshackled:

Freeing America’s K–12 Education System, by Clint
Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
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A Republic, if You
Can Teach It
A new effort to teach civics education holds
real promise—if our hoary K–12 system can be
persuaded to try it.
By Chester E. Finn Jr.
B
ullish but far from sanguine is how I view the ambitious history-
and-civics “roadmap” unveiled in March by the Educating for
American Democracy (EAD) project. I welcomed the venture
when it launched two years ago, have advised it via several of its
committees and feedback sessions, have done a bit of backroom prodding and
editing, and have encouraged my Fordham Institute colleagues to sign on as
an institutional backer. One hopeful sign is the large number of such back-
ers and endorsers and the wide range of views and priorities they represent.
Another encouraging example of the project’s wide appeal is the supportive
editorial in the Wall Street Journal by six former US education secretaries,
three from each party.
The backdrop to my own (and Fordham’s) support is the appalling state of
history and civics education in today’s United States. Our own team is nearing
completion of a comprehensive review of state standards for K–12 schooling in
those two subjects. While I can’t divulge any specifics, I can say with certainty
that many states have bungled it via standards with thin-to-nonexistent
Chester E. Finn Jr. is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and participates
in the Hoover Education Success Initiative.

content, huge gaps, and such a mishmash of formats that it’s nearly impossible
to picture teachers and curriculum developers actually following them.
Perhaps as revealed by the slipshod expectations for student learning sig-
naled by their motley standards (albeit with some stellar exceptions), states
mostly don’t seem to care whether kids learn this material. Though most
retain the obligatory high school US history course, and a fair number have
a required course (often just a single semester) in civics or US government,
rare is the state where schools’ success in imparting this vitally important
knowledge, skills, and dispositions to their pupils figures in their account-
ability plan. Often there are no statewide assessments or other outcome
measures, and when there are, they seldom count. (Yes, students must pass
the required courses, but that’s teacher judgment.)
Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much if adult Americans were well versed
in their country’s history, governing principles, system of government, and
civic institutions—and if they took that knowledge to heart and acted in
accord with it. But—I don’t really need to write this sentence!—we have
ample evidence, accumulating by the day and week, and faster with every
passing month, that that just isn’t so. Unless you haven’t looked at any sort of
screen or newspaper in the past few years, you’re well acquainted with this
meltdown and the havoc it is wreaking on so much that so many have long
cherished about the United States.
Schools alone can’t solve that problem, but what kids learn there can
contribute to a much-needed solution. So the EAD team heroically under-
took to develop a “roadmap” by which schools (and districts, states, etc.) can
reinvigorate history and civics education.
Predictably, this was hard, as much of what divides Americans has its coun-
terpart in K–12 social studies. “Action civics” versus “how a bill becomes a law.”
Skills versus knowledge. “1619” versus “1776.” “Wars, presidents, and other
great men” versus “the history of the oppressed and victimized.” I could go on.
The EAD team strove to enlist a wide range of participants as they sought a
middle ground. They also finessed the toughest questions by posing their entire
new roadmap as a series of questions that kids should wrestle with and be
able to answer rather than trying to prescribe answers to those questions. The
questions are really good—and eighteen-year-olds who possess informed and
thoughtful answers to them will be well prepared for citizenship in the Ameri-
can democracy. But the roadmap is a long way from an actual curriculum.
That’s left to states, districts, schools, and teachers. The hard work lies
ahead. The EAD team also had to finesse some of the stickiest “who does
what” questions. They avoided telling states to build history and civics into
formal accountability structures for schools or students. They avoided pre-
scribing the many enormous changes that will have to occur in teacher prep-
aration. They sketched a very limited role for the federal government, though
one that may bring its own culture wars—as, for example, NAEP frameworks
for assessing these subjects get revised—and one that could metastasize in
worrisome ways if some of EAD’s friends on Capitol Hill get their way.
So there’s no dreaded “national curriculum” here, at least not yet, and that
avoids a lot of problems for the time being. But neither is there a curriculum
here, much less an energy source to push and coordinate all the moving parts
that need to move together.
Documents like this are, of necessity, predicated on so many individuals,
organizations, and institutions changing their present practices. Perhaps most
worrying, the changes sought by EAD cannot happen at scale without a skilled
and well-educated teaching force that is dedicated to breadth and balance,
equipped with a rich and robust curriculum, and capable of delivering it. The
EAD team knows this, but nothing within their power will cause a seamless
silken duvet to replace today’s patchwork quilt. So this elegant roadmap and
its many supporting documents and supporters become, inevitably, something
of an aspirational exercise that starts a conversation, even as we know that
getting K–12 education back into the business of citizen-making is a long-term
enterprise. EAD supplies plenty of thoughtful advice to all concerned, yet
today our K–12 system is ill-equipped to deliver on all those things.
That’s why my admiration and bullishness for what the EAD team has
achieved must be tempered by my shaky confidence that it will make the dif-
ference that American education needs.
Reprinted by permission of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. © 2021 The

Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is What

Lies Ahead for America’s Children and Their Schools,
edited by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Richard Sousa. To
org.

N AT I ON A L SEC UR I T Y
NATI ONAL SECURIT Y
This Is No Time
to Stumble
The Biden administration gets no honeymoon
from geopolitical dangers.
By Victor Davis Hanson
W
hat causes wars?
Innately aggressive
Key points
» Deterrence is a key pre-
cultures and governments,
requisite for meaningful
megalomania, and the desire peace negotiations.
for power, resources, and empire prompt » War can be triggered
nations to bully or attack others. Less rational by a lack of transparency
on the part of potential
Thucydidean motives such as fear and honor enemies.
and perceptions of self-interest are not to be » If foreign powers infer
discounted, either. But what allows these pre- that US foreign policy is
mercurial, they will be
emptive or aggressive agendas to reify, to take
tempted to calibrate it or
shape, and to leave tens of thousands dead? exploit weaknesses.
The less culpable target (and wars are rarely » The Biden administra-
a matter of 50/50 culpability) also has a say in tion should resist broad
deals with China and
what causes wars. The invaded and assaulted Iran that have no realistic
sometimes overlooked or contextualized serial chance of success.
and mounting aggression. They displayed
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, the chair of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military
History in Contemporary Conflict, and a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosper-
ity Project.
STRONGER PARTNERS: US military aircraft coordinate with NATO allies
from other countries near Constanta, Romania, in April. Despite sometimes-
tumultuous relations during the Trump administration, NATO is better
funded, better armed, and a more fair contributor to the shared security effort.
[Jennifer Zima/501st Combat Support Wing, US Air Force]
military weakness or simple political ineptness that eroded deterrence.

They failed to make defensive alliances with stronger nations or slashed
defense investments that made the use of deterrent force impossible.
In sum, without deterrence and the clear potential in extremis to do an
aggressor damage, there can be no meaningful peace negotiations, no “con-
flict resolution”—unless one believes a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung can
become a reasonable interlocutor across the peace table.
DANGEROUS AMBIGUITY
But there are also more subtle follies that can turn tensions into outright
fighting. And they are relevant in the current global landscape as we go not
just from one president to the next, but from a realist and tragic view of
foreign policy to an idealist and therapeutic one.
One catalyst for war is a lack of transparency about the relative strengths
and will of potential enemies.

If, even unwittingly, President Biden projects the image that the Pentagon
is more concerned about ferreting out wayward internal enemies than in
seeking unity by deterring aggressors, then belligerents such as China, North
Korea, Iran, and others will probably—even if falsely and unwisely—wager
that the United States will not or cannot react to provocations, as it has done
in the past. And accordingly, they will be emboldened to provoke their neigh-
bors with less worry about consequences.
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 on the false assumption that
Stalin had been too busy purging his military elite, starving his own
people, or executing both rivals and friends. He certainly did all that and
more. Yet despite Soviet cannibalism, Hitler was apparently unaware that
the chaotic Russians could still field an army twice the size of his own.
Stalin’s tanks and artillery were just as or more deadly than Hitler’s—and
soon far more numerous than the assets of blitzkrieg. A spirited, defiant,
and yes, united populace was determined to protect Mother Russia from
the invader.
Wars are deterred when all the potential players know the relative
strengths of each and the relative willingness to use such power in defense
of a nation’s interests. Lack of such knowledge leads to dangerous misjudg-
ments. And war then becomes a grotesque foreordained laboratory experi-
ment to confirm what should have been known in advance.
What were Argentina’s
generals or Saddam Hus-
sein thinking when they Invaded and assaulted nations some-
provoked the United times overlook or try to explain away
Kingdom or the United signs of aggression.
States during the Falk-
lands War and first Gulf War? No doubt they assumed that their more power-
ful targets were too busy elsewhere, played out, or insufficiently concerned
to react. A lot of damage and death followed in those two respective brief
wars—and all to prove what should have been obvious.
Perhaps Buenos Aires had read one too many times of British parliamen-
tarians referencing the “Malvinas” rather than the Falkland Islands. Or
Saddam remembered too well the United States ambassador to Iraq naively
voicing uninterest in 1990 “border” disputes between quarrelling Arab
neighbors—perhaps in the manner of Dean Acheson’s controversial speech in
January 1950 to the effect that South Korea was probably not inside the US
defensive orbit abroad, thus making a previously hesitant Stalin, Mao, and
Kim Il Sung a little less hesitant.
Both Argentina and Iraq wrongly equated diplomatic naiveté and laxity
with military unreadiness and weakness and paid the price in defeat.
DANGEROUS OVERREACH
The truth is that for the immediate future, the US economy and military
remain the strongest in the world. What reassures our allies is not talk of
new bipartisanship, internationalism, and tolerance, but quiet coupled with
overwhelming power and a clear message to use it in defense of our interests.
During World War II some German and Japanese military grandees point-
ed out to their respective regimes that it was insanity to prompt a potential
alliance among the British empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union,
given their enemies’
aggregate populations,
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 collective GDP, global
on the false assumption that Stalin was reach, and military
preoccupied and militarily weak. potential. But too
many in the deluded
German and Japanese militaries instead judged British appeasement in the
mid-1930s, American isolationism during the 1930s, and Russian collabora-
tion from 1939 to 1941 as proof of weakness and timidity. Nothing is more
dangerous than stronger powers, even inadvertently, sending signals that are
interpreted as weakness by weaker powers.
Biden should not assume that former president Trump’s gratuitous rough
talk abroad was as dangerous as loud laxity. His predecessor never com-
mitted the felony of suggesting to a weaker Iran or China that their aggres-
sion would be contextualized or ignored. And his unpredictability probably
bothered Beijing more than the predictable acquiescence and reassurance of
the Obama years.
It is also dangerous to raise unwarranted expectations that a new round
of negotiations, a new head of state, or a new climate of reconciliation can
reformulate animosities and lead to landmark negotiations and peaceful
resolutions to potential conflicts. If proper attitudes, goodwill, and eager-
ness for negotiations on the part of democracies could ensure peace, then the
twentieth century could have skipped the 150 million people killed in conflicts
and the League of Nations and the United Nations would now be deified for
eliminating deadly wars.
The intifadas and Middle East wars are often the aftermath of unreal-
istic peace efforts to bridge differences that could not be bridged with-
out the perceived humiliation of one or both parties. Thinking an enemy

will give concessions that it simply will not or cannot only inflames an
aggressor.
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s felony was not just going to Munich
with the intention of rewarding German aggression, or believing that he
could trust a thug like Hitler, but also returning waving a piece of paper with
boasts of “peace for our time” that deluded his own countrymen. In the end,
both nations concluded that if a sure peace treaty had failed, then what was
left but war?
The so-called comprehensive Peace of Nicias (421 BC) was supposed to
ensure not just peace to end the first decade of the Peloponnesian War but
also a grand fifty-year peace and de facto alliance of Sparta and Athens to
resume their partnered leadership of the Greek world.
A mere modest armistice would have been a greater achievement. Instead,
within months, both sides were scheming to use third parties to harm their
respective “ally.” And the
massacre at Melos, the
disaster at Sicily, and a Biden must quietly apprise both
near decade of brutal friends and enemies of America’s
naval war in the Aegean force and determination.
lay ahead. Once grand,
comprehensive, all-inclusive peace deals fail, both sides can see no alterna-
tive but war.
“Comprehensive” peace talks can be more dangerous than modest agree-
ments to channel hatred in some way other than shooting. Biden should keep
an eye on Iran and China and avoid the fantasies of some wide-ranging settle-
ment that will be neither thorough nor a settlement.
UNFORCED ERRORS
Just as hazardous is to gratuitously attack the statecraft of one’s predeces-
sor. Such internecine sniping sends the message abroad that common ground
will be found not among Americans but among America and its enemies—a
surreal idea that America’s enemies see as weakness to be leveraged.
Barack Obama made a career out of reassuring the world that George W.
Bush and his pre-emptive wars were reckless and not to be repeated. His
reward was the murderous ISIS caliphate, along with misadventures with
Syria and in Libya. If we wonder why Vladimir Putin turned so ambitiously
aggressive, it might have been that the foundations of Obama-Clinton “reset”
were based on a false conclusion that Bush’s modest pushback against Rus-
sian aggression was too provocative and would be mitigated in Putin’s favor.
When a government loudly and boastfully expresses a new reset, a new
paradigm, a new arrogance about solving problems, it risks blaming its own
country rather than the foreign belligerent, and thereby can only encourage
adventurism.
Joe Biden has billed his foreign policy team as a return of the “bipartisan”
and “internationalist” breakthrough pros—in rebuke of his predecessor, in
the manner that Donald Trump himself sometimes publicly trashed Obama’s
foreign policy, rather than just silently resetting and changing it.
In all these cases, foreign powers, friendly and hostile, infer not just that
US foreign policy is mercurial but that they can calibrate and massage it to
find either assistance or exploit weakness, in ways that otherwise would be
difficult or unwise.
After all, if Biden sounds as if he hates Trump more than he hates the
Iranians, why then would the Iranians not consider him the enemy of their
enemy and now a friend to be used? Why would the world not see irrational
hatred of Trump and his policies as a way to win exemption for their own
behavior?
AN INVITATION TO RISK
Despite the animus toward Trump, nothing is broken abroad. NATO is bet-
ter funded, better armed, and more fairly contributory to the shared cause.
In the Middle East, pro-Western Arab and Muslim nations are now aligned
with the United States
to contain Iran and its
It’s also hazardous to gratuitously appendages like the
attack the statecraft of one’s prede- Assads in Syria, Lebanese
Hezbollah, and West Bank
cessor.
Hamas. Iran, the font
of anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East, has been not
merely sanctioned and isolated but broken and decimated by the pandemic
and crashing oil prices.
The reason that China despised the Trump administration was not, as it
claimed, xenophobia, racism, or China bashing, but rather because Trump
called out and exposed its decades of aggression and subversion, and its
planned trajectory to global hegemony.
When the Biden team talks of re-entering the Iran deal without the
Trump baggage, or wants a new relationship with China, this may well
instead be interpreted by our enemies as rejecting deterrence, forgetting
why the Trump administration held those two countries to account, and

inviting them again to take risks they otherwise might not be willing to
take.
Biden would do better to quietly apprise both friends and enemies of
America’s force and determination. He should resist comprehensive deals
with China and Iran that have no realistic chance of success, given their
agendas. And he could claim Trump’s successes as his own and continue
their current trajectories, rather than court favor abroad by distancing
himself from a largely successful foreign policy guided by former secretary of
state Mike Pompeo.
Otherwise, the alternatives will become increasingly dangerous.
Reprinted by permission of American Greatness. © 2021 Center for Amer-

ican Greatness. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Three

Tweets to Midnight: Effects of the Global Information
Ecosystem on the Risk of Nuclear Conflict, edited
by Harold A. Trinkunas, Herbert S. Lin, and Benjamin
Loehrke. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
CA LI FORNI A
CA LI FORNI A
Tarnished Gold
Yesterday’s state of limitless promise is today’s
state of smoke and mirrors—and broken promises.
By Peter Robinson
If the Pilgrims had landed in California instead of back East,

nobody would have bothered to discover the rest of the country.
—Ronald Reagan
Move to Texas.
—Pete Wilson, when asked his advice for a young Republican

who wanted to go into California politics
O
ne snowy day when I was a kid in upstate New York, I came
across a shoebox in the back of a closet that contained a per-
fectly preserved specimen of the California dream: a century-
old sheaf of letters that a cousin had sent back to his parents
after moving to Los Angeles. The cousin had described endless sunshine,
vast citrus groves, and weather so temperate that the only snow he ever saw
lay glistening on distant mountaintops. “Do not spend another winter back
East,” he had written. “Move to California!”
When I moved to California in the late 1980s, I found myself thinking
often of my distant cousin. California struck me just the way it had struck
him. The place seemed almost dreamlike, an ideal that had achieved reality,
Peter Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowl-
edge, and the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

