Hoover Digest, 2023, No. 2, Spring

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DIGEST
RE SE AR C H + COM M E NTARY
ON P U B L IC P OL ICY
SP R I N G 2 02 3 N O. 2
T H E H O OV E R I N S T I T U T I O N • S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was established
at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, a member of Stanford’s
pioneer graduating class of 1895 and the thirty-first president of the United
States. Created as a library and repository of documents, the Institution
enters its second century with a dual identity: an active public policy
research center and an internationally recognized library and archives.
The Institution’s overarching goals are to:

» Understand the causes and consequences of economic, political,
and social change
» Analyze the effects of government actions and public policies
» Use reasoned argument and intellectual rigor to generate ideas that
nurture the formation of public policy and benefit society
Herbert Hoover’s 1959 statement to the Board of Trustees of Stanford

University continues to guide and define the Institution’s mission in the
twenty-first century:
This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States,

its Bill of Rights, and its method of representative government.
Both our social and economic systems are based on private
enterprise, from which springs initiative and ingenuity. . . .
Ours is a system where the Federal Government should
undertake no governmental, social, or economic action, except
where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for
themselves. . . . The overall mission of this Institution is, from
its records, to recall the voice of experience against the making
of war, and by the study of these records and their publication
to recall man’s endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to
sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life.
This Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library.

But with these purposes as its goal, the Institution itself
must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace,
to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American
system.
By collecting knowledge and generating ideas, the Hoover Institution seeks

to improve the human condition with ideas that promote opportunity and
prosperity, limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals, and
secure and safeguard peace for all.
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ON THE COVER
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Tad and Dianne Taube Director
Historians call it the golden age of flight.
A hundred years ago, shaped by war and ERIC WAKIN
commerce, aviation was capturing the Deputy Director,
imagination of people all around the globe. Director of Library & Archives
This British poster depicts airmail as a
glamorous, high-tech innovation. Routine
today, flying the mails was adventurous,
competitive—and dangerous. California
played a key part in the establishment of
safe, reliable air transportation across
the United States. One huge mountaintop
beacon built to guide night-flying aircraft
still glows today—but only once a year.
See story, page 196.
VISIT HOOVER INSTITUTION ONLINE | www.hoover.org
FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA
TWITTER @HooverInst
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YOUTUBE www.youtube.com/HooverInstitution
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INSTAGRAM https://instagram.com/hooverinstitution
Spring 2023
HOOVE R D IG EST
T HE E CO N O M Y
9 Recession, Inflation, and the Long View
“Recessions are painful interruptions,” says Hoover fellow
John H. Cochrane, “but we should be paying much more
attention to long-run growth.” By Melissa De Witte
15 “Wasteful and Extravagant”

When congressional committees proliferate, so does
entitlement spending. The solution, as it was in the past, is to
consolidate control of the purse. By John F. Cogan
19 Rebooting the Fed

The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is broken. Do we have
to wait two more years before it’s fixed? By Mickey D. Levy
and Charles Plosser
22 It Takes More than a Village . . .

Even if “all politics is local,” the economy and the environment
are not. That’s why the rush to deglobalize—things like
“friend-shoring” and protectionism—threatens both wealth
and climate. By Raghuram G. Rajan
R U SS I A A N D UK R A IN E
28 “Later” Is Too Late
Time is Ukraine’s enemy. The West must arm Kyiv to push
back the invaders—and deter Russia from future aggression.
By Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2023 3
33 History as Bludgeon
Russia’s history represents a mix of ideology, moral squalor,
and force. Hoover fellow Stephen Kotkin traces the
background of the war in Ukraine. By Andrew Roberts
46 Think the Unthinkable

Why would Moscow use a tactical nuclear weapon? Not to
terrorize Ukraine. To terrorize us. By Jakub Grygiel
50 Russians’ Worst Enemy

Vladimir Putin has wrecked his nation’s prestige, its military,
and its hopes. By Timothy Garton Ash
54 Atrocity Foretold
Robert Conquest’s 1986 book Harvest of Sorrow proved entirely
correct about Russia’s cruel exploitation of Ukraine in the
1930s—behavior Russia is now repeating. What’s different now
is Ukraine. This time it will not submit. By Josef Joffe
CHINA
59 China after Mao
The Communist leaders of China promised the country would
rise peacefully. Hoover fellow Frank Dikötter analyzes the
long march of wishful thinking that led the West to believe
them. By Michael R. Auslin
4 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

69 What Would Reagan Do?
The West won the Cold War through pragmatism, idealism,
and strong alliances. We should respond to the China
challenge in the same way. By Peter Berkowitz
74 An Exile Looks at Xi
Longtime Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng examines Xi
Jinping and sees ruthlessness—but also vulnerability. By
Matthew F. Pottinger
85 Taiwan Doesn’t Stand Alone

“Strategic ambiguity”? What Taipei needs from Washington is
strategic clarity. By Miles Maochun Yu
T HE MID D L E E AST
90 Don’t Ignore Lebanon
The United States has been indifferent to Lebanon’s slow-
motion collapse. Terrorism is a likely result. By Russell A.
Berman
P O L I T IC S
95 The Portman Way
Retiring senator Rob Portman, legislative workhorse,
goes home after a long and effective career. He wants to be
remembered “just as somebody who tried to find common
ground and move the country forward.” By Peter Robinson
107 In Case of Emergency

The politics of COVID-19 led to bitter debates over a
fundamental value: the consent of the governed. Were the
emergency measures fair? Were they justified? Did they even
work? By Morris P. Fiorina
113 A Minor Miracle
A bipartisan majority has passed the Electoral Count Reform
Act—proof that political differences can indeed be bridged.
Herewith three more areas where a constructive spirit might
prevail. By Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith
D E F EN S E
118 Managing War
It’s never been easy to harmonize military power with civilian
control, but our democracy demands no less. By Bruce S.
Thornton
124 Smaller, Faster, Deadlier

The supply chain for “energetics,” the essential chemicals in
bombs, shells, and missiles, is surprisingly tenuous. Without
prompt new investments, we’ll be placing our national
security at risk. By Nadia Schadlow
F O R E I G N P O LICY
129 Bringing Japan Aboard
To confront Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific, the United
States, Australia, and Britain are forging new security bonds.
It would make abundant sense to extend those bonds to
Japan. By Michael R. Auslin

T HE E N VIR O N M E N T
134 A New York State of Panic
Yes, the sea is up and the Battery’s down. But New York City
isn’t even close to sinking. By Steven E. Koonin
E D U C ATIO N
137 Truly Fair
What stands in the way of genuine equity in schools? Not
bigotry. Mediocrity. By Michael J. Petrilli
C AL I FO R N IA
140 Newsom’s Nothingburger
A government panel has been given the power to control the
fast-food industry. The thoroughly predictable outcome? Feast
for unions, and a famine for job-seekers. By Lee E. Ohanian
I N T E RVIE WS
145 Electric Sheep
Are computers leading us astray? Psychologist Gerd
Gigerenzer insists that human brains still trump artificial
intelligence (just not at chess). By Russ Roberts
154 “The Soul of a Killer”

As a youth, Hoover fellow Paul Gregory came to know
the future assassin of President Kennedy intimately. In his
new memoir, he describes Lee Harvey Oswald’s narcissism,
Marxist beliefs, and angry ambitions. By Melissa De Witte
158 Grover Cleveland, Classical Liberal

He was “a political purgative”—the remedy for the political
corruption of his day. So says Troy Senik, author of a new
biography of an unlikely figure who found a political need and
filled it. By Peter Robinson
VA LU ES
174 Wisdom to Know the Difference
We can’t fix all the world’s problems at once—but we can fix
some of the worst ones now. If we stop wasting time, that
is, on big ideas with small payoffs. By Bjorn Lomborg and
Jordan B. Peterson
HI STORY A N D C ULTUR E
180 Always in Pursuit
Equality in America is a treasured goal forever awaiting
further refinement. The debate over how to achieve it has
never ended. By David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd
HO OV E R A R C HIVE S
186 Window on a Revolution
Hoover now houses the collection of the Chinese communist
thinker Li Rui, confidant of Mao Zedong. The story of a man
who was both rewarded and brutalized by the movement he
served. By Matthew Krest Lowenstein
196 On the Cover

T HE E CON OM Y
THE ECO NOMY
Recession,
Inflation, and the
Long View
“Recessions are painful interruptions,” says
Hoover fellow John H. Cochrane, “but we should be
paying much more attention to long-run growth.”
By Melissa De Witte
W
hile recessions are painful, they are only temporary
interruptions to the economy, says John H. Cochrane, an
economist at the Hoover Institution, arguing that people
should pay more attention to long-term economic growth,
which in the United States is stagnating.
Here, Cochrane discusses what people understand and don’t understand
about recessions, what is over- and underestimated about them, and why
it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Rather than a focus on quarterly
changes to the growth rate, which is how recessions are currently gauged,
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy,
and a contributor to Hoover’s Conte Initiative on Immigration Reform. He is also
a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a
research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an adjunct
scholar at the Cato Institute. Melissa De Witte is deputy director, social science
communications, for Stanford University Communications.
the long-run growth of the economy matters more. Moreover, the causes of
recessions are not entirely clear, Cochrane says.
He also addresses the relationship between inflation and recession,
stagflation—a recession with inflation—the role the Federal Reserve plays in
managing the health of the economy, and what other factors people should
use to assess that health. For instance, labor force participation, the number
of people employed or actively seeking employment, is a more useful gauge
than unemployment rates.
Cochrane specializes in financial economics and macroeconomics. His
most recent book, The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (Princeton University
Press, 2023), is about inflation.
Melissa De Witte, Stanford News Service: Fears about a

recession have loomed for months, even years. Why isn’t the
United States in a recession yet?
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

John H. Cochrane: One might say that fears about a recession have loomed
for centuries! But, like disease, fear of recession does not itself cause a
recession.
De Witte: What do people—economists included—understand and don’t

understand about recessions?
Cochrane: We know they happen and seem to be a regular phenomenon. In

some sense, recessions look much alike. Economic activity declines through-
out the economy and all over the country, unlike, say, a bad snowstorm that
affects only one area or a boom in one industry, like tech. Durable goods,
investment, housing, and things you borrow to finance, all get hurt much
more; services and nondurable goods (food) fall much less. Employment falls,
unemployment rises.
Recessions often happen when something bad happens: a
financial crisis (1933, 2008), a large monetary or credit policy
tightening, a disruption in oil markets (1973, 1979), or the
moment we find out that a boom has run its course (1929, 1999). But those
are often amplifying factors rather than complete causes, as those events
sometimes don’t lead to recessions.
De Witte: What causes recessions?
Cochrane: Just what causes recessions and drives these mechanisms is a

bit contentious. The fact that every business falls at the same time leads to
the Keynesian idea that “lack of demand” is at fault. But why should people
wake up one day and just want to spend less? Why should that be the same
everywhere in the country? The economy is surely more complex than a one-
dimensional “stimulus” theory describes.
One cause of recession is the natural turbulence of some businesses
expanding and others contracting. In 2008, it was a bit due to the fact that,
no, we aren’t all going to
move to Las Vegas, so
“In my view, we have a one-time we need to stop building
inflation caused by the one-time fis- houses there. In 1999, in
cal blowout of the pandemic.” part the end of the first
round of the Internet.
It seems pretty clear the end of this round of Internet development is at
hand, and as big bets on endless growth go bust, and as people move away
from one kind of job to another, there can be at least a slowdown.
Even famous recessions in 2008 and 1929 show a decided slowing of
economic activity before the financial panic. The financial panic is at least
partly caused by the growth slowdown. Risky companies betting on years of
continued growth are suddenly worth less, as we’re seeing right now in tech.
If banks are overexposed to those businesses, that feedback can make mat-
ters worse.
De Witte: What else do people often misunderstand about recessions?
Cochrane: People also misunderstand the nature of unemployment. Even

in recessions, most people get jobs relatively quickly. The real issue is labor
force participation, the declining number of people who are even looking for
work, in good times and bad.
“Recessions” are when income is going down, and the unemployment rate
is rising. But we are still in “bad times” when income is low and unemploy-
ment is high. That persists a good bit past a “recession.” I think if we could
do it over again, we’d define recessions in terms of low levels of GDP and high
levels of unemployment, not growth rates.

The other thing most people get wrong is to dramatically overstate reces-
sions, painful as they are, in the big scheme of things. A bad recession might
lower income by 5 percent for a few years. But long-run growth overwhelms
such changes. In 1950, average income was under $15,000 per year, in 2012
dollars. Now, it’s $60,000, in 2012 dollars. That’s huge.
Currently, stagnant growth is our big problem. Long-run growth of the
economy matters much more than year-to-year growth rates. Recessions are
painful interruptions,
but we should be paying
much more attention to “The economy is surely more com-
long-run growth.
plex than a one-dimensional ‘stimu-
De Witte: I asked lus’ theory describes.”
[Hoover senior fellow]
John B. Taylor this a few months ago, and I’d be curious to get your take on it
too: What is the relationship between inflation and recession? Why does the
Fed have to aggressively raise interest rates to end inflation?
Cochrane: There is definitely a correlation between inflation and recessions.

Inflation tends to ease in a recession and accelerate in a boom. The Fed is
counting on this effect, as inducing a bit of recession is its only tool right now.
(Or, inflation really comes from fiscal policy, and the Fed is being asked to
counteract that.) But that’s not always and everywhere. Sometimes we have
stagflation: a recession with inflation. That is much more common across the
rest of the world than in the United States. Countries in trouble—that often
includes fiscal trouble for their governments—tend to have inflation in bad
times, not just in good times. That mechanism could be coming to the United
States soon.
Right now, the worry is that the Fed and other central banks, in their
efforts to fight inflation, will tighten money and credit to the point that it
causes a recession. That is, indeed, much of the point of the Fed’s actions.
The standard story for how the Fed affects the economy is that the Fed
slows the economy down, pushing it toward recession, and specifically slow-
ing down parts of the economy that depend on cheap credit, and that this
economic slowdown reduces inflation. The hope is that the Fed can add just
enough recessionary force to offset inflation, but not so much as to actually
see a recession. The fear is that it will overshoot.
But lots of other forces can go wrong. Rising interest rates cause a lot of
financial trouble for businesses that, once again, have set themselves up hop-
ing for perpetually free borrowing.
There are lots of other episodes in which inflation does go away on its
own. In my view, we have a one-time inflation caused by the one-time fiscal
blowout of the pandemic.
If nothing bad happens, in
“Risky companies betting on years of particular no additional
continued growth are suddenly worth fiscal blowout, inflation
less.” will slowly ease without
the Fed having to cause
a recession like we saw in the early 1980s. If the United States returned to a
strong supply-side growth policy, that would help, too. But I may be wrong,
and bad shocks could surely come.
De Witte: Could there be any spillover effects if there is a recession else-

where in the world, such as in the eurozone, the United Kingdom, or China?
Cochrane: Yes. We live in a global economy, like it or not. China seems in

danger [of recession], and surely there will be some spillover. In Europe, both
energy problems and its government debt problems could cause trouble and
spill over to the United States.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Reprinted by per-
mission of Stanford News Service. © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is How

Monetary Policy Got Behind the Curve—and How
to Get Back, edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H.
Cochrane, and John B. Taylor. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

T HE E CON OM Y
THE ECO NOMY
“Wasteful and
Extravagant”
When congressional committees proliferate, so
does entitlement spending. The solution, as it was
in the past, is to consolidate control of the purse.
By John F. Cogan
A
t the start of the year, the US Trea-
Key points
sury began taking steps to avoid
» Entitlement pro-
default on the nation’s $31.4 trillion grams have accounted
national debt. The government had for all the growth in
federal spending rela-
been there before. It will keep arriving there until tive to gross domestic
Congress finds a way to control its voracious appe- product over the past
sixty years.
tite for spending. The political will to cut spending
» In the past, a single
is hard to muster, and congressional history shows
committee in the
that the budget process itself creates incentives for House and another in
excessive spending and budget deficits. the Senate controlled
spending.
Entitlement programs have accounted for all
» A return to consoli-
the growth in federal spending relative to gross dated appropriations
domestic product in the past sixty years, caus- would be a step toward
restraining the growth
ing the persistent budget deficits during that
of the federal budget.
period. Entitlement expenditures are determined
John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution and participates in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project and its policy task
forces on energy, the economy, and health care.
differently from so-called discretionary programs. Spending on the latter
programs is set by fixed appropriations of money. Entitlement expenditures
aren’t fixed in advance but determined by the program’s level of benefits, its
eligibility rules, and economic factors.
Jurisdiction for entitlement legislation is dispersed among more than a
dozen committees in each congressional chamber. In the House, the Agri-
culture Committee has
jurisdiction over farm-
“You will enter upon a path of extrav- support payments and
agance . . . until we find the treasury of food stamps; the Educa-
the country bankrupt.” tion and Workforce Com-
mittee over student loans
and grants; the Ways and Means Committee over Social Security, Medicare
hospital insurance, and welfare programs; and the Energy and Commerce
Committee over Medicaid (sharing responsibility for ObamaCare and Medi-
care Part B with Ways and Means).
In this system, no committee is accountable for total spending. Each com-
mittee has a reason to expand its programs and resist attempts to restrain
them, but none has an incentive to keep overall spending down.
It’s analogous to the classic tragedy of the commons. Imagine a situation
in which many fishermen have access to a commonly owned body of water.
Each fisherman has an incentive to catch as many fish as possible, and no
fisherman has a reason to restrain his catch. The area is eventually depleted
of fish. But there’s one notable difference: unlike the fisherman, once Con-
gress has exhausted its supply of tax revenue, it can borrow from the future.
Earlier Congresses saw the consequences of dispersed spending authority
and used expert committees with specialized knowledge (called authorizing
committees) to create programs and their rules of operation. For most of
the nineteenth century, a single committee in each chamber determined the
total annual budget. The use of a single committee provided accountability
and made possible the necessary funding trade-offs among programs. Except
during wars and recessions, annual budgets were balanced with a suitable
allowance.
But in the late 1870s to the mid-1880s, the House began dispersing spend-
ing authority. Former speaker Samuel Randall delivered a prophetic warning
in 1885: “If you undertake to divide all these appropriations and have many
committees where there ought to be but one, you will enter upon a path of
extravagance that you cannot foresee the length of or the depth of, until we
find the treasury of the country bankrupt.”

The House dismissed these warnings and dispersed appropriations
jurisdiction to eight committees. The Senate later followed suit. The new
incentives caused expenditures to grow rapidly. From the 1890s to World
War I, budget deficits were more frequent and larger than ever before in US
peacetime history.
After World War I, Congress recognized the source of its budget problem
and solved it. A House select committee, established to create a process in
which the president would submit his own comprehensive budget request
to Congress, recommended that the chamber consolidate all appropria-
tion authority into a
single committee. The
remarkable resolution No committee is accountable for total
stripped seven House spending. And none has any incen-
committees of their tive to keep overall spending down.
spending authority. Cit-
ing past support from some of its most respected former members, includ-
ing Appropriations Committee Chairman James Garfield (1871–75) and
Speaker Joseph Cannon (1903–11), the select committee urged members to
“submerge personal ambition for the public good.” The House did so and
consolidated appropriations in 1920. Two years later, the Senate changed
its rules to match.
That restored budget accountability and eliminated the system’s incen-
tives for higher spending. From 1921 to 1930, when the Great Depression hit,
federal spending was restrained and the annual budget balanced.
Starting in the 1930s, however, Congress began creating entitlement pro-
grams for people other than those who had performed some government
service related to defense. (The only previous entitlements were pensions for
servicemen.) The consequence is the return of dispersed committee jurisdiction
in which entitlements now account for two-thirds of federal program spending.
Since the 1970s, Congress has made several failed attempts to change the
budget process, most notably the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impound-
ment Control Act and discretionary appropriations caps and pay-go rules
under the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act and subsequent laws. None of these
reforms has overcome the powerful spending incentives created by the cur-
rent system.
Many other ideas have been floated by individual lawmakers. In June
1979, Senator Joe Biden urged that almost all spending be subject to annual
approval by the Appropriations Committee. Biden said in a floor speech
that his bill would make “new and existing entitlements subject to the
appropriation of funds, thus effectively ending their entitlement status,” with
exceptions only for then-existing Social Security and Medicare benefits.
In the current arrangement, the House and Senate Budget Committees
may appear to provide accountability, but they have no independent author-
ity to change entitlements. Similarly, the omnibus appropriations laws of
recent years may give the appearance that the congressional leadership is in
charge. But these bloated bills fund only discretionary spending and repre-
sent a failure of the appropriations process.
In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson advised Congress that “it will be impos-
sible to deal in any but a very wasteful and extravagant fashion with the
enormous appropriation of public moneys . . . unless the House will consent
to return to its former practice of initiating and preparing all appropriations
bills through a single committee.” The same is true more than a century
later. Consolidating appropriations will be difficult for Congress, but no more
difficult than it was in 1920. Lawmakers should again “submerge personal
ambition for the public good.”
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2023 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
Available from Stanford University Press is The High

Cost of Good Intentions, by John F. Cogan. To order,
visit www.sup.org.

T HE E CON OM Y
THE ECO NOMY
Rebooting the Fed

The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy is broken.
Do we have to wait two more years before it’s
fixed?
By Mickey D. Levy and Charles Plosser
A
s the Federal Reserve continues to debate how much to raise
interest rates, it is sidestepping a fundamental problem: its lack
of a viable monetary-policy strategy. The new strategic frame-
work embraced in 2020, widely recognized as flawed from the
beginning, is now in tatters as the Fed struggles to control inflation without
causing a recession. Yet Chairman Jerome Powell recently stated that the
central bank won’t undertake a new strategy review until at least 2025. Until
then, what will guide monetary policy?
The Fed’s Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strat-
egy, published in 2012, established a balanced approach to its dual mandate
of price stability and maximum employment. It set a target of 2 percent
inflation but made clear that a numeric employment target is inappropri-
ate because labor-market conditions are determined by factors beyond the
scope of monetary policy. Each January, until 2020, the Fed reaffirmed this
strategy.
The Fed’s 2020 strategic plan was misguided. It was heavily influenced by
fears that the effective lower-bound interest rate was dragging down infla-
tion expectations and that rates could fall to zero, creating challenges for
Mickey D. Levy is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution and senior econo-
mist at Berenberg Capital Markets. Charles Plosser is a visiting fellow at the
Hoover Institution and a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadel-
phia.
monetary policy. Few within the Fed questioned the presumption that low
inflation was harming economic performance and would persist.
This led the Fed to adopt an overly complex and unworkable new scheme
of flexible average inflation targeting that favored higher inflation and pri-
oritized an enhanced mandate of maximizing “inclusive” employment. The
approach eschewed pre-emptive monetary tightening when higher inflation
appeared imminent, which seems at odds with the Fed’s goal of managing
inflationary expectations.
The new 2020 framework was a sharp departure from the 2012 statement
and the practices with which the Fed had succeeded in the past. Lost was
Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan’s fundamental theme that price stabil-
ity is the most important contribution monetary policy can make for sus-
tained economic growth and job creation. The benefits of the Fed’s balanced
approach were cast aside for asymmetries and greater reliance on the Fed’s
discretion and judgment.
Things began to unravel even quicker than we had anticipated after
our early published critique of the plan. As inflation soared, the Fed kept
interest rates at zero and continued massive asset purchases, dismissing
inflation risks to support employment. Eschewing pre-emptive tighten-
ing proved costly as aggregate demand soared and employment rapidly
recovered.
Amid its policy missteps of the past two years, the Fed has reaffirmed its
2020 plan. Continuing to do so would highlight the lack of a viable strategy
and reconfirm that the Fed is adrift, further denting its credibility. Instead,
the Fed should announce that it is immediately reassessing its strategy.
The Fed’s review should address the inherent weaknesses of the cur-
rent strategy and consider the appropriate roles of systematic guidelines
and rules that could
help avoid major policy
The Fed seemingly forgot a critically mistakes. It is essential to
important lesson from the 1970s. replace the unnecessar-
ily complex framework
of flexible average inflation targeting, which lacks any numeric guideposts
for how high or long the Fed should tolerate inflation higher than 2 per-
cent after a period of sub–2 percent inflation or what it should do after
high inflation. Restoring a simple 2 percent inflation target with numeric
tolerance bands, or even a simple average inflation target of 2 percent that
addresses overshoots and shortfalls, would clarify monetary policy and Fed
communications.

The strategic review must also assess the Fed’s monetary policy tools.
Reinstating pre-emptive monetary tightening is essential to maintaining the
Fed’s credibility and keeping inflation expectations anchored at 2 percent.
This would reduce the risk that higher inflation becomes entrenched or self-
sustaining. In 2021 and 2022, the Fed seemingly forgot this critically impor-
tant lesson from the 1970s.
The use of forward guidance as a policy tool in place of actual policy
changes also deserves scrutiny. Forward guidance presumes that the Fed has
the credibility to manage
expectations through
words alone, which is Restoring a simple 2 percent inflation
dubious. Policy changes target would clarify monetary policy
speak louder than words. and Fed communications.
The Fed must also reas-
sess the costs and benefits of its balance-sheet policies. If the balance sheet
is deemed an important monetary-policy tool, it should be integrated more
closely into the bank’s traditional interest-rate decisions and objectives.
Mission creep continues to create problems for the Fed. While the
enhanced mandate of maximum inclusive employment is a laudable goal,
the Fed must emphasize that it cannot be quantified and that fine-tuning the
labor market is beyond the scope of monetary policy.
Finally, the Fed must consider the potential contributions the Taylor Rule
and other such systematic rules could play in the conduct and communica-
tion of monetary policy. These valuable benchmarks would be more helpful
than forward guidance and help avoid major policy mistakes.
If the Fed tackles a review and takes steps to acknowledge and correct
the shortcomings of its 2020 strategy, it can strengthen its credibility and
improve future monetary policy.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Mont

Pèlerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of
the Mont Pèlerin Society, edited by Bruce Caldwell. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.
org.
T H E ECO N O M Y
T H E ECO N O M Y
It Takes More
than a Village . . .
Even if “all politics is local,” the economy and
the environment are not. That’s why the rush to
deglobalize—things like “friend-shoring” and
protectionism—threatens both wealth and climate.
By Raghuram G. Rajan
T
he deliberations at November’s United
Nations Climate Change Conference Key points
(COP27) suggested that while policy » Global diversifica-
tion is a recipe for
makers realize the urgency of combat- greater resilience.
ing climate change, they are unlikely to reach a » The more local or
comprehensive collective agreement to address regional a market,
the harder it will be
it. But there is still a way for the world to improve
hit by severe weather
the chances of more effective action in the future: or a malevolent sup-
hit the brakes on deglobalization. Otherwise, the plier.
possibilities for climate action will be set back by » International

agreements will be
the shrinkage of cross-border trade and investment easier to reach and
flows and by the accompanying rise of increasingly enforce in a world
that has not frag-
isolated regional trading blocs.
mented economi-
cally.
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.

CHARGED UP: Jagjit Nanda assembles a lithium ion battery for testing at the
Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Deglobalization would hinder
the production, investment, and innovation needed to replace carbon-inten-
sive processes with climate-friendly ones such as battery production. [Oak
Ridge National Laboratory]
Deglobalization is being accelerated through a combination of old-fash-

ioned protectionism, newfangled “friend-shoring” (limiting trade to countries
with shared values), and geostrategically motivated bans and sanctions. To
see why this trend will frustrate global responses to climate change, consider
the three categories of climate action: mitigation (emissions reduction), adap-
tation, and migration to better conditions. The sequence here is important,
because the challenges implied by each category will become more difficult if
less is done in the category preceding it. If we do too little on mitigation, we
will need more adaptation; and if we do too little on adaptation, we will see
more climate refugees fleeing their increasingly uninhabitable homelands.
New international agreements are needed to manage each of these prob-
lems. But rising geopolitical rivalries will make mitigation agreements more
difficult. How can China and the United States agree to meaningful emis-
sion cuts when they both suspect that the other’s top priority is to secure an
economic, and hence strategic, advantage?
Agreements will be easier to reach and enforce in a world that has not
fragmented economically. When there is ongoing bilateral trade and invest-
ment, both China and the United States will have more reasons and occa-
sions to talk to each other, and there will be more chips (literally!) with which
to barter—a technology transfer here in exchange for an emissions com-
mitment there, for example. Mutual openness, including the free movement
of businesspeople, tourists, and officials, will also make it easier to monitor
climate action, whereas further isolation will only breed more suspicion,
misinformation, and mutual incomprehension.
Deglobalization will also hinder the production, investment, and innova-
tion needed to replace carbon-intensive production processes with climate-
friendly ones. Consider
battery production,
The surest way for developing coun- necessary to store power
tries to create new jobs is to export. from renewable energy
sources. The key inputs
for batteries—lithium, nickel, and cobalt—are projected to be in short supply
within the decade, as are the rare earths used for electrodes. Global battery
production will suffer if manufacturers have to “friend-shore” these com-
modities. After all, most of these resources are mined in unstable or conflict-
ridden countries, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and much of the
existing refining is done in China and Russia.
Yes, some supply chains could be altered over time to pass through friendly
countries. But businesses will struggle to determine who counts as a friend
and who will remain so over the duration of a thirty-year investment. It was
not so long ago that a US president raged even at Canada. Moreover, in the
short run, reshuffling supply chains would severely limit production capacity
and increase costs, reducing the world’s chances of keeping global average
temperatures below critical thresholds within the narrowing timeframe we
have left.
Adaptation to climate change will also be harder in a deglobalized world.
Higher temperatures and changing weather patterns will make traditional
agriculture unviable in many places. New crops and technologies can
help, but these will require innovation, investment, and financing. Many
MORE POWER: Worldwide demand is growing for lithium (opposite page)

and other critical inputs such as cobalt and nickel. More flexible supply chains
and greater international cooperation would help smooth over disruptions.
[Milda 444—Creative Commons]

developing countries outside major regional blocs will be shut out from
such flows. And even the most heroic efforts at adaptation will not preserve
agriculture’s viability in the tropics. Many farmers will have to look for new
livelihoods.
The surest way for developing countries to create new jobs is to export,
tapping into the dependable demand in more highly developed (and less
heat-affected) countries. Yet rising protectionist barriers in more developed
regions will impede such growth, thereby limiting adaptation. Meanwhile,
isolation will not necessarily give developed countries the security they seek.
While possibly diminishing some political risks, confining supply chains
within one’s own country or region will increase their exposure to climate
catastrophes and other risks. Just look at how higher energy costs are cur-
rently affecting all of Europe, but not North America.
Global diversification, by contrast, would bring greater resilience. Ideally,
a supply chain would have multiple suppliers across different regions and
continents in every segment, enabling it to shift quickly from a climate-hit
supplier to a supplier
elsewhere. Similarly, in
The world will need to manage three the case of commodities,
tasks, in order: mitigation (emissions the best insurance is a
reduction), adaptation, and migration well-connected, freely
to better conditions. accessible global market
where disruptions can
be smoothed over, and where no producer has undue leverage. The more
local or regional the market, the more adversely it will be affected by severe
weather or a malevolent supplier.
If mitigation and adaptation fail, people in badly affected areas will be
forced to migrate. Those in less-affected regions should not myopically
assume that they can continue to live comfortably behind border walls. Not
only will the humanitarian tragedy outside be hard to ignore, but desperate
climate refugees will scale or break down any wall.
It would be far better to forge new global agreements to direct climate
refugees toward the countries that can absorb them, and to provide potential
migrants with the job and language training they need to be productive on
arrival. Deglobalization will only hamper such efforts.
Globalization may have fallen out of favor in recent years, but preserving it
is imperative. Even if countries have a legitimate security interest in restrict-
ing trade and investment in strategic and sensitive sectors, we must prevent
these policies from degenerating into isolationism.

At a minimum, the international community should negotiate a Geneva
Convention–style pact to create safe spheres of continued global interaction
that are protected from
sanctions and bans in
most circumstances. Confining supply chains within one’s
These should include own country or region will increase
trade in food, energy, exposure to climate catastrophes and
medicines, and other
other risks.
essential goods, such as
those needed for climate mitigation and adaptation. We should set stringent
conditions for denying countries access to the global payment infrastructure
and for applying secondary sanctions (sanctions against sanction breakers).
Even if we cannot currently agree on a global climate action plan, we still
must preserve the basis for cooperation. There can be no effective climate
action without continued globalization.
Reprinted by permission of Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.

org). © 2023 Project Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.
Available 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-
RUSSI A A N D UKRAINE
“Later” Is Too
Late
Time is Ukraine’s enemy. The West must arm Kyiv
to push back the invaders—and deter Russia from
future aggression.
By Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates
W
hen it comes to the war in Ukraine, about the only thing
that’s certain now is that the fighting and destruction will
continue.
Both of us have dealt with Russian leader Vladimir
Putin on a number of occasions, and we are convinced that he believes time
is on his side: that he can wear down the Ukrainians and that US and Euro-
pean unity and support for Ukraine will eventually erode and fracture. To be
sure, the Russian economy and people will suffer as the war continues, but
Russians have endured far worse.
For Putin, defeat is not an option. He cannot cede to Ukraine the four
eastern provinces he has declared part of Russia. If he cannot be militarily
successful this year, he must retain control of positions in eastern and south-
ern Ukraine that provide future jumping-off points for renewed offensives to
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 Gradu-
ate School of Business as well as a professor of political science at Stanford. She
served as secretary of state from 2005 to 2009. Robert M. Gates was secretary of
defense from 2006 to 2011.

take the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, control the entire Donbas region,
and then move west. Eight years separated Russia’s seizure of Crimea and
the Russian invasion a year ago. Count on Putin to be patient to achieve his
destiny.
Meanwhile, although Ukraine’s response to the invasion has been heroic
and its military has performed brilliantly, the country’s economy is in a sham-
bles, millions of its people have fled, its infrastructure is being destroyed,
and much of its mineral
wealth, industrial capac-
ity, and agricultural land It was clear in 1914, 1941, and 2001
are under Russian con- that unprovoked aggression and
trol. Ukraine’s military attacks on the rule of law and the
capability and economy international order cannot be ignored.
now depend almost
entirely on lifelines from the West—primarily, the United States. Absent
another major Ukrainian breakthrough and success against Russian forces,
Western pressures on Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire will grow as months
of military stalemate pass. Under current circumstances, any negotiated
cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position to resume their
invasion whenever they are ready. That is unacceptable.
The only way to avoid such a scenario is for the United States and its
allies to urgently provide Ukraine with a dramatic increase in military
supplies and capability—sufficient to deter a renewed Russian offensive
and to enable Ukraine to push back Russian forces in the east and south.
Congress has provided enough money to pay for such reinforcement;
what is needed now are
decisions by the United
States and its allies It’s better to stop Putin now, before
to provide the Ukrai- more is demanded of the United
nians the additional States and NATO.
military equipment they
need—above all, mobile armor. The US agreement to provide Stryker and
Bradley armored vehicles is commendable, if overdue. American Abrams
heavy tanks, along with German Leopard tanks, have also been commit-
ted to fill this need. NATO members also should provide the Ukrainians
with longer-range missiles, advanced drones, significant ammunition
stocks (including artillery shells), more reconnaissance and surveillance
capability, and other equipment. These capabilities are needed in weeks,
not months.
Increas-
ingly, members
of Congress
and others in our
public discourse
ask, “Why should we
care? This is not our
fight.” But the United
States has learned

the hard way—in 1914, 1941, and 2001—that unprovoked aggression and
attacks on the rule of law and the international order cannot be ignored.
Eventually, our security was threatened, and we were pulled into conflict.
This time, the economies of the world—ours included—are already seeing
the inflationary impact and the drag on growth caused by Putin’s single-
minded aggression. It is better to stop him now, before more is demanded
of the United States and NATO as a whole.
We have a determined partner in Ukraine that is will-
ing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not
have to do so ourselves in the future.
H O O V E R D IGE ST • S p ring 2023 31

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech before Congress reminded us of
Winston Churchill’s plea in February 1941: “Give us the tools, and we will fin-
ish the job.” We agree with the Biden administration’s determination to avoid
direct confrontation with Russia. However, an emboldened Putin might not
give us that choice. The way to avoid confrontation with Russia in the future
is to help Ukraine push back the invader now. That is the lesson of history
that should guide us, and it lends urgency to the actions that must be taken—
before it is too late.
Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2023 Washington

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

the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan, edited by
Kaoru Ueda. Visit the interactive online exhibition
at https://fanningtheflames.hoover.org. To order the
book, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.
org.

