Hoover Digest, 2024, No. 2, Spring
Hoover Digest, 2024, No. 2, Spring
Hoover Digest, 2024, No. 2, Spring
DIGEST
R E SE AR C H + COM M E NTARY
ON P U B L IC P OL ICY
SP R I N G 2 024 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
begins its second century with a dual identity: an active public policy
research center and an internationally recognized library and archives.
S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
HOOVER DIGEST
RESEARCH + COMMENTARY ON PUBLIC POLICY
S pring 2024 • HOOV ER D IGEST.ORG
The Hoover Digest explores politics, economics, and history, guided by the
scholars and researchers of the Hoover Institution, the public policy research
HOOVER
center at Stanford University. DIGEST
The opinions expressed in the Hoover Digest are those of the authors and
do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Hoover Institution, Stanford PETER ROBINSON
University, or their supporters. As a journal for the work of the scholars and Editor
researchers affiliated with the Hoover Institution, the Hoover Digest does not
accept unsolicited manuscripts. CHARLES LINDSEY
The Hoover Digest (ISSN 1088-5161) is published quarterly by the Hoover Executive Editor
Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, 434 Galvez Mall, Stanford University,
Stanford CA 94305-6003. Periodicals Postage Paid at Palo Alto CA and BARBARA ARELLANO
additional mailing offices. Executive Editor,
Hoover Institution Press
Cambey & West provides sales processing and customer service for the
Hoover Digest. For inquiries, e-mail hooverdigest@cambeywest.com, phone
CHRISTOPHER S. DAUER
(866) 889-9026, or write to: Hoover Digest, PO Box 355, Congers, NY 10920.
Chief External Relations Officer
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the Hoover Institution Press, 434
Galvez Mall, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305-6003.
© 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
HOOVER
INSTITUTION
CONTACT INFORMATION SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION
Comments and suggestions: $49.95 a year to US and Canada (other JOHN B. KLEINHEINZ
digesteditor@stanford.edu international rates higher) Chair, Board of Overseers
(650) 497-5356 www.hooverdigest.org
SUSAN R. McCAW
Vice Chair, Board of Overseers
ON THE COVER
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Tad and Dianne Taube Director
German-born artist and graphic designer
Winold Reiss (1886–1953) painted this ERIC WAKIN
portrait of Wades in the Water, a leader Deputy Director,
and warrior of the Blackfeet tribe, in full Director of Library & Archives
regalia. Reiss befriended many of the
Blackfeet beginning in 1920, when he first
sojourned on their Montana reservation.
Many twentieth-century Americans were
drawn to stories and imagery of the West
and were fascinated with Indians. This
painting was one of several to appear on
a railroad calendar, a framing that told
of technological change pushing aside
traditional ways. See story, page 218.
X @HooverInst
FACEBOOK www.facebook.com/HooverInstStanford
YOUTUBE www.youtube.com/HooverInstitution
PODCAST Hoover Institution on Apple Podcasts
Follow your favorite fellows and topics.
INSTAGRAM https://instagram.com/hooverinstitution Sign up at hoover.org/myhoover
Spring 2024
HOOVER D IG EST
T HE E CO N O M Y
9 Social Security’s Fateful Day
Two roads diverged in 1977, and Congress took the one that
led to higher taxes and—ten years from now—an empty trust
fund. By Andrew G. Biggs, John F. Cogan, and Daniel Heil
14 High Noon
Advanced economies can’t outrun debt and taxes any longer.
By Michael J. Boskin
ISRAEL
27 Empires in a Clear Light
The “colonialism” slander remains just that—a slander.
By Peter Berkowitz
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 3
40 Cheerleaders for Terror
The progressive left has long nursed an old hatred under
its mantle of “social justice.” Because Jews have refused to
become either victims or oppressors, leftists are casting them
out. By Aharon Friedman and Joshua D. Rauh
IRAN
59 Tehran Wins Tenure
Iran wields great ideological power on American university
campuses. How could this have happened? By Russell A.
Berman
R U SS I A A N D UK R A IN E
80 Can Ukraine Still Win?
If anything can break the bloody stalemate, perhaps it’s
an innovative—and overwhelming—air attack. By Rose
Gottemoeller and Michael Ryan
C H I N A A N D TA IWA N
98 “It Will Be Decided Here”
Settling the great-power rivalry between the United States
and China, analysts Dan Blumenthal and Elbridge A. Colby
argue, will come down to American strength, confidence, and
national values. By Peter Robinson
F O R E I GN P O L ICY
108 Bipolar Disorders
An international survey shows the familiar “us versus
them” views of the world have splintered into countless
permutations. Time for new rules. By Timothy Garton Ash
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 5
D E F EN S E
113 The Cost of a Dangerous World
How can we build, deploy, and pay for tomorrow’s military?
Like this. By Michael J. Boskin
T E C HN O LO GY
129 Tech New World
The Stanford Emerging Technology Review sets out on a journey
to understand, explain, and use tomorrow’s transformational
tech. By Condoleezza Rice, John B. Taylor, Jennifer Widom,
and Amy B. Zegart
T HE E NVIR O N ME N T
136 Wasting of the Green
As First World groups shovel money into climate schemes,
they forgo real progress against hunger, sickness, and poverty.
By Bjorn Lomborg
C AL I FO R N IA
147 Facts Meet Fakery
Politicians think they’re qualified to teach California students
to recognize “fake news.” Think about that. By Lee E.
Ohanian
I N T E RVIE W
152 Canceling the Cancelers
Hoover fellow Niall Ferguson probes the spread of an
insidious ideology in America’s institutions of higher learning
and offers a suggestion: start over. By Peter Robinson
VA LU ES
164 Friends, Romans . . . Influencers?
Ancient Rome is supposedly trendy. Time for a few untrendy
lessons about the life and death of empires. By Bruce S.
Thornton
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 7
HI STORY A N D C ULTUR E
177 Dependent No More
It’s been a hundred years since the United States granted
citizenship to American Indians. Will it take a hundred more
before it frees tribes to make their own decisions?
By Terry L. Anderson and Dominic P. Parker
HO OV E R A R C HIVE S
198 The Last Years of Nikola Tesla
A Hoover collection illuminates the ideas, aspirations, and
eccentricities of the “pure scientific genius, a poet in science”
who begged the World War II Allies to help him build a
fantastical weapon to save his beloved Yugoslavia. By Ognjen
Kovačević and Bertrand M. Patenaude
Social Security’s
Fateful Day
Two roads diverged in 1977, and Congress took the
one that led to higher taxes and—ten years from
now—an empty trust fund.
D
ecember 20, 1977: if not a date that will live in infamy, a date on
which a Social Security funding crisis was made inevitable.
Had Congress acted differently that day, by adopting the
unanimous recommendations of a congressionally appointed
expert panel, Social Security’s $22 trillion funding shortfall would not exist,
and retirees would not face a 20 percent benefit cut when Social Security’s
trust fund runs dry in 2034.
As Congress considers a bipartisan fiscal commission to recommend
reforms, it should bear in mind that the coming Social Security funding crisis
is a man-made catastrophe, not a natural disaster.
Since the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, policy makers have
known that changing demographics—specifically, rising numbers of benefi-
ciaries relative to workers paying into the program—would over time cause
Social Security to become more costly.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 9
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
What wasn’t inevitable was a funding crisis. In fact, from 1950 to 1971, Con-
gress was able to increase benefits nine times. That changed in 1977, when
Social Security amendments responded to a technical error in 1972 legisla-
tion that caused retirement benefits to skyrocket and threatened insolvency
by 1979.
The 1977 law sought
to slow the rapid growth
in benefits for future The road not taken: linking the growth
retirees. At the time, of initial benefits to the rate of inflation.
Congress considered two
options. The first, recommended by an expert commission headed by Har-
vard economist William Hsiao, would link the growth of the initial benefits
paid to new retirees to the rate of inflation. The second approach, favored
by the Carter administration, would index initial benefits to national average
wage growth.
While differing only in seemingly technical ways, the two approaches had
dramatically different effects on Social Security’s long-term finances. Simply
put, the Hsiao Commission’s recommendation was fully sustainable under
then-legislated tax rates. It would allow, as the commission wrote, “future
generations to decide what benefit increases are appropriate and what tax
rates to finance them are acceptable.”
In contrast, the alternative approach of “wage indexing” initial benefits
could not be sustained without substantially higher future taxes.
The Hsiao Commission bluntly criticized that policy, saying that it “gravely
doubts the fairness and wisdom of now promising benefits at such a level
that we must commit our
sons and daughters to a
higher tax rate than we Despite knowing since 1984 that
ourselves are willing to Social Security promised far more
pay.” Congress, never- benefits than it could pay, Congress
theless, opted for wage has never passed legislation to
indexing. In doing so,
address this.
Congress guaranteed a
future Social Security funding crisis.
While politicians will happily increase Social Security benefits, they avoid
at all costs reducing them, in particular after (falsely) telling Americans that
these are benefits they have earned and paid for. In reality, a typical couple
retiring in the late 2030s is promised 62 percent more in lifetime benefits
than they paid in taxes, according to SSA’s actuaries.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 11
This explains why, despite being aware since 1984 that Social Security
promised far more benefits than it could pay, Congress has never passed leg-
islation to address this. Year after year, elected officials passed the problem
on to future legislators, who themselves passed it on, until after four decades
a funding crisis approached.
That pattern continues. President Biden, while floating a partial Social
Security fix during the 2020 campaign, has not promoted reform since
taking office. Former president Trump, the Republican frontrunner for
2024, vocally opposes any
benefit reductions but
Over the next ten years, Social Secu- has no plans to pay for
rity will add nearly $3 trillion to the his promises.
publicly held national debt. And so, during the next
ten years, Social Security
will add nearly $3 trillion to the publicly held national debt. Come 2034, the
trust fund will be depleted, and Congress will face the task of addressing
what we’ve calculated will be a $360 billion funding gap in that year alone,
with increasing shortfalls in years to come. All in the interest of paying
inflation-adjusted benefits nearly twice as high in 2034 as were paid to retir-
ees in 1970.
Had our elected officials acted differently on December 20, 1977, and
adopted the Hsiao Commission’s policy, Social Security would be financially
solvent, and its small surpluses could be applied to lowering the public debt
burden rather than adding to it. Although benefits would be about 12 percent
lower than they are today, their inflation-adjusted value would still be about
60 percent higher than in 1977, and a looming insolvency would not threaten
future benefits.
Seniors’ incomes would still be at record high levels because of increases
in benefits from private retirement plans and in earnings in retirement. And
with Social Security fully funded in perpetuity, Congress could have enacted
targeted benefit increases to protect the poorest retirees.
Instead, Congress locked in benefit growth rates that are unsustainable
and yet seemingly impossible to arrest. This history lesson, that Congress
should not commit future Americans to tax rates that current Americans
are unwilling to pay, should not be lost on policy makers as Social Security
reforms are debated.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 13
T H E ECO N O M Y
High Noon
Advanced economies can’t outrun debt and taxes
any longer.
By Michael J. Boskin
A
round the world,
advanced economies are Key points
facing heightened fiscal » Most advanced economies are
saddled with bloated, financially
challenges, owing to the unsustainable welfare states.
simple fact that most have bloated, » Pressure on health and public-
financially unsustainable welfare pension benefits will only increase.
Michael J. Boskin is the Wohlford Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institu-
tion and the Tully M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
He is a member of Hoover’s task forces on energy policy, economic policy, and
national security.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 15
be well below 2-to-1 by 2035. In these economies, the fastest-growing demo-
graphic group comprises those aged eighty-five and up. While we should
welcome longer lifespans, we also must recognize the associated costs for
public budgets.
Worse, with the exception of Northern European countries, advanced econ-
omies have accumulated much larger public debts over the past decade and
a half. For a while, this additional fiscal pressure was masked by extremely
low interest rates; but now, interest costs are ballooning everywhere (though
they are somewhat more manageable in inflation-adjusted terms). As central
banks continue to unwind their huge holdings of government debt (equal to
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 17
to avoid the economically disruptive forced changes that Draghi and others
(including me) have long predicted.
Back when advanced economies were growing rapidly, leaving greater debt
burdens to future generations arguably was not a problem because it was
assumed that our children and grandchildren would be much richer and thus
capable of affording higher taxes. But with productivity growth having long
since slowed, the intergenerational inequity we have created is indefensible.
Viewed in this light, the
policies favored by the
Few political leaders have been political left are a recipe
willing to confront reality and propose for making a bad situation
solutions. worse. If we want to sup-
port stronger economic
growth and intergenerational equity, we should reject proposals for higher
tax rates on businesses and personal capital income, as these will reduce
incentives to save and invest.
The renewed risk of war, terrorism, and other security threats means that
defense spending will have to increase substantially. Economists have long
agreed that investments in the military can justifiably be financed by debt, on
both efficiency and intergenerational-equity grounds. But to support these
necessary outlays, we must get serious about today’s growing fiscal pres-
sures. The sooner policies to address them are implemented, the better. Few
political leaders have been willing to confront reality and propose solutions.
Those who do deserve voters’ support.
When Milton
Friedman
Speaks . . .
Hoover fellow Jennifer Burns explores the fruitful
life and continuing influence of Milton Friedman,
a Hoover luminary and one of the twentieth
century’s most brilliant economists.
By Peter Boettke
T
hough standing around five feet tall, Milton Friedman was a
giant among economists in the twentieth century. Arguably only
John Maynard Keynes walked as easily in the halls of power,
academia, newsrooms, and public-speaking venues. Friedman,
throughout his career, was recognized as an elite economic scientist, an
unusually astute policy analyst, and a prized op-ed writer. He was a highly
in-demand public speaker who was as comfortable on popular afternoon
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 19
OUT OF CHICAGO: The life of Hoover senior research fellow Milton Friedman
(1912–2006), shown accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988, is
also the life of his economic ideas, which had a profound impact in the latter
twentieth century and continue to shape economic thinking. [White House Photo-
graphic Collection]
TV shows such as The Phil Donahue Show as he was in the classroom at the
University of Chicago.
Friedman earned the highest recognitions an economist can receive: the
John Bates Clark Medal, the presidency of the American Economic Asso-
ciation, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was also
a bestselling author, a
popular columnist for
When Milton Friedman spoke, his Newsweek, a frequent
peers, his students, those with politi contributor to the
cal power, and the public listened. He Wall Street Journal, and a
educated an entire generation. recipient of the Presiden-
tial Medal of Freedom. On
December 19, 1969, Friedman’s face graced the cover of Time magazine. When
he spoke, his peers, his students, those with political power, and the public
listened. He educated an entire generation with his TV series Free to Choose,
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 21
OPPORTUNITY AWAITS: The new Milton Friedman biography by Hoover
fellow Jennifer Burns also gives a history of the Chicago School and mon
etarism—delineating the methodological, analytical, and ideological battle
lines of the economics profession. [Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS—Creative Commons]
FEMALE COLLEAGUES
Jennifer Burns has unearthed many gems in Friedman’s life and career, and
among the most fascinating is her discussion of the female economists who
worked closely with him. Rose Director Friedman was a constant in his life,
and she helped him in both acknowledged and unacknowledged ways with
Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose, and his Newsweek columns. Rose was
also Milton’s connection to the research of Dorothy Brady and Margaret Reid
in the fields of consumption economics and home economics. They were the
first developers of the permanent-income hypothesis, which posited that con-
sumption patterns were formed from future expectations and consumption
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 23
smoothing rather than transitory changes in income. This foundational idea
cut out one of the legs of the Keynesian argument about consumption behav-
ior and the multiplier effect of government spending on aggregate economic
performance.
Friedman’s long and productive collaboration with Anna Schwartz led
to A Monetary History of the United States, which transformed the economic
profession’s view of monetary theory and policy and had a significant impact
on central bankers throughout the world. This work also undermined the
Keynesian argument that monetary policy was ineffective, and instead dem-
onstrated that sound monetary policy was a critical factor in the wealth or
poverty of nations.
Burns does not shy away from highlighting blind spots from which Fried-
man may have suffered, which included his penchant for viewing economic-
policy advice as medicine and economists as analogous to Doctors without
Borders. As his fame and reputation grew, he traveled across the globe
to free and oppressed nations alike. He was never a paid consultant but
traveled as a visiting scholar who was granted audiences with leadership.
He told the various political leaders and policy makers he met with about
the distortions caused by monetary-policy mismanagement, the burdens of
overregulation, and the power of private property and the price system to
ameliorate social problems and promote peace and prosperity. His optimism
made him believe that sound economics could save even the sickest eco-
nomic patient.
Friedman did learn from some of the criticisms leveled at him in this
regard. In 2002, for example, when asked if he regretted his mantra
“privatize, privatize, privatize” during a 1979 trip to China, Friedman
replied that he did. He would amend his statement to “privatize, privatize,
privatize—provided there is a rule of law.” In making this revision, he
returned to the teachings of Knight and Simons in Room 7, which sought
to combine price theory with attentiveness to the institutional context of
law and politics.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 25
FRO M H OOVER INSTITU TION PR E SS
Empires in a
Clear Light
The “colonialism” slander remains just that—a
slander.