America’s own land of milk and honey. My distant, long-dead cousin and me.
As it happens, I see now, we bracketed the California dream. The state began
to acquire its special place in American life about the time my cousin moved
here—and to lose it about the time I arrived myself.
Notes from a once-golden state.
•••
“What went wrong?” asks Pete Wilson, who served as the Republican gover-
nor of California during the 1990s. “Hell, what didn’t?”
A native of the Midwest, Wilson moved to California in 1959. Seven years
later, he began a political career during which he would spend four years
in the assembly, a dozen years as mayor of San Diego, eight years in the
US Senate, and eight years as governor. The California that kept voting for
Wilson—he never lost a general election—possessed a functioning two-party
system. As late as 1999, Wilson’s final year as governor, the GOP remained
competitive. Registered Republicans accounted for 36 percent of the Cali-
fornia electorate. The GOP held 37 of the 80 seats in the state assembly, 15
of the 40 seats in the
state senate, and 24 of
California’s 52 seats in The place was almost dreamlike,
the House of Representa- America’s own land of milk and
tives. Today? Registered honey.
Republicans account for
just 24 percent of the California electorate. The GOP holds 19 of the 80 seats
in the assembly, 9 of the 40 seats in the senate, and 11 of California’s 53 seats
in the House of Representatives. The two-party system has collapsed.
Wilson names three causes.
The first: public employees’ unions. In the 1970s, Governor Jerry Brown
signed legislation giving collective-bargaining rights to public employees,
including state employees. This expanded the power of organizations such
as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “Jerry claimed it was
just a minor change,” says Wilson. “I said, ‘The hell it is.’ ” Then, in 1988,
Proposition 98 amended the state constitution, ensuring that each year a
certain portion of the entire state budget—typically at least 40 percent—
would go to public schools. This gave the California Teachers Association
(CTA) a reliable source of income. Since then, the SEIU, the CTA, and other
public employees’ unions have built a political perpetual-motion machine.
The unions back Democratic candidates. The Democrats, once in office,
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT: A charred Venus de Milo statue stands in the
ruins of a house in Sonoma County in late 2017. The Sonoma Complex Fire,
one of the worst in the region’s history, burned more than 110,700 acres in
Sonoma and Napa counties and took twenty-four lives. [Gibson Outdoor Photogra-
phy—Alamy]
spend public money to the benefit of the unions. Then the unions back more
Democratic candidates.
The second factor: changes in the state’s economic base. Over the past sev-
eral decades, the aerospace and energy industries, which tended to be cen-
trist or Republican, surrendered their dominance of the California economy
to an entirely new industry, Big Tech, which is totally woke. From staunch
Republican business leaders such as David Packard to thorough liberals such
as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey—for the GOP, this was not progress.
The final factor: immigration. In just the past few decades, more than ten
million immigrants have come to California, the majority from Mexico or
Central America, many of those illegally. This huge inflow quickly placed
the GOP in a bind—and note that it was a principled bind. The GOP sought
to welcome legal immigration. “Hell, if you come here the right way, you’re
American, and we want your vote. It’s as simple as that,” says Wilson. At the
same time, it insisted on opposing illegal immigration. “Illegals are over-
whelmingly good people,” Wilson says. “If I were a Mexican with a family to

support, I’d try to come here myself. But the federal government was failing
to enforce the border and sticking the state with the bill.”
When he ran for re-election as governor in 1994, Wilson supported Propo-
sition 187, which would have denied illegal immigrants an array of services,
including schooling. Again and again during the campaign, Wilson insisted
that he was opposing only illegal behavior, not Hispanics themselves. “We
even ran an ad showing men and women in uniform being sworn in as Ameri-
can citizens,” Wilson says, “and most of them were Hispanic.” It didn’t work.
Although Proposition 187 passed—a court would later set it aside—Hispanic
support for the GOP plummeted. It has yet to recover.
Democrats in the pocket of the public employees’ unions, an economy
dominated by woke Big Tech, and immigration, much of it illegal, at such high
levels that between 1970 and 2018 the Hispanic share of the population rose
from 12 to 39 percent. “The Republican Party in California was never really
defeated,” Wilson says. “It just packed up and moved out.” Texas, Arizona,
Idaho, and half a dozen other states all now harbor a lot of good California
Republicans who couldn’t take it anymore.
•••
Although busy running the San Francisco law firm that she founded, Har-
meet Dhillon volunteers for the Republican Party, serving these days as a
member of the Republican National Committee. She has a brisk, no-nonsense
manner, and, since she’s hardly one to waste her time on useless causes, I
expected her to be able
to present a plan for
restoring the California In California, the two-party system
GOP to competitive sta- has collapsed.
tus. When I tell her that,
she laughs. “If there were a professional code of ethics in politics, the first
rule would be against telling Republicans they can turn California around
any time soon,” Dhillon says. “Right now, we’re only a regional party.”
Only a regional party. The 11 out of California’s 53 congressional districts
that the GOP still holds bear her out. Almost all lie in the mountains of the
north, where you might almost suppose you were in Idaho, or in the agri-
cultural San Joaquin Valley, which looks a lot like agricultural Nebraska, or
in the suburbs of Orange County and San Diego, which appear similar to
the commuter towns of Arizona. To put it another way, the GOP remains
competitive only where California resembles other places. Where the state
BLUE SKY DREAMS: A helicopter drops water east of Groveland, near Yosem-
ite National Park, in March. Vast amounts of deadwood have accumulated in
California’s woodlands, enabling wildfires to become some of the biggest in
state history. [Tracy Barbutes—ZUMA Press]
appears most distinctively itself, in the densely populated coastal belt that
runs from the piers of San Francisco to the sound stages of Hollywood, the
Republican Party holds not a single seat. In a lot of coastal California, for
that matter, voters seldom see a Republican congressional candidate on the
ballot. (Proposition 14, a 2010 ballot measure, mandated that the top two
vote-getters in each primary would go on to compete in the general election,
even if they were both
members of the same
Democrats empowered public- party. The result? Contest
employee unions. Now they’re after contest in which
beholden to them. voters could choose only
between two Democrats.)
The recall of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom? Now that the organiz-
ers have gathered two million signatures, half a million more than needed, it
appears that a recall election will indeed take place. Couldn’t a Republican
win? In a recall election eighteen years ago, after all, Republican Arnold

Schwarzenegger replaced Democratic governor Gray Davis. “Arnold had
total name recognition and enough money to fund his own campaign,” Dhil-
lon says, again refusing to console me. “To succeed in this race a Republican
is going to need $50 million. And if the Dems decide to try to save Newsom,
they’ll pour money into his campaign. Then the Republican will need $100
million.” If a Republican capable of raising that kind of money intends to run,
he has yet to say so.
“Why do I support the Republican Party?” Dhillon asks. “Because you can’t
live here and do nothing. But California is like an alcoholic. We’re going to
have to wait for it to hit rock bottom before it turns around. Until then we
have to focus on the races we can win.”
•••
If the California GOP had designed the perfect candidate for Congress and
the perfect district for him to contest, the candidate would have looked
exactly like Mike Garcia,
and the district would
have looked exactly like The GOP remains competitive only
the Twenty-Fifth. The where California resembles other
son of Mexican immi- places.
grants, Garcia attended
the Naval Academy, flew more than two dozen combat missions during the
Iraq War, and then returned home to become an executive at Raytheon, one
of the quintessential California aerospace companies. Still in his forties,
Garcia is handsome, warm, and well-spoken in both English and Spanish.
The Twenty-Fifth Congressional District, for its part, is the most Republican
congressional district in Los Angeles County. It encompasses both agricul-
tural towns of the kind that tend to support Republicans and suburbs such as
Simi Valley, a place so congenial to Republicans that Ronald Reagan chose it
as the site of his presidential library.
“I went to the district to campaign with Mike,” says Pete Wilson of Garcia’s
campaign for re-election last November. Garcia had first carried the district
in a special election last May, after the Democratic incumbent had resigned
as the result of a sex scandal. Garcia could carry the district comfortably in
November, the GOP reasoned, if he simply held on to traditional Republicans
while attracting the support of as little as one-third of the district’s Hispan-
ics. “Mike worked his ass off,” says Wilson. “And then he ended the day by
giving one of the best damn political speeches I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Garcia did carry the district, but there was nothing comfortable about
it. Out of almost 339,000 votes, his margin came to just 333, or less than
one-tenth of 1 percent. Therewith the California GOP. It can put forward the
perfect candidate in the perfect district—and still barely eke out a win.
•••
“I’ll be keeping an office in California,” said one of the two friends who called
in January to tell me they had decided to move to Texas, “but a lot of the
dynamism in Silicon Valley has shifted to Austin.” This was new. Over the
past decade, I’d grown used to hearing friends of retirement age announce
that they had decided to flee California’s high taxes, but this friend was still
in his twenties—and never mentioned taxes. Even for a tech entrepreneur, he
said, California was now a place to leave behind. “Texas is just so much more
welcoming to business.”
The second friend offered another new reason—one I found still more
unsettling. Although he had lived all his life in California, he explained, he had
decided to depart for the
sake of his conscience. “I
“California is like an alcoholic. We’re used to be able to ignore
going to have to wait for it to hit rock the progressives who run
bottom before it turns around.” the state,” he said. “Not
anymore.” My friend
cited the identity politics, the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, and the trans
agenda. (An example of the latter: a bill is now under consideration in the
California state legislature that would require department stores to sell toys
for boys and girls together, placing firetrucks and ballerina dresses in the
same gender-neutral sales areas.) “Some of what goes on is just evil. I have to
leave the state or I’d feel complicit.”
•••
California’s decline is easy enough to overstate, of course. Almost forty mil-

lion people still choose to live here, and the economy remains so robust that
if California were an independent nation, it would boast the fifth-biggest GDP
on the planet. But the Golden State, the land of opportunity within the land
of opportunity, the California of a large, contented middle class, good public
schools, affordable housing, and an abundance of jobs—that California no
longer exists. With 12 percent of the nation’s population, California now has

one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients and, on reasonable estimates,
the same proportion of the nation’s illegal immigrants. The surest index of
the erosion in the quality of life here: last year, for only the second time in
decades, more people moved out of the state than moved in.
Which brings me to last summer’s wildfires.
As the wildfires burned—altogether they would claim more than four
million acres—vast plumes covered much of the state in a haze. Then, in
mid-September, the meteorological conditions shifted, drawing smoke up
into the high atmosphere. In Northern California, the smoke obscured the
sun. Communities from Napa to Palo Alto to Santa Cruz glowed for days on
end with a weird coppery light—it reminded everyone of the light on Mars
in the Matt Damon movie The Martian—while the sky itself shone a sulfuric
yellow-brown.
A chain of causation ran through my mind. It came to me idly, but I had to
conclude that there was something to it. First the collapse of the GOP had
ceded to the Democratic Party complete control of the state government,
including the entities responsible for forest management. Then the progres-
sives who dominate the Democratic establishment had replaced traditional
forest management with new, supposedly better environmental techniques—
whereas state agencies used to subject some thirty thousand acres a year to
controlled burns, those agencies now burn less than half that amount. With
federal land-management agencies adopting similar techniques, vast quanti-
ties of undergrowth and deadwood had accumulated, enabling the wildfires
to become some of the biggest in California history.
Watching the state grow more and more dysfunctional, I had always sup-
posed there was one aspect of California that politics could never impair.
Now I saw I was mistaken. Politics had even blotted out the beauty of the
California sky.
Reprinted by permission of National Review. © 2021 National Review Inc.

All rights reserved.

California Electricity Crisis, by James L. Sweeney. To
org.
N ATI VE AMERICAN S
N ATI VE AMERICAN S
Hope and Change

in Indian Country?
President Biden’s new interior secretary, Deb
Haaland, has a chance to fix the system that
leaves many of America’s first people poor and
powerless. But will she take it?
By Terry L. Anderson
D
eb Haaland, a Native
American, is now the Key points
» The new interior secretary has
secretary of the interior.
the power to oppose the racism
The Department of the behind federal Indian policy.
Interior houses the Bureau of Indian » Native American groups have
Affairs, the agency for relations with resources that could provide
much-needed revenues for them-
Indian tribes. Chief Justice John Mar- selves.
shall referred to these groups in 1832 » Federal grants keep Indian
as “domestic dependent nations.” In groups beholden to Washington.
that same decision, Marshall declared » Traditional indigenous econo-

mies were built on concepts of
the relationship of Indians to the
ownership and rule of law.
federal government “like that of a ward
Terry L. Anderson is the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and participates in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project. He is past
president of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman,
Montana, and a professor emeritus at Montana State University. His latest book is
Adapt and Be Adept: Market Responses to Climate Change (Hoover Institu-
tion Press, 2021).

to his guardian,” making the secretary the guardian. The ward-guardian
relationship became further entrenched in federal law when the Dawes Act
of 1887 and the Burke Act of 1906 explicitly said Indian land was to be held
in trust by the Department of the Interior and could not be released from
trusteeship until the secretary of the interior—now Haaland—deems Indians
to be “competent and capable.”
Painting herself the same dark shade of green as her boss, President
Biden, has won Secretary Haaland support from environmentalists, but this
is not the leadership Native Americans need from her. As interior secretary,
Haaland is in a position to oppose the explicit racism in federal Indian policy,
for nothing is more racist than calling people wards and giving the govern-
ment the authority to decide whether they are competent and capable. Will
Haaland’s policies acknowledge that Indians are “competent and capable” or
will they continue holding them in colonial bondage?
Haaland can make changes in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) because
she is the trustee of fifty-six million acres of Indian Country. (Throughout
Indian Country the acronym BIA is taken to mean “bossing Indians around”
by wrapping them in “white tape.”)
INDEPENDENCE AND PROSPERITY

Start with Haaland’s position on oil and gas development. She has consistent-
ly said she would “stop all oil and gas leasing on federal lands” and supports
“a ban on fracking,” while calling for “no new pipelines.” Holding to these
positions and moving the Biden administration’s Green New Deal forward,
however, would have major effects on reservations, especially those with
significant energy potential. If Native Americans are competent and capable,
and they are, theirs is the right to make decisions about oil and gas develop-
ment on their lands.
The Ute Tribe in
southern Colorado
illustrates what “com- The “ward and guardian” relationship
petent and capable” has been entrenched in federal law
Indians can do. Biden’s since the late 1800s.
January announcement
of a freeze on oil and gas leasing on federal lands shook the tribe, which has
obtained sovereignty “one barrel at a time.” Because the BIA controls so
much reservation land, the tribe feared the ban might apply to it. A letter
from Luke Duncan, chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe Business Commit-
tee, called the freeze “a direct attack on our economy, sovereignty, and our
right to self-determination.” Resource revenues from the tribe’s oil and gas
resources go into the Southern Ute Growth Fund, estimated to be worth $4
billion, making each of the 1,400 tribal members a millionaire. Needless to
say, the Southern Ute are leery of a Native American interior secretary who
supports Biden’s green policies and says she wants to stop oil and gas leasing.

Fortunately, Biden responded quickly, saying tribes were exempt from the
freeze. But even if this decision holds under Haaland’s leadership of the BIA,
it could hurt tribes such as the Ute, who have diversified their holdings to
include wells in the Outer Continental Shelf under federal management.
On the other hand, the proposed Green New Deal would provide massive
subsidies to wind and
solar energy, both
LAND RICH: An oil rig operates on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. The
Osage Nation, headquartered in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, has been pumping oil
since its first well was drilled in 1897 and continues to pay quarterly royalty
payments to many members. [Angel Wynn—Danita Delimont Photography]
of which are in abundant supply on many reservations. According to a 2018

study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, tribal lands have 5 per-
cent of the nation’s solar energy potential and 9 percent of the wind energy
potential. But whether these sources are tapped should be a decision left to
the tribes.
TRADITIONAL STRENGTHS
Native Americans are the nation’s poorest minority. Their poverty rates
are as high as 25 percent and unemployment rates as high as 69 percent.
Between 2013 and 2017, median income for reservation Native Americans
was $29,097 and for all Native Americans (including those living off reserva-
tions) was $40,315. This compares to approximately $66,943 for all Ameri-
cans, $41,361 for African-Americans, and $51,450 for Hispanics. To this add
high rates of drug abuse, spousal abuse, and alcoholism.
Still, dangling carrots to the tribes in the form of grants from the federal
government is not the solution to reservation poverty. As Bill Yellowtail, a
former regional director of the Environmental Protection Agency under

President Obama, put it, “Dependency has become the reality of our daily
existence. Worst of all, generation by generation it becomes what sociologists
term learned helplessness—an internalized sense of no personal possibil-
ity, transmitted hereditarily and reinforced by recurring circumstances of
hopelessness.”
Haaland has the power to give tribes and their citizens more opportunities
for self-determination. Her first challenge is to free tribes from dependency
on the federal govern-
ment. Virtually all public
services—education, If Native Americans are competent
police protection, low- and capable, and they are, theirs is the
income housing, food right to make decisions about oil and
subsidies, and infra- gas development.
structure—are paid for
through grants from the federal government. Hence, tribal governments,
unlike cities, counties, and states, depend on grants rather than revenue to
fund government services. If they are to have independent, vibrant econo-
mies, tribes will need revenue, not grants.
Haaland can take an important lesson from the record of Charles Curtis,
vice president under Herbert Hoover and the first person of color to hold
that office. Curtis, from Kansas, was one-eighth Kaw Indian. As a senator,
Curtis supported federal boarding schools and introduced the Curtis Act of
1898, aimed at weakening tribal relations and encouraging assimilation into
white society. In a recent study, tribal scholars Stephen Cornell and Joseph
Kalt explored the roots of Indian economic development and found that
culture is part of the glue that “informs and legitimizes conceptions of self,
of social and political organization, of how the world works, and of how the
individual and group appropriately work in the world.”
American Indians can rebuild their economies and culture by referring
back to traditional indigenous economies that were built on concepts of
ownership and rule of
law, underpinned by
cultures that rewarded “Bossing Indians around” is not a just
entrepreneurship as approach, regardless of who takes it.
well as stewardship. For
example, when (not if) the Biden administration creates national monuments
to protect Native American antiquities, as the Obama administration did,
it could give management authority to tribes rather than the DOI. In its co-
management agreement with the National Park Service, the Navajo Nation
has already demonstrated that it is “competent and capable” of managing
Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, for example.
Haaland can help tribes wean American Indians from dependency and find
sources of revenue—even if that revenue comes from fossil fuels. This will
require a much more specific approach than the green mantra the secretary
professes, proclaiming herself a fierce voice “for all of us, our planet, and all
of our protected land.”
“Bossing Indians around” is not a just approach, regardless of who takes it.
Haaland is in a position to right the long-running injustices toward indig-
enous people by promot-
ing tribal sovereignty and
If they are to have independent, individual liberty. Chief
vibrant economies, tribes need rev- Joseph asked for exactly
enue, not grants. this in 1879 when he said,
“Let me be a free man—
free to travel, free to stop, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my
own teacher, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk
and act for myself.” Native Americans had these freedoms before European
contact, and they thrived. Today Secretary Haaland is well placed to free
American Indians from racism and wardship.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Adapt and Be

Adept: Market Responses to Climate Change, edited
by Terry L. Anderson. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or

I N T E RVI E W
I NTERVI EW
The Road to
Selfdom
To Matthew Crawford, author of Why We Drive,
the open road symbolizes the vanishing realm of
human autonomy and skill.
By Russ Roberts
Russ Roberts, EconTalk: My guest is author Matthew Crawford. He is a

senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies
in Culture and author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of
Work. His latest book is Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road,
which is an homage to driving and cars, but it’s about a lot more than driving.
It’s a deep meditation on how we might think about our relationship to tech-
nology and regulation. Matthew, welcome to EconTalk.
Matthew Crawford: Thanks for having me, Russ.
Roberts: Let’s start with the role of serendipity—in life and in driving. You’re
a fan of it. Tell me why and explain serendipity.
Crawford: Serendipity is something that happens when you don’t have a

plan, or things don’t go according to plan. In particular, it’s when things go
Matthew Crawford is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for

Advanced Studies in Culture. His most recent book is Why We Drive: Toward
a Philosophy of the Open Road (William Morrow, 2020). Russ Roberts is the
John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and partici-
pates in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project. He hosts the EconTalk podcast.
well under those conditions. Part of the meaning is that there’s some kind of
risk involved, and it involves hope. My friend Garnette Cadogan wrote this
beautiful essay about walking. He talks about stepping onto an urban side-
walk not knowing who or what you’re going to encounter, and he says that
serendipity is a secular way of speaking of grace. It’s unearned favor.
I try to tie that to the experience of riding a motorcycle through the woods
on a trail where you’re not encountering other people, but the trail itself is so
full of surprises that it takes total concentration. When I push the pace beyond
my skill set and it goes well, I feel somehow enlarged—existentially energized.
So, the book begins with this hunch that somehow risk is bound up with
humanizing possibilities.
AUTOMATION AND AUTONOMY
Roberts: A lot of our life is spent trying to reduce uncertainty. When I go out
for an “exercise walk,” I do a loop around my block. There’s no serendipity
except who else might be strolling. It’s a dull, safe experience. I think it’s a
great metaphor for how we can think about our lives.
Many young people feel they need a plan, and I understand that. For some
people, that’s appropriate. If you want to be a doctor, you’ve got to start plan-
ning early; it’s hard to get there. But for most of us, we’re not sure what we
want to be, and part of life is finding out what that is. And that serendipity
part is enormous. It’s a different way of seeing life—less as an algorithm to be
executed and more as an adventure to be experienced.
Crawford: I like your last formulation: contrasting it with something more

algorithmic. Of course, we’re in the midst of this grand social undertaking
of automation and rendering things algorithmically. One way to think of
automation is that it’s an attempt to eliminate those moments of openness
or serendipity and replace them with machine-generated certainty. Usually,
safety is invoked. There also seems to be a presumption that human beings
are incompetent or not to be trusted. Certainly, in the driverless-car space,
the refrain is that human beings are terrible drivers. It’s hard not to agree
with that, but there is a kind of consistent low regard for human capacities
that seems to be operating there.
Roberts: If we’re not careful, we’ll meet those expectations. When I’m on the
Beltway driving seventy miles an hour with thirty feet of space between me
and cars around me, I do feel like I’m on a bit of an adventure. It amazes me
that we don’t kill ourselves every time we’re out in that.