RU SSIA A N D U K R A IN E
RUSSI A A ND UKRAINE
History as
Bludgeon
Russia’s history represents a mix of ideology, moral
squalor, and force. Hoover fellow Stephen Kotkin
traces the background of the war in Ukraine.
By Andrew Roberts
Andrew Roberts, Secrets of Statecraft: Stephen Kotkin is a world-class

historian and perhaps the foremost expert on the history of the Soviet Union
and Russia alive today. So that’s what we spoke about—Josef Stalin, Russian
history, the way it’s viewed in the West, and of course, Vladimir Putin and his
invasion of Ukraine.
Stephen, who taught you history? And when do you remember thinking
that you’d like to be a historian?
Stephen Kotkin: Well, that question is slightly involved, because I went to

university in the sciences. But I was unable to endure the sight of blood in
medical school and my medical career ended with very high grades but in
Stephen Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and
leads Hoover’s new “Global Futures: History, Statecraft, Systems” research team.
He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for
International Studies and the John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in History and In-
ternational Affairs (Emeritus) in the School of Public and International Affairs at
Princeton University. Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting
Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the
Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. He is the host of a Hoover Insti-
tution podcast, Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts.
my own vomit on the floor of the
operating room in the Univer-
sity of Rochester hospital as a
sophomore.
Roberts: Is that literally

true?
34 H O O VER D IGEST • Spr i n g 2023

Kotkin: Yes, it is.
Roberts: Wow.
Kotkin: I was in organic chemistry, did really well, and was admitted to a
molecular biology class which had a field work component at the hospital.
Then, at the end of my sophomore year, I was supposed to be admitted into
medical school in this special program. University of Rochester, where I
went for my undergraduate degree, had an admission to medical school
early. But the operation, which was a right carotid artery scrape because
we didn’t have Lipitor yet, and so to remove the plaque from the arter-
ies you actually had to open up the jugular and clean it out. I had never
seen anything like that before and I’ve never seen anything like that since
and I didn’t make it to the restroom. And my medical career ended, and I
majored in British poetry.
Roberts: Where there’s not that much blood. But you wound up writing the
biography of the man of blood, Josef Stalin.
Kotkin: I ended up double majoring in history and going to graduate school

for history rather than English, but not in Russian history.
Roberts: When did that come into your life?
Kotkin: That was my third year of the PhD program at Berkeley, when I was
kind of floundering for an adviser. I started in French history. Everyone had a
goatee and drank a lot of coffee. I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life.
Roberts: Neither have I actually, funny enough.
Kotkin: I don’t have facial hair and I’m also not favorably disposed towards
leftist revolution. So, I didn’t fit. As a result of which, I abandoned French
history for Hobsbawm history, but the adviser for Hobsbawm history, after
I had learned Czech in order to impress him, told me he doesn’t take PhD
students. So, that was a bit of a dilemma.
The short answer is Martin Malia, the great historian of intellectual his-
tory, was at Berkeley and I gravitated towards him and started learning Rus-
sian language, and then
Michel Foucault also had
“The belief in communist ideals was an influence on me, the
very pervasive and we did not take it French philosopher, who
seriously enough.” told me it would be inter-
esting to apply his ideas
to the study of Stalin. So, I ended up crazily beginning to learn Russian, third
year of the PhD program, instead of taking my exams, which I put off. I had a
crash course in Russian, and four years later I was an assistant professor of
Russian history at Princeton University.
Roberts: And Martin Malia, whom you mentioned, argued in his book The
Soviet Tragedy that because of the Soviet system’s need for political and eco-
nomic totalitarian control, it couldn’t tap the full reservoir of human poten-
tial regardless of the propaganda and ideology claiming that it could. How do
you feel that that theory has stood up in the past quarter century?
Kotkin: I think we’ve come to understand that totalitarianism, not in the

strawman version but in the sophisticated version, is a very powerful theory
and it’s also a very powerful analytical concept in our response to such
regimes. So, I think Malia won that debate.

Mostly what you see is a Friedrich/Brzezinski simplistic strawman version
of totalitarianism; you can smell the straw burning on the page as they are
getting ready to undo that theory. They portray it as simplistic and idiotic,
which it was, unfortunately, in their version, and then they think they’re done
with it. But Malia’s version, Jan Gross’s version especially, which came a little
bit later, was absolutely spectacular. And that’s the version that I believe I
helped advance and adhere to to this day.
EXPOSING TYRANNY
Roberts: Tell us about Paul Gregory’s Soviet archives workshop here at

Hoover. What did the opening of the Russian archives after the fall of com-
munism tell us about Stalin that we didn’t know already?
Kotkin: Well, Robert Conquest got most of this right. He was here at the
Hoover Institution for decades.
Roberts: Great man, great man.
Kotkin: He wrote the most important books in the Sixties. He later became
an adviser to Prime Minister Thatcher, as you know. He wrote poetry. Con-
quest got the system
more or less right. It’s
not like we got into the “Their oppression was extreme. And
archives and we discov- yet people, not all but many, in fact
ered “oh my word, it probably a majority, felt that they
turns out it’s a constitu- were building a new world.”
tional-rule-of-law order.
It turns out there’s separation of powers and freedoms and civil liberties and
protection of private property; we got it all wrong.” We discovered it was the
tyranny that Conquest and a few others like my adviser Martin Malia had
written about before the opening of the Soviet archives. Because here we had
the anticommunist Hoover archives put together by the emigration, which
are just spectacular. It’s still valuable to this day, even after the opening of the
Soviet Union.
I guess I would say some of the main things we learned have to do with
the belief in communist ideals that was very pervasive and we did not take
seriously enough. That includes the elite and it includes Stalin personally.
The communists turned out to be communists. Just like the Nazis were
Nazis. Just like the communist regime in China today means what it says. We
sometimes have a tendency to tone down, wish away deeply held ideological
beliefs that make us uncomfortable or that we don’t hold ourselves. That was
the main thing.
The other is how deep the moral squalor was at the same time. So, you
have these convictions, deeply held convictions on one side, and then you
have all of these means to enact those convictions that are more than squalor,
honestly. And you learn it and you see it, and still, it makes a very profound
impression on you.
Roberts: Give us an example of what you mean.
Kotkin: Well, they would go to a meeting and talk about social justice and
enacting social justice and ending slavery and wage slavery, as they called
it—meaning just the ability to hire people—destroying parliaments, which
of course means representatives of the people. They would go on in this vein,
and then they’d have a follow-up discussion about murdering this person and
murdering that person without due process, in the name of these very ideals.
And so you see them in their moral universe made up of both the convictions
and the moral squalor simultaneously, and it’s not a show. It’s not something
they’re acting. They actually are very ready, willing, and eager to put in prac-
tice the horrors that Conquest and others documented and that we know
even more about in the name of those very ideals.
Roberts: In 1995, you wrote Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization,

which exposed the realities of everyday life in the Soviet city of Magnitogorsk
in the 1930s. Was the life of ordinary people there as dreadful as one might
imagine it to have been?
Kotkin: It was. But they didn’t all think that. The paradox of the 1930s in the
rise of the Stalinist system was that the deprivation was very severe, their
oppression was extreme. And yet people, not all but many, in fact probably
a majority, felt that they were building a new world. A new world of peace,
justice, abundance. Despite the obvious deprivation. Despite the arbitrary
unjust oppression around them. They were willing to suspend, as it were, the
disbelief in the reality that they were seeing in order to believe in or hope for
this radiant future.
But remember, they were young. The Soviet Union was the youngest coun-
try in the world at the time, as far as major economies go. A huge proportion
of its population was under the age of twenty-five. Which is another reason
that confronting the Nazi land army proved to be a lot easier for the Soviets
than people understood. But these young people, instead of having mundane
lives, instead of waiting to climb the ladder forever in career terms, they

A “GREAT MAN” DOES EVIL: Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin gather for the 1945 Yalta Conference. Stephen Kot-
kin says of the Soviet leader: “Personalities are complex. Evil is human. And
Stalin was an enormous talent. That’s not to say I share his values, or I share
any admiration for his methods. But we cannot dismiss the fact that he was
a talented individual and recognized as such by all those closest to him in the
inner circle.” [UK National Archives]
were building this new world. So, you screw in a bolt or a rivet and it’s not
just a bolt or a rivet but it’s a strike against the international bourgeoisie. So,
this mundane activity suddenly becomes world-historical—and of course,
you’re bathed completely in all of the propaganda about who you are and
what you’re doing in building this new world. And despite everything they
saw going on around them, which could have led to doubts, many of them
believe all through the end of their life . . . Lev Kopelev is the best example.
Your listeners would enjoy his Education of a True Believer, which is probably
the single best book to understand the phenomenon of the rise of Stalinism
that I’ve described in Magnetic Mountain.
Kopelev was a Germanist, and forced into emigration like Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn, of course, came here to Hoover and then settled in Vermont.
Kopelev settled in Germany. He’s less well-known to the Anglo-American
sphere. But Kopelev’s Education of a True Believer charts this youthful accep-
tance, desire to believe, and participation in mass crimes, and then there’s
a regret later on in his life, while he’s an émigré writing his memoirs, but
truthfully writing about the fact that he did believe in this and did partici-
pate in it.
POWER AND VIOLENCE
Roberts: In September 1931, when Stalin discovered that his seventy-three-

year-old history teacher from seminary was in prison in Tiflis, he ordered
Beria to release him. Did Stalin’s sense of Russian and Georgian history come
from his reading in the Tiflis seminary? Before he discovered Marxism and
Leninism?
Kotkin: He discovered Marxism, Leninism, of course, at the seminary. So,

I would argue for simultaneity in his development. The seminary is clearly
enormously influential on him. He’s not allowed to go to university. There
are restrictions on people from the provinces, who can attend university and
other restrictions. He does make it to the seminary. He’s an excellent student.
He has some good teachers. He reads a lot of books, including eventually
underground or forbidden literature that circulates secretly among the stu-
dents. He doesn’t quite finish the seminary. Misses the final exams of his last
year. So, he actually didn’t graduate. And of course, he didn’t become a priest
or monk, as his mother lamented later on.
But nonetheless, what’s interesting about it is he began a process of
continual self-improvement where he got some formal education. Not a
small amount for someone in his time period and that region. Quite a lot of

education, relative to the rest of the population: an autodidact, teaching him-
self and acquiring a lifelong passion for books.
Roberts: You point out that both Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great had
far tougher early years than Stalin. Which czars did Stalin admire and why?
Kotkin: Stalin was about power. And the more power you accumulated, the
more power you exercised, especially on behalf of reasons of state and the
advance of Russian imperial power, the more he admired you. If you had
pangs of conscience, if you worried about arresting, let alone assassinating,
people, summarily executing them, he had less respect for you. So, the waf-
flers, those who hesitated, those who potentially set Russia back, bothered
him.
He loved the czars who were powerful and showed their teeth. So of
course, Ivan the Terrible. He had a fascination with Ivan all the way to the
end of his life. Peter the
Great, as you mentioned;
Alexander. Of course, “The communists turned out to be
Alexander I got to Paris, communists. Just like the Nazis were
as Stalin pointed out Nazis.”
when they congratulated
him when he alighted in Berlin in 1945. And we should remember that there
were monarchs or shahs of the Persian empire, of medieval Georgia. He was
very familiar with that history as well, and he admired many of those figures
who would be less well known to your listeners.
Roberts: Did he admire Catherine the Great for the extension of the empire
under her?
Kotkin: Yes, of course he did. He had a Marxist-Leninist worldview. So, he

felt that Catherine, like Peter, served the interests solely of the capitalist
class. So, he differentiated: his admiration for Peter or Catherine was always
limited by his class analysis.
Roberts: You write of Stalin having “an uncanny fusion of Marxist convic-
tions and great-power sensibilities, sociopathic tendencies, and exceptional
diligence and resolve.” How do you explain these seeming contradictions?
Kotkin: Most people are not flat characters, but they’re round characters, as
E. M. Forster once famously described characters in a good novel. Real life is
complex. Personalities are complex. Evil is human. And Stalin was an enor-
mous talent. That’s not to say I share his values, or I share any admiration for
his methods. But we cannot dismiss the fact that he was a talented individual
and recognized as such by all those closest to him in the inner circle.
Let’s remember he resigned half a dozen times in the 1920s, either orally
or in writing. And every single time, the rest of the leadership, the rest of the
people in the central committee, rose up and declined to accept his resigna-
tion. If they had perceived that he was a threat to them personally or that
he was incapable of carrying that state on his back, they would have gladly
accepted his resignation.
Stalin was a figure that we should not underestimate. Trotsky spent his
entire life, until Stalin had him assassinated, belittling Stalin from afar. And
too much of the Trotsky viewpoint on Stalin has entered the literature and
entered our consciousness: that Stalin could never have been an intellec-
tual of the class of Trotsky. He could never have written well or been smart
enough to have outperformed Trotsky. This critique, of course, is false.
THE REAL STALIN
Roberts: You write of the problem of addressing the role of a single indi-
vidual, even Stalin, in the gigantic sweep of history in the great debate over
the importance of great men and women in history, versus vast impersonal
forces, as T. S. Eliot put it. What does Stalin’s career tell us?
Kotkin: It’s not a prejudice to do something called “great man” history.

Not great in the sense of morally great, but great in the sense of enormous
leverage on the system. We know this from your work on Churchill or on
Napoleon. And one could mention many other people. So, it’s very important
to understand where that leverage comes from and to understand the agency
that they exercised in these colossal structures.
Roberts: You write of Stalin that he offers little help in getting to the bot-
tom of his character and decision making. In 1953, he was called the most
famous and at the same time the most unknown person in the world. How
does a historian like you go about getting to the real Stalin under those
circumstances?
Kotkin: Well, the real Stalin is his life work, which is this accumulation, an
exercise of power over life and death, over hundreds of millions of people. He
became Stalin in the process of acquiring that power and exercising it. He
didn’t become Stalin because of how he was treated by his mother and father
or by his teachers in school or by any other major events in his childhood. He
became Stalin because he was in a position of absolute power for decades in

STAYING THE COURSE: A poster shows Stalin shadowed by Lenin, an
image stressing a continuity of revolutionary goals. Kotkin points out, “We
sometimes have a tendency to tone down, wish away deeply held ideological
beliefs that make us uncomfortable or that we don’t hold ourselves.” [Public
domain]
a major country. And in a major country that had ambitions to be in the first
rank of powers but didn’t have the capabilities, necessarily, and resorted—as
they always do in Russia—to coercion to try to manage or make up the gap
with the West.
But if you’re talking about what we might call his innermost thoughts—
Did he have pangs of conscience? How did he understand the fact that he
was accusing all of these people of participating in treason and conspiracies
which on the face of it was just improbable?—that’s the Stalin that remains
enigmatic for us. Right?
Evidently, Stalin was persuaded of conspiracies that you and I would
dismiss out of hand, so we have to look at the world from his point of view,
less from ours. But even then, we have trouble because there’s so much of the
propaganda, both pro- and anti-Stalin, that got in the way. Few of his minions
survived to write about it. And of course, Stalin, unlike Hitler, never delivered
those recorded table talks.

A DELUSION THAT WILL NOT DIE
Roberts: In 2017, in the Wall Street Journal, you wrote, “Though communism
has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have
died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.”
You put the number of deaths from communism at sixty-five million people
between 1917 and 2017. Under those murderous circumstances, Stephen, why
are there still people in American, British, and European universities who
still propagate Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and various other
offshoots of this political philosophy?
Kotkin: Well, you’d have to ask them.
Roberts: What do you suspect?
Kotkin: I think here we would want to introduce the concept of perverse

and unintended consequences, which is also a synonym for history. People
believe that their intentions are pure, and that the outcome is necessary for
the survival of the human
race. And so, if you just
Stalin “loved the czars who were pow- try harder, if you just
erful and showed their teeth.” exert more, if you just do
it better the next time,
you’ll get to that paradise on earth that you didn’t get to the first time or the
second time, in the case of Mao. We have this problem where too much is put
on intentions and not enough is put on how those intentions play out in the
real world.
So, there’s this eternal appeal to “let’s get another try, let’s do it better the
next time,” rather than “let’s examine the perverse and unintended con-
sequences.” The road to hell is paved with the best intentions. I think that
explains a lot of it.
We have injustices. There were injustices in czarist Russia. That’s why
Stalin joined the underground. He spent his entire adult life through the
age of thirty-nine without a profession, without a legal job, in exile, in
prison, escaping from exile in prison, being harassed and worse by the
czar’s secret police, because there were injustices in czarist Russia and
they were real and he dedicated his life to overcoming those injustices.
The problem, of course, is that the system he presided over was worse.
And the injustices, instead of being transcended, were deepened and made
more pervasive. So Stalin is the ultimate example of perverse and unin-
tended consequences.

Roberts: Which brings us, of course, to the modern totalitarians, to Vladimir
Putin and President Xi. In Putin we see a leader who uses history a good deal
to justify his actions, especially with the invasion of Ukraine. How good a
historian is he?
Kotkin: He’s right that there are tendentious interpretations which inflict
upon Russian interests some distortions. So, there’s some truth to his
critique about the 1930s leading to World War II, about the role of Poland
in some of the 1930s machinations. There is a small kernel of truth in some
of what Putin is saying. But of course, the larger story is his own distortions
and manipulations on behalf of the criminal war that he unleashed against
Ukraine beginning in 2014 and then expanded in February 2022.
However, he’s taught us a lesson here. Which is to say, we need to know
and use our history well, because others will use it if we don’t. And if we
don’t know the history that he’s manipulating, we won’t understand that he is
manipulating that history.
Xi Jinping has learned that lesson as well, but in the Putin sense of the
term. Xi Jinping certainly is manipulating history like Putin in the sense that
Deng Xiaoping is almost, not quite but almost, being erased from Chinese
history. Mao remains elevated because without Mao, you wouldn’t have that
system. And Xi’s elevation of himself on a level with Mao right before our
eyes should . . . let’s put it this way, we should understand the connection
between those manipulations of history and his alteration of the status quo in
East Asia right now.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Adapted from
Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts, a Hoover Institution pod-
cast. © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Uni-
versity.
Available 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 (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
Think the
Unthinkable
Why would Moscow use a tactical nuclear
weapon? Not to terrorize Ukraine. To terrorize us.
By Jakub Grygiel
M
oscow regularly engages in
nuclear saber rattling, and Key points
its battlefield problems in » The principal effect
sought by Russia: to dem-
Ukraine have only increased
onstrate to the Western
the tempo and volume of Russian rhetorical alliance Moscow’s willing-
reliance on nuclear weapons. Using nuclear ness to use the “absolute
weapon.”
weapons, even on a very limited, tactical
» The outcome of any use
level, would not be cost-free. The global of nuclear weapons would
consequences in particular may be counter- be complex, helping Vladi-
mir Putin’s cause in some
productive for Russia. areas and weakening it in
Even though tactical nuclear weapons are others.
meant to alter the dynamics on the battle- » Putin may even see the
use of nuclear weapons as
field—in this case, in Ukraine—their use by
a desperate bid for personal
Russia would target the West as the primary self-preservation.
audience. The tactical target is Ukraine and
Jakub Grygiel is a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a

senior adviser at the Marathon Initiative, and an associate professor of politics at
the Catholic University of America. His latest book is Return of the Barbarians:
Confronting Non-State Actors from Ancient Rome to the Present (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2018).

its forces, but the strategic audience is the West. Russia could launch a tacti-
cal nuclear weapon to block a Ukrainian offensive, to destroy an urban cen-
ter, or even to simply signal the willingness of further escalation by explod-
ing it over an uninhabited area far from the front lines. Regardless of the
immediate target, the principal effect sought would be to demonstrate to the
Western alliance that Russia was willing to use the “absolute weapon,” break-
ing an alleged international taboo, and above all threatening to escalate a
local war on the eastern
steppes of Europe into
a wider conflagration Instead of unifying Europe, a Russian
with devastating conse- use of nuclear weapons would deep-
quences for the whole en the divergent strategic postures
continent, if not more. across the continent.
The purpose of using
nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be to terrorize the West, compelling it
through the fear of further nuclear escalation to stop its military backing of
Kyiv. Russian leader Vladimir Putin may be calculating that because of this
fear, the West would cease the cautious but so far consistent and very effec-
tive logistical support of Ukrainian forces, thus letting Russian manpower
and artillery dominate the battlefield.
SHAKEN EUROPE
Russia could be partially correct in such an assessment because the immedi-
ate benefit would likely be a disintegration of the Western unity in support of
Kyiv. In some European capitals (Berlin, Paris, Rome), while criticizing Putin
for the use of nuclear weapons, a lot of voices on every side of the political
spectrum would call for the end of hostilities, putting enormous pressure on
Ukraine to end its military operations and to acquiesce to a diplomatic deal
favorable to Moscow.
Furthermore, there would be a growing chorus of European critics blam-
ing Russia’s use of nuclear weapons on the strongly pro-Ukrainian positions
of countries like Poland and the United States that are the primary sources
of arms for Kyiv, and thus that would be seen as responsible for the escala-
tion of violence. Such a posture would satisfy two broad strategic approaches
always present in Western capitals: one is the continued search for “strategic
autonomy” (the French version) or more simply a deep skepticism toward the
United States; and second is the dislike of Poland and other Central European
countries that are seen in Germany and Italy as overly anti-Russian and thus
an obstacle to efforts to reach some sort of grand reconciliation with Moscow.
It is possible that the Western European response would differ if the Rus-
sians used a nuclear weapon over a Ukrainian city, causing thousands, or
tens of thousands, of civilian casualties (as opposed, for instance, to using
it on a sparsely populated battlefield). In that case, there might be a popu-
lar moral opprobrium,
spurred by decades of
A Russian use of nuclear weapons anti-nuclear movements.
would increase the risk of dragging The outcome, however,
Beijing and Tehran into a wider, might be not a firmer pos-
potentially even nuclear, conflict. ture against Russia but
instead a more generic
call for some version of “nuclear zero,” targeting equally Russia and the
United States (especially, again, in Germany and Italy, where the anti-nuclear
movements have been most successful). In either case, the end result would
be that American nuclear presence in Europe (i.e., through nuclear sharing)
would be politically more difficult.
The response to a Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons would likely
be very different in Central Europe. Both because of a heightened sense of
threat and because of Western European opposition to nuclear weapons,
Poland would renew its requests to participate in nuclear sharing and to
store tactical nuclear warheads on its territory. Moreover, as the pacifist
pressures grew in Berlin, Central European capitals would increase their
demands that Germany use its financial resources to aid them in defensive
efforts as well as in helping another, likely larger, wave of Ukrainian refugees.
This would exacerbate an already tense intra-European relationship.
In brief, instead of catalyzing a unified European response, a Russian
use of nuclear weapons would deepen the divergent strategic postures in
Europe—overall, a mildly positive outcome for Moscow, especially if the anti-
nuclear, pacifist factions won the argument in Western European capitals.
WHAT DOES PUTIN THINK?

But the picture is more mixed in the rest of the world. A Russian use of
nuclear weapons would in fact be likely to result in much weaker support for
Moscow from China and Iran (as well as states, such as India, that are sitting
on the sidelines). These two states have in practice backed Russia, includ-
ing by supplying it with weapons such as Iranian drones and North Korean
artillery shells, calculating that a Russian victory in Ukraine would continue
to upend the existing international order. Conversely, they reckon that a Rus-
sian defeat would strengthen the West and allow the United States to focus

exclusively on Asia. But a Russian use of nuclear weapons would elevate the
risk of dragging Beijing and Tehran into a wider, potentially even nuclear,
war that could directly affect their interests and their territories.
In other words, these states fear entrapment by Russia and consequently
would detach themselves from Moscow the moment it used a nuclear
weapon.
Obviously, Putin may make a different calculation, leading him to use
nuclear weapons in Ukraine. He may privilege a divided West over Chinese
support. Or he may think
that his domestic base
demands a punishing act The tactical target is Ukraine and its
against Ukraine, a nation forces, but the strategic audience is
that has been presented the West.
to Russians as inferior,
perhaps nonexistent, and certainly full of fascists. Or, in an act of despera-
tion, he may order a nuclear attack in Ukraine for personal self-preservation,
to forestall a military loss of a “special military operation” that was supposed
to be short and glorious. But in the end, the effects would likely be detrimen-
tal to Russia—both for its narrow objective of dominating Ukraine and for
the wider goal of restoring Russian global grandeur.
Subscribe to the online Hoover Institution journal Strategika (hoover.org/

publications/strategika) for analysis of issues of national security in light
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Sergeyevich Olferieff, edited by Gary Hamburg,
translated by Tanya Alexandra Cameron. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
Russians’ Worst
Enemy
Vladimir Putin has wrecked his nation’s prestige,
its military, and its hopes.
By Timothy Garton Ash
T
he time has come to ask whether,
objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin Key points
is an agent of American imperialism. » Since the invasion
For no American has ever done half of Ukraine, hostility to-
ward neoimperial Rus-
as much damage to what Putin calls the “Russian
sia has erupted among
world” as the Russian leader himself has. large numbers of people
This thought came to me recently when I was in the former Soviet
states.
in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrai-
» The idea of a “Russian
nians made refugees in their own country by world” was revived in
Putin’s war. “I was a Russian speaker until 24 the 1990s as a soft-pow-
er initiative. Vladimir
February,” said Adeline, an art student from the
Putin weaponized it.
now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka,
» Russian culture is
referencing the date of Russia’s full-scale inva- a collateral victim of
sion last year. Russia has failed to take over Putin’s self-devouring
cannibalism.
Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out
to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told
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.

me they find “the spirit of freedom” in Ukrainian literature, but of subservi-
ence to power in Russian literature.
Tetiana, a refugee from the ruthlessly bombed and destroyed city of Mari-
upol, had suffered without heat, light, or water in a cellar under constant
bombardment, seen her best friend killed by a Russian missile, and then had
a traumatic odyssey of escape. Tetiana not only speaks much better Russian
than Ukrainian; her mother is actually from Russia, as are her parents-in-
law. The Russian president would consider her a Russian. So I asked her for
her message to Putin. She replied that she would like to kill him.
Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not
just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state,
but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv Interna-
tional Institute of Sociology shows that some 80 percent of Ukrainians had a
positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2 per-
cent. A university lecturer told me that his students now write “russia” with
a small initial letter. “I don’t correct them.”
This may be unsurprising in Ukraine, a country suffering from a Russian
war that is now primarily directed against the civilian population. But the
same thing is happening across much of the territory of the former Russian
(and subsequently Soviet) empire—which, since the early 2000s, Moscow
has tried to reimagine as the russkiy mir, or Russian world.
In Georgia, a strong resentment of neoimperial Russia is more than
understandable, since Russia has occupied roughly a fifth of the country’s
sovereign territory (in Abkhazia and South Ossetia) since 2008. But after the
invasion of Ukraine, that
hostility has enveloped
almost all Russians. Those who justify their wars in terms
Ironically enough, this of culture will find their culture treat-
impacts the many tens ed as an enemy.
of thousands of Russians
who have fled to Georgia precisely to avoid being conscripted into fighting
in Putin’s war against Ukraine. Georgians ask: why don’t you protest back
home? Or as one banner put it, “Putin is killing people in Ukraine while Rus-
sians eat khachapuri in Georgia.” (Khachapuri is the distinctive Georgian
cheese bread.)
The revulsion is also found in central Asian states that still have very close
ties to Moscow. On YouTube, you can watch a magnificent excoriation of the
bullying Russian ambassador to Kazakhstan, Alexey Borodavkin, delivered in
fluent Russian by the Kazakh journalist Arman Shuraev. “Russophobia is all
that you have achieved with your stupid actions,” he says. If Russia invades
Kazakhstan as it has Ukraine, “the entire Kazakh steppe will be strewn with
the corpses of your conscripts. . . . You are idiots. You are cannibals who eat
themselves.”
“Borodavkin,” he concludes, directly addressing the ambassador, “if you
want to see Nazis and fascists in Kazakhstan, look in the mirror and you will
see the main Nazi and fascist. Glory to Ukraine! Forward Kazakhstan!”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24,
2022, the Ukrainian journalist Olha Vorozhbyt tried to explain to an Indian
public what was going
on. “Could you imagine
Wherever I turned, there was total a Britain that claims
rejection not just of the Russian India is in its empire?”
dictator, or of the Russian state, but she wrote in the Indian
of everything and almost everyone Express. “That is what
Russia is doing now.” One
Russian.
can extend the analogy.
Imagine that a revanchist, militarist British dictatorship instrumentalized
the cultural notion of an “English-speaking world” to justify its reinvasion of
India. That’s exactly what Putin has done.
The notion of russkiy mir was revived and repackaged in the late 1990s as
a kind of Russian soft-power initiative (mir means peace as well as world).
In 2007, a Russkiy Mir Foundation was created by presidential decree. This
was presented as a Russian counterpart to the British Council or Germany’s
Goethe-Institut, but the concept was then weaponized by Putin to justify
his war of recolonization in Ukraine. He explicitly mentioned the term in a
speech justifying the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The entirely predictable result: revulsion against his recolonization wars
has extended to the whole broader notion of a Russian-speaking world. Obvi-
ously, a comparison with the English-speaking world points up big differenc-
es as well. Britain’s empire was overseas, Russia’s a contiguous land empire.
The ideology of a Russian world was always closely associated with the
Russian imperial project, the Russian Orthodox Church (now headed by the
ecclesiastical warmonger Patriarch Kirill), and autocracy. But if Britain had
reinvaded India, the British Council wouldn’t be very popular either. Those
who justify their wars in terms of culture will find their culture treated as an
enemy.
Russian culture is thus a collateral victim of Putin’s self-devouring canni-
balism. There was an alternative future in which Russian-speaking culture,

like today’s English-speaking culture, might have become multiculturally
enriched by authors and artists from all its former colonies. What would con-
temporary English-language literature be without authors from India, Africa,
and Oceania? And, after all, fine contemporary Ukrainian writers such as
Andrey Kurkov write—or should I say wrote?—in Russian.
But we must keep our eyes on the main tragedy. Putin is trying to recover
parts of the Russian empire by brute force and terror. He recently boasted
that the Azov Sea has become an internal Russian sea, adding that even
Peter the Great “had still to fight to gain access to [it].” About fourteen mil-
lion Ukrainians, a staggering one-third of the country’s population, have been
made homeless. Europe has seen nothing like this since 1945.
Even in Lviv, in the far west of Ukraine, I encountered frequent multi-hour
power cuts, because Russia has destroyed about 50 percent of the country’s
energy infrastructure. What does Ukraine need most? Every single person
I spoke to gave the same answer: weapons, weapons, weapons. Give us the
tools, they say, and we will finish the job. And so we should.
In the end, Vladimir Putin will go down in history not merely as the man
who failed to restore the Russian empire, but as the destroyer of the Russian
world.
Reprinted from the Guardian (UK). © 2023 Timothy Garton Ash.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is I Saw the

Angel of Death: Experiences of Polish Jews Deported
to the USSR during World War II, edited by Maciej
Siekierski and Feliks Tych. To order, call (800) 888-
Atrocity Foretold
Robert Conquest’s 1986 book Harvest of Sorrow
proved entirely correct about Russia’s cruel
exploitation of Ukraine in the 1930s—behavior
Russia is now repeating. What’s different now is
Ukraine. This time it will not submit.
By Josef Joffe
T
rigger warning: Robert Conquest’s 1986 book, Harvest of Sor-
row, will shock and depress. The book is about the Ukrainian
“Holodomor,” Stalin’s genocide-by-starvation in the early 1930s,
which claimed the lives of some five million, at the low end, and
ten million, according to the highest estimate. Though published a generation
ago, this meticulously researched work by the late Hoover fellow is as relevant
(and heartbreaking) today as we watch Vladimir Putin’s pitiless war against
Ukrainian cities and civilians. The cruise missiles are new, the purpose is the
same: breaking the country’s will to resist the Russian Behemoth next door.
An ancient poem sets the tone of Harvest:
The black earth

Was sown with bones
And watered with blood
For a harvest of sorrow
On the land of Rus.
Josef Joffe is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a mem-
ber of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary
Conflict. He serves on the editorial council of Die Zeit in Hamburg and teaches in-
ternational politics and political theory at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies.

ECHOES: A pro-Ukraine protest sign in London draws a parallel between
Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine and the famine-ravaged Soviet years. The
late Hoover fellow Robert Conquest wrote that millions of Ukrainians starved
in the service of Soviet revolutionary orders—and that cultural and physical
violence continued even afterward. [Alisdare Hickson—Creative Commons]
(Rus was not “Russia,” but the multiethnic creation of invading Norsemen.)
Now listen to Lenin: “The interests of socialism are above the right of
nations to self-determination.” Cut the “socialism” and you can hear Putin.
After centuries of revolt against voracious neighbors, Ukraine was at last
subdued for good by the Soviets in 1920. Conquest notes that the nation “was
the first East-European state to be successfully taken over by the Kremlin.”
Ukraine was not the only victim of oppression across the Russian empire,
yet it paid the highest price of Stalin’s murderous campaign against the
kulaks, the landholding peasantry. As a 1934 Russian novel had it, “Not one
H O O V ER D IG E S T • S p ring 2023 55
of them was guilty of anything, but they belonged to a class that was guilty of
everything.”
So was the nation as such. The forcible collectivization of agriculture, an
ukase proclaimed, was to destroy the “social base of Ukrainian nationalism—
the individual landhold-
ings.” In Europe’s “bread-
The cruise missiles are new, but the basket” there was food
purpose is the same: breaking the aplenty, but grain was
country’s will to resist the Russian piled up in the open to
Behemoth. rot. Desperate Ukrainians
who gleaned the fields or
dug up potatoes were shot. An eyewitness wrote, “The most terrifying sights
were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdo-
mens. . . . Everywhere, we found men and women lying prone, their faces and
bellies bloated.” According to the Bolsheviks, it was not the systematic terror
that caused the Great Famine, but kulak sabotage of the harvest.
Conquest drew a gruesome parallel to Bergen-Belsen, with “well-fed police
and party units” supervising the terror, which claimed the lives of one-quar-
ter of the rural population. Those still alive were so weakened that they could
not bury their family members, Conquest wrote. Meanwhile, Ukrainian grain
was being exported abroad. Fast-forward to today: the Wall Street Journal
reports, “Vessels linked to Russia’s largest grain trader shipped thousands of
tons of stolen Ukrainian grain to global buyers, using a sophisticated system
of feeder vessels and floating cranes.”
NOT JUST DEATH—ERASURE

To kill was not enough. During the Great Famine, Russian peasants were
moved into Ukraine’s empty villages—colonization by Russification. Ukrai-
nians who survived were
expelled and resettled
“In our days,” writes German author throughout the vast
Christine Brinck, “Ukraine has a reaches of the Soviet
chance.” Union. Today, Russians
are being moved into
the southeastern part of Ukraine annexed by Moscow. According to press
reports, thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted to Russia,
where they will be taught to become upstanding Russian citizens.
Back then, Ukrainian national culture was wiped out as well. Academics,
theater directors, and writers were fired or shot. Today, Russia is destroying

LIFE AND DEATH: Ukrainians gather last November to commemorate the
Holodomor, the 1932–33 famine induced by Soviet leaders that led to perhaps
ten million deaths. The forcible collectivization of agriculture aimed to destroy
the “social base of Ukrainian nationalism.” [Lypovetsk Territorial Community]
memory, tearing down monuments about the Holodomor in conquered cities.