By Peter Berkowitz
L
eft-wing intellectuals
have transformed Key points
the complex history » The colonialism slander undercuts US
diplomacy and enfeebles democracy in
of “colonialism” into America.
an all-encompassing slander » Left-wing anti-colonialists contend
against the West. A practice that the perpetration of heinous crimes—
including genocide—belongs to the es-
dating back to the ancient
sence of the West’s colonialism.
world, colonialism involves a
» Universities must stress reasoned his-
nation’s transferring a portion torical scholarship rather than partisan
of its population into a foreign posturing.
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of Hoover’s Military History in Contemporary Conflict
Working Group.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 27
RIGOROUS: In his bestselling book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Oxford
professor Nigel Biggar conducts an incisive scholarly study into “the compli-
cated, morally ambiguous truth” about the British Empire. What Biggar calls
the “unscrupulous indifference to truth” displayed by anti-colonialists also
applies to histories of the Middle East. [Tom Pilston—Panos Pictures]
crimes—including genocide, the systematic effort to wipe out a people—
belongs to the essence of the West’s colonialism.
So successful have the professors been in promulgating the belief that the
West has engaged in centuries of relentlessly brutal conquest and malevolent
domination that the colonialism slander has found its way into the US State
Department bureaucracy. In November, Axios reporters Hans Nichols and
Barak Ravid revealed
that “a junior State
Department employee The obscene abuse of the term
who is organizing a dis- “genocide” has been used against
sent cable on the White Israel and its right of self-defense.
House’s policy on Israel
has used social media to publicly accuse President Biden of being ‘complicit
in genocide’ toward the people of Gaza.”
An organizer of the leaked cable and author of the accusation that the
president whom she serves is complicit in genocide, Sylvia Yacoub is “a
foreign affairs officer in the Bureau of Middle East Affairs for more than two
years.” The obscene abuse of the term “genocide” to characterize Israel’s
exercise of its right of self-defense is a tell-tale sign that Yacoub subscribes to
the colonialism slander. Had she described the jubilantly executed atrocities
and proudly proclaimed goal of the Hamas jihadists as genocide, she would
have employed the term correctly.
The colonialism slander blinds its adherents to basic facts and crucial dis-
tinctions. On October 7, in grotesque violation of the laws of war, the terror-
ists massacred some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 240, mostly
civilians, in furtherance
of their oft-repeated aim
to destroy the Jewish
The colonialism slander blinds its
state. In contrast, and
adherents to basic facts and crucial
in compliance with the
laws of war, Israel has distinctions.
targeted Hamas combat-
ants and their military infrastructure. Before attacking Hamas strongholds,
which the terrorists illegally built inside and under Gaza’s cities, Israel has
warned Palestinian civilians to leave and has directed them to safe areas. The
tragic loss of civilian life in Gaza has resulted from Hamas’s callous conver-
sion of civilian areas into war zones.
It turns out, according to Eitan Fischberger, that Sylvia Yacoub, a gradu-
ate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 29
University, “wrote her thesis paper about colonialism and its role in inter-
national relations.” In “The Georgetown Effect,” an article in City Journal,
Fischberger explained that Yacoub’s thesis reflected the priorities of her
alma mater: “SFS’s curriculum, faculty viewpoints, and campus activities”
revolve around colonialism and “decolonization.”
ATTACKS ON TRUTH
In his bestselling book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar pro-
vides a meticulous accounting of colonialism and the West. A professor
emeritus of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, Biggar writes that in
late 2017, he was “plunged into the ‘culture war’ over colonialism.” Shortly
after publishing an exploration in The Times of London of colonialism’s
contributions as well as its costs, “all hell broke loose.” Critics targeted for
termination his scholarly project “Ethics and Empire,” his distinguished
partner resigned from the enterprise, and nearly two hundred scholars
from around the world denounced him in one online statement, as did
fifty-eight Oxford colleagues in another. Biggar responded in exemplary
fashion by producing an incisive scholarly study—some three hundred
pages of closely argued text and one hundred and thirty pages of learned
endnotes—examining “the complicated, morally ambiguous truth” about
the British Empire’s colonialism.
By contrast, Biggar
emphasizes that the
Edward Said is a quasi-proph- “unscrupulous indiffer-
et of “de-colonization” and his ence to truth” displayed
Orientalism a quasi-bible. by the anti-colonialists—
for whom the late Edward
Said, a Columbia University professor of literature, is a quasi-prophet and
his Orientalism a quasi-bible—reveals that their slanders serve a political
function: the diminution of the West. “One important way of corroding faith
in the West is to denigrate its record, a major part of which is the history of
European empires,” observes Biggar. “And of all those empires, the primary
target is the British one, which was by far the largest and gave birth to the
United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”
Biggar’s “moral assessment” of the British Empire’s colonialism—which
stretches from before 1600 and the creation of the East India Company to
the empire’s post–World War II dissolution—is informed by a species of
Christian realism. He believes that basic moral principles are real and know-
able; human beings are equal in dignity because they are “accountable for
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 31
peoples in the lower levels of government; sought to relieve the plight of
the rural poor and protect them against rapacious landlords; provided a
civil service and judiciary that was generally and extraordinarily incor-
rupt; developed public infrastructure, albeit usually through private
investment; made foreign investment attractive by reducing the risks
through establishing political stability and the rule of law; disseminated
modern agricultural methods and medicine; stood against German
aggression—first militarist, then Nazi—and stood for international law
and order in the two world wars, helping to save both the Western and
the non-Western world for liberal democracy; brought up three of the
most prosperous and liberal states now on earth—Canada, Australia,
and New Zealand—and gave birth to two more, the United States and
Israel; evolved into a loose, consensual, multiracial, international orga-
nization, the (British) Commonwealth of Nations, which some states
that never belonged to the British Empire have opted to join; helped to
plan and realize first the League of Nations and then the United Nations;
through the Commonwealth applied moral pressure to South Africa to
abandon its policy of apartheid; through the wartime anti-fascist alliance
of 1939–45, evolved into an important part of the postwar Western alli-
ance against Soviet and Chinese communism; and still has a significant
afterlife in the Western military alliance of NATO and influential eco-
nomic development agencies.
An admirable scholarly achievement, Biggar’s rigorous assessment
invites critical engagement. However, the very idea of carefully consid-
ering colonialism’s contributions as well as its costs is anathema to the
anti-colonialists. Their postmodern progressivism leaves little room
for dissent from the dogma that colonialism was implacably racist and
rapacious. For the anti-colonialists, the appeal to historical evidence
and reasoned argument amounts to one more noxious feature of the
colonial mindset.
As Biggar observes in his epilogue, anti-colonialists embrace “the ideas
that ‘truth’ is whatever the anti-colonialist revolution requires and that
revolutionary vitality should be preferred to bourgeois reason.”
The widespread colonialism slander undercuts US diplomacy and
enfeebles democracy in America. A crucial part of the remedy consists
in cultivating professors who will engage in reasoned scholarship rather
than partisan posturing and will reorient classrooms around education in,
rather than indoctrination against, the West.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 33
I S R A EL
Worse than
Hitler
The Nazis took pains to hide the atrocities they
committed against Jews. The Hamas killers
celebrated theirs.
By Andrew Roberts
M
y late publisher Lord George Weidenfeld knew about the
Nazis. Escaping from Vienna soon after the Anschluss in
1938, he managed to save his immediate family from the
Holocaust, although he lost many other relatives to it. He
broadcasted to the Third Reich while working for the BBC during the Second
World War, and published Albert Speer’s memoirs after it. If anyone could
get into the psyche of the Nazis, George could.
It therefore came as a surprise when, over tea in the Carlyle Hotel in New
York nearly a decade ago, George said, “There are people who are worse
anti-Semites than the Nazis.” He went on to explain why Al-Qaeda, Hamas,
and Islamic Jihad, although of course not as genocidal on the same physical
scale as the Nazis, were qualitatively worse than the Nazis in their belief
systems, impulses, and instincts.
Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Mili-
tary History in Contemporary Conflict, and a member of the House of Lords.
He is the host of a Hoover Institution podcast, Secrets of Statecraft with
Andrew Roberts.
“NEVER TO BE WRITTEN”
In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a noto-
rious speech to fifty of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak
frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk
about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. . . . I am
referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish
people. . . . It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written
and is never to be written.”
By total contrast, the Hamas killers eighty years later attached GoPro
cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social
media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945,
they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of
Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken
for private delectation rather than public consumption.
When on January 27, 1945, the Red Army reached Auschwitz, they found
only seven thousand living skeletons there, out of a normal camp population
of one hundred and forty thousand, because the Nazis had marched the rest
westwards, partly to kill the death-marchers but also because they did not
want evidence of their crimes to be uncovered. Gassing operations there had
ended in November 1944, and attempts were made to destroy the gas cham-
bers. “Killing installations had been dismantled,” writes Ian Kershaw in his
book The End, “and attempts made to raze the traces of the camp’s murder-
ous activities.”
The sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of
their children and children in front of their parents was broadcast to the
world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their
actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.
The gas chambers were invented in part because the Nazis did not much
enjoy the actual process of killing Jews as much as Himmler hoped they
might. As Laurence Rees notes of Himmler in 1941, “He had observed two
years before the psychological damage that shooting Jews at close range
had caused his team of killers, and so he had overseen the development of
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 35
a system of murder via the gas chambers that to an extent distanced from
emotional trauma.”
No such trauma is evident in Hamas’s teams of killers, who phoned up their
parents on October 7 to boast about the number of Jews they had killed.
After invading countries, the Nazis often took hostages to ensure the
compliance of the local population with their proclamations. The mayor,
businessmen, the popular village priest, and other worthies would be taken
hostage and threatened with execution if resistance were offered to Nazi
rule. It was brutal and in contravention of all the rules of war, but even the
Nazis, foul as they were, did not deliberately take nine-month-old babies and
young children, women, and octogenarians hostage, as Hamas has done. Nor
did the Nazis use babies in incubators and children in hospital ICU units as
human shields.
The Nazis recognized that if the Red Cross or other international agencies
uncovered evidence of the Holocaust there would be an international out-
cry, whereas Hamas has
spotted something about
Instead of demonstrations against the modern world that
Hamas’s atrocities, there are protests has meant that instead of
further victimizing the victims. demonstrations against
their atrocities and
hostage-taking, the largest demonstrations globally have taken place against
the victim, Israel. Even movements traditionally seen as on the left, such as
the women’s movement, have failed to raise their voices against the mass
rape of Israeli women on October 7.
Rape has been seen in every conflict since the dawn of time. The officer
corps of civilized countries denounce it, and in the Second World War even
the barbaric Nazis had strict rules against their Aryan master-race hav-
ing sex with people they considered Untermenschen. “One of the differences
between the atrocities committed by the Nazis who were carrying out the
Final Solution and many other war crimes of the twentieth century,” writes
Laurence Rees in his book Auschwitz, “is the overt insistence by the Nazis
that their troops refrain from sexual violence, not out of humanity but out of
ideology. . . . The Jews and Slavic population of the East represented, to the
Nazis, racially dangerous peoples. . . . Slav and Jewish women (especially the
latter) were absolutely out of bounds. Killing Jewish women was a duty, but
having sex with them was a crime.”
Of course, this was regularly ignored in practice. Maris Rowe-McCulloch’s
article “Sexual Violence Under Occupation During World War II” shows
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 37
IMBUED WITH HATE
Toward the end of the war, senior Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Ernst
Kaltenbrunner tried to exchange Jews for cash, exposing how fundamentally
cynical and corrupt they were, but also how they were willing to put greed
over the killing impulse. Hamas, by contrast, was doing well amid the relative
hiatus in military activity before October 7, with thousands of Gazans being
issued work permits to
earn more in Israel than
Hamas did not put its greed for cash they ever could in Gaza.
over its one true love: killing Jews. Unlike even the heinous
anti-Semites Himmler
and Kaltenbrunner, therefore, Hamas has not put its greed for cash over its
one true love: killing Jews.
“Very many, probably most, Germans were opposed to the Jews during
the Third Reich,” writes Ian Kershaw in his book Hitler, the Germans, and
the Final Solution, “welcomed their exclusion from the economy and society,
and saw them as natural outsiders to the German ‘National Community,’ a
dangerous minority against whom it was legitimate to discriminate. Most
would have drawn the line at physical maltreatment. The very secrecy of
the Final Solution demonstrates more clearly than anything else the fact
that the Nazi leadership felt it could not rely on popular backing for its
exterminationist policy.”
Here, too, the contrast with Hamas is obvious. The elimination of Jews is
openly promised in the Hamas constitution, as it tacitly is in the “from the
river to the sea” chant so
beloved of today’s dem-
The elimination of Jews is promised onstrators in the West.
in the Hamas constitution, as it is in Gazans voted for Hamas
the chant “from the river to the sea.” in 2005 in far greater
proportions than Germans
voted for the Nazis in 1932, and a good proportion of them celebrated wildly
when Hamas paraded its hostages through the streets of Gaza on the afternoon
of October 7.
Kershaw writes of how “the Final Solution would not have been possible
without the . . . depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew.” In
both Gaza and the West Bank, printed educational textbooks present Jews
as despicable, worthless, and sinister figures, utterly depersonalized and
debased. This is a recipe for further generational conflict. Kershaw argues
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 39
I S R A EL
Cheerleaders
for Terror
The progressive left has long nursed an old hatred
under its mantle of “social justice.” Because
Jews have refused to become either victims or
oppressors, leftists are casting them out.
T
he Hamas massacre on
October 7, 2023, set off celebra- Key points
tory rallies around the world. » Outbreaks of hatred of
Israel and Jews are fully in
Immediately afterward, a mix- harmony with the ideologi-
ture of Islamists and progressive reaction- cal roots of the reactionary
progressives.
aries began publicly supporting the Hamas
» Jews have succeeded out of
atrocities as a form of justified resistance to
proportion to their numbers.
Israel and the Jews. That makes them suspect.
Many of the protesters have been calling » From before its founding,
for the destruction of Israel within any Israel has made sacrifices
and taken great risks to make
boundaries. Although some progressives peace with the Arab world.
seem not to understand what “from the These overtures were, and
still are, rejected.
river to the sea” refers to, or who defend
Aharon Friedman is a director and senior tax counsel at the Federal Policy
Group. Joshua D. Rauh is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the
Ormond Family Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of
Business. He leads the Hoover Institution State and Local Government Initiative.
IDEOLOGICAL SCAPEGOAT
The first place to look to understand the reactionary progressives’ response
is their theory of social justice, under which individuals are judged primar-
ily not on their own actions but rather as members of an ethnic, religious,
racial, or other identity. A view of the world that rejects individual responsi-
bility also rejects traditional Western philosophy. Individual responsibility is
paramount to so much of the thinking that undergirds free societies, includ-
ing that put forward by philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart
Mill, and individual responsibility is one of the pillars upon which the United
States was founded.
For example, the reactionary progressive left calls relentlessly for more
wealth and income redistribution. If inequality exists in a given place, the
progressive movement’s solution is more government intervention and
redistribution. A person’s lot is determined by the group to which he belongs.
In this model, oppression of groups is the cause of unequal outcomes. This
creates a world not about individuals but only about groups, and those
are assigned to categories: a group is either a victimizer or victimized, an
oppressor or the oppressed, a colonizer or the colonized.
If some individuals or groups of individuals are less wealthy than others, the
progressive movement rejects the examination of the underlying social and
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 41
cultural issues that might cause some to fail and others to succeed. The dis-
integration of the family and failing schools in poor communities are ignored;
instead, anyone who is wealthier is accused of exploitation. If one group is poor,
the progressive movement assigns the blame to another group that is richer.
Jews pose a problem for this approach. They are a minority—amounting
to some 16.1 million of the world’s 8 billion population, compared to around
2 billion Muslims and
2.4 billion Christians.
Yet relative to the size To Karl Marx, “The chimerical nation-
of their population, and ality of the Jew is the nationality of
despite having suffered the merchant, of the man of money.”
considerable oppression
and violence over centuries, Jews have achieved prominent positions of suc-
cess in many sectors of the economy.
And throughout history, Jews are the group most often accused of having
derived their wealth from keeping others down. Karl Marx despised Jews
because of their alleged materialism. He wrote:
One need not go back to Adolf Hitler’s infamous 1925 book Mein Kampf to
find other bold displays of this accusation. Modern examples of much-lauded
individuals who overtly state this theory include Louis Farrakhan, leader of the
Nation of Islam, who in 2018 stated, “Let me tell you something, when you want
something in this world, the Jew holds the door”—and he didn’t mean holds the
door open—or statements by artist Kanye West in recent years suggesting that
Jews exploit others for personal gain.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 43
Only a few months ago, Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud
Abbas (who also serves as the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
or PLO) gave a speech claiming that Hitler was not motivated by hatred of
Jews but by Jews’ control of money: “They say that Hitler killed the Jews
because they were Jews and that Europe hated the Jews because they were
Jews. Not true. . . . The Europeans fought against these people because of
their role in society, which had to do with usury, money.”
While it is false to downplay the role of religious hatred in the twentieth-
century extermination of European Jews and the pogroms that came
before and since, economic factors have indeed also been important.
These atrocities involved extensive expropriation. The confiscation of
Jewish property during the Nazi era is well documented, as are the eco-
nomic motivations of participants in historical pogroms to join religiously
motivated attackers for economic reasons, such as seeking the elimina-
tion of their debts.
