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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
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ON THE COVER DIRECTORS
A piece of Belgian lace from the Lou CHRISTOPHER S. DAUER
Henry Hoover Collection highlights DENISE ELSON
the American eagle. During World COLIN STEWART
War I, a remarkable agreement ERYN WITCHER TILLMAN
between the Allies and the Central (Bechtel Director of Public Affairs)
Powers allowed Belgian women to
ASSISTANT
continue making traditional lace amid DIRECTORS
the warfare devastating northern
Europe, keeping open a key economic SHANA FARLEY
lifeline. Grateful for US intercession, MARY GINGELL
JEFFREY M. JONES
the lace makers of Belgium sent thou-
SARA MYERS
sands of examples of their work to the
CHARNETTE RICHARD
Americans who had helped save them
KAREN WEISS
from starvation. See story, page 191.
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 Spring 2019
HOOVER D IG EST

T HE ECONOM Y
9 The Case Against Higher Taxes
“Deadweight loss” is just as bad as it sounds, just as
inefficient, just as unfair. By David R. Henderson

16 Perilous Pensions
Social Security is still heading for a fall. Not even the rising
number of new workers can postpone this reckoning. By
Charles Blahous

A M E R ICA N VA LUE S
21 Conservatism for the People
When society and politics become degraded, when American
communities crumble, merely “conserving” isn’t enough.
Conservatism must restore. By Peter Berkowitz

S OC IAL ISM
25 Children of Entitlement
Young leaders who preach socialism and other fantasies
demonstrate an astonishing disregard for facts—maybe
because they’ve never been forced to face any facts. By Bruce
S. Thornton

32 A Manifesto of Misery
Socialism has never succeeded in any way—except in
surviving in credulous minds. By Charles Calomiris

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 3
 R EG U L AT ION
37 When Deregulation Really Took Off
Airline deregulation remains one of the triumphs of sound
economic thinking. But for a while it was touch and go . . . By
David R. Henderson

E DUCAT I ON
44 “End of History” Lessons
The big education battles seem to have settled down,
but history suggests they won’t stay settled. It’s time to
consolidate gains and push the next wave of education ideas.
By Michael J. Petrilli

HE A LT H CA R E
48 No Free Lunch—Or Health Care
“Medicare for all” promises nothing but crippling expense,
inefficiency, and delays. By Scott W. Atlas

P O L IT IC S
53 Inconvenient Billionaires
We can never keep money out of politics. But there is a
solution to the problem of hugely expensive campaigns:
eliminate the spoils of office. By Richard A. Epstein

4 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

60 Robespierre for President?
The Jacobins of the left wing, like those of revolutionary
France, hunger for power—no matter what it costs, no matter
whose heads will roll. By Victor Davis Hanson

L AW
66 Discrimination and the Ivory Tower
The Supreme Court may finally get to clean up the mess that
race-based admissions have created at our universities. By
John Yoo and James C. Phillips

IM M IGRAT ION
76 Gimme Shelter
The definition of a “refugee” dates back decades and has
outlived its usefulness. Nations now need a much more
rigorous idea of just who deserves refuge. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

N AT IO NA L SEC UR IT Y
80 Tech in the Trenches
Silicon Valley has shown a remarkable indifference to
national defense, depriving the Pentagon of both brains and
technological brawn. By Amy B. Zegart and Kevin Childs

J O U R N A L ISM
88 Fake Newsies
This just in: journalists are people, too—sometimes very
dishonest people. The story of a German journalist who told
his readers a pack of lies about the United States. By Josef
Joffe

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 5
 E UR OP E
91 Europe Does Not Exist
Brexit is just one vivid symptom of the Continent’s failure to
produce a true union. By Josef Joffe

AS IA
102 Competence and Confidence
“Strategic patience” in Asia has run its course. Now we and
our allies must prepare for whatever comes next. By H. R.
McMaster

C H IN A
109 The Empire Strikes Back
Determined to hold all power, China is forcing its minority
Uighurs into re-education camps and attacking their very
culture. The Uighurs will not go quietly. By Michael R. Auslin

114 “Covert, Coercive, or Corrupting”

Beijing has declared war—an information war. A team of
Hoover researchers sounds the alarm. By Orville Schell and
Larry Diamond

119 Stop, Thieves

“Trade war” is the wrong description for our clash with China.
Instead, it’s a campaign to halt the stealing of American
technology. By Martin Feldstein

6 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

122 The Door Is Already Open
A strong China can be a peaceable China. By Elizabeth Cobbs

T HE M IDDL E E AST
126 The Road from Damascus
The Trump administration’s timing may be questionable, but the
pullout of US forces from Syria is not. By Thomas H. Henriksen

130 Ancient Animosities

Christians in the Holy Land need allies. Their hostility toward
the Jews doesn’t help. By Samuel Tadros

CA L IFORNIA
139 Scorched Earth
Wildfires last year destroyed thousands of homes and cost
dozens of lives, and California’s environmental policies bear
some of the responsibility. The Golden State needs less red
tape and smarter land management. By Richard A. Epstein