To invoke this term was counterrevolutionary treason in the Soviet Union.
Today, Russians end up in jail when referring to “war” in Ukraine. The cor-
rect designation is “special military operation.” Falsification never stops. Was
the Holodomor genocide, the famine Soviet-made? The Great Soviet Encyclo-
pedia defines “genocide” as “offshoot of decaying imperialism.”
In 1946, the USSR’s All-Union Central Committee passed a resolution stat-
ing that “in the fields of science and literature,” there had been attempts by
“hostile bourgeois ideology to reinstate Ukrainian nationalist concepts.” Nor
were the Bolsheviks the first to shred Ukrainian nationhood. In 1863, during
the reign of Alexander II, an edict asserted that there was no such thing as a
“Ukrainian language”—it was just a “dialect.” Ukrainian books were prohib-
ited, schools and publishing houses were closed.
Written a generation ago, Conquest’s magnificent book curdles the mind,
but it sets the stage for our time by reaching back ninety years. Today, Putin
H O O V E R DIGE ST • S p ring 2023 57

claims that no civilians are being attacked. If the facts can’t be denied, they
are reduced to unfortunate accidents. Back then, one politruk (political
officer) was at least brutally honest about the Holodomor: “It was a fight
between life and death.” The famine had to “show them who was boss.” The
purpose then was “de-Ukrainianization”; today the watchword is “de-Nazifi-
cation” to pretty up naked imperialism.
WHAT HAS CHANGED

“Essentialism,” the idea that a nation’s past is destiny—this is how the Rus-
sians were, this is how they will be—is of course nonsense. How to explain
that the two most rapacious nations of the twentieth century—Germany and
Japan—have renounced
aggression? Yet avoiding
As a 1934 Russian novel had it, “Not essentialism does not
one of them was guilty of anything, eliminate all continuities,
in this case between
but they belonged to a class that was
Stalin and Putin. To
guilty of everything.”
understand Putin’s rape
of Ukraine, read Harvest of Sorrow—a story of ruthlessness, mendacity, and
enslavement. It is Stalin minus Das Kapital. Sometimes, history does repeat
itself—not as a “farce,” as Marx had it in The Eighteenth Brumaire, but as
cruelty and cynicism.
In the 1930s, the world did not pay attention. Today, the West imposes ever
harsher sanctions on Russia, while helping Kyiv with sophisticated weap-
ons and billions in cash. “In our days,” writes the German author Christine
Brinck in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, “Ukraine has a chance, which it never had
during the Holodomor.”
Reprinted by permission of American Purpose. © 2023 American Pur-

pose. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Russia

and Its Islamic World: From the Mongol Conquest to
the Syrian Military Intervention, by Robert Service. To
org.

C HIN A
C HI N A
China after Mao

The Communist leaders of China promised the
country would rise peacefully. Hoover fellow
Frank Dikötter analyzes the long march of wishful
thinking that led the West to believe them.
By Michael R. Auslin
Michael R. Auslin, The Pacific Century: Welcome to The Pacific Century,

a Hoover Institution podcast on China, America, and the struggle for the
twenty-first century. I am really thrilled and honored to be joined by my
colleague Frank Dikötter. Frank is the chair professor of humanities at
the University of Hong Kong and, of course, a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He was professor of modern history of China at the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, received his PhD from the
University of London, and has written and published a dozen books that truly
have changed the way we look at China. His “People’s Trilogy” includes Mao’s
Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, which won
the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. It was also the book of
the year by the Economist, the Independent, the Sunday Times, the London
Frank Dikötter is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the chair profes-
sor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His latest book is China after
Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). Michael R.
Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary
Asia at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of Asia’s New Geopolitics: Es-
says 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). Auslin also participates in Hoover re-
search teams studying military history, the Middle East, Taiwan, China, and the
Indo-Pacific.
Evening Standard—and I could keep going. We are here to talk with Frank
about his brand-new book, China after Mao: The Rise of a Superpower.
There is obviously an enormous amount that has been going on in China,
and an enormous amount of attention being paid to China. But let me start
with a funeral—the funeral of Jiang Zemin. Those who read China After Mao
might come away thinking that the title could just as easily have been “China,
Thanks to Jiang.” Is that a fair assessment?
Frank Dikötter: Well, I am not sure we should have paid more attention
to his passing. [Jiang Zemin] was a dictator, to put it in a nutshell. He was
not exactly a Mr. Democracy. He was a ruthless, devoted Marxist-Leninist.
But I think a great deal
of attention has been
“Jiang Zemin is a committed Marxist- given to Deng Xiaoping,
Leninist. He adheres to the Marxist so-called architect of
principle that the means of produc- China’s reform—which is
tion should belong to the state.” a complete misnomer, of
course—and less to Jiang
Zemin, who seemed sort of an intermediary figure. But he really is the key
person who made the China we know today, for a great many reasons.
It’s a very long list. But first of all, he is put in charge after some two
hundred tanks and a hundred thousand soldiers converge on Beijing to crush
the population in 1989. And he is the one who right away in the summer of
1989 revised the notion of “peaceful evolution.” Now, what is peaceful evolu-
tion? You, as an American, may remember a man called John Foster Dulles;
he was secretary of state. He came up with the notion in 1957. It meant that
the United States and other international institutions like the International
Monetary Fund should help satellite states of the Soviet Union, like Poland
and Hungary, in the hope that they would then somehow peacefully evolve
with economic form toward a democratic model.
On the fourth of June, 1989, the democracy movement was crushed in
Beijing. But on that very same day, in Poland, for the first time under a red
flag, the population voted a Communist Party out of power at the ballot box.
In other words, Poland became a democracy. Hungary followed very soon
afterwards.
This is what horrified the leadership, and Jiang Zemin in particular. To
them, this was a perfect illustration of what would happen if you weren’t
strong enough to resist this attempt by the so-called imperialist camp to infil-
trate and subvert power through the concept of peaceful evolution. So, that

became a top item on his agenda. And it remained that all the way through
his ten years in power, and is with us to this very day.
So, every time you have, in the 1990s, someone like Bill Clinton, Kevin
Rudd, or George Bush say that backed with economic reform, there will be a
democratic position in China, they are really offering Jiang Zemin and others
all the evidence they need that the imperialists are very serious about under-
mining and overthrowing them.
But it goes a lot further than that. The accession to the World Trade
Organization in 2001 is absolutely crucial. Not everybody understands what
happened. In effect, Jiang Zemin and others, Zhu Rongji, made pledges and
promises about how the country, once it joined the WTO, would follow the
rule of law, would have greater transparency in governance, would reform
state enterprises, et cetera. None of that, of course, ever happened. But it
sounded so good that the WTO allowed China to join without making its capi-
tal account convertible, without reforming its state enterprises, and without
making its exchange rate flexible.
From that point onwards, the trade deficit balloons, not just with the
United States, but also with Mexico. In fact, the entire WTO camp. Not
even Bangladesh is able to compete in the production of garments. Why?
Well, because Jiang Zemin is a committed Marxist-Leninist. Like all other
such leaders, he really
adheres to the Marxist
principle that the means “Xi Jinping is a difference of degree,
of production should not of kind.”
belong to the state. That
is what was accomplished by Mao after 1949—to take, through great violence,
the land from the farmers, the banks from the bankers, the shops from the
shopkeepers, and place it all in the hands of the state. So, joining the WTO is
the point where China starts developing very rapidly economically.
And there is so much more with Jiang Zemin, such as the attempt around
2000 to make sure that every private enterprise has a party committee. In
other words, make sure that the private sector is not really private anymore.
As far as I am concerned, from onwards of roughly 2000 the whole distinc-
tion between so-called private and so-called public becomes somewhat
academic.
Auslin: Just so that we’re all clear, in your view, the West—Washington—
really fundamentally misunderstood the concept of “reform and opening
up” that we attribute to Deng. And then followed by Jiang, who we think
was essentially continuing it, until Xi Jinping decided to clamp down on
things. This is a misreading of history. Did we just get the big narrative
wrong?
Dikötter: Yes. Well, you got pretty much everything wrong. What is impor-
tant is to understand this central role that Jiang had in shaping the China

we know today. And from an even broader
perspective, what matters is to understand that
Xi Jinping merely continues what has been put in
place by his predecessors. Not only Jiang Zemin,
but Jiang Zemin mainly. Xi Jinping is a difference of
degree, not of kind.

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT XI
Auslin: There is a view that’s increasingly popular in Washington, that our

problems with China can be summed up in two words: Xi Jinping. And if Xi
Jinping goes, for whatever reason, things will go back to normal. Meaning,
a normal where we know how to deal with the Communist Party. We have
worked with these guys for fifty years. And things will get stable. That is one
view.
There is another view, that what some call hard authoritarianism really
started in 2008 or so. Again, as a complete break with that Deng/Jiang
period. Both of those assessments just don’t match up with the evidence that
you have seen, correct?
Dikötter: Yes, it is all just complete and utter nonsense. One hears a great
deal of nonsense when it comes to China. I am not sure which aspect of Deng
seems cuddly, you know. Is it when he has one campaign after the other
against foreign cultures,
spiritual pollution, and
“They are continuing the Cultural bourgeois liberalization?
Revolution but in a very different Or is it when he sends in
guise, in a very different way.” tanks to crush his own
people? So, Jiang Zemin:
same story. Summer of 1989, peaceful evolution becomes a determined target
for him. In 1999, after the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, he
points out that the Americans hate the People’s Republic of China. And he
says to the standing committee that we must reinforce ourselves economi-
cally and militarily. But we must pretend that we are still friends. Join the
WTO but don’t yield to their demands.
When you want to understand the United States of America, it is gener-
ally a good idea to read the Constitution. And equally, it is a good idea to read
the constitution of the People’s Republic of China. In there are four cardinal
principles which were articulated by Deng Xiaoping and enshrined in the
constitution in 1982.
What are they? Uphold the socialist path—stick to a socialist economy,
which we have got to this very day. Uphold the leadership of the Com-
munist Party, which we also have to this day. Uphold the dictatorship of
the proletariat. And four, uphold Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong
Thought.
I think you could reduce those to two words: Marxism, Leninism. This is
the constitution. And every leader repeats the fundamental importance of

those four cardinal principles, year in, year out. The last time I heard them it
was from Xi Jinping, in October 2022, at the Twentieth Party Congress.
These are committed Marxist-Leninists. There is no going back. If Xi
Jinping dies of a heart attack tomorrow morning, it will be just another one.
You need something much more thorough for this machine to move. This
machine has gone through great trouble, including great violence, to acquire
the means of production that I mentioned earlier. And it has a track record,
which is not exactly an outstanding one, when it comes to embracing free-
dom and liberty. It is not about to abandon what it has acquired and consoli-
dated over some sixty to seventy years.
Auslin: Why do you think we deceived ourselves?
Dikötter: I think it would be fair to say that it is hardly a misconception par-

ticular to the United States. The Germans, the Canadians, the Australians,
just to name a few countries, were just about as deluded. I think at heart it is
wishful thinking, but also a profound misconception, which is slightly racist
if you do not mind me
using the term. When we
say China, what comes China’s view: “We must pretend that
to mind frequently is the we are still friends. Join the WTO but
notion of culture, civiliza- don’t yield to their demands.”
tion, tradition. When,
in fact, what we are talking about with the People’s Republic of China is not
Chinese culture; it is an organization called the Communist Party of China.
And its date of birth is really 1917, with the Bolshevik Revolution of Lenin. So,
that is what you need to study. But all too frequently, the idea is that Chinese
communists are Chinese. They are not really communists.
The Americans make this mistake on numerous occasions. Let me give you
three examples.
Before 1949, when Stalin helps Mao Zedong transform his ragtag army
of guerrilla fighters into a formidable fighting machine during the civil war,
until the red flag goes up over the Forbidden City, the State Department con-
tinues to describe Mao and the communists as merely agrarian reformers.
Far more appealing, in fact, than the Nationalists and Chiang Kai-shek.
Then, Kissinger and Nixon, the rapprochement in 1972. Again, “this is not
a communist culture, this is a Confucian culture.” The idea that this is some
sort of Confucian tradition is, of course, completely bonkers. The extent to
which Kissinger fooled himself or was fooled can be seen in an anecdote,
when he asked Zhou Enlai what he thought of the French Revolution. As
you know, Zhou Enlai said, “It is too soon to say.” This was the moment
where Kissinger realized that the Chinese think in terms of centuries. But, of
course, Zhou Enlai had in mind the French student movement of 1968.
Auslin: People have lived on that anecdote for a half century now.
Dikötter: Yes, it is a good one.

The third example is Bill Clinton, 1994. Same story: Chinese communists
are not really communists, and if we help them economically, they will peace-
fully evolve towards a democracy.
Auslin: Let me ask you about that point. Were they really worried about a
counterrevolution? Were they really worried that this liberalization you have
mentioned—Bill Clinton,
among many others—that
“These are committed Marxist-
this peaceful evolution
Leninists. There is no going back. If Xi would be successful?
Jinping dies of a heart attack tomor- Were they that insecure
row morning, it will be just another or that worried about
one.” their own fragility?
Dikötter: No. You do not understand what revolution is. Chairman Mao said
it very clearly: a mere spark will ignite the prairie. In other words, revolution
always starts somewhere in a dark corner where you do not expect it.
Auslin: OK.
Dikötter: The slightest hint of change must be nipped in the bud. The mer-
est hint of something that might undermine the monopoly of power must be
resisted at all costs.
“SO MUCH INCOMPREHENSION”
Auslin: We hear it a lot that Mikhail Gorbachev, who just passed away, and
the unraveling and fall of the Soviet Union have been an object lesson for the
Chinese Communist Party on what not to do. Is that correct? Do they really
focus on the Soviet Union and say, look, they let in McDonald’s, they let in
this idea that the people will have a voice, and they lost control of everything?
Dikötter: No, I do not think so. It is appealing. I am not saying that the
implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not have great repercussions in the
People’s Republic of China. Until then, the slogan was “only socialism can
save China.” And the moment the Soviet Union implodes, the slogan becomes

“only China can save socialism.” So, there is a change. But China has done all
it can to fight what is referred to as spiritual pollution, foreign things, foreign
ideas. The key architect of this, the man who understood exactly what Dulles
was saying in 1957, the one who understood the danger of the notion of peace-
ful evolution, is Mao Zedong himself. And part of the Cultural Revolution is,
of course, to save communist, proletarian ideology from capitalist, bourgeois
ideas that might lead to bourgeois evolution.
So, to some extent, you could say Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Xi
Jinping are building on that concern that turned into a key component of the
Cultural Revolution. They are continuing the Cultural Revolution but in a
very different guise, in a very different way.
Auslin: Was there another path that could have been taken in the 1980s?
Dikötter: What is this different path, and who, and how? How many leaders
in the 1980s indicated some sort of preference toward separation of powers?
I cannot find anyone.
Zhao Ziyang made it
“I am not sure which aspect of Deng
crystal clear in Red Flag
seems cuddly.”
that there would never
be separation of powers. And there would never be a parliamentary system,
as they have in the imperialist camp.
In 1987, Zhao makes an uncanny prediction. He says that in twenty or
thirty years, when we will have increased the standard of living, ordinary
people will be convinced of the superiority of socialism. And then we will
decrease the scope of bourgeois liberalization even further. That is his vision.
That is pretty much where we are today.
If you tell me that Zhao Ziyang, after 1989, when he was placed under
house arrest, changed his mind, I would say, yes, he did. Absolutely. A good
thing too.
Auslin: How do you assess where the United States and some of the Europe-
an allies sit with regard to China? Are they more realistic? Have they figured
it out?
Dikötter: Well, first of all, I am not an expert on the United States. I am not
even an expert on contemporary politics and the China of today. I really am a
historian. I am not trying to expert. But on the other hand, everyone is, right?
Plenty of people who cannot count to three in Mandarin are China experts,
so you should ask them. But you want a general impression, so I would say
there has been a sea change, and not just in the United States.
But still, so much incomprehension. It is not something hugely complex.
And not only that, but Europeans and Americans have a very long tradition
of dealing with regimes that came out of 1917. There was something called
the Cold War. Of course, it ended in Europe. It never ended here. We are still
in the same Cold War. But there is an extraordinary reservoir of knowledge,
insight, and techniques on how to deal with communist states. And it is as
if all that knowledge and wisdom has just disappeared—as if China is some
sort of strange entity and we are trying to understand what it is. It is crystal
clear what it is.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity. Adapted from The
Pacific Century, a Hoover Institution podcast. © 2023 The Board of
Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
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.

C HIN A
C HI N A
What Would
Reagan Do?
The West won the Cold War through pragmatism,
idealism, and strong alliances. We should respond
to the China challenge in the same way.
By Peter Berkowitz
D
espite the partisan enmities
coursing through the American Key points
body politic, right and left in the » Soviet communists saw
themselves as locked in an
United States have been converg-
inexorable struggle with
ing over the past three years in their baleful the free, democratic, and
assessment of China’s conduct and aims. Like capitalist West. So do the
Chinese.
the Trump administration, the Biden adminis-
» Ronald Reagan scandal-
tration views China as an authoritarian state ized elites by branding the
and strategic competitor. And, according to Soviet Union “an evil em-
pire” and “the focus of evil
a growing consensus in Congress, Beijing
in the modern world.”
advances authoritarian norms and goals to
» Even amid the new great-
reshape world order—to the detriment of power rivalry, the United
American security, freedom, and prosperity. States must preserve peace
and prosperity for itself
The China challenge differs in crucial and its allies.
respects from the Soviet challenge. For one:
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.
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) held approximately half of
Europe captive for almost five decades and specialized in exporting weapons
and communist revolution around the world. In contrast, the Chinese Com-
munist Party (CCP)—notwithstanding its formidable military, its crushing
of freedom in Hong Kong, and its threats to seize Taiwan—is largely content
to let peoples and nations govern themselves. Instead, it uses its enormous
commercial might and the lure of its vast consumer markets to snare other
countries in relations of dependence and subservience.
At the same time, the Cold War–era Soviet Communist Party—like today’s
CCP, and consistent with the Marxist-Leninist tenets that they share—
regarded itself as locked in an inexorable struggle over the shape of world
order with the free, democratic, and capitalist West. Since Ronald Reagan
played a decisive role in
leading the United States
Events vindicated Ronald Reagan.
to victory over the Soviet
Union in the Cold War, it stands to reason that his diplomatic legacy offers
lessons about dealing with contemporary China, another authoritarian great
power driven by the communist conviction that rights-protecting democra-
cies must be overcome.
A VISION OF SUCCESS
One would be hard-pressed to find a better guide to Reagan’s foreign policy
achievements than William Inboden’s recent book, The Peacemaker: Ronald
Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Inboden is executive direc-
tor of the Clements Center for National Security and associate professor
of public policy and history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, both at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Reagan viewed nearly all US foreign policy through a Cold War lens. From
China and Taiwan to Nicaragua and El Salvador, from promoting freedom,
democracy, and human rights to cooperating with right-wing authoritar-
ians, from America’s disastrous intervention in Lebanon to its well-executed
operation in Grenada—his every move abroad took into consideration the
global chessboard. In Reagan’s estimation—as in the Kremlin’s—the global
chessboard pitted the US-led free world against the communist world led by
the Soviet Union.
In generous moments during Reagan’s presidency, America’s foreign policy
establishment’s best and brightest—along with most scholars and journal-
ists—derided him, in Democratic Party wise man Clark Clifford’s words,
as an “amiable dunce.” In less generous but more common moments, they

denounced Reagan as an ignorant warmonger liable to provoke the Soviets
and ignite a nuclear conflagration.
Events vindicated Reagan. Ten months after he left office, in November
1989, Berliners dismantled the Berlin Wall. Just over two years later, in
December 1991, the Soviet Union unilaterally dissolved itself.
Scholars will persist in debating how much credit for the West’s victory
in the Cold War goes to Reagan (as well as his vital partners, British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II) and how much to the
reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev, who was named CPSU general secretary
in 1985 and presided over the Soviet Union’s self-termination. The conven-
tional wisdom allocates considerable credit to Gorbachev, though, as Inboden
points out, its eighth and final leader sought to preserve the Soviet Union,
not end it.
That Reagan largely assessed the Soviet challenge correctly and imple-
mented policies that were swiftly followed by their intended outcomes bol-
sters the case for his statesmanship. Before being elected president—when
détente, or the relaxation of tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union instituted
by Nixon and Kissinger,
governed US foreign Fear of American progress in antimis-
policy—Reagan suc- sile research drove the Soviets to the
cinctly stated his Cold negotiating table.
War strategy: “We win,
they lose.” In a March 1983 speech delivered at the annual convention of the
National Association of Evangelicals, he scandalized elites by branding the
Soviet Union “an evil empire” and, indeed, “the focus of evil in the modern
world.”
In addition, and to the dismay of foreign policy authorities, Reagan backed
the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI envisaged a system of space-based anti-
missile weapons intended to greatly diminish if not end the threat of nuclear
war. The experts insisted that SDI undermined the rationale for peace and
stability based on the military doctrine of “mutually assured destruction.”
MAD maintained the balance of power through the shared knowledge that
each side’s nuclear forces could survive a first strike and inflict a devastat-
ing retaliatory blow. By giving the United States the capability of destroying
incoming Soviet missiles, the foreign policy establishment argued, SDI would
destabilize superpower relations and render arms control impossible.
Fanciful and dangerous as Reagan’s project seemed to critics, we now
know, according to Inboden, that fear of American progress in SDI research
and development not only drove the Soviets to the negotiating table but
impelled Gorbachev to move beyond arms control to reach with Reagan the
first arms-reduction agreement. That agreement was eventually formalized
in two treaties: START I in 1991 between the United States and the Soviet
Union; and, in 1993, START II (which never formally entered into effect).
FIVE PILLARS
Not all aspects of Reagan’s Cold War strategy apply directly to the China
challenge. Inboden stresses, for example, that from the outset Reagan pur-
sued “negotiated surrender.” Such a goal makes little sense regarding the
CCP. As long as Beijing’s enormous economy grows—and notwithstanding
America’s increasingly energetic efforts to reduce reliance on China for criti-
cal materials, technologies, and products—America must preserve peace and
order in a world in which its chief great-power rival remains not only one of
its major trading partners but also that of its friends and allies.
Major features of Reagan’s diplomacy, however, are as pertinent to pre-
vailing in strategic competition against China as they were to defeating the
Soviet Union. Five stand out.
» The United States must recognize, as did Reagan in the Cold War,
that the China challenge involves a global battle of ideas. Accordingly,
America must improve its diplomats’ and security analysts’ understanding of
the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist beliefs about dictatorship and the party’s ultrana-
tionalist convictions about Beijing’s rightful place in the world, both of which
shape the party’s interests and objectives. The United States also needs to
enhance through educational reform its own citizens’ grasp of American
constitutional principles.
» The United States must renovate its alliance system to address con-
temporary geopolitical imperatives. Reagan saw partners—particularly
Britain, Canada, West Germany, and Japan—as crucial to prevailing in the
Cold War. The same is
true for meeting the Chi-
The United States has an incentive na challenge. The United
to seize opportunities to help those States must recalibrate
seeking freedom and democracy. alliances, share responsi-
bilities among partners—
where possible, nations committed to individual freedom and democratic
self-government; and where necessary, friendly authoritarian regimes—and
reform international institutions to fashion a multi-pronged foreign policy
that combines cooperation with, and constraint and deterrence of, the CCP.

» The United States must pursue “peace through strength.” This will
blend force and diplomacy, hard and soft power, pressure and outreach. Just
as Reagan persuaded the Soviets to negotiate nuclear weapons reductions by
modernizing American forces, so too must the United States strengthen its
military to persuade the CCP to join serious arms talks. To ensure military
excellence, the United States must, as did Reagan in the 1980s, foster a thriv-
ing economy—one that grows, provides good jobs for its citizens, and leads
the world in high-tech industries.
» The United States has an interest, consistent with its founding prin-
ciples, in a freer and more democratic world. Reagan argued for this in his
landmark 1982 Westmin-
ster speech, and showed
it in seeking freedom for The China challenge involves a global
Poland and human rights battle of ideas.
protections for Soviet
Jews and other peoples and nations suffering under Soviet oppression. That
doesn’t confer a license to engage in regime change or preclude partnering
with authoritarian governments that share America’s goals. It does provide
the United States an incentive to seize opportunities to assist those who seek
freedom and democracy.
» The United States must operate with the awareness that geopolitics
typically entails painful trade-offs, tragic choices, and alternatives rang-
ing from bad to dreadful. Reagan’s team also understood this. The guiding
question for American diplomats should always be which of the imperfect
options best secures US freedom and prosperity.
Taking Reagan’s lessons to heart will fortify the heartening convergence
between left and right concerning the China challenge.
Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2023 RealClearHold-

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

Future of American Intelligence, edited by Peter
Berkowitz. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
C H IN A
C H IN A
An Exile Looks
at Xi
Longtime Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng
examines Xi Jinping and sees ruthlessness—but
also vulnerability.
By Matthew F. Pottinger
I
n 1978, activist Wei Jingsheng became China’s most prominent dis-
sident when he posted a signed essay—or “big character poster,” as
they are called in China—on a wall in Beijing, arguing eloquently for
democracy. He was imprisoned twice for his blistering criticism of the
Chinese Communist Party, spending some eighteen years behind bars before
relocating to the United States. Interestingly, he grew up near Xi Jinping,
who would become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in
2012. Wei’s little brother knew Xi when they were both children.
In November, I sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Wei in Washing-
ton. We discussed his indoctrination in, and then rejection of, communism as
a young person, the future of political dissent in China, and Xi’s reading hab-
its, psychology, and greatest vulnerabilities, from the low-level bureaucrats
who could stick gum into the party’s gears to the public’s lack of confidence
in the regime.
Wei Jingsheng is a human rights activist known for his participation in the Chi-
nese democracy movement. He is the founder of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation in
Washington, DC. Matthew F. Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the
Hoover Institution. He served as deputy White House national security adviser in
2019–21.

Wei didn’t hedge on the threats to democracy growing around the globe. “If
the United States continues to choose business interests and tolerate author-
itarianism—be it the Chinese Communist Party or Saudi Arabia—if they are
tolerated for business profits, global democracy will inevitably wane,” he said.
Matthew F. Pottinger: I know you really love reading. You’ve written about
the fact that you read a lot of socialist theory and literature when you were
a middle school student, right before the Cultural Revolution started in
1966. You read Marx
and Engels and Lenin
and Mao and Stalin, and “Many Communist officials are in
you’ve written before contact with me through friends.
that as a middle school They hope we can do more outside
student, you really were China to bring about changes inside
indoctrinated to become
China.”
what you called a bona
fide Maoist fanatic. But you also developed a love for philosophy in those
years, and that helped equip you really for the critical skills that you applied
later to go from becoming a Maoist to one of the most prominent critics of
Maoism and one of the most prominent critics of the Communist Party. How
did the sixteen-year-old Wei Jingsheng, the Maoist fanatic, become Wei Jing-
sheng, the lifelong dissident and pro-democracy activist?
Wei Jingsheng: You have a good memory. I do love reading. But when I was
in school, I didn’t like reading books on politics and philosophy. I liked read-
ing novels. I read so much that I was denied membership in the Young Pio-
neers [a Communist youth organization]. I was considered a bad student who
didn’t listen in class but read novels. I particularly liked the French writer
Balzac, the American writer Mark Twain, etc. These are among the writers I
liked. Also, there was the Russian writer Chekhov. I liked these writers very
much.
Later we had a political teacher, who taught political classes. This teacher
was a Rightist, loved debating with students, and often preached Marxist
theories. We thought what he said wasn’t necessarily true, right? So, a few
students started to read on Marxism and Leninism to debate with him. I
borrowed these books so often from the library, the librarian got to know me.
I was given access to the book depository. We read very fast and engaged in
debates with our teacher.
Later the Cultural Revolution started. At the time I still believed in Marx-
ism. I believed Chairman Mao was right, was great, and this and that. Later,
during the Cultural Revolution, we became the first group of Red Guards.
But in just a few months, we were betrayed by Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing
[Madame Mao]. Suddenly it seemed we were no longer revolutionary, but
anti-revolutionary. Furthermore, the parents of many of our classmates
became anti-revolutionaries.
So, after the betrayal, there started a small movement among us youth,
a movement to figure out if Chairman Mao was wrong, whether he strayed
from the path of Marx and Lenin. During that time, including when we
were sent to the countryside, we read many more books by Marx, the
collected works of Marx and Engels, works of Lenin. We read closely
and thought about it carefully. That was when I realized that the mis-
take was not made by Mao Zedong, the mistake was rooted in Marx. You
can’t use the most hideous, violent means to build a beautiful society. It is
contradictory.
That was when I realized, that was the moment when I moved away from
communism, when I no longer thought communism was good. Of course, the
numerous deaths of starvation I witnessed in the countryside were also a
catalyst for my change of heart.
WHAT IS XI THINKING?
Pottinger: Can you expound on Xi Jinping Thought?
Wei: Xi Jinping doesn’t have much thought. Honestly, this is my little broth-
er’s impression of him. I did not know him well. There was Liu He, living
upstairs from us; he is the vice premier now. Liu He lived upstairs, and he
was familiar [with Xi]. Those two, my little brother and Liu He, they knew Xi
Jinping relatively well. So according to their description, Xi Jinping didn’t
seem to like reading. Later he brags about reading this and that, but I don’t
think so. Those are lies to boost his image.
I think once he became the leader of the Communist Party, he came to
recognize many of Mao Zedong’s actions were probably more effective than
those of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin’s
reforms brought economic growth, but what about ideology? According to
them, people became confused and no longer trusted the Communist Party
and Chairman Mao as much. Xi probably considered it a bad state of affairs.
He wants to re-establish the kind of authority Mao Zedong enjoyed. Every-
one obeys one person; everyone follows the baton. His current position is
probably why he prefers it that way. His aversion to reading and thinking
probably has something to do with it, too.

WE DISSENT: Demonstrators hold up placards bearing democracy activist
Wei Jingsheng’s photo during a march in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. Wei
had been sentenced to fourteen years in prison but was released and allowed
to move abroad. [Newscom]
Pottinger: I have to say, I’ve read a lot of Xi Jinping’s speeches. When you
look at the internal-facing speeches, I could still come away with the impres-
sion that he is a committed Leninist, that he is a communist, that he’s not
faking it. Even if you’re right that he’s not fully immersed in the broadest
sense into Marxist theory, he certainly has shown an aptitude for grasping
the essence of a Leninist system of government, the essence of Stalinism,
being able to purge his enemies and to climb steadily, steadily higher up that
slippery pole of power. So, I wonder if we would be underestimating him if we
were to say that there really isn’t an ideology there?
Wei: First, once you become a leader, it no longer matters if you don’t have an
ideology. Your assistants will write one for you. They will invent some for you.
Why does [political theorist] Wang Huning always come up with new sayings,
new thoughts for them? That is the job for people like him, right?
On the other hand, Xi Jinping’s family has had its share of misfortunes.
His father was persecuted at the end of the 1950s, badly persecuted. Given
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S p ring 2023 77
his family experience, he probably has heard a lot about, or learned a lot
from, the cutthroat political struggles within the party. So, he thinks Stalin’s
methods—Mao Zedong learned a lot from Stalin; not so much Marx and
Lenin, but Stalin. Stalin’s methods of purge and oppression appeal to him
more. Although his family,
including himself, suf-
“The mistake was not made by Mao fered these persecutions,
Zedong. The mistake was rooted in perhaps, comparable to
the well-known Stock-
Marx.”
holm syndrome, their
suffering leads them to believe these methods are correct, are effective. Now
he’s picked it up. He started to use these methods of persecution he suffered
through on others. This is a natural progression.
He has been slowly practicing these methods during his long tenure as
an official. Chinese call it the “Thick Black Theory.” It’s about how to deal
with others, how to plot against others, and how to bully others. He probably
grows increasingly skilled at this with all the practice.
POWERFUL AND VULNERABLE
Pottinger: Before the Twentieth Party Congress, you had said in some of
your interviews and tweets that it was possible that Xi Jinping might not
get a third term. Here we are; we’ve now seen the outcome of that party
congress. Not only did he get a third term, he hasn’t identified a suc-
cessor, which implies that he’s going for a fourth term and maybe more.
He has completely eliminated nonloyalists from the highest ranks of the
Communist Party. Did you underestimate him, and what do you think this
portends?
Wei: I indeed underestimated him. I did not expect him to employ such
rogue methods to instigate a small coup d’état—a palace coup. He reneged
on all his promises to the other members of the leadership. In addition to
the third term, he promoted his own people to surround himself. That he
would use such despicable tricks to remain in power, this is something I did
not expect. Judging from the impression he gave me when he was little, he
should not have been such a wicked person. But like we just discussed, his
family education, and his decades of experiences as an official, might have
led him down the path of evil and increasingly to take after Stalin and Mao
Zedong, even exceeding those two in his villainy. He persecutes others with
such craft.

