Hoover Digest, 2024, No. 1, Fall

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DIGEST
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W I N TER 2 024 N O.1
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
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ON THE COVER
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Tad and Dianne Taube Director
“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live
forever.” These famous lines from a poem ERIC WAKIN
by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930)— Deputy Director,
titled, perhaps a bit obviously, “Vladimir Director of Library & Archives
Ilych Lenin”—express a wish for eternal
remembrance of the Bolshevik revolution-
ary he adored. Lenin’s embalmed body
has been on public view in Moscow for a
hundred years, since his death in January
1924. Mayakovsky was at times a symbol
of radical liberation and, at other times, of
an oppressive state. He killed himself in
1930 amid personal and political tumult.
See story, page 198.
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Winter 2024
HOOVER D I G E ST
T HE E CO N O M Y
9 Inflation: No Mystery Here
There are lots of theories about what triggered the recent bout
of inflation. But the strongest one is this: that government
created trillions in debt with no thought of paying it back.
By John H. Cochrane
14 Sound as a Dollar?
Rising US government debt threatens the value of the US
currency. Investors around the world are acting accordingly.
By Kevin A. Hassett
20 Twisting the Tax Code

The Biden administration is colluding with other countries
so that Congress feels pressured to accept a global tax code.
American voters and lawmakers never agreed to that.
By Aharon Friedman and Joshua D. Rauh
R U SS I A A N D UK R A IN E
24 NATO Holds the Line
Nothing deterred Russia from invading Ukraine, but
deterrence didn’t fail completely. Vladimir Putin hasn’t
crossed any NATO borders—so far. By Rose Gottemoeller
29 Pushkin Gets the Shove

As Ukraine sheds itself of everything Russian, it’s hard times
for an imperialist poet. By Timothy Garton Ash
H O O V ER D I G E ST • W inter 2024 3
F O R E I G N P O LICY
35 Cold Comfort
If Cold War truly has returned, so have its many lessons,
including this one: authoritarians will be proven wrong.
By Condoleezza Rice and Niall Ferguson
C H I N A AN D TA IWA N
41 Beijing’s Bill Comes Due
China favored socialist dictates over market principles. Now
it must pay for its economic mismanagement. By Mickey D.
Levy
52 Silicon Triangle
Taiwan and the semiconductor industry are intertwined. In a
time of Chinese aggression, keeping them both secure calls for
partnerships and preparedness. By Larry Diamond,
Jim Ellis, and Orville Schell
59 Innovation Is a Marathon
In the advanced-technology race with China, the United
States is stumbling. Why we need a new tech strategy.
By Michael Brown and Robert Atkinson
4 H O O VER DIGEST • Wi n ter 2024

D E F EN SE
69 Armed and Ready
Ever since war erupted in Ukraine, weapons shortages and
obsolete facilities have bedeviled the Pentagon. Now there’s a
potential solution: a “munitions campus” to speed up design,
testing, and production of a modern US arsenal. By Nadia
Schadlow
74 Fighting Fires with Data

Dominating future battlefields demands not just better
weapons but a better way of using them. Fire suppression—
that’s the key. By Eran Ortal
80 A Fateful Price
Hoover fellow Bruce S. Thornton’s new book investigates
a democratic paradox: civilians must restrain, but can also
hamper, military leadership. By Jonathan Movroydis
INDIA
88 A Nuanced Look at Nehru
Seeking political advantage, India’s ruling party is denigrating
founding figure Jawaharlal Nehru. The government can learn
from both Nehru’s missteps and his accomplishments. By
Sumit Ganguly
A F G HA N ISTA N
94 Afghanistan: Apartheid State
When US soldiers withdrew, systematic violence against
women resumed. World leaders should join figures in the Arab
and Muslim world to resist this injustice. By Nader Nadery
L AW
102 “It Leaves People Free to Disagree”
A new book by Hoover senior fellow Michael McConnell
disputes the idea that the Constitution excludes religion
from public life. Instead, he writes, the establishment clause
champions individual conscience. By Monica Schreiber
E NE R GY A N D THE E N VIR ONMENT

107 The Climate Cudgel
In their attacks on energy companies, cities and states are
abusing the legal system. By John Yoo
111 More Smoke, Less Fire

No, the world is not “on fire”—in fact, areas burned by wildfire
have been shrinking. It’s the rhetoric that’s overheated.
By Bjorn Lomborg
F R E E EX P R E SSIO N
116 Can We Say That?
Censorship may amplify the power of elites, but it both offends
and endangers free societies. By Peter Berkowitz
6 H O O V ER DIGEST • Wi n ter 2024

E D U C ATIO N
121 Learn by Example
Why do Asian-American students excel? Let’s stop being
afraid to ask. By Michael J. Petrilli and Amber M. Northern
125 COVID’s Lifetime Tax

Learning losses can persist for decades. Why we can’t close
the books on the young victims of pandemic policies.
By Eric A. Hanushek
131 May the Talented Students Bloom

States don’t serve gifted learners well. Here’s a detailed plan
for doing better. By Chester E. Finn Jr.
C AL I FO R N IA
135 California or Bust
It’s bust. California’s problems show no sign of fixing
themselves. By Lee E. Ohanian
I N T E RVIE WS
144 Does Merit Still Matter?
Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell expounds on a familiar
theme: society’s never-ending delusion that equality can
advance at the expense of merit. By Peter Robinson
155 A Climate of “Mischief”

In climate research, the science is too often buried under the
politics. Scientist and Hoover senior fellow Steven E. Koonin
shows how. By Peter Robinson
VA LU ES
168 Pandora’s Last Gift
Hope remains: for renewal, for a return to America’s founding
principles. By Chris Gibson
HO OV E R A R C HIVE S
174 “The Americans Were a Godsend”
Hoover fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude tells how American
humanitarians, led by Herbert Hoover, fought famine and
saved millions of Russian lives. By Jonathan Movroydis
183 Sympathy for the Devil

A fascist-favoring journalist landed an exclusive interview
with Adolf Hitler as German tanks rolled into France. Hitler
expected public sympathy and the reporter expected praise.
Both were badly mistaken. By Benjamin S. Goldstein
198 On the Cover
8 H O O V ER DIGEST • Wi n ter 2024

T HE E CON OM Y
Inflation: No
Mystery Here
There are lots of theories about what triggered the
recent bout of inflation. But the strongest one is
this: that government created trillions in debt with
no thought of paying it back.
By John H. Cochrane
A
s inflation eases, representatives of different schools of thought
are taking victory laps. But who really deserves one? What have
we learned about inflation?
I think the episode is a smashing confirmation of the fiscal
theory of the price level. Where did inflation come from? Our government
borrowed about $5 trillion and wrote people checks. Crucially, and unlike in
2008, there was no mention of how the new debt would be repaid, no prom-
ise of debt reduction later. The spending was couched as an “emergency
expenditure” not going through the usual budget process or requiring offsets.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen argued that “with interest rates at historic
lows”—they were then—debt isn’t a concern, so “the smartest thing we can
do is act big.”
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy,
and a contributor to Hoover’s Conte Initiative on Immigration Reform. He is also
a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a
research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an adjunct
scholar at the Cato Institute.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2024 9
People could have looked at all this new debt, thought it would be repaid
with interest, and therefore regarded it as a good investment. They didn’t.
They chose to try to spend the new debt rather than save it. But we can’t all
sell, so that drives up prices.
Inflation peaked in June
2022 and continues to
A one-time $5 trillion fiscal blowout ease, with interest rates
causes a one-time rise in the level below inflation until April
2023 and no recession.
of prices.
Why? Again, fiscal theory
provides a straightforward answer. A one-time $5 trillion fiscal blowout
causes a one-time rise in the level of prices, just enough to inflate away
the value of the debt by $5 trillion. Then inflation stops, even if the Federal
Reserve does nothing.
10 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2024

The Fed is still important in fiscal theory. The Fed bought about $
3 trillion
of the new debt and converted it to interest-paying reserves. Giving people
checks backed by reserves is arguably a more powerful inducement to
spend than giving people Treasury
bonds. Now, by raising interest
rates, the Fed lowers current
inflation but at the cost of
more-persistent infla-
tion. That smoothing is
beneficial.
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
H O O V E R D IG E S T • W inter 2024 11
These are core propositions of fiscal theory, stated ahead of time and at
odds with conventional theories.
What of supply shocks, as espoused by “team transitory”—for example,
Alan Blinder recently in the Wall Street Journal? In this view, as Blinder
describes it, “most of the rising inflation wasn’t due to an overheated
economy fueled by monetary and fiscal policy, but rather to several ‘special
factors’ that would disappear on their own. Principal among them were
rising prices for food and energy and supply-side bottlenecks from the
pandemic.”
There are two problems with this view. First, it confuses relative prices
with the price level. If televisions are in short supply, the price will rise
relative to other goods and wages. A supply shock can’t make the price of
everything go up unless the government gives people enough money or debt
to afford the higher prices. Second, it predicts that the price level, not the
inflation rate, will return to where it came from—that any inflation should be
followed by a period of deflation.
Monetarists also took a victory lap, noting the $4 trillion rise in M2
between the onset of the pandemic and inflation’s breakout in early 2021.
This rise was almost mechanical: the Treasury deposited checks in people’s
bank accounts, which are part of M2. After decades, M2 finally seemed to
have something to do with inflation.
But does money alone drive inflation? Suppose there had been no deficit,
and the Fed had done another $5 trillion of quantitative easing, buying
$5 trillion of bonds in exchange for $5 trillion in reserves. Would people with
$5 trillion more cash but
$5 trillion less Treasury
Witch hunts for “greed,” “price bonds, and thus no net
gouging,” and “monopoly” have increase in wealth, have
followed inflation for centuries. tried to spend money,
driving up prices? We
pretty much know the answer—similar QE throughout the 2010s had basi-
cally no effect on inflation. In the monetarist view, more money and less
bonds has exactly the same effect as more money and more bonds. In the
fiscal view, overall government debt, including reserves, matters, not its
particular maturity.
The Phillips Curve remains the predominant mode of thinking about infla-
tion, but this view has utterly failed. In this view, inflation is driven by output
and employment. A year ago, a loud chorus said that inflation couldn’t be
tamed without a recession, and without interest rates substantially above

inflation, as in the early 1980s. Yet inflation has eased, with interest rates
barely poking above inflation at all, and no recession in sight.
Witch hunts for “greed,” “price gouging,” and “monopoly” have followed
inflation for centuries. They too at best confuse relative prices for the level of
all prices and wages.
A fiscal point of view isn’t encouraging about the future, however. Infla-
tion is easing but remains high. The United States is running a scandalous
$1.5 trillion deficit with
unemployment at 3.8
percent (as of August) When the next crisis comes, will
and no temporary crisis markets have faith that the United
justifying such huge States can repay that additional
borrowing. Unfunded debt?
entitlements loom over
any plan for sustainable government finances. The Congressional Budget
Office projects constantly growing deficits, and even its warnings assume
nothing bad happens to drive another bout of borrowing.
Do people believe that the United States now can raise future taxes over
spending by $1.5 trillion a year to finance new debt without more inflation?
When the next crisis comes and Washington wants to borrow, say, $10 trillion
for more bailouts, stimulus, transfers, or perhaps a real war, will markets
have faith that the United States can repay that additional debt? If not,
another cycle of inflation will surely erupt, no matter what the Fed does with
interest rates.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2024 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Strategies for Monetary Policy, edited by John H.
Cochrane and John B. Taylor. To order, call (800)
888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
T H E ECO N O M Y
Sound as a
Dollar?
Rising US government debt threatens the value of
the US currency. Investors around the world are
acting accordingly.
By Kevin A. Hassett
W
ith Fitch’s shocking downgrade of the United States’ credit
rating last summer, the question of whether the United
States will default on its debts in the coming years has
become painfully urgent. Just how pressing the question
is can be shown by examining the debt held by the public relative to gross
domestic product from 1939 to 2022 and then projecting its growth through
2053, using the latest Congressional Budget Office forecast. Today, this
measure is almost as high as it was at the end of World War II, and it’s on
track to almost double by 2053. To put the 2053 number of 194.6 percent in
perspective: it would be roughly 75 percent higher than the peak of Weimar
Germany’s indebtedness before it experienced hyperinflation.
But perhaps Weimar Germany was an outlier. Such spikes in debt are
common throughout history. The question, of course, is what typically hap-
pens next.
Governments have often found themselves with massive amounts of debt
after wars or natural disasters. As a practical matter, a government in such
Kevin A. Hassett is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and

recently served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

a situation has but four options. It can, as Senator Bernie Sanders might rec-
ommend, confiscate the property of citizens to repay the debt. Exactly this
approach, Aristotle writes, was adopted in his time by the Ephesians, who
seized the jewelry of the rich women of Ephesus and used it to retire govern-
ment debts. The second approach would be to dramatically cut spending,
possibly combining this with option one. The third approach is more direct.
A government can sim-
ply default on its debt by
refusing to pay it back or History corroborates a connection
by modifying the terms between crisis and exploding debt.
to extend the repayment
period indefinitely. But by far the most common approach—option four—has
been currency debasement.
To begin a history of currency debasement, one must start with the aptly
named Dionysius I of Syracuse. The profligate and ruthless tyrant, who pur-
portedly drank himself to death, employed mercenaries to take command of
Syracuse and used them to terrorize his own people and even declare war on
Carthage. Mercenaries and wars, of course, can be quite costly, so Dionysius
quickly found himself with an unmanageable debt. In response, he laid out
the playbook that governments have reliably followed ever since. He ordered,
on pain of capital punishment, that all money be turned over to the govern-
ment. He then reminted the coins and changed the numbers, doubling their
value. One drachma was suddenly worth two. With this debased currency,
according to a historical account by historian Max Winkler, he “repaid” his
debts.
History corroborates the connection between war or crisis and explod-
ing debt. When Rome began the First Punic War, Winkler reports, its coins
contained twelve ounces of metal. After the war, Rome reduced the metal
content of its currency to two ounces. After the Second Punic War, the metal
content was reduced to one ounce. After the Third Punic War, it dropped
all the way to half an ounce. Each time, the government repaid its debts,
but lenders were left significantly worse off. Rather than engage in out-
right default, Rome repeated this practice throughout its history, perhaps
because Roman law required that someone who reneged on his debts be
disemboweled.
Sovereign default has historically put a heavy burden on the citizenry. But
as international capital markets evolved, default or debasement became even
more common, as it is often more politically feasible for a politician to cheat
foreign investors than to cheat his own citizens. But with this increasing
16 H O O VER DI GEST • Win ter 2024

integration of capital markets came an increased sensitivity of the global
economy to localized devaluations or defaults.
The worst modern example of this, of course, was the collapse of Weimar
Germany, which led to global economic calamity. The fact that the victorious
Allies extracted heavy
reparations from the
Germans is well known. Rather than engage in outright
What is perhaps less default, Rome repeatedly debased its
understood is that the currency.
reparations were needed
to pay the interest on the massive debts the Allies had incurred during
World War I. When the deutschmark dropped to a trillionth of its initial
value, and the Germans’ ability to pay reparations evaporated, the entire
international financial house of cards collapsed. Suddenly, in 1931, interna-
tional capital flows seized up, and many sovereigns stopped payment
on their debts. According to a fascinating IMF study, this episode
came about because of the complex web in which the government
finances of virtually every country are interwoven.
This is not to say that outright default is unknown. In a
recent historical review (“Empirical Research on Sovereign
Debt and Default,” National Bureau of Economic
Research working paper), economists Michael
Tomz and Mark L. J. Wright collected data
on 176 sovereign entities since 1820. They
found that there had been 248 defaults and that these tended to occur in
waves, the most recent of which was just a few decades ago. Given the
global explosion of debt after the COVID-19 pandemic, another wave is not
unthinkable.
Fine, a skeptic might say, but the United States would never default on
its debt. It will somehow find a way, as it always has. But the United States
has defaulted on its debts, or technically on its promises to pay, four times
already. The first default happened during the Civil War, when the convert-
ibility of the currency into precious metals was suspended. A similar decou-
pling of the currency from the promise to deliver precious metal happened as
recently as 1971.
Our skeptic might then turn to the US postwar experience. We honored
our debt from World War II, and the economy boomed. Perhaps we can just
return to the playbook that delivered that miracle?
Perhaps not. A recent study by economists Julien Acalin and Laurence M.
Ball (“Did the US Really Grow Out of Its World War II Debt?” NBER work-
ing paper) looked at the
methods that the US gov-
Given the global explosion of debt ernment used to restore
after COVID-19, another wave of balance and found that
defaults is not unthinkable. it relied on three tools
and a bit of good fortune.
The first tool was our old friend, currency debasement. The government
printed money, inflation was higher than expected, and bondholders were
paid back with devalued money, just as in Syracuse back in the day. The
second tool was something the literature refers to as “financial repression.”
The government ordered financial institutions to hold large quantities of US
debt while it kept the interest rate close to zero. Thus the runaway expense
was controlled, and the fact that low interest rates created little demand
for our debt was neutralized. The third tool was austerity. The government
recognized that it was in a perilous state, and so it regularly ran surpluses.
Finally, the economy helped. Until the 1970s, the economy grew at a rate
that was significantly higher than the interest rate. Higher incomes made it
easier to retire debt.
Today, our productivity slowdown and aging population make it unlikely
that the economic-growth rate will exceed the interest rate; and financial
repression, while an available tool, looks to be a dangerous one in the wake
of the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and other banks. Congress could decide
to run large surpluses in order to pay back the debt, but neither political

party seems willing to propose such a thing, which leaves us with the most
commonly relied-upon tool: inflation and consequent currency devaluation.
In other words, we know how this story has to end. Markets do as well.
At the start of the previous administration, the price of gold was about
$1,200 per ounce. Today it is closing in on $2,000. But gold is illiquid. People
would prefer a currency that can be used for everyday transactions but is
not exposed to what we might call the “Dionysian risks” associated with
government fiat. As a result, alternative, more-liquid stores of wealth have
blossomed on the Internet. Back at the start of 2017, Bitcoin was trading at
$1,000 per coin. Last fall, it was trading at close to $30,000.
One might consider these quests for dollar alternatives to be some sort of
speculative bubble. But a look at the exploding US debt and a careful study
of history suggest that investors around the world are engaged in a sensible
flight to relative safety.
Reprinted by permission of National Review. © 2024 National Review Inc.

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

Monetary Policy Got Behind the Curve—and How
to Get Back, edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H.
Cochrane, and John B. Taylor. To order, call (800)
T H E ECO N O M Y
Twisting the Tax

Code
The Biden administration is colluding with other
countries so that Congress feels pressured to
accept a global tax code. American voters and
lawmakers never agreed to that.
By Aharon Friedman and Joshua D. Rauh
O
ur Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right (subject to a
president’s veto) to impose taxes on the American people. The
right of a country to make its own tax law is an important aspect
of sovereignty. These United States were founded upon this
principle. Taxation without representation prompted the Boston Tea Party
and the American Revolution.
Sovereignty means respecting the right of each country to make its own
rules. However, the Biden administration, as reflected in a recent article by
former Treasury officials Natasha Sarin and Kimberly Clausing, in defending
its efforts to enact a global tax code advances a novel explanation of sover-
eignty and the Constitution: that the agreement negotiated by the adminis-
tration expands American sovereignty by giving Congress the freedom to
choose higher tax rates.
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.

A FOOT IN THE DOOR: Google has operations in countries such as Ireland,
with its Dublin headquarters shown here. The Biden administration is crafting
a formal agreement with the rest of the world to impose minimum tax rates; the
goal is to increase taxes on US firms’ domestic profits. [Artur Widak—NurPhoto]
The fact the Biden administration feels it necessary to craft a formal agree-
ment with the rest of the world to impose minimum tax rates proves that not
all countries prefer higher taxes. Forcing other countries to enact one’s own
policy preferences in order to make it easier to enact those policies at home
is not sovereignty but imperialism.
The Biden administration’s drive for a Global Tax Code, starting with major
corporations, violates our Constitution. By colluding with foreign nations, it aims
to do what Congress has refused to do: increase taxes on US firms’ domestic
profits. The administra-
tion has proposed trillions
Not all countries want higher taxes.
of dollars of tax hikes in
its annual proposed budgets, but a Congress controlled by Democrats in the
administration’s first two years rejected most of those proposals. The adminis-
tration responded by asking voters to elect a Congress supporting tax increases.
Instead, Republicans pledging to oppose tax hikes gained control of the House.
Rather than respect this decision by the American people, Treasury Sec-
retary Janet Yellen is trying to circumvent the elections and the Constitution
by colluding with foreign powers to raise taxes on American companies by
having those other countries raise taxes on profits earned in America. She
openly boasts that the agreement leaves congressional Republicans with no
choice but to raise taxes on American companies because, otherwise, other
countries will seize those taxes. The Godfather might call this an offer Con-
gress cannot refuse.
Sarin and Clausing mis-
Yellen is trying to circumvent leadingly claim that the
elections and the Constitution by agreement merely allows
colluding with foreign powers. a country like France to
tax the French subsidiary
of a US company to prevent shifting profits out of France. But the agree-
ment does much more. It purports to give the right to France to tax Ameri-
can companies’ domestic US profits, as well as those of all its “undertaxed”
foreign subsidiaries, as long as the company has any subsidiary in France.
France would claim this right if America’s tax rate is below the agreed
minimum, or America’s tax credits are not structured to France’s liking, or
if America allows its companies access to other countries’ tax breaks. The
amount France may seize can be many times the French subsidiary’s total
revenue, let alone profit.
It is true that from time immemorial, France could (in theory) tax or seize
assets from French subsidiaries of American companies on any grounds. But
it has not done so because every previous president would have retaliated
harshly. Yellen is not only refraining from promising to retaliate but actively
encouraging such action.
Do Democrats want to set the precedent that if Congress refuses a future
Republican president’s request to repeal tax provisions beloved by Demo-
crats, like green-energy tax credits, requesting foreign powers to effectively
do so is legitimate?
Sarin and Clausing claim that the global tax code would increase federal
tax revenue because companies would have less incentive to book profits
outside the United States. They ignore the recent conclusion of Congress’s
nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) that the agreement would
cost the United States more than $50 billion, even if Congress decided to
raise taxes on American companies in order to comply, and $100 billion oth-
erwise because foreign countries raising taxes on American companies will
be credited against US taxes.
Sarin and Clausing can disagree with JCT, but their dismissal of JCT
scores as arguments by “Republican lawmakers” is disingenuous. And if
JCT’s score is so unreasonable, Treasury should share its own scores instead
of refusing requests from Congress to do so.

Another argument made by Sarin and Clausing is that this deal reduces the
competitive disadvantages faced by US companies because of competitors in
low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions. But if the United States and Europe impose a
higher tax burden on companies than other competitive parts of the world to
partially fund their unsustainable budgets, does that then give us the right to
gang up on other countries? And if Sarin and Clausing are concerned about
companies within the United States that don’t have access to profit-shifting
to reduce their tax burden, an easy solution to that would be to simplify our
tax code to level the playing field against their multinational competitors—but
that is only possible if we retain control over our own tax code.
In addition, Sarin and Clausing want us to be upset that “companies pay
effective tax rates on their profits . . . lower than that of many middle-class
families.” But this is a false comparison. As Milton Friedman wrote, “Corpo-
rate officials may sign the check, but the money that they forward to Internal
Revenue comes from the corporation’s employees, customers, or stockhold-
ers.” Not only that, to the extent that individuals own corporate stock, and to
the extent that stockholders bear the benefits of lower corporate-tax rates,
the corporate tax is only the first layer—they must additionally pay capital-
gains tax and/or dividend taxes (20 percent if long term/qualified). Plus, for
wealthier shareholders, there is an additional 3.8 percent net-investment tax
and the additional 0.9 percent Medicare tax imposed by the Affordable Care
Act. State taxes too will kick in.
The authors allege that Republican concerns about sovereignty and the
Constitution are just a subterfuge to hide their real motivations. Accusing
members of Congress of not even believing their own arguments reflects
the contempt for Congress shown by Yellen’s Treasury in circumventing
Congress and instead asking foreign countries to impose tax increases on
American income if Congress refuses to do so.
Reprinted by permission of National Review. © 2024 National Review Inc.

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hooverpress.org.
RUSSI A A N D UKRAINE
NATO Holds
the Line
Nothing deterred Russia from invading Ukraine,
but deterrence didn’t fail completely. Vladimir
Putin hasn’t crossed any NATO borders—so far.
By Rose Gottemoeller
D
eterrence clearly failed in Ukraine.
In the run-up to Russia’s invasion Key points
in February 2022, America and its »» America and NATO are
assisting Ukraine, not
NATO allies took steps to warn
fighting for it. Russia is
Russia of dire consequences, including deep refraining from striking
sanctions and political excommunication. None NATO territory.
of that mattered to Vladimir Putin. »» The fast-moving nature

of the war’s strike-coun-
Some argue that NATO failed to deter Putin terstrike dynamic makes
because he has nuclear weapons. The Kremlin’s it impossible to see the
future.
nuclear saber-rattling feeds this view, bringing
»» NATO must take pains
nuclear weapons to public consciousness in a
to bolster proximity
way that they have not been for many years. deterrence, lest direct
And yet, as the war goes on, Russia has confrontation break out.
indeed been deterred. Although the Russians
Rose Gottemoeller is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a partici-

pant in Hoover’s Task Force on National Security. She is also the Steven C. Házy
Lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Stud-
ies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is a
former deputy secretary general of NATO.

RED LINES: A Polish soldier takes part in NATO exercises in the San Gregorio
training area in Spain. Regarding Ukraine, the status quo for America and NATO
means assisting Ukraine, but not fighting for it. For Russia, it means not striking
NATO territory. [Michał Zieliński—Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum]
rage against the arms and equipment that NATO countries are sending
to Ukraine, they have not once touched NATO territory to try to stop the
shipments. The Russians brag, often without confirmation, about destroying
NATO weapons in storage or on the battlefields in Ukraine, but they have not
disrupted transit in NATO countries.
So Russia and NATO
countries are equally
deterred from direct Although the Russians rage, they
confrontation, hewing have not once touched NATO territory
close to the principle to try to stop arms and equipment.
that President Biden
laid down at the outset of the invasion: the necessity to avoid a general war
in Europe that could escalate into global nuclear annihilation. For America
and NATO, this means assisting Ukraine, but not fighting for it. For Russia, it
means not striking NATO territory.
As the war continues, deterrence is taking on a more nuanced and
complex character that bears close watching. Take the efforts to continue
grain shipments out of
Black Sea ports despite
Both Moscow and Washington see the Russians’ withdrawal
the need to avoid a general war in from the unbrokered
Europe that could escalate into global grain deal. When Rus-
sia left the deal in July,
nuclear annihilation.
it declared a block-
ade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports, threatened commercial vessels with
attack, and began bombing Ukrainian ports, destroying grain silos and
infrastructure.
Ukraine responded by appealing to NATO allies to support its efforts to ship
grain and turning to its ports on the Danube. Although these river ports do
not have the capacity of the large Black Sea ports such as Odessa, they do have
certain advantages. One is their proximity to the Bosporus, which shortens the
time it takes for ships to exit the Black Sea.
Another is that a NATO country—Romania—is right across the river.
NATO has been alert to Russian missiles straying over alliance territory,
warning Moscow sharply and keeping its defenses on high alert. Likewise,
it has been policing Black Sea airspace adjacent to NATO countries that
border the sea—Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey—using a combination of
manned aircraft and drones.
These NATO actions are having a deterrence effect that is benefiting
Ukraine. The Russians have attacked the Ukrainian Danube ports of Izmail
and Reni, but not with the
massive firepower that
Russia has attacked Ukrainian has so damaged Odessa.
Danube ports, but not with the Likewise, for the commer-
massive firepower that has so cial vessels operating out
damaged Odessa. of Ukraine’s Danube ports,
the presence of NATO
aircraft over their shipping lanes provides some measure of security from
Russian attacks.
One might call this “proximity deterrence”: the closer a Ukrainian
facility is to NATO territory, the more it will avoid massive Russian
missile strikes. The more sea transport lanes there are close to NATO

shores, the more likely vessels operating there will escape Russian
attacks.
How long can this more nuanced notion of deterrence survive? After
all, it does have limits: NATO is not providing naval escorts for shipping,
and R ussia and Ukraine are engaged in a strike-counterstrike dynamic
that changes day by day. As Russia has struck hard at Ukraine’s Black
Sea ports, Ukraine has
responded by going
after Russian ports and There is evidence of “proximity
ships. It attacked the deterrence”: the closer a Ukrainian
port of Novorossiysk facility is to NATO territory, the more
on August 4, severely it will avoid massive Russian missile
damaging a naval vessel. strikes.
It has also targeted Rus-
sian shipping, attacking a tanker near the Kerch Bridge, which links Russia
to Crimea, and which Ukraine also damaged in July.
These attacks delivered a clear message to Putin: we are now able and will-
ing to strike back. The Ukrainians are skilled missileers and they are making
the most of their indigenous and rapidly evolving capabilities.
The fast-moving nature of this strike-counterstrike dynamic makes it
impossible to see the future. Indeed, on August 13, a Russian naval vessel
fired warning shots at a cargo ship headed for Izmail and boarded it for
inspection. The Ukrainian government responded by advising ships to sail
as close as possible to the northwestern coast of the Black Sea, through
the territorial waters of Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania.
As the dynamic continues to evolve, and potentially to spiral, NATO
must take pains to bolster proximity deterrence, keeping up its air-policing
of Black Sea transit lanes close to NATO states. It must post constant
reminders of the NATO promise to defend every inch of the alliance’s ter-
ritory, including Romanian territory across the Danube from Ukrainian
ports.
In this way, the alliance can continue to provide the benefits of proxim-
ity deterrence—with their inherent limits—to Ukraine’s Danube ports and
to shipping in and out of the Black Sea. However, were Russia to increase
the pressure in that neighborhood, NATO would face growing danger of
attacks straying onto its territory. That could be the moment at which
NATO-Russia deterrence fails, leading to direct confrontation. The stakes
could hardly be higher. Escalation, particularly nuclear escalation, must be
avoided at all costs.
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RU SSIA A N D U K R A IN E
Pushkin Gets the

Shove
As Ukraine sheds itself of everything Russian, it’s
hard times for an imperialist poet.
By Timothy Garton Ash
L
ast summer, I stood at the corner of what used to be Pushkin
Street in Kyiv. Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of
Ukraine in 2022, it has been renamed Yevhen Chykalenko Street,
after a major figure of the early twentieth-century Ukrainian inde-
pendence movement. To lovers of literature and opera, canceling A
lexander
Pushkin, poet and author of Eugene Onegin, might seem a bit over the top.
Putin, yes, but why Pushkin?
For Ukrainians, however, engaged in an existential struggle for their
independence against Russia’s war of recolonization, Pushkin is a symbol of
the Russian imperial-
ism that has long denied
Ukraine’s right to a sepa- To Ukrainians, Alexander Pushkin
rate national existence. symbolizes the Russian imperialism
Pushkin was a great poet that has long denied Ukraine’s right to
but he was also a poet a separate existence.
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).
of Russian imperialism, just as Rudyard
Kipling was a great poet but also a poet
of British imperialism.
Pushkin’s “Poltava” depicts the Ukrai-
nian Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa as a
fickle traitor to the heroic Russian czar
Peter the Great, who nonetheless
triumphed over the Swedes in
the 1709 Battle of Poltava—
and twelve years later formally
founded the Russian Empire.
As Russian forces bombarded
Ukraine in 2022, an officially distrib-
uted video showed Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov reciting lines
from Pushkin’s “To the Slander-
ers of Russia,” a poem fulminating
against Western supporters of Slavs
rebelling against Russia. Cutaways
to photos of US President Joe Biden
and a G7 summit made the message
plain. When Russian forces occu-
pied Kherson, billboards

featuring Pushkin were deployed in a propaganda campaign that proclaimed
Russia was “here forever.”
Small wonder some Ukrainians now refer on social media to “Pushkin
ists” launching missile attacks on their cities. For example: “Pushkinists
didn’t allow us to sleep
properly—it was very
loud in Kyiv.” (After a When Russian forces occupied
couple of late-night hours Kherson, Pushkin’s face appeared
in an air-raid shelter, I on billboards boasting that Russia
didn’t feel all that friend- was “here forever.”
ly to Pushkinists myself.)
Behind this Ukrainian rejection of Pushkin is a much larger story. With
hindsight, we can see that the decline of the Russian Empire has been one
of the great drivers of European history over the past forty years. And with
foresight, we should expect it to remain one of Europe’s greatest challenges
for at least the next twenty years, if not another forty.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire continued in a
rather peculiar form as the Soviet Union. When the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was founded in 1922, Vladimir Lenin decided it should be a state of
notional equality between its constituent union republics. (Josef Stalin, like
Putin a hundred years later, wanted Ukraine to be part of the Russian Fed-
eration.) After the Second World War, this novel version of empire dominated
IN SYNC: A Russian literacy poster from the 1920s quotes “A Bacchic Song,”
a Pushkin poem: “Long live the sun! And down with the night!” Nikolai
Rimsky-Korsakov set the poem to a choral score in 1876. Russia’s fondness
for Pushkin’s outlook and works has made him poet non grata in Ukraine.
[Poster collection—Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
Central and East European countries all the way to an Iron Curtain running
through the middle of Germany. From Warsaw to Washington, people saw it
as both a Soviet and a Russian empire.
In the 1970s, this imperial superpower still seemed to be a formidable rival
to the United States, even in parts of Africa and Latin America—but by the
1980s it was already in visible decline. Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempted reforms
culminated, between 1989 and 1991, in the most spectacular peaceful collapse of
any empire in history. This collapse dissolved not just Soviet/Russian control of
Central and Eastern Europe, but also the much older imperial bonds between
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Unusually, and precisely because of the complex
relationship between Soviet and Russia, it was the leader of the core imperial
nation, Russia’s Boris Yeltsin, who gave the final push.