145 Red Ink in the Golden State

California owes hundreds of billions of dollars in pension
obligations it can’t meet. Hoover fellow Joshua D. Rauh says
the overpromising needs to stop—now. By Clifton B. Parker

149 Newsom Laces Up His Shoes

California’s new governor is chasing a national profile. By
taking the lead on immigration, he could earn attention and
praise—or fail miserably. By Bill Whalen

IN T E RVIE WS
154 Loners and Lost Tribes
In war or in peace, who has your back? Author Sebastian
Junger explores the tension between freedom and the ancient
longing for community. By Russell Roberts

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 7
163 Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Biographer and historian Andrew Roberts, granted exclusive
access to archives about Winston Churchill (including the
diaries of King George VI), paints a portrait both familiar and
fresh. By Peter Robinson

HOOV E R A R C HIVE S
175 Siberian Quagmire
As the First World War drew to a close, the victorious Allies
suddenly found themselves clashing with Bolsheviks in
Russia. How that intervention went astray is a tangled, and
cautionary, tale. By Kyle Duchynski

191 A Stitch in Time

Belgian women, backed by US aid during World War I,
thanked Americans by sending messages made from
traditional lace and needlework. Lou Henry Hoover gathered
those fragile reminders of a historic humanitarian moment.
By Jean McElwee Cannon

8 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 T H E ECON OM Y

TH E ECONOMY

The Case Against

Higher Taxes
“Deadweight loss” is just as bad as it sounds, just
as inefficient, just as unfair.

By David R. Henderson

A
number of Democratic politicians—and
some economists, including Paul Krug- Key points
man—have recently advocated substan- »» “Deadweight
tially higher income tax rates on high- loss” arises from
attempts to avoid
income Americans. The current top federal tax rate on taxes.
income is 37 percent for married people filing jointly, »» An increased
and it applies to all taxable income over $612,350. The tax rate causes
people to engage
highest state income tax rate in the United States is in
in behavior that
California, where it is 13.3 percent on taxable income would otherwise
over $1 million. Thus, the highest-income people in be inefficient.

California lose over half of their incremental income to »» Most people

believe in fairness
the government. even when consid-
That politicians favor higher tax rates is not surpris- ering taxes on the
rich.
ing. That some economists do, and that one particular
economist is making such a bad case for higher tax
rates, is somewhat surprising.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an

emeritus professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
California.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 9
 Economists, whatever their ideology,
tend to oppose high marginal tax rates
for one very good economic reason:
what they call deadweight loss.
Moreover, a substantial minor-
ity of economists, including
myself, oppose high marginal
tax rates on philosophical
grounds. Also interesting
is that the majority
of Americans,
if they under-
stood how
high are the
tax rates

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

10 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

that high-income Americans pay, would favor substantially cutting tax
rates on the top earners.

THE DEAD HAND

Economists often come up with cumbersome terms to describe important
concepts. But deadweight loss is quite clear: it beautifully describes one
of the big harms from taxation. The deadweight loss from taxes is the loss
imposed on some that is
not a gain to anyone. So,
for example, a typical Americans don’t understand how
estimate of deadweight high tax rates already are. Asked to
loss from taxes is 30 choose a fair rate, they would actually
percent of revenue favor cuts for the top earners.
raised. That means that
if the government takes $1 million in additional taxes, there is an additional
$300,000 cost imposed on players in the economy.
Where does this deadweight loss come from? People’s attempts to avoid
taxes. So, for example, an increase in the marginal tax rate might cause
people to work less. Or it might cause them to buy a more expensive house so
that they can deduct the additional interest on the mortgage. Those are just
two of the ways people can adjust. They might also evade taxes by under-
stating income or overstating expenses and deductions. Why do we call the
result deadweight loss? Because in each case, the tax system gives people an
incentive to do something that they would not have chosen to do at a lower