But now, although he has achieved his goal, the outcome is very unstable,
and he cannot win the acceptance of the public. Without true acceptance,
he has little legitimacy. With hardly any legitimacy, he is going to have some
very hard times ahead. The biggest conundrum for him is how to control this
Communist Party.
Pottinger: What are Xi Jinping’s vulnerabilities now? He looks all-powerful,

or as close to being all-powerful as any Chinese paramount leader has been.
Wei: On the surface, to foreigners, Xi Jinping appears to be all powerful,

with tremendous authority. To Americans, a president, having assumed the
presidency, has corresponding powers. Others must put their trust in the
president and obey orders issued by the president.
It is different in China. Occupying the office without credibility will not
lead to obedience. Chinese officials are very skilled at disobeying without
getting caught. There is a Chinese saying, “There are policies from the top,
and there are countermeasures at the bottom.” They have various ways to
handle it. When oth-
ers do not have faith in
you, when you have no “They, including Mao Zedong, never
credibility and receive abandoned the banner of democracy,
no acceptance, you are in even though what was really imple-
big trouble. Your orders mented was dictatorship.”
might not be carried out
at all. Others might have ways to have your orders vanish into thin air.
Under such circumstances, lacking credibility, lacking confidence from the
people or authority among the people is Xi Jinping’s biggest vulnerability.
The Communist Party shares the same biggest vulnerability as Xi Jinping.
The Communist Party has no credibility either. It agrees with you, makes
promises to you, but it will not deliver.
Pottinger: You spent eighteen years in prison. And the first time you went
to prison, it was because of your role, in 1978, in what became known as the
Democracy Wall Movement. You pasted a manifesto onto a public wall, and
you were calling for what you called the Fifth Modernization, which hadn’t
been included in Deng Xiaoping’s description of things that China needed to
modernize, like science and technology and industry and national defense.
You called for a fifth modernization, which was democracy. Looking back
and looking at this moment right now, do you think that China felt closer to
democracy in 1978, or does it feel closer to democracy now, in late 2022?
Wei: At that time, we were very close. [Writer and activist] Bao Tong agreed
with me too. According to him, the Communist Party at the time did not
know what direction to take. Mao Zedong’s way, Stalin’s way—everyone knew
that would not work. Those paths lead to the ruin of the nation. But then
what instead?
At that time, Bao Tong opined, the Communist Party could have chosen the
path of democracy. Because these Communist cadres, big or small, climbed
up to their position under the banner of democracy when they were young.
They, including Mao Zedong, never abandoned the banner of democracy,
even though what was really implemented was dictatorship. The party could
have chosen the path of democracy at the time. There was a real chance.
Unfortunately, Deng Xiaoping chose otherwise. He chose the traditional
Chinese road, a road where the market economy is headed by authoritarian
politics. He knew a mar-
ket economy is superior to
“Once you become a leader, it no lon- a planned economy. There
ger matters if you don’t have an ideol- is no doubt about it. But
ogy. Your assistants will write one for the debate at the time, the
biggest argument within
you.”
the Communist Party,
was whether we should adopt Western-style parliamentary democracy or
continue on the path of one-party dictatorship. There were many veteran
Communist members with lifelong faith in communism who believed that
the one-party rule must be upheld. At the time Deng Xiaoping proposed the
“four upholds,” with the cardinal principle being “uphold the leadership of
the party.” That was how we missed the opportunity at the time.
In 1989, when the people rose to demand democracy, although Zhao Ziyang
was not necessarily pro-democracy, at least he did not want to suppress the
people; he, perhaps, advocated for compromises. That was another opportu-
nity which we also missed.
Now, under Xi Jinping’s high-handed governance, there is a new opportuni-
ty. When authoritarian politics threaten not only the masses, the dissidents,
but also Communist officials themselves, people might start considering, is
there a different path available? Officials in the United States don’t necessar-
ily end up in prison over just any mistakes. Meanwhile, even without making
mistakes, Communist Party officials can be sent to prison simply upon Xi’s
displeasure. To the party officials, the American system at least provides
more personal security. Given the circumstances, maybe more and more Chi-
nese Communist Party officials would hope to choose a path to democracy.

This is not my conjecture, but a conclusion based on the information I have
received. Many Communist officials are in contact with me through friends.
They hope we can do more outside China to bring about changes inside
China.
Although the opportunity is present, the outcome depends on what choice
the international community makes. If the United States continues to choose
business interests and tolerate authoritarianism, be it the Chinese Commu-
nist Party or Saudi Arabia, if they are tolerated for business profits, global
democracy will inevitably wane.
IS THERE REASON FOR OPTIMISM?
Pottinger: Under Xi Jinping, Beijing has built a surveillance system that is

probably more advanced than anything we have seen before. The exiled Cen-
tral Party School official Cai Xia has described it as exquisite totalitarianism.
Is there a path toward a moment like the Democracy Wall Movement, and
the 1980s you just described?
Wei: What Cai Xia said makes a certain kind of sense, but she is rather pes-
simistic. The high-tech surveillance Xi Jinping employs to control society
does lead to the belief that it is increasingly difficult, even impossible, to over-
throw the regime using traditional tactics. But the problem is that high tech
is not only accessible to Xi Jinping. The masses can master it, too. Resisters
can also make use of these high-tech means. Both sides enjoy equal oppor-
tunities. The key is whether there is enough confidence to take actions to
overthrow the Commu-
nist Party. But of course,
Cai Xia and some others “Democracy in China can be estab-
don’t always share the lished only by the people in China.”
same opinions. They
are anti-Xi, but not anti-communism. They oppose Xi Jinping, but not the
Communist Party. They think such a stance can be accepted by more people.
But I believe we need to oppose not only Xi Jinping but also the Communist
Party. If we could get rid of Xi Jinping, the Communist Party won’t last long,
either; the end will be near. When it comes to that, the Communist Party
might reform itself, thus creating an opportunity for democracy.
I am still relatively optimistic. I don’t believe Xi Jinping could control
everything. Especially when no one trusts you and you still need people to
manage the surveillance system, would they be loyal to you? So, I think there
are still opportunities.
Pottinger: You reminded me that in 1999, when the United States was debat-
ing whether or not to extend permanent normal trade relations to China,
paving the way for China to come into the World Trade Organization, you
gave a warning at the time to members of Congress. You said China’s closed
tyranny under Mao Zedong was terrible for the Chinese people. But what you
termed the open tyranny that had been ushered in by Deng Xiaoping would be
very, very dangerous for democracies everywhere. That was in 1999. I have to
say, it looks like it was a fairly prescient warning in hindsight. Could you talk
a little bit about that?
Wei: The past twenty-some years have proved that an open tyranny is even
better at deceiving. During these years, major Western businesses have
invested in China and painted a pretty picture of China for the outside world.
A lot of the American people have come to believe it, thus letting down
their guard against China. A lot of academics are also advocating for China.
China’s infiltration of the United States has led to problems in the health of
the American system. Now Americans are starting to realize how serious the
infiltration is. It is close to taking control of our regime, our thinking. This
situation, this is exactly the result of Deng Xiaoping’s open tyranny.
On the contrary, as Xi Jinping closes up the country, more and more people
might be able to see the true face of the authoritarian regime, the danger it
poses to the United States and its neighboring countries. Also, without the
support of the people, it might grow increasingly weak, and it’s paradoxically
not as dangerous as that of the open society under Deng Xiaoping. Therefore,
right now is the best opportunity for the people to confront the Communist
Party.
TAIWAN
Pottinger: What do you think Beijing’s and Xi Jinping’s intentions are with
respect to Taiwan in his third five-year term?
Wei: According to the calculations of Xi Jinping and his clique, now perhaps
presents the best opportunity to attack Taiwan—because the attention of
the United States and other Western countries is focusing on Ukraine, where
the war is unlikely to end any time soon, and where the United States would
invest more aid. If he launches a war against Taiwan now, he needs to con-
sider whether the United States and Japan would send aid to Taiwan.
Chinese leaders have been talking about “liberating Taiwan” for years, and
why did they never make the move? The United States is the decisive factor

in the decision. They cannot defeat the United States. Any move against
Taiwan might invite fierce retribution from the United States. But now, the
United States’ attention is elsewhere. This presents an important window of
opportunity to Xi Jinping. Therefore, he has been desperately mobilizing for
war.
On the other hand, on the domestic front, we have just talked about how
much he is hated and loathed. He has no credibility—not among the people
or among the bureaucrats. How would you extricate yourself from this
conundrum? Those in power have always resorted to a simple method: start
a foreign war, which might immediately alleviate internal conflicts. Stupid as
Xi Jinping is, he understands this. If he doesn’t, others will be sure to remind
him. He would start a war with Taiwan if only to stabilize his regime. There-
fore, we must stay vigilant, we cannot drop our guard.
Pottinger: Maybe we could close with some of your reflections on what is the
role of a Chinese dissident today—a Chinese dissident in exile, like yourself.
Wei: My thinking was formed even before I left China. Why did I agree to be
sent out of China, to the United States? First, I believe the overseas democ-
racy movement has
paramount importance.
Mobilizing international “Chinese leaders have been talking
pressure gives domestic about ‘liberating Taiwan’ for years,
dissidents some room to and why did they never make the
maneuver. The Commu- move?”
nist Party fears global
public opinion. They always have, right from the beginning. The party talks
about how it fears nothing on the international stage, but it is terrified. This
is a “merit” of the Communist Party—it knows it cannot alienate the whole
world. So, an important job for us overseas is to mobilize the international
community to put pressure on the Communist Party.
Another important job is to facilitate the flow of information to the domes-
tic audience, such as what democracy in America looks like, and why it is
good. We utilize all channels. There are more and more channels nowadays,
including social media. I have hundreds of thousands of followers on my
Twitter, and half of them are using Twitter through a VPN. They send their
greetings, so I know they come from within China. This is how we commu-
nicate information and discuss problems with people inside China, how we
explain issues that they find perplexing. I think this is also very important to
the future democratization.
Democracy in China can be established only by the people in China. It
cannot depend on people overseas. The majority of those overseas are never
able to return. The more the people in China know, the smoother the process
of establishing democracy will be. So, this is an important part of our work.
These two are our main tasks.
Lin Yang translated this interview into English. This conversation was
edited for length and clarity. Reprinted by permission of Politico (www.
politico.com). © 2023 Politico SPRL. All rights reserved.
Available 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

C HIN A
C HI N A
Taiwan Doesn’t
Stand Alone
“Strategic ambiguity”? What Taipei needs from
Washington is strategic clarity.
By Miles Maochun Yu
C
onversations about US policy toward
Taiwan often invoke “strategic ambigu- Key points
ity.” The promotion of this concept is » Strategic ambigui-
ty has never been the
quixotic, provocative, and dangerous. official US position.
Strategic ambiguity has never been the official US » Chinese leaders,
position. What has kept the Taiwan Strait peaceful for their part, have
never believed that
and stable for the past seven decades is not strategic
the United States is
ambiguity, but the exact opposite. When it comes to ambiguous about its
the use of force in defense of Taiwan, America’s posi- intent to intervene
in a Taiwan inva-
tion is consistent and unambiguous: strategic clarity. sion.
The concept of strategic ambiguity refers to the » Strategic clarity on
supposed US position of not stating whether it Taiwan should also
offer clarity about
will use force to defend Taiwan, if and when China
the China challenge
invades the democratic nation. The policy’s pur- as a whole.
ported purpose is to discourage such aggression, as
Miles Maochun Yu is the Robert Alexander Mercer Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He is a participant in Hoover’s working group on the Role of Military
History in Contemporary Conflict and Hoover’s project on China’s Global Sharp
Power.
well as any pretext for such aggression, namely the unilateral declaration of
independence by Taiwan.
Dating back to the mid-1990s, the almost mystical thinking about “strategic
ambiguity” has spread like a contagion, affecting the minds of policy makers.
Proponents regard it as a balm to soothe China, and a way for Washington to
engage China without engendering Beijing’s wrath, which would spoil “the most
important bilateral relationship in the world.” But too often, strategic ambiguity
becomes a convenient excuse for indolence in America’s China policy.
The concept of strategic ambiguity is intellectually incoherent. It confuses
strategic intent with tactical operations. In its strategic intent, the United
States has always maintained a policy and practice of strategic clarity.
Implicitly or explicitly, every US president since Harry Truman has upheld
America’s intent to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
As is the case with all military plans, the only ambiguities are tactical and
operational—questions of how, not if.
Strategic ambiguity is also quixotic because Beijing has never believed that
the United States is ambiguous about its intent to intervene militarily in the
event of an invasion of Taiwan. This belief alone should make it obvious that
talk about strategic ambiguity in Washington or elsewhere is delusional.
It is difficult to find any influential person in the government of the People’s
Republic of China who believes in America’s strategic ambiguity. All Communist
leaders, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, firmly believe the United States will
intervene with force in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, subscribing to
the unwavering belief in what the Chinese Communist Party calls the John Fos-
ter Dulles Doctrine on Taiwan: that the US grand strategy for global hegemony
demands and requires Taiwan to be an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the
United States, that the United States would never let a communist country like
China take over Taiwan, and that the United States will unequivocally use force
to intervene if the Chinese military attempts to invade the island.
Guided by its own belief in America’s strategic clarity, the Communist
Party has embarked on a massive military buildup targeting the US military
as its preponderant threat in any Taiwan invasion scenario. Beijing’s theory
of victory, which informs its operations and tactics, envisions defeating
the US military as a prerequisite for taking Taiwan. On this point, China is
unambiguous.
Strategic ambiguity is not codified US strategic doctrine, though it has fre-
quently been invoked by Beltway policy makers and pundits as if it were. Yet
it has been repeated enough in democratic capitals that some leaders believe
that it may actually be true that the United States is indecisive, undecided,

BIG STICK: Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, shoulders a battlefield weapon.
Implicitly or explicitly, every American president since Harry Truman has
upheld America’s intent to intervene if there is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
[Office of the President, Republic of China]
and above all, ambiguous, when it comes to Taiwan’s defense against a PLA
invasion.
However, repetition does not make falsehoods true. America’s long-
standing strategic clarity with regard to Taiwan’s defense goes back seven
decades.
PRESIDENTS AGREE
This clarity dates back to June 25, 1950, the day the communist China–
backed North Korean People’s Army launched the Korean War. On that same
day, President Truman dispatched the US Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan
Strait to protect the island nation from a possible invasion, and to neutralize
the area. This strategic clarity was codified in 1955 with the Sino-American
Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States of America and the
Republic of China (Taiwan), which lasted for thirty years.
Then, on January 1, 1980, President Jimmy Carter unilaterally terminated
the Mutual Defense Treaty. However, even with this change, the United
Stated did not abandon its strategic intent to defend Taiwan. Since 1980,
H O O V ER D IG E ST • S p ring 2023 87
what has followed has been a period of gradual evolution from the Carter-
Reagan era of what might be called “strategic translucency,” wherein the old
clarity found new forms.
These new forms began with the landmark 1979 Taiwan Relations Act and
President Reagan’s Six Assurances. President George H. W. Bush then gave
long-standing American strategic clarity on Taiwan new life, selling Taipei
unprecedented numbers of high-grade American F-16 fighters.
Strategic clarity has lasted through every PRC-instigated crisis and provo-
cation against Taiwan.
Most famously, during
US warships repeatedly defy China’s the Third Taiwan Strait
so-called “red line” by sailing through Crisis in 1995 and 1996,
the Taiwan Strait. President Bill Clinton
dispatched two US air-
craft carrier battle groups to the waters near the Taiwan Strait, where the
Chinese military had fired missiles to intimidate Taiwanese voters.
Presidents have reiterated strategic clarity through statements and other
actions. In 2001, President George W. Bush explicitly stated that he would
“do whatever it takes to defend Taiwan.” Later, during the Trump adminis-
tration, the United States developed an extraordinarily robust US-Taiwan
relationship that was entirely outside the framework of the US-China rela-
tionship. This closer relationship included dramatic increases in arms sales
of critical weapons to Taiwan, as well as numerous high-level, official visits to
the democratic island nation.
BE PREPARED
Today, we live in a time of enhanced US strategic clarity. It has grown in the
past six years, through Republican and Democratic administrations.
We see it in US warships that have repeatedly defied China’s so-called “red
line” by conducting freedom-of-navigation operations through the Taiwan
Strait. The frequency of these operations has dramatically increased, essen-
tially internationalizing the crucial waterway for Taiwan’s defense.
The US Congress has also achieved a historic, bipartisan consensus on
the importance of defending Taiwan. We have seen this in several landmark
acts passed with unanimous, or near-unanimous, support, further codifying
America’s strategic clarity in defense of Taiwan.
America’s military leaders have reiterated the US position of strategic
clarity. Admiral Samuel J. Paparo is the commander of US Pacific Fleet, with
the responsibility to carry out America’s military operations in the event of a

Chinese attack on Taiwan. On October 19, 2022, Admiral Paparo stated that
the United States will “be prepared to thwart any invasion of Taiwan, any
effort to resolve the matter by force, and on that, there is no ambiguity.”
The White House has been equally clear. Since October 2021, on four sepa-
rate occasions, President Joe Biden has explicitly and unambiguously stated
that the United States would intervene militarily if the People’s Republic of
China invaded Taiwan.
Still, some in Washington refuse to give up their belief in strategic ambigu-
ity. They invoke White House clarifications on the president’s statements,
calling them “pushback” or “backtracking.” However, White House reitera-
tions of the unchanged “one-China policy” are not inconsistent with Ameri-
can presidents’ strategic clarity on the defense of Taiwan. On the contrary,
they affirm it.
Reiterating America’s one-China policy bolsters the US position of stra-
tegic clarity. An essential component of that policy is the long-standing US
position against the use of force to settle the Taiwan issue, by either side of
the Taiwan Strait. There is nothing ambiguous about this position, as mul-
tiple administrations have stated.
Strategic clarity on Taiwan should help provide strategic clarity on the
China challenge as a whole. The Chinese Communist Party is a revision-
ist regime poised to launch a chain of aggression in the Indo-Pacific, with
Taiwan as the first link in that chain. We have seen such aggression before, in
the Sudetenland with Nazi Germany, and in Manchuria with Imperial Japan.
Taiwan is China’s Sudetenland. Beijing is not ambiguous about this, and
neither should we be. Let’s avoid the dangerous and tragic “strategic ambigu-
ity” as seen in Munich in 1938.
Reprinted by permission of the Taipei Times (www.taipeitimes.com). ©

2023 Taipei Times. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

Struggle across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China
Problem, by Ramon H. Myers and Jialin Zhang. To
org.
T H E MI DDL E EAST
T H E MI DDL E EAST
Don’t Ignore
Lebanon
The United States has been indifferent to
Lebanon’s slow-motion collapse. Terrorism is a
likely result.
By Russell A. Berman
A
long the highway that leads from
Beirut north to Baalbek, the Key points
ancient city of Heliopolis and the » Russia’s return to
the Levant poses major
site of the spectacular ruins of the challenges for the United
Temple of Zeus, you reach a point where sud- States and its partners.
denly a series of billboards lines the road, and » Further collapse of

Lebanon would unleash
the familiar face of Vladimir Putin stares down
a new wave of refugees,
as you drive past. It would be hard to describe foster fresh terrorism,
his expression as friendly, but the Arabic text on and upset regional sta-
bility.
the signs conveys a warm greeting from Russia.
» Direct Hezbollah rule,
Not far, across the mountains to the east, lies if it came, would finally
Syria, a Russian client state of sorts. Damascus establish an Iranian
toehold on the Mediter-
is less than two hours away. Toward the north-
ranean.
west, a similar drive would get you to Tartus
Russell A. Berman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-chair of

Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the
Islamic World, and a participant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project and its
working groups on military history and national security. He is also the Walter A.
Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

and then via the Syrian coastline to Latakia, where Russia has established its
naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean.
Three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is actively try-
ing to reacquire its former spheres of influence, returning as a major player
in the Levant. This assertion of power on Putin’s part poses a direct chal-
lenge to the network of US partners in the region. It is therefore also a threat
to US security. But this Russian encroachment takes on special significance
in light of Lebanon’s domestic crisis, which deserves greater attention from
Washington. Let’s take a closer look.
DRAINED
Lebanon’s problems are legion. The financial crisis has led to a 90 percent
loss of value in the Lebanese pound, and those who have money in savings
accounts are prohibited from withdrawing their funds from the banks.
Stories abound of armed efforts to retrieve a depositor’s own savings. These
“bank robbers” have become folk heroes. In the meantime, many Lebanese
survive thanks primarily to remittances from relatives living abroad. As
the financial system
crumbles, the physical
infrastructure is erod- ISIS and other Sunni radicals have
ing too, notably in the never been far away—right across the
northern city of Tripoli, Syrian border.
where houses collapse
for lack of attention to structural problems. Throughout the country, public
utility services have also ceased to function. Electricity is available only from
private generators, with the cost of fuel rising dramatically. Some consumer
items, and especially many vital medical supplies, are simply not available.
The talented personnel who used to contribute to the enviable quality of
Lebanese hospitals and universities are doing their best to leave in search
of stability and appropriate remuneration elsewhere, especially in the Gulf
countries, increasingly in Egypt and further afield as well. Others—without
capital or international networks—try desperately to flee the country illegal-
ly by boat, heading for Cyprus, but too often drowning in the Mediterranean.
The country is collapsing, but the political leadership remains unwilling to
take the necessary reform steps, since precisely those reforms would mean
ending their own reign of corruption.
The slow-motion implosion of Lebanon deserves closer attention from
Washington, not only because of the domestic human suffering, which must
elicit sympathy, but also because of the potential international repercussions.
Most obvious, the further collapse of Lebanon would unleash a new wave
of refugees, presumably traveling into Cyprus or Greece or otherwise into
Europe. Although Europe has absorbed many fewer refugees than Turkey,
Jordan, or Lebanon itself, a significant increase in new arrivals is bound to
exacerbate political conflicts in Italy, Germany, France, and elsewhere. An
influx of refugees from Lebanon will inevitably pose a threat to the political
stability of America’s European allies.
In order to avoid far-right electoral victories in Europe—far right and
therefore pro-Russian—the challenges in the Middle East and especially
Lebanon need attention. The Biden administration’s diplomats should be
worrying about this connection.
Second, even a small flow of refugees from Lebanon raises the prospect of
an accelerated spread of cholera. This epidemic originated in Syria, but by
now more than a thousand cases have been registered in Lebanon. Cholera
disseminates through
unsanitary conditions
Lebanon is collapsing, but the politi- in agriculture, food
cal leadership is unwilling to embrace handling, and the water
reform—because it would end their supply, precisely the sort
reign of corruption. of conditions emerg-
ing amid the collapse of
Lebanese infrastructure. Of foremost importance, one should determine how
to provide adequate health care to those directly affected. However, other
consequences also deserve consideration: if cholera were to reach Europe in
the wake of refugee arrivals, the political response would be brutal. Unfortu-
nately, policy development in the State Department stovepipes the regions,
as if the Middle East and Europe had nothing to do with each other. Because
of the bureaucratic structure, US foreign policy ignores the transregional
connections.
Third, the general collapse of order and economic security is a recipe for
terrorism. ISIS and other Sunni radicals have never been far away, right
across the Syrian border. In addition, the multidenominational character of
Lebanon—and the proximity of Sunni and Shia communities—could invite a
return to sectarian violence. A splintering of the country might ensue, with
the dwindling Christian population—it is disproportionately the Christians
fleeing the Lebanese disaster—opting for an autonomous regionalism or
even secession. Separatist movements could reignite the civil war, with all
the attendant damage to the social fabric in Lebanon, and with repercussions
in the larger region likely.

Finally, the erosion of Lebanese stability will ultimately provide Hezbollah,
the radical Shia movement, a proxy of Iran, an opportunity to seize power
directly. To date, Hezbollah has preferred to act outside the government,
while nonetheless controlling it as a kingmaker of sorts. This arrangement
has allowed it to exercise control without bearing any governmental respon-
sibility. At some point, however, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah—or
his masters in Tehran—may decide that the time has come to seize power
openly. Direct Hezbollah rule, if it came, would finally establish an Iranian
toehold on the Mediterranean. Already, some Lebanese refer to Hezbollah
and the Iranian presence as “the occupation,” i.e., the control of the country
by a foreign power. A Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon would be attentive to direc-
tives from Tehran but would cooperate with Moscow as well; the remaining
ties to Washington would wither.
NO UPSIDE TO INACTION
None of this is in the interests of the United States. Certainly, the rise of
China means that the United States must pay greater attention to the
Indo-Pacific region. Yet it would be foolish to interpret the “pivot to Asia” as
abandoning other regions. The Middle East continues to be vital to American
global interests. America’s primary security architecture partner, Europe,
is directly vulnerable to instability in the Middle East, which enhanced US
engagement could counteract. At the same time, the United States has good
reason to push back
against the intrusion
of Russian power. Nor Russia is actively trying to reacquire
should it be forgotten its former spheres of influence.
that Lebanon is located
next to US partners Israel and Jordan, and within striking distance of NATO
ally Turkey. A degradation of the situation in Lebanon threatens that net-
work as well.
Expect Russia to take advantage of Lebanese instability. Inaction from
Washington will not make things better.
Those billboards of Putin on the road to Baalbek are clear indications of
Russian ambitions and a direct challenge to American influence. Lebanon is
a front in the clash with Russia: at this point, Lebanon may not be an active
theater like Ukraine, but it is an important piece in the puzzle of the Russian
strategy to expel the United States from the region.
To resist that effort, the United States needs to take steps to stabilize Leb-
anon. It should build on the many pro-American assets in Lebanese society,
while providing needed support to the vital institutions that link Lebanon
to the West: the hospitals, the universities, and the army. Lebanon is a small
country, but it deserves increased US attention in the context of America’s
global competitions.
Subscribe to The Caravan, the online Hoover Institution journal that

explores the contemporary dilemmas of the greater Middle East (www.
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Retreat: America’s Withdrawal from the Middle East,
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visit www.hooverpress.org.

POLIT IC S
P O L I TI C S
The Portman Way

Retiring senator Rob Portman, legislative
workhorse, goes home after a long and effective
career. He wants to be remembered “just as
somebody who tried to find common ground and
move the country forward.”
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: George Will said, “The senator

probably will win a second term, despite the fact that he deserves to do so.”
That was six years ago. The senator did win a second term, and today he’s
leaving public office after a dozen years in the Senate, a dozen years in the
House, and several years in senior positions in the White House. What does
Rob Portman, the gentleman from Ohio, want the rest of us to know about
the state of our republic?
Rob Portman: Peter, thanks for having me on again.
Robinson: Actually, I should say thank you. We are meeting in the Hugh
Scott Room in the United States Capitol, and you only get to use the Hugh
Scott Room if you’re a senator, so thank you. Why did you do it the way you
did these past thirty years? You graduated in 1984 from a very prestigious
law school; you could have stuck with the law. Just the other day, I looked up
what partners in big firms in this town are pulling down these days, and it’s
Rob Portman is a distinguished visiting fellow at the American Enterprise

Institute who served as a US senator from Ohio in 2011–23, in the House of Rep-
resentatives from 1993 to 2005, and in several executive branch positions. 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.
$3 million to $6 million to $7 million a year. Over the past thirty years, you
have forgone tens of millions of dollars in income.
Portman: Don’t tell Jane that, please.
Robinson: Has it been worth it?
Portman: Oh, yeah. Look, I love public service. And, actually, when I left
Dartmouth in 1979, I started a public service job, and that was my sort of
opening. And I realized that although you have to go to law school to get
ahead in this town, ultimately I wanted to be in public service in one way or
another. I didn’t know I’d be in elected office.
Robinson: You started in the White House, and you’ve gone up. And every
time you have stood before the people of Ohio and asked for their votes,
you’ve won. You have not lost a single election. So first I asked whether it was
worth it; now my question is, why are you calling it quits?
Portman: It’s a good question, because I do love what I do, and I feel truly
honored to have been able to do it. And as I tell my constituents back home,
you’ve given me the opportunity of a lifetime to help serve Ohio and our
country, and get stuff done. I’m a legislator. Kind of boring, but I’m into
actually getting things done, finding that common ground, moving the ball
forward, and I love that. But, having said that, it’s time. Twelve years in the
Senate, twelve years in the House. I also served in both Bush administra-
tions. I love my family. I love the opportunity to be back in Ohio full-time, I’m
sixty-six years old, so no spring chicken.
Robinson: Don’t say such things.
Portman: It’s time to try something else. And it’s probably going to be public
service in some way, probably helping from the outside to try to encourage
the country to move in a more civil, bipartisan way, because I think that’s
what’s necessary right now and it’s what’s missing. And then also the private
sector, I look forward to getting back to that.
Robinson: So you’ll be practicing law?
Portman: Perhaps, but I like being on the business side of things rather than
the law side, having done both. We have a family business back home, as you
know, the historic Golden Lamb Inn, Ohio’s most iconic restaurant, as it was
recently named. Thirteen presidents have stayed there—all Republican, by
the way. I’m proud of that place. My brother’s been kind of picking up the

majority of the work there, so I’ll be able to help more on that. And look, I
just can’t wait to be home, and to have more time to focus on the things that
are really important in life, which is family and faith. And being able to go out
to the farm and do a little bush hogging without worrying I’m going to get
a call from my office saying you’ve got to respond to this pesky reporter, or
whatever.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Robinson: You’re a contented man. Could we talk for a moment or two about
the arc of this career? I asked your staff to give me your top two or three
accomplishments in the Senate. Thirteen pages, single spaced, is what they
gave me. We’re not going to do this again, you’re only stepping down from the
Senate once, so let’s go through this, if you don’t mind.
Portman: Well, George H. W. Bush was my mentor. He’s the one who I
looked up to—a decent, honorable guy, and he moved me from the council’s
office to the legislative
affairs job, and I will be
very grateful for that, “I wanted to be in public service in
because I really wasn’t one way or another. I didn’t know I’d
qualified. He put me at
be in elected office.”
the table. George H. W.
Bush was well liked by the staff, and well respected by members of Congress,
but he also had this passion for how to find that middle ground. For that he
was punished politically. I was proud of him. I think he was an incredibly
effective executive. He’d already been vice president; he knew what he was
doing. He was very good on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold
War, extremely effective at dealing with Gorbachev and the realities of that
seismic shift. But he also was the guy who early on said, “We’ve got to figure
out a way to find that common ground.” And for that. I think he didn’t win
re-election.
Robinson: Right. More than a dozen years in the House of Representatives,

what stands out?
Portman: As I look back on those days, the things that stand out to me are
where you can change the culture or change the approach that our coun-
try takes to an issue. I was involved in the budget and trade and tax issues;
those were my things. Early on, I developed a passion for two things. One
was unfunded mandates on the states, and I ended up being the Republican
author of the unfunded-mandates legislation.
Robinson: You’d better explain what an unfunded mandate means.
Portman: It’s where the federal government puts a mandate on state or

local government but doesn’t pay for it. It used to be really out of control.
We put in place legislation that allowed for the first time—and this was a
big fight within Congress at the Rules Committee level—the ability for any
member to raise a point of order if there was an unfunded mandate being
placed on a state or local government. As a result, all of a sudden, unfunded
mandates started to disappear, because no one wanted to be subject to the
point of order and have to explain themselves publicly as to why they were
telling their constituents back home, “We’re going to force you to do this a
certain way, but we’re not going to pay anything for it.” That was a change
in attitude, where the federal government had to pull back a little bit rather
than keep dumping things on state and local taxpayers and saying, “We know
best.” That was very satisfying.
The second thing I’ll mention pertained to the drug issue. In particular, I
took a stance that we had to change our focus from the so-called supply side
of drugs to the demand side.
Robinson: Right.
Portman: Republicans at that time were very good, in my view, on inter-

diction of drugs, on going to
places like Colombia
and
H O O V ER DIG E ST • S p ring 2023 99

helping them rid themselves of some of their drugs, poppy fields and so
on, and good on the prosecution side. But where we were missing the boat,
in my view, was on the demand side. And therefore prevention, education,
treatment, and longer-term recovery. So I passed into law, with Speaker
Gingrich’s help, something called the Drug-Free Communities Act. It said
that we ought to encourage more prevention and we ought to help let com-
munities start community coalitions around the country that deal with the
demand side of this, not just the supply side. Over two thousand com-
munity coalitions later, including one in my hometown that I founded, we
began to shift the emphasis from focusing on the supply side only to saying
ultimately what drives us is the demand. It’s a very Adam Smith kind of
Republican approach, I thought.
We really changed the trajectory in the 1990s: we made great progress
and reduced substance abuse. But it’s like the ocean; the waves keep com-
ing in, it never stops. And then later, in the Senate, I was the lead on the
legislation called the
Comprehensive Addic-
“There are plenty of workhorses here tion and Recovery Act,
who don’t focus on the cable shows, which took it to the next
and don’t give fiery speeches on the level, which is to say not
floor, don’t throw out the red meat.” only should we focus
more on the demand
side, but we should focus more on treating substance abuse as a disease.
You put more emphasis on getting people into treatment and recovery,
knowing that you can’t just lock people up and expect this to go away,
that an addiction has to be addressed. So, again, not a very Republican
approach at the time, but now is fairly well acknowledged, I think, as the
right way to do it.
Now we need to ensure that we’re coming up with new strategies. Because
once again, after making tremendous progress—a couple years after our
legislation passed, you had a reduction of 22 percent, for instance, in opioid
overdoses in Ohio—we were hit with COVID, and those rates went back up
again. But that’s something that I’m proud of because it shifted people’s para-
digm and made a difference.
A CLOSE EYE ON TRADE
Robinson: You served as United States trade representative. I suspect that’s

a position not well understood outside Washington, but it’s huge. The elite

negotiator for the country on trade. And then you served as director of the
Office of Management and Budget, and it’s the director of OMB who produc-
es the budget and looks at it all and has a chance to try to do sensible things.
What comes to mind there? What are you proud of in those?
Portman: Well, US trade rep is actually my favorite job, in the sense that I
was kind of on my own. And I wouldn’t have left, except that I was asked to
come over to OMB, which was fascinating too in its own way. As you said, it’s
a difficult job, it’s a grind. I had three teenagers at home, it was difficult to
balance it.
On the trade job, I would say the biggest change we made was with regard
to China. I started a top-to-bottom review of US-China trade policy. It hadn’t
been done in years, if ever. And we were able to be tougher on China, and we
were sort of ahead of our time in that sense. At that point, we had a perma-
nent trade relationship with China in place, which brought them into the
world trading system through the World Trade Organization. But China was
not following the rules. And so we were able not just to point that out but to
do more enforcement actions than had ever been done before, including tak-
ing China to the WTO for the first time for a successful case.
Robinson: I can remember it in the Reagan White House: the thinking in

this town for years was that if we bring China into the world trading system,
first they’ll free up their economy and experience economic growth, and then
eventually, once they achieve a certain level of wealth, the next thing that
happens—it happened in South Korea and it happened in Taiwan—is that
they’ll move toward democracy.
Portman: Absolutely.
Robinson: And Rob Portman was one of the first people in the town who
spotted what was really happening, and it wasn’t what we hoped or thought
or wanted, correct?
Portman: That’s correct. Prior to President Xi, I think they were making
some progress along those lines. But back when I was US trade rep in 2006,
they were backsliding on the commitments that they had made. Now they’re
back to a much more protectionist approach, meaning subsidizing their
industries, dumping products in the United States at below their cost. I had
been a trade lawyer early in my career in Washington, and I felt strongly
that we weren’t calling China to account. We were assuming there’d be this
miraculous transformation.