Foolishly, many in the West assumed this was the end of the story, but
declining empires don’t give up without a struggle. The first signs of a push-
back were there already
in 1992 in a Russian army
occupation of what is still The Soviet collapse severed the much
the breakaway territory older imperial bonds between Russia,
of Transnistria, at the Ukraine, and Belarus.
eastern end of the newly
sovereign state of Moldova, as well as subsequently in two brutal wars to
subdue Chechnya inside the Russian Federation.
The empire then struck back decisively, across international frontiers,
with the occupation of two large areas of Georgia in 2008; the annexation
of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014; and
the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In his speeches
and essays, the Russian leader makes it perfectly clear that his primary
reference point is the Russian Empire. Surprised by his boss’s decision in
February 2022, Foreign Minister Lavrov reportedly muttered to a friendly
oligarch that Putin has only three advisers: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the
Great. And Catherine the Great.”
This history won’t be over even if Ukraine regains every square meter
of its sovereign territory, including Crimea. There will still be Belarus, a
country of more than nine million people that at the beginning of this decade
witnessed one of the most sustained efforts of civil resistance in modern his-
tory, against the increasingly autocratic rule of President Alexander Lukash-
enko. There are the independent post-Soviet states of Moldova, Georgia,
Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as those in Central Asia. Inside the Russian
Federation, there are republics such as Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tatarstan.
At the moment, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov is one of Putin’s most loyal
henchmen, but if Russia enters a “time of troubles,” Kadyrov might begin to
make other calculations.
We in the West should not kid ourselves that we can “manage” the decline
of this nuclear-armed empire, any more than European powers could “man-
age” the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Western democracies have a chronic tendency to overes-
timate their ability to influence the domestic politics of authoritarian regimes.
Our possibilities of direct influence are especially minimal in today’s Russia, a
personalist dictatorship in an advanced state of paranoia and repression.
After Putin, and perhaps his immediate successors, there should come a
moment when we have more possibilities of constructive engagement, and
we should prepare for that. But it will be a long time before Russia finally
accepts that it has lost an empire and begins to find a role.
What we can and must do in the meantime is to ensure that those coun-
tries that seek a better future outside a declining Russian Empire are able
to do so in peace, security, and freedom. Geopolitics, like nature, abhors a
vacuum. In the long run, bringing Ukraine and its smaller neighbors into
both the European Union and NATO, thus securing them against any future
attempt at recolonization, will be a service also to Russia. With the door to
empire finally closed, it can start the long walk to nation-statehood. That
walk will, however, be especially difficult because, unlike old European states
such as France and Portugal, which acquired and then lost overseas empires,
Russia has no historically, geographically, or constitutionally well-defined
state to return to.
Another post-imperial future was possible. Russian-language literature
could have been enriched by the work of Ukrainian and other postcolonial
writers, as English literature has been enriched by the work of South Asian,
African, and Caribbean
writers. Trying to restore
Trying to restore the “Russian world” the “Russian world” by
by force, Putin has destroyed it. force, Putin has destroyed
it. In May 2013, 80 percent
of Ukrainians said they had a positive general attitude to Russia. In May 2023,
only 2 percent of the Ukrainians that pollsters could still reach gave that
answer. And Pushkin Street has been renamed. Putin has done for Pushkin.
Only when Ukraine is securely embraced by both the strong arms of the geo-
political West, the EU, and NATO, will its people be able to sleep easily, as Esto-
nians and Lithuanians do, untroubled by nightly attacks from “Pushkinists.”
Then Ukrainians might even go back to reading Eugene Onegin with pleasure.
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FOR E IGN POLICY
Cold Comfort
If Cold War truly has returned, so have its many
lessons, including this one: authoritarians will be
proven wrong.
By Condoleezza Rice and Niall Ferguson
T
he intensifying rivalry between America and China has led many
to speak of a second Cold War. Others reject the analogy. We can
say this: the world’s two largest economies seem to have little
space for cooperation and a great deal of room for conflict.
The greatest difference with the first Cold War is, of course, the origin of
this rivalry. After the Second World War, the two superpowers, the United
States and the Soviet Union, settled quickly into confrontation. They had
little in common. The Soviet Union was a military giant but an economic
recluse, isolated from most of the global economy.
China, conversely, was brought into the international economy by its own
choices under Deng Xiaoping and by the decisions of global capitalists. For
thirty years it benefited from integration and access to foreign capital and
know-how. Along the way, China acquired an aptitude for indigenous innova-
tion, not just intellectual-property theft.
Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director and the Thomas and
Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the Denning
Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford University’s Graduate
School of Business as well as a professor of political science at Stanford. 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 His-
tory Lab. He also participates in Hoover’s task forces on military history, digital
currency, global policy, and semiconductors.

China had been chipping away at American power for years. But it took the
more frontal approach of Xi Jinping, who speaks of surpassing America in
frontier technologies and calls the Taiwan Strait Chinese national waters,
to shock America and its allies into fully understanding the challenge
ahead.
FIVE COLD WAR LESSONS

China has built an impressive global network of telecommunications
infrastructure, underwater cables, port access, and military bases
(or rights to build them) in client states. With each project, Chinese
influence has evolved from pure mercantilism to a desire for political
influence. If nothing else, the scale of China’s market has a magnetic
attraction.
America has been slow to react. Too often it resorts to public
cajoling of other countries to resist Chinese investment, while
offering too few alternatives.
The truth is, though, that China’s foreign-investment strategy
is beginning to show cracks. Its “loan to own” approach, its reliance
on Chinese rather than local workers, and infrastructure construction
failures—including some spectacular accidents—are arousing resent-
ment in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere.
In the Cold War and after, the Marshall Plan, the Peace
Corps, the American-backed “green revolution” in Indian
agriculture, and the PEPFAR initiative to tackle HIV/AIDS showed that
America could improve the lives of people abroad. The question today is
how far it can take advantage of Chinese missteps with an equally effective
strategy.
From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Hoover Institution, where we are
both fellows, fostered the study of the Cold War. Its archives remain
crucial to scholars of the
period. We would do well
It took Xi Jinping to shock America to understand it and to
and its allies into fully understanding take its lessons to heart.
the challenges. Five stand out.
The first is that allies
matter, for both good and ill. China has clients that are beholden to it in
one way or another. The most important, Russia, has become a liability
because of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. For now, China finds itself
trying to support its Russian “partner without limits” while staying on
the right side of the American and European sanctions line. It is a tough
balancing act.
America, meanwhile, is blessed with a European alliance revitalized
by its firm response to Russia’s aggression and a measurably stronger
NATO with the addition of Finland and, assuming holdouts ratify its
membership, Sweden. America also has strong allies in Asia such as
South Korea and Japan, and in Australia. Its relationship with India is
deepening.
The second lesson is that deterrence requires military capability that
matches the rhetoric surrounding it. China has been improving every aspect
of its military capability while the war in Ukraine and wargaming about
Taiwan have revealed
weaknesses in the West’s.
A war between America and China The West must respond
could be even more dangerous than immediately by procuring
one with the Soviet Union would more advanced weap-
onry, developing secure
have been.
supply chains for critical
materials and components, and rebuilding the defense-industrial base. Peace
through strength really does work.
Third, engage in efforts to avoid accidental war. To this day we benefit
from contacts between the American and Russian armed forces (estab-
lished during the Cold War) to prevent an accident between them. Given the

nature of today’s technologies, not least artificial intelligence, a war between
America and China could be even more dangerous than one with the Soviet
Union would have been. China has been unwilling to discuss accident preven-
tion, despite near-misses between Chinese and American planes and ships.
That is a mistake.
Fourth, remember
George Kennan, the In the past, authoritarian rulers have
American diplomat based mistaken the cacophony of freedom
in Moscow who wrote the for weakness.
“Long Telegram.” The
greatest insight in Kennan’s essay-length message, wired to Harry Truman’s
State Department in 1946, was to point clearly to the disadvantages that
plagued the Soviet Union. He advised his government to deny Moscow scope
for external expansion, and argued that the Soviet Union’s own internal con-
tradictions would eventually weaken it.
China is economically stronger than the Soviet Union ever was, but there,
too, contradictions are showing. A deflating property sector, high youth
unemployment, and disastrous demographics all plague China. Authoritarian
leaders prefer the certainties of political control over the risks of economic
liberalization.
IT’S NOT TOO LATE

The final lesson of the first Cold War is that nothing is inevitable. The
leaders of that time never underestimated the challenge before them. Suc-
cess today will require democracies to come to terms with their own flaws
and contradictions—not least, fractures in society caused by ethnic, social,
and class differences and the tendency for these to be amplified in online
echo chambers. Failure to safeguard the legitimacy of political institu-
tions that protect freedom has led to plummeting confidence in democracy
itself.
Still, it is worth remembering that democracies have been counted out
before by authoritarian rulers who mistook the cacophony of freedom
for weakness and assumed that the suppression of dissenting voices in
their own societies was a sign of strength. From Harry Truman to Ronald
Reagan to George H. W. Bush, the best Cold War presidents understood
that the authoritarians were wrong. If this generation of leaders can show
similar resolve, the outcome of this new superpower rivalry—whether it is
a second Cold War or something new—should be another victory for the
free world.
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CHIN A A N D TA IWA N
Beijing’s Bill
Comes Due
China favored socialist dictates over market
principles. Now it must pay for its economic
mismanagement.
By Mickey D. Levy
C
hina has evolved from an engine of global growth to a source
of weakness and risk, and it has its leaders and their economic
policies to blame. Sizable government-generated excesses in real
estate and debt are unraveling, weighing heavily on economic
performance and government finances. Declines in household net worth are
undercutting confidence and consumer spending. Many of the largest land
developers have gone into bankruptcy or defaulted on their debt. Global
economies and trade are also adversely affected. The US and Japanese
experiences with real estate
bubbles suggest that China
China will probably need years
will probably need years
to revive economic activity.
to unwind its excesses and
revive dampened economic activity, and a fundamental assessment points to
dramatically slower potential growth.
China’s path from impoverished nation to the world’s second-biggest econ-
omy and leading exporter was built on an odd combination. Chinese leaders
Mickey D. Levy is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution and senior

economist at Berenberg Capital Markets.

allowed US-style free enterprise to thrive alongside their central command-
and-control regime, which dictated the allocation of resources. The capitalist
elements took advantage of China’s abundant low-cost labor, ramped up capi-
tal investment, and drove innovation and entrepreneurship that generated
sizable gains in productivity. Foreign physical and financial capital flowed
into China, which acquired international technological know-how through
both legal and illegal avenues. The economic results were remarkable: during
the period 2000–14, China accounted for 30 percent of global growth and its
share of global exports rose from 4 percent to 14 percent. Profits from its
world-leading export-related manufacturing generated substantial wealth
that was used to build productivity-enhancing infra-
structure and a modern society.
COOLING OFF: A Chinese steelworker fabricates materials at a mill in Huaian
City, Jiangsu province. Starting around 2000, profits from China’s world-lead-
ing export-related manufacturing generated substantial wealth, which was
used to build productivity-enhancing infrastructure and a modern society.
Productivity gains have now slowed. [Cfoto/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom]
Chinese leader Xi Jinping began clamping down on free enterprise in 2012

in favor of China’s socialist ideals and enhanced central control. He mis-
takenly believed that adhering to a socialist regime would maintain strong
economic growth. China’s potential growth began to decelerate naturally
as its labor and capital usage rose toward capacity, and productivity gains
slowed, raising costs of production. The crackdown on the high-productivity
high-tech and social media firms has been particularly damaging.
Xi continued China’s long-standing central-planning practice of establish-
ing annual GDP growth targets, and as potential growth decelerated, those
targets became unrealistically high. While growth in consumer spending, pri-
vate business investment, and exports simmered down, the high GDP targets
were achieved through more and more government investment focused on
infrastructure and real estate that relied heavily on debt financing.

Two telltale signs suggested that the run of strong GDP growth was unsus-
tainable. First, gross capital formation (private plus government investment)
remained above 40 percent of GDP, far above that of other nations, with a
high and rising share investment in residential properties. This resource
misallocation pointed to lower productivity and future problems. Second,
financing the government investment relied heavily on debt, and the murky
web of flows that serviced the debt spelled trouble.
ANALYZING THE PROBLEM

Unlike in the United States, Chinese fiscal policy is financed partially by
the central government and heavily by local governments, and admin-
istered largely by local governments, as dictated by leaders in Beijing.
Local government leaders met their GDP targets largely through invest-
ment spending on infrastructure and residential real estate activities.
They relied heavily on land sales to real estate developers and borrowing
through massive bond issuances. Local government financing vehicles
(LGFVs) and shadow banks were heavy purchasers of the local govern-
ment bonds. The LGFVs also invested directly in infrastructure projects,
financed by leverage, and purchased land (on orders from Beijing when
real estate softened). The LGFVs and shadow banks relied on fragile fund-
ing sources, including wealth managers that sought higher returns than
provided by yields on deposits in the large state-owned enterprise (SOE)
banks. Individual purchasers of bonds and investors in wealth manage-
ment funds bore the risks, with large and often unspecified exposures to
real estate. Private land developers also relied heavily on leverage and
bond issuance. Before defaulting in 2021, Evergrande, a top Chinese devel-
oper that subsequently filed for bankruptcy, had an estimated $340 billion
of debt.
Official government statistics place the central government’s debt-
to-GDP ratio at 22 percent through 2022, significantly below the United
States’ 123 percent or Europe’s 89 percent. However, LGFVs are treated
as private entities and their debt is counted as corporate debt, which has
ballooned. Total Chinese government debt, including central government,
local government, LGFV, policy bank, and implicit (schools, hospitals, etc.),
is conservatively estimated at 142 percent of GDP. This ratio is above those
of the United States and Europe but well below Japan’s 264 percent. As in
Japan, the largest portion of Chinese government debt is held by domestic
creditors, particularly as foreign holders have reduced their exposure in
response to mounting credit problems of China’s real estate developers.
China’s fiscal policy and debt financing hinged critically on rising real
estate values and expectations. The mounting excesses in real estate
began unraveling in late 2021 as expectations shifted down and housing
demand fell. Land sales and construction collapsed. This undercut local
government finances. More than fifty developers have filed for bank-
ruptcy or defaulted. Some cash-strapped local governments are having
trouble servicing their debt and have requested financial support from
Beijing.
CONSEQUENCES
The Chinese economy must now adjust to the unwinding of the govern-
ment-generated excesses in real estate and debt. Signs of weakness are
spreading. Real estate activity and prices are falling. A reported sixty-
four of sixty-nine cities
report declining prices
The economy must now adjust to the of existing residences,
unwinding of China’s government- and mounting anec-
generated excesses in real estate dotal evidence and debt
and debt. defaults by leading land
developers suggest
declines are steeper than data provided by China’s National Bureau of
Statistics (NBS). Expectations that prices will fall further are deterring
home purchasers.
Consumer spending is weak, reflecting job losses and lower wages in
manufacturing, while household net worth that had become overweight-
ed on real estate has fallen sharply. Consumer confidence has fallen
sharply and will undercut government efforts to stimulate spending. The
NBS has decided to stop publishing the unfavorable confidence survey
data.
Gross capital formation is now a key source of weakness in the domestic
economy. Private business investment is soft, and the financial challenges
facing local governments and LGFVs are severely constraining government
investment spending.
China’s exports and imports are both falling. Exports fell in July 2023 by
14.6 percent year over year in US dollar terms (9.3 percent in yuan terms).
Weak global demand for Chinese goods reflects slow growth globally, with
softer US goods consumption; overall weak conditions in Europe; and efforts
by advanced economies to reduce reliance on Chinese goods and supply
chains. China’s exports to advanced nations fell by larger percentages, but

its exports to Russia have soared over 70 percent in the past year from a
relatively small base.
The sharp decline in Chinese imports in July—down 12.2 percent year over
year in USD terms and 6.7 percent in yuan terms—is associated with weak
domestic demand. Falling imports of consumer goods reflects soft consump-
tion, while the slump in production in China’s export-related manufacturing
sectors lowers the demand for imported capital goods.
The unreliability of China’s official data increases the difficulty of
assessing true economic conditions. Not surprising, the NBS has stopped
publishing select data that are particularly downcast; besides consumer
confidence (no longer released after April 2023), the youth unemployment
rate, over 21 percent in its last reading, is no longer published. Forecasting
China’s GDP growth is perhaps more a game of estimating what China’s
leaders and the bureau of statistics choose to publish than a forecast
of realistic trends. Anecdotal evidence is dominated by signs of empty
apartment complexes rather than construction cranes; weaker consumer
spending is confirmed by declining imports from Japan and South Korea;
and the highly publicized failures and bankruptcies of China’s major build-
ing developers continue to jar bond markets. A critical issue influencing
GDP forecasting is whether China has the financing bandwidth to main-
tain rapid spending of government.
GLOBAL JITTERS
China’s economic weakness is spreading internationally, contributing to
declining global trade volumes that have fallen below pre-pandemic levels.
Nations and companies with large export exposure to China have been the
hardest hit. Asia, the
world’s biggest trad-
ing bloc, is feeling the China’s economic weakness is
biggest impact. Exports spreading around the world.
of every major Asian
nation (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, India)
and Australia are falling, although levels remain above their pre-pandemic
trend lines. Many emerging economies that rely heavily on exporting com-
modities and industrial materials to China are also experiencing declining
exports and falling prices.
European economies have significant exposure to China, both directly and
indirectly, and are experiencing declining manufacturing production. Ger-
many has significant export exposure to China, particularly in motor vehicles
and parts. China is excelling in the production of electric vehicles (EVs) and
has surpassed Japan and Germany as the world’s largest auto exporter.
The United States is better situated, with relatively less export exposure
to China. Its export of merchandising goods as a percentage of GDP is
nearly one-third less than Europe’s share, according to OECD data. More-
over, the United States’ largest trading partners—Canada and Mexico—
are better positioned than most nations and may benefit from an increase
in production facilities as global companies reduce their supply chain
exposures to China.
HARD LESSONS IN JAPAN AND AMERICA

The history of excesses in real estate, debt, and asset price bubbles—Japan
in the late 1980s and the United States in the early 2000s—suggests China’s
unwinding will be long, and likely an economic drag for years.
The US debt-financed housing bubble of the early 2000s offers a useful
comparison. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored
enterprises that finance and support mortgage lending, infused excessive
risk-taking and leverage into the mortgage market, creating systemic risk.
The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. These factors led to exces-
sive reliance on debt and boosted home values. When expectations of home
values shifted down, complex derivatives of the mortgage debt unraveled and
devastated the mortgage market.
The origin of Japan’s excesses had different parallels to China. Japan’s
economy boomed from the conclusion of World War II through the mid-
1980s, and then slowed as it approached capacity. Japanese leaders failed
to acknowledge that its potential growth had slowed, and the Bank of Japan
kept rates artificially low to pump up growth. The low rates did not gener-
ate faster growth or consumer price inflation but instead generated a severe
asset price bubble, with the Nikkei and property prices rising to dizzying
heights. At the peak, Japan’s debt levels were moderate, far below China’s
current ratios as a percent of GDP. The Bank of Japan raised rates to let
some air out of the bubble, which led to a collapse of 75 percent in the Nikkei
and a 70 percent decline in land values.
Both episodes, the unwinding of the US debt-financed housing bubble
and Japan’s asset price bubble, were long and dampened economic perfor-
mance. The unraveling of the US mortgage and short-term funding mar-
kets provoked a financial crisis. Household balance sheets were crippled.
Insolvent big banks that were overinvested in risky mortgage-backed
assets required capital infusions from the government. Bank loans declined

through 2013 and the recovery from the “global financial crisis” was soft.
Japan’s government did not acknowledge that the collapse in asset prices
had generated insolvent conditions in banks, which were allowed to con-
tinue operating. Bank lending fell and Japan incurred a “lost decade” of
on-and-off recession and mild deflation. The Japanese government finally
recapitalized and reorganized the banking system in 1997, financed by ris-
ing government debt.
China has already acknowledged its real estate woes and is providing
capital and regulatory support, but the harm to consumer balance sheets
and government finances poses major challenges. In particular, the blow to
government finances will severely crimp fiscal stimulus and the ability of
government investment spending to prop up GDP growth. China’s leaders
will probably manage to avoid a financial crisis or an extended Japan-style
bout of recession and mild deflation, but they will be unable to avoid the drag
on growth.
THE GROWTH OUTLOOK

Beyond the necessary unwinding of excesses, China faces diminished
longer-run potential growth. Its biggest problem is its leaders’ rejection of
US-style free enterprise and capitalism, the primary driver of its sustained
robust growth that made it an economic powerhouse in the first place.
Realistically, China’s leadership will continue to be guided by communist
ideals while clamping down on entrepreneurship and capitalistic behavior
deemed inconsistent with those ideals. In this context, consider the basic
foundations of potential economic growth: growth in labor force and capi-
tal, and productivity.
China’s population and labor force are declining. The realities of its one-
child policy have caught up with demographics and will persist. That leaves
capital and productivity to pick up the slack. Gross capital formation will
continue to grow rapidly, but a high and rising share will be government
investment spending, including government allocations to low-productivity
state-owned enterprises. Weakened local-government finances will limit
investment spending and fiscal stimulus. Business investment in capital
will be constrained by government mandates and regulations and by slower
growth of the economy, profits, and cash flows.
The prospects for sustained rapid productivity gains are diminished by the
high and rising government share of gross capital formation and outsized
allocations to the large, low-productivity SOEs, while the government contin-
ues to suppress China’s highly productive private sector.
Meanwhile, the large and highly productive export-related manufacturing
sectors have begun to feel the impact of efforts by Western nations to reduce
their reliance on Chinese supply chains. This trend is gathering momentum,
with measurable impacts on China’s exports. The Biden administration
has placed limits on US
exports of advanced semi-
A reasonable intermediate-term conductors and quantum-
estimate of China’s potential growth computing capabilities to
is approximately 2 to 3 percent. China and investments
in China that are deemed
important to US national security. Other Western nations are following suit.
China needs such key inputs for its advanced semiconductor and AI develop-
ment, and for its ability to acquire critical technological know-how. This will
constrain productive capacity.
The last official government target for real GDP was 5 percent, but Chi-
nese leaders have backed away from that. They understand that the economy
is sputtering and that fiscal stimulus is limited by the government’s stretched
finances. A reasonable intermediate-term estimate of China’s potential
growth is approximately 2 to 3 percent. Straining for a higher target would
require excessive reliance on government investment in unproductive activi-
ties that would further lower potential growth. Setting a much lower growth
target would be economically rational but the government is highly unlikely
to take such a sharp departure.
Obviously, this puts Chinese leaders in a bind. They are struggling with the
tradeoff between adhering to socialist ideals and maintaining central control
over their citizens, and
weaker economic per-
While no longer the engine of global formance and the unwel-
growth, China is still a powerhouse, come social effects that
the world’s second-largest economy. may follow.
While China is no lon-
ger the engine of global growth, it remains a powerhouse as the world’s
second-largest economy and is highly innovative in an array of high-tech
sectors. Its market for many consumer goods is the biggest in the world.
The surge in China’s production and export of EVs highlights its economic
prowess. Even if its domestic demand growth remains weak and foreign
demand for Chinese goods gradually slows, China will remain the larg-
est and most important manufacturing and global trading hub for years
to come.

But China’s biggest trading partners and the world’s economies must
adjust to—and brace themselves for—permanently slower growth and
continuing challenges. Beyond the implications for economic conditions, this
new climate will have profound implications for China’s geopolitical posture
and strategies.
Special to the Hoover Digest.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is China’s

Influence and American Interests: Promoting
Constructive Vigilance, edited by Larry Diamond and
Orville Schell. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
C H IN A A N D TAIWAN
Silicon Triangle
Taiwan and the semiconductor industry are
intertwined. In a time of Chinese aggression,
keeping them both secure calls for partnerships
and preparedness.
By Larry Diamond, Jim Ellis, and Orville Schell
T
wo of the biggest areas
of risk in an increasingly Key points
fraught US-Chinese rela- »» The United States has two
intertwined interests: safeguard
tionship are the security of the security of global chip supply
Taiwan and the security of the semi- chains and ensure security and
autonomy for Taiwan.
conductor supply chain. Each is high
»» The United States must ensure
stakes and difficult in its own right. But
that its demand for semiconduc-
taken together, they become even more tors is met by friendly countries
challenging. Although each is critically in stable trading partnerships.
important to the United States, their »» Federal and state governments

should ease regulatory obsta-
solutions do not always neatly align. The cles to domestic chip-making
most obvious ways to reduce the risk in capacity.
one area can easily increase risk in the
Larry Diamond is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institu-
tion and the co-chair of Hoover’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and
on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. Jim Ellis (US Navy, Ret.) is the Annenberg
Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover and a member of Hoover’s task forces
on national security, energy policy, and military history. He co-chairs Hoover’s
Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region. Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross
Director of the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations. They are the editors
of Silicon Triangle: The United States, Taiwan, China, and Global Semi-
conductor Security (Hoover Institution Press, 2023).

CHIPS AHOY: The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. factory takes
shape in north Phoenix, where full-scale operations are scheduled to start
in 2024. President Biden gave a speech celebrating the project at the site in
December 2022, during his first trip to Arizona of his presidency. The United
States is making a priority of such investments to create jobs and enhance the
resilience of US supply chains. [Kyodonews/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom]
other. Finding a way to manage this treacherous “silicon triangle” among

Beijing, Taiwan, and Washington is thus one of the most important—and
trickiest—challenges for US foreign policy today.
The United States remains a world leader in semiconductor research and
design, but its share of global manufacturing has fallen from 37 percent in
1999 to 12 percent today.
Taiwan now accounts for
the largest share of fabri- China could suddenly gain dominance
cation by far—producing over the most critical manufactured
60 percent of the world’s commodity in the world.
chips and more than
90 percent of its leading-edge logic chips, key components in the world’s most
advanced communications tools and computers and critical in the race for
leadership in artificial intelligence. After Taiwan, the other top manufactur-
ers of semiconductors are South Korea (which leads in the production of
memory chips), Japan, and China, in that order. The United States has fallen
to fifth place.
Policy makers broadly recognize the dangers of leaving the supply chain of
such an essential component in an increasingly digital economy vulnerable
to prolonged disruption—or worse, to deliberate denial by an adversary. The
“chip famine” that emerged globally in 2020 wreaked havoc across a wide
variety of industries. Worse still would be a chip shortage, or an embargo
imposed by a hostile power, that crippled the production and maintenance of
advanced US weapons systems.
That fear is one of many reasons for concern about the security of Taiwan.
Beijing’s escalating military and geopolitical pressure raises an enormous
risk for the United States and its allies: if Beijing were able to success-
fully seize Taiwan, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s regime could suddenly gain
dominance over the most critical manufactured commodity in the world—if
the conflict did not disable or destroy much of Taiwan’s capacity to produce
semiconductors.
Some strategists assume that the semiconductor industry constitutes a
“silicon shield” for Taiwan, because chips are now so critically important
to the global economy and to China’s economy that in the absence of an
extreme crisis or provocation, Chinese leaders would be unlikely to risk a
conflict that could destroy or severely disrupt China’s own (and the world’s)
supply of chips. What is more, the reliance of much of the rest of the world
on Taiwan’s semiconductor industry gives a host of other governments an
added stake in deterring conflict over Taiwan. Yet placing too much stock
in this logic would be
unwise; if Beijing decides
Chips may be “the new oil,” in one to use force, it will be
view, but their journey from raw impelled principally by
material to end use is far more other political and geopo-
litical reasons.
complex.
In this silicon triangle,
the United States has two intertwined interests: to safeguard the security
of global supply chains for semiconductors—which must include some
prudent degree of reshoring of production—and to ensure security and
autonomous choice for Taiwan. The challenge is to forge a cooperative
strategy in which the pursuit of each goal does not undermine the other.
That requires building on the unique geopolitical strength of the United
States—its dense web of partnerships and alliances—to enhance the resil-
ience of the supply chain while at the same time working with Taiwan to

jointly strengthen military and economic capabilities to deter aggression by
Beijing.
The United States needs investment from Taiwan to expand semiconduc-
tor manufacturing on American soil, thus creating jobs and enhancing the
resilience of US supply chains; Taiwan needs the security assistance of the
United States to protect both its semiconductor industry and its democracy
from aggression. Pursued together, while also deepening cooperation with
other US partners and allies crucial to global semiconductor production,
these aims can reinforce one another in ways that will enhance both supply
chain resilience and the security of Taiwan.
BRINGING THE CHIPS HOME

In strategic terms, chips may be “the new oil,” as one formulation posits,
but their journey from raw material to end use is far more complex. Their
production depends on advanced designs and enormously sophisticated (and
expensive) equipment. The most advanced chips are “fabbed” by state-of-
the-art machines that use extreme ultraviolet lithography. These machines
are produced by just one company, Advanced Semiconductor Materials
Lithography, which is based in the Netherlands. In addition to raw materi-
als and highly capital-intensive plants and equipment, production requires
a close-knit, highly educated, and well-trained workforce of engineers and
technicians. Once fabricated, chips must go through assembly, testing, and
packaging, which are most often done in other plants in other countries.
And each fab is also dependent on continual program upgrades and techni-
cal maintenance. Often,
these critical roles are
divided among different It’s wise to locate production of many
countries. The United kinds of chips on US soil. But global
States, accordingly, must supply chains will remain.
aim to ensure that the
bulk of its demand for semiconductors (including the most advanced chips)
is filled at each step in the supply chain by friendly countries committed to
maintaining stable trading partnerships.
It is wise to seek to locate production of a wide variety of chips on US soil
by providing financial incentives for reshoring, as the 2022 CHIPS and Sci-
ence Act does. But even if the United States doubles its share of global chip
production in the coming years, it will still depend heavily on global supply
chains, which must engage trusted partners. Principally, these will be the
United States’ friends and allies, not just Taiwan but also France, Germany,
Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea. (India is also poised to
become a player in the industry, and the United States should help encour-
age investment in manufacturing there.) And even chip manufacturing in
the United States will depend on working with the most technologically
capable companies, many of them non-American. Taiwan Semiconduc-
tor Manufacturing Company, for example, is already building a $12 billion
manufacturing plant for leading-edge chips in Phoenix. In December 2022, it
announced it would build a second, even more advanced plant there, bring-
ing TSMC’s total investment in the United States to $40 billion, already
exceeding the $39 billion in subsidies for US chip manufacturing provided
by the CHIPS Act.
In addition to subsidies, the United States must provide lower costs, ample
infrastructure, expanded services, and engineering talent to attract further
private investment in semiconductor manufacturing. Congress can help by
extending 100 percent tax depreciation for short-lived capital assets (a rule
that has lapsed). Doing so would reduce the massive upfront costs of semi-
conductor manufacturing equipment needed to set up a new fab and offset
other construction costs that TSMC has estimated to be four times higher
in the United States than in Taiwan. Congress should also extend the chip
manufacturing tax credit in the CHIPS Act beyond its 2027 sunset provision
and broaden the credit to cover key material inputs and the manufacture of
equipment.
Federal and state government should also ease regulatory burdens to
make it possible to construct plants in the United States more quickly. Given
the industry’s relatively short technology cycles, multiyear environmental
reviews will make a significant expansion in chip manufacturing a futile
task. States can also help lure investment by ensuring adequate water and
electricity supplies and providing incentives for related service and equip-
ment companies, fostering the kinds of geographic clusters that helped drive
Taiwan’s semiconductor miracle.
Partnering with Taiwan also offers huge opportunities on the technologi-
cal front. US research centers and universities can benefit from Taiwanese
support on talent development, while Taiwanese firms can benefit from
expanding research and development efforts in the United States. US
policy could help incentivize such collaborations. It could invite leading
semiconductor companies from Taiwan (as well as from South Korea) to
join the United States’ new public-private National Semiconductor Technol-
ogy Center, while also building on efforts such as a collaboration between
Purdue University and the Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek to develop a

new joint chip design center. Policy makers can also enhance education and
training in the United States, by encouraging the “semiconductor colleges”
embedded in Taiwan’s top universities to partner with a proposed American
Semiconductor Academy, as well as providing more funding for Taiwanese
students to study in the United States and for American students to study
in Taiwan. Broader economic and technological ties between the United
States and Taiwan would also be strengthened by a treaty precluding double
taxation of expatriate workers and by completing negotiations on a free
trade agreement.
Yet as it fosters chip manufacturing at home, Washington must do
more to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Here, key lessons of the war in
Ukraine are instructive.
Although it is always
better to deter an attack Washington must do more to deter a
than to try to repel it, Chinese attack on Taiwan. The war in
both tasks depend on Ukraine is instructive.
the delivery of effec-
tive w
eaponry—especially the kind of mobile weaponry that can help turn
Taiwan into a “porcupine” that the People’s Liberation Army would be
unable to swallow. The United States must do more to help Taiwan get the
additional advanced weapons it needs. Given the long delays in Pentagon
procurement, Washington should pursue licensing agreements with Tai-
wan’s manufacturing sector to rapidly scale up local production of weapons
such as Javelin antitank missiles, Stinger surface-to-air missiles, drones,
and satellite communications systems.
COMPETITION WILL PERSIST

As it strengthens partnerships with and attracts investment from friends
and allies, the United States must also exercise vigilance about China’s semi-
conductor ambitions. It is not realistic or desirable to freeze China out of the
global supply chain entirely. Instead, the goal must be to ensure that neither
China nor any other potential future adversary can weaponize its position in
semiconductor supply chains. On the domestic front, this will require more
vigorous and transparent review of inbound investments by the Committee
on Foreign Investment in the United States to ensure that potential adver-
saries do not acquire effective control over key US technologies. There may
also be value in reviewing and restricting outbound investments in critical
foreign technologies, and in implementing new technology export controls to
protect the most sensitive US intellectual property—building on the Biden
administration’s decision to restrict the export of technologies and tools that
would help China make advanced logic chips.
Another risk to guard against is Chinese dumping of certain kinds of
lower-end chips, which could allow Beijing to drive out competitors from and
achieve a dominant position in important segments of the market. These
“legacy” chips are heavily used not only in consumer products but also in US
weapons systems. Chinese dominance of this market would thus pose serious
economic and security risks.
According to US intelligence and other analysts, Xi has set 2027 as the
year by which China must be militarily ready to attack Taiwan. Although Xi
may have been given second thoughts by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
struggles in his invasion of Ukraine, there is still little time to lose in project-
ing US readiness and resolve and in strengthening Taiwan’s ability to protect
its democracy and the world’s microchip supply chain. Economic, techno-
logical, and strategic competition between China and the United States will
remain the dominant feature of geopolitics for years, if not decades, to come.
To enhance its chances of prevailing in this competition, the United States
will need reliable international partners with whom it can reconfigure and
strengthen its semiconductor supply chain. No partner is more important in
this effort than Taiwan.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com).