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 11
 tax rate. The increased tax rate causes them to engage in behavior that oth-
erwise would be inefficient for them.
This can best be illustrated with an extreme hypothetical example. Imag-
ine that the federal government imposes a $2,000 additional tax on everyone,
but gives them a way out: they can avoid the tax if they fly to Alaska and
back. For those who would have flown to Alaska anyway, there is no dead-
weight loss. But for those who would not have, there is a deadweight loss. As
long as the cost of flying to Alaska—including the cost of your time minus
any “disvalue” you put on going to Alaska—is less than $2,000, you will do it.
Imagine that the cost is $1,900. Then you will fly there, and the deadweight
loss from your adjustment will be a whopping $1,900.
The fact that taxes cause people to adjust to avoid some or all of them is
one of the reasons that many economists oppose high tax rates.
And here’s the kicker. A theorem in economics says the deadweight loss
from a tax is proportional not to the tax rate, but to the square of the tax rate.
Consider the 37 percent top federal tax rate. Some economists, such as MIT’s
Peter Diamond and UC-Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez, have advocated that it
be raised to 70
percent or higher.
The deadweight loss from taxes is the loss To make the math
imposed on some that is a gain to none. simple, imagine
that Congress and
the president were to double it to 74 percent. The deadweight loss wouldn’t
double. It would quadruple.
In the 1970s, when the top marginal tax rate in the United States was 70
percent, economist Art Laffer drew his famous Laffer Curve. He showed
that tax rates could be so high that cutting them would actually increase
revenue and raising them could decrease revenue. And even if raising tax
rates doesn’t decrease revenue, what’s clear from both basic economics and
empirical studies is that raising tax rates by x percent will raise tax revenues
by less than x percent. Why? Because of the adjustments people make to
avoid taxes.
So, for example, consider a high-income Californian who is currently pay-
ing 50.3 cents in federal and state taxes on every additional dollar earned,
which means that he’s keeping 49.7 cents. Then imagine that the advocates
of higher tax rates get their way and raise his federal tax rate to 70 percent.
Now he’s paying 83.3 cents on every additional dollar earned and keeping
only 16.7 cents. Put aside all the other ways he might adjust, and consider
just his decision about how much to earn. His incentive to earn an additional

12 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

dollar has fallen from 49.7 cents to 16.7 cents, a drop of 66 percent. Is it hard
to imagine that this Californian will work less?

TAXATION EQUALS EXTRACTION

Economist Paul Krugman, in his January 5 column in the New York Times,
admits that high tax rates reduce the incentive to work, but says it doesn’t
matter for anyone other than the people who are taxed. Perhaps you think
I’m exaggerating his point. But here’s what he wrote:

In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or

other distortions—which is the kind of economy conservatives
want us to believe we have—everyone gets paid his or her margin-
al product. That is, if you get paid $1,000 an hour, it’s because each
extra hour you work adds $1,000 worth to the economy’s output.

In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If
a rich man works an extra hour, adding $1,000 to the economy, but
gets paid $1,000 for his efforts, the combined income of everyone
else doesn’t change, does it? Ah, but it does—because he pays
taxes on that extra $1,000. So the social benefit from getting high-
income individuals to work a bit harder is the tax revenue gener-
ated by that extra effort—and conversely the cost of their working
less is the reduction in the taxes they pay.

Or to put it a bit more succinctly, when taxing the rich, all we

should care about is how much revenue we raise. The optimal tax
rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the
maximum possible revenue.

Krugman’s denial of basic economics is stunning. The fact is that there are
gains from trade, and the fewer people there are producing things, the less
trade there is. So the losers from higher tax rates are not just those who are
taxed but also those who don’t get to buy the goods and services that those
higher-taxed people stop producing. There is no contradiction between the
idea that people are paid their marginal product and the idea that when they
produce, other people benefit.
Notice something else that Krugman seems to believe: rich people literally
don’t count. He writes, “The social benefit from getting high-income individu-
als to work a bit harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort.”
That’s true only if rich people aren’t part of society. And in case you thought
Krugman was just being careless, look at another line above: “When taxing

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 13
the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise.” He seems to
regard “the rich” as cattle to be raised and exploited. That’s a very negative
view of humanity.
It’s also a strange view. Krugman, who is quite rich whether measured by
income or wealth, is excluding himself from society. Some might say that I
care more about Paul Krugman than Paul Krugman does.

AMERICANS T HINK TAXES ARE HIGH ENOUGH

Fortunately, I’m not alone. Guess who else cares about rich people, whether
we measure “richness” by income or wealth? The vast majority of Ameri-
cans do. If you poll people about whether the rich should pay more in taxes,
the majority will typically say yes. But then ask them what percent of their
income the rich should pay in taxes, and the vast majority will give a number
that’s below the percent
they currently pay. In
a 2012 poll conducted Certain politicians seem to think that
by The Hill, 75 percent rich people are cattle to be slaugh-
of respondents thought
tered for their tax revenue.
that the rich should pay
a rate of 30 percent or lower. So they don’t forget about fairness when they
consider taxes on the rich and they don’t, like Krugman, seem to regard the
rich as cattle.
Unfortunately, the poll specified neither whether the question was about
marginal tax rates or average tax rates, nor whether it was about income
taxes or taxes in general. Still, the data are striking. And they’re consis-
tent with data from a Reader’s Digest poll in the 1990s. The poll asked what
percent of their income a family of four making $200,000 should pay in all
taxes to all levels of government, including income taxes, Social Security,
sales taxes, and property taxes. The median response of almost all income
and demographic groups was that the maximum should be 25 percent. That
is well below the percent of income paid in taxes by actual families making
$200,000 then (which is approximately $320,000 in today’s dollars).
Even noted activist Al Sharpton thought the rich should be taxed less. In
a 2004 interview with John Stossel, Sharpton said the rich should pay their
fair share of taxes. Stossel asked him what percent of total federal income
taxes the rich should pay. Sharpton’s answer: at least 15 percent. At the time,
noted Stossel, they paid 34 percent of all federal income taxes. All the rich
people I know, except for Paul Krugman, would take Sharpton’s deal in a New
York minute.