Robinson: It was a reasonable hope.
Portman: But they didn’t play by the rules, and I think that was important.
INFRASTRUCTURE BREAKTHROUGH
Robinson: This brings us to this body, the United States Senate. What are
you proudest of here?
Portman: I think we’ve had sixty-some bills passed under President Obama
and eighty-some under President Trump, and then about forty under this
president, so there’s been a lot. I guess I’d mention two things. One seems a
little obscure, but I think it’s really important, and that’s how you deal with
US companies relative to the international tax systems. It’s very compli-
cated. I really dug into that. I was the lead on that in the tax reform efforts.
And what happened was a change in the rules to say that we weren’t going to
disadvantage American companies, which to me means American workers.
Second, I guess I have to mention the infrastructure bill.
Robinson: The infrastructure bill that just passed a few months ago.
Portman: Yes. It had been talked about for literally five administrations,
including the Bush administration where I’d worked, not just the second
Bush, but the first Bush administration. President Trump had talked about
it. People were saying:
“Can’t we get back to the
“I’m a legislator. Kind of boring, but days of Dwight Eisen-
I’m into actually getting things done.” hower, when we started
the Interstate Highway
System? Can’t we make a serious investment in infrastructure over the long
haul?” And so, when President Biden got elected, he proposed such a bill. We
looked at it on our side of the aisle and said: “This is full of huge new taxes,
the biggest tax increase in American history. And much of the spending is
not about infrastructure, it’s about so-called soft infrastructure.”
Robinson: Right.
Portman: This would be child care, health care, and so on. And so [Arizona]
Senator Sinema and I looked at this as an opportunity to pull out the core
infrastructure—think roads, bridges, railroads, and ports, but also digital
infrastructure, broadband—and just do that part, not all this soft stuff that
you might want to do in another bill. That doesn’t belong with infrastructure.

And at the same time, take out the tax increases that would hurt American
workers. And by trimming it down and taking out the tax increases, we were
able to come together with a compromise. We then went to five Republicans
and five Democrats, then ten Republicans and ten Democrats, and grew it
out from the center. Eventually, it passed the US Senate with a more than
two-thirds majority, and both the minority leader and the majority leader
supported it.
Now, is it perfect? No, it’s not exactly what I would’ve written, but it does
move us forward. Long-term economic growth will depend on that.
SERVICE OR PERFORMANCE?
Robinson: Here’s what you haven’t said. We just went across three decades,
and I didn’t hear you say, “I gave an especially memorable speech,” or “I
sponsored legislation that got a splashy headline in the New York Times,” or “I
moved my state or my party or my caucus in a certain ideological direction.”
Here’s what you said over and over again: I found a Democrat to work with.
We found out what we could accomplish. Carl Hayden, the great seven-term
senator from Arizona, once said, “If you want to get ahead here in the United
States Senate, you have to be a workhorse and not a show horse.” And Rob
Portman has been a workhorse, and proud of it, correct?
Portman: Yes.
Robinson: But here’s a quotation from Yuval Levin’s book of a year or two
ago, A Time to Build. Today legislators seek “a prominent role in the theater
of our national politics, and they view the institution of Congress as a par-
ticularly prominent stage in that theater, a way to raise their profiles . . . and
to establish themselves as celebrities.” Is that now the way to get ahead in
the US Senate?
Portman: I think you’ve analyzed it pretty well. But I don’t know that it’s a
necessary part of doing the job, because there are plenty of workhorses here
who don’t focus on the cable shows, and don’t give fiery speeches on the floor,
don’t throw out the red meat, on the right or the left, but instead focus on
finding common ground because you have to get sixty votes in the Senate for
just about anything. And I think that’s good, by the way—I support the fili-
buster. This is helping our democracy to achieve things that are sustainable,
bipartisan—as opposed to jerking back and forth between extremes, which
is what would happen otherwise. There are plenty of members who continue
to be workhorses. They’re very important for the people they represent. My

view’s really pretty simple, and I’ve had this since I got involved in public
service. I think it’s an honor to serve, because you get to make a difference in
people’s lives. And you were hired to get something done, to make people’s
lives better. You weren’t hired to be a talk show host and a star.
I think your job as a senator ought to be how to find common ground
between yourself and your colleagues on the other side. Ben Cardin, for
instance, one of my best
friends, from Maryland.
“That’s how the founders intended it. We’ve done more on
They didn’t intend for unelected rep- retirement security than
resentatives to decide big issues.” has been done for decades
around here. We’ve done
four bills together over twenty-five years. We’ve got another one right now
that helps people save more through their IRAs and their 401(k), and helps
small businesses be able to have a 401(k) for their employees. Very impor-
tant stuff for my constituents, but not the sort of thing that lends itself to a
controversial talk show host.
MY FELLOW AMERICANS
Robinson: There is a view that the Congress of the United States, to which
you have devoted the prime years of your life, has abdicated responsibility to
the permanent bureaucracy or the deep state.
Portman: I agree.
Robinson: You’re supposed to cheer me up a little.
Portman: Well, here’s one solution, which is bipartisan. It’s a bill that Sena-
tor Mark Warner, who’s a Democrat, and I have proposed over the years,
and it says that independent agencies should be subject to the same regula-
tory review process as an executive branch agency. Because these inde-
pendent agencies—think of all the alphabet soups, the FECs and FTCs and
SECs and so on—are able to regulate in ways that often are taking power
from the executive branch and significantly from the legislative branch.
So we think they should be subject to the rule-making function within the
Office of Management and Budget. It’s a place where you look at new regu-
lations and say this meets the cost-benefit analysis or doesn’t. Often these
independent agencies put rules out that have huge costs and relatively
small benefits. So I think they should be brought in to this process, that’s
part of the answer.

And part of the answer also is for Congress to legislate with more preci-
sion. We pass legislation that is often very broad and gives enormous powers
to the agencies. We should instead be saying, “This is our clear intent.” It
requires us to do more work here, to have more experts. But that’s how the
founders intended it. They didn’t intend for unelected representatives to
decide big issues.
Robinson: Would you agree that there’s an opportunity here? I’m trying to
talk you into sticking around.
Portman: There’s definitely an opportunity.
Robinson: Because the Supreme Court is now in a mood to backstop it, isn’t
that right?
Portman: Yeah, absolutely. But my strong view is this needs to come back to
Congress, because we’re the elected representatives, we should do our work.
There are some who say that our economy and our society generally are so
much more complicated today that it’s impossible for Congress to do this job.
I feel that the answer to that is to provide Congress with the wherewithal to
do it and to be held accountable for it.
Robinson: There’s a kind of feeling in the air—well, compared to the 1980s,

when you and I were both kids in this town. The United States is richer, a lot
richer in per capita GDP
and constant dollars.
This country does know “What social media has done and
how to create wealth, what cable TV has done is whip up
but in all kinds of other this frenzy that makes it more diffi-
ways—family life, drug cult to solve our problems in America
use, the state of our and to make progress.”
schools, our standing in
the world, the competence of the government—the United States is worse
off than it was when you got your job in the administration of George H. W.
Bush. Do you buy that? Are our best days behind us?
Portman: No, absolutely not. American people are incredibly resilient, but
also entrepreneurial, hardworking. When given the chance, people do pretty
darn well on their own. It doesn’t mean government doesn’t have a role to
establish the parameters, the structure for success. But it does mean that we
are very blessed to live in a country where people are willing to take a risk
and grow something for themselves and their family, but also for others. I

saw my dad do this. He was a young guy in his late thirties, started his own
business, lost money the first few years, and had five employees. My mom
was the bookkeeper. They ended up with a company of almost three hundred
people. What motivated him? Helping those people develop their careers and
help their families. And that’s still out there. That’s the America I grew up in.
That’s the America that I think is still there.
But there is an issue we’ve got to resolve: making fellow Americans an ene-
my. We can have opposing political views, that’s fine. But what social media
has done and what cable TV has done is whip up this frenzy that makes it
more difficult to solve our problems in America and to make progress. We
have to calm things down a little bit. And I don’t think COVID helped, by the
way. But as long as we can figure out how to talk to each other and continue
to have that national sense of pride in our country and who we are, we’ll be
fine.
Robinson: Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote this about you: “Portman
was not built for these political times.”
Portman: I just respectfully disagree.

POLIT IC S
P O L I TI C S
In Case of
Emergency
The politics of COVID-19 led to bitter debates over
a fundamental value: the consent of the governed.
Were the emergency measures fair? Were they
justified? Did they even work?
By Morris P. Fiorina
N
o large-scale society operates under unanimity rules. Conse-
quently, in real world democracies, some interests win and
some lose in normal policy making. But at a minimum, democ-
racy demands that all significant interests have a chance to be
heard—to have a seat at the table. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic
raises questions about whether that has been the case.
A prima facie question concerns the fact that a single public health official
in some cases can assume near-dictatorial powers. One public health official
can partially shut down the economy or suspend civil liberties in his or her
jurisdiction. If elected, like mayors or governors, a single decision maker
would be less of a problem—elected officials represent and are account-
able to the constituencies that elected them. But public health officials are
selected, not elected, and they are selected on the basis of their expertise,
not because they represent the community. Concentrating such power in the
Morris P. Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt
Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He is the editor of
Who Governs? Emergency Powers in the Time of COVID (Hoover Institution
Press, 2023).

hands of a single unelected official raises an immediate concern about the
absence of representation.
A second problem of representation that arises from the experience of
the coronavirus pandemic is that the officials who promulgated emergency
orders did not experience the costs of those orders. This is not a reference
to the numerous reported cases in which public officials attended dinners,
wedding receptions, and other social functions that were disallowed under
existing regulations. Rather, no matter how stringent the policies that public
health officials imposed, they continued to draw their salaries and accumu-
late their benefits. They suffered no personal cost from the shutdowns and
other restrictions that damaged or destroyed the livelihoods of people who
owned or worked in nonessential businesses. Probably their higher economic
status allowed many of them to send their children to in-person schools more
than was the case for the average citizen, or to engage paid help to make
remote schooling easier. As a Harvard Medical School doctor dryly com-
mented in City Journal:
Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young, low-risk

journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while
throwing children, the working class, and high-risk older people
under the bus.
Academic research documented the unequal economic and other costs

associated with the pandemic. The unequal impact of lockdowns and similar
restrictions possibly contributed to the notable partisan difference in sup-
port for such policies. A higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans
are public sector workers, with millions employed in education, government,
and the nonprofit sector, parts of the economy generally less subject to pay
cuts and layoffs—not to mention bankruptcies—than private sector workers.
Former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau once said that “war
is too important to be left to the generals.” Much the same sentiment applies
to the decisions by public health officials in pandemics. In the early days of
the COVID pandemic, economics and business commentators argued that
the public health benefits of shutdowns should be weighed against the likely
economic costs. Civil libertarians raised the same concerns about trade-
offs between shutdowns and civil liberties. My impression is that few public
health officials gave more than lip service to the recognition of such trade-
offs. Instead, most discounted them.
Public health officials are chosen on the basis of expertise, not representa-
tiveness. Like all specialists, they exhibit a degree of tunnel vision, focusing

OBEY: A worker in protective clothing emerges from a building during a
COVID lockdown in Beijing. In the United States, the pandemic created near-
dictatorial powers for public health officials, giving them the power to shut
down the economy or suspend civil liberties. [Newscom]
on the variable their professional training emphasizes—public health, in

this case—and discounting much else. Doctor Sara Cody, the Santa Clara
County health officer, remarked in a June 2021 lecture, “It’s clear that public
health officials have a singular focus and a duty and commitment to protect
the public health; that’s why we’re in the field. I think it’s immensely more
complicated for elected officials.” Depending on your point of view, Cody is
identifying a feature or a bug.
Doctor Anthony Fauci, who by most accounts performed admirably
throughout the crisis, provided a striking illustration of the specialist per-
spective after a testy exchange with Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) at

a congressional hearing in April 2021, where Jordan charged that pandemic
guidelines “trampled” on Americans’ liberties. Fauci told CNN’s Dana Bash:
“This has nothing to do with liberties, Dana. We’re talking about the fact that
560,000 people in our country have died. We’re talking about [60,000] to
70,000 new infections per
day. That’s the issue. This
Concentrating power in the hands of is a public health issue.
a single unelected official raises an It’s not a civil liberties
immediate concern about the lack of issue” [my emphasis].
Probably most Americans
representation.
would agree with Fauci
that public health considerations often outweighed civil liberties infringe-
ments during the pandemic, but not that the latter are completely ignorable.
Public health officials were not alone in this regard. Some elected officials
saw the issues raised by the pandemic similarly as one-sided as Fauci did.
Democratic governors in blue states such as New York and California tended
to issue more stringent restrictions than Republican governors in red states
such as Florida and Texas did. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo famously
commented that “if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” No
one really believes that, of course; if they did, they would lobby for five-mile-
per-hour speed limits so almost no one would die in car accidents. As Doctor
Scott Morrow, the San Mateo County health officer, commented on his pro-
fession’s focus on infection rates, “When you only look at one thing, you only
see one thing.”
Regardless of whether emergency orders are issued by elected or appoint-
ed officials, their issuance and maintenance would have greater legitimacy
if done by collective bodies more representative of the community, bodies
that include health officers but also others—economists, business leaders,
educators, psychologists,
clergy, and politicians who
Few public health officials gave more would articulate other
than lip service to the trade-offs interests held by com-
involving economic costs and civil munity members. Indeed,
liberties. according to the Santa
Clara County health offi-
cer, “This unilateral decision making is really a breathtaking departure from
normal public health practice because normal public health practice is all
about stakeholder engagement and shared decision making. . . . So this was
quite different.” Perhaps after the initial response to the emergency there

should be a greater emphasis on returning to the more normal public health
practice where a “more holistic” approach is adopted.
In his remarks, Cuomo went on to comment that “no American is going to
say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life. Because no American is
going to say how much a life is worth.” Actually, of course, many Americans
say just that virtually every day—personally and professionally. As Glenn
Greenwald, a dissenting commentator on the political left, observes:
In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace poli-

cies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of
people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because
they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevita-
bly result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange
for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit
analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms,
is foundational to public policy debates—except when it comes to
COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.
Program analysts evaluate the value of human lives when they do cost-
benefit analyses of environmental, health and safety, and other regulations.
Insurance companies and Medicare actuaries assign a value to human lives
when they decide what drugs and procedures to cover. Courts decide how
much lives are worth when they determine damages in lawsuits involving
loss of lives. And speak-
ing personally, as a rea-
sonably healthy senior Emergency powers are more complex
citizen, I may have some and consequential than day-to-day
productive years left, but political decision making, but they
my life certainly is not still demand a weighing of costs and
worth anywhere near as benefits.
much as the lives of my
grandchildren, even less so if I had a serious illness or dementia. Treating all
lives as equally valuable is a political decision, not a public health decision. In
asserting that he would do anything to save one life, Cuomo was attempting
to camouflage a political decision as a public health decision.
In responding to criticism that her department’s response to the pandemic
was too heavily focused on the pandemic itself and not on the other economic
and social harms that accompanied it, Cody commented that it was a “fair
criticism” to ask, “Why weren’t we looking at health in a more holistic way?”
She went on to say, in her 2021 lecture,

My challenge and the tension that I have felt over the last year
and a half has been one, feeling constrained, like as far as an order,
I should really just think about communicable disease and I also
know that all of these economic social (sic) harms translate to
health harms. And it’s like, I wished that I could take the economic
and social harms and magically convert them to some health harm
scale, right? And then compare trade-offs. But that little formula,
it doesn’t exist, best I know.
Unfortunately, Cody is correct. Such a scale does not exist. And lacking
such a scale, the comparison of trade-offs is a matter of judgment, and in a
democratic society, that judgment is a political one. The essence of political
decision making is weigh-
ing benefits and costs—on
“This rational cost-benefit analysis whom they accrue, how
much, when, and where.
. . . is foundational to public policy
The case of emergency
debates—except when it comes to
powers is more complex
COVID, where it has been bizarrely and consequential than
declared off-limits.” day-to-day political deci-
sion making, but it cannot
escape this basic fact. As such, the use of emergency powers should be
studied and evaluated in the context of democratic governance, not set over
and above it.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Excerpted from Who Governs? Emergency

Powers in the Time of COVID (Hoover Institution Press, 2023), edited by
Morris P. Fiorina. © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Junior University. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Who

Governs? Emergency Powers in the Time of COVID,
edited by Morris P. Fiorina. To order, call (800) 888-

POLIT IC S
P O L I TI C S
A Minor Miracle
A bipartisan majority has passed the Electoral
Count Reform Act—proof that political differences
can indeed be bridged. Herewith three more areas
where a constructive spirit might prevail.
By Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith
T
he Electoral Count Reform Act
(ECRA), which President Biden Key points
signed into law in December, is noth- » The 1887 statute
ing short of a miracle in the annals of governing the electoral-
vote counting was a
democracy reform. It would merit that recogni- shambles. The events
tion at any time. But that it found a path through of January 6, 2021,
made clear that the
the highly polarized politics and pressures of
statute would have to
the times makes the achievement all the more be reformed.
remarkable. Already we have seen retrospectives » There was bipartisan
that rightly note key factors contributing to its agreement that Con-
gress and the states
success, such as strong congressional leadership should not be allowed,
and the constructive use of bipartisan expertise at the whim of a parti-
san majority, to simply
on complex technical and constitutional ques-
throw out votes.
tions. There is much credit to go around.
» The Electoral Count
The ECRA experience also presents a possible Reform Act privileges
model for thinking about what might be feasible in neither party.
the next phase of federal-level democracy reform.
Bob Bauer is a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at

New York University School of Law. Jack Goldsmith is a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution. He is also Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Univer-
sity and co-founder of Lawfare.

Of course, the divided 118th Congress will make for much tougher sledding
for all such endeavors. In the best of times, reform is caught up in party and
other politics. This is even more true in a presidential election cycle in this
sharply divided polity. But what worked in the Electoral Count Act case may
help shape the reform agenda for the near future.
DESPERATE N EED
First, nobody seriously disputed the merits of Electoral Count Act reform.
The 1887 statute was a shambles in desperate need of fixing. Its weaknesses
were papered over by widespread observance of norms governing the con-
gressional vote count for longer than a century. Then the times caught up
with it. The calamitous January 6–7, 2021, session left no doubt that failure to
amend the statute before the next presidential election posed unacceptable
risks.
Second, and this strength is not to be underestimated, the case on the
merits was entirely compatible with commonsense intuition. By and large,
there was agreement that Congress should not be able, on the whim of a
partisan majority, to simply chuck out votes for president that some wished
had been cast differently,
and that the states should
The reform succeeded because of not be able to change the
common sense and a shared recogni- outcome of an election
tion of the problem. by changing the law after
Election Day. There were
a few voices to suggest that perhaps the vice president did have the unilateral
authority to reject election results or suspend the proceedings. But this was
always a distinctly minority view on both sides of the aisle.
Third, nobody could argue that reform of the Electoral Count Act would
have the effect of advantaging one party over the other. Each party under-
stands perfectly well that control of Congress will shift, as will the identity of
the vice president. And the same is true of control of state legislatures that
might be preparing “alternative slates of electors” to substitute for the ones
approved by the voters. So, the ECRA was blessedly free of the perceived
danger of political engineering that would somehow sculpt the competitive
landscape favorably for one party or the other into the future.
Fourth, the ECRA was not part of an ambitious package of electoral
reforms (like the sprawling and ill-fated Protecting Our Democracy Act) that
linked the success of any one type of relatively uncontroversial reform to the
fate of many other somewhat more controversial reforms. To be sure, the

ECRA was in the same Senate bill as presidential transition reform, but the
latter discrete reform was related to the ECRA and relatively uncontrover-
sial. When the fate of one reform is tied to a much more ambitious, contro-
versial, and disconnected set of other reforms, reaching consensus obviously
becomes much harder.
Fifth, the issues that needed to be worked through for passage of the
ECRA lent themselves to the constructive support and participation of a
bipartisan community of legal experts. The aim of reform was to work with
baseline agreements, such as the need to raise the thresholds for objections
or clarify the role of the vice president, and then tackle more controversial
questions, such as the role for the courts in resolving disputes over the
actions of state legislatures and officials.
This could be done—and was done—without igniting the fatal objection
that Congress was somehow radically altering institutional roles within the
federalist structure.
In testimony before
Congress, and on call to Each party understands perfectly well
support the outstanding that control of Congress will shift, as
congressional staff in the will the identity of the vice president.
drafting process, legal
experts of different backgrounds, party affiliations, and ideological orienta-
tions could help work through these details. In the end, for example, the fed-
eral courts were afforded a significant role, but within existing authorities,
in hearing cases brought by presidential and vice presidential candidates. A
meaningful reform that would not draw fire as “radical” in design stood the
best chance of maintaining bipartisan support.
Many of these criteria, by the way, were the key to other governance
reforms late last year—on presidential transitions, inspectors general, and
presidential transparency about international agreements. In our view, these
criteria for reform suggest the potential for agreement in the next Congress
on reform in at least three areas: emergency powers, vacancies, and war
powers.
FURTHER PROGRESS
The need for emergency powers reform has been explained in detail else-
where. In a nutshell, the problem is that Congress has authorized a wide
array of presidential emergency powers that presidents of both parties have
invoked aggressively in situations that are not real emergencies—and that
presidents can renew indefinitely under the National Emergencies Act,

subject only to veto-overriding supermajorities in Congress. (Congress origi-
nally sought to control emergency powers in the National Emergencies Act
with legislative vetoes, but the Supreme Court’s invalidation of such vetoes
shifted emergency power enormously to the president.)
The good news is that emergency powers reform has bipartisan support in
both houses of Congress. There is even bipartisan agreement on the shape
such reform should take. National emergency powers reform with biparti-
san support came close
to passage last year.
When the fate of one reform is tied to The consensus posi-
a much more ambitious, controver- tion, in brief, is that new
sial, and disconnected reform, con- presidential assertions of
sensus becomes much harder. emergency powers should
terminate after thirty or
so legislative days unless Congress approves the emergency using expedited
procedures. The emergency could then last one year, subject to renewals
by the president that are approved by Congress using the same expedited
procedures. The consensus proposals exempted the president’s most vital
emergency power—the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
This sensible reform is teed up to succeed. No one seriously doubts that
the president’s array of emergency powers, as they have come to be prac-
ticed, are too excessive and undisciplined. Common sense dictates that emer-
gency powers should be limited to real emergencies and not confer timeless
power. The reform is neutral in the sense that it would impact the practices
of presidents of both parties. And, as noted, there is a sensible consensus on
what reform should look like.
As for vacancies reform, the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA)
has allowed presidents of both parties to exercise broad discretion to skirt
the Senate confirmation process by filling vacant senior executive branch
slots with “acting” officials who can serve for two hundred days and some-
times longer. Any sensible reform here must have two elements. First, it
must curb the president’s authority to fill vacant senior executive branch
positions in a way that skirts the Senate’s check and other public account-
ability mechanisms. Second, and just as important, Congress must give the
executive branch something in return.
The flip side of presidential abuse of vacancies is that a recalcitrant Senate
controlled by a party that opposes the president can block effective gover-
nance through its refusal to confirm nominees. There are good reasons to
think that Congress requires confirmation of way too many executive branch

officials, and that the Senate could use this power over confirmations to ham-
string the executive if the latter’s power over vacancies is narrowed. There
needs to be some compromise on this question. We have proposed reduc-
ing the number of Senate-confirmed appointments, but there may be other
solutions.
The current legal regime on vacancies is obviously suboptimal. A reform
like this should be able to attract bipartisan support in Congress, since it
responds to past excesses by presidents of both parties and will apply with
equal force to presidents of both parties.
Finally, war powers reform. There are three basic elements: abrogating the
2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force related to Iraq; updating the
2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force; and amending the War Powers
Resolution. The first is easiest to achieve and has come close to happen-
ing several times in the past few years. It meets all the criteria that made
Electoral Count Act reform possible. The second is harder. But there is a con-
sensus across the parties and the political branches that some reform here is
needed. Reforming the War Powers Resolution will be much harder because
there are stark differences within Congress and between Congress and the
White House.
The passage of the ECRA suggests there are achievable goals of democ-
racy reform even as polarization retains its grip, we now have a divided
government, and a presidential election is less than two years away. The
way forward will not, of course, be easy, and a broad agenda will have to be
trimmed as circumstances require. But success of any one reform invites
consideration of the next steps. It keeps the entire reform enterprise going.
Reprinted by permission of the Lawfare Institute. © 2023 The Lawfare

Institute. 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
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DEFEN SE
DEFEN SE
Managing War
It’s never been easy to harmonize military power
with civilian control, but our democracy demands
no less.
By Bruce S. Thornton
I
n The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of his memoirs of the
World War II era, Winston Churchill catalogues the causes of the
conflict. Among them he lists “the structures and habits of democratic
states,” which “lack those elements of persistence and convictions
which can alone give security to the humble masses. . . . Even in matters of
self-preservation, no policy is pursued even for ten or fifteen years at a time.”
From the birth of democracy in ancient Athens until the present, the politi-
cal institutions that protect the freedom and rights of citizens have also been
potentially dangerous in times of war—by complicating and interfering with
the policies and decisions that, during a conflict, require swift execution,
decisiveness, and persistence.
The “structures and habits” Churchill notes include regularly scheduled
elections, by which the citizens hold their elected leaders accountable; the
right of all citizens to speak openly and freely on all matters, including the
conduct of foreign policy and the management of war; and the voicing of dis-
sent against the war itself and the reasons for conducting it. Most important,
Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of

Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict,
and an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State Univer-
sity, Fresno. He is the editor of Cage Fight: Civilian and Democratic Pres-
sures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy (Hoover Institution Press,
2023).

in democratic states the military establishment and war are subordinated
to the civilian institutions and offices accountable to the citizens through
elections.
VOTERS ARE IN CHARGE

Regular elections, in the United States held every two years, make long-term
military strategies vulnerable to the shifting moods of the electorate, which
are expressed in frequent turnovers in Congress and the presidency. On the
other hand, this critical instrument of political accountability can also change
a dangerous course.
The iconic example in recent American history is the election of Ronald
Reagan in 1980. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, elected after the disastrous
abandonment of Vietnam, counseled that we should get over our “inordinate
fear of communism” and
prioritize human rights
in US foreign policy Thanks to regular elections, military
rather than containing decisions are always subject to what
and pushing back on the voters want.
Soviet Union’s adventur-
ism in Latin America, Afghanistan, and Central Africa. Reagan, in contrast,
announced that it was “morning in America,” exuded confidence and faith
in America’s goodness, increased the military budget, pushed back against
Soviet interventions in Latin America, and summed up his strategy for deal-
ing with the Soviet Union as “we win, they lose.”
Similarly, Donald Trump’s election in 2016 led to a change in military policy
from Barack Obama’s foreign policy of retreat, diplomatic engagement,
and “leading from behind.” Obama had sought a “reset” with Russia, with
promises of “flexibility” made indirectly to Vladimir Putin. He also rejected
planned antimissile batteries for Poland and Czechoslovakia and Javelin
antitank weapons for Ukraine, and in October 2011 withdrew US forces from
Iraq. This latter move created a power vacuum quickly filled by Iran, ISIS,
and other jihadist organizations, and exacerbated the brutal civil war in
Syria by enabling Russia and Iran to take a larger role in that conflict and the
wider region.
Responding to voter displeasure, Trump had campaigned against the “end-
less wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq and near the end of his term negotiated
with the Taliban for withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. The Biden
administration campaigned on the same aim, which ultimately was carried
out in 2021, with the loss of thirteen American lives, the abandonment of

many Afghans who had worked for US authorities, and the loss of billions of
dollars in weapons and materiel.
Some policies are disliked by voters of both parties, which compels Demo-
crat and Republican candidates to promise to address their concerns even
if doing so might compromise long-term strategies for short-term political
gain. In democratic societies, voters can end both a politician’s career and a
party’s control of government.
DISSENT
Relations between civilian governments and the military have often been
contentious, especially over the management of a conflict, its tactics, and its
purposes. The constitutional right to free speech allows citizens to criticize
and protest publicly how a war is conducted, which complicates military
planning and puts pressure on the elected officials who are held accountable
on election day for setbacks and failures.
Since the Sixties and the war in Vietnam, antiwar organizations have pro-
liferated, and protests have accompanied every conflict. These constitution-
ally protected events bolster enemy morale even as they intimidate presi-
dents, legislators, and candidates for elected office. Such demonstrations,
often extensively covered in the news, also affect domestic politics.
In 2004, the US presidential primary overlapped with a violent guer-
rilla resistance in Iraq to the American occupation. Democratic Vermont
governor Howard Dean leveraged antiwar protests to mount a grass-roots
campaign for his party’s nomination, gaining surprising support. Dean’s brief
success spooked the front-
runners for the nomina-
To America’s founders, the centuries tion, Senators John Kerry,
of chronic European warfare typified John Edwards, and Hill-
an abuse of power they were at pains ary Clinton, who reversed
their support for the war,
to avoid.
even though they had
earlier voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force that sanctioned
it, based on the same intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction
(WMDs) that was one of President George W. Bush’s predicates for the war.
For the Democrats, opposition to the war became an important plank in the
party’s platform and eventually in candidate Kerry’s campaign.
Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign also incorporated the antiwar move-
ment’s interpretation of the Iraq War as unnecessary and based on false, if
not manufactured, evidence for Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. By then, voters

were tiring of the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, both still troubled by
violence and seemingly making little progress toward fulfilling Bush’s aim of
creating liberal democracies in nations culturally unsuited for Western politi-
cal ideals.
In 2007, with the antiwar movement still active, then-senator Obama
responded to the “surge” of troops to Iraq, which eventually reduced the
violence, by calling it a
“reckless escalation,”
and introduced legisla- The “military-industrial complex” is
tion to remove all US vulnerable to manipulation, bureau-
combat forces by March cracy, and conflicts of interest.
31, 2008. Obama’s presi-
dential campaign also framed the war in Iraq as predicated on fabricated
intelligence and dubious strategic aims.
Eventually, the Biden administration withdrew all US troops from Afghani-
stan in 2021. The fallout from the withdrawal, driven by people exercising
their First Amendment right, reflects the price Americans pay for the foun-
dational freedom of our political order.
THREATS TO CIVILIAN CONTROL

In the United States, Congress possesses the power to declare war, and the
president serves as commander in chief of the military even if he has no
military experience or training. These provisions give the people the power,
through the representatives they elect, to make war and to hold the military
accountable for how it conducts it.
These guardrails were designed to protect citizens and their freedoms
from the national institution made up of those who are trained in warfare
and have access to the materiel for making war. The founders checked mili-
tary institutions with elected officeholders because European history was
replete with examples of powerful military leaders, autocrats, and kings who
commanded armies without accountability to the people. Those figures often
turned against civilian political institutions to create some form of tyranny.
The founders saw the centuries of chronic European warfare as typifying
abuse of power and heedless destruction of defenseless people.
During the American revolutionary and founding period, one of the pre-
mier historical examples of this danger was Julius Caesar, who abused the
terms of his imperium, the right granted by the Roman senate to wage war
on behalf of the republic, by marching his legions into the city of Rome and
its territory in violation of the law, thus becoming a tyrant not accountable

to the people or the Senate. For the American colonists chafing against the
governance of the British parliament and king, Romans who resisted Caesar
embodied the defense of freedom against tyranny.
This distrust of the military and fear of standing armies has been a peren-
nial feature of American history. And then came the Cold War—with its
nuclear face-off and its
proxy struggles around
Since the Sixties, antiwar organiza- the globe—which required
tions have proliferated, and protests a much larger military,
have accompanied every conflict. and more sophisticated
weapons, than Americans
had been accustomed to. The strategy of “containment” demanded a perma-
nent security and defense establishment, and the cost of that establishment
began to take up more and more of the national budget, leading to clashes
over civilian and military funding.
The modern wariness of the military is reflected in the warning by presi-
dent and former general Dwight Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address,
of the “military-industrial complex.” He painted a picture of a “conjunction
of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” whose
“influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every
statehouse, every office of the federal government,” encompassing “the very
structure of our society.” He cautioned,
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisi-

tion of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power exists and will persist.
One factor underlying Eisenhower’s warning is that our military and

security establishment is housed in large federal agencies concentrated in
Washington and close to Congress, which decides their funding levels. More-
over, such large, hierarchically organized bureaucracies, especially ones not
accountable to the market or the voters, are prone to professional deforma-
tion. The aims and interests of the agency shift from the functions they were
created to perform to the interests of the agency itself. And the proximity to
the Capitol and the White House, and the consulting, advocacy, and lobbying
firms clustered around both, leave such agencies open to their influence.
These large agencies also offer top military leaders opportunities to serve
in a president’s cabinet. Or, upon retirement, retired brass can take lucra-
tive seats on corporate boards of armament manufacturers, or billets with

lobbying firms, where contacts from their years of service are useful in
securing government contracts.
This is not to say that serving in such positions is necessarily about politics
or greed, or that those who do so are not serving honorably. But this state
of affairs is rife with moral hazard, contributing to the disaffection with the
military shared by many citizens. And it leads to distrust of powerful institu-
tions and their perceived careerist or politicized leaders who pursue politi-
cal aims like the “war on carbon” or critical race theory training instead of
military preparedness.
Institutional orthodoxy, received wisdom, and unchallenged paradigms
transform the military and security establishment into the proverbial “box”
we are supposed to “think outside of.” And the lessons of history often cannot
penetrate these silos of orthodoxy.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Adapted from Cage Fight: Civilian and
Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy (Hoover
Institution Press, 2023), edited by Bruce S. Thornton. © 2023 The Board
of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Cage Fight:

Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military
Conflicts and Foreign Policy, edited by Bruce S.
Thornton. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

DEFEN SE
DEFEN SE
Smaller, Faster,
Deadlier
The supply chain for “energetics,” the essential
chemicals in bombs, shells, and missiles, is
surprisingly tenuous. Without prompt new
investments, we’ll be placing our national security
at risk.
By Nadia Schadlow
A
s the war in Ukraine continues to take its tragic toll, US
defense strategists are questioning the nation’s ability to
fight a protracted conflict. US stockpiles of critical munitions
are being depleted as Washington supplies Kyiv with Javelin
antitank and Stinger antiaircraft missiles. For months now, US policy makers
and experts have sounded warnings. Over the past year, Senator Tom Cotton
(R-Arkansas) warned that the national stockpile of munitions is dangerously
low. NATO officials are also worried, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin
has urged allied countries to “dig deep and provide additional capability” to
Ukraine.
But the problem is more complicated than the supply of finished weapons.
Not only is the United States lagging in the production of the missile bod-
ies and artillery shells, but it faces a shortage of the chemicals that these
Nadia Schadlow is a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution

and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She is a former deputy national secu-
rity adviser for strategy.

and other systems depend on for their lethality. These chemicals are called
energetics, and they come in three main forms: explosives, which create the
lethal effects in warheads; propellants, which produce thrust for missiles
and rockets; and pyrotechnics, such as fireworks, which illuminate or mark
targets for military and civilian applications.
Two decades ago, the US National Academy of Sciences observed that
there was “no modern defense system or type of weaponry that does not
rely on energetic materials.” This remains the case today, with nearly every
weapon on the modern battlefield depending on energetic materials.
THE ELEMENTS OF WAR

Not only are energetics relevant to the current munitions pipeline problem,
but they are also critical to advancing the operational concepts that the
US military is developing to deter and counter threats around the world.
Advancements in ener-
getics translate directly
into advantages on the More efficient fuels also mean more
battlefield because they mass can be put into orbit or sent to
allow for increased the moon or Mars.
range, increased lethali-
ty, and decreased weapon size. All these capabilities are important to counter
the anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) challenges, which refers to the Chinese
military’s ability to hold US and allied forces at risk in the South and East
China Seas and elsewhere.
Increased range, for instance, allows a rocket or missile to target an
adversary from a safer distance, helping reduce the danger to friendly forces.
Moreover, for advanced systems, including hypersonic weapons, advanced
energetics can allow hypersonic glide vehicles to achieve greater range while
sustaining higher speeds.
Energetics are also central to lethality, which is the ability to destroy
enemy systems and personnel. More explosive power per weapon increases
the likelihood that a target will be disabled or destroyed on the first shot.
And advanced energetics allow for smaller munitions. For example, the
Defense Department can build smaller bombs with greater lethality. Smaller and
lighter weapons mean US platforms could bring a greater number into the fight
and spend less time restocking. Recent discussions around contested logistics in
high-intensity conflict point to the importance of making everything smaller,
lighter, faster, and more portable.