© 2024 The Atlantic Monthly Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Silicon

Triangle: The United States, Taiwan, China, and
Global Semiconductor Security, edited by Larry
Diamond, James O. Ellis Jr., and Orville Schell. To order,
call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

CHIN A A N D TA IWA N
Innovation Is a
Marathon
In the advanced-technology race with China, the
United States is stumbling. Why we need a new
tech strategy.
By Michael Brown and Robert Atkinson
A
s Beijing has become
Washington’s overrid- Key points
ing challenge of the »» China is determined to displace
the United States as the world’s tech-
twenty-first century, nological and economic superpower.
the Chinese leadership has made »» Beijing is using a vast array of
clear that it aims to displace the tactics in its attempt to overtake the
United States. Some have already
United States as the world’s techno- paid off.
logical and economic superpower. »» Large-scale industrial strategy is
This form of competition has no his- nothing new for the United States.
Today, however, we lack consensus
toric precedent. China has a much
about where it should be applied.
larger and more technologically
advanced economy than did the
Soviet Union at its peak, and in contrast to its Soviet predecessor it is deeply
integrated into the global economy. The rivalry between the two powers has
Michael Brown is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution, a partner at Shield

Capital, and former director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the US Department
of Defense. Robert Atkinson is president of the Information Technology and
Innovation Foundation.
INVENTION: Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution, appears
before a House committee investigating military procurement in 1952. Bush,
who chaired the National Defense Research Committee during World War II,
proposed a system of federally funded research universities tightly linked with
government agencies, industry, and the military. [Warren K. Leffler, Harris & Ewing—
Harry S. Truman Library]
significant diplomatic, military, and ideological aspects, but its most impor-
tant dimensions are technological and economic.
China views dominance of advanced industries as a key to national secu-
rity. It aims to increase its power by establishing global pre-eminence in a
broad array of developing technologies. Many of these, such as biotechnology,
artificial intelligence, and aerospace, are current US strengths. As a result,
it is likely that China will continue employing “innovation mercantilist”
trade and economic policies—including outright intellectual-property theft
and forced technology transfer, along with massive subsidies of domestic
industries—to achieve this goal. These tactics have already been successfully

demonstrated in steel, shipbuilding, solar panels, high-speed rail, LCD
displays, batteries, and advanced telecommunications.
Washington has yet to grapple with the full range of this threat. US policies
thus far have been focused on limiting intellectual-property theft, countering
unfair trade practices, constraining China’s semiconductor industry through
export controls, and strengthening the US military. The CHIPS and Science
Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress in 2022, promise to
support domestic semiconductor and clean-technology production, but they
fall short of offering a comprehensive approach to winning the technology
race. Similarly, the Biden administration’s policy to “invest, align, and com-
pete,” outlined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May 2022, does not
support the funding, private sector coordination, or competitive advantages
at the scale that is required to retain the country’s supremacy in advanced
technologies.
Instead, Washington
must prepare for an A multigenerational campaign
all-out effort to win the will involve large investments in
competition with China.
science, technology, and domestic
This means a multi-
manufacturing.
generational campaign
that will involve large investments in science, technology development, and
domestic manufacturing; an engaged private sector to build national capa-
bilities; and sustained actions to make Chinese tactics unprofitable. To carry
this out, the United States will need to identify the critical and emerging
technologies of the coming century and develop coherent and detailed plans
to nurture them.
THE CRITICAL ONES

Already, the Trump and Biden administrations have created similar lists
of nineteen critical and emerging technologies, including semiconductors,
artificial intelligence, advanced computing, biotechnology, hypersonics, and
space systems. But given that seventeen of these nineteen technologies are
being led by the private sector and have both civilian and military uses, there
is a pressing need to align the private sector with national leadership. Far too
little has been done to coordinate government action and provide incentives
to academia and the private sector to focus on these areas, and to create a
defensive shield against Chinese technological predation aimed at US firms
and universities. Should Washington fail to develop and implement such a
strategy and instead allow Beijing to succeed in its quest for technological
dominance, the United States could become a shell of its former industrial
self, dependent on China for key imports in many areas, including artificial
intelligence, telecommunications, bioengineering, and quantum sciences.
The United States has a long and successful history of large-scale indus-
trial strategy. In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton proposed the
country’s first such policy
to encourage growth in
The United States risks becoming a domestic manufacturing.
shell of its former industrial self. As Hamilton understood,
without such a base the
nation would remain dependent on European imports. During World War II,
US policy makers recognized the importance of the coordinated development of
future technologies. In June 1945, Vannevar Bush, who as chair of the National
Defense Research Committee served as a science adviser to the US govern-
ment, proposed creating a system of federally funded research universities
tightly linked with government agencies, industry, and the military. Its establish-
ment led to significant advances and made the United States the science and
engineering leader in the world. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of
the satellite Sputnik, the United States focused on developing the technologies
required to win the space race, including rockets, satellites, semiconductors,
numerically controlled machine tools, solar cells, early software prototypes, and
many more advanced technologies.
Yet despite this impressive record, there is no current consensus on US
industrial policy or when and how it should be applied. That uncertainty
is dangerous given what is now at stake in the global competition with
China. Indeed, the country that has the ability to innovate faster and bet-
ter, increase global market share in advanced industry production, and
assimilate new technology across its economy will likely determine the
outcome of great-power competition between China and the United States
for decades to come. And to be effective, a new US industrial strategy will
require recognizing and supporting the large range of technologies now
in play, as well as pushing for advancements and breakthroughs in new
technologies.
For much of history, a single technology, such as making bronze or har-
nessing steam power, often defined an epoch. Today, by contrast, multiple
technologies are being invented, adopted, and adapted at the same time,
with the result that the country that can establish a dominant position in
several areas at once stands to accrue the greatest advantage. Never before
have there been so many new technologies used in combination, nor have the

benefits of technological leadership for economic growth and military power
been more dramatic.
Winning the technology race with China means, first and foremost, that
the United States and its allies lead in the technologies—such as semicon-
ductors, artificial intelligence, advanced materials, and biotechnology—that
are likely to underpin entire industries. At the same time, the United States
must work with its allies to defend the West’s economic dominance over
China. At $17 trillion, China’s economy is the second-largest in the world and
approaching the United States’ $23 trillion. But the combined GDP of the
United States and its allies and partners amounts to $50 trillion, compared
with just $19 trillion for the combined GDPs of China, Russia, North Korea,
and Iran. Other nations such as Brazil, Nigeria, Cambodia, Pakistan, and
South Africa are not
yet in China’s orbit, and
strong advanced indus- The country that can establish a
try policies by the United dominant position in several areas
States and its partners at once stands to accrue the greatest
can help to keep them
advantage.
at least nonaligned.
The United States will need to lead a coordinated push to support emerging
advanced technologies and to limit China’s capabilities to maintain this edge.
US laws can prevent China from using the United States’ liberal, open
society to strengthen its own technology base through stolen IP, cybertheft,
industrial espionage, and mercantilist trading relationships. But such actions
require both stronger laws and more active engagement and enforcement by
allied nations’ intelligence and law enforcement organizations.
Although the US government alone cannot bring an effective allied
advanced industrial policy into being, it can do much to get it off the ground.
Leadership in Washington will be needed to create an integrated strategy
that synchronizes policy choices across government agencies and induces
the private sector and research institutions to align their work with national
priorities. And this includes setting the conditions and goals for innovation,
adoption, and production of specific new technologies over many decades.
A ROBUST FRAMEWORK
The US government should communicate to the American people the impor-
tance of this competition, its long timeline, and the large-scale investments
that will be required for a successful outcome. A cultural shift will be neces-
sary to get Americans to engage in this race. Among the ways to accomplish
this would be to call greater attention to American achievements in science
and technology by recognizing and honoring those individuals and compa-
nies who are helping to win this race, just as the United States celebrated its
astronauts during the space race with the Soviet Union.
Most important, however, is the need for a comprehensive policy frame-
work for advanced industries. This will be essential to ensuring US leader-
ship in development, adoption, and scaling of emerging technologies. The
United States can no longer expect a laissez-faire approach to be successful
when competing with China’s top-down, well-articulated industrial strategy
reinforced by consistent, large investments. Left on their own, the profit-
making strategies of advanced technology companies are unlikely to align
with US national strategic interests and result in the desired range of dual-
use technology development and domestic production.
On the other hand, it
would be counterpro-
It would be counterproductive for ductive to adopt China’s
the United States to imitate China’s approach of anointing
anointing of “national champions.” companies as “national
champions” or impos-
ing direct government control. Instead, the United States should support
advanced technology sectors, not specific companies, by using policies, such
as tax incentives and direct investment in an array of technology programs
(such as the Manufacturing USA program), that are aimed at ensuring US
global leadership in those areas. In other words, a company can become a
market leader in an industry that the government has identified as critical
not because the government designated it a winner but because it offers the
best solution and it beat out the competition, while receiving some support
as well as protection against Chinese techno-predation.
Such a policy framework could include several components. To ensure
proper levels of investment, annual federal funding for science and engineer-
ing research should increase to 2 percent of GDP. That level would match
the historic high point reached in the 1960s and would represent a dramatic
increase from the current 0.66 percent of GDP. Notably, it would also amount
to a ninefold increase over the spending authorized in the CHIPS and Sci-
ence Act, or $460 billion per year.
Such large-scale investment is necessary because the government is the
only source of risk-seeking capital that can be sustained to pursue break-
through technologies over the long term. Although some might expect the
private sector to make these investments, company CEOs and venture

capitalists are more focused on far shorter time horizons. Just as it has
for the past seven decades, government support for research (both direct
funding and tax investments) can stimulate the creation of new industries,
which can result in companies such as Google and Microsoft that create
global platforms and millions of high-paying jobs. But these efforts must go
beyond research to include incentives for companies to scale innovations and
manufacture domestically. Otherwise, other countries, including US rivals,
will gain from the development of new US domestic technologies. That’s why,
at minimum, Congress should restore first-year expensing for investments in
machinery, equipment, and software, or even better, re-establish an invest-
ment tax credit.
An advanced industries policy must also spur training and education to
ensure that the US labor force can contribute to the country’s leadership in
new technologies. Even with the planned incentives for US semiconductor
investment in the CHIPS and Science Act, there may not be enough trained
workers in the United States to manufacture advanced chips. The country
must train more scientists, researchers, engineers, and technicians to lever-
age increased investment in science and technology. In addition to expanding
STEM education—particularly at the college and graduate level—the govern-
ment needs to enact immigration reforms to encourage more global STEM
talent to contribute to the US economy.
At the same time, policies must be designed so that they mutually reinforce
one another. Given the federal government’s size and complexity, it is far
more difficult to achieve mutually reinforcing policies than it was during the
Cold War. For example, whereas political and military tools are concentrated
in the Departments of Defense and State, many economic tools are diffused
across the federal government and state governments, as well as the private
sector. Adding complexity, different congressional committees control the
spending priorities of these various governmental departments. The broad
nature of the technology race with China requires that policies are aligned
across departments and all levels of government.
The Defense Department’s spending power also needs to be used to
build an industrial base for markets in areas such as autonomous systems
and space infrastructure. During the Cold War, the Defense Department
was an early adopter of new technologies like semiconductors, a practice
that allowed new industries to achieve scale, rapid declines in cost, and
subsequent penetration of commercial markets. Today, there is an oppor-
tunity for the Defense Department to recover that tradition, creating a
strong industrial base relative to China through early investment and the
adoption of technologies in which the government remains the principal
customer. These could range from satellite technology and space-based
communications to unmanned ships and clean-energy technologies such
as advanced batteries.
THREE STRATEGIC PATHS

US strategy in the technology race should rest on several additional pillars.
The first will be to create more balanced incentives in US capital markets for
long-term investments in innovation and domestic production. These incen-
tives will encourage companies to take on more risk over longer horizons and
invest more domestically, steps that will be crucial to develop national capa-
bilities in particular areas. Since the later decades of the twentieth century,
two trends have reinforced short-termism within corporations.
Globalization has allowed companies to achieve higher profitability (and
lower prices) by producing offshore, including manufacturing to leverage
lower labor rates as well as more generous tax rates and subsidies offered by
foreign governments. And the shareholder revolution has caused short-term
shareholder interests to be prioritized far above the interests of other stake-
holders, including the nation as a whole. With the increase in institutional
ownership of companies, current-period financial returns have become para-
mount; institutional investors now hold stocks for an average of less than one
year, compared with eight years in the 1950s.
Capital-market actors, such as activist investors and private equity firms,
also operate on much shorter investment time horizons and encourage CEOs
to buy back stock with
cash flow, a strategy
Combined with short-term that optimizes quarterly
incentives, globalization has led to earnings per share (EPS)
a dangerous dependence on supply rather than investments
chains from China. in long-term competitive-
ness. As a result, cor-
porate R&D labs—such as AT&T’s Bell Labs—have been eliminated, while
companies have shed manufacturing, moved away from hardware products,
and increasingly relied on overseas suppliers. Over time, this has resulted in
a significant loss of design and production capability.
Combined with short-term incentives, globalization has led to danger-
ous dependence on supply chains from China, which uses economic power
coercively. After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, US policy
makers discovered that the country depended on China for 97 percent of

its antibiotics, 80 percent of its pharmaceutical ingredients, and 85 percent
of its rare-earth-minerals processing, which is essential for a wide array of
products, including semiconductors, magnets, and electronics. Until the
United States is able to change capital market incentives to reward longer-
term, domestic investment, there is an even stronger need for the govern-
ment to invest in R&D and production to ensure national leadership in
crucial advanced industries. Congress should at least double the R&D tax
credit for companies, which now lags far behind China’s credit. It should
reduce capital gains rates for long-term investments to encourage invest-
ment in critical and emerging technologies. And the Securities and Exchange
Commission, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and the busi-
ness community should also develop performance metrics and accounting
standards that measure
longer-term capability
development and R&D It’s essential to slow down China’s
productivity and that exploitation of US and allied
support measures that technology to further its own
discourage corporate advances.
short-termism.
The second pillar will be to slow down China’s exploitation of US and
allied technology to further its own advances. Under the Biden adminis-
tration, in 2022 the Commerce Department introduced export controls on
advanced semiconductors and equipment. Congress should also modify
the United States International Trade Commission’s Section 337 statute
to make it easier to exclude Chinese goods and services that benefit from
unfair trade practices. Section 337 of the 1930 Tariff Act already gives
government the power to do this, but the law needs updating, including
eliminating the need to show economic harm before action can be taken.
Among other steps Washington could take are preventing Chinese firms
from listing on US stock markets; imposing selective tariffs on designated
categories of goods such as rare-earth minerals from China; limiting Chi-
nese access to American research, including by increasing investigations,
prosecutions, and penalties for intellectual-property theft; ending most
scientific and technology collaboration with China; relaxing the enforce-
ment of antitrust rules when US firms agree to avoid sharing technology
with China; and banning the US government from procuring Chinese
goods and services.
As a third pillar, the United States should collaborate more closely with
allies and partners to regulate investment and trade with China. Such steps
should include more effective screening of Chinese outbound investment,
shared export controls and limits on technology transfer, enhanced coopera-
tion on commercial counterintelligence, and jointly enacted import limita-
tions on Chinese goods that benefit from unfair practices.
Washington should also lower trade barriers between its allies and part-
ners. To increase the ability of Asian allies and partners to respond to China,
the United States should formalize a pan-Pacific treaty alliance, building on
the AUKUS security pact among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the
United States, by adding additional countries such as Canada and Japan in
a multipurpose arrangement that includes mutual defense, a stronger allied
defense industrial base, and an enhanced trading bloc.
Policy makers have long recognized that the United States’ asymmetric
advantage is its allies and partners. The scale of this network relative to
China is the only practical way to influence China’s behavior economically,
diplomatically, and militarily. Jointly, the United States and its partners
can rebuild supply chains to eliminate Chinese-controlled chokepoints
and develop alternatives to China for low-cost manufacturing, including
by working more closely with India to help establish it as a manufacturing
hub, especially in electronics. Finally, Washington and partner governments
should collaborate to offer more generous project financing for developing
countries that can serve as an alternative to the punitive debt loads that
China has imposed through its Belt and Road Initiative. In the process, the
United States will attract an even larger set of partners and come closer to
making the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of a “free and
open Indo-Pacific” a reality.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com).

© 2024 The Atlantic Monthly Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the
Indo-Pacific, by Michael R. Auslin. To order,

D E FE N SE
Armed and Ready

Ever since war erupted in Ukraine, weapons
shortages and obsolete facilities have bedeviled
the Pentagon. Now there’s a potential solution: a
“munitions campus” to speed up design, testing,
and production of a modern US arsenal.
By Nadia Schadlow
I
t’s now almost trite to point out the cracks in
the foundation of the US defense industrial base Key points
»» America’s
(DIB). Many facilities are more than a half cen-
defense industrial
tury old, filled with outdated equipment, unable base is aging, inef-
to meet production requirements, and often depen- ficient, and under
great strain.
dent on minerals and chemicals produced mainly by
»» The Pentagon is
our adversaries. The issue is particularly acute for exploring the idea
missiles and munitions, both the weapons needed for of a public-private
partnership to
today’s fight in Ukraine and future capabilities such as
nurture innovation.
hypersonic weapons.
»» The Defense
However, there is one promising development that Department al-
has largely flown under the radar: the Defense Depart- ready runs t esting
facilities. An up-
ment’s recent suggestions that it is poised to create dated model would
a “munitions campus,” as well as other campuses for lead to faster, bet-
ter innovations.
other sectors, such as microelectronics, may be a step
toward solving a host of DIB problems.
Nadia Schadlow is a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution

and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. She is a former deputy national
security adviser for strategy.
The Pentagon’s Manufacturing Capability Expansion and Investment
Prioritization (MCEIP) office—quite a mouthful!—proposes to address
some of these challenges by creating a network of campuses consist-
ing of testing and manufacturing facilities. The campus design is a
public-private partner-
ship centered around a
hub-and-spoke model. We need to let innovations flourish
At the center of the and find their way quickly into the
hub would be capital- weapons needed by warfighters.
intensive, government-
supported facilities needed to test weapons and components. The spokes
around this hub would be a variety of private companies that could use
these expensive and specialized tools and facilities to develop materials
needed by our armed forces, such as key chemical formulations called
energetics.
Such a campus would have several strengths.
First, it provides a missing link in the DIB. It’s not just about money.
There is a requirement for a physical environment that allows innovations
to flourish and find their way quickly into the weapons needed by warfight-
ers. This requires testing. As the Energetics Technology Center (ETC) and
Defense Department’s recently released National Energetics Plan points
out, such testing is critical for moving a technology from one readiness level
to the next. As the ETC experts put it, new materials “must be tested and
qualified, and the necessary processes are expensive, time-consuming, and
arguably outdated.”
Testing these compounds is not like testing software. Components of muni-
tions are volatile: they are chemicals that in various formulations ultimately
are designed to explode. Without the ability to test new compounds, you can’t
realize innovations. Thus,
the creation of testing
facilities means faster Shared facilities and testing sites
innovation for the Defense significantly reduce costs, especially
Department. for smaller companies.
Second, relatedly, it
would enable innovation by integrating the efforts of smaller companies
around the country. Common facilities and testing sites significantly reduce
costs from these firms’ balance sheets—and could drive collaboration. If a
small company has an idea that could pay dividends to the US military, with
this approach they would be more able to afford to experiment and try new
ideas. This is particularly important for startup firms that may not have
much cash on hand to invest in expensive testing facilities.
Third, the munitions-campus concept plays to the US government’s
strengths. DoD already runs several testing facilities in a range of areas,
including, for instance, a “Fort Renewable” that allows early-stage com-
panies to test their ideas related to more resilient electrical grids. US
national laboratories around the country allow users from universities
and the private sector to test innovations and carry out experiments in
facilities that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for one company
to build. This is relevant to a range of other sectors too, including space,
which requires testing and evaluation of components like large vacuum
tubes, and hypersonics, which requires testing to understand how various
materials perform.
Fourth, these common facilities are a step toward onshoring domestic
sources of critical chemicals and propellants because providing a place
where R&D and testing takes place can encourage the production of new
compounds at scale. The existing inhospitable environment to testing and
producing energetic materials has contributed to driving US producers out
of the country or out of business.
Finally, DoD’s campus concept gets around the “not in my back yard”
problem. Many Americans understandably don’t consider a munitions
testing or manufacturing facility as a local upgrade. Also, permitting and
regulatory issues are serious impediments to building new facilities. How-
ever, if the federal government encourages states to identify areas where
a campus could be located, it will get bidders who want to compete for the
facility. It is not surprising that states like Texas, Indiana, New Mexico,
Maryland, and Arizona
are enthusiastically creat-
Common facilities are also a step ing hubs of manufacturing
toward onshoring domestic sources and innovation.
of critical chemicals and propellants. DoD’s campus model
could be a big play. It cre-
ates a collaborative space for R&D as well as the testing and prototyping of
new systems that our military needs. It certainly does not address all of the
problems in our DIB. But the concept is a step forward in addressing some
of the underlying problems that hamper the modernization of our weapon
systems.
The challenge, of course, is actual implementation. Too often, that’s where
things break down.

But if the munitions campus—and others like it—is built in a timely
f ashion, it offers an approach that even skeptics of industrial policy might
get behind.
Reprinted by permission of Breaking Defense. © 2024 Breaking Media,

Inc. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Defense

Budgeting for a Safer World: The Experts Speak,
edited by Michael J. Boskin, John N. Rader, and Kiran
Sridhar. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
DEFEN SE
Fighting Fires
with Data
Dominating future battlefields demands not just
better weapons but a better way of using them.
Fire suppression—that’s the key.
By Eran Ortal
W
orld order as we have known it since the collapse of the
Soviet Union is rapidly changing for the worse. Commen-
taries link that change with the emergence of Chinese
economic strength and ambition, the rise of Russian
nationalism, the decline of nation-states and the Arab states in particular,
and more. But the defense community cannot escape the fact that a signifi-
cant part of that worsening global order should be attributed to the decline
of Western military deterrence. That decline is due not only to insufficient
investments but also to the rapid erosion of Western military supremacy.
The pressing question the defense community faces is what can be done,
from our perspective, to effect change in these realities.
CREATIVE DESTRUCTION
Much has been written and discussed about military change and emerg-
ing technologies. Technology is in fact dominant in the creation of military
Eran Ortal is a contributor to the Hoover Institution’s Middle East and the
Islamic World Working Group. A brigadier general (reserve), he recently re-
tired from the Israel Defense Forces, where he commanded the Dado Center for
Interdisciplinary Military Studies.

SALVO: German soldiers fire an M270 multiple launch rocket system during
training in Grafenwoehr. The American-developed M270 serves in multiple
militaries and Britain has sent several to Ukraine for that country’s defense.
[Markus Rauchenberger—US Army]
capabilities, but we tend to view it in isolation. Two well-known cases of

military disruption from the early years of World War II offer a reminder
that in both force employment and force generation, an accurate and focused
approach to using that technology is also indispensable.
Part of Nazi Germany’s overwhelming success, at least in the initial
phases of the Second World War, had to do not with technological superi-
ority but with a more accurate application of capabilities to solve a spe-
cific problem. French planners, reviewing the lessons of the Great War,
considered the power of artillery to be the dominating force in war. The
Wehrmacht, however, viewed that belief not as an unassailable fact but as a
problem to be solved.
German forces harnessed established technologies of the time—rapid
motorized transport and radio—to enhance their ability to maneuver.
The Maginot Line defending France and the slow command-and-control
structure of the Anglo-French defenders were overwhelmed. In a second
arena, war at sea, the German navy was inferior to that of Britain, with its
mighty fleet of capital ships. But the Kriegsmarine was reasonably quick to
adapt and shift to submarine warfare, which for a time was devastatingly
successful. Germany addressed its naval deficit through a strategy of block-
ading Britain, using area-denial asymmetric tactics.
How focused are war
planners today, compet-
Battlefield disruption is a matter of ing for technological
problem solving. superiority? Numbers
of troops, weapons, and
equipment are essential, as is superior technology, but these are not the
whole story. We need a theoretical framework. What is the great problem
we are trying to solve?
STRATEGY TRANSFORMED
When Russia’s initial offensive in Ukraine failed in February–March 2022,
most analysts were taken by surprise. Putting aside poor Russian perfor-
mance in chain of command and logistics as well as Ukrainian will and
resilience—all true—what we witnessed that winter in Ukraine was the
prevalence of munitions over maneuver. Putting an end to any prospect of
rapid long movements, so-called ranged fires made the war a huge artil-
lery duel: attrition warfare with few, and very costly, movements on the
battlefield.
The second Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020, involving Armenia and
Azerbaijan, provides another example of the evolution in combat.
Unmanned air surveillance, targeting, loitering munitions, and other forms
of accurate long-range weapons swept Armenia’s largely mechanized
forces off the battlefield. The famous fighting quality of the Armenian
forces was no match for the modern targeting-and-strike system deployed
by their adversaries.
In Yemen, Houthi forces
New, close-in automated targeting also have successfully
will force armies to readapt from their used such capabilities,
customary “stand off” mindset. provided by Iran, to deter
the Saudi-led coalition
from continuing and escalating the war there. The Houthi forces had good
teachers: the Lebanese Hezbollah (HL). Fighting the HL in the war of 2006,
Israeli defense forces proved ineffective at stopping rockets fired at Israel’s
home front. At the same time, they also proved to be vulnerable to modern
anti-tank missiles like the Russian Kornet. Since then, Israel seems to have
given up its traditional direct approach to defense and is as much deterred
by the HL as it is deterring it.

Contested domains, a widely used term, refers to a variety of contemporary
military challenges that include cyberwar, electromagnetic measures, and
space. But although these do matter, the one decisive element in battle is
ranged fires. Accurate ranged fires, integrated with targeting capabilities,
simply enable a regional power to deter a global one. In some cases, they
enable malign actors to deter legitimate ones. The very thing that made the
initial Ukrainian defense a success could work against world order.
THE PROBLEM—AND THE NEXT STEP

Accurate, effective weapons integrated with intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance capabilities are no longer exclusive to Western actors or
dominated by them. Those capabilities make it easier for local aggressors to
commit abrupt violations of international norms and the status quo and get
away. Fire dominance defines the problem for any nation that seeks to deploy
its forces to uphold international norms and remove threats.
To return for a moment to the twentieth century, one is tempted to
describe military transformation between the world wars as an endless list
of technologies and capabilities, with the German development of Blitz-
krieg, mentioned above, a prominent example. Blitzkrieg exploited tech-
nology to regain battle-
field maneuverability in
the face of industrial- “There are simply not enough
ized firepower—utiliz- interceptors to sit and play catch.”
ing the second indus-
trial revolution, built upon the internal combustion engine, to overcome
the military consequences of the previous one.
But I suggest that just like some of the interwar and World War II militar-
ies, we are spending much of our resources, including cutting-edge technol-
ogy, improving legacy theories and concepts of war. In the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF), for example, artificial intelligence and other emerging tech-
nologies are put to work mainly to enhance the performance of intelligence
gathering and processing, the heart of the IDF’s targeting machine. While the
results are significant for targeting, the improvements are still no match for
the enemy’s skill in concealment and redundancy. As cyberwar and electro-
magnetic and information warfare take their place in domain doctrines, the
enemy’s fires seem to remain largely untouched.
From a broad perspective, one can look at modern warfare as a history
of fire dominance versus maneuver dominance. Platform-centric think-
ing in today’s armed services means that most responses to the problem
of accurate fire focus on protecting those platforms. Those efforts have
exhausted themselves. Our targeting kill-chains are just not complete and
fast enough to prevent enemy long-range fires from getting through. Modern
force-protection is also insufficient. All single lines of defense are usually
breached. As two defense experts, Tom Karako and Wes Rumbaugh, wrote in
a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis, “There are simply
not enough interceptors to sit and play catch.”
There is another path, yet to be exploited: regain maneuverability and at
the same time render enemy resistance irrelevant by suppressing enemy
fires at their source.
WISDOM BEYOND TECH

Let’s consider some of the key developments in weapons and warfare.
The first industrial revolution in warfare involved steam power and
machine guns, as in the Western Front of World War I. It was characterized
by mass armies and mass slaughter.
The second industrial revolution enabled militaries to regain maneuver-
ability in the face of industrial firepower. It did so thanks to mechanization
and mobile command and control, made possible by the internal-combustion
engine and radio. Engines and radios were essentially better versions of the
older tech (for example, steam engines, telegraph lines, and line-of-sight
signaling).
The third industrial revolution brought computers and networks for
the targeting of platforms. But battlespace awareness in these new “joint”
realms arose only where many people could work behind many computers.
And all three industrial eras had large bureaucracies committed to the way
things were.
The key today is to fully exploit the fourth industrial revolution—
automated and miniature networked components—to successfully target
the fires themselves. “Sensor to shooter” networks should be the leaping
factor that allows the targeting of ascending projectiles and the quick
strike at the fire sources even as they try to disperse. This network of
digital artillery radars and aerial reconnaissance assets would be effective
only at close ranges, forcing us to readapt from our customary “standoff”
mindset. If developed and employed correctly, it would monitor a wide bat-
tlespace and slash response time; artillery pieces, anti-tank and anti-air
missile teams, and others could be located and hit in less than a minute.
Multiple-barrel rocket systems could be struck while they were still firing.
Projectiles could be spotted and intercepted in midflight. The enhanced

targeting and strike capabilities will protect not only military forces but
also civilian populations.
The fourth industrial revolution’s reliance on automated data processing
makes it less dependent on human labor. Military application of it will use
mobile data networks
empowered by new
unmanned aerial and Enhanced sensing, accuracy, and
space assets. And, just speed will still not be enough unless
as with tanks, airplanes, soldiers can get it close to the enemy.
and radios, the military
modernization of the fourth industrial age will be stillborn if we fail to take
it out of our headquarters and into the tactical level. Enhanced sensing,
accuracy, and speed will not be enough unless we get it close to the enemy.
Technology is no magic solution, of course. Hitler’s obsession with “won-
der weapons” in the later stages of World War II attests to that. History also
teaches us that fielding technology is just the beginning. New technology
should make us rethink our way of war.
World War I locked generals’ minds in their chateau headquarters. The
modernization of the 1990s again collected senior commanders, this time in
their digital headquarters. That habit of remote oversight has proven hard to
break. Today, power can and should be shifted to the forces deployed on the
ground. They will work within a new envelope of automated air assets, sen-
sors, data processing, fire suppression, and forward-interception capabilities.
They will be able to outmaneuver ranged fires while confronting adversaries
with a dilemma: fight and be annihilated, or give up. This “data-enhanced
anti-fires maneuver” (DAM) concept of operations should become our
modern Blitzkrieg.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is NATO

in the Crucible, by Deborah L. Hanagan. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
DEFEN SE
A Fateful Price
Hoover fellow Bruce S. Thornton’s new book
investigates a democratic paradox: civilians must
restrain, but can also hamper, military leadership.
By Jonathan Movroydis
H
oover research fellow Bruce S. Thornton’s new book under-
scores a paradox in democracy: when people are allowed to be
free, it opens the possibility of popular dissent and of opposi-
tion to the governing institutions that were intended to protect
that freedom. As the editor of Cage Fight: Civilian and Democratic Pressures on
Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy, newly released by the Hoover Institution
Press, Thornton presents case studies on how the demands of democracy
come into conflict with military execution—whether in ancient Athens, the
American Civil War, the Cold War, or US interventions in Vietnam, Afghani-
stan, and Iraq.
Jonathan Movroydis: How did the book come about?
Bruce S. Thornton: Cage Fight is the product of Hoover’s Military History in