14 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 The simple fact is that people are ignorant of the tax structure and don’t
understand how a progressive income tax works. In the 1990s, a petitioner
asked a high-income friend of mine to sign a petition to put a progressive
income tax on the ballot in Massachusetts. The state constitution required,
and still requires, a proportional state income tax. My friend asked the
petitioner why she thought higher-income people should pay higher tax rates.
She answered, “Because people who make more money should pay more in
tax.” My friend agreed, saying, “If I make five times as much as you, then my
taxes should be five times as high as yours.” “We agree,” said the woman.
“Now will you sign my petition?” Of course he refused. She didn’t under-
stand that with Massachusetts’s proportional tax on income, she had already
achieved what she claimed to want.
In short, the economics, the polling data, and basic fairness say that it’s a
bad idea to raise taxes further on high-income people. That probably won’t
stop many advocates from pushing for higher taxes. But it should.

Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-

ideas), a Hoover Institution online journal. © 2019 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Currencies, Capital, and Central Bank Balances,
edited by John H. Cochrane, Kyle Palermo, and John
B. Taylor. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 15
T H E ECONOMY

T H E ECONOMY

Perilous Pensions
Social Security is still heading for a fall. Not even
the rising number of new workers can postpone
this reckoning.

By Charles Blahous

L
ate last year, Morgan Stanley published a research report pro-
jecting that US labor-force growth would exceed Congressional
Budget Office (CBO) projections starting in the 2020s, and also
asserting that this faster growth “should” delay Social Security’s
insolvency, “perhaps by decades.” Specifically, the report stated that “a faster
increase in the pool of covered workers is an important factor in the Social
Security trustees’ ‘low cost’ scenario, which would delay the date at which
the Social Security trust fund reserves could become depleted from 2034 to
2062.”
Multiple news stories seized uncritically upon this tantalizing prospect,
with an article on MarketWatch stating that such variance in labor-force
growth has “tremendous implications,” that it might help Social Security
solvency last “for another generation,” and that “if Morgan Stanley is right,
the Social Security trust fund reserves might become depleted in 2062,” long
after the current projection of 2034.
The MarketWatch headline, stating that “higher-than-predicted labor-force
participation” might by itself plausibly sustain Social Security for several addi-
tional decades, is flatly wrong. Morgan Stanley’s report should not have sug-
gested this, news articles about the study should not have asserted it, and their
respective authors should correct these misimpressions if they haven’t already.

Charles Blahous is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

16 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

A CASCADE OF ASSUMPTIONS
First, some quick background. For several decades now, annual Social Secu-
rity trustees’ reports have warned consistently that the program’s scheduled
benefit obligations far exceed its projected revenues and have urged lawmakers
to enact financial corrections before it is too late to realistically do so. These
reports have stressed that although various economic and demographic factors
cannot be projected precisely, there is nevertheless a high degree of certainty
that the shortfall will not correct itself without legislative action. The idea that
faster labor-force growth might by itself substantially postpone the problem is
sharply at odds with these repeated bipartisan messages.
Second, a brief disclaimer. I believe strongly in the benefits of increased
labor-force participation. Indeed, much of my own writing about Social Security
policy stresses the value of reforming the program to fix work disincentives.
More labor-force participation is good not only for Social Security finances but
for the economy as a whole, for the larger federal budget, and for workers them-
selves. Nothing that follows in this article should be misconstrued as failing to
recognize the many benefits of faster labor-force growth.
Here is why the “solvent until 2062” claim is erroneous.
Social Security’s trustees sometimes stress that its projected depletion date
is an inadequate proxy for system financial health, for the simple reason that
by the time the insolvency date rolls around, it is far too late to fix the problem.
What matters is the size of the shortfall requiring correction and whether there
is still a reasonable chance to correct it. But even when we invoke the program’s
projected insolvency date as a crude shorthand for its financial condition, it’s
still clear that increased labor-force participation won’t change the contours of
the financial problem all that much.
A larger labor force means more wages subject to the Social Security tax,
which in turn means more revenues for the program. But it also means larger
benefit obligations later, deriving from the additional contributions. The addi-
tional revenues arrive first, delaying insolvency somewhat. Still, the qualitative
net effects aren’t very large. A sensitivity analysis in the trustees’ report shows
that even if annual national real wage growth increases over 50 percent faster
than current projections, insolvency will be delayed by only three years, from
2034 to 2037. Note that this analysis does not focus narrowly on labor-force
participation but models a wider array of factors that might conceivably lead to
more taxable earnings. The bottom line is that even if increased labor-force par-
ticipation were to result in a dramatic acceleration of national earnings growth,
it would still change Social Security’s financial picture very little.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 17
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
 So, what about that trustees’ “low cost” projection scenario that shows Social
Security’s trust funds lasting until 2062? Well, that projection has virtually
nothing to do with increased labor-force participation. Here are just some of the
assumptions that all must pan out for that scenario to transpire:
»» The US fertility rate rebounds to 2.2, permanently. For reference, the cur-
rent US fertility rate is about 1.8, and the United States has not had a single year
exhibiting a 2.2 fertility rate since 1971.
»» Annual US mortality improvements will slow down to barely half the rate of
progress assumed in the primary projections. Basically, this scenario assumes that
Social Security will cost less than now projected because we’ll stop making signifi-
cant progress in improving longevity and recipients won’t collect benefits for as long.
»» Immigration will be more than 25 percent higher than now projected.
»» Annual productivity growth will be more than 20 percent higher than now
projected.
»» Real wages will grow more than 50 percent faster than now projected.
»» After 2028, the United States will never again see an unemployment rate
above 4.5 percent.
»» Disability incidence will drop by more than 20 percent, relative to the
primary projections.
»» Disability recovery rates will increase by more than 20 percent, relative to
the primary projections.
If you think it highly unlikely that all of these factors will occur simultaneously,
thereby delaying Social Security’s projected insolvency until 2062, you are not alone.
The trustees perform an annual stochastic analysis that provides 80 percent
and 95 percent confidence bands for the projections, including the insolvency
date. The 2017 analysis found with 80 percent confidence that Social Security’s
trust funds would be depleted between 2032 and 2039, and 95 percent confi-
dence that depletion would occur between 2030 and 2043. In other words, there
is only a 2.5 percent chance that the trust funds will remain solvent past 2043.
The 2062 insolvency projection scenario is not remotely within the range of
likely outcomes and is not intended to be. It is designed to be an illustration of
the potential range of movement in the projections if, unrealistically, all relevant
variables break in the same direction.