Crawford: It’s extraordinary trust we extend to one
another—a presumption of individual competence
and paying attention.
When Tocqueville traveled around America
as a Frenchman in the mid-nineteenth
century, it struck him that Americans
have this capacity to cooperate to
achieve practical ends, maybe
building a bridge or road. He
thought it was these small-
bore practical activities that
require cooperation and
coordination that served as a
nursery of certain aspects
of the democratic
personality. He thought these capacities were important for collective
self-government.
That’s interesting to think about if we’re going to relieve ourselves of the
burden of that kind of coordinated action on the road. Does that have any
implications for the democratic character and possibly an atrophy of the
social intelligence that we’re exercising on the road without thinking about
it?
Roberts: I think part of the reason we have the government that we have and
the relationship with the state that we have—at least historically—is that it
has something to do with American character and nature. Our willingness to
give up control and autonomy to a nanny state, a wiser artificial intelligence,
a wiser political class of
experts—that’s the under-
“In the driverless-car space, the lying problem.
refrain is that human beings are I can’t help but think
terrible drivers. . . . There is a kind about that incredible
of consistent low regard for human scene in the movie Wit-
ness when they build a
capacities.”
barn in a day. The kind
of community it takes—an Amish community in this case—to make that
happen is a magnificent example of the kind of cooperation you’re talking
about. In this case, it’s an ordered cooperation that’s intended. On the road,
it’s even more beautiful in a way because it’s not intended; it just emerges
from our care and self-care and our trust and expectations of the people in
other cars.
Crawford: Yes, we have this exquisite, finely evolved capacity to predict

one another’s behavior. Where it gets interesting is in this loop of recipro-
cal prediction where you stabilize your own behavior to make yourself more
predictable to others.
To go back to Tocqueville, we have the ability to do just that without the
supervision of the state or maybe some technology that does things for us. I
think it’s not always the state that’s the eroding force of our social capacities,
but a kind of supervisory technocratic regime.
Roberts: Driving is just one example. There are many other aspects of our
lives that have this structure—this creeping paternalism.
Crawford: The paternalism these days proceeds under the banner of

technological improvement. Driverless cars are one instance of this wider

pattern in our relationship to the material world in which the demands of
skill and competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience. And
there’s a dispositional evolution wherein the safer we become, the more
intolerable any remaining risk appears. Also, it makes us more suscep-
tible to claims made on behalf of safety, which are not always in good faith.
Safety becomes a lever of moral intimidation that can be used to arrest
criticism of some program that might be pursuing something quite other
than safety.
Roberts: Of course, sometimes it’s well intended. We’re in the middle of a

pandemic: a perfect example of what you’re talking about. All kinds of things
are claimed to be justified because they save lives. But we don’t live forever,
so extending life is what we’re really talking about. That’s a good thing; I’m in
favor of it. But I think there’s a trade-off as to what we’re willing to give up to
extend our lives.
Crawford: Great point.
Roberts: A lot of your book deals with self-driving cars. I was seduced by the
claims of the advocates. It was four or five years ago when they said: “This is
coming. It’s just a techni-
cal problem. We’ll solve
it in the next year or two, “It’s not always the state that’s the
and we’re going to save eroding force of our social capacities,
forty thousand lives a but a kind of supervisory technocratic
year in the United States regime.”
and even more abroad.”
The idea that in my commute I can sit back, put on my headphones, read,
work on my computer, have a drink—it’s fantastic. What’s wrong with that?
Crawford: I totally get the appeal. There are a few ways to approach this.
One would be simply to note that this merely technical engineering prob-
lem has turned out to be a lot more challenging than they thought it was
going to be even five years ago. So, the horizon when this is supposed to
happen has been pushed back and back, and investors are starting to get
skeptical.
There’s also the more general problem of automation where we’re talk-
ing about the disruption in the labor force that’s likely to happen. In about
two-thirds of the states in the nation, for men without a college degree, the
number one occupation is some form of driving: delivery, trucking, what-
ever. So, if this were to come to fruition, we’re talking about a massive
dislocation in the labor market in precisely that demographic that is the
sort of natural home of that middle-American radical who stands behind
the populist kind of moment. You’re talking about intensifying political
tension in a big way.
Roberts: It’s millions of people. The economist and my youthful self would
be prone to say, “Oh, but they’ll find new jobs. New technologies will
spring up to replace the lost jobs. They’ll get training. Their children will
inherit a better world because they’ll have new opportunities.” And there’s
some truth to that. I still believe that—mostly—when I look at techno-
logical change and trade. But there are some people that are getting left
behind.
There are other ways to cope with this socially other than to stop techno-
logical change. Do you think we should just think twice about it, or do you
think we should stop it?
Crawford: I don’t think the issue is even technology. There’s a kind of tech-
no-mysticism that talks as though all these things are inevitable. And there’s
the hand waving about we’ll all be better off, and everyone will be retrained.
In fact, what you’re talking about is very particular firms with huge lobby-
ing presence in Washington, DC, arranging things to remake our infrastruc-
ture in ways that will result in massive new concentrations and transfers
of wealth. That’s not
technology; it’s political
“The tech firms have now dropped economy. I think we very
the facade and are intervening in easily confuse the two.
elections with perfect openness.” Further, there’s a kind of
program of inducing such
confusion. One element of that is this assertion of inevitability, which demor-
alizes any kind of political opposition. This idea of technological progress as
an inevitable thing, it does a lot of work on behalf of whoever has the kind of
relationships with government to bring about some vision and impose it on
everybody else.
Roberts: That sounds pretty sinister.
Crawford: My book isn’t an anti-technological screed. I am myself a tech-

nologist. But I do bring a jaundiced and cynical presumptive skepticism to
the remaking of things in this quasi-compulsory way by Big Tech, which I
think doesn’t deserve the mantle of progress that we automatically grant to
it. And people are waking up to this; it’s no longer a presumptive thing we’re

willing to extend to Big Tech. Especially in Europe, but here too, I think the
honeymoon is over.
IN THE SURVEILLANCE ECONOMY
Roberts: We had Shoshana Zuboff on the program, and she was worried
about Google. It’s a bit like Google and these large tech companies are a
repair person who comes into your house to fix your washing machine and
says, “I’m not going to charge you, but I did take a lot of photographs of
stuff in your house so I
could learn what your
preferences are, and I’ll “Safety becomes a lever of moral
be sending you some intimidation.”
ads for those things
because I’ve learned something about you. And I sell these photos to
companies that like that. Are you OK with that?” Actually, they don’t even
ask if you’re OK with it; they just tell you it’s a free repair, and you think
it’s great.
So, the paradox is that Google is “free”—which is amazing, because I get
incredible value from it in many ways—but they’re selling stuff, just not
directly. I’m the middleman. I’m the product they’re selling. They’re selling
access to me. One part of me thinks: if I don’t want to buy, I don’t have to.
What’s the harm? Don’t I want ads that are tailored to me?
Crawford: I learned a lot from Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capi-
talism. I sort of take that up in my book in a chapter titled, “If Google Built
Cars.” I’ll just rehearse the basic logic she lays out. The cynics’ dictum is: if
you don’t know what the product is, you’re the product. But that’s not quite
right, by her account. What you are is a source of behavioral data, which is
this raw material that is manufactured into a prediction product, which is
then sold in this sort of open exchange in real time—she calls it a behavioral
futures market.
The ideal in this surveillance economy is to be able to intervene in the very
moment where your behavior is being analyzed in real time and you’re sus-
ceptible to being nudged one way or another. And this happens beneath the
threshold of awareness. She talks about all the subtle means of doing that.
So, the question is: what if the economic logic of the Internet were to slip the
bounds of the screen and start to order the physical environment—where
you don’t have the option of unplugging?
The best example is this idea of the smart city, where everything would
be surveilled, and things like trash collection, police protection, deliveries,
the allocation of scarce road surface at different times of day—all this would
be managed by an urban operating system. And, presumably, Google would
make the trains run on
time because they’re good
“What if the economic logic of the at that. So, what’s the
Internet were to slip the bounds of the downside? Well, you’re
screen and start to order the physical talking about the city now
environment—where you don’t have being run not by a demo-
cratically elected city
the option of unplugging?”
council, but by a cartel
of tech firms using proprietary knowledge that is utterly obscure to you and
inaccessible. You’ve lost any control over the institutions that you’re living
within. That doesn’t sit very well with our liberal political tradition.
Roberts: My first thought is that a smart city compared to the ones most of
us live in where the trash doesn’t get picked up and traffic is hideous has a
certain appeal to it. You could choose not to live there, in theory, which would
be the equivalent of unplugging. But the goal would be to have every city be
smart, because who would want to live in a dumb city?
And there are no traffic accidents in this Oz-like place. There’s also no
man behind the curtain. It’s an algorithm that’s moving the trains, cars, and
groceries around. I don’t have to go to the store if I don’t want to; I can shop
instantly. They even know when I’m out of stuff. It’s an appealing vision. Tell
me why we should be afraid of it—and I think maybe we should be.
Crawford: There’s this great quote from Eric Schmidt, the former head of
Google, that goes something like this: “People don’t want Google to answer
their questions; they want Google to tell them what to do before they even
know they have a question.” Google sort of becomes our trustee. As opposed
to a utility answering questions, it’s instead nudging and steering thought
into channels that seem desirable to Google.
And it’s not simply a profit motive. If that were the case, we’d be talking
about just a cynical exploitation. But it’s not that. If you look at Google’s
priorities in the realm of search, which is its core business, you see this quite
paternal mentality of wanting to create a choice architecture. This is the
nudge idea. It will be salutary and embody the right values. So, you’re not
just giving people what they think they want. You’re giving people options—
choices that are highly curated.

As we’ve seen, that curation is a highly political thing. The tech firms
have now dropped the facade and are intervening in elections with perfect
openness. It’s breathtaking. The democratic pretense has been dropped. It’s
full-blown technocratic paternalism.
I think it’s enraging people. It’s feeding this sense that our institutions are
out of control with this kind of expertise that feels empowered to simply take
things in hand and suppress dissent or even try to manage the information
environment in such a way that other possibilities don’t even show up.
Roberts: Big Tech has so much profit that they can indulge in all kinds of
things that have nothing to do with profit. And they do.
Crawford: They’re states, right? A quasi-governmental entity.
Roberts: I’m a little uncomfortable saying that. But what do we do about it?
The challenge is that the traditional methods of antitrust don’t work very
well. Big Tech apparently doesn’t hurt consumers the way old-school monop-
olies did by jacking up prices. Google is still as cheap to me as it ever was—
zero—but that’s hiding the real price. Here’s a quote from your book.
“Has anyone bothered to ask why the world’s largest advertising firm, for
that is what Google is, is making a massive investment in automobiles? By
colonizing your com-
mute, currently some-
thing you do, an actual “I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt,
activity in the tangible who talked about social atomization
world that demands as one of the preconditions for totali-
your attention, with yet tarianism.”
another tether to the all-
consuming logic of surveillance and profit, those precious fifty-two minutes
of your attention are now available to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
The patterns of your movements through the world will be made available
to those who wish to know you more intimately—for the sake of develop-
ing a deep, proprietary science of steering your behavior. Self-driving cars
must be understood as one more escalation in the war to claim and mon-
etize every moment of life that might otherwise offer a bit of private head
space.”
Should I be afraid of that? Is it scary that they’re monetizing that? Don’t I
like it when Google knows I’ve got a plane reservation because they’ve read
my e-mail, and they know I buy coffee because they’ve seen my Amazon
orders and they tell me where the best coffee shop is?
Crawford: What we’re talking about, even in the fairly benign version you’ve
just articulated, is still a fundamentally different way of inhabiting the world.
The source of unease about this is that somehow there’s this benevolent
entity surrounding me and presenting options that are optimized based on
my previous behavior. It means that I’m a determinate thing that’s known.
Google knows me better than I know myself, because they have systemati-
cally looked at my past behavior and found patterns that I’m not even aware
of. I start to be like a test particle in this sort of field of forces, being managed
beyond the rim of my awareness. Doesn’t that creep you out?
Roberts: Yes, it does. But your book stands at the barricades and says: stop!
Your book says this is not a world we were made to live in, and we’ll lose
something precious when we’re those particles being pushed around by
behavioral incentives. I’m sympathetic to your view, because I’m something
of a nineteenth-century person in a twenty-first-century world. How are you
going to get other people to join you? I wonder if most people are on our side.
Crawford: This idea of being a test particle in a field of forces—a kind of

determinately known entity—is a very lonely picture. I’m reminded of Han-
nah Arendt, who talked about social atomization as one of the preconditions
for totalitarianism. And right now, with the pandemic, we’re feeling a height-
ened atomization. It’s almost a turbocharged version of the trajectory we’ve
been on.
Arendt also talks about bureaucracy—rule by Nobody, as she puts it. It’s
the administrative state, but it’s also all these commercial entities that order
our lives in very far-reaching ways, but which you can’t address. Yesterday I
got my first bill after get-
ting a new cell phone, and
“Those precious fifty-two minutes of it’s wildly different from
your attention are now available to be what I agreed to in the
auctioned off to the highest bidder.” store. So, the usual thing:
I call and was on hold for
an hour before giving up. It’s this sense that there’s no one you can grab hold
of by the lapels and hold to account. She says that’s the definition of tyranny:
power that is not accountable and is not operating in your best interests.
That experience is endemic in modern life—of interacting with bureaucra-
cies that you can’t even address. You can’t get angry at the poor schmuck in
the call center, right?
It’s this feeling of being subject to rule by Nobody that Arendt suggests is
the source of the simmering rage so many people feel. She was writing about

the protest movements of the 1960s, but we’re living through a similar epi-
sode of rage now. And I think that this feeling of being subject to an arbitrary,
unaccountable power that you cannot address is playing a significant role in
this moment of rage.
So, that’s an important part of what we’re talking about with life being
ordered by algorithmic firms that are utterly opaque.
Excerpted by permission from Russ Roberts’s podcast EconTalk (www.

econtalk.org), a production of the Library of Economics and Liberty. ©
2021 Liberty Fund, Inc. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Beyond

Disruption: Technology’s Challenge to Governance,
edited by George P. Shultz, Jim Hoagland, and James
Timbie. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
I N TERVI EW
I N TERVI EW
The Man Who