Contemporary Conflict Working Group, chaired by senior fellow Victor Davis
Hanson. It is the second volume (the first was Disruptive Strategies, edited by
research fellow David Berkey) to have arisen from the conversations we have
Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of

Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict,
and an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at California State Univer-
sity, Fresno. Jonathan Movroydis is the senior content writer for the Hoover
Institution.

in our annual workshop and from the essays of our bimonthly publication,
Strategika.
We chose to focus on the topic of civilian-military relations because of
the events that took place after the 2020 election. Specifically, we consider
the duties of our senior officer corps. These generals and admirals all have
obligations to the president
under whom they serve. But
these officials are also Ameri- “These generals and admirals
can citizens who have declared all have obligations to the presi-
an oath to uphold the US dent under whom they serve. But
Constitution and defend the these officials are also American
country from its enemies. citizens.”
Here is where the dilemma
arises. A civilian government enables citizens to participate in political
deliberation and, in the voting process, to hold our leaders accountable. The
military is based on a hierarchical model. American democracy hasn’t done
so well with hierarchies. If you study the history of the United States, there
have been flashpoints in which tensions between these two institutions have
been on full display. I wanted to explore this aspect of American democracy
in my introduction.
The affairs of the military often require secrecy and dispatch. A modern
military can’t go on, as the ancient Athenians did, debating over issues in
the middle of a war and taking votes. But an important part of our political
order is indeed the right to free speech and to voice our opinions. Our nation
experienced vigorous dissent against the war in Vietnam and the second
Gulf War. Even today, there is tense debate between people who view Ameri-
can aid to Ukraine as a waste of national resources and others who believe
Ukraine is a critical line of defense against Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s assault on the freedoms of the West and the rules-based international
order.
Movroydis: Can this right to hold leaders accountable go too far?
Thornton: In the first essay, Paul Rahe explains how the people of ancient
Athens had taken the principle of accountability, in many senses, to a toxic
level, because any citizen could accuse any government official of malfea-
sance or another crime and there would be a trial. This trial would be heard
by several hundred Athenian citizens picked by a lottery. The penalties of a
conviction could be exile, a fine, or even death. The great fourth-century BC
orator Demosthenes alerted the Athenians to the dangers of their justice
system, in the face of aggression posed by Philip II of the northern Greek
kingdom of Macedon.
Demosthenes said sardonically of Athenian commanders, known as strat-
egoi, that they have a greater chance of being executed because of a trial here
in Athens than dying in battle
against the enemy.
“The military is based on a Eight Athenian admirals
hierarchical model. American suffered such a fate after the
democracy hasn’t done so well Battle of Arginusae during
the Peloponnesian War. Even
with hierarchies.”
though they were victorious
against the Spartans, six of the strategoi were indicted on a capital crime and
executed because a storm prevented them from retrieving the bodies of their
dead sailors.
If you know your Greek literature, in Sophocles’s Antigone, you will remem-
ber the quarrel between Antigone and the tyrant Creon. Antigone’s brothers
Polynices and Eteocles killed each other while fighting in war. The angry
tyrant Creon refused to allow Polynices to be buried with honors. The biggest
obligation families had in Greek society was to bury their dead. So, this whole
business of retrieving the bodies was very important, particularly in a naval
engagement. If the drowned men are never recovered, that means they can’t
reach the underworld. This wasn’t a trivial political issue, although politics
may have played a part. Nevertheless, that level of accountability is very
destructive politically for the city-state. The founders of the United States
were very familiar with this story and its lesson of excess accountability in
public life.
We want accountability. But if accountability becomes excessive, it can con-
strain our military leaders’ ability to achieve mission success. In Vietnam, for
example, the United States was forced to withdraw troops and end material
support for the government of South Vietnam, largely because of the mass
protests that took place on US soil. So, this isn’t just an ancient issue, it’s a
modern one too.
Movroydis: In the second essay, Ralph Peters explores dissent in the efforts
of both sides of the American Civil War. How was that dissent expressed?
Thornton: The Civil War was a conflict over our future national identity.
Some will say it was just a disagreement over tariffs between North and
South. That was part of the problem, but the reason for the war was funda-
mentally about slavery and the nature of American society, in its economic,

social, and political dimensions. That is why the debates of that era were so
passionate. That passion manifested itself in various forms of dissent. For
example, conscription of newly arrived Irish immigrants sparked riots in
New York during the Civil War. Many of these immigrants were incensed that
they were liable for service while slaveowners were spared the potential loss
of labor from sending their subjects into harm’s way. Both the North and the
South also had the challenge of citizens among their populations who sympa-
thized with their military adversary.
Movroydis: In chapter three, Peter Mansoor’s essay talks about the history
of military dissent against elected powers. What did the founders believe
was the appropriate relationship between politicians and high military brass,
especially in times of conflict?
Thornton: As the old saying goes, politics ends at the water’s edge. In other
words, our quarrels shouldn’t be seen by anyone outside the family. We don’t
want our divisions to be exploited by our enemies, especially during war. But
then again, do members of the military not have First Amendment rights?
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, military officers aren’t permit-
ted to freely criticize or undermine their commanders, including the presi-
dent of the United States, who is the commander in chief of the US armed
forces.
Let’s look at this issue from a historical perspective. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, European aristocracies were mired in dynastic
conflicts. One of those conflicts was the Seven Years’ War, in which the Brit-
ish and French fought each other not only in Europe but in North America,
where both powerful nations had colonial interests.
For colonists like George
Washington, who fought as a
militia officer on the side of “European dynastic struggles
the British, their experience created a huge distrust among
of fighting was not in the the colonists about ‘standing
mass conscripted armies of
armies.’”
Europe, because the colonies
were granted a great deal of self-governance. By their own consent, they
participated in the larger army (what was called the Patriot Army) during
that conflict. This quasi-sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed became the
basis for later struggles with the British.
In addition, these European dynastic struggles created a huge distrust
among the colonists about “standing armies.” The prevailing opinion among
the colonists was that militias were called up and then disbanded when the
conflict was over. Militias voted in their own officers. By contrast, profes-
sional armies had a process for selecting and appointing officers from the
top down.
The distrust of the standing army runs throughout American history.
We have movies like Seven Days in May about an attempted coup by generals
against the president of the United States.
The First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and assem-
bly, which enable citizens to air grievances against the government, just
add another layer of complexity to this challenge. I’m not sure it is a
challenge that can be solved without a dangerous diminution of freedom.
President Abraham Lincoln restricted speech and press freedoms during
the Civil War. Shortly after America’s entry into World War I, President
Woodrow Wilson signed the Sedition Act of 1918, which criminalized
certain types of speech, expression, and demonstrations. Some people
argue that the Patriot Act of 2001, which expanded state surveillance to
combat terrorism, was an unconstitutional breach of citizens’ rights to
due process.
Movroydis: How do you reform the national security state when threats are
so persistent?
Thornton: This type of paradox was noticed by Winston Churchill when he

was writing The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of the Second
World War. To paraphrase
Churchill, there are structures
“When you make people free, you of democracy that are inherent-
open the possibility of people ly paradoxical, and they’re just
undermining governing part of the price that we pay to
institutions.” be free. When you make people
free, you open the possibility of
people undermining governing institutions.
This is a balancing act that we have over the years tried to maintain. I
believe that in the post–World War II era, we have been moving too far in the
direction of curtailing freedom. The founders created a mechanism of checks
and balances to prevent abuse of power by any one of the three branches of
government. But that mechanism has come under revision over the past one
hundred years. There has been a weakening of those safeguards and a ten-
dency toward transferring power to a technocracy of specialists who govern
within the federal bureaucracy.

In recent times, we have seen social media giants working with the FBI
to remove content from their platforms that they deem dangerous to our
national security. I don’t think this is a road we want to continue to go down.
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote that factionalism “is sown in the
nature of man.” These are wise words. By their fallen nature, men will try to
aggrandize as much power as possible to serve their interests and thus will
inevitably struggle with one another over property or other earthly goods. It
would be nice if people thought
about the greater good. Some
people do, but it usually “It would be nice if people
doesn’t work that way. That is thought about the greater good.
why we need to preserve our Some people do, but it usually
constitutional order, in which doesn’t work that way.”
government is obliged to guar-
antee individual freedom while also respecting a system of checks
and balances that doesn’t allow any single individual or faction to become
too powerful.
Movroydis: Williamson Murray’s essay addresses how George Kennan’s pol-

icy of containment of Soviet influence and power prevailed in public debates
over isolationist sentiments in America during the early Cold War. Today,
both major political parties have their hawkish and dovish factions when it
comes to the projection of American power in foreign affairs. What can we
learn from the Cold War era about the merits and flaws of these diverging
perspectives?
Thornton: The Cold War has unique characteristics that make it difficult
to apply to other circumstances, but there are some points of recognition.
There are people who study the Peloponnesian War and compare it to the
Cold War. Athens was powerful on the seas and Sparta was powerful on the
land. Athens and Sparta, respectively, wanted to fight that war on their own
terms. The two sides engaged in a tournament of proxy wars and attempted
to peel back allies.
During the Cold War, containment worked in the end. But ask yourself:
does a leader like Ronald Reagan always come along when you need him? We
don’t like to think this way, but in many cases fate plays a role in historical
outcomes.
If you think about Nazi Germany in May 1941, it had achieved control over
most of Europe. It enlisted some countries as allies, coerced others to coop-
erate, and occupied those who resisted. What if Adolf Hitler hadn’t invaded
the Soviet Union? How would that whole postwar world have looked? Hitler
might have been able to preserve his reign over Germany.
Also imagine that there was no atomic bomb and the United States hadn’t
used it to end the war with Japan. Russia had hundreds of thousands of
troops in Eastern Europe. If we had redeployed all our troops from Europe
to Japan, the whole continent would have been left exposed to Soviet aggres-
sion. All the great European powers—Great Britain, France, and Germany—
were exhausted by the war. Thus, without US support, the Soviet Union
would have been able to take over Europe uncontested.
But before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it would have
been inconceivable for most American citizens to support US troop presence
in both the European and Pacific theaters.
In sum, I think it is very difficult to find historical lessons that could be
useful today because many large conflicts are driven by wildcard factors
that are almost impossible to identify. But this makes it all the more impor-
tant that we study the past diligently and carefully so that it speak to us.
Movroydis: The last essay, by Bing West, discusses dissent among the mili-
tary, civilian government, and citizens during the wars of Korea, Vietnam,
and Afghanistan. How does such dissent during wars affect our defense
policy making?
Thornton: It is kind of a gloomy assessment, but really, it’s an age-old lesson

that you must respond to aggression before it reaches a certain point. The
Europeans didn’t do that in the 1930s. They didn’t take on Hitler.
I think even in September
1938, during Hitler’s meeting
“Governments of sovereign with British Prime Minister
citizens with regularly scheduled Neville Chamberlain in Munich,
elections tend to kick the can the German army general staff
down the road.” didn’t believe there was any way
they could take Czechoslovakia,
which was allied with France. Czechoslovakia was not a tiny little helpless
country at the time. But Hitler decided to roll the dice earlier when he remili-
tarized the Rhineland and launched the Anschluss in Austria. Hitler was a
better psychologist than his generals were. He understood the failure of nerve
that had been inflicted on Great Britain and France after World War I.
We should have learned that lesson. At the first signs of aggression, we
need to hit the enemy hard. Today, there are continual calls to ramp up
support for the Ukrainians against Russian aggression. But why did we let

ourselves get to this point, where we have two choices, both of which are kind
of bad? And it’s not like we didn’t know what Vladimir Putin was capable
of. We knew just how brutal he could be when in the 1999 Chechen War, he
made Grozny look like Thebes, utterly destroyed after Alexander the Great’s
campaign in the fourth century BC.
We all knew about Putin’s vision to restore an ethno-Russian empire. In
2008, Putin tore off parts of Georgia and basically got away with it. He also
got away with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
But again, this falls into another paradox of democracy, which Alexis de
Tocqueville talks about in Democracy in America: governments of sovereign
citizens with regularly scheduled elections tend to kick the can down the
road. We believe we can use diplomacy to end the war. But Putin took a year
to get his invading army to Ukraine, and what were we doing? We were using
inflammatory rhetoric and making threats. Then suddenly, he decides to
invade, and we’re shocked. And then, once we start to help push back against
Russian aggression in Ukraine, we do so with half measures. The president of
the United States said, “We’re not going to deploy troops to Ukraine.” So, he
took a piece off the chess board right from the start.
It is unlikely we could have deployed troops in support of Ukraine anyway,
because it would be too costly politically. Again, we come back to the para-
dox: the price we must pay for our political freedom.
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I NDI A
A Nuanced Look
at Nehru
Seeking political advantage, India’s ruling party is
denigrating founding figure Jawaharlal Nehru. The
government can learn from both Nehru’s missteps
and his accomplishments.
By Sumit Ganguly
T
here is no shortage of books about India’s first prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the country from its independence
in 1947 until his death in 1964. From British historian Judith
Brown’s authoritative Nehru: A Political Life (2003) to the more
adulatory Nehru: The Invention of India by Shashi Tharoor, an Indian opposi-
tion lawmaker and former United Nations diplomat, each makes clear that
there is little question that Nehru helped forge the modern Indian state.
As prime minister, Nehru tutored the newly independent India in par-
liamentary democracy and helped knit together a diverse land through
imaginative language policy, under which those attending school would learn
Hindi, English, and a regional language. He fashioned a distinctive foreign
policy, forging a path that sought to steer clear of superpower conflict. And
he helmed the country through many challenges, from resettling refugees
from Pakistan after the partition of India to integrating India’s princely
states into the nascent union.
Sumit Ganguly is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and distinguished

professor of political science and Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civiliza-
tions at Indiana University-Bloomington.

CORDIAL: In this photo from December 16, 1956, President Eisenhower and
first lady Mamie Eisenhower greet Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
and his daughter Indira Gandhi at the White House North Portico. Vice Presi-
dent Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat Nixon, stand at right. Nehru’s vision of
nonalignment grew from a specific historical context: he was determined to
keep India from being drawn into superpower conflict during the Cold War.
[White House Historical Association]
Like any political leader, Nehru was not without flaws. Even sympathetic
observers have admitted that his faith in a mixed economy, which allowed
private enterprise while reserving a role for the state in promoting economic
development, did not result in sustained growth or significantly reduce
poverty. His neglect of the military and attempts to appease China despite a
border dispute led to the 1962 Sino-Indian War.
Nehru’s achievements, nonetheless, seem to far outweigh his question-
able political choices, especially given what nearly two hundred years of
British colonial rule wrought in India. But that is not the view of India’s ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In recent
years, Nehru’s legacy has come under sustained attack. This criticism is most-
ly polemical: the current government finds it politically expedient to demonize
Nehru in the public sphere while it enacts policies that shake the very founda-
tions of the Indian state. These attempts to undermine Nehru’s legacy—as
well as that of his Indian National Congress party, the BJP’s principal opposi-
tion—will no doubt gain momentum as national elections approach.
OFTEN VISIONARY
Historian Taylor C. Sherman’s book Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths
enters the conversation against this political backdrop. Sherman, who teaches
at the London School of Economics, writes deftly about Nehru and what he
bequeathed to India. Despite the somewhat provocative title, her well-researched
book does not seek to discredit the former Indian leader but rather to provide a
nuanced assessment of his
achievements and failures.
This more complex assessment of Sherman demonstrates
Nehru is a far cry from the caricature that while Nehru initiated a
that India’s ruling party is trying to host of visionary programs,
foist on the electorate. they often met political,
institutional, and societal
barriers to implementation. This more complex assessment of Nehru is a far cry
from the caricature that the BJP is trying to foist on the Indian electorate, which
casts Nehru as inept and idealistic to a fault.
Sherman challenges the notion that Nehru was the sole architect of modern
India, which is treated as an article of faith among some of his admirers.
She focuses on seven policy areas, arguing that the leader’s views were hardly
monochromatic for any of them. In Sherman’s telling, Nehru was a patron
who delegated tasks to those he trusted to carry out his vision; these subor-
dinates did not always share his perspective and were sometimes clumsy in
implementing his goals or thwarted by local authorities. (For example, despite
Nehru’s own commitment to secularism, he could not ensure that its prin-
ciples took hold at the grass-roots level.) In each case, Sherman shows how
myths have developed about Nehru and how careful scrutiny of the available
evidence is necessary to understand his policies in their historical context.
Sherman argues that Nehru’s doctrine of nonalignment—still embraced by
India today, though lacking much of its lofty rhetoric—failed to produce coherent
policy outcomes. Despite Nehru’s commitment in principle to the doctrine (and

despite Soviet overtures), India remained squarely situated in the Anglosphere
in the initial years after independence, with links ranging from trade to defense
acquisitions. Meanwhile, Nehru’s appeasement of China fit his worldview, yet
proved to be a disaster
that culminated in the
1962 border war. Among Some argue that Nehru’s doctrine
other matters, Nehru of nonalignment—still embraced
devoted insufficient by India today—failed to produce
resources to military pre-
coherent outcomes.
paredness. When China’s
battle-hardened People’s Liberation Army attacked, the Indian army found
itself underequipped to withstand the onslaught.
Nehru’s vision of nonalignment belonged to a specific historical context:
he was determined to keep India from being drawn into superpower conflict
during the Cold War and sought to prevent the militarization of the coun-
try, instead focusing on economic development. Today, the BJP consciously
avoids using the term “nonalignment” in favor of pursuing so-called strategic
autonomy. By distancing itself from nonalignment, the ruling party aims to
convey to its supporters that it has thrown off the shackles of Nehru’s era.
But far from adopting a principled foreign policy, India’s current government
has taken a callously instrumental approach to its diplomacy. The narrow
pursuit of India’s own interests seems to trump all other considerations.
SECULARISM AND THE ECONOMY

When it comes to secularism, Sherman shows how politicians during the
Nehru era—including those in the Congress Party—showed scant interest
in protecting the rights of India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims.
Recruitment to government offices showed blatant bias, and apart from icon-
ic buildings, many Muslim monuments and mosques were at best neglected
and at worst vandalized. Despite Nehru’s attempts to extend relief to Mus-
lims displaced by the partition of India, local notables stymied his efforts.
The policy limitations he faced stemmed from a variety of factors, including
a lack of administrative capacity and the inability of high-level officials to
compel local authorities to follow through on instructions.
Over the decades, the BJP has suggested that Nehru and his successors
pursued a sort of “pseudo-secularism,” appeasing India’s religious minori-
ties. To be sure, some of those who followed Nehru in the Congress Party
have pandered to certain subsets of India’s Muslim community. In 1986, for
example, then–Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi used his parliamentary majority
to court the Muslim vote by overturning an Indian supreme court judgment
that granted alimony to a Muslim woman, overriding the strictures of Muslim
personal law. But ultimately, the historical evidence does not justify tarring
Nehru with this particular brush. Today, the BJP actively seeks to marginalize
Muslims and deny them equal rights under the Indian constitution; the ruling
party has attacked Nehru’s successors to justify its own policies.
Those committed to free market reforms in India have critiqued Nehru’s
supposedly unyielding commitment to doctrinaire socialism—essentially call-
ing him an ideologue. But once again, Sherman demonstrates that apart from
Nehru’s penchant for Soviet-inspired five-year plans that set out specific eco-
nomic targets, India hardly embraced socialism under his leadership. At the
time, the country largely did not nationalize crucial industries and instead
exhorted business leaders and entrepreneurs to become good nationalists
and work to improve the
country’s economic lot.
India hardly embraced socialism These policies ended
under Nehru’s leadership. up favoring a handful of
firms, leading to a mostly
oligopolistic market that did little to benefit the Indian consumer. Today,
the BJP also appears to favor a handful of business houses—most notably,
those owned by Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani—making its critiques of
Nehru’s policies ring rather hollow.
Sherman’s most telling discussion has to do with how Indian democracy
functioned under Nehru’s watch. The conventional account suggests that
apart from a few lapses, democracy swiftly took root under Nehru and
proved resilient. Sherman writes that electoral democracy with universal
suffrage did emerge quickly in India, drawing on the work of Israeli historian
Ornit Shani. However, she shows that even the Congress Party was not above
resorting to political chicanery despite its significant popularity; its stalwarts
also used the powers of their office to pursue financial gains. As early as 1956,
when the government passed the Companies Act, a provision in the legisla-
tion permitted corporate donations to political parties.
Such dubious practices, now rampant in India, appear to have long
antecedents. Under BJP rule, the most obvious example is the promotion of
electoral bonds, which individuals and companies can purchase from a gov-
ernment-owned bank and then donate to the political party of their choice.
With no transparency requirement, well-heeled people and groups can direct
financial resources to their preferred party or candidate—presumably with
the goal of influencing policy choices.

CLOUDED BY POLITICS
The BJP has made a concerted effort to distance itself from Nehru’s legacies,
from diplomacy to economic policy making. Given the first prime minister’s
lionized role in founding the nation and setting it on its democratic course, it
seems that the BJP has needed to tear down some of Nehru’s myths in order to
build its own. The ruling party has characterized Nehru’s policy failures as his
alone, including the handling of the border dispute with China and his attempts
to regulate the economy.
The strategy is designed
to divert attention from It seems that the BJP has needed to
the BJP’s own shortcom- tear down some of Nehru’s myths in
ings, including its deeply order to build its own.
flawed policies toward
Beijing. The ruling party has created its own version of Nehru, depicting him
as vainglorious, hopelessly idealistic, and committed to flawed policies. And
so far, it has worked, appealing to many people in the BJP’s electoral base.
In the face of this narrative, Sherman’s book does not fundamentally
undermine or celebrate Nehru’s contributions to the early Indian republic.
Instead, it provides a nuanced account of the extraordinary political leader
and his time in office. Like any leader of his stature and tenure, Nehru pur-
sued several questionable policies. But he helped build unity in the wake of
India’s independence and laid the groundwork for India’s industrialization
and a host of institutions. A segment of India’s reading public will no doubt
read Sherman’s book with the care it deserves, but amid the current p olitical
environment—and as the national election approaches—it is possible that
it will not receive the attention that it should. The BJP does not seem
interested in recognizing Nehru’s achievements, nor willing to learn from
his errors.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com).

© 2024 Foreign Policy Group LLC. All rights reserved.
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A F GHA N I STAN
Afghanistan:
Apartheid State
When US soldiers withdrew, systematic violence
against women resumed. World leaders should
join figures in the Arab and Muslim world to resist
this injustice.
By Nader Nadery
M
ore than two years have passed since US forces withdrew
from Afghanistan as the Taliban recaptured the country.
Unfortunately, there is no cause for celebration, especially
for Afghan women.
The United Nations Security Council’s Sanctions Monitoring team has
found that the Taliban maintains strong and symbiotic links with both Al-
Qaeda and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This and the fact that various
terrorist groups have gained increased freedom of movement in the country
has been widely reported in the media. Moreover, news outlets regularly
highlight the ongoing erosion of rights and freedoms in Afghanistan, particu-
larly for women, as well as the extrajudicial killings of former government
officials and those who supported the US military and civilians throughout
the two decades of the US presence in the country.
Shaista (a pseudonym), a young police officer and the sole breadwin-
ner for her family of five, represents one of the more than nineteen million
Nader Nadery is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and participates in

Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the
Islamic World. He is a senior fellow at the Wilson Center.

Afghan women now confined to their homes. Despite her courageous fight
for her rights, regularly participating in street demonstrations, and running
a secret girls’ school at home, she feels abandoned. Fatima, one of Shaista’s
colleagues, said, “Unfortunately, I can no longer work outside. I am confined
to my home, my only role
being household chores. “I am like a ghost, erased from the
I am like a ghost, erased outside world.”
from the outside world.”
Many women and girls are grappling with mental health issues and a sense
of helplessness. One girl even expressed a wish that “God had never created
women.”
DISAPPEARED
The systematic violence against women and the shrinking civic space in
Afghanistan present a dire situation. According to Richard Bennett, the
UN special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, women and girls
in Afghanistan face severe discrimination that may amount to gender
persecution, a crime against humanity. The de facto authorities appear to
govern through systemic discrimination, intending to place women and
girls under complete subjugation. Bennett’s report, presented to the UN
human rights council on June 19, 2023, further highlights these distress-
ing findings.
Prominent international human rights organizations such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch have also documented the profound
impact of the egregious
and systematic viola-
tions on the lives and Women and girls in Afghanistan
well-being of Afghan face severe discrimination that may
women. Afghan media in amount to gender persecution, a
the diaspora, alongside
crime against humanity.
courageous journalists
on the ground, report daily on the suppression of the population, particularly
women, under the Taliban’s authority.
In solidarity with Afghan women’s groups and civil society activists, these
institutions assert that the Taliban’s treatment of women constitutes “gender
apartheid.”
In 2021, Afghan women accounted for 29.39 percent of the country’s four
hundred thousand civil servants. This percentage is close to the average
representation of women (43 percent) in the public sector in South and
Southeast Asian countries, which is three times higher than in Pakistan.
Before the collapse of the Afghan republic, female lawmakers occupied 27
percent of the seats in parliament. Women’s leadership in the public sector,
including the military, stood at 10 percent.
Historically, most of today’s restrictions against women in Afghanistan
were never universally accepted or considered Islamic. Constitutional chang-
es in Afghanistan since 1919 consistently preserved the rights and freedoms
of Afghan women, with a robust bill of rights. Afghan women gained the right
to vote in 1919 and the constitutional right to enter elected politics in 1964.
Afghan women have been cabinet ministers since 1964.
Since assuming power on August 15, 2021, the Taliban have imple-
mented edicts, decrees, instructions, and new rules that profoundly affect
all aspects of Afghan women’s lives in society. These restrictions cover

education, health care, employment, economic opportunities, media pres-
ence, and access to justice. The enforcement mechanisms, such as the
Ministry of Virtue and Vice, and the systematic nature of these policies and
practices aim to eradicate women from society entirely and diminish their
role in public life.
SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION
There is a striking resemblance between the Taliban’s treatment of women
in Afghanistan and the actions and policies of the former apartheid regime
in South Africa. A comparative analysis reveals that both systems aimed to
maintain domination and control over specific groups based on gender or
race. The Taliban’s deliberate efforts to subjugate and marginalize Afghan
women mirror the apartheid regime’s intent to enforce racial superiority.
Additionally, both the Taliban and the apartheid regime created contexts of
systematic oppression.
While the term “gender apartheid” may not be explicitly defined in inter-
national law, the policies and actions of the Taliban align with all the ele-
ments that define the crime of apartheid as a crime against humanity. These
elements are outlined in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppres-
sion and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court. To understand the severity of the situation, we
must interpret at least three key elements of apartheid, as drawn from the
Rome Statute:
» The intent to maintain domination is evident in the Taliban’s deliber-
ate and sustained efforts to subjugate and marginalize Afghan women. They
restrict women’s mobility, education, and work opportunities to maintain
patriarchal control and enforce a gender hierarchy that suppresses women’s
agency and independence.
» The context of systematic oppression is vividly present in the Tali-
ban’s policies and practices. These measures curtail women’s access to
education, health care, and participation in public life. The Taliban’s rigid
interpretation of sharia law perpetuates a deeply entrenched system of
gender-based discrimination, depriving women of their basic rights and
freedoms.
» Inhumane acts exemplify the Taliban’s brutality and the suffering
endured by Afghan women. Public punishments such as flogging and execu-
tions are used as tools of
intimidation and control.
Nowhere in the Islamic world— Testimonies from Afghan
except Afghanistan—are girls banned women contain harrowing
from school or universities. accounts of physical and
psychological violence,
forced marriages, sexual assault, and arbitrary imprisonment of women’s
rights activists. The UN report on the human rights situation in Afghanistan
last May recorded 332 acts of public punishment, including flogging and
other corporal punishments of women and men, by the Taliban in six months.
These acts not only violate fundamental human rights but also foster a cli-
mate of fear and subjugation.
“DISTORTION OF RELIGION”
The rejection of the Taliban’s policy against women as “un-Islamic” has
gained widespread support from the Islamic world, including major

institutions and religious authorities such as Al-Azhar and the Organization
of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Hissein Brahim Taha, the head of the OIC, has
called on Islamic scholars to form a unified position against the Taliban’s ban
on women. Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh of the United Arab Emirates has
expressed it fittingly, stating, “We must reject the exploitation and distortion
of religion or culture as an excuse to deprive women and girls in Afghanistan
of their basic rights. There is no religious basis for this in Afghanistan or
indeed in Islam. In fact, the opposite is true.”
While full gender equality remains elusive in Muslim countries, consid-
erable progress has been made in other places, in contrast to the regres-
sion in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia has five female ambassadors, including
its ambassador to the United States. In May of last year, the kingdom sent
its first female astronaut, Rayyanah Barnawi, to the International Space
Station. Nowhere in the
Islamic world—except
Afghanistan—are girls The problem is not Islam. It’s the
banned from school or Taliban.
universities. In coun-
tries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where the majority of the population
are Muslim, over 52 percent of civil servants are women, and women are
nowhere confined to the home, as they are in Afghanistan. The problem is
not Islam. It is the Taliban.
Afghans understand that it is not the responsibility of other coun-
tries to protect and defend their rights and freedom. While Afghanistan
lacks a figure like South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, a
large number of Afghan activists, both women and men, are fighting
daily against systematic oppression. Activists like Nargis Sadat, who
leads the Powerful Women Movement, music activist Musa Shaheen,
and education campaigner and civil society leader Matiullah Wesa are
just a few examples of individuals who are enduring imprisonment and
torture and have been left without access to lawyers and family visits
for months. Their bravery inspires many more Afghan men and women
to stand up against the Taliban, refusing to let their dreams for a better
future be shattered.
ALLIES
In a powerful show of solidarity, a group of female foreign ministers has
recently stepped forward for the third time to stand with Afghan women and
civil society.
However, the gravity of the situation demands even stronger voices from
human rights advocates and leaders, both men and women. Former US
ambassador Samantha Power, with her distinguished record of human
rights advocacy, could bring significant attention to the recognition of gen-
der apartheid as a crime. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland;
Zainah Anwar, the Malaysian feminist who headed Sisters in Islam; former
first lady Laura Bush, a longtime advocate of Afghan women’s rights; Hill-
ary Clinton, former US
secretary of state; Ursula
American commitments to human von der Leyen, president
rights should not remain mere of the European Com-
statements of condemnation. mission; Ellen Johnson
They must lead to decisive action. Sirleaf, former president
of Liberia; Najla Bouden,
former prime minister of Tunisia; Retno Marsudi, Indonesian foreign
minister; and others should join in the call for action and accountability
alongside Afghan women and US Special Envoy Rina Amiri. Together, they
could lend their influential voices to the cause, amplifying the urgency and
importance of addressing the dire situation in Afghanistan and demanding
the recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity.
The United States, with its professed commitment to human rights,
freedom, and democracy, bears a moral responsibility to stand up against
gender persecution in Afghanistan. President Biden has repeatedly
emphasized human rights as a focus of his foreign policy priorities, with
his administration emphasizing the promotion of democracy, human
rights, and the rule of law in US engagement with the world. These com-
mitments should not remain mere statements of condemnation; they
demand decisive action.
While some will argue that engaging with the Taliban and establishing a
field presence in Afghanistan would be in the interest of the United States,
lessons learned from dealing with the Islamist group should guide any
assumptions about a “changed Taliban.” The administration must not allow
the gender apartheid regime of the Taliban to become a new normal for the
United States or the rest of the world.
Shifting power dynamics and rising global challenges, including the war
in Ukraine, may tempt policy makers to prioritize other concerns over
human rights issues. However, if Aysha, a sixteen-year-old girl who lost her
father who was fighting alongside US forces in Wardak province, can brave
the brutality of the Taliban and take a stand on the street to demand the

right to education, then the United States should not shy away from utiliz-
ing its legal, diplomatic, and other foreign policy tools to stand with Afghan
women.
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L AW
“It Leaves People

Free to Disagree”
A new book by Hoover senior fellow Michael
McConnell disputes the idea that the Constitution
excludes religion from public life. Instead, he
writes, the establishment clause champions
individual conscience.
By Monica Schreiber
T
he establishment clause of the First Amendment, “Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” has
inspired two centuries of political debate and reams of case
law. A new book co-authored by Stanford Law School’s Michael
McConnell adds to the often-fraught discussion with a deep dive into what
the founders envisioned when drafting the establishment clause—and how
that vision can promote religious freedom and diversity in contemporary
America.
McConnell is a former judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the
Tenth Circuit. Widely recognized as one of the country’s foremost advocates
for and scholars of religious liberty, McConnell recently received the Can-
terbury Medal from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The award is the
Michael McConnell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Richard
and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and the director of the Constitutional
Law Center at Stanford Law School. Monica Schreiber is assistant director of
communications at Stanford Law School.

group’s highest honor for an individual “who embodies an unfailing commit-
ment to religious freedom.”
Here, he discusses some of the key arguments in Agreeing to Disagree:
How the Establishment Clause Protects Religious Diversity and Freedom of
Conscience (co-written with University of Georgia School of Law Professor
Nathan Chapman), including why he thinks too many “separation of church
and state” arguments have misconstrued the establishment clause’s original
intention for a religiously pluralistic society.
Monica Schreiber: What are your central arguments in Agreeing to Disagree

and what are some of the key points you hope readers will glean from the
book?
Michael McConnell: The establishment clause, probably more than any oth-
er provision of the Constitution, has been at the center of many of our mod-
ern culture-war debates. It specifically pertains to religion, but in a broader
philosophical sense, it has a bearing on a number of issues about which
Americans disagree quite strongly. The basic thrust of the establishment
clause is that matters of deep, personal conviction should be left to individual
choice. The establishment clause is very often misunderstood and seen only
under the rubric of separation of church and state. It is seen as having the
goal of secularizing the
public sphere, walling
“The basic thrust of the establish-
off religion from the
public sphere, but it is ment clause is that matters of deep,
the contention of our personal conviction should be left to
book that that is not only individual choice.”
historically inaccurate
but also normatively unattractive for today. As we explain, the importance of
the establishment clause is that it leaves people free to disagree. And it keeps
us from trying to use the state’s coercive power to win these battles.
I believe the framers thought that this would enhance freedom of con-
science at an individual level because there would be less likelihood of
government coercion, but also that it would bring about more civic peace and
harmony than if we are constantly engaged in trying to make sure “our side”
wins these conflicts. To put it plainly, we are supposed to agree to disagree.
Schreiber: How have different interpretations of the establishment clause

informed the many decades of debate over school prayer and religious
expression in public schools?