CANCELED OUT
A particularly glaring error in the MarketWatch piece, though an understandable
misimpression given the wording of the original Morgan Stanley report, is its fail-
ure to note that faster labor-force participation growth plays virtually no role in the
trustees’ 2062 projection scenario. Consider this passage from the trustees’ report:

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 19
 More optimistic economic assumptions in the low-cost alternative
are consistent with higher labor-force participation rates, while
demographic assumptions in the low-cost alternative (such as slow-
er improvement in longevity) are consistent with lower labor-force
participation rates. These economic and demographic influences
have largely offsetting effects. Therefore, the projected labor-force
participation rates do not vary substantially across alternatives.

Translated, this means that there are some assumptions in the trustees’
low-cost (2062) scenario that push labor-force participation up, and others
that push it down. On balance, though, there isn’t significant variation in
labor-force participation between the trustees’ main 2034 projection and
their illustrative 2062 projection.
The Morgan Stanley report itself fails to account for the net effects of these
interrelated factors. The report projects higher labor-force participation
rates than CBO does, based on an expectation that recent “improvements in
health and life expectancy” will “continue over the next couple of decades.”
But if those life-expectancy improvements do continue, they won’t boost only
labor-force participation; they will also increase Social Security expenditures
because recipients will collect benefits over longer lifetimes. This is the oppo-
site of what is assumed in the trustees’ low-cost (2062) projection scenario, in
which program expenditures are lowered by beneficiaries dying earlier.
In summary, the trustees have indeed produced an illustrative scenario in
which Social Security insolvency is delayed until 2062, but it’s the product
of an array of extremely improbable assumptions, and, moreover, increased
labor-force participation has nothing to do with it. The representation that
faster labor-force growth might by itself plausibly delay Social Security insol-
vency for nearly three decades is inaccurate and should be corrected.

Reprinted by permission of e21. © 2019 Manhattan Institute for Policy

Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Pension

Wise: Confronting Employer Pension Underfunding—
And Sparing Taxpayers the Next Bailout, by Charles
Blahous. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

20 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 A M E R I CA N VA LUE S

AMERI CAN VALUE S

Conservatism for
the People
When society and politics become degraded,
when American communities crumble, merely
“conserving” isn’t enough. Conservatism must
restore.

By Peter Berkowitz

O
f all the strange and remarkable features
of politics in the Trump era, among the Key points
least surprising is the alliance between »» Sound traditions
and communities
conservatism and populism. Donald nurture political
Trump’s emergence as the tribune of conservative freedom.