Wouldn’t Be
Canceled
The mob came for Laurence Fox, a brilliant British
actor, after he made some mildly controversial
remarks on the BBC. Refusing to apologize
and vanish, Fox then launched a quixotic
counterattack: a campaign for mayor of London.
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: Laurence Fox grew up in a theatri-

cal family. His great-grandfather was a playwright and his grandfather was
an agent. One uncle is the film and theater producer Robert Fox; another
uncle is the actor Edward Fox. His father is the actor James Fox, and half a
dozen siblings and cousins are also actors. Laurence Fox attended Harrow
and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Probably best known in the United
States for playing Sergeant Hathaway on the television drama Lewis, Fox has
enjoyed a varied career from a role in Robert Altman’s classic movie Gosford
Park to a role in a stage production of the Shaw classic, Mrs. Warren’s Profes-
sion. And now, for reasons that he will attempt to persuade us are entirely
Laurence Fox, an actor, ran unsuccessfully in May 2021 as the Reclaim Party’s
candidate for mayor of London. Peter Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Di-
gest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and the Murdoch Distinguished Policy
Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

reasonable, Fox has given up acting for politics. He founded a new party, the
Reclaim Party, and announced his candidacy for mayor of London. He then
ran a full-page ad in British newspapers depicting Winston Churchill muz-
zled. The caption read: “Your London. Your freedom. Reclaim it.” Laurence,
please explain.
Laurence Fox: Yes, he has been muzzled. History can’t speak back to those
that wish to rewrite it or to remove the parts that are unpleasant for them.
There’s something very powerful about the idea of people putting up edifices
to heroes and then people forgetting the heroic acts that they undertook and
instead trying to rewrite it. We’re living in a period of extreme censorship
and extreme political correctness, and we’re also living in an era of mask
mandates. So, I thought: this covers several aspects of the entire freedom-of-
speech debate, which is one of the reasons why we’re in the situation we’re
in lockdown-wise in London. It’s also one of the reasons we’re where we are
culturally in terms of revising our history in a way that’s more palatable to
others.
Robinson: The culture interfered in your life. In January 2020 you appeared
on a television program called Question Time, a sort of highbrow celebrity
talk show that’s very popular in Britain. And by the time that program ended,
your life had been turned upside down. What happened?
Fox: I’d written a sort of anti-censorship song called “The Distance,” and I
was promoting it up and down the country. Someone asked me if I’d like to go
on Question Time. And I said, yeah, because you know as a family we used to
watch it and shout at the television. A lot of families in the United Kingdom
do. And I thought it’d be great and I’ll go on and I’ll say what no one else ever
says on this program. And I went on and I did say what was going through
my mind and seemingly through quite a lot of people’s minds. And an audi-
ence member—who actually later turned out to be a BBC plant—told me that
I wasn’t really allowed an opinion because I was white-privileged. And I said:
that’s racist. Should we not be racist to each other? That’s not a cool way
of being in 2021. We’ve had the civil rights movement. So, I said that we’re
a very tolerant country, which we are. All the stats say it. I think we’re just
behind New Zealand and Canada in terms of welcoming and tolerance and
interracial marriage and all this stuff. So, I just pointed out this factor and
then it exploded.
And the actors’ union, Equity, which I’ve never been a member of because I
don’t trust them as far as I could throw them, said it needs to be denounced.
So, they then went on a period of “burn the witch” for me, which was fun. I
threatened to take them to court, and they had to swiftly retract their state-
ments. But by that point I think the damage was done. You know, showbiz is a
very temporary area. People are frightened for their incomes.
Robinson: You’re all working from project to project.
Fox: And you’re constantly unemployed, and you’ve got to have the right
views. And my views were just clashing with showbiz, and with all the institu-
tions now that are meant to be propping up our culture but are actually drag-
ging it down. So, yeah, I was, as it’s called, canceled. But I think canceled is
the wrong word. I think it’s excommunicated from the church of woke, which
is a much more serious punishment, because canceled sounds fun, right? But
no, it’s an excommunication from a burgeoning religion. But they kind of gave
me wings.
Robinson: So your agent dropped you. They staged a campaign against you.
Twitter went wild. All of that. You could have fought back for a day or two
and retired to the countryside for a year and waited for it to blow over. Not
only did you dig in rhetorically, attacking right back on Twitter, you founded
a political party. How do you go from a bumpy evening on Question Time to
founding a political party?
Fox: Well, it’s interesting actually and I can blame you Americans for a lot
of this. I keep my eye on America much more than I do on England often,
because I’m trying to see what’s going to come our way. And I remember Vic-
tor Davis Hanson being very good on this. Ben Shapiro was also very good,
and he said, do not apologize ever to them, because you’re still going to get
your head chopped off with a guillotine and it’s still going to be the Terror.
So, do not apologize and stand up for yourself as much as you can. And I sat
there for possibly a period
of months feeling very
“They then went on a period of ‘burn distraught, because it’s
the witch’ for me, which was fun.” my source of income, and
also I love acting and I
love art. I think art is incredible. And I just thought, right, I have to do some-
thing about this problem. And I wanted to start a movement. Essentially, it’s
a movement in a lot of ways, because it’s based around an idea. It’s not based
around me, even though they try and make it about me. I was approached
by Jeremy Hosking, who I call a rebalancer. He wants to rebalance things.
He’s saying, if a conversation is going too far in one direction, he would like to

rebalance it in the other direction. He said, we’ll start a political party. So, I
hemmed and hawed about it, and then I thought, fine.
Robinson: Jeremy Hosking is fascinating man in all kinds of ways. But for
purposes of this conversation, he’s fabulously rich. So, he was able to under-
write this effort.
Fox: Yeah. He’s worth hundreds of millions of pounds. He’s a great guy. We
argued about whether it
should be a movement or
a party. And in the end, “Showbiz is a very temporary area.
we agreed that it would People are frightened for their
be a party. And actually, incomes.”
now I’m very grateful
that we did agree it was a party. Because if you look at the way the govern-
ment is heading off in one direction at the moment, it’s great that we will
have at least some of the teeth.
Robinson: Nick Tyrone wrote in The Spectator, “Here’s the thing—if Laurence
Fox is serious about politics, he should become a Tory.” Why didn’t you?
Fox: No, thank you. The thing about the Tories is that they’ll talk a good
game, always, but they just want to remain in power. And the thing about me
is I don’t want to be in power. I want the idea to be in power. And the idea is
freedom of expression and the broadest possible debate. It’s not really about
me. I did speak to Tories.
Robinson: This is Nick Tyrone again in The Spectator about your running for
mayor of London, of all places: “The actor’s brand of anti-wokeness will play
nowhere in the entire country worse than in its capital city.”
Fox: That’s why, that’s the only reason, right? If you’re going to hammer the
things on the cathedral door, you’ve got to hammer them on the cathedral
door. This is the moment. London is the cathedral of wokery—of identity-
based moral supremacy. I thought: It doesn’t matter if I lose; the only thing
that matters is that I stand. That’s the most important thing.
RECLAIMING FREEDOM
Robinson: This is you announcing your candidacy for mayor of London: “But
importantly, I want to reclaim your freedom to speak, to be yourself, to be
part of the national conversation, to cherish your history rather than rewrite
it. And to teach our chil-
dren to be confident,
not ashamed of who
they are and where
they come from.”
Britain is
where the
rights of the
individual
as against
the state
first
emerge

and first take legal form from the Magna Carta on. How can it be that you
ran for mayor of London, of all places, on freedom of speech?
Fox: In London, our institutions are now rising up against us. We have things
like the National Trust saying that they will remove unpleasant statues.
You’ve got [London mayor] Sadiq Khan saying he’s done a commission of
diversity in the public realm at the cost of a hundred million pounds to
remove statues and rename streets. There’s a road in Tottenham in North
London called Black Boy Lane. And Black
Boy Lane was not named after black
boys but after the son of George
I, I think, because he was very
dark. So, we’re having our
history totally rewritten and
our culture totally revised.
Our language is being
abused by people who wish to serve a different narrative. So, London is no
longer the cradle of freedom of speech. And the United Kingdom is no longer
the cradle of freedom of speech, openly.
On one end of the discussion within any population, you’ve got 25 percent
of people who are quite authoritarian. And on the other side, you’ve got 25
percent of people who are quite libertarian. But what we’ve done is we’ve
sliced straight down
the middle and we’ve
“I think canceled is the wrong word. removed the libertarian
I think it’s excommunicated from side of the argument: the
the church of woke, which is a much freedom-loving, continual
more serious punishment.” conversation of culture,
which is wonderful. And
we’ve just stopped it. So this 25 percent of authoritarian people want to shut
down debate. They’re biological denialists. They’re misogynists as well, these
people. It’s just they’re now very loud.
I’m saying we do need to reclaim that half of the conversation again. It’s not
about me. It’s about making the conversation balanced and sort of 52–48, like
Brexit, so there’s a big argument on both sides. That’s a good thing. What you
don’t want is a 95–5 conversation, which is what we’re ending up with here. I
don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s how I feel.
Robinson: It makes striking sense.

Once again, from your announcement of your candidacy for mayor: “I
want to reclaim your freedom. I want to reclaim your freedom to work when
you want to work, where you want to work, and how you want to work, and
remove all the obstacles that stand between you and rebuilding after these
lockdowns. And I want to reclaim your freedom to move. To be with whoever
you want to be with and when you want to be with them. Your fundamental
human need to be together, in sickness and in health. And to never take that
freedom away again. Nobody should say their last goodbyes to anybody on an
iPad ever again.”
Freedom of speech is one thing, but there you’re campaigning against the
lockdown. What’s the connection?
Fox: The connection is the debate. It’s this idea that if there had been a
more balanced debate around this, then the lockdown may not have been
considered as an option. Also, I think we’re entering a period of reflection
now where we can go with comparison analysis. I’m waiting for someone to
give me any evidence that a lockdown is a good idea. What happened was

we stifled the debate very quickly and we politicized it very heavily to make
goodies and baddies. And this is not how you have a solid political debate
with people or within a family. I think lockdown is actually an exemplar of
how bad decisions are made when debate is stifled.
If you shut an entire society down for a year, you’re destabilizing democ-
racy and destabilizing civilization. And I find that something that I have to
stand up against. I’m not anti-lockdown because it’s fashionable. I’m anti-
lockdown because there’s zero science behind it.
RECLAIMING BRITAIN
Robinson: Let me ask a new question in my continuing effort to sort out

Laurence Fox. This is a quotation from your piece in the Telegraph announc-
ing your candidacy: “Sadiq Khan and his nation-hating cronies have their
jealous eyes out on our statues and institutions. Where does his desire to
strip us of our history end? Surely Queen Victoria should be torn from her
plinth in front of Buckingham Palace to be replaced with a monument to
Greta Thunberg. Why are none of our politicians standing to defend us? I feel
it’s important to confess just how in love I am with these tiny island splotches
we call home, and how immovable I am in that love.”
Fox: Amen.
Robinson: If I want to be a little unfair, I’d say you sound almost like Nigel
Farage, or like former Tory prime minister John Major, who famously called
Britain the country of
long shadows on cricket
grounds and warm beer. “I don’t want to be in power. I want
You’re young. You’re an the idea to be in power.”
actor. You’re cool. You
ride motorbikes. You have tattoos and roll your own cigarettes. And here you
are championing Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria. How do those two
Laurence Foxes go together?
Fox: I’m an artist. I love art and I love holding the mirror up to nature. And I
love the idea that art is to push against cultural norms that we don’t want to
accept. And I find that art is no longer a place where one can do that. To me,
politics is the only place where ideas can be discussed openly, really. That’s
what I find. I don’t think I’m trying to sort of hark back to a bygone era of
Britain, even though I think we should pay due deference to the sacrifices
made by others. Because otherwise how can we be grateful to anybody? I
think modern Britain is shaped on those sacrifices, on the Churchills. Imag-
ine Churchill on Twitter. Can you imagine what would have happened if they
had asked in a Twitter poll whether we do the Battle of Britain? We would all
be speaking German.
And the current queen is now being pushed by these crazy nut-job ideo-
logues. She’s thinking of hiring a diversity czar for the royal family. So she’s
going to have a woke party commissar in the royal family saying: “excuse
me, ma’am, no, we don’t say that anymore.” I’m trying to say we do not need
cultural commissars within our national institutions. The national institu-
tions should reflect the nation. That’s all I would say. I think that could sound
old-fashioned, but I think it’s normal.
THE WISDOM OF HUMILITY
Robinson: You have two sons and three dogs and a career to return to maybe
at some point. But how’s it going? As I understand it, you turned over most
of your house to volunteers to print leaflets, edit videos, and so forth. Are
you enjoying this? Or do you secretly say to yourself when you flop into bed
exhausted after the twenty-seventh Zoom call of the day: “How could I have
done this? What a mistake I made.”
Fox: Not at all. I feel absolutely free for the first time ever. And I know
this because a friend of mine is in the process of being totally canceled
and excommunicated at the moment. And he’s struggling so much with
whether to fight back or try to apologize. He said to me: “How can this just
be so natural to you?” And it’s because I’m free. I’ve been released from my
shackles of having to fit
into the establishment
“If you’re going to hammer the things version of what art is or
on the cathedral door, you’ve got to showbiz or any of that
hammer them on the cathedral door. . . . is. And my only require-
London is the cathedral of wokery—of ment of myself is to say
identity-based moral supremacy.” that this is the truth as
I observe it. I stand by
others’ right to question my truth, to question my view. I just think that’s
pure freedom. In the same way as a motorbike is pure freedom. But here,
we’re talking about the preservation of an idea. And that freedom has never
been one generation from being extinct. We don’t pass it on in the blood-
stream. I believe that this is my responsibility. So, it doesn’t really matter
what I feel like when I go to bed at night. What I feel like when I go to bed at

night is that I need to watch at least half an hour of Modern Family with the
kids tomorrow night so that they know I still love them.
Robinson: I sort of half thought you said that if the votes are disappointing
on May 6, on May 7 you’re going to start reading scripts again. But you’re not
saying that at all.
Fox: No. Look, we have to be honest with each other and it brings tears to
my eyes to admit this. To take on wokery in the cathedral of wokery is pos-
sibly not going to be my
first political victory.
I’ve accepted that, but “If you shut an entire society down for
I’ve decided that I’ll win a year, you’re destabilizing democracy
anyway. As long as I put and destabilizing civilization.”
forth a good showing for
those who care about freedom and liberty and the ability to express them-
selves, that’s all I care about.
This is not a project that’s going to take two years. It’s a project that will
take twenty. As Jeremy Hosking said to me: you lose, you lose, you lose, you
lose, you lose, you lose, you win.
Robinson: There’s a passage that you’re very fond of quoting from “East
Coker,” one of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. This is poetry that he worked
on during World War II. He says that the only wisdom we can hope to acquire
is the wisdom of humility. But it’s also about the newness of the present. Why
does that passage—humility before the history of Britain and an awareness
of the new attitude required in the present—matter to you? Is it personal? Is
it political?
Fox: I think it’s just life based in the same way that Psalm 139 really mat-
ters to me. But I think it’s his use of the word limited, when he says there
is limited value in the knowledge derived from experience. I think that’s so
wonderful, because he’s trying to bridge the gap between history and the
present. He’s trying to say he wants to permit people to make their own path
through life, and at the same time understanding that there is a path they’ve
come from. Eliot is very obsessed with time as a writer. And he probably did
more to break down time for a sort of thicko like me than most people could
have done through poetry.
Robinson: Would you end this conversation by reading that passage from
“East Coker”?
Fox: Sure. “There is, it seems to us, at best, only a limited value in the
knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and
falsifies. For the pattern is
new in every moment and
“I love the idea that art is to push every moment is a new
against cultural norms that we don’t and shocking valuation of
want to accept.” all we have been. Do not
let me hear of the wisdom
of old men, but rather of their folly, their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of
possession, of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. The only wisdom
we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Oh
god, he’s good, isn’t he?
Robinson: Laurence Fox: actor-candidate for mayor of London and surely

the only political figure on the planet who quotes T. S. Eliot. Thank you.
Fox: My pleasure. Thank you, Peter.

I N T E RVI E W
I NTERVI EW
“Turning People
into Americans”
Hoover fellow Niall Ferguson is optimistic that
future immigrants will find their “kaleidoscopic
identity” within the American experiment, just as
so many others have done. Including him.
By Chris Walsh and William McKenzie
Bush Center: Let’s start with this broad question: How do you define “we the
people”?
Niall Ferguson: The answer must be the adult citizens of the United States.
That’s what’s meant. And I underline citizens because citizenship is funda-
mental to the idea of a republic. “We the people” can’t include people who are
noncitizens, but it can include citizens abroad. The fundamental notion of a
republic is inseparable from the notion of citizenship. And there must be a
consensus about who is a citizen, as well as a formal legal definition.
Bush Center: How, then, do you create a common narrative in democracies

that have a diverse population?
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institu-
tion, where he is chairman of the History Working Group and participates in
the Human Prosperity Project and Hoover’s task forces on military history and
national security. He is also a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies,
Harvard. Chris Walsh is the senior program manager in the Human Freedom Ini-
tiative at the George W. Bush Institute. William McKenzie is the senior editorial
adviser at the Bush Institute.
Ferguson: We know the answer to that. It’s called American history. And
what’s remarkable about the history of the United States is that this problem
has been solved again and again, even in defiance of critics and skeptics who
said it couldn’t be.
In the nineteenth century, the republic saw great influxes of people who
were not from the English-speaking countries of Great Britain and Ireland.
That might have posed
a challenge, considering
“Get people into the economy, get how deeply rooted the cul-
them working, get their kids educat- ture of the United States
ed, and then you will find that assimi- was in British culture and
lation happens more or less by itself.” thinking. But despite all
the fears that people had,
especially in the late nineteenth century, about immigrants from Poland or
southern Italy or Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the assimilation
of those different groups into the body politic was hugely successful.
That’s continued to be true in the twentieth century and into the twenty-
first century. Again, there’s been skepticism. But the United States has an
amazing track record of turning people into Americans, no matter where
they have come from. And the wider the geographical net has been cast, the
more the system has continued to work.
Now, you used the word narrative. I prefer history. We’re really talking here
about a historically formed idea of what it is to be American, that defines our
identity, not in terms of color, creed, or country of origin, but in terms of an
oath to the Constitution.
Identity is constructed in the American case so that anybody can become
an American. I became an American a couple of years ago, so I’ve been
through this fascinating transformation. As I stood in a rather large and
superannuated cinema in Oakland, California, I looked around and there
were people from all over the world. The largest single group were, in fact,
Chinese. And we all went through the same transformation into Americans.
People born in the United States who don’t go through this process take
much of it for granted. They don’t realize the magic that is almost unique to
the United States, that you can become an American.
Those of us who have become Americans through naturalization actually
have a better handle on the peculiar history of American citizenship. And
I do wish that civics hadn’t withered as it has withered in our education
system. If it hadn’t, maybe native-born Americans would understand this
better.