McConnell: The first big cases were in the 1960s, but the issues have been
debated all the way back to the very first American public schools in the
1840s. Initially the cases were about the leading of a classroom prayer, which
may not technically be coercive, but in a very practical sense, the pressure
on kids to conform was enormous. The argument was that the government
should not be the institution responsible for teaching our children how,
when, and whether to pray. But unfortunately, partly because of the way the
Supreme Court wrote its opinions, that idea was often read to be a somewhat
different principle, which was that religion has to be kept outside of schools
completely.
So in the 1980s, when schools were allowing students to form extracur-
ricular clubs of various sorts, including political clubs, environmental clubs,
and sports clubs, many schools were forbidding religious clubs. Students
who wanted to have, for example, a Bible study club, began going to court
arguing free expression. Virtually every lower court, every federal court,
was siding with the schools saying that such clubs would be a violation of
the establishment clause. But that simply makes no sense in light of the real
purpose of the establishment clause. These clubs were being formed by the
students, not the state. In no sense was the state imposing religious views
upon students. Congress got involved and passed the Equal Access Act,
which said that if a school was going to have any non-curriculum-related,
student-organized clubs, that they could not discriminate on the basis of the
philosophical, religious, or ideological content or speech of those clubs. That
law was struck down by
the Ninth Circuit, but ulti-
“These clubs were being formed mately upheld, in Westside
by the students, not the state. Community Schools [Board
In no sense was the state imposing of Education] v. Mergens,
religious views upon students.” with the Supreme Court
finding that allowing stu-
dents the freedom to form clubs without interference is perfectly in line with
the establishment clause and, indeed, is the opposite of “the establishment of
religion.”
Schreiber: What might people be surprised to learn about the framers of the
Constitution with regard to their views on the role of religion in America?
McConnell: The Supreme Court has said on many occasions that the estab-
lishment clause is in tension with the free exercise clause, which gives a spe-
cial protection for people’s actions when they are exercising their religious

beliefs. Many people assume this tension to be true. It is one contention of
our book that these two clauses are not in tension at all. In fact, they are
entirely complementary. What I think would really surprise many people if
they looked at the history is that the very same people who were favoring the
establishment clause were also the ones favoring free exercise. I think people
would be surprised at just how unified the arguments against the establish-
ment of religion were between the intensely religious minority sects and the
secular Enlightenment figures like Madison and Jefferson.
Schreiber: What cases and developments in the area of religious freedom are
you watching now?
McConnell: There will always be genuinely difficult questions, and the cases
are not going to go away. There will always be hard lines to draw when an
individual teacher is expressing religious ideas or practicing their own reli-
gion in the presence of
students who might be
affected or influenced. “There will always be genuinely
Teachers are rights- difficult questions, and the cases are
carrying individuals with not going to go away.”
their own freedom of
speech and freedom of religion. But at the same time, they also wear a hat
as a kind of authority figure within the school. And it’s often difficult to tell
exactly where that line is going to be.
I do think things have been going in the right direction with the courts,
but I also think that religious intolerance is actually on the rise in the United
States, and that worries me. I think in the area of civil liberties, the court is
not doing a bad job, but the hostility to the court is increasing. And the use of
the court as a kind of political punching bag is on the rise, which is bad for all
of us.
Schreiber: What are some broader lessons you think could be taken from the
ten words of the establishment clause?
McConnell: This goes to the last chapter of our book, which is more specula-
tive and doesn’t make a legal argument, but more of a cultural argument.
There are a lot of things in our culture that are like religion in the sense that
they touch very closely on issues of identity and fundamental ideas that are
not usually susceptible to much compromise and change. The establish-
ment clause does not apply directly to these ideas, but our suggestion is that
maybe the wisdom of the establishment clause could apply to them. If people

would think more about how we could get the government out of deciding
the questions and allowing more individual choice and conscience—in other
words, I go one way, you go a different way, and we don’t try to use the power
of the state to impose our worldview upon anyone else—that would provide
the same sort of benefits for our broader culture-war battles that the estab-
lishment clause provides in the religion context.
Reprinted with permission of Stanford Law School. © 2024 The Board of

Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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ENERGY AND T HE E N V IR ON M E N T
The Climate
Cudgel
In their attacks on energy companies, cities and
states are abusing the legal system.
By John Yoo
C
limate change has become the
latest opportunity for abuse Key points
»» Tort law is being distorted
of the legal system. For many
to seek outlandish damages
decades, liberals have turned from energy companies for
to the courts when the democratic policy- the alleged harms of global
warming.
making process has posed obstacles to
»» Countries other than the
their grandiose plans. Now, left-leaning United States produce roughly
cities and counties want to distort tort 85 percent of the world’s
greenhouse-gas emissions. US
law, our nation’s basic system for resolving
states can’t touch them.
accidents and harms, to seek outlandish
»» Energy companies have
damages from energy companies for the federal licenses to extract and
alleged harms of global warming. sell fossil fuels. Limiting that
work would be up to Congress.
In the latest example, Multnomah
County, Oregon, sued energy companies
John Yoo is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the co-host of the Hoover
Institution podcast The Pacific Century (https://www.hoover.org/publications/
pacific-century), the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is
the co-author, with Robert J. Delahunty, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to
the Supreme Court (Regnery Publishing, 2023).

UNREFINED: A protester in a dinosaur suit joins a climate-change protest in
2019 outside the US Capitol. Left-leaning cities and counties are twisting tort
law to seek damages from energy companies for the alleged harms of global
warming. [Angela N—Creative Commons]
last June for $50 billion for their alleged contribution to the “2021 Pacific
Northwest Heat Dome.” Last summer, four Democratic senators called on the
Department of Justice to follow suit, literally, and pursue energy companies
for allegedly misleading the public about climate change.
Led by New York and San Francisco (of course), liberal cities and coun-
ties have invented lawsuits against every energy company imaginable, from
major producers to refiners and gas sellers, for their role in creating cli-
mate change. Joined by Baltimore; San Francisco; Honolulu; Rhode Island;
Oakland, California; San Mateo, California; and Boulder, Colorado, among
others, public officials in these communities suddenly discovered around
2017 that global warming constituted a “public nuisance” that harmed their
residents and justified financial penalties.
These cities claim that the energy companies have caused broad injury
through the “production and promotion of massive quantities of fossil fuels.”
These businesses allegedly have triggered a “global-warming-induced sea lev-
el rise,” followed by flooding, erosion, and harm to municipal infrastructure
and water systems. These cities also demand that the energy companies fund
a “climate change adaptation program” to build sea walls, raise the elevation
of buildings, and construct “such other infrastructure as is necessary.”

These lawsuits may provide a welcome political distraction for liberal may-
ors and lawmakers, who have presided over the rising crime, stubborn home-
lessness, and failing schools that are ruining our inner cities. But they’re not
serious cases, and no court should treat them as such.
Energy companies receive licenses from the federal government to extract
and sell oil and gas. Nation-
al approval of their opera-
tions should dispel the Such lawsuits may offer politicians
notion that they should pay a welcome distraction from issues
damages or that the dam- like crime, homelessness, and failing
ages would have any real schools.
effect on global warming.
These lawsuits also plainly misuse states’ traditional control over tort law
to control conduct beyond their borders. States have the right to regulate
the harms that occur on their territory, such as pollution or accidents. But
global warming does not take effect primarily within any single state. Coun-
tries other than the United States produce roughly 85 percent of the world’s
greenhouse-gas emissions. And as the Supreme Court unanimously observed
in the 2011 case AEP v. Connecticut, emissions do not remain local but quickly
disperse and commingle in the atmosphere. “Emissions in [New York or]
New Jersey may contribute no more to flooding in New York than emissions
in China,” it said. China alone accounts for about one-third of all greenhouse-
gas emissions.
Moreover, blaming fossil fuels for climate change, which might then affect
city budgets, amounts to the type of extraterritorial regulation forbidden by
the Constitution. Under the “dormant” commerce clause, the Supreme Court
has long struck down state laws that advance economic protectionism under
the guise of health and
safety or environmental
goals. States also cannot No state can impose its own views
impose regulations on of economic or environmental policy
imports that effectively on the rest of the nation.
seek to control activity
that primarily takes place beyond their borders.
The Supreme Court, however, has defended a state’s right to control health
and safety even against a dormant commerce clause challenge. Just last sum-
mer, for example, the court allowed California to regulate the raising of pigs
sold in California, even though more than 90 percent of the livestock came
from outside of California.

But even with the court’s revival of federalism in that case, states do not
have the right to control conduct beyond their territory. A state cannot seek
to impose its own views of economic or environmental policy on the rest of
the nation. Limiting energy
use or replacing fossil fuels
In the end, cities and counties can’t with renewable sources
show that their lawsuits would have should be up to our elected
any effect at all on rising sea levels or representatives in Con-
other harms. gress. The US legislature,
not California, Texas, or
Florida, has the constitutional power “to regulate commerce with foreign
nations, and among the several states.”
These principles show that the city and county lawsuits should fail. These
jurisdictions even have difficulty identifying the discrete benefits of their
claims within their territories. The lawsuits are based on a faulty theory of
public nuisance that holds only select energy companies responsible for the
global rise in temperatures over many decades without assigning their share
of responsibility or considering other sources of carbon dioxide, such as
China and India or manufacturing and agriculture.
Finally, these cities and counties cannot show that their lawsuits would
have any effect on rising sea levels and their harms. The energy companies
might produce carbon dioxide in the single digits as a share of all human
emissions; even if they paid massive damages, other countries and industries
would continue to emit greenhouse gases undeterred.
Blue cities and states should not have the power to use the law to decide
the nation’s balance of energy between renewables, nuclear, and fossil fuels.
Those “major questions,” the court reminded us in striking down the Biden
administration’s student-debt-cancellation program last summer, remain for
Congress to make.
Reprinted by permission of the Washington Examiner. © 2024 Washington

Examiner. All rights reserved.
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and Gordon Lloyd. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

ENERGY AND T HE E N V IR ON M E N T
More Smoke,
Less Fire
No, the world is not “on fire”—in fact, areas burned
by wildfire have been shrinking. It’s the rhetoric
that’s overheated.
By Bjorn Lomborg
O
ne of the most common
tropes in our increasingly Key points
alarmist climate debate »» Since the early 2000s, the area
is that global warming of Earth’s surface burned an-
nually in wildfires has trended
has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. downward.
For more than two decades, sat- »» The latest report by the UN
ellites have recorded fires across climate panel does not attribute
the area burned globally to climate
the planet’s surface. The data are
change.
unequivocal: since the early 2000s,
»» Prescribed burns, wise zoning,
when 3 percent of the world’s land and enhanced land management
caught fire, the area burned annually work better to prevent fires than
climate policy does.
has trended downward. In 2022, the
last year for which there are complete
data, the world hit a record low of 2.2 percent burned area.
Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, president of the Co-
penhagen Consensus Center, and a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business
School. His latest book is Best Things First: The Twelve Most Efficient Solu-
tions for the World’s Poorest and Our Global SDG Promises (Copenhagen
Consensus Center, 2023).

COOL IT: An activist protests in London in late 2022. In that year, despite the
sign’s accusation, US fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in
the 1930s and likely only one-tenth of what caught fire in the early twentieth
century. [Creative Commons]
Yet you’ll struggle to find that reported anywhere. Instead, the news media
act as if the world is ablaze.
In late 2021, the New York Times employed more than forty staffers on a
project called “Postcards from a World on Fire,” headed by a photorealistic

animation of the world in flames. Its explicit goal was to convince readers of the
climate crisis’s immediacy through a series of stories of climate-change-related
devastation across the world, including the 2019–20 wildfires in Australia.
Last summer, much of the focus was on Canada’s wildfires, the smoke from
which covered large parts of the Northeastern United States. Both the Cana-
dian prime minister and the White House blamed climate change.
Yet the latest report
by the United Nations’
Fewer acres burning each year has led
climate panel doesn’t
attribute the area burned to overall lower levels of smoke. This
globally by wildfires to probably prevents almost 100,000
climate change. Instead, infant deaths a year.
it vaguely suggests the
weather conditions that promote wildfires are becoming more common in
some places. Still, the report finds that the change in these weather condi-
tions won’t be detectable above the natural noise even by the end of the
century.
The Biden administration and the Times can paint a convincing picture
of a fiery climate apocalypse because they selectively focus on the parts
of the world that are on fire, not the much larger area where fires are less
prevalent.
While the complete data aren’t in for 2023, global tracking up to July 29 by
the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) showed that more land had
burned in the Americas than usual. But much of the rest of the world had
seen lower burning—in Africa and especially in Europe.
Globally, the GWIS shows that burned area is slightly below the average
between 2012 and 2022, a period that already saw some of the lowest rates of
burned area.
The thick smoke from the Canadian fires that blanketed New York City and
elsewhere was serious but only part of the story. Around the world, fewer
acres burning each year has led to overall lower levels of smoke, which today
likely prevents almost 100,000 infant deaths annually, according to a recent
study by researchers at Stanford and Stockholm University.
SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
Likewise, while Australia’s wildfires in 2019–20 earned media headlines such
as “Apocalypse Now” and “Australia Burns,” the satellite data show this was
a selective narrative. The burning was extraordinary in two Australian states
but extraordinarily small in the rest of the country.

Since the early 2000s, when 8 percent of Australia caught fire, the area
of the country torched each year has declined. The 2019–20 fires scorched
4 percent of Australian land, and this year the burned area will probably be
even less.
That didn’t stop the media from cherry-picking. They ran with a study
from the World Wildlife Fund that found the 2019–20 fires impacted—
meaning took habitat
or food from, subjected
The 2019–20 burning in Australia to heat stress, killed, or
was extraordinary in two states, injured, among other
but extraordinarily small in the rest things—three billion
of the country. animals. But this study
looked mostly at the
two states with the highest burning, not the rest of Australia. Nationally,
wildfires likely killed or harmed six billion animals in 2019–20. That’s near
a record low. In the early 2000s, fires harmed or killed thirteen billion
animals annually.
It’s embarrassingly wrong to claim, as climate scientist Michael Mann
did recently, that climate policy is the “only way” to reduce fires. Prescribed
burning, improved zoning, and enhanced land management are much faster,
more effective, and cheaper solutions for fires than climate policy.
Environmental Protection Agency modeling showed that even with a dras-
tic reduction in emissions, it would take fifty to eighty years before we would
see a small impact in the area burned in the United States.
In the case of American fires, most of the problem is bad land manage-
ment. A century of fire suppression has left more fuel for stronger fires.
Even so, in 2022, US fires burned less than one-fifth of the average burn in
the 1930s and likely only
one-tenth of what caught
In the case of US fires, most of the fire in the early twentieth
problem is bad land management. century.
A century of fire suppression has When reading headlines
left more fuel for stronger fires. about fires, remember
the other climate scare
tactics that proved duds. Polar bears were once the poster cubs for climate
action, yet are now estimated to be more populous than at any time in the
past half century. We were told climate change would produce more hur-
ricanes, yet satellite data show that the number of hurricanes globally since
1980 has trended slightly downward.

COUNT THE COSTS
Global warming is a real challenge.
Over the next century, the costs associated will be the equivalent of one or
two recessions.
The commonsense response would be to recognize that both climate
change and carbon-cutting policies incur costs, then negotiate a balance that
puts the most effective measures first. Surveys repeatedly show that most
voters are unwilling to support the very expensive climate policies activists
and green politicians have proposed.
Overheated headlines about climate Armageddon are an attempt to scare
us into supporting them anyway, at the cost of sensible discussion and
debate.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2024 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.

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F REE EX PRESSION
Can We Say That?

Censorship may amplify the power of elites, but it
both offends and endangers free societies.
By Peter Berkowitz
I
n the United States and Britain, ill-informed
and poorly reasoned opinions about transgen- Key points
derism, climate change, COVID-19, Islamist » Censorship
degrades the qual-
extremism, working-class political inclinations ity of information
and voting patterns, race, sex, hate speech, and iden- available to voters
and officeholders.
tity politics dominate progressive elites’ thinking and
» Free speech
drive their policy making. This alone would pose no
undergirds the
special challenge to freedom and democracy. Mis- rights to religious
guided views, shortsighted laws, moralizing, and abuse liberty, assembly,
petition of govern-
of power leave their mark in the best of times. They ment, self-defense,
will persist as long as human beings remain fallible, property, and due
process of law.
self-interested, subject to appetite and emotion, and
» Censorship is
desirous of wealth, status, and dominion. a symptom of
The deeper concern is the determination of journal- anti-democratic
contempt.
ists, professors and university administrators, K–12
educators, government bureaucrats, high-tech titans
and social media moguls, entertainment-industry movers and shakers, and
corporate executives—a preponderance of what was once called “the estab-
lishment”—to silence dissent from progressive orthodoxy through law and
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution and a member of Hoover’s Military History in Contemporary Conflict Work-
ing Group.

popular opprobrium. That puts liberal democracy itself at risk, not least by
prompting the right to injudiciously retaliate with bans of its own.
Censorship degrades the quality of information available to voters and office-
holders. Flawed assumptions, bad ideas, and haughty attitudes can be rectified
by confrontation with sounder assumptions, better ideas, and suppler atti-
tudes. The suppression of
speech, however, deprives
error of illumination. It Suppressing speech prevents error
converts legitimate posi- from being exposed.
tions to suspect products
of special pleading and coercion. And it insulates true opinions from that con-
tact with alternative perspectives, messy realities, and fiercely held conflicting
convictions that transforms inert knowledge into living wisdom.
Censorship also undercuts the respect for fellow citizens and the rights of
others that sustain political cohesiveness in a liberal democracy. By designat-
ing some opinions as unquestionable and others as unutterable, an overbear-
ing majority—or a crafty and resolute minority—can purge the public square
of those citizens who harbor proscribed thoughts and refuse to genuflect to
authoritative conclusions. The right to free speech, moreover, is indissolubly
bound up with all the other basic rights and fundamental freedoms. I cannot
vindicate my equal rights to religious liberty, assembly, petition of govern-
ment, self-defense, prop-
erty, and due process of
law without the oppor- Censorship also undercuts the
tunity—unencumbered respect for fellow citizens that
by fear of formal govern- sustains political cohesiveness in
ment sanction and of a liberal democracy.
informal social ostra-
cism—to advance my views publicly and, also of crucial importance, to hear
others offer their perspectives.
KEEPING LIBERTY ALIVE

In his short book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, Brendan
O’Neill shows himself a hero of free speech and a champion of the moral
and political conditions in which it thrives. The chief political writer for the
maverick British magazine Spiked, O’Neill argues “that the constant churn
of political correctness—or cancel culture or wokeness or intolerance or
whatever we’re calling it—represents not just an over-the-top clampdown on
speech, but a crisis of Enlightenment.”

The phrase cancel culture, he stresses, fails to capture the gravity of the
threat. He writes:
Every enlightened idea—science is real, race is not, women

should have rights, freedom is good, reason is the best tool for
making sense of our world—risks being crushed under the for-
ever spinning wheel of correct thought. . . . Our curse is not just
to bear witness to the intermittent silencing of controversial com-
mentators, but to watch as liberty, objectivity, democracy, equal-
ity, and the other great gains of the modern era are sacrificed
one by one at the altar of new orthodoxies that pose, so falsely, as
progressive thought.
O’Neill is not content, though, to faithfully record the outrages against

liberty and clear thinking. His sizzling essays, which draw effortlessly on his-
tory and maneuver deftly through contemporary political culture, summon
readers to keep liberty alive. The censors “can cancel our speeches, our jobs,
our respectability, sometimes even our rights,” he acknowledges, “but they
cannot cancel this: the freedom of every person to think and believe as he
sees fit.”
One can appreciate, for example, O’Neill’s indignation over the contorted
language pertaining to the transgender phenomenon—even while affirming
that all human beings are equal in rights, so compassion and concern are due
to those who suffer gender dysphoria and respect is owed to those adults
who have made an informed decision to alter their bodies in line with their
understanding of gender. His objection is simple. If you are a woman, you
don’t possess XY chromosomes and male genitalia, and if you possess XY
chromosomes and male genitalia, you are not a woman. Yet the phrase “her
penis,” as he copiously documents in one essay, now appears routinely.
The casual coupling of those words, O’Neill contends, reflects not only
the corruption of journalists and jurists but also a failure of judgment and
reason. It shows that wokeness, contrary to progressive apologists, has
sunk into official discourse. It demonstrates the willingness of experts and
the authorities to deny nature on behalf of the new transgender orthodoxy.
It confirms the power “of the cultural despotism plaguing Anglo-American
society,” which erodes clarity of expression, common sense, and science. And
it brings into focus how, instead of honoring individuals, the proliferation of
pronouns and the coercive measures employed to spread their use—and pun-
ish their misuse—induces subservience to “the religion of gender fluidity.”
The amazing inroads in recent years—in schools, government bureaucracies,

and corporations—made by the dogma that one’s gender is whatever one
says it is illustrate George Orwell’s signature insight that control over lan-
guage confers control over thought.
Progressive thought police, O’Neill argues in a chapter titled “Islamo-
censorship,” also enforce the absurd view that the very notion of Islamic
extremism expresses Islamophobia. One example is the charge made by
British academics that criticism of the hijab—various head coverings worn
in public by Muslim women—must reflect gendered hostility to Islam. It fol-
lows, O’Neill mordantly points out, that the Islamic Republic of Iran suffered
a severe bout of Islamophobia last year when, following the death of twenty-
two-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the police who had arrested her
for failing to wear her hijab properly, young people across the country rose to
protest Tehran’s mandatory hijab laws.
Just as it is a crime in Iran to criticize Islam, so too is it an offense against
intellectual orthodoxy in the English-speaking academic world to call atten-
tion to oppression and violence within Muslim communities and Muslim
majority nation-states. The penalties differ: “Here you’ll find yourself
accused not of blasphemy, but of Islamophobia. Here you’ll be subjected not
to physical lashes, but to a tongue-lashing—‘phobic,’ ‘racist,’ ‘bigot,’ all of it.
Here you won’t be locked up, but you might be locked out—exiled from polite
society and blacklisted
from campuses for your
profane thoughts.” But “You won’t be locked up, but you
the silencing is similar. might be locked out—exiled from
Reminiscent of Iran’s polite society and blacklisted from
ayatollahs, British and campuses for your profane thoughts.”
US professors and
bureaucrats in effect enforce prohibitions on blasphemy against Islam.
HERETIC HEROES
Where blasphemy is barred, cursing of the impure, the unclean, and the
vulgar is required. A favorite target for the West’s woke is older, white, male
members of the working class.
In “Rise of the Pigs,” O’Neill explores the casual contempt with which Brit-
ish intellectual and political elites refer to white men who voted for Brexit as
gammon—cured ham or bacon. “So widespread was the use of the gammon
slur in liberal and leftish chatter post-Brexit that, in 2018,” writes O’Neill, “the
Collins English Dictionary chose it as one of its words of the year.” The reduction
of fellow citizens to pig meat signifies their unfitness for politics. The evidence?

They voted against elite wishes. The elites’ solution? Limit public discussion
by controlling the information that reaches the people. While the proffered justi-
fication for the new censorship—as for the old—is separating true from false,
in practice the restriction of access to supposed “misinformation” or “disinfor-
mation” aims to conceal
or delegitimize facts,
The real reason for attacking considerations, and argu-
“misinformation” or “disinformation” ments that distract from
is to conceal or delegitimize facts or weaken the progressive
and arguments that contradict the narrative. At bottom, the
progressive assault on free
progressive narrative.
speech reflects anti-dem-
ocratic ire. The educated must censor because otherwise the clash of opinions
will confuse the ignorant and gullible masses or, worse, empower them to vote
as they see fit.
O’Neill warns that in the struggle to preserve free speech it is a mistake to
deny its enemies’ insistence that words wound: “It is precisely because words
can wound, precisely because of their power to unsettle, that they should
never be restricted.” Although not the goal, pain and perplexity are insepa-
rable from the exploration through which we learn who we are as citizens
and human beings. Only by risking the wounds and daring to be disoriented
can we arrive at a responsible understanding of what in our political societies
must be conserved and what must be improved.
Woke censorship renders heretics—especially those who defy the preju-
dices of the age by defending free speech—more vital than ever to liberal
democracy.
Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2024 RealClearHold-

ings LLC. All rights reserved.

Varieties of Conservatism in America, edited by Peter
Berkowitz. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

E D U C AT ION
Learn by Example
Why do Asian-American students excel? Let’s
stop being afraid to ask.
By Michael J. Petrilli and Amber M. Northern
T
he summer of 2023 brought a seismic shift to higher education:
the Supreme Court’s striking down of affirmative action in col-
lege admissions.
Putting aside the rancorous debates about the rationale and
implications of the decision, at the heart of the Harvard case was clear
evidence that the university was discriminating against Asian-American
students.
A revealing 2022 study of Harvard admissions (“Asian American Discrimi-
nation in Harvard Admissions,” in the European Economic Review) found a
“substantial penalty against Asian-American applicants relative to their
white counterparts.” Given that the overall admissions rate for Asian-Amer-
ican applicants at Harvard was around 5 percent, the scholars estimated,
removing what amounted to a handicap would increase their admissions
chances by at least 19 percent.
What’s more, the researchers took on a surprisingly candid tone when not-
ing the differences between the Asian and white applicant pool:
While it is widely understood that Asian-American applicants

are academically stronger than whites, it is startling just how
much stronger they are. During the period we analyze, there were
Michael J. Petrilli is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the president
of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Amber M. Northern is senior vice president
for research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

42 percent more white applicants than Asian-American applicants
overall. Yet, among those who were in the top 10 percent of appli-
cants based on grades and test scores, Asian-American applicants
outnumbered white applicants by more than 45 percent.
Startling indeed.
Findings from the Fordham Institute’s new study, “Excellence Gaps by
Race and Socioeconomic Status,” reminded us of this eye-popping imbalance.
Written by Fordham’s
Meredith Coffey and
Two decades ago, Asian-American Adam Tyner, the report
students were already disproportion- digs into how race and
ately reaching advanced levels. socioeconomic status
(SES) interact to shape
academic “excellence gaps”—disparities in performance among groups of
students achieving at the highest levels.
Their analysis uses nearly twenty years of eighth-grade reading and math
assessment data (2003 to 2022) to document the progress of A merica’s
highest-performing students, meaning those who earned “Advanced”
scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. “the
Nation’s Report Card.” Among other things, it finds that fewer black and
Hispanic students from the highest-SES group (those with college-educat-
ed mothers) are achieving at Advanced levels than we would expect given
their socioeconomic status. That’s a disparity clearly worth our attention.
But so are the study’s findings on Asian-American high achievers—
who deserve our attention for a different reason. Two decades ago,
Asian-American and Pacific Islander students (AAPI) were already dis-
proportionately reaching the Advanced level of performance, and they’ve
only made more progress since then. Part of that progress is due to raising
the floor: Coffey and Tyner find that among students in the lower-SES
ranks (those whose mothers have a high school diploma or less), there’s
been a substantial increase over time in the proportion of AAPI students
who are Advanced.
Add it up and we can see that the AAPI advantage has only grown.
Now let’s put these numbers into a context that is familiar to admissions
officers at highly selective colleges. If we consider both the percentage of
students in each racial subgroup achieving at the Advanced level and their
share of the student population, what does the racial composition of students
scoring Advanced look like?

It’s clear that the proportion of Advanced students who are white dropped
significantly, from 82 to 61 percent, between 2003 and 2022. Yet most of the
diversity gains came from Asian-American students (who went from 10 to
22 percent) and, to a lesser degree, Hispanic students (from 3 to 8 percent).
The proportion of Advanced students who are black decreased over that
time, from a tragically low 3 percent to 2 percent.
Now let’s see how it
looks for reading scores
in 2003 and then in 2022. Reformers should ask: are there
The pattern is largely the practices among Asian-American
same: big declines in the students that could apply
proportion of white stu- more broadly?
dents, with large gains
for Asian-American and Hispanic students. The black proportion is again
down, from 5 to 3 percent.
What can we take from all of this, particularly when it comes to Asian-
American high achievers?
First, they are making solid gains and their success deserves to be
recognized.
Second, although high-achieving students in eighth grade in the United
States are a more diverse group than they were twenty years ago, most of
this growing diversity is driven by gains by Asian-American and Hispanic
students. For Hispanic students, that largely tracks the growth of their
population as a whole, which has nearly doubled over the past two decades.
That’s part of the story for Asian-American students, too (their numbers are
up by a third), but it’s also due to their improved performance. Case in point:
our study finds that Asian-American students are so high achieving that even
those in the lowest-socioeconomic-status group often equal or outperform
higher-SES students of other racial and ethnic groups.
Third, we need to
learn from the success
of AAPI students and High performers are often left to fend
their families—not be for themselves.
threatened by it or seek
to depress their chances of gaining admission to prestigious institutions.
At the national, state, and local levels, policy makers and educators should
ask: are there observable practices among AAPI students that could apply
more broadly? For instance, are they more likely to participate in extra-
curricular activities, sign up for more challenging classes, or take part in

academic tutoring, clubs, or competitions? Are these behaviors helping
AAPI students reach the highest level of academic achievement? If so, how
could smart policies expand those opportunities to students from other
communities?
Education reformers spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and
resources (rightly so) supporting low-performing students. But high per-
formers are often left to fend for themselves. Let’s just say this: it’s not right.
We can do better. And we should start doing better today.
Reprinted by permission of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. © 2024 The

Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All rights reserved.