hopes and popular anxieties was improbable. But »» Conservative

elites must listen
he didn’t invent the alliance between conservatism
more, and more
and populism—or, to speak less polemically, between carefully, to the
conservatism and the people. He rode the wave of a people to bet-
ter understand
populist revolt sweeping across the Western world. their aspirations,
In many liberal democracies, right-wing politicians discontents, and
fears.
have made common cause with disaffected por-
»» Conservatives
tions of the working and middle classes. A recurring
must restore lib-
complaint reverberates across rural and suburban eral education.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in
Contemporary Conflict.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 21
 Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa; similar grievances
roil swaths of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Israel, and
Brazil: an imperious ruling elite has imposed laws, norms, and practices that
radiate disdain for the people’s beliefs and endanger their way of life. Elites
have conspired across partisan lines to promote globalization, free trade,
and mass immigration, benefiting themselves while ignoring the costs for the
less educated and less wealthy. Meanwhile, the mainstream press and social
media, the entertainment industry, and the universities—all dominated by
progressive elites—propagate scorn for conservatism. Conservative elites
and many regular voters find themselves bound together by a common politi-
cal opponent.
Yet the alliance between conservatism and the people—between elites
devoted to preserving tradition and local communities and those who want
them preserved—is as old as modern conservatism itself. Its roots can be
traced to 1790. In “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Anglo-Irish
statesman Edmund Burke sought to preserve British morality, civil society,
and political order, which he regarded as essentially healthy, from baleful
Parisian ideas. The French revolutionaries wanted to perfect politics by
eradicating tradition and transforming humanity. Burke replied that the
British people were fine. Their traditions and communities nurtured politi-
cal freedom, which gave tradition and community room to develop and
flourish.
Reconciling freedom and tradition has since emerged as modern conser-
vatism’s perennial task. A little more than one hundred and fifty years after
Burke, the founders of the conservative movement in America renewed the
relationship between
the right and the people.
The alliance between conservatism William F. Buckley—a
and the people is as old as modern classical liberal devoted to
conservatism itself. self-government and free
markets, and a tradi-
tionalist dedicated to morality anchored in Christianity—launched National
Review in 1955 to safeguard the commitments to freedom and faith that he
believed were alive and well among ordinary Americans.
In a 1985 essay, Irving Kristol distinguished “the new populism” from the
populism America’s founders feared, in which the people’s passions “over-
whelm the political and legal process by which our democracy has tradition-
ally operated.” Inept conduct of the Vietnam War, overreaching courts, fail-
ing schools, and a broken criminal justice system had shattered the people’s

22 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

confidence in the political elites. “The common sense—not the passion, but
the common sense—of the American people has been outraged over the past
twenty years,” Kristol wrote, “by the persistent un-wisdom of their elected
and appointed officials.”
Today, the people are restive and in distress. The danger to their communi-
ties isn’t distant and vague. It isn’t lurking on the outskirts. It has breached
the town walls. It has occupied neighborhoods and infiltrated homes.
Charles Murray explored this multifaceted crisis in his 2012 book Coming
Apart. The lower middle class is beset by plunging marriage rates, a rise in
births to unwed moth-
ers, erosion of men’s
industriousness, surg- Reconciling freedom and tradition
ing crime, and a steep has emerged as modern conserva-
decline in religious faith. tism’s perennial task.
Culprits, particularly in
the industrial heartland, include globalization, workplace automation, and
opioids. The contempt that progressive elites heap on the lower middle class
fuels indignation and resentment.
Preserving and reforming no longer suffice. To conserve, one must also
restore. To restore America’s beleaguered lower-middle-class communities—
indeed, to earn the support of people throughout the nation, regardless of
socioeconomic class—conservative elites must convince the people that lib-
erty and limited government advance the people’s long-term interests. Con-
servative elites must listen more, and more carefully, to the people to better
understand their aspirations, discontents, and fears. This will aid in develop-
ing policies—informed by the principles of constitutional government—that
address the people’s immediate priorities, starting with good jobs, which are
essential to healthy communities.
Sound policy is of little use if Americans don’t understand the precepts
of liberal democracy. A proper liberal education yields that understanding.
To put it mildly, however, few American institutions of higher education
transmit knowledge, and cultivate the spirit, of freedom. Rather, colleges and
universities inculcate the practices and spirit of the tribalism that disfigures
American politics.
Conservatives, therefore, must restore liberal education. That is a long-
term undertaking. In the near term, conservatives should multiply the
supplemental on- and off-campus programs they have already established
to fill the college curriculum’s gaping holes and counteract its illiberal
lessons.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 23
 It’s true that liberal education has always been the province of elites.
It’s also true that beginning with Burke, conservative elites have brought
their learning to bear on behalf of the interest they share with the people
in conserving freedom, including the freedom to conserve local community,
national tradition and religious faith.
In this strange and remarkable moment, lively appreciation of modern
conservatism’s origins, major ideas, and perennial task furnishes invaluable
resources for understanding our politics and advancing the public interest.

Adapted from Peter Berkowitz’s Wriston Lecture, “The Conservative

Challenge in a Populist Moment,” delivered at the Manhattan Institute.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-
Government, and Political Moderation, by Peter
Berkowitz. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

24 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 SOC I A LI SM

S OCI AL I S M

Children of
Entitlement
Young leaders who preach socialism and other
fantasies demonstrate an astonishing disregard
for facts—maybe because they’ve never been
forced to face any facts.