Bush Center: If you could, talk about the thought process you went through
in moving from being a son of Scotland and a British citizen to an American.
Ferguson: Because of a nice arrangement that exists between the United

States and the United Kingdom, I didn’t have to give up my British citizen-
ship. So, I’m both British and American, which is a great combination,
reflecting our common origins.
I didn’t need to become an American citizen. I could have stayed as a Brit-
ish citizen with a green card entitling me to permanent residence here but
not the right to vote. That struck me as anomalous. I certainly was paying my
taxes here, but I wasn’t a full participant in the democratic process. Taxation
without representation is a bad idea.
Bush Center: In a recent lecture, you said that a sudden surge of immigra-
tion is a key contributor to the rise in populism, which we’ve seen not just in
the United States but in other places. So how can democratic societies both
welcome immigrants and yet ease the fears that more immigrants will only
change the culture of their country?
Ferguson: When you look back over American history, you quickly realize
that it’s not quite true to say that we’ve always been a nation of immigrants.
The last great peak before our own time was in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, when
the foreign-born popula-
tion reached about 14 “What’s remarkable about the history
percent of the total. It of the United States is that this prob-
fell steeply from that lem has been solved again and again,
level in the mid-twen- even in defiance of critics and skep-
tieth century, and only
tics who said it couldn’t be.”
relatively recently have
we gotten back up to around that 14 percent level. The key point is, in those
periods when there has been large-scale migration, there has also been a
reaction to it.
For example, the populism of the late nineteenth century, which produced
the 1882 Exclusion Act against Chinese immigrants, has a lot in common
with the populism of the Trump era. It combined a nativist desire to limit
or even halt immigration with a suspicion of liberal elites and a preference
for easy money. We have had a classic populist backlash to globalization
now, just as happened after 1873. But populism has a relatively short half-
life, partly because it tends not to deliver quite what its supporters hope
for. If you look back in the late nineteenth century, populism ultimately
fizzled out.
In the debates about national identity in the early twentieth century and
mid-twentieth century, populists said that you can’t construct a national
identity from a very diverse population. So, you have to reduce the diver-
sity, which is in fact impossible. And the radical left said, “The only way
we can hold this together is with the massive welfare state and a complex
of entitlements.” That’s wrong too, because history tells us that a dynamic
free market economy with easy access to the labor market and good access
to education will do the assimilation much better than a European-style
welfare state.
We know this because of the European experience. Large-scale welfare
states were built particularly after World War II. One consequence of those
structures is that it’s much harder for immigrants to get employed. The
unemployment rate in Northern Europe for non-native-born workers is
roughly double that of
native-born workers.
“Identity is constructed in the Ameri- The answer to this
can case so that anybody can become question you raised is, get
an American.” people into the economy,
get them working, get
their kids educated, and then you will find that assimilation happens more or
less by itself. There is enough that is attractive about American culture for
resistance to it to be pretty difficult.
Building enclaves where traditional cultures hold out is what immigrants
always try to do. But pretty quickly by the second generation, people have
become American. That’s the way this works.
As long as we keep understanding our history, which we’re not doing a
good job of, we’ll realize that this isn’t so tricky and it doesn’t require walls,
and it doesn’t require welfare states. The American way, with its extraor-
dinary combination of individual freedom and patriotism based upon the
Constitution, does the job.
Bush Center: In a free society, how do people maintain an identity without

weaponizing their racial, religious, ethnic, or national identity against some-
one else?
Ferguson: When I grew up in Glasgow in the 1970s, the most frighten-

ing question you could be asked by a boy bigger than you was, “What
are you?” And “What are you?” was a coded question for, “Are you a

Protestant or a Catholic?” Are you a Rangers or a Celtic supporter? That
was the culture I grew up in, where sectarian divisions often spilled over
into violence.
But this was absurd. Any visitor from another country couldn’t tell a Rang-
ers fan from a Celtic
fan. Moving to England,
which was the first of “It doesn’t require walls, and it
my migrations, I began doesn’t require welfare states.”
to realize that identity
couldn’t possibly be so simplistic. I was certainly a Glaswegian and we have
our own peculiar identity in Glasgow, but I was also a Scot and a Briton.
Then, on reflection, part of my childhood having been spent in Kenya, I was
part of what was left of Britain’s empire. And my identity in religious terms
was complicated because my parents had left the Church of Scotland in pro-
test against sectarianism.
So, the more one unpacks one’s own identity, the more one realizes that it
can’t be simply defined. And the key thing that we have gotten wrong, par-
ticularly in the universities in the past twenty or so years, is that we bought
into notions of identity that are very absolute. They produce a ranking of
people by their minority status, by how much historical mistreatment a par-
ticular minority has experienced. Sorting people into distinct ethnic or other
identity silos is completely the wrong way to think about identity. Rather, we
should recognize that each individual has a curious kaleidoscopic identity—
that identity depends on family circumstances, on place of birth, on things
over which we have absolutely no control, even sexual orientation.
We need to remind ourselves that the core animating idea of the United
States is that “we the
people” are a collection
of individuals and our “The American way, with its extraor-
individual liberties set dinary combination of individual
the United States apart freedom and patriotism based upon
from its geopolitical the Constitution, does the job.”
rivals. They invariably
attach more importance to collective rights than to individual rights. And
that’s as true today, as we face China as a strategic rival, as it was when
we faced the Soviet Union or, for that matter, Nazi Germany and imperial
Japan.
What makes the United States distinctive is the emphasis on the individ-
ual’s rights. And that includes the individual’s right to choose and shape his
or her own identity. It’s not set in stone. There’s nowhere in the world quite
like the United States for allowing you to develop your identity in whichever
direction you wish to go. And that’s the key idea for me.
Bush Center: How might leaders in democratic societies create the kind of
culture you’re talking about, where ethnicity is not used as a weapon against
someone else or another group of people?
Ferguson: The most important thing that a leader can do is make clear that
he or she can identify with all citizens and can recognize that all citizens
have a common claim to American values and rights. A president should not
attach any special importance to his ethnic or religious or other origins. The
trick is to have at least an attempt at universalism. Don’t go overboard with
woke notions of identity. Rather, say that all Americans are equal before the
law, regardless of their origins or their religious orientation. A fundamental
equality before the law defines this country, as well as the idea of individual
over collective right.
Bush Center: How would you take what you were just talking about and
apply it to the situation in Europe? Some of these challenges have been acute
there.
Ferguson: The European problem isn’t entirely different from the American
problem. But there has been much larger-scale immigration from Muslim-
majority countries into
Europe than into the Unit-
“The more one unpacks one’s own ed States. Those Muslim-
identity, the more one realizes that it majority countries instill
can’t be simply defined. . . . Each indi- in people who grow up in
vidual has a curious kaleidoscopic them ideas that are quite
at odds with the ideas of
identity.”
Western societies. For
example, the equality of the sexes is not something that is enshrined in Islam.
This has been and still is a huge challenge for European countries.
Bush Center: How do you get societies that once saw diversity as a threat to
their national identity to see diversity instead as an advantage?
Ferguson: If you look at global surveys, the United States is much more
inclined to see diversity as an advantage than almost any other country. The
United States is still comparatively one of the most tolerant countries of
diversity.

There’s been something of a backlash against the notion of diversity in the
past few years, as part of that populist backlash that I talked about earlier.
But the problem has been the way in which the left has sought to weaponize
the issue of identity in its own way. This is potentially a huge tactical mistake.
It underestimates the extent to which people choose their political affilia-
tions in the United States and the way they choose other things. They’re not
baked, as it were, in the cake of one’s country of origin. The good news is that
the American electorate doesn’t behave as those two different models imply.
We are wonderfully confusing and perplexing.
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2021 George W. Bush Presidential Center. All rights reserved.

American Exceptionalism in a New Era: Rebuilding
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I N TERVI EW
I N TERVI EW
“Pluralism Is the
Lifeblood”
How do healthy democracies embrace both
differences and common values? Hoover fellow
Timothy Garton Ash discusses the crucial
balance—and the danger that lies “down the road
of identity politics.”
By Chris Walsh and William McKenzie
Bush Center: We would be interested in your perspective as someone who is

not a US citizen on a question that we have put to several American scholars.
The question is: how would you interpret or define the American Constitu-
tion’s opening statement of “we the people”?
Timothy Garton Ash: What an interesting question to start with. My

spontaneous answer is that it identifies the difference between the US but
also Canadian or Australian senses of the people and a traditional European
sense of what the people is. In German, that would be Volk. The folk, the
people, would be defined by blood and soil. It would be an ethnic definition of
the people.
Timothy Garton Ash is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and partici-
pates in Hoover’s History Working Group. He is Professor of European Studies in
the University of Oxford and the Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s
College, Oxford. Chris Walsh is the senior program manager in the Human Free-
dom Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute. William McKenzie is the senior
editorial adviser at the Bush Institute.

The US definition of the people, like also the French and British definition,
is a civic democratic definition. That seems to be an important difference.
Traditionally, not everyone could become a German or a Pole, but everyone
and anyone can become an American.
Bush Center: You wrote recently about a populism that is defined as “us
versus them,” and you have defined “them” as often meaning immigrants
and people of a different ethnicity. How, then, do democracies with diverse
populations create a common narrative?
Garton Ash: This is one of the great challenges of our time for all our
democracies. I wrote about this a bit in my book on free speech. My Stanford
colleague David Kennedy
told me about a cabaret
where a deliberately sort “Without pluralism, there is no
of multicolored chorus democracy. It’s as simple as that.”
sang, “In 2042 there’ll
be more of us than of you.” In other words, it would be the tipping point,
where those categorized as white or Caucasian would become less than the
majority, simply a plurality. In Germany today, one in four people have what’s
called a migration background, not just immigrants, but also second or third
generation. So, it’s a huge challenge for all of us.
The answers are rather clear. You need senses of community and identity
and belonging that are open to all, provided they live by the rules, the laws,
and the values of the society in which they live.
Empirically, many of the most successful such identities are local ones. You
very often find, for example, in Britain that people will identify very strongly
with the city in which they live. There’ll be people of Manchester or of Liver-
pool or particularly Londoners, who have an almost national sense of identity.
But it’s essential that at the level of the nation, you also have an inclusive,
civic, liberal patriotism.
Bush Center: You’ve also talked about how, in modern populist movements,
populism hates pluralism. So, how do liberal democracies like the United
Kingdom, the United States, or others welcome diversity and pluralism into
their societies?
Garton Ash: Those are two separate things. One is, we have in all our
advanced democracies a lot of very unhappy and quite angry people at the
moment. What populists do is to cynically channel that all and blame it on
“the immigrants” generally without much rational justification. That’s point
number one, we simply have to do a better job of explaining the origins of the
problems.
Number two, what distinguishes a tyranny of the majority from a
genuine democracy is precisely pluralism. It’s not majority-takes-all. It’s
the fact that there are anti-majoritarian institutions. Classically, that
means an independent judiciary, the separation of powers between the
legislature and the executive, but also the media,
churches, universities, and civil society
institutions.
Pluralism is the lifeblood of a genuine
democracy. Without pluralism, there is
no democracy. It’s as simple as that.

What populists are trying to practice is the theory of the British constitu-
tion. You may laugh because you may think the British don’t have a constitu-
tion. We don’t have a written constitution, but we have an unwritten one. And
the theory of parliamentary sovereignty is that the majority in Parliament is
completely sovereign.
In classic British constitutional theory, if the Parliament decided that all
red-bearded people should be shot tomorrow, then all red-bearded people
would be shot tomorrow.
But the reality in
the British sys-
tem is one of
incredibly
rich pluralism. You have an enormously well-established independent
judiciary, a powerful independent media, the House of Lords, universities,
churches, and so on. It’s all about not having a winner-takes-all tyranny of
majority politics.
Bush Center: You were talking about Londoners having a strong identity
while being part of the United Kingdom. In your writings, you have defended
the right of people to be rooted in more than one place or in more than one
way. So, how can people in diverse nations maintain a strong national iden-
tity while still having their own particular ethnic, social, or cultural identity?
Garton Ash: In principle, it’s not that difficult, because all human beings
have multiple identities. I don’t know of any single human being who has only
one identity. The question is how to structure that within a liberal and plural-
ist democracy. The mis-
take that liberals made
“It’s essential that at the level of the over the past thirty years
nation, you also have an inclusive, was to go too far down the
civic, liberal patriotism.” road of identity politics
and a relativist multicul-
turalism, in which every little community, particularly those of immigrant
origin but not only that, was allowed to have its own identity.
That had very damaging consequences. One was a moral and cultural rela-
tivism: “Your traditional Muslim community restricts the rights of women.
That’s fine because that’s your culture.” No, we have to have a set of common
standards.
Second, it left the former majority—typically white working class in many
of our countries—feeling that everybody else was entitled to their identity
politics except them. Then, you get Donald Trump with white-identity poli-
tics or Brexit with white-identity politics.
The third thing wrong with it was there wasn’t a strong enough common
identity. The flag, the national anthem, the constitution, if you’re lucky enough
to have one, are all important in creating a strong common identity. But it’s
also very important identifying with personalities. For the Brits, it’s the queen;
the federal president in Germany; the French president, the symbols of the
republic in France. There’s not just a rational identification, but an emotional
identification. An emotional identification with the nation is a key part.
Bush Center: We see some autocracies rising in places like Hungary in

part by defining their ethnic identity against others. How might democratic

leaders in Europe best uphold what you described as liberalism’s best quest,
which is a way for diverse people or peoples to live together well in condi-
tions of freedom?
Garton Ash: Hungary is a classic example of the difference between tyranny

of the majority and a proper democracy. Viktor Orbán wins elections, which
are not particularly free and fair, partly by scapegoating Roma, Muslims,
and, I’m afraid to say, Jews, as he did with the attack on George Soros. This
is a classic nationalist
ethnic scapegoating, as
we’ve known it many, “I don’t know of any single human
many times in Euro- being who has only one identity. The
pean history. What is question is how to structure that
so shocking about this within a liberal and pluralist democ-
example, and Poland to
racy.”
a lesser extent, is that
these are supposedly democratic countries inside the European Union (EU).
Only democracies are to be members of the EU. That’s written into the basic
treaties of the EU. Part of the question for Europe is its inability to make a
reality of the values it has in its treaties.
Bush Center: When you have large flows of refugees and immigrants into a
country, or as we saw more broadly in Europe a few years ago, what strate-
gies work well in reassuring the citizens of that country that this flow of
immigrants or refugees will not replace their national culture?
Garton Ash: That’s an excellent question. In absolute terms, even those

seemingly large flows at the height of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015 and
2016 were a tiny percentage of the total population of what was then five
hundred million people in the European Union. The problem was that people
in Germany and elsewhere felt that the state was no longer in control. This
situation wasn’t being managed. It’s no accident that the great slogan of
Brexit was “take back control.”
If the numbers are vast, if they’re 10 percent of the population in a single
year, that’s a challenge. Although please bear in mind that at the end of
the Second World War, we had these vast movements of people across the
European continent, and postwar West Germany integrated twelve million
refugees from the east. So it can be done.
It’s the sense that the movement is under control and being managed
that is so important. The great example of this is Canada. We did a study
at Oxford of how the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and Britain
manage diversity. The only one of those countries that actually controls its
immigration is Canada. All the rest of us have flows that are not fully under
control or not under control at all. Canada has it completely under control
partly because of the blessings of geography, but they also carefully ensure
that there’s no single dominant minority. If you look at the Canadian immi-
gration statistics, it’s a rainbow but no single group is dominant. As a result,
Canadians are very accepting of immigration and the prime minister can
turn around and say, “We’ll take thirty thousand or forty thousand refugees
from Syria,” and nobody minds.
The starting point is to be able to manage your immigration. If you let peo-
ple in, then treat them properly. School them, give them the language skills,
give them the vocational
skills. It’s very important
“If we think our maternal language is that people get into the
part of our culture, that’s, in a sense, a workplace, and put them
human and civil right.” on a track to citizenship.
It’s a two-part thing: con-
trolling the inflows, but then really integrating people once they’re there.
Bush Center: Are there other ways that leaders can persuade their countries
that diversity can be an advantage?
Garton Ash: Yes, and I’ll give you a concrete example. In Germany, the
biggest single group of migrant origin is Turkish. There have been a lot of
difficulties about integrating the guest workers and their children, partly
because Germany didn’t grant them citizenship. So, people who had been
born in Germany were still being treated as foreigners.
Last year, two scientists—German but of Turkish origin—discovered the
BioNTech vaccine. That is the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19
that many of us have gotten. That single fact does more to persuade people of
the value of diversity than a hundred school classes.
Individual examples, such as the brilliant footballer or film star who is of immi-
grant origin, also bring it home to people in the way that statistics never do.
Bush Center: Are there examples at the local level where strategies for inte-
grating immigrants or refugees worked particularly well? If so, what can we
learn from them?
Garton Ash: Another important thing is television. Nothing does more for
the recognition and acceptance of people of different origin than their being

on a soap opera. There was a great soap opera in Canada called Little Mosque
on the Prairie. It had a terrific impact.
That goes to representation by the media and in the media. It really mat-
ters that people from a minority see people who look like them on the televi-
sion screen. For example, the BBC now has a terrific correspondent called
Faisal Islam. But Faisal Islam is not their correspondent on Islam, he’s their
economics correspondent—and a very good one. That’s what you need. You
need people who are doing, so to speak, ordinary jobs, not just talking about
their own communities, but, in some sense, representing those communities.
As for the local thing, cities and towns are fantastically important. Barce-
lona, which has a large immigrant population, has an initiative called “We
Are Barcelona.” Paris has something similar. They use symbols, flags, events,
and so on to show we’re
all in this together. That
has a terrific impact.
“At the end of the Second World War
Sometimes it’s easier . . . West Germany integrated twelve
for people initially to million refugees from the east. So it
identify at the lower level can be done.”
with the city than it is
to identify with the whole country, particularly if the country you’re in is a
former colonial country, where your memories of, say, the Brits or the French
are not necessarily altogether sweet.
Bush Center: Are there other ways leaders can reassure their constituents
that bringing in immigrants or refugees will be a good thing and not replace
their national culture?
Garton Ash: It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? To a significant degree, we are entitled
to our own culture. If we think our religious faith is part of our culture, if we
think our maternal language is part of our culture, that’s, in a sense, a human
and civil right.
What one can’t do is classic nineteenth-century-style assimilation, where,
at the extreme, little children in the Belgian Congo were told that they were
Belgians. That is an imperial enterprise. But what one can do is to make
sure that everyone speaks the main language of the country or languages of
the country really well from an early age, which is often not the case. That
everyone knows the history of the country, as well as the history of their
own country of origin. That everyone has civics classes, so that there’s a
common core of communication there, and that we all meet in the same
media spaces.
As we all know, one of the great problems in the United States at the
moment is hyperpolarization, where people are simply living in completely
different realities. That’s not just a problem between Republicans and Demo-
crats, or between Fox News and MSNBC. It’s also a problem if every local
community or every ethnic community has its own particular media world.
We have to bring those worlds together and having a great public service
broadcaster like the BBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is a very
important part of the mix. I devoutly wish we could see the United States
getting back to the place where you had a shared public sphere.
Reprinted by permission of the George W. Bush Presidential Center. ©

2021 George W. Bush Presidential Center. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Milton

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VA LUE S
VALUES
Small Kindnesses
Looking back on a year of great tumult and, at
times, reassurance.
By Condoleezza Rice
I
haven’t been out of the country in more than a year—the longest
stretch since I was twenty-three.
On March 4 of last year, I had a ten-day teaching stint planned at
Oxford and in London. I didn’t go. And I am more than fine with it. I
have learned that I never again want to travel the way that I once did.
My professional stay-at-home life has worked out well. I became director of
the Hoover Institution on September 1, and I have been in the building only
once. Yet conferences and research activities continue remotely with better
attendance, since travel is no longer an obstacle. Virtual seminars and webi-
nars are reaching people who would never have come to Palo Alto. We are
productive and efficient. But Stanford is a ghost town—a university without
students feels weird.
In my personal time, I have learned that remote strength training and
Pilates work just fine. So too do piano lessons on Zoom. I spent last sum-
mer wrestling the Chopin F Minor Ballade to the ground. My piano teacher
retired and moved to Pennsylvania, where we will continue to work together
“virtually.” I would never have thought to do that before 2020. And golf is
God’s gift to social distancing and a reason to get outside.
Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director and the Thomas and
Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the Denning
Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford University’s Graduate
School of Business as well as a professor of political science at Stanford. She served
as secretary of state from 2005 to 2009.
Not all has gone well. I have attended Zoom funerals for four people whom
I loved. I celebrated Easter with the disembodied heads of my family—and
again this year. I miss holidays with family and friends.
Still, my pandemic life has been pretty good. And it makes me a bit guilty
to say that—because for so many it really is a struggle.
I worry about the inequality of work in the United States, which the pan-
demic revealed so starkly. Knowledge workers like me who sit at home and
remain productive are worlds apart from the reality of the waitress who is
unemployed. I am concerned about student learning loss, particularly among
the poorest kids. I don’t understand why opening schools was not deemed
essential.
In the depths of the pandemic, I found our national dialogue toxic, as elites
scoffed at small-business owners who fought to work: “Don’t you understand
that lockdowns are necessary?” Well, yes, but it is easy to say that if you are
working from home, your paycheck secure. I hated the criticism of religious
people who wanted to gather and worship, but I didn’t understand why they
wouldn’t wear a mask. We were all so judgmental and couldn’t seem to walk
in each other’s shoes.
But just when I became despondent about our behavior, I saw a story
about a teenager delivering food to an elderly neighbor or a nurse deter-
mined to help a wife see her husband one last time—on FaceTime. There
were many kindnesses to celebrate, large and small. These were signs that
we will be OK.
The past year has been unnerving and frustrating at times, revealing and
affirming at others. We have learned to take the unexpected in stride. Speak-
ing of unexpected, my Cleveland Browns won a playoff game this season.
Maybe next year—God willing—I can go and see them play.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2021 Dow Jones &
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Sidney D.