Unshackled: Freeing America’s K–12 Education
System, by Clint Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman. To order,

E D U C AT ION
COVID’s
Lifetime Tax
Learning losses can persist for decades. Why
we can’t close the books on the young victims of
pandemic policies.
By Eric A. Hanushek
R
eports of drops in student
achievement due to the COV- Key points
ID-19 pandemic are now treated »» The Nation’s Report Card
(NAEP) shows declines in
as old news. Amid abstract students’ math and reading
reporting of test results, a sense of inevitabil- skills since the pandemic.
ity and complacency has developed. After all, »» People who know more,
as measured by tests like
could the fact that students’ math scores fell
NAEP, earn more throughout
by “nine points” truly be important? their working lives.
The reality is that the cohort of students »» The pandemic learn-
in school in March 2020 has been seriously ing losses imply that the
American population will
harmed—implicitly facing a lifetime tax on be less skilled than it would
earnings of 6 percent. And the harm is not have been—to the tune of $28
trillion in economic losses.
going away.
A simple way to assess learning loss from
the pandemic is to compare the performance of students tested in 2023 to
students taking the same tests in 2020. The most recent data come from
Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He was awarded the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021.

the National Assessment of Educational Progress for thirteen-year-olds.
Often called the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP provides regular assessments
of American students’ math and reading skills at different ages. Comparing
2023 results with those for students tested just before the pandemic reveals
that losses averaged nine points in math and four points in reading. This drop
erased all the gains in students’ math scores since 1990 and moved reading
scores back to where they were in 1975! Low-achieving students lost more
than high achievers, poor students lost more than nonpoor students, and
both black and Hispanic students lost more than white students.
But NAEP, like most tests, uses an arbitrary scale to report scores that
makes the size of changes hard to interpret. The implications of lost learning
are better seen by translating these sterile numbers into economic losses.
Past research confirms that people who know more, as measured by their
performance on tests like NAEP, earn more. The research considers how
individuals’ earnings throughout their working lives differ according to the
skills measured by scores on standardized math and reading tests. Impor-
tantly, the US labor market rewards these cognitive skills more than almost
all developed countries—which in turn implies that the United States pun-
ishes the lack of these skills more than almost all developed countries.
Historical earnings patterns make it is possible to estimate what the learn-
ing losses documented by NAEP will cost the average student in the COVID
cohort: 6 percent lower lifetime earnings than those not in this cohort. In
other words, the pandemic learning losses for this cohort are equivalent on
average to a 6 percent tax surcharge on income throughout the students’
working lives. This rises to 8 percent for the average black student, who suf-
fered greater learning losses according to NAEP.
The economic costs do not end there. The economies of nations with
more skilled populations grow faster in the long run, and the pandemic
learning losses imply that the US population will be less skilled in the
future than it would have been. Using historical growth patterns, it is
again possible to project the aggregate losses to the US economy of hav-
ing this lower-skilled cohort move through the labor force. The economic
CAUTION: Signs at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland

(opposite), mandate the wearing of face masks in October 2021. Historical
earnings patterns indicate the pandemic learning losses of the 2020 cohort
amount to an average of a 6 percent tax throughout the students’ working
lives. This rises to 8 percent for the average black student. [G. Edward Johnson—
Creative Commons]

loss from the lower-skilled workforce amounts in present value terms to
$28 trillion.
Costs in trillions of dollars are perhaps no easier to understand than drops
in test scores. To put this figure in perspective, consider that the projected
loss of $28 trillion amounts to more than one year’s gross domestic prod-
uct. Or that the aggregate losses that are due to unemployment, business
closures, and related economic fallout from the pandemic totaled about
$2 trillion. The losses from the “Great Recession” in 2008 totaled about
$5 trillion. In short, the impact on the economy we should expect from
pandemic-era learning loss dwarfs the impacts that have so captured public
and policy makers’ attention in recent years.
PERMANENT LOSSES
We are struggling as a nation even to get our schools back to where
they were in terms of supporting student learning, but these costs will
be permanent if we just return schools to the status quo of March 2020.
Our schools must improve if we are going to eliminate the burden of lost
learning. Evidence from
a variety of experiences
If schools simply return to business in other nations shows
as usual, the losses will persist. that the losses students
experienced will persist
if schools simply return to business as usual. For example, several German
states had short school years in the 1960s when policy makers sought to
standardize school calendars nationwide. The earnings of students edu-
cated during that period stand out throughout their careers from those
of students educated before and after the adjustment, and not in a good
way. Other examples of extended school disruptions—for example, due to
prolonged teacher strikes—show similarly persistent impacts.
What has been done so far to address learning loss? The federal govern-
ment provided almost $190 billion in COVID relief aid to schools under three
separate appropriations. Only a small portion, however, was required to
be spent on ameliorating learning loss, and most schools have yet to spend
much of these funds even though they disappear in a year.
States and districts have adopted a variety of strategies that most fre-
quently include added instructional time or intensive tutoring. Unfortunate-
ly, the results of these efforts to date have not been good. Even if we opti-
mistically project that the best available programs will be implemented with
fidelity, the losses will not be erased. The scale of current recovery efforts is

simply not enough to overcome the deficits. Moreover, when recovery pro-
grams are voluntary, as is typically the case, higher-achieving students are
more likely to participate,
leading to a widening of
achievement gaps. When recovery programs are
At the same time, the voluntary, higher-achieving students
pandemic strengthened a are more likely to participate. The
number of harmful policy learning gap widens.
trends that may cause
school quality to decline. For one, it reinforced a general drift away from
test-based accountability policies. Additionally, teachers’ unions saw the
pandemic as an opportunity to push a variety of their preferred policies—
including policies well beyond pay, benefits, or anything related to learning.
For example, the Oakland Education Association in the Bay Area, after
agreeing to a substantial pay and benefits hike, nonetheless went on an eight-
day strike in May 2023 over “common good” clauses, including reparations
for black students and “environmental justice.”
ANSWERS
There is a clear roadmap to success, albeit one that leads to political
tension. The one policy that is known from research to be effective is
ensuring that all students have an effective teacher. Recruiting and retain-
ing more effective teachers has, of course, been the goal of many policy
initiatives, but a variant
of this emphasis can
be the solution to the One solution: give incentives to the
learning loss problem: most effective current teachers to
simply provide incen- teach more students.
tives for the most
effective current teachers to teach more students. The highly effective
teachers could teach larger classes or added sections of courses with both
monetary incentives and additional support for this work. Unused federal
funds could immediately support this tactic. Indeed, one could go further
and use part of the funds to buy out the contracts of the least-effective
teachers. These steps could instantly improve the average effectiveness of
instruction, both making up for pandemic-era learning losses and improv-
ing schools going forward.
Such policies have been shown to work in a few large districts, including
Washington, DC, and Dallas. Deploying them now at scale could save the

COVID cohort from a 6 percent lifetime tax. The alternative, saying change is
“too hard,” amounts to accepting the lifetime injury to current students along
with a $28 trillion national loss.
Reprinted from Education Next (www.educationnext.org). © 2024 Educa-

tion Next Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.
Available from Stanford University Press is The High

Cost of Good Intentions: A History of US Federal
Entitlement Programs, by John F. Cogan. To order, visit
www.sup.org.

E D U C AT ION
May the Talented

Students Bloom
States don’t serve gifted learners well. Here’s a
detailed plan for doing better.
By Chester E. Finn Jr.
G
etting advanced learners (a.k.a. “gifted” students) the education
they need, and ensuring that this works equitably for youngsters
from every sort of background, is substantially the responsibility
of state leaders.
Districts and individual schools, charters included, do the heavy lifting, but
states create the policy structures (and funding flows) within which this hap-
pens. They create guidelines for which students are eligible, how they should
be identified, what services must be provided for them, how to track their
progress and the performance of their schools, what qualifications must their
teachers possess, and how to ensure fairness across the board.
Today, sadly, America’s high-flying students—and those with the potential
to soar—face a dizzying array of inconsistent and incomplete state policies
and practices. This is meticulously—and depressingly—documented in the
National Association for Gifted Children’s “State of the States” report. Work-
ing through its tables and analyses yields much insight into what a jumble
Chester E. Finn Jr. is the Volker Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover
Institution and participates in the Hoover Education Success Initiative. He is
Distinguished Senior Fellow and President Emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute.

is this policy domain between states—and how inconsistent many states are
within their own policies.
In Fordham’s home state of Ohio, for example, statutes supply a reason-
ably clear definition of who’s eligible for “gifted and talented” education, a
mandate for their identification, and guidance as to what methods should
be used to identify them.
The Buckeye State also
America’s high-flying students does a credible job of
face a dizzying array of inconsistent, tracking the achievement
incomplete state policies. growth (on state assess-
ments) at the school level
of those who do get identified, and it reports how many within that popula-
tion actually receive some sort of extra services from their districts. Good
start, sure.
Yet Ohio has absolutely no requirement for serving those kids, i.e.,
nothing that obligates Buckeye schools to do anything different for their
advanced learners at any level—not elementary, not middle, not high
school—let alone any mechanism for ensuring equitable participation. As
a result, just 5.2 percent of those identified as “gifted” in Ohio are black
and 21.4 percent come from low-socioeconomic-status families (these data
are from 2020–21), though the state’s public school population that year
contained approximately 16.8 percent black youngsters and 48.4 percent
from lower-SES households. Unsurprisingly, Ohio loses large quantities
of high-potential human capital—and does far less well than it might on
upward mobility—by virtue of the fact that gifted poor kids are much
likelier to “lose altitude” as they pass through school than their more
prosperous peers.
What, then, should state leaders do—assuming, as we should, that they
care about giving every child the fullest and most challenging education that
those youngsters can effectively use, developing their state’s human capital,
deploying rational policies, and narrowing the yawning “excellence gaps”
that exist today?
Rejoice! An answer is at hand. They should turn to and follow the useful
nine-part policy roadmap for state leaders that was recently developed by
the National Working Group on Advanced Education in its excellent report,
Building a Wider, More Diverse Pipeline of Advanced Learners.
Here’s the plan—noting up front that all nine of these steps must be taken
in synchronized fashion. It’s not “pick and choose” your policy—or today’s
chaos will persist.

First, in their school and district accountability systems, states should
place significant weight on student-level progress over time, not just grade-
level proficiency, so as to encourage all schools to help all students achieve
their full potential, including high achievers. When all the focus is on get-
ting kids over the proficient bar, those who have already cleared it might be
ignored.
Second, states should eliminate any policies that bar early entrance to
kindergarten, middle school, or high school. This allows high performers to
start sooner, move faster,
and get farther.
Third, states should Gifted poor kids are much likelier
mandate the use of local, to “lose altitude” as they pass through
school-based norms for school than their more prosperous
identifying students for
peers.
advanced programs, in
particular at the elementary level. That means that every elementary school
in the state should have a “gifted program” of some kind, serving at least
the top 5 or 10 percent of its students or ensuring that they’re well served
elsewhere.
Fourth, states should implement specific requirements about the services
provided to advanced learners, services such as achievement grouping,
accelerated learning, serious enrichment, specialized schools, and more.
Too many states—as in the Ohio example above—require identification but
nothing to ensure that those who get identified will get the schooling they
need.
Fifth, states should mandate that districts and charter networks allow for
acceleration (including grade skipping) for students who could benefit from
it, and should clarify that middle school students who complete high school
courses can earn high school credit.
Sixth, states should publicly report on the students participating in
advanced education, including their achievement and growth over time, as
well as their demographic characteristics.
Seventh, states should ensure that preparation and in-service professional-
development programs offer evidence-based instruction in advanced educa-
tion, both for district-level coordinators and for teachers.
Eighth, states should enforce the federal requirement that states explain
how teacher-preparation programs address education of special populations,
including advanced learners. (Today, this is a requirement for Title II reports
that is widely ignored.)

Ninth and finally, states should provide funding and other incentives to
encourage schools to frequently and equitably evaluate all students and
provide a continuum of services to every student who could benefit.
Take that list to heart, state leaders, put its precepts into practice—all, not
some of them, and in time your state will do right by its advanced learners,
strengthen its economy, encourage upward mobility, and boost equality of
opportunity.
Reprinted by permission of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. © 2024 The

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

Lies Ahead for America’s Children and Their Schools,
edited by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Richard Sousa. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit

C A LIFOR N IA
California or
Bust
It’s bust. California’s problems show no sign of
fixing themselves.
By Lee E. Ohanian
F
or the past five years, my Hoover colleague Bill Whalen and I have
written about the economics of California, its state policies, and
its state politics. Before I began writing in the Hoover Institu-
tion online journal California on Your Mind, I knew that some of
California’s economic policies were poorly designed and creating significant
waste and dysfunction. But it wasn’t until after I began studying these issues
in detail that I found out just how badly California is politically managed. The
problems are so numerous, so glaring, and so costly that I thought California
politicians would self-correct. I was wrong.
Every major policy error I have observed has become worse in the past
five years, including budget waste, the failure of politicians to prioritize what
Californians want, the lack of oversight and accountability within state and
local government, and a deepening of the costly symbiosis between state
politicians and the political interest groups who lie at the center of nearly all
of California’s policy failures. And this nexus will preserve California’s deeply
flawed policy status quo until voters decide that they have had enough.
Lee E. Ohanian is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a professor

of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic
Research at UCLA.

BLOATED PAYROLLS
Overpayment and waste within state government is considerable, and it
largely reflects the lack of incentives for state agencies to be efficient and
the lack of accountability when they make costly mistakes. California’s state
budget has grown more than 50 percent in the past five years, rising from
$201 billion in 2018–19 to $311 billion this fiscal year, totaling nearly $24,000
per California household. Despite this budget, I doubt one could identify any
major activity or department within state government that performs at a
high level and is operated at a reasonable cost.
State employee compensation is one major cost component that appears to
be too expensive. State workers on average received about $143,000 in total
compensation in 2019, roughly twice as much as private sector compensation
that year. This reported difference understates the gap, however, because
public sector pension contributions are understated, prefunding of public
sector retirement health benefits are not included in compensation, and
the value of additional public sector compensated days off is not included.
A state public-private compensation comparison has not been performed
since 2019, but average state worker compensation today could be as high as
$170,000 if it has kept up with inflation.
One reason state government compensation significantly exceeds private
sector compensation is because few public sector agencies seriously bench-
mark their compensation
practices to those in the
Private sector pay is linked to the private sector. Private
value created by employees. Public sector compensation is
sector pay isn’t. disciplined by the value
created by employees.
In a competitive marketplace, private sector employers need to pay enough
to attract the talent they seek but will suffer losses if they overpay. These
compensation dynamics are largely absent in the public sector, which leads
to public sector workers receiving higher compensation than they would in
the private sector.
For example, average compensation in the California Highway Patrol
was $209,000 in 2019. For comparison, total compensation in the highest
paying private sector industry in the country (utilities) averaged about
$128,000 in 2019. This is for an industry that is extremely capital intensive
and that tends to hire highly skilled specialists. In contrast, the primary
requirements for becoming a highway patrol officer are high school

graduation or equivalent, a valid California driver’s license, and no felony
convictions. The reason highway patrol employees receive such high com-
pensation is because they are represented by a powerful union, and there
are inadequate incentives within state government to do anything other
than agree every three years to the union’s lucrative collective bargaining
agreements.
The same issue holds for many other state workers, including California
state prison guards, who earn twice as much as prison guards in the rest
of the country and who are also represented by a powerful union. Total
compensation for a senior prison guard exceeds $200,000 annually, and
this compensation doesn’t include overtime. In 2021, overtime pay within
the prison system totaled over $500 million, reflecting union contracts that
provide generous overtime rates. But the cost to taxpayers goes beyond
inflated prison system salaries because the prison guard union effectively
fights prison reforms, ranging from those that would rein in the behavior of
corrupt guards to those that would enhance job training and rehabilitation
of inmates, which in turn would help support their social transition and job
prospects after leaving prison.
TOO MUCH TROUBLE TO FIX

The significant waste within state government reflects poor decision making
by state agencies, which can have disastrous effects. One example is Califor-
nia’s Employment Development Department (EDD), which is responsible for
the administration of state unemployment benefits. The EDD manages this
activity using a patchworked mainframe computer from the 1980s, running
software developed in the
1950s. The system has
long been susceptible to Jobless benefits are calculated on a
fraud, which was suc- patchworked mainframe computer
cessfully managed using from the 1980s, running software
third-party software that from the 1950s.
was costing about $1 mil-
lion per year—about 0.5 percent of the department’s budget. But the depart-
ment chose to discontinue the software because of its cost. This led to more
than $30 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims being paid during the
height of the COVID pandemic, and many legitimate claims affecting nearly
one million workers being held up for months. To benchmark the size of this
fraud, it is about 50 percent larger than the annual budget of Tennessee, the
country’s fifteenth-largest state.

Why is the EDD running an ancient IT system that can’t reliably detect
fraud or pay legitimate claims on time? Because there are inadequate incen-
tives and accountability within the department. The EDD has performed
poorly for years and has been the subject of five audits in the past decade,
but those audits have had little if any effect. Sharon Hilliard, who directed
California’s EDD during the pandemic, had been working at the EDD for
thirty-seven years, having started at the age of nineteen. She had been steadi-
ly promoted to the top in an agency that had become increasingly antiquated
and inefficient during her tenure. No one within state government ever asked
whether she was quali-
fied to lead the agency
Once upon a time, a vision of high- because it was simply
speed rail was sold to voters. easier to continue to run
the EDD on autopilot.
But the saga of the EDD didn’t end when the public health emergency did.
The fraudulent payments led the state to take out a loan from the federal
government to replenish the state’s unemployment funds—a loan the state
subsequently defaulted on last year. Federal unemployment-insurance law
transfers the state’s liability to California’s private businesses, which now
must pay higher unemployment taxes for years to pay off the state govern-
ment’s debt.
The EDD is now the subject of a House of Representatives Oversight and
Accountability Committee investigation, in which the agency appears not to
be complying with the committee’s document requests.
TRAIN IN VAIN
California’s high-speed rail is perhaps the most striking example of the
state’s pet political spending that provides no value to Californians. In
2008, voters were promised a transportation system that would connect
Northern with Southern California and the Central Valley with the coast,
with trains traveling more than two hundred miles per hour, at a cost of
about $33 billion, to be built by 2020. Voters agreed to a $9.95 billion bond
issue for seed money in 2008, with the expectation that private investment
would be forthcoming.
Fifteen years later, the taxpayer seed money has been spent, and costs
have increased to the point that the original $33 billion budget will not be
enough to complete even a route between Bakersfield and Merced, which is
perhaps more than a decade away—if it’s completed at all. The project has
never attracted private funding, as it has been plagued by mismanagement,

lawsuits, and neglected oversight. Nearly all aspects of the project’s manage-
ment were turned over to consultants who were among the project’s largest
political supporters in 2008.
The project should never have even been initiated: reports from the state
Legislative Analyst’s Office in 2008 and 2009 showed that the original busi-
ness plan and subsequent plans were deficient, including a failure to account
for project risks and their mitigation, how funds would be secured, the
allocation of costs, what methods were used to forecast ridership, the type
of equipment to be used, an estimated date of completion for environmental
reviews, or a ridership break-even point.
Even high-speed rail’s most ardent defenders admit that the project
requires substantial federal funding if it’s ever to have a chance, but the
current makeup of the House of Representatives is likely to object, given the
project’s enormous delays and cost overruns.
The vision sold to
voters in 2008 has
become a fantasy, yet Three-fourths of the students in
the state’s Democratic California schools don’t learn enough
Party continues to fund to succeed in the world they will
what has become a pet
inherit.
project, with no path to
completion. There is so little accountability within the state that lawmakers
don’t feel the need to explain the failures of the project to their constituents.
The state Senate’s Transportation Committee hasn’t issued a report on high-
speed rail since 2016, and the state Assembly’s Transportation Committee
has no documents on it.
SHAMEFUL SCHOOLS
California’s K–12 public education system is the best illustration of the
damage created by relationships between state policy makers and political
interest groups. More than 75 percent of California students lack proficiency
in math or reading, despite a $128 billion state education budget that exceeds
the entire budget of most states. And as the system fails to educate our chil-
dren, the state’s Department of Education threatens to sue education experts
who would testify against the department for this failure.
Education in California fails because there are inadequate incentives and
accountability within the system. Teacher tenure is frequently awarded after
only eighteen months of teaching, and it is extremely costly to fire a tenured
teacher for poor performance. Education economists have estimated that

replacing the worst teachers from California classrooms would substantially
boost the achievement and future lifetime earnings of students. Teacher
compensation is divorced from teacher effectiveness within unions’ collective
bargaining agreements, which means that highly performing teachers are
not financially rewarded. But modifying teacher tenure rules and implement-
ing merit-based pay have been impossible to accomplish, and this is entirely
due to the close relationship between state politicians and teachers’ unions.
In 2018, two Democrats—Tony Thurmond and Marshall Tuck—ran for
the office of state school superintendent. Tuck was a reform candidate
who had turned around
several failing schools in
A powerful environmental lobby Los Angeles, within just
blocks reforms that would increase one year, by implementing
California’s water supplies and create modest reforms. Thur-
more housing. mond had no experience
running a school yet was
the candidate supported by California’s education establishment. In August
2018, just three months before the election, Tuck addressed the California
state Democratic Party’s annual convention about his ideas to improve Cali-
fornia schools. But he was shouted down until his time to speak had expired.
He couldn’t say one word. If he had been permitted to speak, he would have
explained his ideas about creating lifelong training programs for teachers,
raising pay for teachers and principals in poor communities, and rewarding
teachers based on their performance.
But any change to the status quo is anathema to education interest
groups and the politicians they support. Those who pay the ultimate
price for this are the three out of four children who go through our K–12
classrooms without learning enough to succeed in the world that they will
inherit. It’s not as if we don’t know how to teach our kids. One extremely
successful California charter school is achieving outstanding learning
outcomes by giving teachers the flexibility they need and by eliminating
confrontational union-management relationships. The blueprint is there
for us to follow. If we did, we could immediately improve the lives of more
than five million children. It is hard to imagine anything sadder within the
realm of our state policies.
INERTIA IS TOO STRONG

I had hoped that California’s political leaders would implement sensible
policy reforms that would benefit so many Californians, particularly the

thirteen million people within the state who live in or near poverty, whose
children suffer from the worst schools, and who try to manage on an annual
household income of $41,000 or less per year for a family of three.
But after watching California policies and politics up close for the past
five years, I now realize that my hope that California’s politicians would
self-correct was misplaced. California’s policy failures won’t be resolved
because that would mean California politicians breaking away from the
status quo interest-group cocoons in which they are so fully enmeshed.
These include a powerful environmental lobby that blocks policy reforms
that would increase California’s water supplies and reduce building costs
to create more housing; a host of unions that block the implementation of
market-based pay and work rules to enhance worker efficiency; and other
obstacles.
The policy reforms are there for the taking. Better policies would cre-
ate better schools, less costly housing, better roads, more water, and lower
energy costs. But those reforms will sit on the shelf until voters choose
differently. I hope that in another five years I will be able to write that
voters did just that.
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.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

California Electricity Crisis, by James L. Sweeney. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

I NTERVI EW
Does Merit Still

Matter?
Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell expounds on
a familiar theme: society’s never-ending delusion
that equality can advance at the expense of merit.
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: After growing up in Harlem,

Thomas Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps, then received an
undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from Columbia, and
a doctorate from the University of Chicago. After teaching at universities
that included Cornell, Brandeis, and UCLA, Dr. Sowell became a fellow at the
Hoover Institution in 1977. Thomas Sowell is the author of some forty books,
including his newest volume, Social Justice Fallacies. And this past spring, he
turned ninety-three. Tom, welcome back.
Thomas Sowell: Oh, good being here.
Robinson: Dr. Martin Luther King said in 1963: “I have a dream that my four
little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” You write that
Dr. King’s message was equal opportunity for individuals regardless of race.
Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy
at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is Social Justice Fallacies (Basic
Books, 2023). Peter Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of
Uncommon Knowledge, and the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the
Hoover Institution.

HE PERSISTED: Hoover senior fellow Thomas Sowell reminds readers,
“Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who imagine that
they can control a whole society with the ease with which one puts chess
pieces where you want them on a chess board.” [Uncommon Knowledge—Hoover
Institution]
In the years that followed, the goal changed to equal outcomes for groups.
What now rose to dominance was the social justice agenda. If those backing
the social justice agenda could have everything they wanted, what would the
country look like?
Sowell: We’d be killing each other.
Robinson: What is the social justice agenda? What do they want?
Sowell: They want everybody to have equal outcomes or as close as they can
get to it. Unfortunately, you don’t have the preconditions for that, even in the
same family. One of the examples I use in the book is among five-child fami-
lies, the National Merit finalist is the firstborn just over half the time. That is,
more often than the other four siblings combined. The fifth-born is 6 percent
of the time. And so it was, even where you have almost ideal conditions.

They’re born to the same parents, raised under the same roof, and they’re
not the same.
Robinson: Because all kinds of things matter, including birth order.
Sowell: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Robinson: You take on various fallacies here. Let’s take on a couple of them.
The “equal chances” fallacy, I’m quoting you: “Even in a society with equal
opportunity, people from different backgrounds do not necessarily even want
to do the same things. In American sports, blacks are very overrepresented
in professional basketball,
whites in professional ten-
“There’s this notion of this inert nis, and Hispanics in Major
mass of people down there and then League Baseball.” Why is
the wonderfully brilliant people at that telling?
the top who ought to be telling them Sowell: Because the implicit
what to do.” assumption and sometimes
explicit assumption is that in
a world where everything was fair, where everyone was treated fairly, things
would be representative of the population, the demographics of the whole
in all these various activities. Imagine a black kid born in Harlem and he’s
born with a body identical to that of Rudolf Nureyev, the great ballet dancer;
the odds are a thousand to one that he’ll become a ballet dancer, much less
another Rudolf Nureyev. Chances are, he wouldn’t even think about it.
Robinson: So, you mean to say that when you tried out for the Brooklyn
Dodgers—you tried out for a pitching position and they didn’t hire you—you
were not being discriminated against?
Sowell: Actually, I was trying out for first base, and the real reason I messed
up was that my position was center field. But in order to be a good center
fielder, I needed hours and hours of practice, and it was a very bad spring. I
got very little practice. And so I figured I’m going to go out and make an idiot
of myself in center field, so I made an idiot of myself at first base.
Robinson: Chess pieces fallacy: explain that one.
Sowell: Well, Adam Smith had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who
imagine that they can control a whole society with the ease with which one
puts chess pieces where you want them on a chess board. And so, there’s
this notion of this inert mass of people down there and then the wonderfully

brilliant people at the top who ought to be telling them what to do. And
there’s no thought that first of all, those at the top don’t even know the
people’s individual conditions who are very different from themselves. And
when they try to help, they can make things disastrous.
Robinson: You discuss a theory of justice, which is in certain circles . . every

university in the country, the philosophy department, political science, sociol-
ogy. There is the big book on social justice written by John Rawls, philoso-
pher at Harvard. “Rawls refers to things that society should arrange,” you
write. And then Tom Sowell says, “Interior decorators arrange, governments
compel. It is not a subtle distinction.”
Sowell: Well, if you’re going to try to get some kind of result, you have to
specify through what kinds of mechanism you expect to get that result. And
different mechanisms, whether it’s the governments, the market, the Red
Cross, whatever, they have their own individual things that they’re good at
and not so good at. And so, you can’t get the social justice result that you
want unless you have the kind of institution that’s likely to produce that
result. Politics is not that kind of institution.
Robinson: And yet they all implicitly rely on government.
Sowell: Yes.
Robinson: Redistribution of wealth, using legal regimes to adjust the propor-

tions of various groups that get certain jobs. They all rely on government.
And what’s distinctive about government is it’s the one institution that can
send you to jail.
Sowell: Yes, one of the real problems is that you have people making deci-
sions for which they pay no price when they’re wrong, no matter how high a
price other people pay.
Right now, the homicide rates are beyond anything that were around, let’s say,
prior to 1960. And I mention 1960 in this case because that’s when the Supreme
Court remade the criminal law. They discovered rights in the Constitution that
no one had noticed for over a century and they were impervious to evidence.
Robinson: Contrast your neighborhood in Harlem when you were an eight-

and nine- and ten-year-old boy with what we see in neighborhoods in Chicago
today, say.
Sowell: Oh my gosh, people are astonished when I tell them I grew up in

Harlem. I can’t remember ever hearing a gunshot. I’ve checked with my

relatives who grew up in similar neighborhoods in Washington and down in
North Carolina; they never heard a gunshot when they were growing up. I
remember going back to Harlem some years ago to do some research at a
high school. And I looked out the window, and there’s this park there near
the high school. I mentioned in passing that when I lived in Harlem as a kid,
I would take my dog for
a walk in that park. And
“People are astonished when I tell looks of horror came over
them I grew up in Harlem. I can’t the students’ faces. People
remember ever hearing a gunshot.” have no idea how much has
retrogressed over the years
in the black community and how much of what progress has been made has
not been made by politicians or by charismatic leaders.
DURABLE DELUSIONS
Robinson: The big fallacy—at least, I take this is in many ways the heart of
the book—racial fallacies. Almost all of your book is addressed to the cur-
rent moment, but in racial fallacies, you start by going back about a hundred
years to lay out the Progressive position in the 1910s and ’20s and for some
years afterward in addressing immigration from Eastern and Southern
Europe: “This massive increase in immigration begins toward the end of
the nineteenth century and carries on through the 1920s. In addressing the
massive increase in immigration, Progressives claimed that these new immi-
grants were inherently genetically, and therefore permanently, inferior.” So,
your argument is that a century or so ago, Progressives believed roughly the
same about Polish and Italian immigrants that whites in the South had long
believed about blacks.
Sowell: Oh yes.
Robinson: I’ll read a quotation: “With the passing years, more and more evi-
dence undermined the conclusion of the genetic determinists. Jews, who had
scored low on the 1917 Army mental test, began to score above the national
average on various tests as they became a more English-speaking group.
A study showed that black orphans raised by white families had signifi-
cantly higher average IQs than other black children.” You call them genetic
determinists, which is one way of putting it. Some races were permanently
inferior.
Sowell: Yes, and should be eliminated.

Robinson: And we’ve learned that’s total nonsense. Jews are stupid in 1917
because they score badly on tests . . .
Sowell: Yes, on tests written in English. And people who spoke English did
better on those tests.
Robinson: Or that blacks have a certain fixed IQ ranking.
Sowell: Yes, but even as of the time of World War I, the data show that black
soldiers scored below white soldiers. The people who believed that this was
genetically determined, they said, that’s it, that’s the answer, and they moved
on. Some other people said, let’s look at it more closely. They discovered that
black soldiers from New York,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and one
or two other states scored “People’s genes do not change
higher than white soldiers when they cross a state line.”
from Mississippi, Alabama, et
cetera. And as I mentioned in the book, people’s genes do not change when
they cross a state line. When you have people who are crusading for some
idea, whatever the idea is, and they find some data that fits what they believe,
that’s the end of the story as far as they’re concerned.
Robinson: And then get listened to.
Sowell: Yes, yes.
RACIAL ESSENTIALISM
Robinson: From the Progressive position a century ago to the progressive
position today, racial assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism
that we just discussed, which proclaimed that race is everything as an expla-
nation of group differences, to the opposite view that racism is the primary
explanation of group differences. How did this happen?
Sowell: Well, it happened because a lot of people arrived at the same conclu-
sion and they had high IQs and PhDs, and that was the end of the story as far
as many people were concerned. I mean, a high IQ and low information is a
very dangerous combination.
Robinson: You once told me, “Peter, the main advantage of earning a Har-
vard degree is that you never again in all your life have to be intimidated by
anyone who has a Harvard degree.” Tom, as I read this book, for the most
part, it’s objective, it’s calm, it’s analytical, but when you take on this modern

progressive position that racism accounts for anything, there are passages
in which you’re angry. I felt that there are passages in which there’s emotion
that is very close to this.
“Median black family income has been lower than median white family
income for generations, but the median per capita income of Asian groups
is more than $15,000 a year higher than the median per capita income of
white Americans. Is this the white supremacy we’re so often warned about?
For more than a quarter of a century, in no year has the annual poverty rate
of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year
has the poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent. If
black poverty is caused by systemic racism, do racists make an exception for
blacks who are married?”
I guess you’re allowed to be angry. Do you have the feeling, when you’re
addressing this notion that racism accounts for everything, that the argu-
ments are subtle, it’s persuasive, and you can forgive someone for buying that
argument? Or do you have the feeling that it’s willful?
Sowell: No, I don’t. I think that people don’t look for certain evidence and
therefore they don’t find it. And so, on the basis of what they know at a given
time, this may be very plau-
sible. The problem is that
“I think that people don’t look for you really need other people
certain evidence and therefore they with a different orientation
don’t find it.” who are skeptical and who
will then look for things
and find things that are very different from that. One of the things I found
interesting was the fact that there are counties in the United States which are
among the poorest counties in the country. And six of those counties have a
population that ranges from 90 percent white to 100 percent white.
Robinson: Appalachian counties, Kentucky and Ohio, as I recall.
Sowell: Of course, there’s that great book that was written, Hillbilly Elegy.
Robinson: J. D. Vance, now Senator Vance.
Sowell: And these are people who have faced zero racism.
Robinson: They are white, after all.
Sowell: And they are white, and zero racism, and also back in the 1930s,
when they did IQ studies, their IQs were not only at the same level as those

of blacks, they had the same pattern: namely that the young people, whether
they were black or hillbilly, would have an IQ very close to the national aver-
age at age six, but by the time they were teenagers, it just kept going down
and down and down because it’s relative to the other people of that age
group. And they were simply falling behind. So, it was clearly not biological,
it was social. These hillbilly counties had incomes that were not only lower
than the national average, they were lower than the average of black incomes
for a period of half a century. Obviously, there must be other things that
cause people to be poor other than racism.
FALSE LEADERS
Robinson: Now, this book is dedicated to fallacies, to showing errors in
premises and errors in analysis. It’s not dedicated to an alternative explana-
tion. Nevertheless, you’ve got this argument lurking in here that it’s the way
people live, it’s the cultural patterns. So, what are the patterns that pay off?
Sowell: In terms of fallacies for our public policy, what does not pay off is
having charismatic leaders depending upon government to do things, if you
look what has happened to blacks before and after there was a massive gov-
ernment effort on their behalf. The poverty rate among blacks, if you start in
1940 instead of 1960—because 1960 is the magic number for people who say
the government did all these wonderful things and blacks advanced because
of it—in 1940, the black poverty rate was 87 percent. By 1960, it was down to
47 percent. From 1960 to 1970, it went down to 30 percent. And in 1970, affir-
mative action is now in place. It went down to 29 percent. So, in the twenty
years prior to the 1960s, the black poverty rate went down by 40 points and
in the twenty years after 1960, it went down by 18 points.
Robinson: Year zero is 1865 for African-Americans. And the point you make
in a number of places is that the black family is overwhelmingly intact. Right
up to 1960.
Sowell: Not only do people take credit for things that were not their doing,
they overlook the negative things that came in after the 1960s as a result
of policy. In 1940, 17 percent of black children were raised in single-parent
homes. I forget the exact date in the twentieth century, but after these won-
derful reforms were put in, that quadrupled to 68 percent of black children
being raised in single-parent homes. Now, there’s a whole literature on all
the bad things that happen to kids who are raised by single parents; whether
they are black or white, American or British, the studies show the same

things. One study said fatherlessness has a bigger effect than even race and
poverty. And certainly as I think back on my own life, I realize how fortunate
I was because even though my biological father died before I was born and I
was adopted, I was adopted into a family where I was the only child in a fam-
ily of four adults and these were not people who were out having an active
social life someplace. The life was there in the home.
Robinson: They gave you their time.
Sowell: Yes, and years later when I became a parent, like other new parents,
I wanted to know when a kid was supposed to do this, when he’s supposed
to do that. And I said, how old was I when I started to walk? And the lone
surviving member of the family that raised me said, “Tommy, nobody knows
when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you.”
Robinson: From Social Justice Fallacies: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was
a major factor in ending the denial of basic constitutional rights to blacks
in the South, but there is
no point trying to make
“Consequences matter, or should that the main source of the
matter, more than some attractive or black rise out of poverty.
fashionable theory.” Nor can the left act as if the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 was
solely their work. A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted
for the act.” So, you’re saying something here which is . . .
Sowell: Sacrilege.
Robinson: It’s shocking, it’s heretical. Well, you say the Civil Rights Act
ensured equality before the law. It was overdue, it was necessary, it was just.
It’s an accomplishment in American history, but at about the same time, we
get the creation of a vast expansion of the welfare state, and it does people
harm. It harms the African-American family.
Sowell: Yes, and the other thing too. The Civil Rights Act was not what got
blacks into professional occupations. In the decade prior to 1964, the number
of blacks in professional occupations doubled. So, this is not a result of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Robinson: Tom, let me read a few single sentences from your book and you
tell us what you meant. “Stupid people can create problems, but it often
takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.”