TAKE THAT: An M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) is
fired during joint training in Sweden. The United States has provided HIMARS
equipment to Ukraine, and the battlefield drain is depleting many critical
supplies. The National Academy of Sciences pointed out that there exists “no
modern defense system or type of weaponry that does not rely on energetic
materials.” [Spc. Devin Klecan—US Army]
Moreover, energetics are essential to other areas as well, particularly in the

commercial and military space domain. More efficient energetic fuels mean
more mass can be put into orbit or transferred to the moon or Mars. Just as
energy-dense propellants increase weapons range and speed, increased den-
sity can provide spacecraft longer range, better maneuverability (important
for repairs in space), and increased engagement speeds.
FORGING A NEW CHAIN

For more than a decade, the US energetics supply chain has been brittle.
Although the United States developed key compounds—such as CL-20, one
of the world’s most powerful non-nuclear explosives—in the late 1980s, the
United States never produced it at scale. In contrast, China began producing

CL-20 at scale a decade ago, and Russia added the compound to its arsenal.
Recent assessments of the industrial base have found that the Pentagon
imports roughly a third of its energetic materials from foreign sources,
with a significant portion coming from China. Domestic production relies
on a handful of aging production facilities and suffers from a lack of surge
capacity.
The most widely used energetic materials come from a small number of
government-owned and -operated facilities that produce, mix, load, and pack
them into weapon systems. Much of this takes place at the Holston and Radford
Army Ammunition Plants. Both are government-owned contractor-operated
facilities that produce energetics which fulfill joint service requirements. Holston
Army Ammunition Plant is also the only producer of RDX and HMX, two of the
most common energetics in US munitions.
Extensive government regulation for facilities that produce and handle
explosive compounds also means that new ones have not been built. Even if
companies are interested in producing energetics, they face high barriers to
entry.
The good news is that attention to the issue has increased in the past year.
Most recently, with White House support, the Defense Department has used
the Defense Production Act to work with one company that develops an
important chemical (aminoguanidine bicarbonate) and to initiate more col-
laboration between the Pentagon and other suppliers of critical chemicals. In
addition, the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act calls for an additional
$3 billion for munitions. The NDAA will also allow for longer-term contracts,
encouraging manufacturers to invest some of their own capital.
While the Defense Department is rightly focused on Ukraine’s immediate
needs and on replenishing US stocks, it should also look to the future and not
merely invest in legacy munitions production. Undersecretary of Defense for
Acquisition and Sus-
tainment Bill LaPlante
recently observed that Advancements in energetics trans-
the Ukraine conflict is an late directly into battlefield advan-
opportunity to modern- tage.
ize the supply chains
of the US defense industrial base. He is right: the Pentagon now has a big
opportunity to tackle the underlying problems in the energetics enterprise
by advancing the development of new compounds produced at home, with
twenty-first-century manufacturing methods. The Chinese government is
already doing so, both in this sector and in many others.

Given the relatively “bounded” arena of energetics, the Pentagon has a
chance to align strategically many of the programs designed to promote
public-private partnerships over the past decade.
At each stage of the energetics capital stack, the Defense Department can
target its nondilutive investment capital, loans, loan guarantees, prototyping
contracts, and produc-
tion contracts to ensure
Recent discussions about high-inten- that the energetics sector
sity conflict point to the importance has the right incentives
of making everything smaller, lighter, to develop in the United
States. Companies in this
faster, and more portable.
sector must be willing to
take the necessary R&D risks, and they will only do that if they are confi-
dent of an enduring marketplace. This would include tapping into programs
across the DoD enterprise, such as DARPA’s Embedded Entrepreneur-
ship Initiative; the Defense Innovation Unit’s National Security Innovation
Capital; AFWERX (part of the Air Force Research Laboratory); the Small
Business Innovation Research; the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve;
and the newly established Office of Strategic Capital.
Wars are rarely short, and the Department of Defense is currently provid-
ing necessary lethal aid to Ukraine and preparing for the possibility of war
with China in the western Pacific. It should be inconceivable for the “arsenal
of democracy” to run short of the very chemicals responsible for military
weapons’ propulsion and lethality. By focusing investment on building new,
more lethal energetic compounds, and replacing twentieth-century facilities
with twenty-first-century plants, the Department of Defense can position
itself to deter—and if needed, fight—the nation’s next war.
Reprinted by permission of Proceedings (usni.org/magazines/proceed-

ings). © 2023 US Naval Institute. All rights reserved.

Disruptive Strategies: The Military Campaigns of
Ascendant Powers and Their Rivals, edited by David
L. Berkey. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

FOR E IGN POLICY
FO REI G N POLICY
Bringing Japan
Aboard
To confront Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific, the
United States, Australia, and Britain are forging
new security bonds. It would make abundant
sense to extend those bonds to Japan.
By Michael R. Auslin
A
new quad is coalescing in the Indo-Pacific, and it is likely to have
an even greater impact than the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,
a grouping that brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the
United States. The new alignment is coming about as Australia,
Britain, Japan, and the United States increasingly align their security interests
against the growth of China’s influence and power. The prospect of adding
Japan to the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) defense
cooperation pact, established in 2021—which would turn the group into JAU-
KUS—could transform security cooperation among liberal democracies in the
Indo-Pacific in a way no previous alliance or quasi-alliance has done.
Such a partnership was not preordained. Indeed, reports last year that
Japan was quietly being asked about joining AUKUS were quickly denied by
Michael R. Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contem-

porary Asia at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of Asia’s New Geopolitics:
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). Auslin also participates in Hoover research teams
studying military history, the Middle East, Taiwan, China, and the Indo-Pacific.

Tokyo; then–White House press secretary Jen Psaki also dismissed the idea.
But Japan looks to be aligning itself with the trio nonetheless, part of a stra-
tegic revolution that has not only transformed Tokyo’s security posture but
also turned it into an increasingly important actor in the Indo-Pacific.
FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

Under former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated
last July, Japan dropped most restrictions on joint weapons development,
steadily increased its military budget, and embraced a more active defense
posture, including allowing its military forces to engage in collective self-
defense with partners.
Since taking power in October 2021, current prime minister Fumio Kishida
has not only built on Abe’s foreign and security policies but also expanded
and enhanced Japan’s ties with leading liberal nations in Asia and beyond.
Kishida immediately joined Washington and European capitals in sanction-
ing Russia after it invaded Ukraine. He has deepened Japan’s engagement
with NATO, becoming in June the first Japanese leader to attend a NATO
summit. At home, Kishida has continued to increase Japan’s defense budget,
with the possibility of doubling it to nearly $100 billion, and in December
published a new national security strategy.
The takeaway for Asia watchers is that Japan’s strategic revolution is
not tied to political personalities but rather to evolving Chinese and North
Korean threats. Tokyo will continue to develop its capabilities and expand its
partnerships as long as Asia’s security environment remains unstable.
A core element of Kishida’s approach is a steady alignment with the three
AUKUS nations. In late October, Canberra and Tokyo signed a Joint Decla-
ration on Security Cooperation. Although it is not a formal mutual defense
pact, the agreement enhances Japan and Australia’s “special strategic
partnership” while reiterating their support for global norms and regional
openness. They had already signed a military reciprocal access agreement,
which eases the procedures for visiting forces and allows the Australian and
Japanese militaries to hold joint exercises and work together on disaster
relief, including with the United States.
With their new security cooperation declaration, the two countries pledge
to “deepen practical cooperation and further enhance interoperability”
between their militaries while sharing intelligence, cooperating on cyber
defense, and working to secure their supply chains, among other actions. If
fully implemented, the proposed scope of cooperation would make the part-
nership among the most important for each nation.

In January, Britain and Japan signed a reciprocal access agreement similar
to the one Japan already has with Australia, easing the entry of troops into
each other’s countries and enhancing joint military exercises and logistics
cooperation. This follows a July announcement that Tokyo and London will
cooperate (with Italy) on developing a next-generation fighter jet. The British
Royal Navy and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force held joint exercises
in the English Channel the previous month, just a year after Britain’s new
Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier and a strike group visited Japan.
For Britain, the access agreement with Japan puts more meat on the
bones of London’s “tilt” toward the Indo-Pacific region, a strategic shift first
outlined by the government of former prime minister Boris Johnson. A deep-
ening of British-Japanese defense ties, along with current prime minister
Rishi Sunak’s expected revision of London’s most important public strate-
gic document, its “integrated review,” to focus more clearly on the Chinese
threat, sets the stage for greater formal cooperation with Canberra, Tokyo,
and Washington in the Indo-Pacific.
A NATURAL EVOLUTION
Even before the four countries reach any formal agreement, however, an
informal JAUKUS is already emerging, thanks to an alignment of actions
aimed at balancing Chinese advances. In October 2021, the four countries’
navies conducted joint
training in the Indian
Japan’s strategic revolution is not tied Ocean. In August 2022,
to political personalities but to evolv- Japan announced it would
ing Chinese and North Korean threats. research hypersonic
missiles, shortly after
AUKUS stated it would focus on developing both hypersonic and counter-
hypersonic technology. Similarly, Japan is increasing its investment in
quantum computing, to be carried out in part by Fujitsu, owner of the world’s
second-fastest supercomputer. This initiative meshes with AUKUS’s commit-
ment to jointly develop quantum and artificial intelligence technologies with
potential military implications.
Similarly, the four nations are increasingly aligned on domestic security
issues. All four have banned Huawei from their domestic telecommunications
networks, especially 6G, although implementation has been uneven. Further-
more, British Security Minister Tom Tugendhat’s announcement that Britain
would close all remaining Confucius Institutes means that each of the four
nations is moving to reduce the presence and influence of the Beijing-funded

organization, which has exerted pressure on universities around the world to
mute criticism of China and push narratives that benefit the interests of the
Chinese state.
The next step in creating an actual JAUKUS would be to consider how to
slowly formalize Japan’s participation. It could begin by inviting Japanese
officials to observe some
of the seventeen AUKUS
working groups on areas Britain’s access agreement with
of common interest, such Japan puts more meat on the bones
as quantum computing of London’s “tilt” toward the Indo-
and hypersonic develop- Pacific region.
ment. A next stage would
be to explore modified JAUKUS status for Japan or regular attendance at
meetings of joint steering groups, which set policy on the two core topics
that AUKUS is focused on—submarines and advanced capabilities—while
longer-term membership is discussed. Throughout, quietly exploring how
Tokyo might participate in AUKUS’s core effort to supply nuclear-powered
submarines to Australia could help map out potential diplomatic and political
landmines, not least in Japanese domestic politics, where the opposition to
nuclear technology for any military use remains strong.
Regardless of the process by which it happens and its ultimate status—
whether it is an alliance, a pact, or something more informal—JAUKUS is
a natural evolution of converging security concerns and initiatives by four
leading liberal nations with a will and ability to think strategically about the
Indo-Pacific. As the commonality of their policies and goals becomes ever
more apparent, the JAUKUS nations are likely to see the benefit of further
coordinating and joining their efforts, all of which promises to help maintain
stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com). ©

2023 Foreign Policy Group LLC. All rights reserved.
Available 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-

T H E EN VI RO NMENT
T H E EN VI RO NMENT
A New York State

of Panic
Yes, the sea is up and the Battery’s down. But New
York City isn’t even close to sinking.
By Steven E. Koonin
A
recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration report
yet again raises alarm that New Yorkers are about to be inun-
dated by rapidly rising seas. But a review of the data suggests
that such warnings need to be taken with more than a few
grains of sea salt.
The record of sea level measured at the southern tip of Manhattan, known
as the Battery, begins in 1856. It shows that today’s waters are 19 inches
higher than they were 167 years ago, rising an average of 3.5 inches every 30
years. The geologic record shows that this rise began some 20,000 years ago
as the last great glaciers melted, causing the New York coastline to move
inland more than 50 miles.
There is no question that sea level at the Battery will continue to rise in
coming decades, if only because the land has been steadily sinking about 2
inches every 30 years because of factors including tectonic motion, rebound
from the mass of the glaciers, and local subsidence. Rather, the question is
whether growing human influences on the climate will cause the sea level
Steven E. Koonin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor at New

York University, and the author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us,
What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella Books, 2021).

to rise more rapidly. To judge that, we can compare recent rates of rise with
those in the past, when human influences were much smaller.
The rise in sea level over each 30-year period since 1920 has varied
between 1.5 and 6 inches. The 5-inch rise over the most recent 30 years is
higher than the century-long average, but it isn’t unprecedented and shows
no sign of increasing.
As the Earth warms, changes in sea level at the Battery will depend
in part on global changes. These include the loss of ice from mountain
glaciers, Greenland, and
Antarctica, as well as
the ocean’s expansion The waters around New York City
as it warms. It’s very began rising some 20,000 years ago
difficult to predict these as the last great glaciers melted.
changes—many fac-
tors influence ice loss, and the oceans absorb only 0.25 percent of the heat
flowing through the Earth’s climate system. The 30-year rises in the latter
half of the twentieth century were diminished by about an inch because of
the filling of reservoirs behind dams and changes in groundwater around
the world.
The Battery’s sea level also depends on local changes in the sea and
the sinking of the land. Most important is the natural variability of winds,
currents such as the Gulf Stream, salinity, and temperatures of the North
Atlantic, which cause variations in sea level along the entire Northeast coast
of the United States. Because of these many variables, climate models can’t
account for the ups and downs.
Despite this, the recent NASA report echoes a National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration report predicting more than a foot of rise at the
Battery by 2050. Such a
rise during the coming
30 years would be more The Battery’s sea level hasn’t done
than double the rise anything in recent decades that it
over the past 30 years hasn’t done over the past century.
and more than triple the
past century’s average. Even more remarkably, the NOAA report says this
rise will happen regardless of future greenhouse-gas emissions. There is no
way of knowing if this prediction is correct.
So while New Yorkers should watch the waters around them, there is no
need to dash to higher ground. The Battery’s sea level hasn’t done anything
in recent decades that it hasn’t done over the past century. And although

we’ll have to wait three decades to test the predicted one-foot rise, measure-
ments over the next decade should tell us how quickly we’ll need to raise the
seawalls.

Renewing Indigenous Economies, by Terry L.
Anderson and Kathy Ratté. To order, call (800) 888-

E D U C AT ION
EDUC ATI ON
Truly Fair
What stands in the way of genuine equity in
schools? Not bigotry. Mediocrity.
By Michael J. Petrilli
L
ast fall, Stephen Sawchuk published an Education Week article
exploring why “educational equity” had become a “trigger
word”—even though the notion has been baked into federal policy
for decades. “Equity may be the law,” he wrote, “but we don’t
agree on what it means.”
I can understand Sawchuk’s confusion because, properly construed, the
call for greater equity can and should command widespread support from
Americans across the ideological spectrum.
A potentially unifying argument might go something like the following.
A WIN-WIN PROPOSAL
In a great country like ours, we should aspire for every child to grow up to
achieve his or her full potential. Anything less is a waste of talent and a blem-
ish on human dignity and flourishing.
Schools have a particular role to play in helping children achieve their full
academic potential, and have supporting roles in helping children develop
socially, emotionally, artistically, and athletically.
Yet we know that our country is failing to live up to this aspiration because
millions of boys and girls are failing to live up to their full potential. And we
know that most of the reasons have to do with what happens between concep-
tion and kindergarten—that the strains of poverty, family instability, parental
Michael J. Petrilli is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the president
of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

substance abuse, and other social ills mean that many children enter schools far
behind what their cognitive trajectory otherwise could have been.
We know this in part because of the evidence of achievement gaps that can be
measured at school entry, if not before. If we reject the notion that genetic differ-
ences drive racial achievement gaps as morally and empirically dubious—which
we absolutely should—then the explanation for their existence as early as age five
must be differing life circumstances, including the gaping chasms in socioeco-
nomic status and its associated opportunities.
A major focus of “equity work,” then, is to close these gaps in the zero-to-five
years—both because it’s the right thing to do, and so that all children have the
opportunity to achieve their full potential—cognitively, academically, and otherwise.
This project has tended to be the domain of the political left, with its calls for
better pre- and post-natal health care; the eradication of environmental pollut-
ants like lead paint; direct financial supports for families with young children,
like 2021’s expanded and fully refundable child tax credits; and expanded public
support for high quality child care. Yet the political right has contributions to
make as well, with its calls for greater personal responsibility; greater family sta-
bility, especially via married, two-parent families; and for welfare programs that
encourage—rather than discourage—marriage and work, which have been shown
to lead to better outcomes for kids.
Schools also have a critical role to play, especially at the elementary level, where
students are still young enough for a great education to make a significant differ-
ence in their academic trajectories. Schools may not be able to overcome all the
damage of poverty, family instability, and their associated ills, but they can do a lot,
as we know from the markedly different achievement trajectories of children in the
highest-performing high-poverty schools—many of them public charter schools—
compared to kids in more typical school settings.
Educational equity, then, means providing children, especially poor children,
with excellence—excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers,
excellent tutoring, excellent enrichment. Some of that costs more money in high-
poverty settings, so yes, educational equity demands that we spend more public
dollars on the students who need it most.
The greatest enemy of equity, then, is mediocrity. It’s the everyday bureaucratic
dysfunction that remains all too common in American education. It’s the deci-
sions that public officials take that block excellent schools, including excellent
public charter schools, from growing or replicating. It’s the inertia that keeps
traditional public schools from retaining many of their best young teachers. It’s
the refusal to intervene when a principal is not up to the task of creating a culture
of excellence.

Note what is not an enemy of equity: excellence. Indeed, far from it—excel-
lence is the antidote to inequity.
A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE

And yet—back to the puzzle that Sawchuk presented in his article—some
“equity advocates” have turned the notion into a “trigger word” by arguing
that excellence is indeed the enemy. By their line of thinking, anything that
helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels, or even just celebrates that
achievement—such as gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, or Nation-
al Merit Scholarships—is at war with equity. These advocates see equity as a
zero-sum game. Rather than focusing on helping every child achieve his or her
potential, potential that inevitably varies from individual to individual, they
seek a world in which the outcomes children achieve are closer to equal—even
if that equality comes by leveling-down the high achievers.
Needless to say, this conception of equity is highly unpopular, and not just
on the political right. As well it should be, because it’s also morally bankrupt.
It is simply wrong to embrace policies and practices that seek to put a ceil-
ing on any child’s achievement—just as it is wrong to block efforts to get all
students to a floor of basic literacy and numeracy.
John Gardner once asked if we can “be equal and excellent too.” The answer
is an unequivocal yes. And in the domain of racial equity, the way to do that is to
ensure that all children, from every racial and ethnic group, get what they need
to live up to their full potential. And for high-potential children from underrep-
resented groups in particular, it means identifying their talent early, cultivating
it through gifted-and-talented programs and the like, and keeping them on a
trajectory of high achievement all the way through high school and beyond.
It bears repeating: Excellence is not the enemy of equity; it is the antidote
to inequity. Equity advocates would do well to keep that in mind.
Reprinted by permission of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. © 2023 The

Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All rights reserved.

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.

C A L I FO RN I A
C A L I FO RN I A
Newsom’s
Nothingburger
A government panel has been given the power
to control the fast-food industry. The thoroughly
predictable outcome? Feast for unions, and a
famine for job-seekers.
By Lee E. Ohanian
C
alifornia’s new fast-food law, signed last September, aims to
establish a politically appointed council with unprecedented
power to regulate the industry by setting worker wages, hours,
and other working conditions. A successful signature-gathering
campaign has temporarily put the brakes on the law, pending a statewide
referendum to be held next year, but it’s worth taking a close look at legisla-
tion that is not merely government overreach on steroids. This law would
essentially kill the franchisor-franchisee model within the industry and would
almost certainly destroy thousands of jobs by driving up the cost of doing
business and increasing the level of automation in the industry.
The law couldn’t have come at a worse time. According to the most
recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in Califor-
nia’s fast-food industry remains nearly 20 percent below its pre-pandemic
level (representing a loss of more than seventy-five thousand jobs). Even
Lee E. Ohanian is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a participant in

Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project. He is a professor of economics and director of
the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at UCLA.

more disturbing is that industry employment continued to decline even
after the height of the pandemic, losing an additional twenty-five thousand
jobs between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2021 (data for 2022 are
unavailable).
The law applies to any fast-food chain in California that has at least one
hundred stores nationwide sharing a common brand. The average fast-food
restaurant is marginally profitable, with profit margins averaging between
6 and 9 percent in normal times. Franchisee capital requirements are large,
sometimes requiring
$2 million or more to Unionized businesses are exempt
get a franchise up and
from the new law.
running. Most fast-food
workers are young, and many work part time, which tends to lead to high
turnover, as high as 143 percent annually. This means that over the course of
a year, a workplace that begins the year with a hundred employees will need
to hire one hundred and forty-three workers over the course of that year to
finish the year with a hundred employees. Not surprising, 78 percent of fast-
food restaurant operators indicate that recruiting and retaining workers is
their top priority.
The bill passed both the eighty-member state Assembly and the forty-
member state Senate by only one vote in each chamber, despite the state’s
having a 60–20 Democratic supermajority in the Assembly and a 31–9
supermajority in the Senate. No Republican lawmakers supported the bill.
SOMETHING SWEET FOR THE UNIONS

Why was such an extreme law passed and signed into law by Governor
Gavin Newsom, whose own finance department opposed the bill? The bill
was marketed as necessary to protect worker health and safety and to fight
employer wage theft. But there are, of course, already laws at the federal and
state level that protect worker safety and health, and California passed a law
in 2021 that makes wage theft a criminal offense in the state. Former Clinton
administration labor secretary Robert Reich remarked that California is
home to the “nation’s foremost set of laws to protect workers.”
The new fast-food law is not about protecting its workers. It is an under-
the-radar attempt by politicians to increase unionization. Union fingerprints
are all over this law. Unionized businesses—those operating under a col-
lective bargaining agreement—are in fact exempt from the new law. Like
so many other recent California bills, the law has the goal of increasing the
likelihood that a business will be unionized—as it raises the cost of not being

unionized. The council will have substantial latitude to punish nonunion busi-
nesses de facto, as the bill allows the council to set wages as high as $22 per
hour, along with wielding the right to dictate working hours and other condi-
tions of employment. Suddenly, collective bargaining looks so much better
than it did before, but only because the new law makes running a nonunion
business remarkably more expensive.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was one of the stron-
gest supporters of the bill. No surprise there. The SEIU has spent about $100
million since 2012 to raise the state’s minimum wage, which is another indi-
rect way of increasing unionization. The SEIU will be the main beneficiary of
the new law should restaurants cave and accept collective bargaining. Lorena
Gonzalez, the chief officer of the California Labor Federation, which is the
umbrella organization of more than twelve hundred labor unions within
the state, was the original author of the bill when she was in the California
Assembly. Gonzalez believes that every workplace should be unionized and
uses, shall we say, colorful language to characterize those who question the
role of unions in today’s economy.
Private sector unionization has been dropping for more than fifty years. At
one time, 40 percent of California workers belonged to a union. Today, fewer
than 8 percent of private sector workers in the state are unionized. There are
two reasons unionization rates have plummeted. One is that many of today’s
workers wish to have the independence and flexibility to negotiate their own
work arrangements rather than be subject to the terms of a collective bar-
gaining, one-size-fits-all agreement. The other is that most US unions have
an awful track record of representing the interests of their members. Major
American unionized industries, including autos, steel, and rubber, have col-
lapsed over time as chronic industrial conflict, including strikes and work
slowdowns, resulted in American industries falling behind foreign producers,
becoming uncompetitive, and losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the
process.
CHANGES ARE ON THE MENU

Job loss now looms large in the fast-food industry, an industry already tran-
sitioning from employees to machines. Robots and other forms of artificial
intelligence are taking the place of workers in fast-food restaurants, and
California’s new law will only accelerate this process.
Nala Robotics has introduced the “Wingman,” a robot that can bread, sea-
son, and perfectly fry chicken wings for $2,999 per month. It can also prepare
other fried foods, including french fries and onion rings. Assuming a ten-hour

restaurant operating day, the Wingman costs about $10 per hour to operate.
Miso Robotics has developed “Flippy,” a robotic arm that can flip a burger
or any other food that is cooked on a flat grill. Flippy, which cost Miso $50
million to create, rents for
$3,500 per month, which
The new law makes running a non- includes on-site mainte-
union business remarkably more nance, or can be pur-
expensive. chased for $30,000 per
unit. Self-ordering kiosks,
which sell for about $50,000, are taking the place of workers in many restau-
rants. These devices are just the beginning. As AI technologies advance, even
more sophisticated and cost-effective devices and software will appear and
will take the place of any worker who cannot deliver a comparable profit to
the employer.
California’s new law is in essence legislating away thousands of future jobs
by preventing workers and employers from reaching employment agree-
ments on their own terms. The law places failed union leadership above the
interests of individuals who wish to work and business owners who wish to
hire. And don’t be surprised if similar councils are formed in the future to
organize workers in other industries. Unions are desperate for new recruits.
After decades of losses, it appears that the only way that they can grow is
by having legislators take away the freedoms that are crucial for individual
prosperity and economic growth.
Read California on Your Mind, the online Hoover Institution journal that
probes the politics and economics of the Golden State (www.hoover.org/
publications/californiaonyourmind). © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the
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.

IN T E RV IE W
I N TERVI EW
Electric Sheep
Are computers leading us astray? Psychologist
Gerd Gigerenzer insists that human brains still
trump artificial intelligence (just not at chess).
By Russ Roberts
Russ Roberts, EconTalk: You write a lot about artificial intelligence, and you
say at one point that AI—artificial intelligence—lacks common sense.
Gerd Gigerenzer: Yes. Common sense has been underestimated in psychol-

ogy and in philosophy. It’s a great contribution of AI to show how difficult it is
to model common sense.
For instance, [computer program] AlphaZero can beat every human in
chess and Go, but it doesn’t know that there is a game that’s called chess
or Go. A deep neural network, in order to learn, to distinguish pictures
of, say school buses, from other objects on the street, needs ten thousand
pictures of school buses to learn that. If you have a four-year-old and point
to a school bus, you may have to point another time, but then the kid has
gotten it.
So, what I’m saying is that artificial intelligence, as in deep neural net-
works, has a very different kind of intelligence that does not resemble, much,
human intelligence. Deep neural networks are statistical machines that can
do a very powerful look for correlations. That’s not the greatest ability of the
Gerd Gigerenzer is the author of How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why
Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms (MIT Press, 2022) and director
emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Russ Roberts is
the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a partici-
pant in Hoover’s Human Prosperity Project, host of the podcast EconTalk, and
the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem.

human mind. We are strong in causal stories. We invent, we are looking. A
little child just asks, “Why? Why? Why? Why do I have to eat broccoli? Why
are the neighbors so much richer than we?” It wants causal stories.
Another aspect of human intelligence is intuitive psychology. How can a
deep neural network know about these things?
Finally, there’s intuitive physics. Already, children understand that an
object that disappears behind a screen is not gone. How does a neural net-
work know that? It’s very difficult. It’s a big challenge to get common sense
into neural networks.
Roberts: So, a big issue in computer science is this: Is the brain a computer?
Is the computer a brain? They both have electricity. They both have on/off
switches. There’s a ten-
dency in human thought,
“If we want to invest in better AI, which is utterly fascinat-
smarter AI—we also should invest in ing and I think underap-
smarter people.” preciated, that we tend to
use whatever is the most
advanced technology as our model for how the brain works. It used to be a
clock. Now, of course, it’s a computer. And there is a presumption that when a
computer learns to recognize the school bus, it’s mimicking the brain. But, as
you point out, it’s not mimicking the brain.
There’s a lot of utopian thinking about what computers will be capable of in
the coming years. Are you skeptical of those promises?
Gigerenzer: There’s certainly a lot of marketing hype out there. When IBM
had this great success with Watson in the game Jeopardy! everyone was
amazed. But it’s a game—again, a well-defined structure. And even the rules
of Jeopardy! had to be adapted to the capabilities of Watson.
Here we have an example of a general principle: if the world is stable, like a
game, then algorithms will most likely beat us, performing much better. But
if it’s lots of uncertainty, as in cancer treatment or investment, then you need
to be very cautious.
Roberts: But isn’t the hope that, “OK, Watson today is a first-year medical stu-
dent, but give it enough data, it’ll become a second-year medical student. And
in a few years, it’ll be the best doctor in the world”? And we can all go to it for
diagnosis. We’ll just do a body scan, or our smartwatch will tell Watson some-
thing about our heartbeat, and so on. It will be able to do anything better than
any doctor. And you won’t have to wait in line because it can do this instantly.

Gigerenzer: That’s rhetoric. If you read Yuval Harari, or many other proph-
ets of AI, that’s what they preach.
Now, I have studied psychology and statistics, and I know what a statistical
machine can do. A deep neural network is about correlations and it’s a pow-
erful version of a nonlinear multiple regression, or a discriminant analysis.
Nobody has ever talked about multiple regressions as intelligence. We should
not bluff away into the story of super-intelligence.
Deep neural networks can do something that we cannot do. And we can do
something that they cannot do. We should, if we want to invest in better AI,
smarter AI—we also should invest in smarter people. That’s what we really
need. So, smarter doctors, more experts who can tell the difference, and no
wasting lots of money on things that don’t work. If Watson could be this great
investor, then IBM wouldn’t be in the financial troubles it is.
Roberts: There’s
a more general
principle, and I “AlphaZero can beat every human in
think it’s in your chess and Go, but it doesn’t know that
book, which is that there is a game that’s called chess or Go.”
fundamentally,
when we’re looking at correlations in Big Data, we’re presuming that the
past will tell us what the future will be like. And sometimes it can. But in
most human environments, it can’t. Past EconTalk guest Ed Leamer likes to
say, “We are storytelling, pattern-seeking animals.” The computer doesn’t
have any common sense to examine whether a correlation is just a correla-
tion or a causation.
Gigerenzer: The general lesson is: there’s a difference between stable worlds
and uncertainty, unstable worlds. Particularly, if the future is not like the
past, then Big Data doesn’t help you.
WHAT PRICE PRIVACY?
Roberts: Now, you are a strong and I think eloquent promoter of human
abilities and a counterweight to the view that we’re going to be dominated
by machines, that they’re going to take over because they’ll be able to do
everything—everything. Our brains are really amazing. Yet at the same
time, there’s a paradox in your book, which is that you’re very worried about
the ability of tech companies to use Big Data to manipulate us. How do you
resolve that paradox?

Gigerenzer: The statement that you made is right on point. It’s not about AI
by itself. It’s about the people behind AI and their motives. We usually talk
about whether AI will be omniscient, or AI will be just an assistant tool; but
we need to talk about those behind it. That is what really worries me.
It’s certain that we are in a situation where a few tech companies, and
mostly a few relatively young white males who are immensely rich, shape
the emotions and the values, and also control the time, of almost everyone
else. Google gets 80 percent of its revenue from advertisement. Face-
book, 97 percent. And that makes the customer—the user—no longer the
customer.
Roberts: There is something creepy about it. On the other hand, you could
argue, and sometimes I argue like this, because it’s interesting and it may be
true, “OK. So those sales people interrupt my conversation every once in a
while. They don’t literally shut me up.” And I find that somewhat annoying.
But actually, it’s kind of useful, because sometimes it’s something I actually
want, because they know a lot about me. I’m playing a little bit of rhetoric
here now. But I’m increasingly scared, so take a shot.
Gigerenzer: There are two kinds of personal information that need to be

distinguished. One, for instance, comes from collecting information about
what books you buy and
recommending other
“Deep neural networks can do some- books. The other is taking
thing that we cannot do. And we can all the information such as
do something that they cannot do.” whether you’re depressed
today, whether you are
pregnant, whether you have had heart failure or cancer, and using that
information to target you in the right moment with the right advertisement.
That’s the part that we do not need. I’m living in Berlin. And East Germany
had the Stasi.
Roberts: The secret police.
Gigerenzer: If the Stasi had had these methods, they would have been
overenthusiastic.
The final point I want to make is that people underestimate how closely
tech companies are interrelated with governments. So, they say, “Oh, it
doesn’t matter whether Zuckerberg knows what I’m doing because the gov-
ernment doesn’t know.” No. Edward Snowden, a few years ago, showed how
close the connection is in the United States.

THINK DIFFERENT: Gerd Gigerenzer, former chief of the Max Planck Institute
for Human Development in Berlin, argues that “the idea of education—under-
standing the world, having control over the world, and also over oneself—it
seems to be fading. We need to steer against that.” [Stephan Röhl—Creative Com-
mons]
Roberts: I think a lot of people don’t realize what they’re actually being
surveilled about, how widespread it is. But you’re also arguing that even if
they knew, they go, “Eh, what’s the big deal? I get a lot of products that I’m
interested in. It’s actually pretty good.”
Gigerenzer: There’s the so-called privacy paradox. In many countries,

people say their greatest concern about the digital life is that they don’t
know where the data is going and what’s done with it. If that’s the greatest
concern, then you would expect they would be willing to pay something.
That’s the economic view. Germany is a good case. Germans would be a
good candidate for a people who are worried about their privacy and would
be willing to pay.
That’s what I thought.
So, I have done now three surveys since 2018, a representative sample of
all Germans over eighteen. I asked them, “How much would you be willing
to pay for all social media if you could keep your data?” We are talking about
H O O V E R DIG E ST • S p ring 2023 149

the data about whether you are depressed, whether you’re pregnant, and all
those things that they really don’t need. “How much are you willing to pay to
get your privacy back?”
Seventy-five percent of Germans said, “Nothing.” Not a single euro.
Roberts: I found that fascinating. I think the privacy paradox includes the
fact that, when you tell me that my data is available on the web, I think, “Well,
no one person is really looking at it.” But they can: there are individuals who
could look at it. We kind of ignore the possibility that it might not be anony-
mous, really.
SLEEPERS, AWAKE
Gigerenzer: I see people sleepwalking into surveillance. So, for instance, in

the studies we have done, most people are not aware that a smart TV may
record every personal conversation people have in front of it, whether it’s in
the living room or in the bedroom. At least in the German data, 85 percent
are not aware about that, although it can be found in some of the user notes,
but who is reading these things?
And here is another dimension: that the potential of algorithms for surveil-
lance changes our own values. We are no longer concerned so much about
privacy. We still say we are concerned, but not really. And then, we’ll get a
new generation of people.
And that’s why I think an important partial solution is: make people smart.
Open their eyes and make them think about what’s happening.
Roberts: I’ve always liked

that solution, which you
“If Watson could be this great inves- could call more informa-
tor, then IBM wouldn’t be in the finan- tion, raising awareness.
cial troubles it is.” A simple way to describe
it is education. I spent a
good chunk of my life thinking about, say, confirmation bias and similar prob-
lems. And when you make people aware of it, it’s pretty cool. It’s a good thing
to be aware of, that you’re easily fooled.
I think you quoted Richard Feynman: “The first principle is not to fool
yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool.” So, the more we make people
aware of that, you think it’d make a better world.
I’ve become a little bit skeptical of people’s desire for truth. I think they
like comfort more than they like truth. So, the education—here I am, I’m

a president of a college and I run a weekly podcast that tries to educate
people—it’s a quixotic mission, I’m afraid. It may not be the road to real suc-
cess. But I would say it’s the only road I want to go down—and I think it’s the
right road, to encourage people to be aware of these things and to be more
sensitive to them.
Gigerenzer: I think there’s an obligation to be optimistic and do something.