Drell: Into the Heart of Matter, Passionately, by Lenora
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hooverpress.org.

HISTORY A N D C ULT UR E
H I STORY AN D CULT UR E
Disruptive
Strategies
A new military history book edited by Hoover
fellow David L. Berkey explores the repeated
collisions of rising and established powers.
By Jonathan Movroydis
Jonathan Movroydis: The new Hoover Institution Press book Disruptive

Strategies: The Military Campaigns of Ascendant Powers and Their Rivals,
edited by David L. Berkey, collects historical case studies that explore what
happens when a rising power, such as modern China, disrupts the predomi-
nance of a hegemon, such as the United States.
What is the genesis of Disruptive Strategies?
David L. Berkey: The book is the product of the military history working
group at Hoover, which was established by Martin and Illie Anderson Senior
Fellow Victor Davis Hanson and former Hoover director John Raisian back
in 2012. The purpose of the working group is to apply the lessons of military
history to contemporary policy challenges. The working group has always
maintained that the study of military history, long a staple in history depart-
ments at colleges and universities across the country, has experienced a
David L. Berkey is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and participates in

Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict.
He is the editor of Disruptive Strategies: The Military Campaigns of As-
cendant Powers and Their Rivals (Hoover Institution Press, 2021). Jonathan
Movroydis is the senior content writer for the Hoover Institution.
decline, both in the number of courses that are being taught as well as in the
number of faculty who are dedicated to its study. The working group was
intended to inform not only academics but also people within the echelons of
military leadership and in the media.
The book was designed to show how a contemporary crisis facing the
United States—a rising China—can be informed by historical case stud-
ies. We wanted to illustrate some examples from the past that showed how
states could successfully, or as the case may be, unsuccessfully, grapple with
a similar situation. The point here was not necessarily to be prescriptive in
coming up with an answer to what the United States must do under the cur-
rent circumstances, but rather it was to look at what historical factors might
be important to consider.
The result of this study is that it became very clear that the number of
possible examples to choose from was really extensive. As a historian, I think
we can take comfort in the knowledge that the situation that we are in today
is by no means unique and throughout history has been confronted by many
different nations and states.
Movroydis: Is the central theme of Disruptive Strategies what Graham Allison

calls the “Thucydides trap”?
Berkey: Graham Allison of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

wrote a very important book that examines what pre-emptive measures a
hegemonic state might take to prevent the challenge to its supremacy by a
rising power.
This is the story found in Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War
in the fifth century BCE. In Thucydides’s view, Athens’s fear of a rising Spar-
ta led it to declare war as a pre-emptive measure. Graham Allison questioned
whether it was inevitable that the United States, fearing the rise of China,
would also pre-emptively go to war. Allison looked at historical studies that
show under what circumstances states go to war.
Our focus is different. This is a book about military campaigns. The book
provides examples that are all illustrative of states that had already made
the decision to go to war. We look at what factors were important from a
LION OF THE NORTH: A cup (facing page) commemorates Gustavus Adol-

phus, king of Sweden in 1611–32 and a military leader in the Thirty Years’ War
who made his country into a major European power. Sweden was unable to
hold onto its gains after his death. The cup, made in Frankfurt, resides in the
British Museum. [Jonathan Cardy—Creative Commons]
leadership perspective in bringing about a successful resolution to these
conflicts.
Movroydis: The Peloponnesian War essay written by visiting fellow Paul

Rahe explains how Athens and Sparta exploited each other’s weaknesses.
What were their respective weaknesses?
Berkey: During the Peloponnesian War, Athens, at the outset, had an

extremely powerful navy dating back to the conclusion of the Persian Wars in
the first quarter of the fifth century BCE. Athens had established an impe-
rial base, which required tribute payments from allies for protection from
incursions by the Persian empire. Over time, Thucydides notes, the charac-
ter of this alliance changed, and there was no longer necessarily a Persian
threat in the way that there had been at the outset of the century. As a result
of the tributes, Athens acquired a tremendous amount of financial reserves,
enabling it to further increase the size of its navy and also to undertake some
of the great cultural pro-
grams for which Athens is
“We wanted to illustrate some exam- still known and admired
ples from the past that showed how to this day.
states could successfully, or as the In contrast, Sparta had
case may be, unsuccessfully, grapple for centuries been the
predominant land power
with a similar situation.”
in the Greek world and it
had a much more insular society, unlike the far more cosmopolitan Athenian
empire. The Peloponnesian War pitted against each other these two states
with very different visions of governance, very different forms of govern-
ment, different strengths and weaknesses in military terms, and a different
set of relationships with their allies.
While Sparta had a strong hoplite infantry, it lacked the naval forces and
training to contest Athens at sea. In a similar way, Athens, which had estab-
lished a great navy, had a much smaller and less capable land force. Again,
the Peloponnesian War was really a conflict about different views of gover-
nance and relationships with allies, and from that perspective it is somewhat
similar to what we’re seeing in the world today with respect to the United
States and China. These tensions were fueled also by innate differences
between a democratic, Ionian, naval, cosmopolitan, and imperial Athens, and
an oligarchical, Doric, infantry-centered, rural, and parochial Sparta.
One of the really decisive moments in the Peloponnesian War, and this
is brought out in Paul Rahe’s chapter, was the re-entrance of Persia into

Greek politics. The Persian empire began in the later stages of the conflict to
re-engage diplomatically with Sparta and its allies by providing them with
financial resources to construct a fleet. Therefore, for the first time, Sparta
was able to contest Athens’s strength at sea. This development became a
major turning point of the war.
Movroydis: An essay written by visiting fellow Barry Strauss discusses how

Rome overcame Carthage in the Punic Wars by marshaling armies of free
citizens. Why was that a key factor?
Berkey: Rome had the tremendous human resources on the Italic Penin-
sula from which it was able to marshal a defense against Carthage. This is a
particularly interesting study. Unlike some of the other examples of military
campaigns that are found in this book, Barry Strauss looked at not just one
specific military event, but rather three wars spread out over more than a
century.
The first Punic War was a contest between Rome and Carthage over Sicily.
Then in the second Punic War, under the leadership of Hannibal, Carthage
invaded the Italic Peninsula. It was during that struggle that Rome was able
to marshal not only its
own citizens but also the
other allied states in Ita- “The situation that we are in today is
ly that could contribute by no means unique, and throughout
to the common defense history has been confronted by many
against this external
different nations and states.”
existential threat. This
was a very important development for the Roman army, because it tipped the
scales of the power balance in its favor and created a situation where it could
combat a really remarkable general, Hannibal, and prevent the destruction
of its empire in that campaign. Carthage was never able to assemble the
manpower of North Africa in the way that republican Rome had been able to
unite much of Italy.
Movroydis: Edward Luttwak’s essay illustrates a high-risk strategy used by

Byzantine emperor Herakleios. What does this say about taking calculated
risks during military campaigns?
Berkey: Luttwak has taken in many ways the opposite approach to that
taken by Paul Rahe and Barry Strauss, which is that he elected to look very
closely at a single year of the Byzantine empire in the seventh century.
The Sassanid empire had been a near-constant thorn in the side of the
Byzantine empire for centuries. When a new Sassanid emperor, Khosrow
II, assumed power, what was a low-level conflict escalated into an attempt
to push Sassanian forces all the way to Constantinople and overthrow the
Byzantine empire.
The Sassanids invaded the Byzantine empire from multiple sides, includ-
ing Egypt, Syria, the Anatolian Plateau, and up to Constantinople. In this
situation, Herakleios, rather than trying to make some heroic defense from
within the walls of Constantinople, elected instead to gamble by leading a
counteroffensive toward the heart of the Sassanid empire.
This was really an extraordinary move. In effect, Herakleios was able to
take advantage of the fact that Sassanian forces were dispersed throughout
the Byzantine empire. He
was also able to exploit
“Leadership is a very important factor military alliances that had
in the success of military campaigns been established in previ-
in trying either to promote a rising ous generations on the
state’s power or to prevent a state outskirts of the Sassanid
from being overthrown.” empire. This then led to
the capture and plunder
of various important cities within the heart of that empire and ultimately to
the withdrawal of Sassanian forces from Byzantine territory.
Movroydis: Visiting fellow Andrew Roberts and Peter Mansoor talk about
the genius of military leaders, respectively Napoleon Bonaparte of France
and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Will you talk about the importance of
wise and bold leadership in campaigns and how to continue sound policy
making after a great leader has left power?
Berkey: It’s an important question. Part of this book deals with successful
military campaigns and contributing factors such as systems of government,
structures of alliances, and favorable balances of power. What’s very different
in the case of the chapters about Napoleon Bonaparte and Gustavus Adol-
phus is that they encompass crucial issues surrounding successful military
leadership.
I think what’s important here is, one, Napoleon’s education in military his-
tory and martial training were very important to his initial successes, includ-
ing his first test as a commander during France’s 1796 campaign in Italy.
Napoleon’s careful preparation for battle permitted his numerically smaller
forces to achieve success by the use of speed and deception, thereby allowing
his French forces to keep their opponents on their heels.

Two, in a military campaign that had been going on for some time during
the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, Sweden’s Gustavus Adol-
phus was able to control large parts of continental Europe. What initially had
been a campaign to protect Sweden gradually took on a different character
under his leadership. Both of these examples show how military leaders
through their genius, preparation, and influence with their soldiers were able
to achieve success on the battlefield.
After Gustavus Adolphus died, a small and resource-strapped Sweden was
no longer able to sustain its success in Europe. There are other examples
that we could point to in ancient history when individual generals achieved
great successes but, after their death or decline in political influence, their
countries’ military campaigns fell apart.
I’m thinking about Alexander the Great and his remarkable success
extending Macedonian influence throughout vast stretches of the Persian
empire. After his death, Macedon’s power quickly fell apart in a struggle that
involved numerous other successor monarchs who were all trying to main-
tain what Alexander had
achieved. This is also the
case with the Theban “When human beings, operating by
general Epaminondas. air, sea, and land, are engaging with
After the Battle of Man- the forces of a competitor state, it is
tinea in the middle of the possible for accidents and misunder-
fourth century BCE, a
standings to occur.”
tactical Theban victory
over Sparta that also resulted in the death of Epaminondas, the historical
record shows that Epaminondas’s successors weren’t able to maintain The-
bes’s hegemony in the Greek world.
These studies certainly show that leadership is a very important factor in
the success of military campaigns in trying either to promote a rising state’s
power or to prevent a state from being overthrown. These cases are remind-
ers that while great generals can lead smaller powers to historic victories, if
institutional support and manpower and resources are lacking, such plans
are often aborted on the deaths of such rare gifted leaders.
Movroydis: The essay by Michael Auslin, the Payson J. Treat Distinguished

Research Fellow, is about a hypothetical Sino-American conflict. What les-
sons can be learned from this look at a possible future?
Berkey: Misha’s essay is interesting in that it lays out, in great detail and
accuracy, the current military assets of both the United States and China
stationed in the Indo-Pacific region. He stresses the reality that when human
beings, operating by air, sea, and land, are engaging with the forces of a
competitor state, it is possible for accidents and misunderstandings to occur,
which could then rapidly escalate to war. Given the havoc that a major war
would bring to the nations of the Indo-Pacific—in addition to the damage to
the international financial system and the unimaginable cost of a nuclear
war between China and our nation—it is imperative to prevent such a war
from occurring. The way to achieve that goal is by continuing to maintain our
military and technological advantages, and to promote our leadership among
allies in the region such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. This
chapter is a cautionary tale about how the erosion of American power and
influence might force us to make concessions to China that would result in
the loss of freedom and independence for the people of the Indo-Pacific, and
damage our standing in the world.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Disruptive

Strategies: The Military Campaigns of Ascendant
Powers and Their Rivals, edited by David L. Berkey. To
org.

H OOVE R A R C H I VE S
H OOVER A RCHIVE S
Operation Tagil
The Paris archive of the imperial Russian secret
police is among Hoover’s most treasured holdings.
How it landed on the Stanford campus is a cloak-
and-dagger tale worthy of the collection.
By Bertrand M. Patenaude
O
n October 29, 1957, the Hoover Institution staged a media event
unlike any other in its hundred-year history. National and local
news outlets were on hand, including a film crew from NBC News,
to cover the proceedings, which began at 10:30 a.m. inside Hoover
Tower. The occasion was the unveiling of a blockbuster collection Hoover had
been harboring in secret for thirty years. It was the files of the Paris branch of
the Okhrana, the imperial Russian secret police. Headquartered in St. Peters-
burg, the Russian capital, the Okhrana had established an office inside the
embassy in Paris in 1883, and that office eventually absorbed all other czarist
police bureaus outside Russia. It became the principal repository of all of Rus-
sia’s intelligence information on the revolutionary movements abroad.
The Paris files were long assumed to have been destroyed at the time of the
Russian Revolution of 1917. Now, in 1957, they turned up on the Stanford campus.
As the press coverage of the Hoover event reported, the rescue of this
Okhrana archive was due largely to the determination and resourcefulness
of Vasilii Maklakov, the Russian ambassador to France of the Provisional
Government, the unstable entity that sought to govern Russia in 1917 between
Bertrand M. Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest

book is Defining Moments: The First One Hundred Years of the Hoover In-
stitution (Hoover Institution Press, 2019). Sarah Patton of the Hoover Institu-
tion Library & Archives contributed to the research for this article.
IN FROM THE COLD: Hoover Director C. Easton Rothwell, Assistant Director
Witold Sworakowski, and reference librarian Marina Tinkoff open the first
crates of the Okhrana collection in October 1957 under the watchful eye of a
news camera. Secretly stored for more than thirty years before its debut, the
blockbuster collection immediately drew the attention of intelligence agents
and students of espionage, surveillance, and terrorism. [Bob Campbell—San Fran-
cisco Chronicle/Polaris Images]
“OPERATION TAGIL”: Those who assembled and shipped the Okhrana col-
lection gave it a code name derived from an obscure Siberian village, whose
railway station is shown in this 1922 photo taken by an American relief work-
er. To preserve secrecy, the word “Tagil” was not to be written on the crates
themselves. Only the initials “H.W.L.,” for Hoover War Library, would appear.
[Raymond McKnight Sloan papers, 1920–1926—Hoover Institution Archives]
the fall of the Romanovs in the February Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure
of power in what became known as the Great October Socialist Revolution.
Western European governments held out on granting diplomatic recogni-
tion to the Soviet government for several years, on the assumption that the
Communist regime would soon collapse, but eventually they were forced to
reconcile themselves to the new reality. When France granted diplomatic rec-
ognition to the Soviet Union in 1924, it was obliged by international law to turn
over the former Russian embassy building and all its contents to the Soviet
government. Ambassador Maklakov—as the story was told in 1957—signed
a letter to the French government saying he had incinerated the Okhrana
archive when in fact he had managed to hide it in a secret location in Paris.
Maklakov then arranged for the Okhrana archive, together with the embas-
sy’s diplomatic papers, to be shipped to the Hoover Library. The files were
packed into eighteen large wooden crates, each weighing about five hundred
pounds, each bound with wire whose ends were fastened together by lead
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S u m m e r 2021 203
seals impressed with the Westernized variant of Maklakov’s initials on one
side—B.M., for Basil Maklakoff—and a code word on the other: “Tagil,” the
name of an obscure Siberian village. In accordance with the contract Mak-
lakov signed with the Hoover Library in 1926, the existence of the collection
was to be kept secret for thirty years.
THE GREAT UNVEILING