Sowell: Oh my gosh, think of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. You
mention genetic determinism; they drew the conclusion from their reasoning
that you had to put an end to certain races. They had what they called eugen-
ics but what was later called genocide. There was a Progressive who wrote a
book with that theme [The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant] which
was translated into German and Hitler called it his Bible.
During the 1920s, in reaction to World War I, the idea rose among the
intellectual elites that the way to prevent war was to stop arming, you see.
Disarmament was the way
to avoid a war. No evi-
dence made the slightest “Do we want a society in which
impression on them, and some babies are born into the world
they pulled the West into as heirs of prepackaged grievances
a war that probably would against other babies born on the
never have happened
same day?”
because the totalitar-
ian dictatorships that started that war were well aware that the United
States, Britain, and France had an industrial capacity greater than theirs.
And you wouldn’t ordinarily attack countries that have greater industrial
capacity than yours unless you thought that they were gutless and foolish
enough not to remain armed.
Robinson: “In politics, the goal is not truth, but votes.”
Sowell: If you can get people to believe that their problems are all due to rac-
ists, you will get their votes. But that’s not the case. It’s very doubtful wheth-
er all the racists in the country today have half the negative effect on blacks
as the teachers’ unions have. The teachers’ unions keep the schools lousy in
areas where the people who send their kids to school do not have the option
to send them to a private school.
Robinson: Tom, would you close our discussion by reading a passage from
Social Justice Fallacies?
Sowell: Well, I still agree with it. “Do we want the mixture of students who
are going to be trained to do advanced medical research to be representative
of the demographic makeup of the population as a whole, or do we want stu-
dents with the highest probability of finding cures for cancer and Alzheim-
er’s? Do you want airline pilots chosen for demographic representation of
various groups, or would you prefer to fly with pilots who were chosen for
their mastery of all the complex things that increase your chances of arriving

safely at your destination? Consequences matter, or should matter, more
than some attractive or fashionable theory. More fundamentally, do we want
a society in which some babies are born into the world as heirs of prepack-
aged grievances against other babies born on the same day, blighting both
their lives, or do we want to at least leave them the option to work things out
better in their lives than we have in ours?”

IN T E RV IE W
A Climate of
“Mischief”
In climate research, the science is too often buried
under the politics. Scientist and Hoover senior
fellow Steven E. Koonin shows how.
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: A scientist who’s skeptical about

climate science, or at least about a lot of what passes for climate science,
Steven Koonin is a professor at New York University and a senior fellow at
the Hoover Institution. Dr. Koonin received a bachelor of science degree
from Caltech and a doctorate in physics from MIT. During a career in which
he published more than two hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers and
a textbook on computational physics, Dr. Koonin rose to become provost of
Caltech. In 2009, President Obama appointed him undersecretary of sci-
ence at the Department of Energy, a position he held for some two and a half
years, during which he found himself shocked by the misuse of climate sci-
ence in politics and the press. In 2021, Dr. Koonin published Unsettled: What
Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why it Matters.
In Unsettled, you write of a 2014 workshop for the American Physical
Society in which you and several colleagues were asked to subject current
Steven E. Koonin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor at New

York University, and the author of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us,
What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (BenBella Books, 2021). Peter Robin-
son is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and
the M
urdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

climate science to a stress test—to push it, to prod it, to test it, to see how
good it was. I quote: “I’m a scientist. I work to understand the world through
measurements and observations. I came away from the workshop not only
surprised but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less
mature than I had supposed.” Let’s start with that. What had you supposed?
Steven E. Koonin: Well, I had supposed that humans were warming the
globe. Carbon dioxide was accumulating in the atmosphere, causing all kinds
of trouble, melting ice caps, warming oceans, and so on. And the data didn’t
support a lot of that. And the projections of what would happen in the future
relied on models that were, let’s say, shaky at best.

DATA AND DISTORTION: NYU professor and former Caltech provost Steven
E. Koonin grew skeptical of climate policy making when he realized, in his
words, “the projections of what would happen in the future relied on models
that were, let’s say, shaky at best.” [Kelly Kollar]
Robinson: Former senator John Kerry, then President Biden’s special envoy
for climate, said in a 2021 address to the UN Security Council: “Net-zero
emissions by 2050 or earlier is the only way that science tells us we can limit
this planet’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. . . . Overwhelming evidence tells
us that anything more will have catastrophic implications. We are march-
ing forward in what is tantamount to a mutual suicide pact.” Overwhelming
evidence, science tells us, what’s wrong with that?
Koonin: Well, you should look at the actual science, which I suspect Ambas-
sador Kerry had not done. You know, the United Nations puts out assessment
reports—the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that
are meant to survey, assess, and summarize the state of our knowledge
about the climate. Those reports are massive, and you really need to be a
scientist to understand them. I can understand this stuff. Ambassador Kerry
and other politicians certainly have not done that. But then, he’s getting his
information perhaps from the summary for policy makers in those reports,

or more likely from an even further boiled-down version. And as you boil
down the good assessment into the summary, into more condensed versions,
there’s plenty of room for mischief. And that mischief is evident when you
compare what comes out at the end of that game of telephone with what the
actual science really is.
Robinson: Let’s start with what we know. From Unsettled: “We can all agree
that the globe has gotten warmer over the last several decades.” No debunk-
ing needed there.
Koonin: And, in fact, it’s gotten warmer over the past four centuries.
Robinson: OK, now that’s a different assertion.
Koonin: Well, yes, that’s correct, but it’s equally supported by the assessment
reports.
Robinson: Again, from Unsettled: “There is no question that our emission of

greenhouse gases, in particular CO2, is exerting a warming influence on the
planet.” We’re pumping CO2 into the air, into the atmosphere. CO2 is a green-
house gas. It must be having some effect.
Koonin: Of course. Absolutely. It’s coming from human activities. Mostly

fossil fuels.
Robinson: All right. Now, onto what we don’t know.

“Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the
climate, they are small in relation to the climate system as a whole. That sets
a very high bar for projecting the consequences of human influences.” That is
so counter to the general understanding that informs the headlines, particu-
larly during the hot summer of 2023. So, explain that.
Koonin: Human influences as described in the IPCC reports are a 1 percent

effect on the radiation flow, the flow of heat radiation in sunlight in the atmo-
sphere. One percent.
Whereas the average “Human influences are a 1 percent
temperature of the earth
effect on a complicated, chaotic,
is about 300 degrees
multi-scale system for which we have
Kelvin, about 55 degrees
Fahrenheit. poor observations.”
So, you know, 1 percent change in the temperature you might think is about a
1 percent change in the radiation. So human influences are a 1 percent effect on
a complicated, chaotic, multi-scale system for which we have poor observations.

Robinson: Let’s continue with what we don’t know, one of the great themes of
this book. Let’s start with that IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. I realized as I read the book that I’ve heard it quoted over and over
again and didn’t even know what it was. I’ll do this quickly. There are 195
countries that nominate scientists to assess climate research and they do
these assessments in cycles that last six or seven years.
Koonin: Right.
Robinson: At the end of each of these cycles, which begin way back in 1988,
they publish a report. From Unsettled: “Most of the disconnect comes from
a long game of telephone that starts with the research literature and runs
through the assessment reports to the summaries of the assessment reports,
and then on to the media coverage. There are abundant opportunities to get
things wrong.” How can it be that this committee, the IPCC nominated by
195 countries—which means 195 parochial interests at play—how can they
produce anything that’s any good in the first place? And yet, you seem quite
relaxed about the original science.
Koonin: The underlying science is expressed in the data and in the research
literature, the journals and research papers people produce, the conference
proceedings, and so on. The IPCC takes those and assesses and summarizes
them. And in general, it does a pretty good job. There’s not going to be much
politics in that, although they might quibble among themselves about adjec-
tives and adverbs. This is “extremely certain,” or this is “unlikely” or “highly
unlikely” and so on.
Robinson: You say this is done by fellow professionals in a professional man-

ner. Now things begin to go wrong.
Koonin: Nobody who isn’t deeply in the field is going to read all that stuff.
So, there is a formal process to create a summary for policy makers, which
is initially drafted by the
governments, not by the
“It’s the governments who have scientists. In the end, it’s
approved the summary for policy the governments who
makers line by line. And that’s where have approved the sum-
the disconnect happens.” mary for policy makers
line by line. And that’s
where the disconnect happens. I’ll give you an example.
Robinson: Please.

Koonin: Look at the most recent report, and the summary for policy makers
is talking about deaths from extreme heat, incremental deaths. And it says
that extreme heat or heat waves have contributed to mortality.
Robinson: OK.
Koonin: And that’s true. But what they forgot to tell you was that the warm-
ing of the planet decreased the incidence of extreme cold events. And since
nine times as many people around the globe die from extreme cold than from
extreme heat, the warming from the planet has actually cut the number of
deaths from extreme temperatures by a lot.
So, that statement was completely factual, but factually incomplete in a
way meant to alarm, not to inform.
And so, you get Kerry saying that; you get the secretary general of the
United Nations, António Guterres, saying we’re on a highway to climate hell
with our foot on the accelerator.
Robinson: And the statements are preposterous.
Koonin: Yes, of course they are. The climate scientists are negligent for not
speaking up and saying that’s preposterous.
THE TROUBLE WITH MODELS

Robinson: Here I’ll depart from Unsettled for a moment to quote from a piece
you published in the Wall Street Journal: “Projections of future climate and
weather events rely on
models demonstrably
unfit for the purpose.” “That statement was completely
factual, but factually incomplete in a
Koonin: Well, to make
way meant to alarm, not to inform.”
a projection of future
climate, you need to build this big, complicated computer model, which is
really one of the grand computational challenges. And then you have to feed
into the model what you think future emissions are going to be. And the IPCC
has five or six different scenarios: high emissions, low emissions, and so on.
If you take a particular scenario and feed it into the roughly fifty different
models that exist that are developed by groups around the world, you get a
range of answers. The range is as big as the change you’re trying to describe
itself. And we can go into the reasons why there is that uncertainty. And in
the latest generation of models, about 40 percent of them were deemed to be
too sensitive to be of much use.

Robinson: Too sensitive?
Koonin: Yes. You add the carbon dioxide in, and the temperature goes up too
fast, compared to what we’ve seen already. That’s really disheartening. The
world’s best modelers, trying as hard as they can, get it very wrong at least
40 percent of the time.
Robinson: So, I’m reading this and I’m thinking that these problems that
Dr. Koonin is describing will become less and less, and then we’ll get it.
Koonin: Maybe.
Robinson: And this is one of the most astonishing passages in your book.
“Having better tools and information to work with should make the models
more accurate and more in line with each other. This has not happened. The
spread in results among differing computer models is increasing.” As our
processing power increases, we should be closing in on reliable conclusions.
And yet they seem to be receding faster than we approach them. How can
that be?
Koonin: As the models become more sophisticated, what does that mean?
That means either you made the “grid boxes” a little bit smaller in the
model, so there are more of them, or you made more sophisticated your
description of what goes on inside the grid boxes. The globe is divided into
ten million of these boxes.
The average size of a
“It’s going to be a long time before grid box in the current
generation is a hundred
we get a computer a thousand times
kilometers, or sixty miles.
more powerful than what we have
And within that sixty
today.” miles, there’s a lot that
goes on that we can’t
describe explicitly in the computer: clouds are maybe five kilometers big,
and rain happens here and not there within the grid box. We can’t describe
all that detail.
The current grid boxes are a hundred kilometers. So, you might say, why
not make them ten? Well, suddenly the number of boxes has gone up by a
hundred. So, you need a hundred-times-more-powerful computer, but it’s
worse than that. The time steps have to be smaller, also. And so, the process-
ing power actually goes up as the cube of the grid size. If you want to go from
a hundred kilometers to ten kilometers, the processing power required goes

up by a factor of a thousand, and it’s going to be a long time before we get a
computer a thousand times more powerful than what we have today.
Robinson: But am I wrong that it’s all reducible to data and we’ll get it
someday?
Koonin: Well, I think we will do better. But I’m still queasy about that. Take
weather prediction. You feed the current state of the weather into the model
and you can predict what the weather’s going to be tomorrow, next day, and so
on. And we’ve gotten better and better at that over the past twenty or thirty
years. But the main reason we’ve gotten so good is the initial data: we know
better and better the state of the atmosphere right now so we can predict it.
Climate’s a different problem. Climate is really driven by the oceans. We have
not-very-good data on the oceans. And to be able to specify the state of the
ocean now and then know it ten or twenty, thirty, forty years from now is a
much harder problem. It’s not obvious to me we’re going to get it right. But it’s
worth trying because it’s a grand computational challenge and we will develop
technologies and learn techniques that will be helpful in other applications.
MISSION FOR MISINFORMATION

Robinson: CBS News reported this past May: “Scientists say climate change
is making hurricanes worse.” Your view: “Hurricanes and tornadoes show no
changes attributable to human influences.”
Koonin: The media, if you’ll excuse me, get their information from reporters
who have little or no scientific training. Reporters on the climate beat have
to produce stories—the
more dramatic, the bet-
ter. When I say some-
“Reporters on the climate beat have
thing about hurricanes,
I quote right from the
to produce stories—the more dramat-
IPCC reports, and it ic, the better.”
doesn’t say that at all.
Robinson: Actually, this is an old headline, from 2020 by the UN Environ-

ment Program. “Climate change is making record-breaking floods the new
normal.” Here you are in Unsettled: “We don’t know whether floods globally
are increasing, decreasing, or doing nothing at all.”
Koonin: I would say that the United Nations needs to check their press
release against the IPCC reports before they say anything. When I wrote

Unsettled, I tried very hard to stick with the gold standard, which was the
IPCC report at the time or the subsequent research literature. And I had
available to me the fifth assessment report, which came out in 2014. The
sixth assessment report came out about a year ago. And I’m proud to say
there’s essentially nothing in there now that needs to be changed.
Robinson: All right, agriculture and a 2019 headline in the New York Times:
“Climate change threatens the world’s food supply, United Nations warns.”
And you write: “Agricultural yields have surged during the past century, even
as the globe has warmed. And projected price impacts of future human-
induced climate changes through 2050 should hardly be noticeable among
ordinary market dynamics.”
Koonin: Not what I said, but what the IPCC said.

I’ve actually gotten to the point where I say, oh no, not another one. Do I
have to do that too? This is endemic to media that are ill-informed and have
an agenda to set.
Robinson: And what is their agenda?
Koonin: The agenda is to promote alarm, and induce governments to

decarbonize. I think that probably their primary agenda is to get clicks and
eyeballs. But, you know, there are organizations, such as one called Cover-
ing Climate Now, and their mission is to promote the narrative. They will
not allow anything to be
broadcast or written that
“They will not allow anything to be is counter to the narra-
broadcast or written that is counter tive that we’ve broken the
to the narrative that we’ve broken the climate and we’re headed
climate and we’re headed for suicide.” for suicide, etc.
HEAVY WEATHER
Robinson: Here are more headlines in that vein. “Heat records are
broken around the globe as earth warms, fast. From north to south,
temperatures are surging as greenhouse gases combined with the
effects of El Niño.”
And: “Heat waves grip three continents as climate change warms earth.
Across North America, Europe, and Asia hundreds of millions endured blis-
tering conditions. A US official called it a threat to all humankind.”
“July heat waves nearly impossible without climate change, studies say.
Record temperatures have been fueled by decades of fossil fuel emissions.”

This is my last one, from July 27: “This looks like Earth’s warmest month.
Hotter ones appear to be in store. July is on track to break all records for any
month, scientists say, as the planet enters an extended period of exceptional
warmth.”
Koonin: All those headlines confuse weather and climate.
Robinson: Give me a tutorial on that.
Koonin: Weather is what happens every day, or maybe even every season.
Climate, the official definition, is a multi-decade average of weather proper-
ties. So don’t tell me about what happened this year but tell me about what
happened the average of the past ten or twenty years, and then we can talk
climate. We have data that go back to about 1979. So, we have good monthly
measures of the global temperature in the lower atmosphere for forty-some-
thing years.
What you see is month-to-month variations, of course, but a long-term
trend that’s going up. No question about it. It’s going up at about 0.13, 0.15—I
won’t get the number exactly right—degrees per decade. That’s some combi-
nation of natural variability and greenhouse gases. Human influences, more
generally. And then, every couple years, you see a sharp spike, and that’s El
Niño.
Robinson: Take just a moment to explain El Niño.
Koonin: El Niño is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once

every four or five years. Heat builds up in the Equatorial Pacific to the east of
Indonesia and so on. And when enough of it builds up, it kind of surges across
the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds as it surges toward South
America. It was discovered in the nineteenth century and it’s kind of well
understood at this point.
Robinson: Nineteenth century means this phenomenon has nothing to do

with CO2.
Koonin: Correct. Now, people talk about changes in that phenomenon as a

result of CO2, but it’s there in the climate system already. And when it hap-
pens, it influences weather and climate all over the world.
Robinson: So, let me take you to New York. You spent July there. I happened
to visit in July and we had Canadian wildfires, and the press telling us that
the wildfires are because of climate change. For the first time that anybody
I know could remember, smoke is so heavy in Canada and it gets blown into

New York. And the sky feels as though a solar eclipse is taking place. New
York is hot, really hot. And we’re reading reports that they’re sweltering even
in Madrid, a culture built around heat in the midday, where even they don’t
quite know how to handle this heat. And it’s perfectly normal for people to
say wait a minute, this is getting scary. It feels for the first time as though the
Earth is threatening. Suddenly you can’t breathe the air. It feels uncomfort-
able. It’s scary.
Koonin: I understand.
Robinson: And your response to that?
Koonin: I have two responses. We have a very short memory for weather.
Go back in the archives of the newspapers and you can read from even the
nineteenth century on the East Coast descriptions of so-called “yellow days”
when the atmosphere was clouded by smoke from Canadian fires. So, look at
the historical record first, and if it happened before human influences were
significant, you got a much higher bar to clear to blame CO2.
The second response is there’s a lot of variability. Here in California, you
had two decades of drought and the governor was screaming “new normal,
new normal!” And look at what happened last year: record, at least historical
record, torrential rains. People forgot about the 1862 event where the Central
Valley was under many feet of water. Climate is not weather, and the weather
can really fool you.
ADAPTATION
Koonin: Let me talk about adaptation a little bit and give you some
examples that are probably not well known. If you go back to 1900 and you
look from 1900 till today, the globe warmed by about 1.3 degrees Celsius.
That’s the global temperature record that everybody more or less agrees
upon. The IPCC projects about the same amount of warming over the next
hundred years. What’s going to happen over the next hundred years as that
warming happens? We can look at the past to get some sense of how we
might fare.
Since 1900 until now, the global population has gone up by a factor of five.
We’re now at eight billion people. The average lifespan or life expectancy
went from thirty-two years to seventy-three years. The GDP per capita in
constant dollars went up by a factor of seven. The literacy rate went up by a
factor of four, the nutrition, etc. And we’ve seen . . .
Robinson: Life got better.

Koonin: . . . the greatest flourishing of human well-being ever, even as the
globe warmed by 1.3 degrees. And the kicker, of course, is that the death rate
from extreme weather events fell by a factor of fifty. Better prediction, better
resilience of infrastructure. So, to think that another 1.3 or 1.4 degrees over
the next century is going to significantly derail that beggars belief. Not an
existential threat—perhaps some drag on the economy. The IPCC says not
very much at all. You know, the notion that the world is going to end unless
we stop greenhouse gas is just nonsense.
Robinson: This is not a mutual suicide pact?
Koonin: No, not at all.

But the biggest problem in trying to reduce emissions is not the one and a
half billion people in the developed world. It’s the six and a half billion people
who don’t have enough energy. And you are telling them that because of
some vague, distant threat that we in the developed world are worried about,
that they’re going to have to pay more for energy or get less reliable sources.
They should be able to make their own choices about whether they’re willing
to tolerate whatever threat there might be from the climate versus having
round-the-clock lighting, adequate refrigeration, transportation, and so on.
A great statistic, which I don’t think I have in the book: three billion people
on the planet of the eight billion use less electricity every year than the
average US refrigerator. So, fix that problem first, which is existential and
immediate and soluble. And then we can talk about some vague climate thing
that might happen fifty years from now.
I was taught that you tell the whole truth and you let the politicians make
the value judgments and the cost-effectiveness trade-offs and so on. My
sense of that balance is no better than anybody else’s. But the thing I can
bring to the table are the scientific facts.

VA LUES
Pandora’s Last
Gift
Hope remains: for renewal, for a return to
America’s founding principles.
By Chris Gibson
T
he dysfunction and vitriol that characterize our present political
age have been unfolding for decades. This is among the reasons
Patrick Deneen’s thought-provoking 2018 book, Why Liberalism
Failed, made such an impact on those who care deeply about
America and its future. Deneen painstakingly documented our failing politi-
cal process and the fraying of our social fabric.
But while Deneen provided an accurate and disturbing portrayal of
contemporary America, he misplaced the origins of these developments.
Deneen traced our dysfunction to the very founding of the country when he
claimed America redefined liberty away from self-control, opting instead
for one of unbounded freedom. In the process, Deneen argued that James
Madison and the architects of the Constitution pivoted away from per-
sonal virtue as the cornerstone for our way of life and adopted instead the
unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, which, similar to Adam Smith’s logic,
was thought to ultimately produce public virtue. This defining moment in
Chris Gibson is a participant in the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on the

Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict and a former Hoover National
Security Affairs Fellow. He is the former president of Siena College and served six
years in Congress, representing New York’s Nineteenth District. He also served
twenty-nine years in the US military, retiring from the Army as a colonel.

the American experiment, according to Deneen, put us on a path towards
disunity, decline, and failure.
While highly consequential, Deneen’s work was criticized for both mis-
characterizing the founding and for not providing alternative approaches, if
indeed liberalism had failed. In his follow-up book, Regime Change, pub-
lished in June 2023, Deneen responded to those critics and provided his
vision for a postliberal America. Like the initial book, this one is sure to
stir debate and I commend him for that, but this book has sharpened my
opposition to his work.
REGIME CHANGE?
In both books, Deneen contends that the American founding was a full
embrace of John Locke’s version of liberalism fraught with fatal philosophi-
cal contradictions. He asserts that our two major competing philosophies are
actually two sides of the same coin. First, classical liberalism, which advocates
unfettered capitalism and the protection of personal liberty. This version,
he says, masquerades as “conservatism” in America. The other is progres-
sive liberalism, prominent since the early twentieth century, which favors an
ever-expanding national government to promote the general welfare of its
citizens. Deneen argues that what they share is a deep fear of the people, and
accordingly, despite their occasional narrow differences, often collaborate to
implement legal and normative impediments to keep the people far from the
levers of power. Deneen also argues that both have a zeal for “progress,” a
commitment to constantly changing the “rules of the game” in pursuit of bet-
ter arrangements that ultimately serve the ends of the elite—not the people.
In Regime Change, Deneen argues that a new conservative elite class should
be fostered, one that is committed to the welfare of the people. Contrary to
Marxism, which also purports to advance the cause of the common man, this
new elite must also actu-
ally share the values of
the people, which Deneen How would we stop a new elite from
argues are historically being corrupted by power like the one
conservative; embracing we have now?
national unity, stability,
tradition, and custom. Deneen believes this new conservative elite will address
the vast wealth inequality in America and rein in the social engineering, which
has destroyed the family, the church, and the cherished American way of life.
Deneen concludes that his approach is nested within traditional conservative
philosophy as championed by Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli.

Although Deneen claims he’s restoring “Aristotelian balance,” Regime
Change reads more like an over-correction. While I agree America is clearly
out of balance, favoring today over tomorrow, the self over our obligations
to others, and the material over the spiritual, and while I concur the current
ruling elite are chiefly responsible for these unsustainable developments, if
history is any guide Deneen’s idealism is more likely to produce tyrannical
abuse and more misery than to achieve his intended purpose.
Robespierre and the Jacobins claimed the mantle of leadership of the
French Revolution with lofty aspirations of empowering the people too, but
their ideological zeal quickly devolved into a Reign of Terror that threat-
ened anyone who would not stand behind the new orthodoxy. From Deneen’s
idealism more questions arise: if the Constitution is flawed because it’s based
on self-interest rather than virtue, what replaces it? How do we get this new
conservative elite into power? How do we prevent this new elite from being
corrupted by power like the one we have now? If capitalism is bad, what
replaces it?
For all its faults, the Constitution provided answers to most of these ques-
tions, drawn as it was from a keen reading of history and a realistic view
of humankind. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention ultimately
concluded that what we needed at the time was both a more vigorous central
government to adequately defend ourselves and promote prosperity and
upward mobility (hence
the embrace of Hamilton’s
The Constitution drew from a keen vision of capitalism) and
reading of history and a realistic view the means for the govern-
ment to check itself. This
of humankind.
could only be realized
by having “ambition counteract ambition.” As Madison acknowledged in
Federalist No. 10 and 51, men are not angels: thus, the separation of powers
and checks and balances in the Constitution. Deneen’s far-ranging criticism
of the founding misses these warrants.
THE FOUNDATION
The Constitution did not usher in a fully Lockean liberal society. Post-
Constitution American society was more a hybrid between Lockean
liberalism and Puritanical communitarianism, producing something new in
the human experience. The conception of the “American dream” provides
evidence for this blend. From Locke we promote the individual, possessed
with God-given rights secured by the new American state and free to rise

to their potential. But from the Puritans we also embrace the notion that
individuals have obligations to others—to their families, churches, commu-
nities, and country. Among those obligations was to provide for children so
that they could climb the socioeconomic ladder to new heights in America,
beyond their parents. This might require individuals to sacrifice their own
interests for their children, but such balance was woven into the DNA of
the American dream.
The Constitution established the rules of the game to advance the Ameri-
can dream. The legal framework was bound together with a communitarian
political culture that sought balance, to provide meaning to a “race of life”
unleashed by the capital-
istic spirit that accom-
panied the Constitution. The Constitution established the
Tocqueville acknowl- rules to advance the American dream.
edged this “American
exceptionalism” and prophesized that while it, like all human-designed
arrangements, was itself flawed, it was best aligned with human nature, and
as such, would eventually propel America into global superpower status.
That was crazy talk to the heads of state of Europe at the time who still
believed, as Thomas Hobbes opined, that common people could not govern
themselves. Only monarchs supported by a loyal aristocracy could save the
people from the people. Such thinking was the conservative position before
the United States of America existed. However, American exceptionalism
has changed the world for the better, and now conserving that is the true
“conservative” position, contrary to Deneen’s contention.
The steady undoing of American exceptionalism, beginning in the
twentieth century (specifically the centralizing of power in the executive
branch and shifting away from being a “nation of laws” to one governed by
executive orders and bureaucratic regulations and the eroding of balance in
our political culture), has caused the angst and travails we now face. While
Deneen is right in one sense—what is needed now is “getting it right” and not
“progress”—we should not embrace regime change. Giving up on American
exceptionalism would ultimately significantly curtail liberty and by exten-
sion, limit human creativity, prosperity, and felicity.
WHAT NOW?
Deneen is also right that our current path probably leads to the end of the
republic as we know it. However, in considering a course correction, we
should turn to the classics.

In Greek mythology we are given the story of Pandora, the unimaginably
beautiful woman created by Hephaestus at the behest of Zeus to punish man
for his lack of piety for the gods. All of the other Olympian gods supported
Zeus’s desire to create woman and showed that support by showering gifts
upon Pandora. The final gift was a beautiful box that the gods told Pandora
contained the most amazing gifts, but that she must never open. Not surpris-
ingly, the temptation proved more than Pandora could resist and when she
opened the box, misery and wrath were unleashed upon humanity (the afflic-
tions of old age, disease, wars, etc.). However, at the bottom of the box was
the last gift: hope. Zeus actually gave humanity hope as a punishment so that
people would press on in the face of hardship, ensuring that all the harsh con-
sequences would be fully experienced. Yet, by giving us hope, in some ways
God also provides balance, because hope inspires the desire for redemption
and the possibility of “getting it right” the second time. As Americans, we
should be inspired to action by this story.
Even in our dire circumstances, if we keep hope and choose wisely,
America can find renewal. With the founding principles, we were on the right
path, but we strayed from it and now, like Pandora, are facing the conse-
quences. We must now recover those principles.
To do so, we need to immediately enact reforms to strengthen American
exceptionalism. This must start with political reforms to restore the people’s
faith in democracy, which is woefully lacking. Deneen is partially right; we
need new people in government, but we don’t need a new elite. The found-
ers envisioned citizen-
legislators in the House of
What’s needed are reforms to Representatives, not pro-
strengthen American exceptionalism. fessional politicians. As
we did with the Articles
of Confederation when we had “rotation in office,” we need term limits for
members of Congress in the way we now have for the president. We should
also enact independent redistricting, campaign-finance reform of the right
kind, stricter anti-lobbying measures, and other actions to empower citizen-
legislators. We must also repair the separation of powers. Congress (not the
president) was meant to be the “first among equals” to ensure the people
were sovereign, and we need to restore that original intent.
We must also restore balance to our political culture and repair our social
fabric. E pluribus unum—“out of many, one”—is the familiar American motto.
We must be able to both celebrate our diversity (Lockean) and honor our uni-
ty (communitarian). To help foster unity, we need more common experiences.

It is time to revisit universal national service. Since we can’t afford and
don’t need a ten-million-strong military, we should broaden the definition of
national service to include areas that benefit all of society and to partner with
the private sector to bring it about. Second, while fluency in multiple languages
is always a plus, we should be able to communicate in a common language
(English). Third, while recognizing that as a nation we have at times committed
grievous acts, we should also be able to carefully study our history and honor
the heroes of our past, from all backgrounds. Toward that end, the classroom
should be the marketplace of ideas where primary sources are carefully read—
before adding ideologically diverse secondary sources that seek to explain and
provide meaning. Our unity will be strengthened by recommitting ourselves to
classical education, not indoctrination of our young.
We must also find ways to strengthen our support for family, church,
and volunteer organizations. Tocqueville focused on the central role that
volunteer organizations had on advancing American exceptionalism. It’s
clear America has witnessed a significant decline in these institutions since
World War II, and society is worse off for it. The classics teach us the criti-
cal role parents play in shaping the habits of children, an essential dimen-
sion of developing good citizens. In religious gatherings, all are united in
common purpose regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orienta-
tion. Such devotion to common cause is habit-forming and would clearly
help our country.
America is both a great and a good nation. For all of its faults, there is no
question that America has changed the world for the better. We must not
turn our backs on the Constitution and American exceptionalism. Now is the
time to get it right.

American Exceptionalism in a New Era: Rebuilding
the Foundation of Freedom and Prosperity, edited by
Thomas W. Gilligan. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or

H OOVER A RCH IVES
“The Americans
Were a Godsend”
Hoover fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude tells how
American humanitarians, led by Herbert Hoover,
fought famine and saved millions of Russian lives.
By Jonathan Movroydis
A
new book from the Hoover Institution Press, Bread + Medicine:
American Famine Relief in Soviet Russia, 1921–1923, tells the story
of how the American Relief Administration, led by future presi-
dent Herbert Hoover, undertook a large-scale humanitarian
relief effort that saved the lives of millions of starving people in Soviet Russia
from 1921 through 1923. The authors, Hoover research fellow Bertrand M.
Patenaude and scholar Joan Nabseth Stevenson, wrote the book as a com-
panion to an exhibition at Stanford University last year.
Jonathan Movroydis: What were the origins of Bread + Medicine and how
did you get involved in it?
Bertrand M. Patenaude: I’ve spent most of my professional life working on

this particular story about the American Relief Administration, led by Her-
bert Hoover. I’ve spent a lot of time delving into the Soviet famine of 1921 to
’23, and did a lot of work that went into a book that came out in 2002 [The Big
Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine
Bertrand M. Patenaude is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Jonathan Movroydis is the senior content writer for the Hoover Institution.