A HATRED OF SUCCESS
The reactionary progressive response to the Hamas attacks fits directly into
this framework. Those who reject what they perceive to be unjust economic
inequality join with those motivated by religious hate. Jews have a special
and despised place in the
progressive hierarchy, as
Jews have a special and despised a living refutation of the
place in the progressive hierarchy, as a worldview that failure
living refutation of the worldview that is generally the fault of
discrimination is insurmountable. others and discrimina-
tion and systemic racism
are insurmountable obstacles that hold groups back from thriving in the
modern economy.
For hardcore progressives, Israel is the Jew of the world’s countries,
both literally and figuratively. Israel lifted itself out of poverty. A poor
country at the outset, with much difficulty Israel absorbed Jewish refu-
gees from Arab countries who were forced to flee or were expelled. Israel
would later absorb Jewish refugees from behind the Iron Curtain and
Jews from Ethiopia, and is now absorbing Jews fleeing Western Europe.
These different groups of Jews have had many cultural, religious, and
social differences. Yet Israel has built a society melding these groups
together in some respects, even while each maintains many of its own
distinct traditions.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 45
Although portions of western Palestine were occupied by Transjordan
(which occupied an area extending from eastern Jerusalem to the Jordan
River and named it the West Bank) and Egypt (which occupied Gaza in
1948–67), neither set up an independent Arab state in western Palestine.
Instead, they initially kept the territories for themselves. Instead of reset-
tling the Palestinian Arabs (as Israel had done for a similar number of Jewish
refugees from Arab countries, and as was done after World War II for tens of
millions of displaced persons), the Arab countries generally forced them to
remain permanent refugees.
Palestinians, through their leadership, have insisted on remaining wards
of the United Nations and its Palestinian refugee agency, the UNRWA,
instead of taking responsibility for themselves. When the opportunity arose
to reconstitute the Jewish state in just a portion of the Jewish homeland and
surrounded by enemies, Israel did not declare the arrangement an “open air
prison”—the epithet often applied to Gaza—and refuse to take responsibility
for its people. Instead, Israel set to work building a state and its institutions,
building an economy, and building a society.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • sp ring 2024 47
it views violence as justified if it moves towards the redistribution of
resources that serves its social justice goals.
The disturbing level of support in the West and America for nihilistic ter-
ror against Israel—not just killing but rape, torture, and mutilation—makes
it clear that the situation in the Middle East strikes a particular chord with
the reactionary progressive movement. On one hand, the total dedication of
large parts of Palestinian Arab society and resources to Israel’s destruction,
instead of building its own state alongside Israel, fits into the resistance nar-
rative of the oppressed. Indeed, Hamas has openly spent billions in foreign
aid on a terror apparatus for attacking Israeli civilians. On the other hand,
Israel’s economic success despite great hardship challenges the progressive
left’s oppressor narrative, so that successful nation must be condemned as
a “colonizer.” In the world’s perception of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the
entire progressive narrative is at stake.
Life or Death
Questions
Israeli commentator Daniel Gordis says October 7
obliterated Israelis’ belief that they could live in
quasi-peace among their enemies. Now comes
“a profound conversation about why Jewish
sovereignty was an important project in the first
place.”
By Russ Roberts
Russ Roberts, EconTalk: My guest’s Substack, Israel from the Inside with
Daniel Gordis, is an extraordinary window into what is happening here.
Today, we’re going to talk about two things: how the events of October 7 and
the war that followed have changed you, Danny, and your perspective on this
country; and how the country has changed in response to the war, and maybe
where it’s headed. You moved here in 1998 from Los Angeles to what shortly
after you arrived became a war zone, into what is often called the second
Intifada. So, you’ve seen a lot of chapters of this conflict, you’ve written about
them, you’ve lived through them, and I want to talk about how this one is
different, if at all. To do that, I want to start with the Intifada. What was that
about and how did you experience it?
Russ Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at the Hoover Institu-
tion, host of the podcast EconTalk, and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem.
Daniel Gordis is the Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College and author of
Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (Ecco, 2016), among other works.
He publishes Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis on Substack.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 49
STARTING OVER: Author and commentator Daniel Gordis on the broad impli-
cations of the Gaza conflict: “This is not really about Israel and Hamas. It’s
really about whether or not the West has it in itself to defend the idea of liberal
democracy.” [Yoram Reshef Studios]
Daniel Gordis: Well, we got here in 1998. In 1999, it’s hard to believe, but this
guy named Ehud Barak won an election and beat a guy named Bibi Netan-
yahu. Everybody assumed Barak made three promises. He was going to get
out of Lebanon, he was going to make peace with Syria, and he was going
to make peace with the Palestinians. The peace with Syria went nowhere;
the Syrians had no interest in negotiating back then. He did actually get the
army out of Lebanon, after about eighteen years. It’s actually very telling that
the young men who were the last ones to come out of Lebanon and lock the
gate—they literally got off their APCs [armored personnel carriers] and they
closed the gate and they put a chain and lock on it—were born the year Israel
went into Lebanon in 1982. That seemed unbelievably positive.
What we didn’t understand then was that every Israeli pullback, whether
it’s from Gaza in 2005, whether it’s from Lebanon in 2000, wherever, it’s
always interpreted as weakness.
By the fall of 2000, Israel was involved in what at first seemed to be a
kind of series of terrorist events. The Intifada, an Arabic word which means
Roberts: Back up for a second and explain, for listeners who don’t know what
Oslo is.
Gordis: Oslo is an agreement. It starts in the 1980s, goes into the 1990s. It
is an agreement in which Israel, theoretically, reaches an agreement that
creates the Palestinian Authority. Israel, at first through intermediaries
and then directly, negotiates with the Palestine Liberation Organization and
agrees to a series of steps. And the thought was that Oslo would lead over
time to Israel pulling out of all sorts of areas—Jericho and Hebron and so
on—and would eventually lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.
But to come back to our story: the reason I mention all of that now is
because there’s a lot of going on in Israel in which the right wing—which
objected to pulling out of Gaza in 2005—is saying, “I told you so. We told you
eighteen years ago this was going to be a disaster.” In the summer of 2005,
when the Israeli army
went into the Jewish
towns and settlements in “Every Israeli pullback, whether
Gaza and literally pulled it’s from Gaza in 2005, whether it’s
people out of their houses from Lebanon in 2000, wherever, it’s
and then bulldozed them
always interpreted as weakness.”
a few days later, you see
people screaming, “You don’t understand what you’re doing. There are going
to be rockets on Sderot, and there are going to be RPGs coming on this kib-
butz and that kibbutz, and one day they’re actually going to come in here and
they’re going to kidnap people.” It’s unbelievable to go back and look at those
old videos, to watch these people who were totally right.
There was also a lot of “I told you so” going on in 2000 during the second
Intifada, about Oslo. They said, “Every time we give back territory, it’s per-
ceived as weakness and it results in Palestinian aggression.” It’s very hard to
argue with that claim, even though those of us who still hold out—or held out,
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 51
I think is more appropriate—some hope for peace thought, “We should prob-
ably take this chance, or that chance. Maybe it’ll be different this time.”
So, we’re here in 1998, come with three kids. It was a very scary time. It was
a very sad time. Lots of buses blew up because of suicide bombers. It was a
war of suicide bombings
in buses, and restaurants,
“We never thought for a moment and so on. But here’s what
that Israel’s existence was on the we need to understand: it
line. What’s going on now actually is was not an existential war
existential.” on Israel’s part. Nobody
ever said: “You blow up
enough buses and you destroy enough cafes, you can bring down a country.”
You can make a country miserable. You can make a country angry. You can
create a generation of young children who are going to have PTSD and vote
very differently. By the way, the people who came of age back then are the
right wing of Israel now, and that’s not incidental. But we never thought for a
moment that Israel’s existence was on the line. What’s going on now actually
is existential.
Roberts: When the Intifada ended in 2004, why did it end? What changed?
DEATH OF AN ILLUSION
Roberts: Your book [If a Place Can Make You Cry] chronicles it very movingly.
It was a horrible time for Israel. It was a horrible time for the Palestinians.
Israeli efforts to dismantle that infrastructure, of course, had many innocent
victims.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 53
our children in the north or in the south with the possibility that people can
come over the border again and rape and pillage and burn and murder and
do horrible things. We don’t trust the government. We don’t trust the army.”
If we cannot win this war . . . and I’m going to say something a little contro-
versial: it’s not clear that we can. The country is sobering up after the first
months of a sense of huge unity and “together, we’re going to win.”
Gordis: I think everything you said is exactly right. By the way, Bibi is in
a very, very bad spot because he’s articulated two goals for this war: the
destruction of Hamas and returning all of the hostages. It’s very easy to see
Roberts: They said they weren’t going to fly because they did not feel that
Netanyahu’s coalition represented them, so they stopped doing their reserve
training in the months of judicial reform that were so contentious. And then
as soon as October 7 happened, they ran to their planes . . .
Gordis: Two and a half hours later, they were in the cockpits.
Roberts: . . . and everybody else was in their convoy and truck and car getting
to their bases and reporting. And others outside of Israel who had been anti-
Netanyahu were fighting their way to get back here to defend their country.
So, it’s an extraordinary moment.
Do you have any optimism, Danny?
Gordis: Yeah.
Gordis: I have optimism. You said before that my pessimism is a little sur-
prising. I’m not pessimistic. I don’t know that we’re going to destroy Hamas,
and I don’t think we’re going to get all the hostages back, unfortunately. But
I think that certain things have happened to this country that, at the end of
the day, are going to make us much stronger. We have been reminded that we
did not move Israel from the Middle East to Western Europe. We pretended
in Tel Aviv that if you have enough high-tech companies and enough startups,
and a lot of fancy cafes and bars and restaurants and Tumi stores, you’ll live
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 55
that kind of a life. And you think, yeah, back in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s
we were in the Middle East, but now we’re kind of in Western Europe.
Well, we’re not. We are, as the expression goes, in the villa that’s in the
jungle. And Israelis are recognizing, tragically, if you want to survive in the
jungle, you’ve got to act like you live in the jungle. You can’t act like you live
along the Seine or the Thames.
I think this is going to bring Israelis back to where we were seventy-five
years ago: a profound conversation about why Jewish sovereignty was an
important project in the first place. A profound conversation about what kind
of a country this needs to be.
I do not believe that all of the divisiveness that preceded October 7 has
been washed away. Polls are beginning to come out that show that just
below the surface, the resentments are still there. We’re going to have to
figure this out very carefully. If Bibi doesn’t resign, I think we’re in for a
very ugly political period, and it’s quite possible that the hundreds of thou-
sands of protesters that we saw about judicial reform are going to seem
piddly compared to the millions of people who could take to the streets at
the end of this war.
I’m not pessimistic about the future of Israel. I’m actually very optimistic
about the future of Israel and always have been. I think that this is going to
spark a renewed devotion to the project called the Jewish state.
Six months from now, a year from now, two years from now, whenever this
thing ends, Israel is going to start over. People are asking, “What should we
call this war?” A number of people have said we should call this the second
war of independence because this was the war where we had a fight—an
existential battle—for
our right to exist all over
“Israelis are recognizing, tragically, again. But not only that:
if you want to survive in the jungle, this was the war in which
you’ve got to act like you live in the society came together
jungle. You can’t act like you live determined to rebuild. We
have a lot of questions to
along the Seine or the Thames.”
ask ourselves.
I believe that the Israel that’s going to emerge from this is going to be
stronger, more determined, more Jewishly self-conscious in a positive way—
conscious that this is not just a Hebrew-speaking European country but the
country of the Jewish people. It’s even possible that we’re going to emerge
with a much deeper relationship with diaspora Jews. We’re in this together.
The Jewish world is hitting control-alt-delete, basically. The Jewish world
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. © 2024 Liberty Fund Inc. All
rights reserved.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 57
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON CRUCIAL
CHALLENGES TO SECURITY AND PROSPERITY
H.R. M C MASTER
Tehran Wins
Tenure
Iran wields great ideological power on American
university campuses. How could this have
happened?
By Russell A. Berman
T
he outbreak of anti-Israel sentiment in American universities
after the Hamas attack last October 7 has been widely docu-
mented. Students as well as professors rushed to celebrate the
atrocities: one Cornell professor found the murders “exhilarat-
ing,” while a Columbia colleague declared the slaughter “awesome.” Then,
when the inevitable Israeli response began, with a forcefulness that should
have surprised no one, the Hamas enthusiasts protested on campus and off,
often with violence.
This has been a sorry episode in the history of American universi-
ties, and it has contributed to the already widespread public skepticism
toward once-revered institutions of higher education. There would be
much to be said about the events of October 2023 as indicators of the
systemic anti-Semitism in American progressive culture. Another point,
far from peripheral, concerns Iranian soft power: the contrast between
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 59
the voluble outcry with regard to the Gaza War and the deafening silence
on American campuses concerning the repressive character of the Teh-
ran regime.
No atrocity committed by the regime in Tehran, no matter how vile, inter-
ests the idealists on American campuses. Some institutions of higher educa-
tion have turned into mouthpieces for Tehran and do their best to silence
criticism. If universities have become incubators of extremism and advocates
for America’s enemies, why should society support them?
We should first ask how we have come to this. How
has Tehran been able to impose its point of view
on American institutions? Why have schol-
ars and students, who otherwise claim
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 61
wear the hijab, just as they had nothing to say about the rapes in Israel car-
ried out by Hamas, which they may have found “exhilarating.” Nor do campus
progressives, faculty or students, speak out against the torture of political
prisoners in Iran, the intentional blinding of protestors, or the execution
of critical journalists. Even Iranian attempts to assassinate critical voices
in the United States have left the progressive community indifferent. The
soft power of the Islamic
Republic has its knee on
The Iran problem—the silencing of the throat of the academic
Iran’s critics by higher education— left, keeping it unable to
is part of a larger problem in the utter the smallest word of
academy. criticism.
Exploring this prob-
lem requires a diagnosis of the multifaceted malaise that pervades much of
higher education. Some explanations are specific to Iran and the relation-
ship of Iran specialists to the regime, and some are a function of particular
political constellations in the United States. Yet the success of Iranian soft
power in the United States is ultimately also about a much broader failure of
US higher education to live up to its mission of free inquiry, which is now too
often subordinated to ideological allegiances, vacuous virtue signaling, and
an obligatory hostility toward the United States that is embedded in curri-
cula. The Iran problem—the silencing of Iran critics by higher education—is
very much a piece of a larger problem in the academy.
One can distinguish three dynamics specific to Iranian soft power in the
academy. The first and most innocent version of scholarly silence with regard
to the policies of repression carried out by Tehran pertains to those US-
based experts whose specialized research requires them to travel to Iran
to conduct interviews or to consult archives and the like. These academics
know that if they express public criticism of the Iranian regime here, the
regime may refuse to grant them a visa, and their research would therefore
come to an abrupt halt. This pressure is similar to the problem of Western
journalists reporting in other authoritarian contexts who know that they
have to watch what they say or report, or risk expulsion. No wonder some
journalists and academics begin to sound like parrots instead of analysts: in
order to do their job, they have to do it poorly. Add to this the fact that Iran
ranks among the lowest countries for press freedom. Reporters Without
Borders ranks it 177 out of 180.
Second, there is a different kind of professional misconduct, when scholars
based in the United States, and therefore not in fear of being imprisoned
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 63
The third version of Iranian soft power proceeded thanks to some
successful personnel placements. Amid the US promotion of a softer
approach to Iran, an Iran-created network of policy makers, the “Iran
Experts Initiative,” was formed. It succeeded in placing some of its mem-
bers in influential positions in the State Department and Pentagon, as well
as in key think tanks.
A DEEPER ROT
Yet these three specific factors—academics with their need for access to
Iran, the impact of political polarization on scholarly discourse, and the influ-
ence of Iran-friendly agents in government—would not have shaped academ-
ic discourse as extensively as they have if not for profound changes that had
already been taking place for decades in higher education.
The various pressures to refrain, at the least, from criticizing the Islamic
Republic fell on fertile ground in the relevant university disciplines—parts
of the humanities and the interpretive social sciences, and especially Middle
East Studies—that have embraced a fundamental hostility to the West
and an exclusively negative estimation of the role of the United States in
the world. In large swaths of these fields, the West is viewed as marked by
indelible sins, the worst moments of which are deemed to be always pres-
ent, with no regard to achievements or improvements, only permanent guilt.
European history is therefore reduced to colonialism, just as American
history is always only slavery, never a story of evolving freedom. Universi-
ties, of course, ought to be where students develop critical thinking skills,
including criticism of their own societies. That legitimate project of criticism
has morphed into indoctrination. The result is curriculums built around the
dogmatic rejection of the ideas of the Western tradition or the policies of the
United States.
This malaise pervades important parts of the university, and in this
milieu Iranian soft power finds a welcoming audience eager to have its
biases confirmed. The
propagandists of the
Because US conservatives criticize Islamic Republic of Iran
Tehran, academic criticism of Tehran present it as a revolu-
must be prohibited. tionary regime hostile
to the West, exactly
what ideology-driven scholars can view as confirming their ideological
assumptions. For those students for whom “revolution is the answer”
and who want to pursue it “by any means necessary,” the brutality of the
TURNING AROUND
The challenge is to figure out how to solve the problem and save our univer-
sities. That is easier said than done, given traditions of faculty governance:
ideologues get to appoint new ideologues. Curing the universities will not come
quickly. It will require leadership and vision by university leaders who can exer-
cise shaping power through appointments of level-headed department chairs
and program directors, but especially through decisions about the allocation
of funds. Resources should be withheld from units that have become irrevo-
cably politicized, new hires allowed only if the political deck is not stacked in
advance. In some cases,
new units—centers,
departments, or even Ideologues get to appoint new
schools—could be initi- ideologues.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 65
of thinking and a commitment to the common good. Institutions of higher
education need to be able to withstand the malign influences of foreign soft
power, Iranian or otherwise. Our universities can be regained, but we must
fight to retrieve them.