The revelation that the Okhrana’s Paris files had survived and were being
opened and inventoried on the Stanford University campus made national
headlines and attracted the attention of intelligence agents and students of
espionage, surveillance, and terrorism.
The collection easily lived up to the hype; it is one of Hoover’s gems, a trea-
sure among treasures. No other archival collection can match the Okhrana files’
vivid documentation of Russia’s revolutionary underground in the decades lead-
ing up to the fall of the Romanovs. The Okhrana’s Paris branch was established
in the wake of the assassination of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg in 1881 by
bomb-throwing political terrorists. From that moment on, revolutionary terror
and assassination became chief concerns of the Russian imperial government,
which enhanced its surveillance of the swelling number of Russian political
émigrés in Europe, many of them recent fugitives from Siberian exile.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the exile groups, the
Socialist Revolutionary Party, had formed a secret Combat Organization to
run terror operations inside Russia targeted at czarist ministers and the roy-
al family, including Czar Nicholas II. This terrorist unit carried out a series
of spectacular assassinations in the first decade of the century that took the
lives of numerous officials, including provincial governors, two interior minis-
ters, and the governor-general of St. Petersburg. Such terrorist acts helped
foment, and then punctuated, the Russian Revolution of 1905, which nearly
toppled the czarist regime. In 1911, an Okhrana agent-turned-terrorist shot
and killed the prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin.
The once-top-secret Okhrana files and photographs—contained in more
than two hundred archival boxes—detail the activities of the police and their
EUREKA: Ralph Lutz (facing page), chairman of the Hoover Library’s board
of directors, headed to Europe in 1926 on an extended collecting trip. He
arranged to acquire many important Russian archives, including the papers
of Petr Vrangel, former commander of White forces in Southern Russia. Three
nights before Lutz was due to sail for home, he was stunned by the news that
the Paris files of the czarist-era secret police not only still existed, but that
they could be entrusted to Hoover for safekeeping—if the matter were handled
very carefully. [Hoover Institution Archives]
BIG NEWS: A banner headline atop the Stanford Daily of October 30, 1957,
introduces a mugshot of a young Leon Trotsky, a picture of the confidential
contract regarding the Okhrana files, and a photo of Rothwell and Sworakow
ski examining the material. Initially the crates were stored in the basement of
the Stanford Museum, today the Cantor Arts Center. After the Hoover Tower
was finished in 1941, they were removed to the tower’s top floor. [Hoover Institu-
tion Archives]
surveillance targets in locations across Europe. The intelligence gathering

of the czarist secret police involved plainclothes surveillance, secret infor-
mants, intercepted mail, and collaboration with local police forces such as
Scotland Yard and the French Sûreté. The collection’s most visually compel-
ling feature is its thousands of photographs: police mugshots of individual
radicals—males and females, young and old, some later famous, many pho-
tographed multiple times through the years—as well as studio photographs
of individuals unaware that the cameraman would turn the negatives over
to the Russian police. The collection shines a spotlight on what US diplomat
and historian George F. Kennan once called “the dim half world of czarist
police intrigue,” resurrecting cloak-and-dagger tales of double-dealing and
treachery that unfolded at the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight
of imperial Russia.
It would take years to inventory and organize the vast collection before it
could be made available to researchers. By the morning of October 29, 1957,
only a few of the crates had been pried open and their contents hurriedly
inspected. What the Hoover staff discovered were dozens of thick folders,
each belted with a cloth strap and buckle, containing detailed records about
the backgrounds and activities of Russian revolutionaries in Western and
Central Europe. The Hoover Institution’s investigators, led by assistant direc-
tor Witold Sworakowski, were naturally on the lookout for bold-faced names
among the files, with future Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Josef
Stalin at the top of the list. For now, their big catch was Leon Trotsky, as
seen in side and front mugshots as an eighteen-year-old radical in 1898. That
pair of images of a youthful and confident-looking Trotsky—identified by
his family name, Bronstein—stole the show. The news outlets took their cue
from a Stanford University News Service press release, which remarked
that Trotsky “is pictured with such a bushy head of hair he might easily be
mistaken for a woman.” Of course, a decade later he would have passed as
just another campus radical.
Newspaper articles about the Okhrana unveiling tantalized readers by
suggesting a dramatic story behind the clandestine shipment of the files
from Paris to Palo Alto, an exploit the Stanford press release called Opera-
tion Tagil. “Hoover Institution officials said they could not divulge at this
time how Maklakoff was able to ship the huge files here without their being
opened at the time for French or United States government inspection,”
wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Some of the agents who helped him are still
alive.” The assumption that Maklakov himself would have been imperiled
seemed confirmed by his insistence on a “death clause,” assuring that the
seals on the crates were not to be broken during his lifetime.
In a piece headlined “Phantom File,” Harry Bergman, a reporter for the
International News Service, outdid his fellow reporters in sensationalizing
the story behind the Okhrana Big Reveal. A veteran newshound, Bergman
had seen it all, but that did nothing to inhibit his powers of imagination in
describing Hoover’s “historical bombshell,” the release of the “dossiers and
other hush-hush documents” that Ambassador Maklakov, “at the risk of
his life,” had smuggled out of Paris with the help of “secret anti-communist
agents,” some of whom were still at large:
Cloak and dagger intrigue worthy of the most hair-raising movie

thriller accounted for the survival of these tell-tale documents
which are expected to shed much light on hitherto unrevealed
facets of the rise of the Bolsheviks to power.
Bergman’s prose was extravagant, but it captured the spirit of deception

and intrigue involved in the execution of Operation Tagil. The true story of
how the Okhrana files escaped the clutches of the Soviet and French authori-
ties and landed on the Stanford campus has become lost over the years
beneath multiple layers of myth and misinformation. Now it can be told.
PARIS, 1926
In a remark that was ignored by just about all the reporters present at the
Okhrana unveiling, the Hoover Institution’s director, C. Easton Rothwell, indi-
cated that a former Russian imperial army general had served as intermedi-
ary between the Hoover Library and Ambassador Maklakov. Rothwell was
referring to Lieutenant General Nikolai Golovin, an imperial Russian officer
and military historian. In 1919, during the civil war between Reds and Whites
that followed the Russian Revolution, Golovin had made his way to Siberia
to join up with the White army forces there. He arrived to find those forces
in retreat and, doubling back to Vladivostok, sailed for Europe by way of the
United States. On the transatlantic crossing in August 1920, Golovin met
Stanford historian Frank Golder, who was starting out on his first collecting
trip for the Hoover Library. Golovin impressed Golder as “a highly trained
man and a gentleman,” and he recommended the general as a valuable
contact to his colleagues at what was at the time known as the Hoover War
Library, founded by Herbert Hoover in 1919.
This was the beginning of Golovin’s long association with the Hoover
Library, a relationship formalized in 1924 by Ephraim Adams, the library’s
founding director, who appointed Golovin, based in Paris, an agent for the
Hoover Library. Thanks to Golovin’s efforts, during the next several years
Hoover acquired the papers of White army generals and Russian political
figures and diplomats in emigration.
In 1925, Ralph Lutz succeeded Adams, his former history professor at
Stanford, as chairman of the Hoover Library’s board of directors. The follow-
ing year, Lutz embarked on an extended collecting trip in Europe. In Paris his
work was greatly facilitated by Golovin’s expertise, connections, and diplo-
matic skills. Lutz signed an agreement to acquire the papers of General Petr
Vrangel, commanding general of the White army in Southern Russia until
his defeat in 1920. Golovin had secured the cooperation of former imperial
foreign minister Sergei Sazonov to assist him in collecting the archives of the
various Russian embassies and missions. A major acquisition in 1926 was the
SUSPICION: The Okhrana collected vast numbers of mugshots (facing page)

and surveillance material on Russian political émigrés and people involved
in the revolutionary underground. The Paris branch, established in 1883 after
the assassination of Czar Alexander II, eventually absorbed the other czarist
police bureaus outside Russia and became the principal repository of their
intelligence information. [Okhrana records—photos collated by Samira Bozorgi, Hoover
Institution Archives]
papers of Mikhail Girs, dean of the Russian diplomatic corps abroad. Lutz
completed the negotiations that Golovin had begun before his arrival in Paris
and signed the contract for the Girs papers on December 10. Lutz called it
“one of the greatest diplomatic archives that it would be possible for any
private library to acquire. . . . Golovine deserves great credit for the way he
continued the negotiations and secured the support of Sazonoff for the idea
of depositing all Russian diplomatic archives in the Hoover War Library.”
His six-month European sojourn now coming to an end, Lutz was set to sail
for New York on December 14. Three nights before his departure, Golovin
surprised him with the news that Ambassador Maklakov was “ready under
certain conditions to place in our library for safekeeping not only the diplomat-
ic archives of the embassy,” he wrote to Adams, “but also the famous archive
of the secret imperial police force.” Lutz was unaware that the secret police
archive still existed; that it might now be made available to the Hoover Library
came as a shock. Golovin sketched in the backstory for his American colleague.
At the time of the October Revolution of 1917 the Okhrana’s Paris records
were being examined by a committee set up by Alexander Kerensky, head of
the Russian Provisional Government. After Kerensky was overthrown by the
Bolsheviks and fled Russia, the French foreign office told Maklakov to lock up
the archives inside the embassy building—at 79, rue de Grenelle—or else they
would be seized by the French police. Maklakov readily complied. Seven years
later, as the French government was preparing to announce its de jure recogni-
tion of the USSR, a tip from the French foreign ministry alerted Maklakov that
the embassy building was about to be turned over to the Soviets and encour-
aged him to remove the Okhrana files from the premises and simulate their
destruction by fire. Instead, he concocted the story that the archive had been
stolen from the embassy by “infuriated reactionaries,” in Lutz’s description.
“Since then,” he informed Adams, “the documents have remained concealed
from even the French police in a place known only to Maklakoff and his aides.”
Now, two years after that act of deception, the archive once again appeared
to be in danger of confiscation. During recent negotiations between French
THE LAST AMBASSADOR: Vasilii Maklakov (facing page) was the key to the
rescue of the Okhrana archives and the diplomatic papers of imperial Rus-
sia’s embassy in Paris. He had been Russia’s ambassador to France on behalf
of the short-lived Provisional Government, which was swept aside by the
Bolsheviks. When France recognized the Soviet Union in 1924, Maklakov hid
the Okhrana files instead of destroying them or turning them over to the Soviet
government. [Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection—Hoover Institution Archives]
THE GO-BETWEEN: Nikolai Golovin had been a lieutenant general in imperial
Russia. On a transatlantic crossing in 1920, he met Stanford historian Frank
Golder, who was sailing to Europe on a collecting expedition. Golovin helped
steer multiple important Russian archives to Hoover over the next several
years. It was he who presented Lutz with the tantalizing possibility of acquir-
ing “the famous archive of the secret imperial police force.” [Hoover Institution
Archives]
and Soviet officials, the latter raised the question as to the whereabouts
of the archive. The Soviets assumed it was in the possession of the French
government and requested that it be handed over. A key member of a
French parliamentary commission involved in negotiations allegedly told his
Soviet counterparts that they could have the archive if they could locate it.
The French police were now said to be actively looking for the files, which
were assumed to hold compromising information about former and current
French officials and politicians. Golovin’s tale must have set Lutz’s head spin-
ning. “After stating the above facts,” he later recalled of their conversation,
“Golovine asked me what I could do to save the archives.”
PARIS TO PALO ALTO, 1927

Lutz had little time to act. Golovin arranged for him to meet with Maklakov,
whom Lutz found “anxious to turn the archives over to us right away.” He
was also struck by Maklakov’s cautiousness. After the two men agreed on the
general terms of a draft contract, the ambassador insisted that no one but
Golovin’s son would be allowed to type the proposed contract. When Lutz,
who would need to request the authority of the Hoover board of directors in
order to sign the contract, told Maklakov that he would go to the US embassy
and send a cable to Stanford using the embassy code, Maklakov objected.
Owing to a recent strain in Franco-Italian relations caused by tensions in
border towns along the Riviera, the French government had reimposed the
wartime censorship of cables. French experts would be able to decipher the
embassy code, Maklakov said, a fact confirmed for Lutz by embassy officials
later that same day. Maklakov asked Lutz to wait until he arrived in New York
to telegraph his request to Stanford for authority to sign their agreement.
Maklakov told Lutz that the Tagil collection was stored in three separate loca-
tions within Paris. They would need to be gathered in one place—and it would
have to be a safe place. As Herbert Hoover was the US secretary of commerce,
Lutz knew he could turn for help to the commercial attaché at the US embassy,
Chester Lloyd Jones. Before the war, Jones had been a professor of political
science at the University of Wisconsin. He was instinctively sympathetic to
Professor Lutz’s quest to rescue the prized collection for the Hoover Library. He
agreed to stash the cases in his storeroom in the embassy pending their ship-
ment to Stanford. He asked Lutz to write him a letter from aboard ship stating
that he would be sending him boxes of “war documents” for storage.
Lutz must have been under considerable strain as he contemplated the
various ways the operation could go terribly wrong and bring scandal on
the Hoover Library and its founder. “One of my conditions,” he explained to
A NEW HOME: The signature page of the contract signed by Ralph Lutz and
former Russian ambassador Vasilii Maklakov is shown with the twine, wire,
and seals that secured the boxes for shipment from Paris to Stanford. The
word “Tagil” and Maklakov’s initials, B.M., appear on either side of the seal.
Maklakov hoped all along to return the files to a restored Russian government.
He expressed misgivings in 1956 when the collection’s thirty years of secrecy
were about to end, imploring the Hoover Library “to let the past sleep a little
longer.” Director Rothwell agreed. [Hoover Institution Archives]
Adams, “was that as soon as the boxes were uncovered all Russian markings
were to be removed and the words Hoover War Library etc. painted on each
box. Then the boxes were to be taken in daylight in a truck driven by former
Russian officers to the embassy.” Lutz did not indicate whether these soldiers
should be armed, but the plot now begins to have the makings of a hair-raising
movie thriller. If Maklakov did not think this course of action was advisable,
Lutz told Golovin, an alternative was to store them with G. E. Stechert & Co.,
the international publisher and book exporter and importer whose Paris office
regularly shipped books and periodicals to Stanford. Lutz left letters with Gol-
ovin authorizing him to place the documents either with Jones at the embassy
or at the Stechert office. The decision would be his to make.
214 H O O V ER DI GEST • Summer 2021

Maklakov informed Lutz that “in case of trouble” he had prepared a let-
ter of justification to be sent to French Premier Raymond Poincaré. “Since
Poincaré knows about the Hoover Library and has written us about war
questions,” Lutz reassured Adams, “I feel certain that he will be glad to have
these documents sent to Stanford and the evidence against certain French
statesmen kept sealed for thirty years.” These arrangements now in place,
Lutz prepared to depart Paris. Golovin’s elation is palpable in a letter he
addressed to Adams on December 12: “I may add now, that Mr. Maklakoff has
decided to hand over his Archives to H.W.L. and signed a Contract subject to
approval by the Directors of the Library. Professor Lutz is taking a copy of
this Contract with him to U.S.A. and will give you certain particulars on the
Collection which, for a certain reason, cannot be mentioned in a letter. All I
can tell you, is that this Collection is unique and of an enormous value.”
Lutz set sail on the SS Leviathan on December 14. Aboard ship he wrote
letters to Stanford President Ray Lyman Wilbur, a fellow member of the
Hoover board of directors, and Professor Adams in which he described the
basic terms of the Maklakov contract. Maklakov agreed to turn the archive
over to Hoover for “safekeeping,” with Hoover obligating itself “to take care
of and preserve the aforesaid Archives” for a period of thirty years. The key
clause read: “Documents, papers, and other historical material enclosed in
sealed cases bearing the mention ‘Tagil’ are to be delivered without inven-
tory and shall be kept under seal for the whole of the thirty year period.”
Maklakov retained the right to withdraw all or part of the Tagil collection
from the library “upon a twelve months’ notice. It is understood that in such
case the Documents will be returned to a Restored Russian Government,
duly recognized by Mr. Basil Maklakoff.” At the end of the thirty-year period,
all documents not reclaimed by Maklakov would become the property of the
Hoover War Library.
Upon arrival in New York on December 20, Lutz sent Adams a telegram
requesting authority from the board of directors to sign the contract. He
asked for the response to be sent by wire to Herbert Hoover’s office in Wash-
ington, where Lutz was headed next. Approval arrived the following day, and
Hoover, himself a member of the board, endorsed the contract. Lutz wrote
Golovin: “I have just this minute received a wire from Stanford authoriz-
ing me to sign the contract with Ambassador Maklakoff and at Secretary
Hoover’s suggestion I am sending this contract signed through the diplomat-
ic pouch in care of Mr. Jones, the Commercial Attaché at Paris. I am asking
Mr. Jones to send it to your address or to deliver it to you in person.” Golovin
received the contract on January 14 and delivered it in person to Maklakov.
The next challenge was to assemble the Tagil boxes in one place, no minor
feat considering that their total weight was about 2500 kilos (2.75 tons). This
part of the story is documented in the letters exchanged within Paris between
Golovin and Maklakov, writing in their native Russian. On one occasion Gol-
ovin had misread Maklakov’s handwritten note and shown up at the wrong
meeting place. Anxious to avoid future such missed connections, Golovin dip-
lomatically requested that the former ambassador type his letters: “Despite
all my good intentions I cannot understand your handwriting.” Lutz had left it
up to Golovin to decide whether to store the cases at the US embassy or the
Stechert office. As it happened, the files were stored at both locations in suc-
cession. The boxes were gathered together and delivered by truck to Stechert
on April 3. There the seals were put in place. It was Jones who stipulated that
neither the word “Tagil” nor the words “Hoover War Library” should appear
on the cases: only the initials H.W.L. and the number of the case.
Golovin then arranged for the transfer of the precious cargo to the Ameri-
can embassy, which took place on April 12. He wrote to Lutz that same day to
convey the good news: “I have the pleasure to inform you that I have handed
over to-day the Collection
‘Tagil’ to Mr. Jones. . . . I
Vasilii Maklakov—so the story went am very pleased with the
in 1957—claimed to have incinerated successful performance of
the Okhrana archive. In fact he had this difficult task and this
Collection is now to be for-
hidden it.
warded to the Hoover War
Library. I will be very thankful if you inform me about the reception of these
boxes as soon as they arrive to Stanford.” He added appreciatively: “I think I
may as well inform you of the exceptional amiableness manifested by Mr. Jones
towards me and concerning all our business.”
The final hurdle to clear was to find a way for the cases to be shipped
to Stanford without having to pass inspection by French or US customs
officials. At President Wilbur’s direction, Lutz wrote to Secretary Hoover on
April 25 to inquire if Jones could ship the eighteen boxes directly from Paris
to San Francisco by water freight. “We feel that we can place these docu-
ments here in an absolutely safe place provided that Mr. Jones can get them
out of France as official material.” Hoover’s office made the arrangements.
Three months later, the boxes arrived at the customs house at 555 Battery
Street in San Francisco with the seals intact.
On July 29, Lutz wrote to Golovin with the good news: “The Tagil collec-
tion has arrived and has been safely stored.” The boxes were kept in the

basement of the Stanford Museum, today known as the Cantor Arts Center.
In those days the Hoover Library was located in two of the lower floors of the
stacks of the University Library, today known as Green Library, and storing
them there was out of the question. The boxes were bound together in four
groups with strips of wood, each group bearing the following label: “This
TAGIL COLLECTION of 18 boxes belongs to the Hoover War Library.” After
the Hoover Tower was constructed in 1941, the boxes were transferred to a
storage room on the tower’s top floor.
“LET THE PAST SLEEP A LITTLE LONGER”