VICTIMS: The Russian famine of 1921–23 was precipitated by revolution, civil
war, food requisitioning, broken-down transportation, and a severe drought
that triggered a crop failure. Vladimir Lenin initially resisted the idea of out-
side help but eventually relented. The task of fending off mass starvation was
taken up by the American Relief Administration, which was already relieving
hunger across Central and Eastern Europe. [American Relief Administration Russian
operational records—Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
of 1921], which was the first real book in English about the famine—surprising
because that’s a major famine. But the story I really wanted to tell was about
the relief mission.
Since completing the book, I’ve always said there were two stories that
someone will come along and do one day. One was the story of Ukraine. We’re
talking about Soviet Russia, it’s dominated by Moscow, but Ukraine is one
of the constituent parts of this fledgling country. But I also said that there’s
an untold story still in the archives having to do with the medical relief. The
American doctors and their counterparts launched this amazingly complex,
vast medical relief effort.
When COVID hit in 2020, I was convinced that what we ought to do is
mark the centennial of the Soviet Russian famine and of the Hoover relief
mission. Given the COVID pandemic and all the focus on medical issues

LIFELINES: Amid years of internal turmoil, both communist and non-com-
munist forces had been seizing food from civilians, not only to feed their own
armies but to deny it to the other side. Many starving peasants resorted to
cannibalism. The ARA workers arranged to feed a daily meal to patients in
hospitals receiving American medical supplies, such as this one in Petrograd
(today St. Petersburg), partnering with local officials to distribute bread, milk,
and other foodstuffs. Communist minders kept a close eye on the Americans
and their helpers. [American Relief Administration Russian operational records—Hoover
Institution Library & Archives]
and the fact that in 1922 the ARA introduced a vaccination program
which was controversial, I thought it would really resonate with
audiences today.
Where does the title
“Maxim Gorky sent out an appeal to come from? The way the
anybody who would help. People are world found out about the
dying. The fields are burning.” famine was that in July
1921, the writer Maxim
Gorky sent out an appeal to anybody who would help. People are dying. The
fields are burning. And the very last line of the appeal says, “Give bread and
medicine.”

PESTILENCE: Hunger was not the only enemy—disease was its ally. Sanitation
was critical for clinic hygiene and to fight typhus-carrying lice. Simple soap
was an effective weapon. In this photo, people carry branches into a bathhouse
for scrubbing. Bathhouses such as this one took care of the masses of refugees
roaming the devastated land, while the ARA supplied bandages, instruments,
and linens to hospitals that often had nothing—not even anesthesia. [American
Relief Administration Russian operational records—Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
I wanted to make clear that in 1921–23, this relief mission succeeds only
because there is a collaboration of Americans and Soviets—which means
Russians in most cases—and including doctors. We highlight in the book
how American and Russian doctors—and Ukrainian doctors as well—work
together for the whole two years. American doctors are spread very thin;
they are there as administrators and they need staffs. They need the local
physicians to help them, people working in the hospitals, nurses, medical
students. And the collaborative dimension of the story is one that I really
wanted to emphasize.
Movroydis: Herbert Hoover is considered by many to be a rugged individu-

alist and capitalist. How does he extend his relief efforts in Western and
Central Europe and parts of Eastern Europe into the Soviet Union?
Patenaude: This is a fascinating part of the story. Gorky’s appeal comes

out in the West, and there’s really only one person who can do anything

MOTHERLAND: The scale of Russia’s great famine was almost incalcu-
lable, but the ARA workers confronted it as they had other vast humanitarian
problems. Millions had to be fed. Russia had not been able to import medical
equipment since 1914, when it went to war against Germany, its main sup-
plier. To combat disease, the American workers even had to install new water
lines and sewers. [American Relief Administration Russian operational records—Hoover
about the famine: Herbert Hoover. He has the organization, the ARA,
the American Relief Administration. He has the experienced personnel,
he has the know-how, and he is also by this point secretary of commerce
in the Harding administration. He has the contacts and he can make the
wheels turn.
The question among historians is, was Lenin’s government in Moscow
surprised when Hoover responded and offered to feed one million children?
Eventually that figure
goes way up, by the way,
“Hoover did think food would cure it. and by the summer of
So, if you started feeding anywhere 1922 the ARA is feed-
in Europe or in Russia, eventually ing 10.5 million Soviet
Bolshevism would go away.” citizens a day, adults and
children. I think they
were surprised. You see in the internal correspondence that Lenin and
company were really panicky about this because Hoover was also known

RECOVERY: In the spring and summer of 1922, the worst threat to health was
cholera, a disease spread by contaminated water or food. The rescue mission
began a vast vaccination campaign. For those leery of getting the shot, the
ARA provided reassurance by obtaining the medicine from the Pasteur Insti-
tute in Paris, a trusted source. Vaccination was also linked to the provision
of food and the ability to travel outside afflicted lands. The ARA left Russia
in 1923, with the Soviet government expressing “satisfaction and thanks.”
[American Relief Administration Russian operational records—Hoover Institution Library &
Archives]
for his anti-communism. He was a strident anti-Bolshevist. He was against

any military intervention in Soviet Russia, but he was very hardheaded
about Bolshevism. He did think food would cure it. So, if you started feed-
ing anywhere in Europe or in Russia, eventually Bolshevism would go away.
Lenin and company set strict guidelines. They set up a whole hierarchy of
secret police minders who would be affiliated and associated with all of the
relief operations of the Americans throughout the country. And they occasional-
ly arrested some of the Americans’ local staffs. Hoover insisted, “We must have
a free hand in hiring our local staffs who would help us choose the beneficia-
ries.” So, there were strained relations throughout the two years, but ultimately,
because Hoover has the food and the medicine, they’re able to succeed.

Feeding the enemy . . . there was concern at home that maybe we shouldn’t
be sending aid over to a communist system. Herbert Hoover has a great
quote. He writes a letter to a man in Kansas City who’s questioning why
we’re feeding Bolsheviks. He writes, “You have to separate in your mind the
150,000 communists over there from the 150 million Soviet citizens.” We’re
feeding the Soviet people, Hoover was saying, not the Soviet government.
In 1921, only Herbert Hoover could have led the way in arranging for an
American-endorsed relief mission to Soviet Russia. Everyone trusted that
Hoover knew what he was doing. Few questioned it.
Movroydis: What was the Russian people’s reaction to Herbert Hoover and
the American Relief Administration? Did they have a favorable view despite
the minders and some of the Soviet propaganda?
Patenaude: Absolutely. They were just coming out of an absolutely

tumultuous period of revolution and civil war, and then came famine. The
Americans were a godsend. They saw the Americans as a tie to the outside
world from which they had been cut off for all of these years. Remember,
Herbert Hoover at this time was known as the master of efficiency. The
Russians marveled at how quickly these Americans worked. Overall, there
was great admiration and
enthusiasm about the
“We’re feeding the people; we’re Americans. And there
not feeding the government.” was tremendous sadness
and a sense of loss when
the Americans left because they felt that they were losing a lifeline. Their
hopes that the Bolsheviks would go away, or that Russia would once again
become normal and it would have relations with other countries the way it
had before the world war, all those hopes were vanishing.
Hoover’s picture shows up in the background of photos we have through-
out Soviet Russia, in kitchens and so on. When a few Americans returned
just a couple years later, in 1925 and 1927, they noticed that Hoover had been
eclipsed by Henry Ford, with his factory system for building automobiles. But
for those two years, no other American was as popular as Herbert Hoover.
Movroydis: Could you talk about the vaccination efforts?
Patenaude: The ARA had never mounted a medical program in any of its
operations in Central and Eastern Europe. But in the summer of 1921, it’s
clear that there’s a threat of typhus, especially; typhus might even spread
into Europe through Poland because there are a lot of people trying to get

out of the country. So Hoover thinks, “Well, the American Red Cross can go
in and do a medical program.” But the Soviet government would not allow
the American Red Cross in. It had been associated with some of the White,
or anti-Red, armies on the periphery during the civil war.
So Hoover decides, “We’re going to have to do this,” and gathers a couple
of doctors who had been associated with the American Expeditionary Force
in World War I. They don’t understand the enormity of the problem. It’s the
same with the food relief: they ended up feeding not a few but many, many
millions. Russia had not been able to import medical equipment since 1914.
Germany had been its main supplier.
In some areas, 50 percent of the doctors are gone. Some are leaving the
country, but most are succumbing to the diseases they’re trying to conquer.
Hospitals have no supplies—even basic stuff like linens, surgical instruments,
bandages. One of the first American doctors on the scene arrives to see
surgery being performed without anesthesia and the wound covered up with
dirty newspaper.
This was a surprise to me. The doctors say, “Above all, we need soap.” They
set up bathhouses for the kids. They realize that they’re not going to stop a
lot of these diseases without that.
Once they get the ball rolling, there are two major threats. The first one
is typhus. There is no vaccine for typhus; it’s spread by infected lice. The
approach was to sanitize various facilities, provide better hygiene. They
fumigate clothing, which they have to import machinery to do. And they
also have to gather refugees, millions of whom are on the move, and get
them into barracks where they can be cleaned and their clothing can be
sterilized.
Then, as the temperatures are warming up toward the spring of 1922,
cholera becomes the main threat. Now here, they can do something about it:
vaccination. But the head of the relief mission in Moscow realizes that not
only will the population be a bit skeptical, but so will Soviet medical doctors.
So, even though the vaccines are available more cheaply from the United
States, he imports all the vaccine from the Pasteur Institute in Paris because
he knows that the Russian doctors regard the Pasteur Institute as the gold
standard.
You can imagine vaccine skepticism. But the big deal here is that the ARA
has leverage: food, so bread and medicine. You go to an ARA kitchen and the
kids line up for their meal. You want your food, you get your shot. And if you
want to get on a train to leave Soviet Russia for the West, you need proof of
the ARA vaccination.

There were cholera outbreaks in 1919, 1920, and the summer of ’21, but not
in the summer of ’22. The ARA basically put an end to that.
Movroydis: What was the overall impact of the bread and medicine mission?
Do any data speak to that?
Patenaude: That’s a tough one. How do you add up the number of lives
saved? Here’s the thing that I now know that I wish I had known or been
aware of more clearly twenty years ago: in a famine, most people do not die
of starvation. Few people starve to death. Most people die of famine-related
disease.
There’s one exception in recent times: Mao’s Great Famine and the Great
Leap Forward, with numbers that run up to forty million victims. That’s a
case where probably most of the victims died of outright starvation.
To go back to the ARA and its work in Soviet Russia, it’s hard to add up
how many lives were saved there. But if you think about the big picture—and
how the ARA took it upon itself to install water filters, to put in new piping
for sewers and water lines, and so on—I would feel comfortable saying that
six million died, and it probably would have been double that absent the
ARA’s bread and medicine.
Special to the Hoover Digest. This interview was edited for length and
clarity.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Bread +

Medicine: American Famine Relief in Soviet Russia,
1921–1923, by Bertrand M. Patenaude and Joan
Nabseth Stevenson. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or

HOOV E R A R C HIV E S
Sympathy for the

Devil
A fascist-favoring journalist landed an exclusive
interview with Adolf Hitler as German tanks rolled
into France. Hitler expected public sympathy and
the reporter expected praise. Both were badly
mistaken.
By Benjamin S. Goldstein
B
litzkrieg had disrupted European flights. So, only after a train,
plane, and two separate car rides in early June 1940 did Karl H.
von Wiegand, the sixty-five-year-old German-American “dean of
foreign correspondents,” arrive at the small red-brick Belgian
chateau where he would
conduct the most cru-
Karl H. von Wiegand learned from his
cial—and most contro-
earliest days in journalism to connect
versial—interview of his
personal politics, sensationalism,
long career.
Preserved in von
and interviews with historic figures.
Wiegand’s papers at the Hoover Institution Archives is a letter he sent to his
British assistant, fellow journalist, and mistress Lady Grace Marguerite Hay
Drummond-Hay, wherein he recounted, with the flair of a journalist steeped
in turn-of-the-century sensationalism, this momentous assignment. After
Benjamin S. Goldstein is a PhD candidate in history and a Roland Marchand

Fellow at the University of California, Davis.

ITEM: Karl H. von Wiegand (who added the “von” early in his journalism
career) was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States as a child.
He launched his career in the American Southwest. Von Wiegand had a knack
for interviewing famous newsmakers around the world, and the Hearst media
empire showcased that talent. As early as 1917, he was also known as a confi-
dant of German officials. [Cosmopolitan]
a luncheon with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop “came

the sound of a car on the crunching gravel of the drive. A six-wheeler open
type car . . . with sun-top up, drew up. Hitler, sitting in front with the chauf-
feur, got out.” Recently arrived from the victorious French battlefront, Adolf
Hitler brimmed with menacing self-confidence. Von Wiegand remembered
that “gone was his former shyness. . . . In its place there had come sureness of
himself. . . . His character, his iron willpower, his grim tenacity is beginning to
break through the former mask-like face. . . . There is a touch of the sinister,
something dark. It suits the face—of a conqueror.”
Von Wiegand was no stranger to Hitler, high German politics, or contro-
versial interviews. Karl Heinrich Wiegand was born in Germany in 1874 and

THE GO-BETWEEN: Von Wiegand cut a distinguished figure, whether acting
as an informal diplomat between the Wilson White House and the Kaiser’s
Germany in 1917 or reporting from distant battlefields. [Karl. H. von Wiegand
papers—Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
migrated to the United States a few years later. After a peripatetic, gal-
livanting youth throughout the American Midwest and West, he appended
the “von” to his last name as he began dabbling in journalism. A few years
before the outbreak of World War I in Europe, he returned to Europe as

UP AND AWAY: Von Wiegand stands on the flight deck of the Graf Zeppelin
with his confidante and fellow correspondent, Lady Grace Marguerite Hay
Drummond-Hay. The two filed numerous dispatches from their travels on the
giant German airship, which completed a round-the-world trip in 1929. Years
later, the two were interned in a camp in the Philippines when the Japanese
invaded in 1941. [Source unknown]
a foreign correspondent. During the war, he quickly established himself

as one of the most sensationalist and pro-German US correspondents,
cleverly snagging interviews with Crown Prince Wilhelm, Grand Admiral
Erich Raeder, and perhaps even the pope (the Vatican denied this). After he
joined the notoriously pro-German US media empire of William Randolph
Hearst in 1917, he was soon appointed as a special diplomatic emissary by
Colonel Edward House, the top foreign affairs adviser to President Wilson,
to help explore a separate peace deal with Germany via neutral Sweden.
Although geopolitics shifted before this mission could come to fruition,
von Wiegand learned from his earliest days in journalism to treat personal
politics, sensationalism, and interviews with world-historic figures as
inseparably connected.
These lessons carried over into von Wiegand’s work in tumultuous
interwar Europe, where he kept a wary eye on both the emergence of

EMBEDDED: Von Wiegand was well-known for his travels to war zones and
hot spots, such as this visit to the Eastern Front during World War I. The
reporter (at left, wearing glasses), would snag exclusive interviews with
Crown Prince Wilhelm and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, among others. The
signs indicate this photo was taken in Poland. [Karl. H. von Wiegand papers—Hoover
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME: William Randolph Hearst had been urging von
Wiegand to arrange an interview with Hitler for years. Here, von Wiegand
waits with officers on the balcony of the Crillon Hotel in Paris, overlook-
ing the Place de la Concorde, a few hours after the Wehrmacht entered the
French capital. Von Wiegand had intrigued German officials with an offer
of mediation between Germany and the United States, which he said was
on the brink of entering the war on the Allied side. [Karl. H. von Wiegand papers—
Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
Bolshevism in the new Soviet Union and the explosive politics of early Wei-
mar Germany. Claiming to have met Hitler in 1921, von Wiegand produced
the first known English-language interview of the future Führer, profiling
the thirty-two-year-old
“man of the people”
When the time came, von Wiegand and his movement in
was the Nazis’ interviewer of choice. vivid and exaggerated
detail. He kept in on-
and-off contact with Nazi politics as they ebbed and flowed and ultimately
cemented power in the early 1930s. When the time came, von Wiegand was
the Nazis’ interviewer of choice.
He had been critical of the Nazis at times during the 1930s, but by 1940 he
had changed. Witnessing the wars rippling across Europe, Africa, and Asia

RENDEZVOUS: At this chateau in Belgium, von Wiegand came face-to-
face with the Nazi dictator, remarking later in a personal letter about Hitler’s
“menacing self-confidence” and “iron willpower.” The interview was in fact
carefully scripted—down to having the questions and answers composed in
advance—and whatever its impact on Axis audiences, von Wiegand’s article
aroused mostly disbelief and even derision among Allied readers. [Benjamin S.
Goldstein]
and growing increasingly afraid of the spread of communism, von Wiegand

was now solidly sympathetic and collaborative towards the Nazis.
OUTREACH TO AMERICA
The interview with Hitler in June 1940 came at a critical time in US and
world politics. Hitler’s dream of European domination seemed one step
closer to fulfillment: France was all but defeated and the British were pinned

SWEPT UP: “Europe for the Europeans, America for the Americans” was the
message Hitler wanted von Wiegand to convey. The message from the man
von Wiegand had dubbed the “German Mussolini” in 1921 aroused such sus-
picion in the United States that the FBI opened a file on the reporter and filed it
under “espionage.” [Karl. H. von Wiegand papers—Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
down on the beaches of Dunkirk, hoping to dash across the Channel during
a fighting retreat. Only one thing seemed able to ruin Hitler’s dream: the
Americans. If President Roosevelt were to marshal the industrial and mili-
tary might of the United States to support Hitler’s enemies, or even declare
war, Germany would face serious trouble. So, through this interview and its
subsequent publication through both the US media and Nazi propaganda
channels, Hitler hoped to reassure the United States that he had limited,
justifiable war aims and that he respected US sovereignty. “Europe for the
Europeans, America for the Americans,” was the headline on the New York
Journal-American, Hearst’s New York City flagship paper, on June 14. It was a
bold ploy.

VERY USEFUL: Nazi propagandists translated the interview and distributed
copies of it around Europe. Today, the precise relationship between von
Wiegand and Nazi Germany remains murky. Nonetheless, von Wiegand
clearly developed personal sympathies toward the fascist movement as
part of his fear of advancing communism. [UCLA Library]
And it failed. It failed not only for Hitler, in convincing the United States of
his peaceful intentions, but for von Wiegand himself. This interview forever
marked him as a Nazi dupe at best and a Nazi propagandist at worst. In the
short term, it garnered him widespread popular condemnation while also
earning him the attention of the FBI, which began investigating him. His file
was classified under the category “espionage.”
However, it was not purely the politics of the interview that tainted von
Wiegand’s record, both then and now. It was also the particular journalistic
style the correspondent used—one enmeshed in a deep tradition of crusad-
ing sensationalism, proclivity toward drama and dramatic figures, and dif-
ficulty separating reportage from personal politics. By the early 1940s, many
Americans understandably viewed this journalistic approach as disturbingly
similar to the propaganda pumped out by fascist and totalitarian movements
in Europe.
The archival record that has emerged in the ensuing eighty years tells an
even darker story. Scholars can investigate not just the papers von Wiegand’s
family deposited at the Hoover Archives shortly after his death in 1961 but
also an increment to these materials acquired just last year: postwar inter-
views of Nazi operatives, von Wiegand’s recently declassified FBI file, which
runs 398 pages, and intelligence scattered across the diplomatic archives of
six countries.
What emerges from these sources adds to the context of his Hitler inter-
view and his broader relationship with fascist powers. The connections are
still not entirely clear; the precise depth of von Wiegand’s collaboration—
and especially the role of money in this relationship—remains opaque. Yet
through the evidence of a very strong working relationship between von
Wiegand and the Nazi Party, we see indications of the depth of von Wiegand’s
ideological and stylistic overlap with Nazi objectives, as well as the ethical
and journalistic sacrifices he made along the way.
A VERY USEFUL REPORTER

How did the interview come about? Von Wiegand had been trying to scoop an
interview with the increasingly reclusive Führer throughout the late 1930s.
“Mr. Hearst had long wanted it,” von Wiegand privately remarked. He had
even flown to Berlin some weeks earlier from his base in Rome, trying to
get access. Hitler’s invasion of France in spring 1940 gave him an opening.
Shortly after the Nazis launched their Blitzkrieg, as recorded in the German
Naval Staff Operations Division’s War Diary, von Wiegand went to the Ger-
man armed forces with the message that “Germany should now offer peace

on generous terms; an offer of peace by the Führer would find the most
ready support in the USA.” Yet if the Nazis did not seize this opportunity—an
opportunity von Wiegand was clearly all too willing to facilitate—“the USA
will then enter the war on the side of the allies.” In less than a week, he got a
call from the German Embassy in Rome asking him to interview the German
dictator.
After a long, roundabout journey, von Wiegand had lunch with von Rib-
bentrop and Wehrmacht General Max Pfeffer. During the luncheon, von
Ribbentrop, Germany’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom, “closed
his eyes now and then . . . thinking,” and while talking occasionally dipped
into English, “beautiful
perfect English—much
better than my German,” To Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels,
von Wiegand recalled. “these interviews from a reputable
The meal itself was “sol- journalist, who has a great name in
diers’ faire, plain.” After the world, serve us extremely well
lunch, von Wiegand and
right now.”
von Ribbentrop headed
to another chateau, driving for two hours through a landscape desolate with
“broken tanks, overturned motor trucks … occasional gaunt smoke-black-
ened ruins of houses or buildings” that marked “the path of war very clearly.”
Upon arriving at the next chateau, likely abandoned by its Belgian owners,
they made themselves at home in a “cozy drawing room,” decorated with
“portraits of Belgian and French beauties of another epoch.”
Then Hitler arrived. In also came Hitler’s press secretary, a diplomat, an
interpreter, and a photographer. “No military man had come with him,” Von
Wiegand recalled, perfect for an interview promoting peace. Hitler chatted
for a bit about the hot weather and how his soldiers must be suffering. Von
Wiegand observed the man he had known for nearly twenty years, seeing
now in the Führer’s face a “fanatical determination that marks the whole
career of this man.” Clutched in Hitler’s hands were sheets of typewrit-
ten paper, with prepared questions (which von Wiegand had first drafted
in his initial visit to Berlin) and answers (which von Ribbentrop and Hitler
had drafted). Von Wiegand claimed that these papers, copies of which are
preserved in his papers, formed “only the basis for our 45 minutes talk.” Yet
they closely mirror the interview story which von Wiegand cabled, without
criticism or comment, back to the United States.
The prepared questions make the propagandistic nature of the interview
clear. It is hard to imagine a more softball question than the final one: “What

are the Führer’s conceptions of a peace in Europe and in the world which will
last for two to three generations?”
The very first question—“Does Germany recognize the American Monroe
Doctrine for the Western Hemisphere”—led to the catchy slogan that began
von Wiegand’s dispatch: “The Americas to Americans, Europe to the Euro-
peans.” In other words, if the United States respected Nazi/Fascist rule over
Europe, Hitler would respect US domain over the Americas. “This recipro-
cal basic Monroe Doctrine . . . declared Fuehrer Hitler to me today, not only
would ensure peace for all times between the Old and New Worlds, but would
be a most ideal foundation for peace throughout the whole world,” von Wie-
gand gushed. Neither the cost of that “peace,” nor the many times over the
years that Hitler had promised peace only to renege on his promises, found a
place in von Wiegand’s article.
Von Wiegand knew that the interview served a deeply political purpose.
As he confided to American diplomats, the Nazis had offered the interview
for two reasons: “to pacify public opinion in the United States” and “to
induce England to make
overtures for peace.”
Von Wiegand feared that To these diplomats, von
communism would roll across Wiegand also passed on
Europe, if not the world, without the confidential, not-for-print
dam of Nazism to hold it back. information from Hitler:
that peace terms for the
Western powers would be “drastically revised”—made harsher—if France
and England continued “dogged resistance.” He also shared his own opinion
that “America’s desire to give increasing assistance to the Western pow-
ers” would backfire by causing the Germans to crush their enemies quicker
“before American assistance could be really effective.” He even claimed in
private correspondence that Hitler had personally asked him to travel to
Britain as a German peace envoy, although because of the low likelihood of
success, he refused.
The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, noted in his meticulously
kept diary that the interview was a part of “our sharp polemics against
England using . . . propaganda.” And indeed, von Wiegand’s interview flooded
across Nazi propaganda channels. On the radio, it was broadcast domesti-
cally on German radio, while internationally it rode the airwaves to England,
occupied Denmark, occupied Holland, Greece, Hungary, and India. In print,
it was translated into at least ten European languages and distributed by
Nazi propagandists in pamphlets throughout Europe. In the United States, it

was reprinted in a 100,000-copy edition of the German consulate’s curiously
named propaganda magazine, Facts in Review, which bragged that the inter-
view was a “clear answer to widespread propaganda about alleged German
intentions concerning the Western Hemisphere.”
Most Americans did not see it that way. In a press conference, FDR casu-
ally dismissed the interview, noting that Hitler’s declarations brought up
“recollections” of the German dictator’s previous broken promises. Most
American newspapers concurred. In local newspapers, the interview was
often printed under headlines such as “Hitler has no designs on America—
but that’s only his side of the story.” One Tennessee newspaper, noting von
Wiegand’s admission that Hitler had read off a list of prepared questions and
answers, called the interview a “typical example of Hitler propaganda . . . a
tissue of stupid lies and distortions” printed only for its importance as “news
. . . not as truth.” The syndicated investigative columnists Drew Pearson and
Robert Allen disparaged the interview, rightly guessing that von Wiegand’s
long history (and sympathy) with German politics led him to be “selected as
the man who could best put across a message.”
In a 1942 article, journalist Sidney A. Freifeld surmised, correctly, that the
circumstances of the interview had “converted the interviewer into a mere
conveyor of an oral Nazi handout.”
ON TO THE NEXT STORY

After the interview, von Wiegand continued in the same vein. Within a
few weeks, he had conducted a similarly propagandistic and similarly
poorly received interview with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, com-
mander of the Luftwaffe. Then, after a quick return trip to the United
States, he took his
talents to East Asia and
tried to explain Japa- The roving correspondent spent
nese imperial ambi- his final years in Egypt, in a villa
tions to an American overlooking the pyramids.
audience. In Manila
on December 7, 1941, von Wiegand was partially blinded in explosions as
Japan bombed US possessions across the Pacific. Interned briefly by the
Japanese, sent to occupied Shanghai, and then repatriated to the United
States in a prisoner-of-war exchange, von Wiegand spent the last months
of the war in neutral but fascist-leaning Spain. He increasingly warned
about the dangers of the United States’ wartime partner, the Soviet
Union, which von Wiegand feared would roll across Europe, if not the

world, without the dam of Nazism to hold it back. While he was in Madrid
in the waning years of the war, Nazi intelligence reached out to him,
hoping that he would serve once again as a journalistic conduit for Nazi
peace feelers. Before anything could get off the ground, Allied forces had
swarmed Berlin and brought the Third Reich to an end.
But von Wiegand’s career was not over. For nearly two more decades, he
continued traveling the world, sounding the alarm against communist influ-
ence through an inseparable mix of reporting and opinion. He also continued
his questionable interview methods, reaching out to anti-communist dicta-
tors such as Francisco Franco of Spain and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt,
where von Wiegand spent his final years, in a villa he constructed overlook-
ing the pyramids at Cairo. After a mysterious last-minute trip to Japan in
1961, the “dean of foreign correspondents” caught pneumonia and flew to
Zurich for emergency treatment, where he died at eighty-six.
How deep von Wiegand dug his own grave—how deep into complete col-
laboration with the Nazis—is still unclear. Yet the surviving evidence, now
including von Wiegand’s
FBI file, suggests at
He once mused, “fiction is the only the very least a strong
way to tell the truth and put your collaboration based on
thoughts into the mouth of your mutual interests and
characters.” methods, and quite
possibly a subservient
relationship in which von Wiegand directly received Nazi directions for his
journalism. Postwar interrogations of Nazi propaganda operatives suggest
that at least by the time he went to Asia after his interview with Hitler, he
may have requested to join the Nazi payroll and begun taking orders from
the Nazi propaganda ministry. Goebbels himself noted in his diary in 1941
that “Wiegand is no longer quoted in our [German] press, as not to com-
promise him.” The term “compromise” is curious, and hints at a collabora-
tive relationship. Goebbels frequently admired the quality and nature of
von Wiegand’s journalism, noting that “these interviews from a reputable
journalist, who has a great name in the world, serve us extremely well
right now.”
Even as Goebbels drafted those words in October 1941, they were losing
their truth. As one FBI employee noted, von Wiegand’s file was “replete with
correspondence from irate citizens requesting that the bureau take some
action against him.” One irate American complained in 1945 that “Hitler,
Goebbels, Goering, and Himmler, not to mention some Japs, have laughed

at his work—he is a rare gem to them . . . he must think all Americans are
dummkopfs.”
Von Wiegand often defended himself as a mere straight-shooting journal-
ist who wanted “America’s foreign news service . . . [to] remain clean and
above . . . suspicion,” as he told his daughter, Charmion, in 1945. Yet his
letters also show a different, competing impulse. Von Wiegand was unable
to separate his politics, personal beliefs, and flair for drama from his journal-
ism. As he confided to his son-in-law, he often wondered if he should have
become a n ovelist. After all, he believed that “fiction is the only way to tell
the truth and put your thoughts into the mouth of your characters.” Denizens
of today’s oversaturated media landscape, struggling to separate fact from
fiction, substance from drama, and truth from dogma, should pay heed.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is America

and the Future of War: The Past as Prologue, by
Williamson Murray. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or

On the Cover
“L
enin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live forever.” These
famous lines from a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky
(1893–1930)—titled, perhaps a bit obviously, “Vladimir
Ilych Lenin”—express a wish for eternal remembrance
of the Bolshevik revolutionary he adored. Lenin’s embalmed body has been
on public view in Moscow for a hundred years, since his death in January
1924, except for a brief sojourn in Siberia as World War II raged. Mayakovsky
killed himself not long after, amid tumult in his personal life and a hot-and-
cold relationship with Soviet officialdom.
Mayakovsky, born in Georgia, grew to prominence as a public revolu-
tionary and a flamboyant bad boy of the arts. Tall, glowering, and hand-
some, he plunged into the Russian Futurist scene (its manifesto: “A Slap
in the Face of Public Taste”), which rejected artistic tradition. Being
called “unpoetic” was a compliment. Mayakovsky made himself visible
as an activist, writer, playwright, actor, editor, and poster designer. He
packed an illegal pistol and helped prison breaks. He willingly took to
propaganda and agitprop—the crude persuasive materials meant to
goad the masses into action. Above all, he wrote in his autobiography,
he admired Marx.
Mayakovsky attracted plenty of admiration himself, particularly after he
started writing poetry during his own stint in prison. But there was a shadow
over his devotion to the revolution: he was an artist, an iconoclast, and artists
have a complicated relationship with authority.
He had left the precursor to the party several years before the Bolshe-
viks seized power in 1917, but he met the revolution with enthusiasm. He
and other artistic figures swore their allegiance. Mayakovsky lectured and
recited, and wrote pamphlets for children, in the service of what he called
“communist futurism.” His celebrity grew. He toured outside Russia as a
leading light of leftist art. The summit of his fame came in 1924 with the
composition of his three-thousand-line Lenin tribute, which was rapturously
received and then published as a book. A four-volume edition of his collected
works appeared in 1929.
But the scene changed. The
Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers began to chafe. Younger
strivers accused Mayakovsky of
being a petit-bourgeois intellectual,
a “false leftist”—worse, a favorite
of Trotsky. Students shouted him
down and the press mocked him.
Mayakovsky had a long trail of
lovers, including an interpreter in
New York who bore him a child,
and a long list of poems about those
women. In 1930, after a romantic
disappointment with one married
woman, he shot himself. A previ-
ous lover and muse, also married,
said that with the poet, suicide was
“a chronic disease inside him.” A
fellow artist regretted that he had
squandered his once-innovative,
rebellious talent to serve the state.
The proletarian writers group shut down all mention of Mayakovsky after his
death and canceled publication of his works.
But Stalin liked him, and that made all the difference. After the poet’s muse
wrote to the Soviet leader in the mid-1930s asking him to intervene, Stalin
declared Mayakovsky “the best and the most talented” poet of the age, and sud-
denly the country was awash in praise. The town of his birthplace was renamed
in his honor, and a Mayakovsky museum and library opened in Moscow.
Sic transit gloria: the Communist Party’s belated sanctification of Maya-
kovsky led to what his close friend Boris Pasternak called a second death for
the poet. After Stalin died, Mayakovsky became in many eyes the pet poet of
Stalin’s oppressive state. Yet later still, younger poets and activists saw him
with fresh eyes. His reputation in the aging Soviet Union fell and rose a few
more times, depending on what passed for avant-garde, but this poster from
the Hoover Archives shows his words still held power in the late twentieth
century. No one knows whether Mayakovsky—like Lenin, like any shooting
star—“will live forever.” The face that scowls from old photos continues to
challenge readers to see him as reformer, romantic, rebel, or revolutionary—
depending on one’s point of view.
—Charles Lindsey

HOOVER INSTITUTION ON WAR, REVOLUTION AND PEACE
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foreign government leader, searching for ways to help Americans and
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HOOVER DIGEST
WINTER 2024 NO. 1
The Economy
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Defense
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Law
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Free Expression
Education
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Values
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HOOVER

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