Shamed and
Confused
American colleges denounce their own country
while excusing Islamicists. Iran finds this
extremely useful.
By Mariam Memarsadeghi
D
espite domestic dissent over its brutality, corruption, and mani-
fold existential crises, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to
be emboldened globally. The theocracy exerts soft power inter-
nationally as a means to ensure its survival, sustain its capacity
for terror operations and military attacks, and provide cover for its advance-
ment of a nuclear weapons program. It is a regime that regularly calls for the
destruction of the “Great Satan” and Israel. In this sense, it is a more overt
enemy to America and to freedom writ large than are the regimes of Russia
and China.
Hamas, a chief proxy for the regime’s imperial Islamist ambitions, is at war
with Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy and America’s chief ally in the
region. While denying direct involvement in the October 7 attack on Israel,
supreme leader Ali Khamenei quickly celebrated as a victory the pogrom in
which Hamas killed more Jews than have been killed in any single day since
the Holocaust.
Mariam Memarsadeghi is founder and director of the Cyrus Forum for Iran’s
Future and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 67
The Islamic Republic’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, met
just days after the terror attack with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in
Doha, Qatar. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Quds
Force in particular are overseers of Hamas, providing it funding, train-
ing, intelligence, ideological backing, and global propaganda, including on
American social media platforms such as X. The IRGC is the only govern-
ment department ever
designated by the United
How does a regime so openly hostile States as a foreign
to the United States develop such a terrorist organization
robust network of influence on (FTO).
The regime’s hard pow-
US soil?
er includes attacks on US
bases and the killing of US soldiers and contractors stationed in the region,
the taking of US hostages, the attempted kidnapping and killing of US
citizens on US soil, the targeting of former US officials for assassination, and
cyberwar on US entities. The regime’s soft power abroad is more difficult to
spot than these open manifestations of nefarious power but is arguably more
potent because of its pervasive, insidious effect on American attitudes and
policy making toward a state opposed to the West’s most fundamental liberal
values.
How does a regime so openly hostile to the United States develop a
robust network of influence on US soil? How does it manage to have
American think tankers, scholars, civic groups, peace activists, media
outlets, celebrities, elected officials, and even the very diaspora it has
expunged spread its messaging? I have written elsewhere about the varied
soft-power nodes of the regime. In this article, I will focus on America’s
universities.
SELF-LOATHING IS USEFUL
An overarching strategy of the Islamic Republic is one inspired by the
USSR and its KGB, which Khamenei has been known to study and emu-
late, and not only for the need to avoid the type of reforms that brought an
end to the communist dictatorship. His regime, like other anti-American
regimes, has learned to capitalize on and reinforce America’s own inter-
nal weaknesses to thwart policies that advance the security interests and
values of the world’s democracies. America’s growing tendency for self-
loathing, division, isolationism, and cynicism toward its global leadership
and the unique capacity of liberal democracy to safeguard human freedom
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 69
and inequality, and is the single most important symbol of global jihad. The
reality that girls and women in Iran are being beaten to death for showing
some strands of hair does not fit the progressive narrative about the hijab,
nor does the willingness of Iranian girls and women to risk their lives to over-
throw the regime that forces them to wear it.
“Regime change” is, in the ethic of these educated elites, contemptible,
particularly for peoples of the Middle East. And yet Iran’s Woman-Life-
Freedom uprising has
forced them to face the
The Islamic Republic’s soft-power fierce power of Iranian
strategy prioritizes scholars, girls and women and the
especially those of Iranian descent. silence of Western femi-
nists about their decades-
long struggle to throw off the real-world Handmaid’s Tale that suffocates
them. It has compelled them to see, if still not admit, that in the eyes of the
Iranian people, wholesale democratic transition is the only way to solve the
problem of the Islamic Republic.
NO QUESTIONS
One reason for the dissonance between the truth of the lives of the Iranian
people and the progressive outlook is cancel culture’s shutting down of
opportunities for questioning, critical thought, and exposure to a plurality
of perspectives. In one instance at the London School of Economics, I was
shouted at incessantly by a group of angry, bearded young men while giv-
ing a public talk about the regime’s human rights abuses. They called me a
warmonger because I support international sanctions and other pressure on
the Islamic Republic, a talking point about me taken straight from the regime
itself. The men had taken seats in the auditorium like everyone else. It is
impossible to know if such agitators are paid regime agents whose job it is to
intimidate and defame dissidents abroad and to shape Western public opin-
ion, or if they are merely misguided students who have absorbed a mindset
intolerant of those insisting that regimes like Iran’s are an existential threat
to their own freedoms and way of life.
The Islamic Republic’s soft-power strategy prioritizes university scholars,
giving those of Iranian descent in particular access to regime insiders while
grooming them to provide a whitewashed version of even the most brutal
aspects of clerical rule.
The University of Maryland produces polls on Iranian public opinion
that claim the Iranian people strongly support the regime, its top officials,
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 71
Americans who will soon run our country’s national security establishment,
serve in Congress, report the news, and teach future generations.
Guns and
Paranoia
Tehran built its entire revolutionary edifice on
an obsession with the “Great Satan” and all its
purported harms.
By Abbas Milani
A
li Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has shaped a foreign policy
for the Islamic Republic around several overriding concepts:
jihad, or holy war, culture wars, soft power, an enemy con-
spiracy, and a “historic turn.” They are interrelated and are at
the core of the regime’s successful effort to create an intellectual proxy in the
West to fight the purported “culture war” and facilitate the turn.
In the convoluted calculus of Khamenei’s mind, these concepts cohere into
a vision that sees the West, and particularly America, in decline; Israel in its
death throes; Asia, particularly China, on the rise; and Islam, led of course by
Khamenei, on the threshold of a historic change that would bring about an
end to the catastrophic era of Judeo-Christian Western hegemony and usher
in the apocalyptic victory of Islam.
For years, Ali Khamenei has argued that successive US administrations
have attempted to overthrow Iran’s clerical regime through coercive means.
To him, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, no less than Barack Obama, Donald
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 73
HARD LINE: Hossein Shariatmadari, managing editor of an Iranian news-
paper and an ally of the Tehran regime, has argued that the Holocaust “was
falsely claimed by Zionist and Western governments.” Ali Khamenei, Iran’s
supreme leader, has woven together a foreign policy built on jihad, culture
wars, soft power, and an enemy conspiracy, all seasoned with “progressive
discourse.” [Foad Ashtari—Creative Commons]
Trump, and now Joe Biden, have all pursued the same policy of attempting to
destroy the regime—either with an iron fist, or the same fist clad in a velvet
glove—and have all failed. Thus, they have launched not just a “culture war”
but also created a “cultural NATO.” In a talk given as early as November 9,
2006, Khamenei for the
first time used the term
Khamenei preaches that the West “cultural NATO,” going
is attacking Islam through nihilism, on at length—as is the
materialism, individualism, and pattern in the autumn of
rationalism. every “patriarch”—about
a conspiracy, spearheaded
not only by the United States—in his neologism the “Greatest Satan”—but
also by “Zionists.” He even alluded to financier and philanthropist George
Soros in a tone that betrayed his anti-Semitism, calling him “that Jew whose
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 75
proxies but also opportunistically uses a whole army of “fellow travelers,”
hired guns (literally and metaphorically), “progressives” keen on defend-
ing, or “contextualizing,” any action of the regime based on the claim that
it is fighting “colonialism” and Euro-centric or Judeo-Christian hegemony.
Most ironic is the existence of some feminists in this strange alliance.
They are wary of criticizing the regime’s gender apartheid and its blatantly
misogynistic laws. The complicit silence of some parts of the feminist move-
ment about women’s restricted freedom in Iran is an example of the perni-
cious influence of Tehran’s “soft power.”
Some of the fellow travelers are faculty members of prominent universi-
ties. They sit on committees, review and pass judgment on articles or books
submitted for publication, and write articles partially validated by the names
of the institutions they are affiliated with. And through it all, they help pro-
mote or justify the regime’s ideology and actions, silence or sideline critics,
and sometimes offer “explanations” of the regime’s behavior by drenching it
in the lexicon of “progres-
sive discourse.” Mean-
Fellow travelers are eager to defend, time, a combination of
or “contextualize,” any action of the rumor and reality creates
regime, no matter how oppressive. an atmosphere of fear
among Iranian students
and faculty that Big Brother will punish dissent or disagreement and reward
consent and cooperation.
Western journalists are led to believe that harsh criticism of the regime,
even pointed questions in press conferences, will mean a denial of access or
entry visa. Obviously, many journalists are not intimidated; sadly, some are.
Hand in hand with its soft power, the Tehran regime creates a perception
that it wields an omniscient and ruthless “sharp power.” Random acts of
intimidation against returning members of the Iranian diaspora, along with a
shifting, ambiguous “red line” denoting the activity the regime will not toler-
ate, have helped Tehran extend its reign of terror to Iranians abroad.
CALCIFIED
It is impossible to track how much money the Islamic Republic of Iran
spends in creating this vast, varied, multi-pronged, multi-purposed network
that provides a muscular soft power. One estimate calculated by the Founda-
tion for Defense of Democracies puts the total budget for Iran’s ideological
activities in 2019 at around $3 billion. It is facile to think that personal gain
drives every one of the regime’s fellow travelers who support, legitimize, or
POTEMKIN PROTESTS
Another component of Tehran’s mandate is symbolic politics; specifically,
organizing mass demonstrations and Islamic and Shiite rituals in cities
across the world. In recent years, from Sydney and Toronto to London and
Los Angeles, there have been mourning rituals during Moharram—the
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 77
month of mourning for Shiites for the battle of Karbala and the martyrdom
of Hossein, the prophet’s grandson and a revered figure in Shiism. Journal-
ists and scholars sympathetic to the regime, as well as its overt mouthpieces
in Iran, then use these rented crowds as signs and symbols of the regime’s
sustained support around the world.
Essential to Khamenei’s vision is criticism of what he calls the hypocrisy of
democracy. But his regime hypocritically uses all the liberties of a democracy
to promote an illiberal vision.
As in all its wars, the clerical regime uses a variety of proxies in an asym-
metrical battle. Its past operatives and officials, as well as new fellow travel-
ers of every hue, use the cherished liberties of a democracy to promote the
regime’s soft power strategy; yet in Iran, no possibilities exist for advocates
of democracy.
Can Ukraine
Still Win?
If anything can break the bloody stalemate,
perhaps it’s an innovative—and overwhelming—
air attack.
U
kraine’s daring attack on a major
Russian warship in occupied Key points
» Ukraine has made
Crimea in the small hours of
progress denying Russia
December 26 was one more control of the sea and the
episode in Kyiv’s strategy to deny Russia air. But more is needed to
win.
control over the Black Sea. With most of its
» Decisive air power, using
ships driven out of its home port in Sevasto- more and better weapons,
pol, the Russian Black Sea Fleet can no longer might offer Kyiv a break-
through.
find safe haven anywhere along the Crimean
» US and European aid
Peninsula. All ports there are now vulnerable
will help Ukraine manage
to attack. operational complexity
The Institute for the Study of War tells the and combine technology,
information, and tactics.
story with data, showing that Sevastopol saw
a steady decline in the number of Russian naval vessels in port between June
and December 2023; by contrast, Novorossiysk on the Russian mainland far-
ther east showed a steady gain. While Russia has been going all-out to attack
Ukraine’s infrastructure, its risky move to deploy ships and submarines
armed with Kalibr missiles in the Black Sea is exposing them to potential
Ukrainian attack. It is a tacit acknowledgment that Russia can no longer
depend on Crimean ports and launch sites.
Ukraine’s success has been due to domestically produced missiles and
drones, sometimes launched using Zodiac boats or personal watercraft. But
its most potent attacks have come from the air, where Ukraine has used its
Soviet-era fighter aircraft to launch both domestically produced and NATO-
supplied missiles. These attacks have taken place with the protection of
Ukraine’s advanced air defenses—including newly supplied foreign ones—
which are regularly shooting down the majority of Russian missiles and
drones destined for Ukrainian targets.
Ukraine thus has made significant strides denying Russia control of both
the sea and airspace over and around its territory, thereby preventing the
H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2024 81
Russian navy and air force from operating with impunity. But is that enough
for Kyiv to win? To many Western observers, victory doesn’t seem possible
in the face of wave after
wave of Russian troops
Ukraine’s defeat would also mean grinding down Ukrainian
defeat for the United States and its defenders. Ukraine’s strat-
allies in Europe and Asia. egy to deny Russia free
use of its sea and airspace
may be working, but as things stand, it cannot defeat the Russian army on the
ground, nor can it defend against every missile striking civilian targets.
Indeed, the current conventional wisdom in large parts of the West is that
Ukraine is losing the ground war, leaving no pathway to victory for the coun-
try as Russia pounds Ukrainian civilians into submission. Kyiv might as well
call for a cease-fire and sue for peace.
The trouble with this scenario is that it spells defeat not only for Ukraine,
but also for the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia. It would
embolden both Russia and China to pursue their political, economic, and
security objectives undeterred—including the seizure of new territory in
Eastern Europe and Taiwan.
DEADLY COORDINATION
But is the conventional wisdom right—or does Ukraine’s clever success at sea
and in the air suggest that a different outcome is possible? Perhaps the Russian
army can be defeated by making use of Ukraine’s willingness to fight in new
ways. If you ask a US military professional, the key to dislodging the Russians
is to subject them to relentless and accurate air attacks that are well synchro-
nized with the maneuver of combined arms forces on the ground. While the
Ukrainians are admirably using the weapons at hand to strike Russian forces
both strategically, as in Crimea, and operationally, as in hitting command and
logistics targets, success at the tactical level has remained elusive. To achieve a
tactical breakthrough on the ground front that leads to operational and strate-
gic success, they will need to be more effective from the air.
For power from the air to be decisive in 2024, the Ukrainian armed forces
must create temporary windows of localized air superiority in which to mass
firepower and maneuver forces. Given the Ukrainians’ success in denying
their airspace to Russia at points of their choosing, such windows are pos-
sible using the assets they already have at hand. More and better weapons
tailored to this scenario would make them more successful across the entire
front with Russia.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 83
Given Russia’s willingness to endure significant casualty rates, the eJAAT
could be even more effective on defense: Massing firepower against advanc-
ing troops through an eJAAT might result in a stunning rout of the attackers,
opening opportunities for Ukraine to strategically exploit the sudden change
of fortunes.
I
s there a specifically Russian way of war? The way the Russian army
has systematically flouted the Geneva Conventions in its brutal,
unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine inevitably prompts the
question.
Russia has deliberately chosen to fight a war in Ukraine that is reminiscent
of the worst aspects of World War II—the conflict that led to the develop-
ment of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The mass rapes, torture, and targeting
of residential areas for shelling are too widespread to be anything other than
the result of Russia’s high command turning a blind eye to abuses. Indeed,
the Russian officer corps seems to view civilian terror and death as inherent
to its campaign plan.
On a visit to the towns of Bucha and Irpin outside Kyiv in May 2023, we
came face to face with Russian barbarism. We saw where the mass grave in
Bucha had been dug by Russian soldiers hoping to hide the massacre that
had taken place there in late February and March of 2022. In a field behind
the church, some 458 people had been buried, many of them with their hands
David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.), was commander of the troop surge in Iraq, US
Central Command, and NATO and US forces in Afghanistan. Andrew Roberts
is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a mem-
ber of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary
Conflict, and a member of the House of Lords. He is the host of a Hoover Institution
podcast, Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 85
tied behind their backs and showing signs of torture. Their bodies have now
been disinterred by war-crimes investigators.
It is striking, in the twenty-first century, how human rights abuses are still
an inherent part of the way that Russians fight both foreign and domestic
enemies. When Russia’s history and the psychology of its often badly led
army are taken into account, however, the exceptionally brutal Russian way
of war becomes perhaps more comprehensible.
THROWBACK
While researching our new book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945
to Ukraine (Harper, 2023), we immediately noted how much warfare has
evolved during that period. Developments, especially in the field of smart and
precision weaponry and unmanned systems, have enabled modern armies
to adhere better to the standards of the Geneva Conventions that seek to
limit the barbarity of war and protect civilians, medics, and those who can no
longer fight, such as the wounded and prisoners of war.
“Smart bombs” first came into major operational use during Operation
Desert Storm in 1991, and since then huge advances in microelectronics and
navigation have been made to the point that Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian
Quds Force commander, could be assassinated in January 2020 by precision
munitions fired from a US-made MQ-9 Reaper drone that destroyed his mov-
ing car without collateral damage.
True, Russia’s smart-weapon technology has been hampered by Western
sanctions since the invasion of Ukraine, but it was still more than capable
of avoiding the residential centers and shopping malls in Ukraine that have
been destroyed—and
continue to be hit.
In Ukraine, the Russian officer corps The viciousness
seems to view civilian terror and undoubtedly reflects frus-
death as inherent to its campaign tration at the failure of
the Russian offensives to
plan.
achieve a speedy victory.