And one can really point to blind spots. For instance, the most recent inter-
national PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] study, which
tests the fifteen-year-olds . . .
Roberts: In math, right?
Gigerenzer: . . . in math, in language, in the sciences; and this time, they

also had a component about digital understanding. To make it short, 90
percent of fifteen-year-
olds, the digital natives,
do not know how to tell “The future of a democracy is in peo-
facts from fakes. Gov- ple who think—who want to think.”
ernments spend billions
for tablets and whiteboards for technology in schools. They spend almost
nothing on making teachers smart and pupils smart. And by smart, I mean
that they understand these concepts.
Roberts: I think you’re pointing out something really profound, which is:
if we don’t think about how the world works, if you don’t know how the
world works, you will be the customer. If you don’t know who the sucker
is at the poker table, it’s you. And most of us are the sucker at the poker
table.
Gigerenzer: The idea of education—understanding the world, having control

over the world, and also over oneself—it seems to be fading. We need to steer
against that. And we can do something. We can start in the schools and open
the eyes. In the same way as we can teach risk literacy in general. It’s still not
happening in schools, except in Finland.
NEW WORLDS
Roberts: Late in my life, I’ve become very aware of how complex uncertainty
and risk are. Which is ironic: I’m an economist, trained in statistics, econo-
metrics, and so on. And I think people are starting to realize: “Yeah, most
people don’t really understand risk and they don’t understand probability. So,

what we need to do is introduce statistics into the high school curriculum.”
So they have. And it’s mostly horrible. It’s cookbook, teaching people how to
calculate means and medians—things you can test on an exam. What’s the
standard deviation?
The subtle, deep, commonsense ideas of how to think about the fact that
the world is unpredictable—there’s not a curriculum for that. That’s the chal-
lenge, I think: creating educational material that would help open people’s
eyes.
Your argument—which you make very persuasively in the book—is that we
spend a lot of time teaching people how to use technology, right? We don’t
spend any time thinking about what this does to us. And it might be OK, but
you should think about that. It’s weird that we don’t.
Gigerenzer: Particularly in the digital age, one thing becomes clear: that
people should think a little bit more. The future of a democracy is in people
who think—who want to think. And not just follow some message.
There is another world out there which I do not want, but I could under-
stand that some people think it is a great option. It’s a world where we all
are surveilled, predicted,
and controlled, where
“And here is another dimension: that the good guys—good
the potential of algorithms for surveil- guys defined by a gov-
lance changes our own values.” ernment—get goodies.
Such as in China, where
in a hospital you’re treated first if you have a high social score. Those with a
lower score have to wait. And those with the lowest score get punished.
And, as far as we know, many people in China find this a good system.
What I see in Germany is that the number of people who think a social-credit
system would be a good idea in Germany is increasing. What do you think:
higher among the young or among the old?
Roberts: Young.
Gigerenzer: Yes. Among the young, it’s 28 percent. One other group, which I
found striking, are people who have a lifelong career working for the gov-
ernment: 37 percent of them think it would be a good idea. They probably
believe they’re on the right side anyhow: they are obedient to the govern-
ment, why not collect a few goodies?
Roberts: All of what you’ve written in this book is deeply alarming in an

authoritarian state, but in a way, it’s even more alarming in a democracy.

Gigerenzer: But it’s not destiny. We can change that. There are lots of things
to do to create a better world, a world where the Internet is more like it was
once meant to be.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. Reprinted by permission
from Russ Roberts’s podcast EconTalk (www.econtalk.org), a production
of the Library of Economics and Liberty. © 2023 Liberty Fund Inc. 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.

I NTERVI EW
I NTERVI EW
“The Soul of a
Killer”
As a youth, Hoover fellow Paul R. Gregory came to
know the future assassin of President Kennedy
intimately. In his new memoir, he describes Lee
Harvey Oswald’s narcissism, Marxist beliefs, and
angry ambitions.
By Melissa De Witte
T
hose alive when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Novem-
ber 22, 1963, remember where they were and what they were
doing when they heard the news that the president had been
shot. For Hoover fellow Paul R. Gregory, then a twenty-one-
year-old college student at the University of Oklahoma, the day became
particularly memorable—life-changing, even—when he saw television news
footage of Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, being escorted into police
headquarters.
“I know that guy,” he said to himself, confused and in disbelief. Gregory
had gotten to know Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina, from whom he had
taken Russian language lessons. For much of the summer of 1962, Gregory
Paul R. Gregory is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is Cullen Pro-

fessor (Emeritus) in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston,
a research fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, and
emeritus chair of the International Advisory Board of the Kyiv School of Econom-
ics. Melissa De Witte is deputy director, social science communications, for Stan-
ford University Communications.

had been, outside of Lee’s family, the couple’s only friend. Gregory’s new
book, The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (Diversion Books,
2022), details a story he has kept largely private (with the exception of speak-
ing to the authorities at the time).
Gregory spoke about what he knew of Oswald and how the assassination
has captivated conspiracy theorists for sixty years.
Melissa De Witte, Stanford News Service: After the assassination, you and
your family were able to remain beneath the radar; in their public records,
the Secret Service referred to you as a “known associate” of Lee Harvey
Oswald. Why share your story now?
Paul Gregory: My father and I were immediately known to the Secret Ser-
vice by the night of the assassination. We did not want our association with
a Marine deserter and avowed communist to be known in our community.
Decades after the assassination, I still have no desire to tell my story, even
among friends and colleagues. It was only when I became convinced that my
account adds to the limited historical record did I sit down and write.
De Witte: How did you get to know the Oswalds?
Gregory: When Lee and Marina returned to Fort Worth in June of 1962, Lee
thought he could get a job using his Russian language skills. My father, born
in Siberia, taught Russian at the local library. Lee came to visit my father in
his office to get a certifi-
cate of language profi-
ciency. Lee invited my “He wished to pay back society for
father to visit him and not recognizing his exceptionalism.”
Marina at his brother’s
house. As a Russian speaker (far from perfect), I went along and met Lee and
Marina. Shortly thereafter, we visited them in their duplex, and we agreed
that I would come regularly for language lessons from Marina, who spoke no
English whatsoever. Thus began regular meetings until mid-September.
De Witte: Much has been written and said about Oswald. How do your expe-
riences shed new light on who he was and what he was like?
Gregory: I show that Oswald had all the characteristics to kill a major politi-
cal figure—the means, the motive, and the soul of a killer.
In the period from Oswald’s return to Texas with his wife, Marina, to
their move to Dallas, I was the only one who broke through the cocoon in
which Lee had Marina living. I saw them on a regular basis for conversation,

shopping, and driving around Fort Worth. I observed Lee as a manipulative
loner who concealed himself from others and guarded the strict boundar-
ies he erected around his troubled marriage with Marina. Similarly, Lee
maintained a barrier of secrecy around himself. He had the habit of deflect-
ing questions about himself. They were his business and not for others to
know. By inviting Lee and Marina to our house to introduce Marina to [other
Russians living in Dallas], we unwittingly ended Marina’s isolation—to Lee’s
distress.
De Witte: There are several theories about who killed JFK, including the
belief that Oswald did not do it. Why is JFK’s murder shrouded in so much
mystery? Why do people think that Oswald was not his killer?
Gregory: We cannot believe that history can be changed by a random set

of circumstances. It’s
hard for people to accept
“It is a shame that so few have care- that a “little guy”—Lee’s
fully researched the material in the mother referred to him as
“the boy”—of no known
voluminous Warren Report.”
accomplishments could
kill the most guarded person in America on his own. This leaves [them] two
explanations for JFK’s murder. Either Oswald was a “patsy,” or he was a will-
ing cog in a well-organized conspiracy in which he was an unlikely “follower.”
There is simply no way he could have pulled this off on his own, conspiracy
theorists would say. Judging by the most recent polls, the American public
still buys this story.
De Witte: What do you think was Oswald’s motive for assassinating JFK?
Gregory: Oswald dreamed of going into the history books, where he had
learned from his mother that he belonged. He wished to pay back society
for not recognizing his exceptionalism. He wanted to punish Marina for her
ridicule of his ideas and her scorn of his manhood.
De Witte: Is there anything else you would like to add?
Gregory: It is a shame that so few have carefully researched the material in

the voluminous Warren Report [a culmination of findings from the commis-
sion, chaired by then–chief justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren, to
investigate the assassination], to understand the evidence which prompted
the sole-gunman conclusion. Instead, critics glom onto bits and pieces
and minor contradictions to build mountains out of molehills. Among the

multitude of conspiracy theories is even one that places my father and me
among the conspirators.
The JFK assassination marks an end of national innocence; namely, our
readiness to accept the word of our most distinguished public figures. On
the day the Warren Commission issued its report to the American people,
two-thirds of the public believed its findings. Now that figure has dropped to
one-third.
Reprinted by permission of Stanford News Service. © 2023 The Board of

Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Women

of the Gulag: Portraits of Five Remarkable Lives, by
Paul R. Gregory. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
www.hooverpress.org.

I NTERVI EW
I NTERVI EW
Grover Cleveland,
Classical Liberal
He was “a political purgative”—the remedy for the
political corruption of his day. So says Troy Senik,
author of a new biography of an unlikely figure
who found a political need and filled it.
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: A former president is ready for

a comeback. Despite being a political novice and facing a sex scandal that
nearly ended his campaign, he took down a titan of the political establish-
ment in a first bid for the White House, squeezing into office by the slimmest
of margins. After four years of disrupting business as usual in Washington,
he was denied re-election in a close race that some of his supporters claimed
was stolen from him. And now he looks poised for a third presidential run at
a historic restoration to office. The year is 1892, and the former president in
question is not Donald Trump or anyone even remotely like him: it’s Grover
Cleveland.
Troy Senik is the author of a splendid new biography of Cleveland. A grad-
uate of Belmont University and Pepperdine, Troy served as a speechwriter
for President George W. Bush. He has written extensively on politics, served
Troy Senik is the author of A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improb-
able Presidency of Grover Cleveland (Threshold Editions, 2022), a former presi-
dential speechwriter for George W. Bush, and co-founder of Kite & Key Media. Peter
Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge,
and the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

as vice president of the Manhattan Institute, and hosts Hoover’s Law Talk
podcast. He is also a founder of Kite & Key, a digital media company devoted
to public policy. Troy, welcome.
Troy Senik: Peter, delighted to be with you.
Robinson: All right, I’m going to begin with the back of this book, the
acknowledgments. You write about your pals Matt Latimer and Keith
Urbahn, who run something called Javelin, a literary agency, and you men-
tion that “during a purely social visit they told you there was a market for
a new Grover Cleveland biography.” By the way, that strikes me as an odd
conversation right there. But it gets stranger. “Neither of them realizing that
they were sitting across the table from someone who had been nursing that
ambition for the better part of two decades.” You spent almost twenty years
wanting to write a book about Grover Cleveland. Explain this.
Senik: That does not sound like a sign of mental well-being, is what you’re
suggesting.
Robinson: Your words, not mine, but yes.
Senik: I had an interest in Grover Cleveland that went back to my child-

hood. And the only way that I can explain it is that I developed an interest in
American history, specifically the presidency. Why does this antique figure
from the late nineteenth century stand out to me? For a lot of the same rea-
sons that I wrote the book: he is a man who is very much counter to his era
in American politics. This is a guy who comes in and breaks furniture, totally
moving against the tide of that era.
And I suppose maybe biography informs ideology a bit. I’m a guy who grew
up in a very rural part of Southern California. When you hear “Southern
California,” you are not thinking of the place where I grew up, which looks
like Arizona and feels like Oklahoma. We rode horses, not bicycles. We lived
off a dirt road. As I got interested in politics, it’s funny, the first political
figure I can ever remember being compelled by, not that I had any sense for
the substance of what he was doing, was Ross Perot. Because of this outsider
sensibility. For somebody who came from a social milieu like mine, the defin-
ing feature of politics as a young kid was the falseness of it, you know. You’d
watch somebody on a Sunday show and they’d be speaking in this strange
language that was only accessible to politicians.
Robinson: And so, there you were, leading a life of the kind that for decades,
a couple of centuries, at least, Americans have thought of as the authentic


American way of life. And just two hours away was Hollywood and a Univer-
sal theme park and Disneyland and that all seemed garish and fake and yet
dominant.
Senik: That’s basically right. Although I have to say, it wasn’t driven by

resentment. I didn’t begrudge them this. It just felt false. So, as I looked back
through American history, I suppose that I had a weakness for these figures
like Grover Cleveland who kind of emerge ex nihilo.
ANOTHER TIME
Robinson: I’m persuaded, actually. All right, Grover Cleveland, the inacces-
sible man, he’s born in 1837. He was born just a couple of weeks after Martin
Van Buren became president. Cleveland goes on to become our twenty-
second and twenty-fourth president, serving from 1885 to 1889 and
then again from 1893 to 1897. I’m quoting you: “If Cleveland
seems like an inaccessible figure, it’s in large
part because we don’t understand the
America he inhabited, a country
somehow more

alien to us than the more distant ones of the Civil War or even the founding
fathers.”
Senik: When you’re thinking about the Civil War or the founding generation,
the principles at play in those eras are quite simple, quite accessible for a
modern audience because they’re so fundamental. Here, you’re talking about
the late nineteenth century. We could go through the list of some of the issues
that Grover Cleveland dealt with during his presidency and, my God, do they
seem foreign. We’re talking about pensions for military veterans. We’re talk-
ing about civil service protections. We’re talking about the role of silver in
the monetary supply.
Robinson: The issues are not war and peace, or slavery and freedom—the
issues are economic growth, the emergence of new industries, the adjust-
ment of the government to a much bigger country and economy, and it’s
complicated.
Senik: It’s hard for Americans to get a bead on any of these issues, which is
why, as I go through the book, I keep trying to draw analogies. For instance,
there are huge fights about tariffs during the Cleveland years. You know,
when I was a kid and we got the two days of American history that are dedi-
cated to this period in the country’s history, I always thought, “Why did they
care about tariffs so much?” Because all you knew is that they fought about
tariffs. Well, they cared about tariffs because fighting about tariffs during
those days would be the equivalent to fighting about individual income tax
rates today. That’s where all the money came from.
Robinson: For the federal government.
Senik: With a few exceptions; there are excise taxes for liquor and things like
Western land sales. But that’s the reason that it has that salience in his era.
And in large measure this is first and foremost a biography, but I am trying
to sneak in there, for Americans who had the same kind of education that
I did, sort of a remedial course in what mattered during this era and why,
because it is so faint to us now.
Robinson: We’ll work our way into the era and into what the man was like
by talking about the pre-presidential Cleveland, who’s pretty interesting.
He’s the son of a Presbyterian minister who dies when Cleveland is still a
teen. Cleveland moves to Buffalo, where he has an uncle, and takes up the
law. At the age of thirty-three, he’s elected as a Democrat, as sheriff of Erie
County. OK, why Buffalo, why the law, why does upstate New York matter

in a way that it hasn’t mattered in about one hundred and twenty years?
Fill us in.
Senik: It’s relevant to know that he’s from a very large family. He’s the fifth
of nine children, and the second-oldest son, so a lot of the financial responsi-
bility for caring for his widowed mother and his younger sisters falls on his
shoulders. And he goes to New York City for a year, teaches in a school for
the blind, hates it, returns home to upstate New York with a mindset that he
has to go somewhere to make himself. He does not set out to go to Buffalo. He
sets out to go to Cleveland, Ohio, named after a distant relative, and it seems
like that was at least part of the consideration. Buffalo happens as a sort of
happy accident, because he
stops off there on the way
to Cleveland. He has an “I am trying to sneak in there, for
uncle by marriage there, Americans who had the same kind
Lewis Allen, who’s promi- of education that I did, sort of a
nent in the community.
remedial course in what mattered
He’s a wealthy real estate
developer, is involved in
during this era.”
politics, though he’s a Whig
and does not share Grover’s politics. But he sees in his nephew some poten-
tial that he feels is going to go to waste if he follows through on this kind of
half-thought-through plan to go to Cleveland.
Allen gets him installed in a local law firm. We really don’t have any evi-
dence as to why the law, other than a sense that Cleveland clearly wanted
to make something of himself, and this was the thing that he seemed best
calibrated for. He gets some distinction as a lawyer in Buffalo, but it’s not
because he’s Perry Mason. This is not somebody who is known for courtroom
theatrics; this is somebody who barely sees the inside of a courtroom. He is
constantly being paired with lawyers who do fit that description. Lawyers
who, it’s worth mentioning, are usually pretty politically connected. This is a
subtle part of his rise. But Grover Cleveland’s the guy in the office until two
o’clock in the morning going through every footnote, figuring out every detail.
Robinson: Hardworking. Meticulous.
Senik: Hardworking to a point that, even by today’s standards, we would

regard as excessive. The normal work hours for Grover Cleveland throughout
his career are always attested to be 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. or so. And this is where
he starts generating attention. But even then, he’s not the guy that you look

at and think, “Well, someday he’s going to be the mayor of the city; someday
he’s going to be governor.”
Robinson: Of course, but it’s worth noting, as you do, that Buffalo was the
happening town. The Erie Canal has cut across upstate New York, and Buf-
falo is right there. On the Erie Canal you can go from Buffalo down to New
York City. And so, Grover Cleveland, through this happenstance of an uncle,
ends up a lawyer doing the sort of legal infrastructure of a growing town in a
growing American economy, correct?
Senik: Yes, and it’s a great place to be if your profile is Grover Cleveland’s.
This is a city that is emerging and coming into its own but doesn’t have an
old caste of social elites.
Robinson: There are no Vanderbilts or Rensselaers. There’s no old Dutch,

Roosevelts, as there are in New York.
Senik: That’s right. There’s a path that there never would’ve been had he
stayed in Manhattan when he was eighteen years old.
IMPROBABLE RISE
Robinson: By the way, he’s a Democrat. How did that happen?
Senik: Grover Cleveland is not an introspective man. There are no volumi-

nous diary entries explaining his thinking. Weirdly, particularly because his
political career starts
relatively late, he almost
“We could go through the list of some emerges sort of fully
of the issues that Grover Cleveland formed, so we don’t have
dealt with during his presidency and, anything in his own
my God, do they seem foreign.” hand that explains this.
Remember, a Democrat
of Cleveland’s era and of his particular caste is a classical-liberal Democrat
out of the Jeffersonian tradition: limited government, constitutionalism, light
touch on economic matters.
Robinson: He anticipates the Reagan Democrats by a little more than a

century.
Senik: And this is all consistent with something that you see throughout
his life and his lineage: this is a family, even though he’s born in New Jer-
sey, of New England Puritans. People who really believe in the value of

self-discipline and hard work. The earliest writing we have in his hand, from
when he’s in elementary school, has him writing admiringly about George
Washington and Andrew Jackson as children because he respects the fact
that they applied their time wisely and that was the thing that made them
successes later on in life. A deeply Puritan sentiment. And that has always
been my supposition about how you get the classical-liberal Democrat that
Grover Cleveland is.
Robinson: All right, now comes the rise. He becomes sheriff of Erie County
for a couple of years in his thirties, then gets back out of politics and devotes
himself to the law. But then, as you write, “he would become the mayor of
Buffalo, the governor of New York, and the twenty-second president of the
United States.” From obscurity to the White House in four years, how?
Senik: The early part of his career, up through this mayor’s race, is sort of
distinguished by his being asked to do jobs nobody else wants to do. He’s a
reliable party regular, nobody thinks that highly of him, but he’s got this repu-
tation for integrity, and
they think that’s good for
some Republican cross- “Fighting about tariffs during those
over votes. Very valuable days would be the equivalent to fight-
at the time, because ing about individual income tax rates
Buffalo is still a slightly today. That’s where all the money
more Republican than came from.”
Democratic town, and
this is the story behind his recruitment to run for mayor. The Democratic
apparatus in Buffalo couldn’t find anybody else.
I tried very hard in this book . . . there are hagiographic accounts of Cleveland
that make him seem like the starlet in the drugstore who’s just discovered, and
this sweet wind sweeps him up all the way to the Oval Office. That’s not correct.
The real, genuine ambition doesn’t come until a little later down the road.
So, how does this happen so quickly? The context is really important. Post–
Civil War, you’re in an environment where the Republican Party, as a result of
the war, is in control of almost everything for a very long period. And in the
book, I refer to what follows as something like the equivalent of political gout.
They had it too good for too long. And the federal government, in particu-
lar, is rife with corruption. At this moment, you have a huge, party-splitting
fight within the Republican Party over party patronage and the civil service,
whether this is just the way you do business. You give the job to your guy,
whether he’s doing it honestly or not.

MAN OF THE MOMENT: An 1893 print depicts President Grover Cleveland,
his wife, Frances, and their daughter, Ruth. “Grover Cleveland is not an intro-
spective man,” observes biographer Troy Senik. “There are no voluminous
diary entries explaining his thinking. Weirdly, particularly because his politi-
cal career starts relatively late, he almost emerges sort of fully formed.” [Library
of Congress]
You have a guy who is able to unify the Democratic Party behind him but also
attract this reformist contingent of Republicans without making them feel like
they’re betraying their Republicanism. He is a political purgative. He is the rem-
edy for this corruption. This is how he is viewed everywhere. Early on, he says
two important things. One is, “There’s no difference between a Democratic thief
and a Republican thief.” And the second, which is one of the few philosophical
constants throughout his career, is that any time the government spends a cent
more than is required for the basic necessities of government, that is tanta-
mount to theft. So, he is putting the political class on notice from the start.
Robinson: So, this is the kind of man who would not appeal at all to the party
pros, except that, in his very person, he solves a serious problem for them.
166 H O O V ER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

Senik: Yes. He can get the votes. So, the machine will back him, and Republi-
cans will turn, and off he goes. It’s not a detailed set of policies.
SEEDS AND SILVER
Robinson: The first term. He’s elected in 1884, he takes office in March of
1885, and he serves for four years. The Texas Seed Bill. In 1887, there’s a
drought in Texas. The drought is so bad these farmers have eaten their seed
corn, so to speak. They’ve got nothing. And Congress says, “Well, let’s just
get them started. We’ll pass a bill that’ll give them enough to buy some seed
corn.” And Grover Cleveland vetoes it. He writes this in his veto message: “I
can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.” He goes
to the Constitution. “Though the people support the government the govern-
ment should not support the people.” Make that intelligible.
Senik: Isn’t that amazing? The first line of that always gets quoted by lib-
ertarians. The libertarians can’t bear to quote the next line because it is so
unpalatable, the way he puts it. But within the confines of its own era, and
trying to explain the way Grover Cleveland thought about it, there is some-
thing interesting about that veto message if you read it further. His message
is that when you do these sorts of things, it creates an expectation amongst
the citizenry that something’s always going to be forthcoming from the gov-
ernment when something goes bad, and that what they actually need to do is
rely on the bonds of civil society. That the fundamentally American thing to
do is to help your neighbor.
Robinson: Silver: this gets complicated. It’s monetary policy. I’m going to put
it very briefly, and you’re going to tell me why Cleveland took the stand he
did. The currency was based on gold. And the argument was that we should
also mint coins out of silver, which was in effect arguing that we should
expand the money supply.
Senik: Yes.
Robinson: Which would benefit debtors, farmers, new enterprises, people

who needed to borrow money. By the way, this was a position popular in the
Democratic Party, and William Jennings Bryan, who’s a major figure for the
rest of the nineteenth century—the Democrats nominate him three times—is
a silver man. And Cleveland says, “No, gold and gold alone.” Why?
Senik: This is a real lawyer’s mind, somebody who cares about preci-
sion, who cares about principle. As I write in the book, he never says this

explicitly, but I think it’s pretty clear if you read between the lines: there is
a violation of principle here that bothers him. If you are changing the terms
of the monetary supply, you are changing what every contract in America is
denominated in. Again, this seems antique to modern audience . . .
Robinson: The sanctity of contract.
Senik: The sanctity of contract. As a classical liberal, he just cannot get his
head around this. We have to have—this is a consistent theme throughout his
presidency and throughout his life—one set of rules for everybody. If you had
to distill his political philosophy into one sentence, it would be that.
Robinson: All right: tariffs. Again, these are issues.
Senik: Yes.
Robinson: High tariffs—in effect, taxes on imported goods—had been intro-

duced during the Civil War, and the argument supporting them was that it
protected American industry. It made it possible for American manufactur-
ers to sell their goods in the United States and made it much harder, much
more difficult, or unlikely that a foreign entity would be able to undercut
Americans. Now, sometime after the Civil War, Republicans want to keep the
tariffs high, and Grover Cleveland wants to cut them. Why?
Senik: The way that the tariff issue plays out in Grover Cleveland’s era is
very different from the way that we think of it now. Cleveland’s position is
not just lower tariffs for the sake of what we call tax relief, even though he
believes that cutting tariffs is the populist position. He looks at the tariff
system and sees a system of collusion. He says, “Well, who gets the tariffs?”
Whoever the corporate interests are, or whoever has Congress wired.
And it’s important to note that nobody is talking about free trade. We’re
talking about lower tariffs versus higher tariffs. At this point, in the American
political context, free trade was absolutely toxic. One of the reasons was that
the Democratic Party had a big contingent of Irish voters, and free trade was
regarded as suspiciously English, so one was never to flirt with free trade.
Cleveland wants to jump-start the economy. There also is a massive surplus
“A LAWYER’S MIND”: Biographer Troy Senik (opposite) says Grover Cleve-

land resisted the idea that “something’s always going to be forthcoming from
the government when something goes bad,” instead acting as if “the funda-
mentally American thing to do is to help your neighbor.” [Joseph Spiteri]

at this time. And for the guy who says any extra cent is theft, that’s morally
offensive: the idea that you’re taking in this level of tariffs at the same time
you’ve got all this money sitting in the vaults. But it all goes back to this—
Robinson: The amazing thing is you just get this again and again. It really
is a living idea in his head that that money belongs to people. It is not the
government’s money. It’s
not just tax revenues; it
“Grover Cleveland’s the guy in the belongs to his neighbors
office until two o’clock in the morning in Buffalo, it belongs to
going through every footnote, figuring poor struggling people
like his own siblings when
out every detail.”
they were young.
Senik: He talks about it in these terms. There are several speeches where he
refers to the public official’s responsibility as that of a fiduciary. What would
you do if you knew the person whose money you were holding? You would
fear their judgment if you had betrayed their trust in the way that you did
business. For somebody who ends up in the White House, all of his charac-
teristics are the ones that you would want from somebody who ran the local
general store.
SCANDAL
Robinson: We’ve been talking about probity, integrity, and principle, and this
brings us to his personal life.
Senik: Yes, it does.
Robinson: Which was a little odd.
Senik: Yes.
Robinson: You say he was from old Puritan New England stock, and indeed
he was, but I’m quoting the book again, “Cleveland came to office having
endured a sex scandal during the 1884 presidential campaign, when he was
accused of having fathered a child out of wedlock during his years as a Buf-
falo bachelor and subsequently of having had the mother institutionalized.”
He “was accused,” the passive voice there. Was it true?
Senik: Elements of it were true. . . .
Robinson: That’s a rather lawyerly answer yourself, there.

Senik: Without getting fully into the forensics, which people can read in the
book if they want to get an account at that depth . . . Cleveland, shortly after
he gets the nomination in 1884, is accused of having fathered a child out of
wedlock about a decade before, back in Buffalo. The allegations that run in
the newspaper start with that basic fact and build into this grand soap opera
of allegations. The child is abducted from her, she is institutionalized—all
this, it is alleged, because he is so nervous about how this is going to affect
his potential political prospects. So, what do we actually know about what
happened? Well, not everything; a lot of this has been lost to history. But the
real fireworks in this story, we now know, are products of the partisan press
at the time.
It is a little strange because there are admiring accounts that point to him
telling his campaign associates, “Whatever you do, tell the truth.” And the
story always stops there.
They never tell you what
the truth actually was. “All of his characteristics are the ones
This does not happen in that you would want from somebody
the way that it would in who ran the local general store.”
a campaign in the year
2024. There is no expectation that Grover Cleveland is going to go in front of
a bank of cameras and tell you exactly what happened.
He just makes the decision, “I have to take my lumps.” So, he just sticks
with it throughout the campaign, doesn’t really say much, and he is right. It
does go away.
Robinson: All right. Midway through his first term, the still-single forty-nine-
year-old Grover Cleveland marries Frances Folsom. The twenty-one-year-old
daughter of Cleveland’s deceased best friend, Oscar Folsom. That is icky.
That’s just unsettling.
Senik: Stipulated.
Robinson: And they have children. They have what appears to be a perfectly
happy life together.
Senik: On all accounts. . . . I don’t know, I actually researched this and

couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. I doubt that it was dramatically less icky
in the era, but it seems to have been somewhat less. It’s amazing how little
of the press coverage at the time is focused on this. Now, this is partially
because the press adores this woman. Frances Cleveland is Jackie Kennedy
before her time.

Robinson: Yes, right.
Senik: But a couple of elements of this story get distorted in the popular tell-
ing. One is that Grover Cleveland essentially raised this woman, that she was
his legal ward because
her father, his former law
“They never tell you what the truth
partner, had passed away
actually was. This does not happen in
in a carriage accident.
the way that it would in a campaign in And so, you’ll read these
the year 2024.” stories kind of suggest-
ing that he was grooming
her all along. But this is missing vital context, which I only discovered in the
writing of this book. This has mostly been elided by historians. When Oscar
Folsom, his law partner, passes away, Frances Folsom is made his legal ward,
but in a somewhat unusual legal arrangement for the day he is essentially
just kind of the executor of the state; he has a fiduciary responsibility to her
and her mother. Not only does he not raise her, they live in different states for
a big chunk of this time, and when she comes back to New York, she’s actu-
ally engaged to somebody else.
A BULWARK
Robinson: Aside from Troy Senik, to whom is Grover Cleveland a hero? I

served in the Reagan White House, and Ronald Reagan actually loved Calvin
Coolidge. Who loved Grover Cleveland?
Senik: In his era, or today?
Robinson: Just name anybody aside from you. I don’t recall that FDR ever
said of Cleveland, “Now there was a man,” or “There was a president.”
Senik: I was told the other day, and I haven’t verified this, that Harry Tru-
man was actually a deep admirer.
Robinson: That, I could believe.
Senik: And Bill Clinton apparently had a modest obsession with him during
his own presidency.
Robinson: There is nothing modest about Bill Clinton’s obsessions.

Cleveland is born in one country, and then we have the Civil War, which
changes the entire relationship of the federal government to the states and
to the people, and then we have economic growth. During this man’s lifetime,

we go from an overwhelmingly agrarian economy where the big innovation
in trade is the Erie Canal—a ditch narrower than this studio that cuts across
upstate New York—and by the time he becomes president, the country is
crisscrossed with railroad lines and shipyards are building enormous steam-
ers, and John D. Rockefeller has struck oil in Western Pennsylvania. It’s a
new country, even as the old America struggles to come to grips with this
new country that is aborning.
Senik: That’s the essence of it. Although it is worth noting that even in his
own time, he’s a little
bit yesterday’s man.
It’s like the line, I can’t “He does not have an idea of how to
remember who it comes recast American society. He doesn’t
from, you sometimes think that’s the job. He thinks the job
hear about Churchill: it’s is to be a bulwark for the American
not just that he seems people.”
old-fashioned now, he
seemed old-fashioned in that era. You’re seeing the rest of American politics
start to turn the corner into the twentieth century, and Cleveland is sort of
the last holdout of the old one. I don’t think he could be anything else, though,
because there is nothing, and I don’t mean this as an epithet, but there is
nothing visionary about this man. He does not have an idea of how to recast
American society. He doesn’t think that’s the job. He thinks the job is to be a
bulwark for the American people. He is there to keep the government from
getting into your wallet, getting into your rights. The idea that he’s going
to restructure the entirety of the federal government never would have
occurred to him.

VA LUES
VA LUES
Wisdom to Know
the Difference
We can’t fix all the world’s problems at once—but
we can fix some of the worst ones now. If we stop
wasting time, that is, on big ideas with small
payoffs.
By Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson
I
n 2015, the world’s leaders attempted to address the major problems
facing humanity by setting the Sustainable Development Goals, a com-
pilation of one hundred and sixty-nine targets to be hit by 2030. Every
admirable pursuit imaginable, in some real sense, made the list: eradi-
cating poverty and disease; stopping war; protecting biodiversity; improving
education—and, of course, ameliorating climate change.
In 2023, we’re at the halfway point, given the 2016–30 time-horizon, but we
will be far from halfway toward hitting our putative targets. Given current
trends, we will achieve them half a century late (and that estimate does not
factor in the COVID-19 disruption).
What is the main cause of our failure? Our inability to prioritize.
There is little difference between having one hundred and sixty-nine
goals and having none. That is simply too many directions to travel in,
Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, president of the

Copenhagen Consensus Center, and a visiting professor at the Copenhagen
Business School. Jordan B. Peterson is professor emeritus at the University of
Toronto. His latest book is Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (Portfolio,
2021).

simultaneously—too many projects to track; too much fragmenting of atten-
tion; too many constituencies all asking for additional resources. Targets of
clear fundamental importance (reducing infant mortality; ensuring basic
education) are put on equal footing with well-intentioned but comparatively
trivial targets such as boosting recycling and promoting lifestyles in harmony
with nature.
In consequence, we have dithered away eight years and spent a lot of effort
and money doing so. It is long past time to identify and prioritize our most
crucial goals.
SOLVING H UNGER
The Copenhagen Consensus has ranked the Sustainable Development Goals
by return on investment. What does this mean? Determining where the most
progress can be made, in the most efficient manner, for the most beneficial
return.
The think tank brought together several Nobel laureates with more than a
hundred leading economists and divided them into teams, each charged with
determining where our dollars, rupees, and shillings might be devoted to do
the most good. This careful exercise is already delivering compelling results.
We could, for example, truly hasten an end to hunger.
Imagine that, for example, as priority one: no more emaciated, desperate,
permanently damaged children; no more starving or malnourished people.
We have seen a dramatic decline in hunger over the past century, reducing
the proportion of humanity living in a permanent state of nutritional short-
age from two-thirds to less than 10 percent. Nonetheless, more than eight
hundred million people
still don’t have enough
food, and three mil- Essential nutrients for pregnant
lion mothers and their mothers would cost just a bit over $2
children will die from per pregnancy.
hunger this year.
Progress toward the UN targets for food provision is occurring so slowly
that we won’t achieve our putative goals until the next century—in no small
part because of our abject failure to prioritize. This is morally unacceptable,
and pragmatically unnecessary.
Hunger is a problem we know how to fix. In the longer run, we need
freer trade that can allow the world’s malnourished to lift themselves out
of poverty. In the medium term, we need more agricultural innovation,
which has clearly made its value known over the past century and more.