By Bruce S. Thornton

M
any millennials have developed an affection for socialism, in
defiance of its long record of failure. Electoral maven Karl
Rove recently warned us not to ignore or dismiss this enthu-
siasm. Socialism’s dismal record “doesn’t mean new forms
of socialism can’t gain a following,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Rove’s
solution is for Republicans to “do the hard work of updating old arguments”
and to “hone their arguments” against socialist policies in preparation for the
2020 presidential race.
Welcome back to 2,500 years of dubious thinking about the power of rea-
son and coherent argument to dispel bad ideas. It didn’t save Socrates from
the hemlock, and it’s unlikely to change the minds of the worst educated,
most self-centered, and most pampered cohort in American history.
This stubborn belief in the power of rational thought and knowledge
to improve human life lies at the heart of modern political ideologies like

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 a professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 25
 Marxism and progressivism. Both assume that the knowledge useful for
politically organizing a state or society is “scientific,” comprising principles
and techniques that are beyond ideology and universally true. Hence the

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

26 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

need for enlightened technocratic elites to control social institutions and use
power to rationally arrange human existence more justly and efficiently.
The flaw in this thinking was first identified by contemporaries of Plato,
whose Republic imagined a utopia of
elite Guardians educated to exercise
totalitarian control over society. And the
earliest critics of Plato’s flawed assump-
tions about human nature were likewise
Greek writers such as Thucydides and
Sophocles. Both argued that a human

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 27
 nature universally subject to irrational passions, free will, and a tragic world
would always to some degree triumph over the rational mind.
Yet despite the subsequent millennia in which history demonstrated that
the road to utopia is lined with mountains of corpses, the dream of creating
heaven on earth by applying rational techniques of control and improvement
over human beings has not lost its allure. In modern times, the decline of
faith and the belief in a transcendent reality has made us even more vulner-
able to political religions, those delusional visions of human power and will
purportedly able to eliminate the tragic limits of earthly life, such as inequal-
ity, suffering, injustice, and violence.

HEDGING IN THE “FACTIONS”

The founders knew this history of political speculation going back to ancient
Athens, and they agreed with Machiavelli that “it is necessary for whoever
arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all
men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they
have the opportunity.” This fundamental assumption also underlies the Con-
stitution’s architecture, most famously laid out by James Madison in Federal-
ist No. 10.
To protect political freedom, Madison writes, the state must be organized
to protect against “faction,” groups of citizens united and motivated “by
some common impulse
or passion, or interest,
Human nature, subject to irrational adverse to the rights of
passions and free will, will always to other citizens, or to the
some degree defeat the rational mind. permanent and aggregate
interest of the community
as a whole.” Freedom nourishes faction and gives it scope, especially freedom
of speech, which allows opinions to be publicized and conflict with those of
others. Finally, faction is not a result of bad education or poverty, it is “sown
in the nature of man,” which creates a “connection between his reason and
his self-love,” and makes “his opinions and passions” a “reciprocal influence
on each other.” To protect the freedom of all from this dynamic, the founders
checked and balanced and divided power so no one faction could dominate
the rest and create tyranny.
Notice that although Madison does mention “interest,” property and
wealth, he says nothing about rational scientific truths or rational arguments
as causes of factions or means for restraining them. We don’t as a people
gather into parties over facts, scientific theories, and mathematical formulas,

28 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

rather than over factional purposes to which some, like global warming, can
be put. Mainly that’s because the most important political disagreements
concern questions that science or reason or facts alone can’t answer: What
are human beings? What do we owe to others? Why do we do what we do?
What is the best way of life? What is the highest good for a political commu-
nity? And who should participate in governing?
Most of us, then, are
not going to be talked out
of our political passions, Machiavelli warned, “Presuppose
any more than we will that all men are bad and that they will
abandon our economic use their malignity of mind every time
interests. Yet every elec- they have the opportunity.”
tion we hear over and
over about the “partisan divide” that keeps us from rational discussions and
solutions about important issues. Half an hour on any raucous website, cable
show, or network news program will demonstrate that what we decry as
“partisanship,” “polarization,” and even “hatred” are politics just as Madison
understood it, and whose threat to freedom he guarded against by making
“ambition counter ambition.”
There are, however, differences between our world and the centuries
before World War II that have exacerbated these factional passions. Our high
level of material existence, safety, and comfort is on an unprecedented scale.
One consequence has been the elevation of expectations for our existence far
beyond what’s possible for flawed, passionate creatures like us. And these
expectations never seem to be gratified, but only to escalate.
Older generations grew up in a harder, more dangerous, more contingent
world of material want, disease, and daily physical labor. Their expectations
were tempered by hard experience and constant reminders that their desires
and dreams were a matter of indifference in such a world. More of them were
skeptical about the utopi-
an promises of socialism
and communism. These We don’t gather into parties over
collectivist ideologies did facts, scientific theories, and math-
see some success after ematical formulas.
initial enthusiasm, but
invariably they failed because they couldn’t meet the expectations they had
raised. As a consequence, collectivist ideologies have had to resort to murder,
gulags, tyranny, and corruption––imposing by force what could not be won by
the persuasion of success, as free market capitalism has done.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 29
 Millennials are a different breed. They have lived in this brave new world
of affluence from childhood, and so have a much higher baseline standard
of material comfort and greater expectations for achieving political ideals
like universal free health care, guaranteed jobs, free college tuition, social
harmony, and equality of outcomes rather than of opportunity. But they are
continually disappointed and aggrieved: our country hasn’t been eager to
repeat the failures of a century of socialist economies and social policies.
Having spent forty years in the university watching the degradation of
scholarly disciplines, I’d like for Rove to show me where to find the millennial
socialists educated enough in traditional subjects like history, philosophy, or
critical thinking to be open to rational persuasion. A generation marked by
both an elevated, unearned sense of self-regard and an arrogant certainty
about their own intellectual and moral superiority is likelier to complain and
threaten than to listen thoughtfully.