Taking out such frustration and anger on unarmed civilians through torture
and rape is a response that is tragically as old as war itself.
Indeed, even when the Red Army was winning the 1944–45 campaign in
Eastern Europe and Germany, its soldiers raped several million women,
according to Antony Beevor’s book The Fall of Berlin 1945; other historians
have given higher figures. This behavior was significantly different from
every other army in that conflict, including the German army, where rape
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 87
In the main, however, US-led Coalition forces in the wars of the post-9/11
era went to considerable lengths to avoid civilian deaths, regularly curtail-
ing operations to do so. “Having seen our troops up close in repeated fights,”
assert General Jim Mattis and Bing West in their 2019 book, Call Sign Chaos:
Learning to Lead, “I doubt any military in history could match their efforts to
avoid injuring the innocent.”
Nor does the West employ essentially mercenary auxiliary units in the way
that Russia does. The Wagner Group, for example, is synonymous with war
crimes; another excep-
tionally brutal group of
Taking out frustration and anger on fighters in Ukraine and
civilians through torture and rape is Syria is commanded by
as old as war itself. Ramzan Kadyrov, Chech-
nya’s vicious, unstable,
dictatorial leader. His strongman rule has been characterized by the kidnap-
ping, torture, and murder of human rights activists, political opponents, and
their families.
It is, of course, important to differentiate between the Russian people and
the Russian armed forces when apportioning blame for “the Russian way of
war.” As the British statesman Edmund Burke rightly stated, “I do not know
the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.” He was
writing, in 1775, about the American colonists. However, in the unlikely event
that Putin ever has to face justice at the International Criminal Court, there
ought to be a large number of his high command and henchmen standing in
the dock beside him.
By Ralph Peters
T
he Russian-Orthodox jihad in Ukraine adheres uncannily to the
patterns of campaigning and giving battle that have defined the
Russian way of war since Peter the Great fielded his empire’s
first modernized army and defeated the Swedish warrior-state of
Charles XII at Poltava in 1709. Today’s pretender to the throne of the czars,
Vladimir Putin, has introduced a few new tools (such as drones) but no new
behaviors. The list of tactical and operational characteristics that follows is
as reliable as the Russian taste for vodka.
Our misunderstanding of Moscow’s latest aggression is not about hyper-
sonic missiles or the massive deployment of land mines, but about a pre-
modern state that can reach into space, a slumbering cult ever awaiting a
prophet’s call, and a friendless frontier land with a sense of divine purpose so
enduring it shapes the worldview of atheists.
The date that continues to deform the Russian soul isn’t 1917, or 1941,
or 1991, but 1453, when Byzantium, the “Second Rome,” weakened by the
assaults of other Christians, fell to the Muslim Turks, inspiring a struggling
duchy far to the north to assume the title of the “Third Rome” and the duty
to recover all that had been lost over centuries.
Ralph Peters participates in the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on the Role
of Military History in Contemporary Conflict.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 89
We smirk at Putin’s counterfactual interpretation of history, but we would
be wiser to pay attention. He’s telling us precisely who he is and who his sub-
jects are. We merely roll our eyes because that’s far easier than attempting to
grasp the mythologized spiritual landscape of a population that looks more
or less like us but responds to events as souls from another cosmology.
Russian war crimes in
eastern Ukraine should
surprise no one. We see Russia is a premodern state that can
Ukrainians as patriots reach into space. It’s a slumbering
fighting desperately
cult ever awaiting a prophet’s call.
for their freedom. The
Russians see separatist rebels and heretical apostates. We see a struggle to
defend de jure sovereignty. Putin sees yet another uprising in a centuries-
long chain of rebellions against Moscow’s entitlement to rule the steppes. We
imagine a resolution of this crisis within the framework of twenty-first-
century diplomacy. Putin (like Stalin and many a czar) believes that the
fiction of a Ukrainian identity must be exterminated. The rapes, torture,
looting, and wanton slaughter in Ukraine are not lamentable corollaries but
means to an end.
BLOODY VICTORIES
Here are a few of the consistencies.
» Unpreparedness. Russian forces have rarely entered a conflict with a
well-prepared military. Initial reverses consistently revealed hollow forces,
faulty arms, poor training, incompetent leadership, and overconfidence.
While Putin’s Russia may be the worst grab-ocracy in all of that benighted
land’s history, extensive corruption has never been absent—it’s a primary
tool of state control, for creating dependencies. Thus, again and again, star-
tling deficiencies have had to be redeemed with an appalling (to us) sacrifice
of lives.
Yet, the Russians have also shown unexpected resilience and a knack for
recovering as wars drag on. Awful at short wars, Russians have achieved
CRUSADER: Czar Peter the Great (opposite) fielded the first modernized
army of Russia, which has been an aggressor state for half a millennium.
From the sixteenth century onward, Russia fought routine wars of expansion,
intensified by the idea of divine duty inherent in its role as the “Third Rome”
after Byzantium fell in 1453. [Pierre Gabriel Langlois (1754–1810) from original by Louis
Caravaque (1684–1754)]
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 91
“impossible” victories in longer conflicts, as the sycophants are cast aside
and the capable rise to command. For example, the Red Army’s catastrophic
losses in the first months of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) should
have finished Stalin’s regime. But under the pressures of war, a terror-
crippled military whose scrawled plans were laughably inept managed by
mid-war to produce solidly professional staff work that won battles. By the
closing phases of the war, Red Army plans were the professional equal of
those in Western armies and won campaigns. In war, Russians lose and learn.
We have already seen the pat-
tern in Ukraine, albeit still at an
In war, Russians lose and learn. early stage.
The postwar pattern, too, is
consistent: earnest reforms are implemented and real improvements made,
but over time the reform impulse dissipates and the military bureaucracy
reverts to its traditional apathy and thievery. The closest thing to an excep-
tion from the post-Napoleonic period to today was the Russo-Turkish War of
1877–78, when post-Crimean-War reforms still retained some effectiveness.
Despite superior Ottoman armaments, such as Krupp artillery and American-
designed rifles, the Russians reached the outskirts of Istanbul and were halted
only by threats of intervention on the Ottoman Empire’s behalf by European
powers. On the other hand, reforms in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War of
1904–5 did not have adequate time to recast the force before the outbreak of a
far greater war in 1914 and the Russian dash to disaster at Tannenberg.
» Clumsy offense, stalwart defense. On the attack, Russian forces are stiff
yet unsteady, and readily paralyzed by surprises (as we saw on the outskirts
of Kyiv in the present war’s first days). They rely on mass and the readiness
to suffer “intolerable” casualties. In World War II, a prevalent comment was
“we have a lot of people.” Heartless it may have been, but that attitude got
Russian forces to Berlin.
On the other hand, Russian soldiers over the centuries have shown them-
selves to be stalwart and steady on the defense when led with even marginal
competence. We are witnessing that in Ukraine, as a “broken” Russian
military nonetheless continues to prosecute an uninspiring war doggedly.
Millions of land mines help, but even if draconian punishments are part of
the equation, Russian troops continue to man their defenses and will not be
vulnerable to mass losses until they are displaced from their fortifications in
disorder.
The fatalism and resolution of Russian infantry on the defense led to
Frederick the Great’s notable—and bloody—defeats at Zorndorf (1758) and
MILITARY FAILINGS
Drastic losses in the early, botched phases of Moscow’s wars consistently
lead decision-makers to turn to firepower: first artillery and now airpower
(in one form or another).
» Reliance on massive firepower. Russia’s first gunners were European
mercenaries, present in Muscovy from at least the sixteenth century onward,
and only under Peter the
Great did Russia begin
to methodically develop In World War II, a prevalent remark
its “native” artillery arm. about Russian losses was “we have a
Ironically, the profession- lot of people.”
alization of the artillery
advanced because officers of noble birth—the handsomely uniformed
dilettantes—disdained the dirty, sweaty work of the gun crews, leaving
gunnery to the untitled but ambitious and competent. The same applied
to engineers, who would form another island of professionalism in a sea of
mediocrity. Young noblemen wanted to serve in elite cavalry regiments or, at
least, infantry regiments of the best lineage. Artillery and engineer officers
needed to prove their worth.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 93
This tradition of strong artillery and competent engineers is manifest in
Ukraine today. Russian targeters need not be up to discriminating Western
standards (we want the Ukrainians to fight politely, of course); on the con-
trary, the unbounded readiness to inflict destruction on anything or anyone
within range is a great advantage for any military power—despite our ahis-
torical insistence otherwise.
» Poor command and control, weak coordination. Russian deficiencies—
and they are grave—in these areas are products of rivalries, distrust, and fear.
The atmosphere of trust taken for granted within Western armies simply does
not exist in Russian ranks.
Officers do not know
The Red Army of 1945 was not the whom they can trust, if
one of 1941. So too, in Ukraine, the anyone. The officer who
Russian forces of 2025 will not be acts on his own initiative
those of 2022. becomes the scapegoat for
those who wait too long
to act. The mindset is difficult for an American officer to grasp—rather than
chafing at constricting orders, Russian officers crave them.
The Russian vision for an effective military is stuck in the eighteenth
century, where clockwork drills hoped to produce military automatons.
Showpiece exercises, with an emphasis on scripts and rigid timetables, may
provide impressive visuals for foreign observers and propaganda clips, but
they do not build capable modern units and formations as free-play exercises
and rigorous gunnery practice do.
Nonetheless, we can expect to see Russian forces improve their combat
coordination under the pressures of wartime. Just as the Red Army of 1945
was not the one of 1941, so too, if the Ukraine war continues, the Russian
combat forces of 2025 will not be those of 2022.
Time is on Russia’s side, not ours.
» Poor intelligence. Those responsible for Russia’s military intelligence
completely missed Japanese preparations for war in 1904; they misread
German dispositions in 1914; they utterly misread Finnish determination in
1939 (as they did with Ukraine in 2022); terrified of annoying Stalin, they
closed their eyes to Nazi Germany’s impossible-to-hide preparations for a
multi-front invasion; they underestimated American resolve and suffered the
propaganda defeat of the Berlin Airlift; they repeated their underapprecia-
tion of American grit in the Cuban missile crisis; they expected a quick win
in Afghanistan; and they wildly erred in predicting the NATO response to
Ukraine.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 95
today’s Western think-tank caste simply cannot imagine, let alone accept,
Russia’s behavior in Ukraine is shaped by a religious imperialism and secular
evangelism that have not progressed beyond the medieval, a faith that never
had a Reformation and a social order that never had a Renaissance.
Only during Europe’s Enlightenment did Russian rulers begin to impose
a selective veneer of Western practices, and the instigator of that, Peter
the Great, was interested in
utility, not ethics. Nor did
For Russian leaders, the only modernity make the slight-
immorality is to lose. est inroads with the general
population, which remained
mired in servitude, ignorance, and obscurantist religion that preached pas-
sive obedience and the virtues of suffering. The Soviet era merely secularized
the vocabulary. Russia’s metaphysical landscape is stuck in the Middle Ages.
With smartphones.
VIOLENCE IS DESTINY
The Russian sense of destiny, of righteousness, of entitlement, and, yes, of
divine duty more closely resembles jihad in its purest, cruelest form than it
does the mixed-motive Crusades of medieval Europe. The single thing Rus-
sians share with the most sincere of the Christian Crusaders is the conviction
that any act is acceptable if it furthers a divine destiny.
From the sixteenth century onward, Russia fought routine wars of expan-
sion in every direction—although the fiercest were waged against Turks and
Tartars, the former the power that held Byzantium, the Second Rome, cap-
tive; and the latter the remnants of the Mongol yoke.
The wars with Catholic Poles or Lutheran Swedes, Balts, and Germans,
were also intensified by the grip of faith. Polish Counter-Reformation Catholi-
cism was virtually a different religion from Eastern Orthodoxy’s dour cult of
suffering that still shapes today’s Russian mentality.
Even if Putin does not really believe in religion, his view of the world and
his mission is shaped by it. The Soviet era did not abandon that sense of
destiny but merely substituted other gods and commandments. The endless
debate over whether Russia is European or Asian misses the target entirely.
Russia is neither. Russia is Russian.
For us, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the violation of a sovereign state. For
the Russians, the war in Ukraine is the belated suppression of yet another
Cossack uprising that began a decade ago on the Maidan in Kyiv, another
traitorous rebellion in the long tradition of Ukrainian resistance.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 97
C H IN A A N D TAIWAN
“It Will Be
Decided Here”
Settling the great-power rivalry between the
United States and China, analysts Dan Blumenthal
and Elbridge A. Colby argue, will come down to
American strength, confidence, and national
values.
By Peter Robinson
Dan Blumenthal: First of all, the world itself would be a much more authori-
tarian, corrupt, and dictatorial place. So, it wouldn’t be a welcoming place
for Americans who cherish their freedoms and their liberties. The Chinese
Dan Blumenthal is the director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Insti-
tute. His most recent book is The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a
Decaying State (AEI Press, 2020). Elbridge A. Colby is a founder of the Mara-
thon Initiative. His most recent publication is The Strategy of Denial: American
Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press, 2021). Peter
Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge,
and the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
would enforce their will, as they’ve done in Hong Kong and other places, to
make more countries authoritarian and dictatorial. Second, we would be
locked out of many of the economic arrangements inside the East Asian area,
parts of which have the potential to really boom and be the future of econom-
ic activity throughout the world. And third, our military would be reduced
to probably defending around our hemisphere and be locked out of access to
East Asia. We’ve really needed access to East Asia to secure ourselves since
the end of World War II. So, at these three levels, I think the world would be
a lot more difficult and challenging for the United States.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2024 99
as a state, and a great number of Chinese people—is pursuing in the great
rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a hegemonic or dominant position. Not
imperial as in the old days, but a kind of soft control over first, Asia, which,
as Dan rightly pointed out, is going to be the world’s largest market area.
China would orient the world’s largest economic area around itself. It would
have the best universities, its treasury department would enforce sanctions
against everybody, its companies would become the world-beating ones, its
stock exchange would be the world’s best, its currency would ultimately sup-
plant the dollar.
What would that mean for Americans? We know we would become a lot
poorer because the Chinese would gatekeep that large economic area, not
only against Americans
but also Europeans and
“China would orient the world’s
Middle Easterners and
largest economic area around itself.”
Latin Americans, who
would essentially be forced to play ball in the same way that today many
countries play ball with our sanctions, even though they don’t want to. And
then we become less free. Why? Because if we don’t have economic control,
or at least a significant amount of control over our own destiny, and we’re
becoming poorer, the issues are going to be settled—even your employment
is going to be settled—ultimately, in Beijing.
My favorite example of this is social media companies. Today we have a
lot of debates in our country about social media companies. I have a lot of
concerns about them, but we all assume that the issues can be solved in
Washington or Sacramento or Albany, or whatever. That wouldn’t be the
case. They would be settled in Beijing, either directly or indirectly. Today, the
Chinese are talking about Xinjiang or Hong Kong or Taiwan. But we know
it’s human nature that their ambitions and their demands will expand and
escalate.
Blumenthal: We can’t live with either, because East Asia is just so funda-
mentally important for US national security. You’re talking about massive
economies. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the growing economies of the
Colby: I agree with Dan: the stakes are global, but the strategy is primarily
about Asia. And this gets back to something Winston Churchill very memo-
rably said, I think it was at the beginning of World War I: “Europe is the
decisive theater; if we get things right there, we can put everything else right
again.” Europe was the world’s largest market area, and it controlled vast
empires through its various countries. Churchill recognized through both
world wars, as we did, that if you defeated the Germans, you could set other
things right again. So, Asia is the decisive theater, but the implications will be
global.
We could survive in that world, but if you go back to The Federalist Papers
and the whole tradition of the American republic, we aren’t just looking for
the bare minimum. We
want a country in which
people can flourish “Taiwan is the only Chinese democ-
and grow and become racy in the world. And this drives the
prosperous and confi- Chinese Communist Party crazy.”
dent, and that creates a
certain kind of culture. What’s in jeopardy is, in a way, actually far greater in
scale than even the Axis powers.
Robinson: So, what is in this man’s head? The two models seem to be, he’s
an emperor, he’s operating in the ancient Chinese imperial tradition, or he
is a communist. And Dan, you say, in The China Nightmare, that “the CCP
is no longer a communist revolutionary party.” On the other hand, doing
my research, I discovered that shortly after becoming general secretary, Xi
Jinping gave a speech to the party in which he said, “There are people who
Colby: Gratitude is not often found. As an Austrian once said, “We will shock
the world by our ingratitude.” So, that’s something to bear in mind. Also, the
mindset that the Chinese have, and I think it is true that Xi Jinping himself is
a dedicated Marxist-Leninist in some way . . .
Robinson: He is a communist?
Colby: I think so, but the project he has embarked upon is the great rejuve-
nation of the Chinese nation, which not only is not Marxist, but is something
closer to nationalism. Here’s the way I try to approach it in my book. We can
paint Xi Jinping and Beijing in the most lurid and negative light, but I think
it helps from a strategic perspective to almost give them the benefit of the
doubt. And the thing I fear is that China actually has very potent incentives
to create what I think of as a secure geoeconomic sphere. They think of us as
an existential threat. They think that we did nuclear blackmail, that we tried
to divide them, that we’ve tried to exploit them. Going back to the Opium
Wars and the Boxer Rebellion, they think of the past two hundred years as
a terrible experience in which they were ruthlessly exploited by foreigners,
Westerners, Japan, et cetera. And so, they have to be strong and dominant to
be secure. That is not just Xi Jinping, I think that’s a common view.