DON’T DELAY: Food workers distribute aid in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. “Hunger is a problem we know how to fix,” write Bjorn Lomborg and
Jordan B. Peterson, who stress that immediate action to provide nutrients and
vitamins helps not only children but also the societies in which they will grow
up. [International Committee of the Red Cross]
This would drive higher crop yields, increase the food supply, and reduce
hunger.
However, we also need solutions that can help now. And the economic
research helps identify ingenious, effective, and implementable solutions.
Hunger hits hardest in the first thousand days of a child’s life, beginning
with conception and proceeding over the next two years. Boys and girls
who face a shortage of essential nutrients and vitamins grow more slowly.
It compromises their bodies, and their brains develop less optimally, result-
ing in a decrease in the general cognitive ability (IQ) so crucial to long-term
success. Children deprived in this manner attend school less often (and learn
less effectively when they do attend) and achieve lower grades, and are less
productive and poorer as adults.
The damage done in the earliest period of childhood deprives starved indi-
viduals of their potential, making us all much poorer than we might have been.
We could and should deliver essential nutrients to pregnant mothers. The
provision of a daily multivitamin/mineral supplement would cost just a bit

over $2 per pregnancy. When babies so provisioned are born, they are much
less likely to suffer the estimated average five-point IQ loss. Such babies will
be more productive, personally and socially, for the entire course of their
lives.
SMARTER SCHOOLS
Why would we not prioritize this path?
Because, instead, we are trying foolishly to please everyone and failing to
think carefully and clearly while doing so. We spend too little, too unwisely,
on everything and ignore
the most effective solu-
tions. We are therefore Rather than concentrating on what
depriving the world’s we could and should do, we frighten
poor and humankind as a and demoralize our young people.
whole of the result of the
intelligence and productivity that would otherwise be available to us.
Consider, also, what we could accomplish in education. The world has final-
ly managed to get almost all children in school. Unfortunately, the schools are
too often of low quality, and many students still learn almost nothing. More
than half the children in poor countries cannot read and understand a simple
text by the age of ten.
Schools typically group children by age. This is a significant problem
because age and ability are not the same thing. Any random group of twenty
or sixty children of the same age will be very diverse in their domain knowl-
edge. This means that the struggling children will be lost and the competent
children bored and restless, no matter at what level their instructors pitch
their teaching.
The innovative solution, research-tested around the world? Let each
child spend one hour a day with a tablet that adapts teaching exactly to
the level of that child. Even as the rest of the school day is unchanged,
this will over a year produce learning equivalent to three years of typical
education.
What would this cost? (And, of course, what would it cost not to do it?) The
shared tablet, charging costs (often solar panels), and extra teacher instruc-
tion cost about $26 per student, per year. But tripling the rate of learning for
just one year makes each student more productive in adulthood.
This straightforward and implementable solution means that each dollar
so invested would deliver $65 in long-term benefits. Why in the world would
we fail to so invest, given that return?

VIRTUE IS CHEAP
There are many other areas where small, careful, wisely targeted invest-
ments can deliver truly transformative change.
We could, for example, forthrightly tackle the terrible but still too-invisible
killer diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. We could address the
problems of corruption that still bedevil far too many countries, particularly
in the developing world. We could focus on formulating and cooperating on
trade deals that would enable the economic growth that is a proven antidote
to absolute poverty.
Instead, we are fragmenting our attention by attending to far too many
goals, each with its own noisy constituency, whose reactions to necessary pri-
oritization make us afraid. We are, simultaneously and paradoxically, focused
instead on problems that have simple solutions and make us feel virtuous
(like recycling).
We insist on spending trillions on inefficient climate solutions—witness
the $400 billion Germany is about to have spent since 2010, delivering an
underwhelming reduc-
tion in fossil-fuel use from
People who no longer need to worry 79 percent to 77 percent.
about starvation can turn their atten- We alarm ourselves with
tion to such comparative luxuries as unwarranted, apocalyp-
environmental management. tic prophecies, ignoring
the fact, for example,
that increased wealth and resilience have actually reduced death risks from
climate-related catastrophes like floods and storms by more than 99 percent
over the past century.
Our excessive focus on some problems and our scattered attention in
relationship to the rest mean we are dooming people who could have been
efficiently lifted out of their terrible poverty and ignorance.
Rather than concentrating on what we could and should do, with laser-like
precision, we demoralize our young people, carelessly portraying all expan-
sive economic activity as intrinsically damaging to the planet (which it is not)
and typifying their ambition as nothing but the latest manifestation of an
endless pattern of universal oppression.
Imagine, instead, that we determined to act wisely.
With a comparatively minor investment, we could dramatically reduce
hunger and improve education. The newly secure and informed people
so produced would now have the capacity and opportunity to adopt the
long-term view. This is exactly what happens when poverty is reduced and

schooling provided: people who no longer need to worry about their starving
children can turn their attention to such comparative luxuries as broader
environmental management.
Let’s resolve to do the best things first. We could make that our resolution
for the future, striving to do better than we have in the past—as our young
people express their desperation for a more compelling vision of the path
forward, and instead of dooming the poor to their misery in our insistence on
attending to all problems, often with poor and inefficient policies.
The world will not deliver on the promises made by its too-careless lead-
ers in 2015, but it is by no means too late to do better. What world might
we collectively strive to bring into being if we resolved to help the poor and
desperate in the ways we know to be most efficient, effective, and morally
compelling?
Reprinted by permission of the New York Post. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Human

Prosperity Project: Essays on Socialism and Free-
Market Capitalism. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

H I STO RY A N D CULT URE
H I STO RY A N D CULT URE
Always in Pursuit
Equality in America is a treasured goal forever
awaiting further refinement. The debate over how
to achieve it has never ended.
By David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd
F
or at least a hundred years and counting, Americans have debat-
ed what equality of opportunity means. To some, it is closely tied
to freedom, centering on the right of each individual to pursue
whatever life or calling he or she may choose. To others, it is more
a question of circumstances and the limits those may place on one’s ability to
make life choices. Are all Americans born with equality of opportunity and
therefore free to choose their own paths? Or is equality of opportunity some-
thing that must be created by evening out inequalities innate in each person’s
abilities as well as those defined by economic and social circumstances?
Soon this debate turns to the role of government in equality of opportu-
nity. If equality of opportunity is primarily a question of legal and political
rights, the government’s role would involve setting forth and defending
individual rights and the freedom to choose. If, on the other hand, equality
of opportunity is about a level playing field, the government’s responsibil-
ity would expand to include education and policies designed to achieve
economic and social equality. The former implies a more limited role for
government, essentially leaving the individual free to pursue his or her own
opportunities. The latter brings the government directly onto the playing
David Davenport is a research fellow (emeritus) at the Hoover Institution and a

senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center. Gordon Lloyd is a senior fellow at the Ash-
brook Center and the Robert and Katheryn Dockson Professor (Emeritus) at the
Pepperdine University School of Public Policy.

field, passing laws and enacting policies in an attempt to create greater
equality and opportunity.
Focusing this debate narrowly on equality of opportunity is a challenge,
because this was not a term America’s founders used. In fact, the founders felt
that equality, broadly speaking, was something Americans already had as a
natural right, and the government’s role was to defend and protect it. The Pro-
gressives, on the other hand, called out equality of opportunity specifically as
something that had been lost. For the founders, then, equality was something
you moved from, and for the Progressives, it was something to move toward.
Even with these differences, however, reconstructing the debate over equality
of opportunity proves to be a useful and important exercise.
This is still a debate today. Is equality of opportunity something for each indi-
vidual to pursue as best he or she can, under a limited government? Or is equality
of opportunity something the government itself can and should seek to create?
GENIUS OF THE FOUNDING

In order to comprehend the nature of the equality that James Madison and his
fellow founders wanted to pursue in the new world, we must begin by under-
standing the nature of the inequality of opportunity that existed in the Old
World they had left behind. Indeed, since inequality of opportunity per se was
not extensively debated by the founders and the Progressives, we must look
for strong clues about it in two places: the inequality each sought to overcome
and the form of government each saw as likely to create appropriate equality.
For all of its advanced thinking about governance, the Britain that was
home to the founding generation was socially and politically a class system.
One was born into a certain position in life, perhaps a monarch or aris-
tocrat, more likely a worker or a serf, with very little mobility among the
groups. These practices were extended to Britain’s colonies as well, leaving
the American colonies vulnerable to this sort of continuation of European
inequality. Monarchy and aristocracy should not, the founders agreed, have
any place in the New World. Indeed, when understanding the nature of the
equality of opportunity that the founders sought to create, the rejection of
monarchy and class was at the heart of the matter.
Therefore, it was vital that the Declaration of Independence state, in its
second paragraph, the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.”
Further, the Declaration continued, all are “endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
pursuit of Happiness.” Clearly in the New World, the old notions that people
were born by nature to be inevitably an aristocrat or a peasant, a monarch or

a subject, would not be part of the new order of things. Rather, people were
created equal and had the unalienable right to pursue happiness each in his
own way. Put differently, human beings not only had an inherent ability to
govern themselves but they had the right, by “the Laws of Nature,” to do so.
With citizens possessing the liberty to pursue equality of opportunity, the
question then arises: what form of government would best assure the equality of
opportunity claimed by the Declaration of Independence? It is on this question,
especially, that the thinking of Madison would come to the fore. For Madison
and his fellow founders, the government that would best protect both liberty and
equality was a republican form, one that would allow no place for monarchy or
aristocracy. As Benjamin Franklin put it in response to the question of what kind
of government the founders had established: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
By the eighteenth century, republicanism was embraced as the preferred
alternative to monarchy, or rule by one for private benefit; aristocracy, or
rule by the few who are better than the rest of us; and democracy, or direct
rule of the many. The republican form of government had been tested suc-
cessfully at the state level before the adoption of the national Constitution.
All forms appealed to “the people” as the only legitimate source of authority.
Common features were representative government with regular elections, no
titles of nobility or primogeniture, fewer restraints on who could vote and run
for office, and protection of freedom of the press and liberty of conscience.
Even though the Declaration of Independence had left open the particular
form of government to be chosen, each state selected a democratic republi-
can form to secure the twin goals of liberty and equality.
Yet between 1781 and 1787, leaders such as Madison, Alexander Hamilton,
and George Washington argued that something had gone wrong with the
American experiment in self-government. They saw the principles of the
American Revolution at risk because state legislatures were dominant and
the majorities were passing laws that undermined both the liberty of individ-
uals and the public good. Each state had the power and equal opportunity to
go its own way, and the federal government under the Articles of Confedera-
tion had only the limited powers that were explicitly expressed. There was no
federal champion capable of guarding liberty and equality.
Madison then focused on the American challenge that is still with us
today: how to protect both liberty and equality. He saw the question as how
to protect majority rule, that is to say equality, as well as minority rights, or
liberty. The assumption was that the rights of the majority are protected by
the principle of majority rule. The challenge, then, of the republican form
is to protect the liberty and rights of the minority also. In a sense this is a

“EQUAL LAWS”: Writing in Federalist No. 10, James Madison helped formu-
late the idea that equality could be achieved by upholding liberty and con-
structing a republican form of government to protect it. [John Vanderlyn (1775–
1852)]
fundamental dilemma of American political life: Can we have both majority
rule and minority rights? Or: Can we have equality and liberty too?
Madison took up these questions in Federalist No. 10, the most famous
of the Federalist Papers. He argued that part of the reconciliation between
equality and liberty requires an understanding of human nature, which—
unlike the later Progressives—he thought was fixed and not malleable.
Human beings are quarrelsome and contentious by nature—or, as Madison
famously put it, faction is “sown in the nature of man.”
To pursue equality to its fullest form, to quote Madison in Federalist No. 10,
would mean giving “to every citizen the same opinions, passions, and inter-
ests,” something both unrealistic and, with individual liberty, undesirable.
Hamilton agreed with Madison: “The door” to advancement in society “ought
to be equally open to all.” But human nature informs us that “there are
strong minds in every walk of life, that will rise superior to the disadvantages
of the situation, and will commend the tribute due to their merit.”
The formula by which equality would be achieved for Madison and the
founders was through these two powerful ideas: liberty as the philosophi-
cal base, and the republican form of government as the system to protect
it. Liberty affords each individual the right to make his or her own choices,
unconstrained by any political power such as a monarchy or aristocracy. A
republic provides the opportunity for both majority rights, or equality, and
for minority rights, or liberty. Thomas Jefferson described this combination,
in his first inaugural address, as a “sacred principle,” that “the will of the
majority is in all cases to prevail” but the minority possesses “their equal
rights which equal law must protect.” Or, as Madison succinctly put it: “equal
laws protecting equal rights.” Equality, liberty, and the republican form: these
three summarize the Madisonian approach of the founders.
A PERENNIAL DEBATE
The founders or the Progressives? Madison or Wilson? Or perhaps we are
required to accept some compromise of the two? Which view of equality of
opportunity will be the basis for American domestic policy in the twenty-first
century? That is still very much the debate today. As the founders stated
in the Declaration, “all men are created equal,” and, armed with individual
liberty, Americans were free to pursue equality of opportunity as they saw
fit. It was the role of government to defend these political freedoms through
the constitutional republic created by the Constitution.
To all this, the Progressives said that that might have been sufficient in the
eighteenth century, but equality of opportunity in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries required more of government. With the closing of the American fron-
tier and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, American “rugged individual-
ism” was no longer enough. People had to prepare to live in closer quarters
in urban areas, requiring both more government regulation and assistance.
The federal govern-
ment needed to play a
much larger role in the The founders felt that equality was
economy, in the regula- something Americans already had as
tion of business, and in a natural right. The government’s role
social programs to aid was to defend and protect it.
those less able to provide
for themselves. This, the Progressives argued, was the new path to equality of
opportunity: more government, more regulation, and greater security.
In his book The Conservative Sensibility, George Will correctly argues that
the whole liberal-versus-conservative debate today still boils down to whose
model we follow: the founders or the Progressives. He argues that what
conservatives seek to conserve is the founding, whereas Wilson and the
Progressives find Madison’s ideas anachronistic and out of touch. It is this
debate, and the policies its proponents sought to implement, that we now fol-
low in the modern era, from the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, to the Great
Society of Lyndon Johnson, through the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, to
today. And then we ask the question: for the future, is there room for both the
founders and the Progressives as we pursue equality of opportunity, or must
we choose only one?
Special to the Hoover Digest. Excerpted from Equality of Opportunity: A

Century of Debate, by David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd (Hoover Insti-
tution Press, 2023). © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Junior University. All rights reserved.
Forthcoming from the Hoover Institution Press is

Equality of Opportunity: A Century of Debate, by
David Davenport and Gordon Lloyd. To order, call

H OOVER A RCH IVES
H OOVER A RCH IVES
Window on a
Revolution
Hoover now houses the collection of the Chinese
communist thinker Li Rui, confidant of Mao
Zedong. The story of a man who was both
rewarded and brutalized by the movement he
served.
By Matthew Krest Lowenstein
L
i Rui (1917–2019) was a senior cadre in the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) and the former personal secretary to Chairman Mao
Zedong. His tumultuous career was in many ways iconic of the
many idealists who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. He
assisted the party’s propaganda efforts in the war against Japan (1937–45)
and then against the Nationalists (1945–49). After the Communist victory
and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he threw himself into
building socialism—first in a propaganda capacity, later in the hydropower
system. His career reached its apex in 1958, with his appointment as Mao’s
personal secretary. But with the outbreak of the Great Leap Forward and,
later, the Cultural Revolution, he found his devotion to the cause repaid in
decades of brutal political persecution.
The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired the Li Rui papers,
an exciting new collection now available to scholars. Li’s personal collection
Matthew Krest Lowenstein is a Hoover Fellow who studies the economic history
of modern China.

offers an insider’s view into the upper echelons of the CCP not available any-
where else in the world—especially not in Xi Jinping’s China.
The Li Rui collection is vast. It comprises more than forty-nine boxes of
archival material spanning 1938 to 2018 and contains Li Rui’s personal and
official correspondence, diaries, transcripts of high-level party meetings,
photographs from throughout the Mao era, and other miscellaneous docu-
ments. This collection will be broadly useful to historians, political scientists,
and other scholars interested in the Chinese Communist Party.
The opening of the archive is timely. COVID-19 restrictions have made
travel to China increasingly difficult, and access to archives is irregular. For
foreigners, archives may be entirely inaccessible, with pandemic restrictions
effectively banning foreign nationals from reviewing them.
ARCHIVAL TREASURES
Among the Li Rui collection are high-level party documents, which scholars
of the CCP and high politics will find especially useful. His detailed notes
from the Central Party Committee Dongbei Conference on Land Reform in
1948 offer a look into the senior leadership’s early views of land reform. It is
fascinating to read Li Lisan (no relation) complaining about “peasant egali-
tarianism” and the peas-
ants’ inability to under-
stand class distinctions, Li’s personal diaries offer a rare por-
which he feared was trait of how members of a communist
leading to revolution- family devoted themselves to making
ary excess. Notes on the a revolution, which would ultimately
back and forth between tear them apart.
senior cadres such as
Li Lisan, Huang Kecheng, Zhang Wentian, and others allow a first-person
understanding of how senior cadres’ ideological faith in Marxism determined
national policy.
Li Rui’s papers relating to the infamous Lushan Conference in 1959—
which affirmed the Great Leap Forward and purged many of its opponents,
including Peng Dehuai and Li Rui himself—are similarly illuminating. These
records contain meeting minutes as well as Li Rui’s attempts to rebut Kang
Sheng’s accusations of disloyalty.
Li Rui’s diaries constitute the largest part of the collection. They span the
years 1945 to 2018. Helpfully, many of these have been transcribed, which
makes for faster reading than the original handwriting. Moreover, the seven-
decade scope of these diaries means they offer something to scholars of

virtually all fields. Historians of the Cold War may be interested in Li Rui’s
diaries from his trip to the Soviet Union, while analysts of Xi Jinping’s admin-
istration can peruse his entries from the late 2000s. In addition to Li Rui’s
own diaries, the collection includes the diaries of Fan Yuanzhen—Li’s first
wife—from 1938 to 1947. They thus give us a rare portrait of how a commu-
nist family devoted themselves to making a revolution that would ultimately
tear them apart.
Li’s correspondence is largely personal. The bulk of it consists of corre-
spondence with Fan Yuanzhen as well as his other family members. These
span the length of his adulthood, from 1938 to 1988. His early letters to his
wife burn with youthful idealism. In one letter penned in 1939, Li Rui urges
Fan to abandon her bourgeois fantasies about finding “her ideal career” and
to focus on her work as a journalist. Li Rui explains, “Today, our goal is to
forge ourselves into firm and bold, and absolutely unyielding, Bolsheviks! I
believe that this line of work [journalism] suits you. It can develop your tal-
ents.” This is typical of Li Rui’s early letters, which often proclaim his ardent
desire to self-improve and to temper himself into the ideal communist.
EXPELLED AND RESTO RED

Li Rui was born in 1917 in Beijing, where his father was serving as a repre-
sentative to the National Assembly from Hunan province. When the Bei-
yang warlords disbanded the National Assembly later that year, the family
returned to their native Hunan, where Li would spend the rest of his youth. A
student at Wuhan University, he displayed an early interest in literature and
politics. Li published in student newspapers and headed propaganda efforts
of student political movements. Eventually he became a founding member of
Wuhan University’s Communist Party cell.
After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), the CCP
put Li to work on its wartime propaganda efforts, editing party publications
in Hunan. In 1939, Fan became a reporter for Xinhua media, the CCP’s offi-
cial news network, in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing. Later
that year, Li left with several senior party members for the CCP’s guerrilla
CENTER OF POWER: The Li Rui collection helps to illuminate how Mao

Zedong (opposite, shown in 1966) and his senior cadres’ ideological faith in
Marxism determined national policy. Mao appointed Li his personal secretary
in 1958. Only a year later, Li was expelled from the party and sentenced to
labor on a farm—not the first punishment inflicted on him by the party, or the
last. [Wikimedia Commons]

REVOLUTIONARY: A soldier stands guard next to a portrait of Mao Zedong
at the Tiananmen Gate. Through the vast Li Rui collection now held at the
Hoover Institution, a deep view of the Mao era comes into focus. [Creative Com-
mons]
headquarters in Yan’an. There, he continued to serve the party’s propaganda

efforts, editing Liberation Daily and following Mao’s orders to focus the paper
on promoting the Communist Party.
During his wartime experience in Yan’an, Li got his first taste of a Com-
munist Party purge. He was jailed briefly after being accused of spying for
the Nationalists. In 1945, Japanese surrender set the stage for the civil war
between the Nationalists and the Communists. Li was against sent to assist
propaganda efforts, this time editing party publications near the front lines
in what was then Rehe province (now part of Hebei province).
After the Communist victory and the founding of the People’s Republic
of China in 1949, Li began to serve in a number of prominent roles in the
propaganda and industrial “systems,” eventually serving as director of the
hydropower construction agency.
In 1958, Li reached the apex of his career. At the Central Conference in
Nanning, Mao Zedong appointed him his personal secretary. Several months
later, Li was promoted to vice minister of hydropower. But the turmoil of the

IDEALIST: Li Rui kept diaries for more than seven decades, and Hoover’s
collection also includes the diaries of his first wife, Fan Yuanzhen. Li’s early
letters burn with youthful idealism. “Today, our goal is to forge ourselves into
firm and bold, and absolutely unyielding, Bolsheviks!” he wrote in a 1939 let-
ter to Fan. [Li Nanyang]
UNQUESTIONED: A postage stamp shows Mao Zedong exhorting workers
during the Cultural Revolution, a movement that gave the Chinese leader
complete power to purge his opponents and establish a cult of personality.
[Wikimedia Commons]
Great Leap Forward soon led to serious reverses. At the Lushan Conference
in 1959, Li was labeled a member of an “anti-party clique” for opposition to
aggressive hydropower construction. He was expelled from the party and
sentenced to labor reform at a farm, where he almost starved. After this stint
in reform through labor, he was allowed to resume work as a cultural officer
in the hydropower sector.
But more political troubles were soon to come. The outbreak of the Cultur-
al Revolution in 1966 once again made Li a target. In 1967, he was imprisoned
in solitary confinement without conviction or even an accusation. He would
not be freed from prison for eight more years.
With the end of the Cultural Revolution, Li’s party membership was
reinstated, and he again began to hold prominent positions in the party. In
1982, he was appointed to the extremely powerful Organization Department
in charge of party nomenklatura, rising to regular vice minister the following
year. In 1984, he was relieved from this position owing to opposition from old
political enemies, and went into retirement.
192 H O O VE R DIG EST • Spr i n g 2023

PERSECUTION: The Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, claiming promi-
nent victims such as Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, shown here in a 1967 tele-
vised image. Purged by Mao, Liu was publicly humiliated and sent to prison,
where he died (he was officially rehabilitated nine years later). During the
Cultural Revolution, Li Rui also was a target of the government, imprisoned in
solitary confinement without conviction or even charge. [Wikimedia Commons]
Yet his “retirement” was an active one. He continued to serve on the Cen-
tral Consultative Committee. In 1989, during the Tiananmen Square protests,
he sided with party liberals and called publicly for a compromise between
the students and the military. For this position, he was severely criticized in
the wake of the June 4 massacre. In 1992, the Central Consultative Commit-
tee was disbanded, and Li ceased to hold a formal position in government.
Nevertheless, he continued to play an active role in the political life of the
country.
He worked for liberalizing reforms—first in his official capacity and later
as patron of Yanhuang Chunqiu, the house journal of the embattled reform-
ist and liberal-minded faction of the party. Li’s “consultancy” consisted, in
fact, of running interference for the journal and allowing it to publish critical
scholarship and essays until 2016, when it was taken over by Xi Jinping
loyalists.
H O O V ER D IGE ST • S p ring 2023 193

“REFORM AND OPENING”: Li Rui continually worked for reforms, in later
years as patron of the house journal of the embattled reformist and liberal-
minded faction of the Communist Party—until Xi Jinping loyalists took it over.
Li’s archives will allow scholars of China to access detailed, truthful informa-
tion about the history of China’s government. [Li Nanyang]
He told the BBC in 2017, “Whenever there’s a clash between the party and
humanity. I insist on humanity.”
R OAD S NOT TAKEN

The Li Rui archives are the subject of some controversy. Starting in 2014, his
daughter, Li Nanyang, brought the documents from China to the Hoover
Institution on her father’s behalf. But Li’s widow, Zhang Yuzhen, is
contesting ownership of the diaries, claiming they were brought to the
United States improperly.
Li Rui died on February 16, 2019, and was given a state funeral, which took
place under tight security and with a degree of official honor that his daugh-
ter said Li did not want.
According to an obituary Li Rui was given a state funeral, with
in the BBC, “the fact that a degree of official honor that his
Mr. Li was one of the daughter said Li would have refused.
original revolutionaries
meant that he occupied
a special place in contemporary China—one that allowed him a degree of
freedom to talk about the ruling party’s many issues, and how he felt things
should be done differently.”
In donating his personal papers to the Hoover Archives, Li Rui expressed
the wish that they would serve as a resource for people seeking to under-
stand why China has failed to achieve a constitutional system. His gift helps
keep alive the flame of reform and opening in China. By giving scholars
access to the party’s internal documents, he has made it possible for schol-
ars to write about the Chinese Communist Party in a way that is empirically
rigorous and boldly truthful.
Special to the Hoover Digest.

Hammer, Sickle, and Soil: The Soviet Drive to
Collectivize Agriculture, by Jonathan Daly. To order,
call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

On the Cover
H
istorians call it the golden age of flight. A hundred years ago,
shaped by war and commerce, aviation was capturing the
imagination of people all around the globe. There were barn-
stormers, wing walkers, embryonic passenger airlines, and
airmail pioneers. This British poster by artist Frank Newbould (1887–1951)
depicts airmail as a glamorous innovation. Routine today, flying the mails in
those years was adventurous, competitive, and dangerous. California played
a key part in the establishment of safe, reliable air links across the United
States. One huge mountaintop beacon built to guide night-flying aircraft still
glows above the Bay Area today—but only once a year.
The Post Office Department began scheduled airmail service between
New York and Washington in 1918, but it was expensive and spotty. In Feb-
ruary 1921, four planes set out in the dead of winter in an attempt to swap
mail between New York and San Francisco. Three were forced down, one
pilot died, and the mail barely made it through, but Congress was impressed
enough by the stunt to bestow funding for a proper cross-country airmail
network. It wasn’t until 1923 that two Army pilots carried out the first nonstop
transcontinental flight, traveling east to west so their plane could burn off
enough fuel to climb over the Western mountains. Lieutenants John Arthur
Macready and Oakley George Kelly flew from Long Island to San Diego in
a blistering 26 hours, 50 minutes, and 38.8 seconds. Their bulky Fokker T-2
monoplane resides at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Curious relics of that improvised era remain scattered around the country,
including in the Bay Area: big concrete arrows, placed at strategic points to
direct pilots to nearby airports. If the pilots could see them, of course.
The next step was night flight. A steel tower atop Mount Diablo, east of
Oakland, went up in 1928, along with another in the San Gabriel Valley. Both
were built by the Standard Oil Corporation of California, today’s Chevron,
which had an interest in promoting the sale of aviation fuel. On April 16, 1928,
Charles Lindbergh himself pressed a telegraph key in Denver to switch on

the ten-million-candle-
power Mount Diablo lamp.
According to the Oak-
land Tribune, Secretary
of Commerce Herbert
Hoover said over the
radio—another tech inno-
vation, and one Hoover
favored—that “tonight
we are using the newest
method of communica-
tion to dedicate a service
to the newest method of
transportation. Private
enterprise, in a contribu-
tion to the development
of aviation, has erected
two mammoth beacons to
guide the flyers over our
national airways at night.”
On clear nights the rotat-
ing light was powerful
enough to be seen from Reno in the east, Redding in the north, and Bakers-
field in the south.
The second light tower, in the Merced Hills (today’s Montebello), looked
down on an area where Standard had struck oil in 1917. It was dismantled in
1965 and the site in recent years has been swallowed up by Metro Heights, a
luxury homes development that boasts “incredible views.”
But the Mount Diablo tower, with its own incredible views, remains. The
light was moved to its current stone structure, built by the Civilian Conserva-
tion Corps, in 1939. The beacon went dark after Pearl Harbor, amid fears that
it might attract enemy aircraft. After the war, it was deemed obsolete. Radar
and radio, not giant lamps, guided airplanes now. But after a Pearl Harbor
Day commemoration in 1964, when the light was rekindled by Fleet Admiral
Chester Nimitz, hero of the Pacific theater, keepers of the light arranged for
it to be illuminated once a year. It shines every December 7, a memorial to
those lost in World War II.
—Charles Lindsey

HOOVER INSTITUTION ON WAR, REVOLUTION AND PEACE
Board of Overseers
Chair Brady Enright
John B. Kleinheinz Henry A. Fernandez
Robert A. Ferris
Vice Chair James Fleming Jr.
Samuel L. Ginn
Susan R. McCaw
Shari Glazer
Michael W. Gleba
Members Kenneth Goldman
Eric L. Affeldt
Lawrence E. Golub
Katherine H. Alden
Robert E. Grady
Neil R. Anderson
Jerry Grundhofer
Paul V. Barber Cynthia Fry Gunn
Barbara Barrett Paul G. Haaga Jr.
John F. Barrett Karen Hargrove
Barry Beal Jr. Richard R. Hargrove
Donald R. Beall Everett J. Hauck
Douglas Bergeron Diana Hawkins
Wendy Bingham Cox Kenneth A. Hersh
Jeffrey W. Bird Heather R. Higgins
James J. Bochnowski Allan Hoover III
David Booth Margaret Hoover
Richard Breeden Philip Hudner
Jerome V. Bruni Claudia P. Huntington
John L. “Jack” Bunce Jr. John K. Hurley
Robert H. Castellini Nicolas Ibañez Scott
Charles Cobb James D. Jameson
Jean-Pierre L. “JP” Conte William E. Jenkins
Berry R. Cox Charles B. Johnson
Harlan Crow Elizabeth Pryor Johnson
Mark Dalzell Gregory E. Johnson
James W. Davidson John Jordan
Paul Lewis “Lew” Davies III Stephen S. Kahng
George H. Davis Jr. Michael E. Kavoukjian
Michael Dokupil Peter W. Kuyper
Dixon R. Doll Colby Lane
Susan Ford Dorsey Davide Leone
Herbert M. Dwight Walter Loewenstern Jr.
Steven L. Eggert Bill Loomis
Dana M. Emery Hamid Mani, M.D.

James D. Marver George W. Siguler

Michael G. McCaffery Ellen Siminoff
Craig O. McCaw Amb. Ronald P. Spogli
David McDonald William C. Steere Jr.
Harold “Terry” McGraw III David L. Steffy
Henry A. McKinnell Mark A. Stevens
Deedee McMurtry Lee Styslinger III
Carole J. McNeil W. Clarke Swanson Jr.
Mary G. Meeker Stephen D. Taylor
Jennifer L. “Jenji” Mercer Michael E. Tennenbaum
Rebekah Mercer Marc Tessier-Lavigne*
Roger S. Mertz Charles B. Thornton Jr.
Harold M. “Max” Messmer Jr. Victor S. Trione
Mitchell J. Milias Darnell M. Whitt II
K. Rupert Murdoch Paul H. Wick
George A. Needham James R. Wilkinson
Thomas Nelson Dede Wilsey
Laura O’Connor Yu Wu
Robert J. Oster
Jerry Yang*
Ross Perot Jr.
*Ex officio members of the Board
Joel C. Peterson
George J. Records
Christopher R. Redlich Jr. Distinguished Overseers
Samuel T. Reeves Martin Anderson
Geoffrey S. Rehnert Wendy H. Borcherdt
Kathleen “Cab” Rogers W. Kurt Hauser
Robert Rosenkranz Peyton M. Lake
Adam Ross Shirley Cox Matteson
Theresa W. “Terry” Ryan Bowen H. McCoy
Douglas G. Scrivner Boyd C. Smith
Park Shaper
Peter O. Shea Overseers Emeritus
Roderick W. Shepard Frederick L. Allen
Robert Shipman Joseph W. Donner
Thomas M. Siebel Robert J. Swain

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HOOVER DIGEST
WINTER 2023 NO. 1
The Economy
Russia and Ukraine
China
The Middle East
Politics
Defense
Foreign Policy
The Environment
Education
California
Interviews
» John H. Cochrane
» Frank Dikötter
» Gerd Gigerenzer
» Paul R. Gregory
» Stephen Kotkin
» Rob Portman
» Troy Senik
» Wei Jingsheng
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

VISIT HOOVER INSTITUTION ONLINE | www.hoover.org

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

15 “Wasteful and Extravagant”

19 Rebooting the Fed

22 It Takes More than a Village . . .

46 Think the Unthinkable

50 Russians’ Worst Enemy

4 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

85 Taiwan Doesn’t Stand Alone

107 In Case of Emergency

124 Smaller, Faster, Deadlier

6 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

154 “The Soul of a Killer”

158 Grover Cleveland, Classical Liberal

196 On the Cover

8 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

THE ECO NOMY

Melissa De Witte, Stanford News Service: Fears about a

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

10 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

De Witte: What do people—economists included—understand and don’t

Cochrane: We know they happen and seem to be a regular phenomenon. In

De Witte: What causes recessions?

Cochrane: Just what causes recessions and drives these mechanisms is a

De Witte: What else do people often misunderstand about recessions?

Cochrane: People also misunderstand the nature of unemployment. Even

12 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

Cochrane: There is definitely a correlation between inflation and recessions.

De Witte: Could there be any spillover effects if there is a recession else-

Cochrane: Yes. We live in a global economy, like it or not. China seems in

New from the Hoover Institution Press is How

14 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

THE ECO NOMY

16 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

Available from Stanford University Press is The High

18 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

THE ECO NOMY

Rebooting the Fed

By Mickey D. Levy and Charles Plosser

20 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Mont

possibilities for climate action will be set back by » International

22 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

Deglobalization is being accelerated through a combination of old-fash-

MORE POWER: Worldwide demand is growing for lithium (opposite page)

24 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

26 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

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

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Adapt

By Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates

28 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

30 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 2023

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]