In 1956, as the end of the thirty-year period approached, Maklakov began to
get nervous about the inevitable hoopla that would accompany the open-
ing of the Okhrana archive. He conveyed his concerns to an old friend who
was now affiliated with the Hoover Institution: Alexander Kerensky, the last
prime minister of the Provisional Government, who had appointed Maklakov
as Russia’s ambassador to France in 1917. In February 1956 Kerensky was
named a Hoover research associate in connection with a project to compile
and publish a multivolume collection of documents on the Provisional Gov-
ernment. That spring, Maklakov wrote to him for advice and assistance.
Maklakov informed Kerensky of the circumstances that led him to con-
ceal the existence of the Okhrana archive back in 1924, even though legally it
should have been handed over to the Soviets. He justified his action by saying
that its removal from the embassy had been done “with the knowledge, and
even at the request of, the French government of the time,” which feared that
the files “could compromise a lot of people.” Now he worried that their unveil-
ing would be used to create a sensation and a scandal that would tarnish the
reputations of former Russian and French officials and leave him open to
accusations of illegally removing the archive from the embassy and shipping it
to Stanford. The Soviet government and private individuals of one or another
camp, Maklakov was certain, would cause him much unpleasantness.
Of course, Maklakov told Kerensky, he had not expected it to come to this
when he signed the contract with the Hoover Library. On the contrary, he had
assumed that at some point he would be able to turn the Okhrana archive
over to a “restored Russian government” whose legitimacy he would rec-
ognize, as the contract allowed. “In 1926 nobody thought that Soviet power
would still exist in thirty years,” he lamented. “But now that deadline is
approaching.” Maklakov said he was in no position to demand of the Hoover
Institution that it delay opening the collection, and he wished to avoid writing
a formal request that might be denied. Perhaps Kerensky would be willing to
make inquiries on his behalf to find out if Hoover’s directors might possibly
agree to postpone the unsealing of the cases, or at least to delay publicity
about their contents. “If the Hoover Library . . . could allow me not to live to
see that scandal, I would be grateful to it for every postponement.”
Kerensky spoke about Maklakov’s unease to Rothwell, who readily agreed
to extend the period of
restriction on the Tagil
After the Hoover Tower was con- collection. “Your reasons
structed in 1941, the boxes were are perfectly understand-
transferred to a room on the tower’s able and I shall be glad
to comply,” Rothwell
top floor.
wrote to Maklakov in
June, enclosing a draft of the proposed revision to the contract ensuring that
the collection would remain closed during Maklakov’s lifetime. Maklakov
expressed his gratitude to Rothwell for appreciating “ma position délicate.”
On September 26, Rothwell sent Maklakov the finalized statement for him to
sign and return. “This will close the ‘Tagil’ matter according to your wishes.”
As it turns out, it did not. A Hoover Library staff member visiting Paris
that October reported back to campus that Maklakov was agitated about
what he assumed was the imminent opening of the Okhrana files. “Laissez
dormir le passé,” he told his visitor. “Tell them . . . beg them, to let the past
sleep a little longer.” Reading this letter, assistant director Sworakowski
realized that Maklakov had not received the statement revising the Tagil
contract. He mailed the document once again, this time via Kerensky, who
was spending the winter in Paris. Maklakov, enfeebled by declining health
and grief over the death of his beloved sister, did not get around to mailing
back the signed statement until June 4, 1957. At the end of June he went
to Switzerland on vacation. He died there, near Geneva, on July 15, at age
eighty-eight. That October, Maklakov having been laid to rest, the Tagil seals
were broken and the past reawakened.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Defining

Moments: The First One Hundred Years of the Hoover
Institution, by Bertrand M. Patenaude. To order, call

H OOVE R A R C H I VE S
H OOVER A RCHIVE S
Return to
Chernobyl
Thirty-five years ago, a nuclear disaster unfolded
in Ukraine. The Soviet empire, too, was about to
melt down. Archival materials illuminate those
times of danger and dissolution.
By Anatol Shmelev
T
he Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of thirty-five years ago holds
a special place among technogenic disasters. Aside from the
environmental, health, social, and economic consequences of this
uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, it also had unparalleled politi-
cal impact. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy covered the significance of Cher-
nobyl in the collapse of the USSR in his book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear
Catastrophe (Basic Books, 2018), arguing that the disaster was both a result
of failures in the Soviet system as well as a cause of the ultimate failure of the
system itself. Therefore, the catastrophe is very much part—and even a central
part—of the story of the late Soviet period, making it an important event for
the Hoover Institution Archives to document and preserve for researchers.
Hoover holds a broad array of Chernobyl documentation ranging from
the personal fates of local inhabitants affected by the disaster to Politburo
discussions of causes and consequences.
Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow and the Robert Conquest Curator for Russia
and Eurasia at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is In the Wake of Empire:
Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917–1920 (Hoover Institu-
tion Press, 2021).
Among the first materials on the topic to find their way into the Archives
are the records of Fond 89, microfilmed in the early 1990s as part of the mas-
sive Hoover Institution/Chadwyck-Healey/Rosarkhiv project that now forms
the Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State microfilm
collection. Fond 89 occupies a special place in this resource as an artificial
documentary collection pulled together by order of President Boris Yeltsin to
document the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union for a public trial . . . which never took place.
Numerous documents in this collection pertain to Chernobyl, and of these
particularly important are the Politburo discussions on dealing with the
consequences of the tragedy.
The recently acquired Alla Yaroshinska papers serve as an important
supplement to the documents of Fond 89, in some cases eclipsing the official
documentation in value. Yaroshinska is a journalist and was a political figure
in the late USSR. She served as a member of the Supreme Soviet from 1989
to 1991, deputy to the minister of press and information until 1993, and then
adviser to Yeltsin and member of his Presidential Council. As a journal-
ist in the 1980s, she was a prominent campaigner for perestroika, and has
since written or co-written more than twenty books on freedom of speech,
human rights, nuclear ecology, and nuclear security in the former USSR. As
a member of the Ecology and Glasnost Committee of the Supreme Soviet,
she urged full disclosure of the extent of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and
the contamination it spread over wide areas of territory. In 1990, Yaroshinska
was appointed to a commission of inquiry into Chernobyl, collected a large
amount of material on the subject, and used some of it in a report to the
European Parliament at that time.
The papers in this collection fall into two categories. The first is largely
correspondence with constituents, as well as with local (municipal and
regional) authorities and ministries (defense and others) regarding constitu-
ent issues. This correspondence provides a valuable window on the work-
ings of the Soviet system in the two years before its collapse, especially in
the region of Zhitomir (in northern Ukraine), heavily affected by radioactive
contamination during the Chernobyl disaster. Constituents ask for assistance
with a variety of issues, and together these requests form a microcosm of
Soviet economic and social problems, underscoring the system’s excessive
centralization and paternalism.
The other subset of papers consists almost entirely of materials dealing
with the Chernobyl nuclear accident, especially its effects on the region of
Zhitomir. The key documents in the collection are minutes of meetings of the

DON’T WALK—RUN: A pedestrian crossing sign stands in Pripyat, Ukraine,
within the area evacuated after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Hoover’s
recently acquired Alla Yaroshinska papers are among the collections that
provide a window into the investigations of the Chernobyl disaster and the
radioactive contamination. [Eddie Gerald—Alamy]
Politburo’s ad hoc committee to address the disaster, including associated

documentation on countering foreign reporting of the news (counterpropa-
ganda). Many of these minutes never made it into Fond 89 and have since
been restricted and are now unavailable for research, except at Hoover.
A set of photographs shows the damaged nuclear power plant and sur-
roundings, including animals suffering from radiation-induced mutations.
There are also papers dealing with other Soviet nuclear accidents and
nuclear policy in general in the USSR, before and after Chernobyl.
Sonja Schmid is an associate professor of science and technology studies
at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and author of Producing Power: The Pre-
Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (MIT Press, 2015), as well as
numerous articles and book chapters on Chernobyl, Fukushima, and issues
in nuclear safety. In 2011 she was contracted by the Hoover Institution to
conduct a series of oral history interviews with several of the scientists and
engineers who led the efforts to deal with the consequences of the nuclear
RECLAIMED BY NATURE: Bumper cars rust in an abandoned amusement
park in Pripyat, a city within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Archival materials
about the “Chernobyl children”—youth who were affected by radiation, dis-
placement, and other health issues—are among Hoover’s Chernobyl holdings.
Amid the picturesque ruins, tourism actually has been on the rise since parts
of the zone were deemed safe for short visits. [Alamy]
meltdown at Chernobyl. The topics ranged from the political to the techni-
cal. The interviews are supplemented by video recordings, printed matter,
and slides. Among the interviewees was Nikolai Steinberg, chief engineer of
Chernobyl from 1986 to 1987, and later top-level Ukrainian regulator.
Both the records of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) broad-
casts and the BBC World Service radio recordings provide valuable audio
and paper documentation on the catastrophe, and not just from a Western
perspective: the BBC recordings contain an interview with Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev and other audio material that touches on Chernobyl, for
example a program on the “Chernobyl children”: youth who suffered or were
affected by radiation, displacement, and other health issues. The RFE/RL
broadcast audio recordings and scripts cover the unfolding tragedy in the
form of news bulletins, interviews, press monitoring, and other reports (par-
ticularly well represented in the records of the Belarus service).

In addition to the major resources described above, the true archival
archaeologist will unearth even more beneath the surface. The papers of
Eileen Gail De Planque, a member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commis-
sion, deal with the accident in connection with US nuclear policy. Hoover
also has the recording of a Firing Line program devoted to Chernobyl; vari-
ous Soviet propaganda
pamphlets and articles
on the subject in the Documents show the Soviet system’s
Herbert Romerstein excessive centralization and pater-
collection; photographic nalism.
prints of the damaged
nuclear plant and demonstrations against its return to functioning status in
the Ukrainian pictorial collection; a large clipping file; documentary video
materials in the Victor J. Yasmann papers; newspapers published by groups
of invalids and veterans of the “liquidation” of the disaster within the inde-
pendent press collection; and much more.
Some of these riches have already been mined by scholars, the most recent
example being a thorough and penetrating scholarly book published in
German by Professor Melanie Arndt titled Tschernobylkinder (Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2020), an examination of the fate of the “Chernobyl children,”
particularly those sent abroad for treatment and rehabilitation. Arndt places
the stories of these children within the context of transnational humanitar-
ian relief and the shifting political landscape of the post-Soviet independent
states, particularly Belarus.
In this manner, the Hoover Institution’s archival treasures allow scholars
to examine historical events from a variety of perspectives, enabling them to
interweave the seemingly disparate strands of environmental, technological,
scientific, humanitarian, diplomatic, and political history into a complex quilt
that forms the narrative of the past.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is In the Wake

of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International
Affairs, 1917–1920, by Anatol Shmelev. To order, call
On the Cover
J
ulie Helen Heyneman (1868–1942) spent her childhood and youth
in San Francisco, where she attended classes at the Art Students
League. She sailed for Europe in 1891 to immerse herself in art. Liv-
ing in London, she became a pupil and lifelong friend of John Singer
Sargent, the noted portrait painter. Heyneman would continue her life of
art—painter, teacher, and writer—but for a brief period during the terrible
years of the Great War, she also shone as a humanitarian.
In February 1916 she established California House, located at 82 Lancaster
Gate, West London, as a refuge for disabled Belgian soldiers. The carnage of
World War I had produced vast numbers of wounded men who found them-
selves in a strange land unable to work, get home, or even make themselves
understood. This poster by Belgian graphic artist Constant “Stan” Van Offel
(1885–1924) shows one such soldier approaching Heyneman’s door, the shad-
ing of the figure suggesting the man’s need to be made whole.
California House met a very specific, if fleeting, need. According to the
website Lost Hospitals of London, “Wounded Belgian soldiers crowding into
the Belgian Refugee Clearing Station at the former skating rink at Aldwych
clamored for ‘something to do.’ Miss Julie Helen Heyneman . . . took pity
on them and, together with a committee of fellow Californians living in
London, arranged to provide premises and some occupation for them which
would benefit them in the future.” Subscribers back in California proved
eager to give money; Lou Henry Hoover was on the board of California
House, along with luminaries such as Bernard Baruch, Phoebe Hearst, and
Sargent.
Most of the soldiers spoke Flemish. Heyneman and her allies taught them
English, of course, and found work for some as interpreters. The soldiers also
took free classes in subjects such as math, chemistry, and other languages.
Those who had lost their legs in battle were taught manual arts: woodwork-
ing, bookbinding, drawing, and painting. The emphasis, Heyneman later said,
was on productive work: handicrafts were sold and the soldiers kept part of
the proceeds.
In time, Heyneman would extend her charitable work to British soldiers
recovering from their wounds. The British gathered in a refuge called
Kitchener House, co-managed with the British Red Cross and modeled along

Heyneman’s lines.
In 1918 it drew ten
times as many men
as California House.
As a news article
pointed out that
year, the war’s dead-
ly impact was not
confined to visible
injuries: “Everybody
knows it on the face
of our men—a sort
of apathy, the look of
a mind divested of
mental initiative. . . .
A man’s body heals
much faster when
his mind and spirit
are kept from rust-
ing.” At a time when
“shell shock” was
a new and disturb-
ing phenomenon,
Heyneman’s work
helped draw atten-
tion to the great
need for both physi-
cal and mental rehabilitation of combatants.
California House closed in 1919 as the need diminished, and “the good
angel of this establishment,” as she was described in The Argonaut, went on
to other things. “Many hundreds have found in its hospitality that which has
saved their lives and, equally important, that which has re-established their
efficiencies for practical life and revived their hopes,” the magazine noted.
“Nothing better in the sphere of mercy and charity has been done in connec-
tion with the war.”
Heyneman eventually returned to San Francisco and was active in society
and art there. Her example during the war went beyond kindness. It helped
the public understand—and prepare for—the needs of wounded warriors.
—Charles Lindsey

HOOVER INSTITUTION ON WAR, REVOLUTION AND PEACE
Board of Overseers
Chair Michael W. Gleba
Thomas F. Stephenson Robert E. Grady
Jerry Grundhofer
Vice Chair Cynthia Fry Gunn
Susan R. McCaw Richard R. Hargrove
Everett J. Hauck
Members Kenneth A. Hersh
Katherine H. Alden Heather R. Higgins
Neil R. Anderson Margaret Hoover
John F. Barrett Philip Hudner
Robert G. Barrett Claudia P. Huntington
Donald R. Beall Nicolas Ibañez Scott
Peter S. Bing James D. Jameson
Walter E. Blessey Jr. William E. Jenkins
Joanne Whittier Blokker Franklin P. Johnson Jr.
William Kay Blount Gregory E. Johnson
James J. Bochnowski Mark Chapin Johnson
David Booth John Jordan
Jerry Bruni Stephen S. Kahng
John L. “Jack” Bunce Jr. Mary Myers Kauppila
James J. Carroll III Michael E. Kavoukjian
Robert H. Castellini John B. Kleinheinz
Jean-Pierre L. “JP” Conte Richard Kovacevich
Berry R. Cox Peter W. Kuyper
James W. Davidson Allen J. Lauer
Paul Lewis “Lew” Davies III Howard H. Leach
Steven L. Eggert Davide Leone
Jeffrey A. Farber Howard W. Lutnick
Henry A. Fernandez James D. Marver
Robert A. Ferris Craig O. McCaw
Carly Fiorina David McDonald
James E. Forrest Harold “Terry” McGraw III
Stephen B. Gaddis Henry A. McKinnell
Samuel L. Ginn Deedee McMurtry

Carole J. McNeil David L. Steffy

Mary G. Meeker Kevin Stump
Jennifer L. “Jenji” Mercer Curtis Sloane Tamkin
Rebekah Mercer Marc Tessier-Lavigne*
Roger S. Mertz Charles B. Thornton Jr.
Harold M. “Max” Messmer Jr. Thomas J. Tierney
Jeremiah Milbank III Victor S. Trione
Mitchell J. Milias Darnell M. Whitt II
Scott Minerd Paul H. Wick
K. Rupert Murdoch Diane B. “Dede” Wilsey
George E. Myers Richard G. Wolford
George A. Needham Yu Wu
Thomas Nelson Jerry Yang*
*Ex officio members of the Board
Robert G. O’Donnell
Robert J. Oster
Distinguished Overseers
Jay A. Precourt
Martin Anderson
George J. Records
Peter B. Bedford
Christopher R. Redlich Jr.
Wendy H. Borcherdt
Samuel T. Reeves
W. Kurt Hauser
Kathleen “Cab” Rogers
Peyton M. Lake
Robert Rosencranz
Shirley Cox Matteson
Adam Ross Bowen H. McCoy
Theresa W. “Terry” Ryan Boyd C. Smith
Douglas G. Scrivner
Peter O. Shea Overseers Emeritus
Robert Shipman Frederick L. Allen
Thomas M. Siebel Joseph W. Donner
George W. Siguler Dody Small
Ronald P. Spogli Robert J. Swain
The Hoover Institution gratefully
acknowledges gifts of support
for the Hoover Digest from:
Bertha and John Garabedian Charitable Foundation
u u u
The Hoover Institution is supported by donations from individuals,

foundations, corporations, and partnerships. If you are interested in
supporting the research programs of the Hoover Institution or the
Hoover Library and Archives, please contact the Office of Development,
telephone 650.725.6715 or fax 650.723.1952. Gifts to the Hoover Institution
are tax deductible under applicable rules. The Hoover Institution is part
of Stanford University’s tax-exempt status as a Section 501(c)(3)
“public charity.” Confirming documentation is available upon request.
Contact: hooverdevelopment@stanford.edu
hoover.org/donate
HOOVER DIGEST
SUMMER 2021 NO. 3
Democracy and Human Rights

The Economy
China
Africa
The Middle East
Nuclear Proliferation
Immigration
Education
National Security
California
Native Americans
Interviews
» Matthew Crawford
» Laurence Fox
» Niall Ferguson
» Timothy Garton Ash
Values
History and Culture
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HOOVER

The Institution’s overarching goals are to:

Herbert Hoover’s 1959 statement to the Board of Trustees of Stanford

This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States,

This Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library.

By collecting knowledge and generating ideas, the Hoover Institution seeks

THE HOOVER INSTITUTION

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA DOWNLOAD OUR APP

TWITTER @HooverInst Stay up to date on the latest

DE M O C RACY A ND HUMAN RI GHTS

15 Charles Hill: Grand Strategist

19 Exposing the Kleptocrats

27 Courage, not Cancellation

47 How to Kill Opportunity

4 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

N UC L E A R P ROL IFE RAT ION

128 A Republic, if You Can Teach It

6 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

164 The Man Who Wouldn’t Be Canceled

175 “Turning People into Americans”

182 “Pluralism Is the Lifeblood”

HISTORY A ND C ULT URE

219 Return to Chernobyl

224 On the Cover

8 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN R IG H TS

HOW STATES FIT IN

10 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

12 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

Awareness has been growing in the US—and in nations around

Official PRC documents have described the present situation in hundred-

Subscribe to The Caravan, the online Hoover Institution journal that

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Russia

14 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN R IG H TS

Harrison Smith is an obituary writer for the Washington Post.

16 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

“The international world of states and their modern system is a literary

Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2021 Washington Post

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

18 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN R IG H TS

in the world. » Fighting kleptoc-

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

20 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

22 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

24 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is China’s

26 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN R IG H TS

28 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered

30 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2021 RealClearHoldings

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

how should we do it? » The aftermath of the CO-

ties in the United States and elsewhere in » Developed countries are

32 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

34 H O O VER DI GEST • Summer 2021

Reprinted by permission of Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.