HARD POWER
Robinson: On to hard power. As I understand it, China has invested in two
basic areas. Its own navy. From The China Nightmare: “China has launched
more submarines, surface warships, amphibious-assault ships, and auxiliary
vessels than the total
number of ships current-
ly serving in the navies “Xi Jinping will not be satisfied that
of Germany, India, Spain, he is safe and secure . . . unless the
Taiwan, and the United world order changes.”
Kingdom combined.”
China’s second major investment is forces capable of destroying our naval
vessels. Ship-killing missiles, essentially. They want us out of the Pacific? Is it
as simple as that?
Colby: We can argue about intent. I would point out a concrete historical
example that I think has bearing. Was it rational for the Japanese to attack
the United States and the European colonial powers at the end of 1941? It did
so for reasons that are not dissimilar: the creation of a secure geoeconomic
sphere and the perception that we were trying to strangle them. There are
real echoes. Not to say that it’s an exact analogy, but strict rationality in neo-
classical economic terms is not how countries often behave.
Colby: Well, Xi Jinping apparently thinks that we are trying to contain and
suppress them. According to the Wall Street Journal, Xi personally uses
the term “strangling.” That we are trying to suppress their growth. If you
go back to the work of Robert Gilpin, I think the most compelling scholar-
ship about why wars often happen is a fear of economic slowdown. And if
you think of Xi Jinping’s incentives, they do have to grow. This is the basic
bargain of the Communist Party. I’m not saying they’re justified, just as I
wouldn’t say that the Japanese were justified, but if we’re thinking about it
Blumenthal: I would say that the Chinese don’t just have a strategy to keep
us out of Asia. They use their military every day. Every day, they are intrud-
ing upon Taiwan’s airspace and Taiwan’s maritime space. They are putting
pressure on the Japanese and the Senkaku Islands to loosen Japanese con-
trol over their own administered islands. They’re using force, as we speak,
in the South China Sea, to intimidate and make excessive claims. So, this
military is not staying in garrison, it’s out every day, shaping and intimidat-
ing the region, trying to send a message to the region that the United States
doesn’t have the endurance or staying power to defend these allies. Their
grand strategy is one of coercion.
RETURN TO EMPIRE
Robinson: From Dan’s book: “Beijing is obsessed with national reunification.
Taiwan is the last Qing Dynasty territory that Communist China has not
managed to reconquer.”
The Qing Dynasty fell more than one hundred and ten years ago. Why does
the Chinese Communist Party want Taiwan now?
Colby: Two reasons. One is nationalist irredentism. I would say it’s easy for
us who’ve had a great last century to float magnanimously above these kinds
of petty disputes. But a lot of the Chinese narrative, and there’s some reason
for it, is foreign exploitation going back to the Opium Wars and the exploita-
tion of the weakness of the Qing. In Western Europe, nationalism is in bad
odor because they were the ones who imperialized everybody. But if you go to
India, people are also very nationalistic, and proudly so. Or Vietnam. And they
remember the humilia-
tions they suffered. They
“He went into a full-blown ideological don’t want a repeat of that
crusade to make the party red again, experience, so Taiwan is
more communist.” important in that context.
And as the Chinese think
about it—and I think this is genuinely felt—they do want to end the civil war,
rightly or not.
More important, though, Taiwan is the critical way for them to pursue this
geoeconomic sphere. They have to break out of the first island chain, and
they have to break apart what I call the anti-hegemonic coalition, which is
clearly forming and is part of the containment narrative that the Chinese see.
Blumenthal: There’s one more big, big issue. Taiwan is the only Chinese
democracy in the world. And this drives the Chinese Communist Party crazy.
Before 2016, there would be tourists pouring into Taiwan from China. And
China didn’t like it, because what would they do at night? They would watch
political TV shows! The raucous democracy of Taiwan. And they would enjoy
it. And this is something Beijing just cannot countenance. They’ve been
telling people for so long that democracy is chaotic, that democracy doesn’t
work. And guess what? In Taiwan, it really does work. They held an election
a few months ago, and it was another peaceful transfer of power. It’s just
something China cannot live with.
Robinson: One argument is that if Xi Jinping sees us take our hands off
Ukraine, he will conclude that that is the way we handle our allies, and that
will embolden him in Taiwan. That the defense of Taiwan runs through
Ukraine.
Robinson: Last question. George Kennan, at the beginning of the Cold War,
wrote, “The decision”—between the USSR and the United States—“will
really fall in large measure in this country itself. The issue of Soviet-American
relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a
nation among nations. To avoid destruction, the United States need only
measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation
as a great nation.” Is something like that analysis applicable now?
Blumenthal: Yes. We are a far, far wealthier country than China. We have
not used our wealth well; we haven’t translated it into power. But we have
an allied system second to none. We have a military that, if we get our act
together in the next few years, is second to none. It will be decided here.
SILICON TRIANGLE
The United States, Taiwan, China,
and Global Semiconductor Security
Edited by Larry Diamond, James O. Ellis Jr., and Orville Schell
Bipolar
Disorders
An international survey shows the familiar “us
versus them” views of the world have splintered
into countless permutations. Time for new rules.
A
s the leaders of the world’s two superpowers, the United States
and China, held a summit last winter in San Francisco, many
observers harked back to grand bipolar simplicities. A new Cold
War! The West versus the rest! Democracy versus autocracy!
Let’s woo the global south! But the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt
warned us always to beware of the terribles simplificateurs, the frightful
simplifiers. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we now live in
a world fragmented between multiple great and middle powers who do not
divide simply into two camps.
The results of an ambitious round of global polling, released in November,
help us to understand this new world disorder. Conducted for the European
Council on Foreign Relations and an Oxford University research project
on Europe in a Changing World that I co-direct, this is the second time we
have surveyed what we call in shorthand the Citrus countries: China, India,
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. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe
(Yale University Press, 2023).
Turkey, Russia, and the United States. Last autumn we added to them five
other major non-European countries: Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Africa,
Brazil, and South Korea—as well as covering eleven European countries.
The Cost of a
Dangerous World
How can we build, deploy, and pay for tomorrow’s
military? Like this.
By Michael J. Boskin
T
he US defense budget provides the
resources and authorities for the Key points
military to deter aggression and, » It’s widely held in na-
tional security circles that
if necessary, defeat aggressors. the world has become
Its adequacy and composition reflect Amer- increasingly dangerous.
Michael J. Boskin is the Wohlford Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
and the Tully M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is
a member of Hoover’s task forces on energy policy, economic policy, and national
security. His latest book, co-edited with John N. Rader and Kiran Sridhar, is
Defense Budgeting for a Safer World: The Experts Speak (Hoover Institu-
tion Press, 2023), from which this essay is adapted.
COLLECTIVE WISDOM
This new book by the Hoover Institution Press, Defense Budgeting for a Safer
World: The Experts Speak, brings together and interweaves the main contem-
porary topics in national security budgeting. These include the geopolitical,
military, and fiscal context for defense budget reforms; the threats the nation
faces and might face; the strategies necessary to enable effective actions to
deal with those threats; and the technology, recapitalization, and innovation
challenges the services face and the opportunities for better harnessing new
technologies.
Also covered are personnel strengths and weaknesses, from recruiting
to training and retaining the active-duty force; to the best mix of active-
duty and reserve personnel and private contractors, including highly
technical talent. There are also overviews of reform possibilities, the
checkered history of previous reform attempts, and a discussion of the
politics of enacting defense budgets that are adequate, flexible, and incen-
tivized enough to do the job without the undue burden of non-core-mission
spending that crowds
out mission-critical
America’s geopolitical strategy and imperatives.
military preparedness are stretched Fiscal issues loom
and challenged. ever larger: the grow-
ing national debt, the
rapidly approaching insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, and the
dilemma those budgetary pressures will create for making the necessary
investments in defense. In their efforts to rightsize the defense budget, the
Pentagon and Congress will need to do a much better job of using resourc-
es for the things the military needs to do. Not just more bucks, but more
bang for the buck.
Our allies are key to our overall strategy and its execution. Former secre-
tary of state Condoleezza Rice stresses the vital role allies play in protecting
our—and their—national security through the fusion of intelligence, diplo-
macy, and the military. As Jim Mattis states, the “only thing worse than going
to war with allies is going to war without them.”
There are many opportunities and options for reform to strengthen the
security of the United States and the world by combining efficiency, realign-
ment of priorities, and greater flexibility with the additional spending neces-
sary to do the job. Whether the nation has the political will to seize the best
of them, with the urgency required, is an open question. In an ever more
dangerous world, our national security in the coming years depends on doing
so. We hope the papers and presentations by leading experts in this volume
will serve as a valuable resource in that effort.
Hearts and
Minds—and
Force
Counterinsurgency campaigns of the past used
harsh tactics that harmed civilians and drove
away supporters. In small wars, is there a better
way?
O
ver the years, the United States failed to achieve its desired
objectives in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan because it followed
an inadequate counterinsurgency doctrine. This inadequacy has
still not been addressed. Failure to do so poses a national secu-
rity vulnerability that can be exploited in the coming years by both nation-
states and nonstate actors.
But developing and refining such a doctrine is never easy, and the dif-
ficulty begins with the words themselves: US military counterinsurgency
doctrine focuses on achieving the support and consent of the population,
while “successful” counterinsurgencies in the twentieth century—military
LtCol David M. DiCrescenzo (US Army) serves in the Massachusetts Army Na-
tional Guard and is an adjunct professor of homeland security studies at Endicott
College and a Massachusetts state trooper. LtCol Arun Shankar (USMC), a
2022–23 national security affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution, serves with US
Space Command.
PACIFICATION
As mentioned above, successful counterinsurgency operations such as the
ones that follow involved tactics that are unlawful and unacceptable to modern
Americans. They also demonstrate the interplay between violence and persua-
sion, with implications for the design of modern counterinsurgency approaches.
» The Philippines. US military forces arrived in the Philippines in 1898
after the Spanish-American War. About three hundred thousand Moros
in the Sulu Archipelago and southern half of Mindanao enjoyed a fair level
of autonomy. They also held societal norms that put them at odds with US
interests. American officers were frustrated by local values, including slav-
ery, and local leaders’ inability to maintain order. After initial efforts failed
to exchange local rule
for recognition of US
sovereignty, US officers Future conflict is likely to blur the
lobbied for direct con- lines between irregular and conven-
trol. Thus, in 1903, a US tional warfare even further.
military governor was
appointed and given wide authority to bring order and modernize the area.
Major General Leonard Wood abolished slavery, installed a new legal code,
and restored a tax on every adult male. These policies resulted in increased
opposition, and hostilities followed.
The Moros used various tactics, including suicide attacks, guerrilla war-
fare, and, most commonly, the use of prepared defensive positions upon the
approach of US military forces. Moros possessed a limited number of rifles
and primarily armed themselves with edged weapons, putting them at a
disadvantage to US weaponry.
NEXT STEPS
If historical success in counterinsurgencies consistently involved the use of
tactics that go against US values and the rule of law, as the above cases indi-
cate, how does the United States win in future counterinsurgencies? Ameri-
can forces could pursue two strategies:
» Stay out of the counterinsurgency business. Accepting that US values
are incompatible with tactics used in successful counterinsurgencies, the
United States can avoid counterinsurgencies by carrying out limited dura-
tion, high intensity, offensive operations. For example, the United States
successfully applied military power in Afghanistan in the months after
9/11. Today, it can develop a strategy for conducting defined-term offensive
operations against groups or areas responsible for attacks on US interests.
These operations would probably demand a high level of “shock and awe” to
message adversaries that threats against the United States are dealt with
decisively. This approach requires building a robust intelligence capability
and avoiding on-the-ground post-conflict stabilization and recovery opera-
tions, which would give adversary groups the time and opportunity to draw
US forces into prolonged conflict.
» Refine current counterinsurgency doctrine to develop ways to
achieve victory without violating American values. For instance, continuity
of the security personnel in the areas they secure is critical for seeking a
The first issue of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review, the product of
a major new technology education initiative for policy makers, has been released.
Download it at setr.stanford.edu.
E
merging technologies are transforming societies, economies,
and geopolitics. This moment brings unparalleled promise
and novel risks. In every era, technological advances buoy
nations that develop and scale them—helping to save lives,
win wars, foster greater prosperity, and advance the human condition.
At the same time, history is filled with examples where slow-moving
governments stifled innovation in ways policy makers never intended,
and nefarious actors used technological advances in ways that inventors
never imagined.
Technology is a tool. It is not inherently good or bad. But its use can
amplify human talent or degrade it, uplift societies or repress them, solve
Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director and the Thomas and
Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. John B. Taylor
is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution.
Jennifer Widom is the Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of
Engineering and the Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering at Stanford University. Amy B. Zegart is the Morris Arnold and
Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
GUIDEPOSTS
Our efforts are guided by four observations:
» Policy makers need better resources to help them understand techno-
logical developments faster, continuously, and more easily.
Technology policy increasingly requires a more sophisticated understand-
ing across a broad range of fields and sectors. Indeed, policy makers today
include an expanding array of decision makers, from legislators and execu-
tive branch officials in Washington to state and local governments, inves-
tors, and corporate leaders. Too often, government leaders lack technical
expertise to understand scientific developments, while technologists lack
the policy expertise to consider and build security, safety, and other societal
considerations into their products by design.
Policy makers need to understand technological basics and new discov-
eries before crises emerge; to focus their attention on the most important
issues; to better assess the policy implications; and to see over the horizon
to shape, accelerate, and guide technological innovation and applications.
We need a new model of technology education for nontechnical leaders. This
report aims to be a first, important step.
CHAIRED BY Condoleezza Rice, John B. Taylor, Jennifer Widom, and Amy Zegart
DIRECTED BY Herbert S. Lin
Emerging technologies are transforming societies, economies, and geopolitics, and at a time of
great-power competition between the United States and China, the stakes today are especially
high. The Stanford Emerging Technology Review brings together scientists, engineers, and
social scientists to account for new developments at Stanford University in 10 key technology
areas, highlight their policy implications, opportunities, and risks, and identify barriers for US
government decision makers and private-sector leaders.
setr.stanford.edu
T H E EN VI RO NMENT
Wasting of the
Green
As First World groups shovel money into climate
schemes, they forgo real progress against hunger,
sickness, and poverty.
By Bjorn Lomborg
W
ell-off nations seem
to have forgotten that Key points
while they’re no longer » Climate ranks far down the
priority list of people living
plagued by poverty- in poor countries. Even the
related ills such as hunger and illiteracy, World Bank’s own polling
shows this.
most people in the world still are. Increas-
» Real development invest-
ingly, the Biden administration and leaders
ments can dramatically
of other high-income countries are putting change lives for the better
climate policy ahead of these core develop- now, while making poor coun-
tries more resilient.
ment issues.
» Developmental institu-
It’s easy to treat reducing carbon output tions should speak for the
as the world’s priority when your life is world’s poorest—not the elites
in Washington, London, and
comfortable. Things can still be tough for Paris.
people in high-income countries, but the
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2024 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
A Nation Still
at Risk
Forty years ago, an urgent report called for the
transformation of American schools. Stephen L.
Bowen, leader of the Hoover Education Success
Initiative, discusses how far we still have to go.
By Jonathan Movroydis
Stephen L. Bowen: A Nation at Risk came out in 1983. It was produced by the
National Commission on Excellence in Education, which was chaired by Ter-
rel Bell, President Reagan’s secretary of education. People who remember the
Reagan era recall that one of the things President Reagan campaigned on was
getting rid of the Department of Education, which had been created by his pre-
decessor, Jimmy Carter. Poor Terrel Bell was tasked with getting rid of his own
department. That didn’t happen, but Bell thought, all right, at least if we’re going
to make this argument, let’s get a sense of how things are going. So, he pitched the
Movroydis: Since state governors were the key drivers of this reform, were
the states more or less aligned on this issue?
Movroydis: The new Hoover report, A Nation at Risk +40, is edited by you
and Hoover fellow Margaret Raymond. What are you and the other scholars
hoping to accomplish with this publication?
Bowen: The Hoover Education Success Initiative, which I lead, is a project that’s
really about connecting the research we’re doing with policy makers. We have
Bowen: A lot of them are topic-specific. The paper on early childhood, for
example, says early childhood education can be really impactful, but it has to
be high quality, you have to train the staff and have strong curricula. A paper
on school choice talks about how school-choice programs are structured and
how important it is to structure them the right way. The school-finance paper
that Hoover senior fellow Rick Hanushek wrote talks about how important it is
to understand that simply spending money on schools isn’t enough, we have to
get better at figuring out which money spent in which way is having the most
impact. And Margaret Raymond wrote a concluding essay where she went
through all twelve papers to identify common themes, and she came up with
this list of “I words”: impulsive, incremental, incoherent, impatient, intransigent,
ineffective. Here’s what they mean.
Impulsive: You can see that people put the reforms in place without a lot of
planning, without thinking about how hard they were going to be to imple-
ment, and without thinking about how to sustain them over the long term.
Learn more at
hoover.org/hesi
C A LIFOR N IA
Facts Meet
Fakery
Politicians think they’re qualified to teach
California students to recognize “fake news.”
Think about that.
By Lee E. Ohanian
C
alifornia has a new requirement
for its K–12 students: learn how Key points
to recognize fake news. Assem- » California requires that
schools teach “media
blyman Marc Berman (D–Menlo literacy” in kindergarten
Park), who sponsored the bill requiring this through twelfth grade.
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). © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Canceling the
Cancelers
Hoover fellow Niall Ferguson probes the spread of
an insidious ideology in America’s institutions of
higher learning and offers a suggestion: start over.
By Peter Robinson
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
where he is chairman of the History Working Group and co-leader of the Hoover
History Lab. He also participates in Hoover’s task forces on military history, digi-
tal currency, global policy, and semiconductors. Peter Robinson is the editor of
the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and the Murdoch Dis-
tinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Robinson: But you use the word treason for your own experience of your fel-
low academics. What exactly are they betraying?
CANCELED
Robinson: You earned your doctorate more than three decades ago, and
you’ve been a public intellectual at least since the moment that first book
on the First World War [The Pity of War] became an international bestseller.
What happened ten years ago?
Ferguson: Well, it was almost ten years ago that I think my wife, Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, and I came into contact with cancel culture for the first time. That was
when she was invited to give a commencement address at Brandeis Universi-
ty, and then shortly before the event was told that she was disinvited because
a strange coalition of
progressive and Islamist
“Cancel culture began to be some- elements had signed a
thing of a recurrent phenomenon in petition demanding she be
universities in the United States.” disinvited. It was at that
stage that cancel culture
began to be something of a recurrent phenomenon in universities in the
United States. I remember digging into it and trying to understand what was
going on, and being kind of mystified by this unholy alliance between radical
leftists, gay rights activists, and Islamists who thought that somebody like my
wife should be publicly humiliated. And I think that’s when I began to worry
that something was going wrong, and I spotted it going wrong at that time
at Harvard, where I was a professor. It is in the space of about ten years that
what you might call wokeism has gone from being a fringe fashion to being
the dominant ideology of the major universities.
Ferguson: I think for many American Jews who had, perhaps, been at Har-
vard, or Stanford, or Yale, or Princeton, and had left many years ago and got
on with their lives, whether it was in technology or finance in the real world,
Ferguson: That’s the context. Now, if you look at these institutions you see
they were already right-leaning, even before World War I. And perhaps that
shouldn’t surprise us, because it was the social elite that went to university.
It was a much narrower section of society than today. The trauma of defeat
in 1918 led to a tremendous backlash, a backlash not only against the Weimar
Republic, the successor to the imperial regime, but I think broadly, a back-
lash against many other things associated with defeat, a backlash against the
Anglo-Saxon powers that had won the war. And it was in this context that
many students and professors were highly attracted by an exciting new dema-
gogic figure, Adolf Hitler, and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
It wasn’t especially attractive to workers. Workers in the 1920s gravi-
tated towards either the Social Democrats or the Communists. And so, the
NSDAP, the Nazi Party, in its early phase, as it grew in the 1920s and broke
through electorally in 1932 and ’33, was a party that was very attractive to
people with university degrees. The radical right penetrated the student
body and the professorship, and anti-Semitism became institutionalized.
If you think about why an ideology spreads, there are two driving forces.
Typically, the obvious one is that people are just persuaded by it. But the
other reason ideologies spread is that there are people who gain from them.
“Who, whom?” is always the good question. Lenin wasn’t wrong about that.
And in the case of Germany in the 1930s, “who, whom?” was that the gentile
professors could screw over the Jewish ones. The Jewish professors were
removed from their jobs because professors were civil servants, in effect, in
the German system. That’s one of the earliest things the Nazis do when they
come to power: purge the civil service of Jews. That’s a terrific career oppor-
tunity if you’re not Jewish and you can avoid the purge, so you see the self-
interest that motivated certain people to become Nazis. People became Nazis
once it was clear that the Nazis really were in power; the massive increase
in Nazi Party membership after Hitler is very clearly establishing a dictator-
ship. I find this a very interesting moment in German history because it’s the
moment when the opportunists join the convinced.
Robinson: Here I want to make sure that I understand whether you’re mak-
ing a strong or weak version of the argument.
Robinson: You do tend to, Niall, I do know that. You write, “The lesson of
German history for American academia should now be clear. In Germany, to
use the legalistic language of 2023, ‘speech crossed into conduct.’ The ‘final
solution of the Jewish question’ began as speech. To be precise, it began as
lectures and monographs and scholarly articles.” All right, German universi-
ties failed to stop Hitler. That much is clear. But are you making the much
stronger argument that the universities helped to produce the Holocaust?
Robinson: By now, I feel certain that some of our listeners will be agreeing
with your friends. They’ll be saying, “This is all fascinating as a matter of
history, but there Niall Ferguson goes again, exaggerating away. What hap-
pened there could not happen here because the cases are virtually opposite.
The German universities glorify the German state and the dominant ethnic
group, the so-called Aryan race. American universities don’t glorify America.
They’re very happy to have the borders erased. They’re one-worlders, they’re
internationalists. They’re not committed to glorifying the dominant WASP,
the old WASP ascendancy. On the contrary, they’re committed to humiliating
it on behalf of other ethnic groups. So, the cases are not just different, but
almost opposite to each other.” Why is that wrong?
Ferguson: Bill Ackman was well known to me long before you came across
him, as one of the world’s most successful activist hedge fund managers. And
he just turned his activism away from corporations that were being badly
run to the Harvard Corporation and Harvard University, and I just wish he’d
done it sooner. I think I could put it more brutally, because “diversity, equity,
and inclusion” is a kind of newspeak, in Orwell’s sense. It actually means the
exact opposite of what it says. The diversity they aspire to is uniformity—
uniformity of ideological outlook. Equity is actually entirely absent because
there’s no due process when the DEI bureaucracy goes into action. And as for
inclusion, the real objective is exclusion of those who aren’t conforming to the
ideology of the progressive left. Where did it come from? That’s quite easy,
I think, to explain.
Ferguson: The universities in the 1960s already leaned liberal. The problem
in the 1970s and ’80s was that the liberals had a tendency to hire Marxists
over other liberals. And
then, in due course, the
Marxists would hire cul- “Identity politics is designed to be
tural Marxists, the post- hostile to individual liberty by insist-
1989 version of Marxism, ing that nobody is an individual.”
which switched econom-
ics out in favor of identity politics. When you lost the class war, as the left
did spectacularly in the 1980s, and you lost the Cold War too, what was left?
Well, it turned out that the answer was identity politics, and identity politics
is designed to be hostile to individual liberty by insisting that nobody is an
individual.
RESCUING ACADEMIA
Robinson: Here are two posts on X. From Konstantin Kisin: “One of the
biggest benefits of Bill Ackman’s successful campaign to dismantle discrimi-
natory practices at elite colleges is that it proves something that many of us
have been saying for a long time: all it takes is for a few people with power,
money, and influence to start standing up to this crap and it’ll be over.” And
Ferguson: Since October 7, and not only because of Bill Ackman. Many other
people have either publicly or privately expressed their horror at the way
things have been going at the major universities. That’s good and it can only,
I think, begin the process of change, and that’s where Jordan Peterson is
right. There’s a lot here that’s wrong. Part of the problem is that when you set
aside academic standards to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion—in other
words, you start making appointments not on the basis of ability and perfor-
mance and achievement, but on the basis of other criteria—you are essential-
ly going to start giving promotion and performance to inferior scholars. And
how do inferior scholars get by? Plagiarism is one of the ways that people
get by who are not really up to it. So, that’s part of it. But Jordan Peterson is
right that the problems are profound, and they won’t be addressed simply by
replacing presidents or even boards of trustees. They have to be addressed
by changing the way that universities are run.
One of the recommendations I have made on behalf of the new university
we are founding in Austin, Texas, is that there should be proper constitutional
protection within a university’s governance system of free speech, of academ-
ic freedom, and it needs to be enforced. It’s all very well having the “Chicago
Principles,” and they sound grand, but if they’re not enforced, if undergradu-
ates don’t feel free to speak because there may be consequences, then what
use are they? So, the University of Austin will be unique in that it will model
a new kind of academic governance in which the freedom of students and
professors alike will be protected, and that freedom will be enforced.
Robinson: Here’s what occurs to this layman’s mind. We have a tax code
which has favored universities for decades, permitting a Harvard to accu-
mulate an endowment of $50 billion; Yale and Stanford are in the multiple of
tens of billions of dollars; Princeton is not far behind. You can change the tax
code, you can point out that during the Cold War is when federal funding of
research at these institutions began to become routine, but this was in the
1950s, when the institutions were making common cause with the rest of the
nation. Now the institutions are in a world of their own, this woke DEI world,
so you could cut off the funding. What does the rest of the country do to say,
“stop this nonsense”?
Ferguson: But I’m a little bit more optimistic because I think it’s been
brought home forcibly to trustees all across the country, not just at Harvard,
that they have to change the way they go about things: that they can no
longer allow the ideo-
logues, the progressives,
to call the shots, and “We can be an institution that shows
that has to be a step in that liberals and conservatives can
the right direction. You work together on academic problems,
and I are fellows at the leaving politics at the threshold.”
Hoover Institution. The
Hoover Institution is unique in that it’s a semiautonomous republic within
Stanford University. Why is there no Hoover Institution at Harvard—ever
wondered?—or at Yale? They could use a Hoover Institution, those places.
One of the reasons that I believe passionately in what we do here at Hoover
is that we are the counterculture to DEI, and if we can continue to show that
it’s possible to engage in scholarship in a way that is not politicized, if we can
be an institution that shows that liberals and conservatives can work togeth-
er on academic problems, leaving politics at the threshold, then we’ll also be
acting as role models. So, I’m kind of hopeful, just a little bit hopeful, Peter,
that the probability of there being Hoover Institutions at other universities
just went up from zero percent to, I don’t know, maybe five.
Friends,
Romans . . .
Influencers?
Ancient Rome is supposedly trendy. Time for a
few untrendy lessons about the life and death of
empires.
By Bruce S. Thornton
R
ecently a trend on
TikTok had its fifteen Key points
minutes of click-fame. » Roman wisdom insists on virtue,
fealty to the gods, and moral vigilance.
It seems that some
» US foreign policy has indulged the
women are asking their men how idea that nonlethal diplomacy can
often they think about the Roman defuse conflict and restore peace.
Empire. The usual suspect experts » No matter how noble our inten-
tions, how brilliant our civilization,
were consulted, and of course they
how sophisticated and expansive
concluded that this interest in our empire, human nature never
Rome reflects modern males’ angst changes.
Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising, the
rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion, rocks, firebrands flying. Rage
finds them arms but then, if they chance to see a man among them, one
whose devotion and public service [pietas] lends him weight, they stand
For Romans who had lived through the bloody chaos of the dying republic,
this scene would have been all too familiar. Note the idealism that all free gov-
ernments are predicated on: persuasion should trump force, words should
replace blood. But Virgil’s and his readers’ knowledge that such a scene of
leadership had rarely happened in the decades-long death of the republic
challenges the idealism.
This prizing of language over force has also characterized a century of
our foreign policy of moralizing internationalism, the idea that nonlethal
diplomacy can defuse conflict and restore peace. However, we predicate its
efficacy more on rational technique and transactional negotiations than on
the virtue of a great leader. And that noble idealism has also failed, as we
are witnessing today with the Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran,
another milestone on the road to decline.
The second, more important expression of Virgil’s qualified idealism comes
when Jupiter calms down his daughter—and Aeneas’s mother—Venus amid
her angry grief over
Juno’s violence against
her son and his fated To Virgil, peace doesn’t depend on
future glory. The “father material improvements. It depends
of gods and men” assures on great leaders controlling the per-
his daughter that the manent passions of men.
glorious civilization, the
Roman Empire, will indeed happen: “Then will the violent centuries, battles
set aside, grow gentle, kind,” and force be replaced by laws and a higher
civilization.
This “new world order,” moreover, as we’ve been calling it since the Ver-
sailles settlement, will create lasting peace:
The terrible Gates of War with their welded iron bars will stand bolted
shut, and locked inside the Frenzy of civil strife will crouch down on his
savage weapons, hands pinioned behind his back with a hundred brazen
shackles, monstrously roaring out from his bloody jaws.”
This is the Pax Romana that will rule the world, and that created the founda-
tions of the West.
This idealistic hope for the Roman Empire was expressed much later in
Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” and in Norman Angell’s 1914
HUBRIS
This lesson in impossible idealism is why we should think about the Romans,
for we still cling to the foreign policy idealism that has driven our foreign
relations for a century. Our “rules-based liberal order” and technocratic
hubris have claimed that through greater knowledge and material improve-
ment, human nature also can be improved, and conflict resolved through
diplomacy and global institutions.
Moreover, we assume that a complex diversity of peoples want to live
just like us in a Pax Americana, once their illiberal and tyrannical leaders
are neutralized. They will then embrace our political idealism of tolerance
and unalienable rights and discard their own ambitions for dominance and
power. But those passions remain, and without a credible threat of force to
deter them, they will erupt into violence against our arrogant tutelage. The
Middle East since World War II illustrates this tragic reality, as does Russia’s
brutal war against Ukraine, one fueled by Putin’s dreams of correcting the
“geopolitical disaster,” as he described the collapse of the Soviet empire, and
restoring the ethnic Russian empire.
Whom Can
We Trust?
Brandice Canes-Wrone, head of Hoover’s new
Center for Revitalizing American Institutions,
looks for ways to bring fresh life to American
democracy.
By Jonathan Movroydis
Movroydis: What are the roots of the low trust and confidence in our
institutions?
Canes-Wrone: The first one is about what we might think of as formal gov-
ernmental bodies—for instance, Congress, the executive branch, the courts,
state and local governmental bodies, the military, and executive agencies.
We’ll consider topics such as, how has the balance of power between the
presidency and Congress changed over time? To what extent do Congress
and our state legislatures reflect the preferences of their constituents? And
what reforms might increase the effectiveness of these institutions?
Canes-Wrone: Here,
we’re thinking about “What are the most effective policies
organizations that are
and practices for ensuring the integrity
outside the government
of and participation in our elections?”
but nonetheless critical
to a well-functioning democracy and, correspondingly, the practices that
affect how the democracy operates. Examples of organizations include the
media, interest groups, and even universities, and examples of practices
include how elections are administered and what constitutes freedom of
speech. We’ll consider topics such as, what are the most effective policies
Movroydis: How does the center plan to do its research and communicate it
to policy makers and other stakeholders?
Movroydis: Could you talk about why multiple perspectives are important?
Canes-Wrone: The center is looking for solutions that extend beyond specific
parties. RAI is interested in what works, and one thing we haven’t talked
about yet is that the public’s trust in state and local governments is an excep-
tion to the general decline in trust. Citizens tend to be much more supportive
of their state and local governments. Amid the general crisis in confidence,
it makes sense to think about why things are working at least better in the
states and localities than at the national level.
One of the important features of RAI, consistent with bipartisanship,
is—and to me, this is always at the heart of any scholarly work—to be
very open to alternative ideas and be willing to defend your own through
discussion.
RAI is a Hoover-funded institution. We share Hoover’s commitment
to individual freedom, and that’s part of our mission. But when it comes
Dependent No
More
It’s been a hundred years since the United States
granted citizenship to American Indians. Will it
take a hundred more before it frees tribes to make
their own decisions?
I
n 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA), declaring
that “all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the
United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the
United States.” President Coolidge signed it into law on June 2, 1924.
The act, partially inspired by robust Native American enlistment during the
First World War, is celebrated as a step toward honoring American Indians—
regardless of whether they abandoned their tribal affiliations—by welcom-
ing them to US citizenship, giving them the right to vote. There is, however,
dissonance in “declaring” people as citizens who were the continent’s first
inhabitants and who were already citizens of their own nations—Iroquois,
Comanche, Osage, Sioux, Crow, and so on. Those nations long had rules of
law, boundaries, and rituals for choosing leaders and adopting others into
Terry L. Anderson is the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He is past president of the Property and Environment Research Center
(PERC) in Bozeman, Montana, and a professor emeritus at Montana State Uni-
versity. Dominic P. Parker is a senior fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution
and a professor of applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He
and Terry Anderson direct the Hoover Project on Renewing Indigenous Economies.
POWER IN AUTONOMY
On the 100th anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act, it is appropriate to
reflect that Native Americans held a status before the conquest by Europe-
ans that allowed them to be, in the words of Crow tribal citizen Bill Yel-
lowtail, “strong, self-sufficient, self-initiating, entrepreneurial, independent,
“DEAD CAPITAL”
Once Indians were declared to be wards of the federal government, they
became more like colonial citizens. The nature of their tribal governments,
the laws to which they must abide, the structure of their property rights,
and even their racial identity were mostly determined by a bureaucracy
unaccountable to them. The legacy consists of today’s policies regulating
everything from health care to education to reservation land use that are still
manifest in federal agencies such as the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Education,
and the Indian Health Service.
Bureaucracy went so far as to tie Native American citizenship to ethnic-
ity by inventing a pseudoscientific “blood quantum” system of enumeration
that persists to this day. Blood quantum was determined by federal Indian
agents who tracked the fraction of ancestors documented as full-blooded
Indian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, sometimes just by looking
at the person. These assessments determined eligibility for federal payments
under treaties, land cessions, and litigation settlements. Before the Indian
A PROFOUND SHIFT
The recent landmark case of McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) provides an opportunity
to redefine the meaning of citizenship for American Indians. The case began
over the question of whether the federal or state government had jurisdiction
over a case involving Jimcy McGirt, a citizen of the Seminole Tribe, who was
accused of sexually assaulting a non-Indian minor. Ultimately, the case was
heard by the US Supreme Court, which ruled that criminal cases belong in
federal or tribal courts if the crime was committed in “Indian Territory,” and it
concluded that this land makes up nearly half of the state of Oklahoma.
Some citizens of Oklahoma who are not citizens of the “Five Civilized
Tribes”—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—feared
that the new jurisdictional arrangement would stunt the state’s economy.
Memorial Day:
One Life
To honor our fallen warriors, remember them as
individuals. A commander’s eulogy.
By H. R. McMaster
I
n World War II, America lost 291,557 military lives in combat. But, as
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rick Atkinson wrote, “Each death is
as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. The most critical lesson for
every American is to understand, viscerally, that this vast host died
one by one by one; to understand in your bones that they died for you.”
Perhaps back then, it was easier for more Americans to feel that reality
in their bones. These days, with a relatively small all-volunteer force, the
American people are more distant from those who fight in their name.
Combat veterans suppress dreadful memories of battles, but they never
forget their comrades who fell alongside them one by one. Their countenanc-
es, often smiling or laughing, flash before our mind’s eye. I see them unex-
pectedly. Sometimes they come in waves.
This Memorial Day, in between the backyard barbecues and parades,
Americans might hear statistics of our fallen soldiers, like the approximately
H. R. McMaster (US Army, Ret.), a former national security adviser, is the Fouad
and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of mul-
tiple Hoover working groups including military history, Islamism, China/Taiwan,
and the Middle East. He heads the Hoover Afghanistan Research & Relief Team
and hosts the Hoover interview series Battlegrounds. He is also the Bernard and
Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
650,000 who died in battle since the beginning of the War of Independence.
They might know that 7,054 American military personnel died in the most
recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But most are unfamiliar with the stories
of individual soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice. That is a shame.
To help our fellow Americans appreciate such a sacrifice, we who served
alongside those heroes should tell the stories of our fallen comrades as we
lost them: one by one.
A MODEL SCOUT
Today, I would like to share my memory of Private First Class Joseph Knott,
the first trooper killed in action after the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment
returned to Iraq for its second combat tour of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Even now, I still see Joseph, smiling, in my mind’s eye. Just twenty-one, from
Yuma, Arizona, he was the very model of a cavalry scout. In fact, his photo,
in silhouette standing guard in the gunner’s station of his Humvee as the sun
A PROUD VOLUNTEER
Two days later I eulogized Joseph, surrounded by his fellow cavalry troopers
at our base in Baghdad. I wish that more Americans could witness combat
memorials to the fallen so they could understand how fortunate we are to
have selfless young men and women willing to fight and sacrifice in our
name. Eighteen years later, I welcome readers back to that ceremony, with
the speech I gave about Joseph:
“We are here to honor and say goodbye to one of our Brave Rifles broth-
ers, a great cavalry trooper and a fine man, Private First Class Joseph Knott.
Private First Class Knott, like all of you, volunteered to serve his nation in
time of war. On 17 April
during operations in the
South Baghdad area, he “Sergeant Harris said ‘he always had
made the ultimate sacri- a smile on his face and served our
fice to bring peace to this country proudly.’ ”
difficult region, defeat
the forces of terrorism and hatred, and permit children, both in Iraq and in
our own nation, to live free of fear. Our thoughts and prayers are with him
and with his family—his father, Jerry; his mother, Pamela; his sisters, Susan
and Sheela; and his brother, Jerry.”
I then shared the reminiscences of Joseph from soldiers in our platoon.
Grief shared is grief divided.
“Corporal Dillard recalled how ‘he strived for excellence in everything he
did and always kept the morale of his fellow troopers high.’
“Staff Sergeant Hodges, who I know has the highest standards, described
Joseph as an ‘exemplary soldier . . . motivated and disciplined.’
“Specialist Bruce recalled that ‘everything he did, he put all of his energy
into it and made sure it was done right.’
“Sergeant Braxton recalled that ‘he was the type of person who would do
everything he could to help the next person.’
To the families of those who have given their holy blood for our land, we
all bow to you in reverence and to the souls of your loved ones. Their
sacrifice was not in vain. They are not dead, but alive, and their souls
hovering around us every second of every minute. They will never be
forgotten. . . . We see them in the smile of every child, and in every flower
growing in this land. Let America, their families, and the world be proud
of their sacrifice for humanity and life.
Combat memorial ceremonies help military units, which take on the quali-
ties of a family, communalize grief and resolve to continue the mission. At the
end of the ceremony, soldiers kneel one by one, or with their squad, in front
of the fallen soldier’s boots and helmet, which sit on top of an inverted rifle.
T
he June 6, 1944, invasion marked the largest amphibious landing
since the Persians under Xerxes invaded the Greek mainland
in 480 BC. Nearly 160,000 American, British, and Canadian
soldiers stormed five beaches of Nazi-occupied France. The plan
was to liberate Western Europe after four years of occupation, push into
Germany, and end the Nazi regime. Less than a year later, the Allies from the
West, and the Soviet Russians from the East, did just that, utterly destroying
Hitler’s Third Reich.
Two years earlier, in August 1942, Germany had repulsed with heavy
Canadian losses an earlier Normandy raid at Dieppe. In 1944, the Germans
also knew roughly when the Allies would be coming. They placed their best
general, Erwin Rommel, in charge of the Normandy defenses.
The huge D-Day force required enormous supplies of arms and provisions
just to get off the beaches, yet the Allies had no way to capture even one port
on the heavily fortified French coast.
To land so many troops so quickly, the Allies would have to ensure com-
plete naval and air supremacy. They would have to tow over from Britain
their own portable harbors, lay their own gasoline pipeline across the English
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and the chair of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Mili-
tary History in Contemporary Conflict.
Channel, and invent novel ships and armored vehicles just to get onto and
over the beaches.
More dangerous still, the invaders would need to ensure armor and tactical
air dominance to avoid being cut off, surrounded, and annihilated once they
went inland.
German Panzer units—battle-hardened troops in frightening Panther and
Tiger tanks, with over three hard years of fighting experience on the Eastern
Front—were confident they could annihilate in a matter of days the outnum-
bered and lightly armed invaders.
Such a huge force required fifty miles of landing space on the beaches.
That vast expanse ensured that some landing sites were less than ideal—
Omaha Beach in particular.
“I
’ve been honored to be asked to read a tribute to a great Ameri-
can, Nikola Tesla.” So began New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia
on WNYC radio on January 10, 1943, three days after the great
inventor’s death in Manhattan at age eighty-six. The eulogy was
written by Slovenian author and translator Louis Adamic. The half-hour broad-
cast opened with an “Ave Maria” played by Zlatko Baloković, a Croatian violinist
and friend of Tesla’s, who also played a Serbian patriotic song, “Tamo Daleko”
(“There, Far Away”). The eulogy stated that Tesla had “died in his humble hotel
room . . . . He died in poverty, but he was one of the most useful and successful
men who ever lived. His achievements were great and are becoming greater as
time goes on.” The fact that Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia were all represented in
the ceremony is testimony to Tesla’s enduring bond to his Yugoslav homeland.
Ognjen Kovačević is the metadata librarian at the Hoover Institution Library &
Archives. Bertrand M. Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution
and a lecturer in history and international relations at Stanford University.
Nikola Tesla, the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest, was born in 1856 in the
Austrian Empire, the part that today belongs to the Republic of Croatia. At
the time of his birth and during his youth, the idea of South Slav unity was
gathering force. Tesla immigrated to the United States in 1884. During his
lifetime, he would witness the unification of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and
other ethno-national groups into one country, Yugoslavia (literally, the Union
of South Slavs); years of political turbulence and troubled relations between
the constituent nations of Yugoslavia; and finally, the demise of the kingdom
of Yugoslavia in the whirlwind of the Second World War. To the end, Tesla
remained loyal to Yugoslavia as well as to his adopted homeland, the United
States. “He is a feather in the cap of the whole human race,” intoned La Guar-
dia, “and Yugoslavia and America can be proud of him.”
The eulogy lauded the scientific achievements and discoveries of the man
many consider the inventor of radio and the pioneer of modern methods for
generating and transmitting electrical power. Tesla’s first important inven-
tion came in 1888 in the form of the alternating current (AC) induction motor,
a method of converting energy to mechanical force superior in efficiency
to the use of direct current. In 1891, in his quest to develop a system for the
A SECRET WEAPON
The Tesla legend has, if anything, grown stronger with time. In recent years
he has been called “the inventor of the twentieth century” and “the inventor
reply from Davidson, he sent him another letter: “I remind you again respect-
fully that a barrage by my machines is the only possible remedy.”
Skepticism about the potential of Tesla’s proposed teleforce aside, a
major sticking point was that the inventor was asking for funds up front
in order to make good on
his promises. He believed
“His achievements were great and are that what he was asking
becoming greater as time goes on.” for was a small price to
pay in view of the expect-
ed payoff, and he grew exasperated when his proposal was not instantly
embraced. He again wrote to Davidson on February 8, 1938, to express
his incredulity that “his Majesty’s Government” could be so “amazingly
short-sighted and penurious.” If the British government failed to act, Tesla
wrote, the people will find out that Davidson and people in positions of
responsibility like him had done nothing to defend them and they will rise
up in revolution. “And I can predict, with almost mathematical certitude,”
the scientist said, “that your distinguished career would be quickly and
tragically terminated.”
Tesla argued that he could not make a convincing case for his invention
simply by providing a mere summary of his ideas. His scheme would have
to be spelled out in detail, which meant financing up front. “If something is
to be done I must meet your representatives well prepared to answer every
question and to prove everything, that is to say furnish, virtually, all informa-
tion to be contained in my full specifications which the disgusting stinginess
of the British Government has prevented me from producing—a vice that
may cause the fall of the Empire. To this end it would be necessary to prepare
condensed specifications, drawings, and diagrams.” The information could be
compiled within six weeks, Tesla wrote, at a cost of twelve hundred pounds
(about $150,000 in today’s dollars), “not including a reasonable compensation
for myself.”
For the last forty years Dr. Tesla has been the storm center of
scientific controversy. Recognized in the early part of his career
as the father of modern methods of generating and distributing
electrical energy, and pre-dating even Marconi in his experiments
with wireless, Dr. Tesla has been decorated by many governments
for his accomplishments. In recent years, however, it has been his
custom to announce at his annual parties the perfection of inven-
tions which some scientists have challenged as fantastic.
As the doubters pointed out, nearly all of Tesla’s major discoveries and
inventions had come in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. In
a 1934 profile of Tesla in the New York Herald Tribune, American journalist
Joseph Alsop noted that “over and over again he has been ridiculed as a luna-
tic.” After Tesla died, author Gerald W. Johnson wrote that toward the end
of his life “his eccentricity touched the very verge of sanity.” And yet even the
doubters were reluctant to dismiss him outright, conscious of the fact that he
was not some crackpot inventor but the great Nikola Tesla.
It was a point driven home by William Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize–win-
ning New York Times science reporter, in a profile published in September
1940, as the Battle of Britain was in full swing and the unrelenting German
bombardment Tesla had warned about was making headlines. Laurence,
an old acquaintance of Tesla’s, wrote that he “stands ready to divulge to the
Tesla told Laurence he needed $2 million (about $44 million today) to pro-
ceed with his project. The price might seem steep, Laurence observed, but $2
million was “a very small
sum compared with what
is at stake. If Mr. Tesla An obituary noted Tesla’s “world
really fulfills his prom- of fantasy crackling with electric
ise the result achieved sparks, packed with strange tow-
would be truly stagger- ers to receive and emit energy and
ing . . . . Considering the dreamy contrivances to give utopian
probabilities in the case
man complete control of nature.”
even if the chances were
100,000-to-1 against Mr. Tesla, the odds would still be largely in favor of taking
a chance on spending $2,000,000.” As for the notion that Tesla was over the
hill—or had wandered over the edge—Laurence countered that “he still retains
full intellectual vigor” and urged US defense officials to take his proposals seri-
ously. “The sum is insignificant compared with the magnitude of the stake.”
“POOR TESLA”
“Tesla passed away last night,” Ambassador Fotić wrote in his diary on
January 8, 1943. “The hotel maid found him dead in his bed. Poor Tesla,
At the end of the Second World War, Yugoslavia was restored, this time
as a federation of six “republics” under communist rule. Identification
LIGHT THE WAY: A bronze statue of Nikola Tesla (opposite) has stood at the
corner of Birch Street and Sheridan Avenue in Palo Alto since 2013. Artist
Terry Guyer created the figure, which re-enacts a Tesla experiment in wireless
light, and used crowdfunding to pay for it. True to its likeness, the statue emits
invisible energy—in this case, a wi-fi signal. [Bertrand M. Patenaude]
G
erman-born artist and graphic designer Winold Reiss (1886–1953)
created this portrait of Wades in the Water, a leader and warrior
of the Blackfeet tribe. Reiss befriended many of the Blackfeet
beginning in 1920, when he first sojourned on their Montana
reservation. “After reading stories of the American West, my grandfather
decided to come to America with the express purpose of creating a perma-
nent living memorial to the Native culture and spiritual way of life with very
accurate portraits,” a grandson, Peter Reiss, said at a 2022 exhibit at the
Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, as quoted in the D
aily Inter Lake.
Reiss also opened an art school and taught Blackfeet for free.
This calendar reframes the Old West for an age of steel. Starting in 1927, Reiss
painted many Indians, including Wades in the Water, for the Great Northern Rail-
way, whose “Empire Builder” Streamliners streaked across the country’s northern
edge and right through Glacier National Park, which was carved out of Blackfeet
lands. Even before Reiss came West, the railway had been using Indian imagery to
attract visitors to the park, where it operated a hotel and other amenities. Under the
slogan “See America First,” it invited travelers to see the first Americans. Blackfeet
were hired to “camp” for tourists, performing dances, songs, and ceremonies. Their
likenesses appeared on postcards, playing cards, train schedules, and menus.
Meanwhile, the Great Northern was building a future that pushed a former
way of life even further into the past. Founder James J. Hill settled waves of
immigrants along the tracks and boosted farming, logging, and shipping. He
completed his transcontinental route in 1893, the same year Frederick Jack-
son Turner declared the frontier closed. Ayn Rand wrote in 1966 that the GN
“was responsible, single-handed, for the development of the entire American
Northwest”—a mention that has endeared Hill to many libertarians, particu-
larly for his refusal to accept federal subsidies. (He also may have inspired
Atlas Shrugged.) Hill wrote a manifesto/memoir titled Highways of Progress.
Wades in the Water was a longtime Blackfeet police chief. His ordinary
chief’s attire—olive linen coat, brass buttons, red epaulets—is kept in the
Museum of the Plains Indian.
—Charles Lindsey
218 H O O VER DI GEST • spri n g 2024
Board of Overseers
Chair Susan Ford Dorsey
Herbert M. Dwight
John B. Kleinheinz
Steven L. Eggert
Dana M. Emery
Vice Chair Brady Enright
Susan R. McCaw Jeffrey A. Farber
Michael Farello
Members Henry A. Fernandez
Eric L. Affeldt Robert A. Ferris
Katherine H. Alden John J. Fisher
Neil R. Anderson James Fleming Jr.
John Backus Jr. Stephen B. Gaddis
Paul V. Barber Venky Ganesan
Barbara Barrett Samuel L. Ginn
John F. Barrett Shari Glazer
Barry Beal Jr. Michael W. Gleba
Douglas Bergeron Kenneth Goldman
Wendy Bingham Cox Lawrence E. Golub
Robert E. Grady
Jeffrey W. Bird
Jerry Grundhofer
James J. Bochnowski
Cynthia Fry Gunn
Zachary Bookman
Paul G. Haaga Jr.
David Booth Karen Hargrove
Richard Breeden Richard R. Hargrove
Jerome V. Bruni Everett J. Hauck
John L. “Jack” Bunce Jr. Diana Hawkins
Clint Carlson Kenneth A. Hersh
James J. Carroll III Heather R. Higgins
Robert H. Castellini Allan Hoover III
Charles Cobb Margaret Hoover
Jean-Pierre L. “JP” Conte Philip Hudner
Berry R. Cox Claudia P. Huntington
Harlan Crow John K. Hurley
Mark Dalzell Nicolas Ibañez Scott
James W. Davidson James D. Jameson
Lew Davies William E. Jenkins
George H. Davis Jr. Charles B. Johnson
Jim Davis Elizabeth Pryor Johnson
Jean DeSombre Franklin P. Johnson Jr.
Michael Dokupil Gregory E. Johnson
Dixon R. Doll John Jordan
This fall, don’t miss our related gallery exhibition in Hoover Tower at
Stanford University and expanded online exhibition.
THE HUMAN
PROSPERITY
PROJECT
Contact: hooverdevelopment@stanford.edu
hoover.org/donate
HOOVER DIGEST
SPRING 2024 NO. 2
The Economy
Israel
Iran
Russia and Ukraine
China and Taiwan
Foreign Policy
Defense
Technology
The Environment
Education
California
Interviews
» Dan Blumenthal and Elbridge A. Colby
» Stephen L. Bowen
» Brandice Canes-Wrone
» Niall Ferguson
» Daniel Gordis
Values
History and Culture
Hoover Archives