GOOD CITIZENS VS. BAD IDEAS

Not all millennials, of course, resemble this portrait. Millions reject the
nostrums of fashionable leftism and trendy socialism. They have experienced
a world more challenging than their parents’ basements or a college dorm
room. They go to church, serve in the military, protect our streets, and raise
their children to be virtuous. But because they are busy at these adult activi-
ties, they don’t have the impact on our culture and politics that subsidized
activists and “social justice” warriors do. That’s why the establishment media
ignores them.
Will socialism, as Rove
fears, start to attract
In our safe, comfortable society, more and more voters as
expectations rise far beyond what’s the boomers die off and
the Democratic coalition
possible for flawed creatures like us.
of tribes expands? I don’t
And these expectations seem only to
think so, and not because
escalate. of President Trump’s suc-
cess in starting to reverse
Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America, of which the
current socialist enthusiasm is the logical culmination. Nor will socialism be
rejected because Republicans fanned out across the country to meetings and
town halls and made converts with refurbished messaging.
Rather, our socialist poseurs are heading inexorably toward a looming eco-
nomic disaster: the unfunded liabilities, mountains of government debt, and

30 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

unsustainable entitlement spending, for which the reckoning is relentlessly
growing closer. And who’s on the hook for that bill? Not most of us boomers.
The millennials are going to be left holding the bag, and some hard lessons
about an unforgiving reality and the eternal laws of compound interest will
have to be learned.
But crises are unpre-
dictable and irrational,
Collectivist ideologies resort to mur-
and, as Thucydides said,
bring men’s characters der, gulags, tyranny, and corruption—
down to the level of their imposing by force what they couldn’t
circumstances. That win by the persuasion of success.
process of righting our
fiscal ship is likely to be dangerous and rife with social disorder that will
make our petty quarrels over tweets and porn stars seem quaint. Voters may
even become sufficiently frightened for their economic future, and desperate
enough, to turn to socialism for solutions that don’t require anything from
them beyond more of other people’s money.
There’s no predicting how things will turn out in such circumstances, or
how millennials will respond. But one thing right now we know for sure:
socialism will fail. It always has, and it always will.

Reprinted by permission of FrontPage Magazine. © 2019 FrontPageMag-

azine.com. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and
Political Stalemate, by Morris P. Fiorina. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 31
S O C I AL I S M

S O C I AL I S M

A Manifesto of
Misery
Socialism has never succeeded in any way—
except in surviving in credulous minds.

By Charles Calomiris

T
he overarching message of The Opportu-
nity Costs of Socialism—a study recently Key points
released by the President’s Council of »» Many people are
infatuated with so-
Economic Advisers (CEA)—is that the cialism yet ignorant
advocacy of socialism cannot reasonably be based of its failures.

on policy preferences; its attraction has always been »» Socialism is built

on false promises,
grounded in a combination of wishful thinking and but the most egre-
ignorance. For example, the CEA study shows that gious failure is this: it
has never conquered
the socialist approach to “single payer” health care
poverty.
advocated by many on the left would cost much
»» Historians agree
more than other approaches and deliver much less, that prosper-
resulting in the significant worsening of mortality ity comes through
personal freedom,
and morbidity, not just higher taxes and reduced property rights, and
economic growth. free markets.
One prominent opinion-page editor described the
study’s conclusions to me as too obvious to warrant

Charles Calomiris is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution

and the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia Univer-
sity.

32 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

mention. That reaction reflects the very problem the study seeks to remedy.
Obvious facts about socialism are not discussed enough. Few people are
willing to read fifty-page studies like the CEA’s and there has been very little
media coverage of it—journalists or politicians who could summarize the
CEA findings haven’t seen sufficient reason to do so (or may themselves be
among the uninformed advocates of socialism). The ignorant advocacy of
socialism is a significant threat to our democracy.
Socialism has existed in many forms. They lie on a continuum, from the
central-planning nightmare of the USSR to the Scandinavian democratic
experiments of several
decades ago. The idea
that unites the various Marx made many specific, erroneous
embodiments of social- predictions about capitalism, includ-
ism is that economic ing its declining profitability and ris-
freedom is counterpro- ing unemployment.
ductive to the aspira-
tions of humanity. It would be far better and fairer, socialists argue, for the
state to distribute scarce resources rather than let the market allocate goods
and services by itself. Socialism seeks control of economic decisions, either
through central planning or through expropriative taxation and regulation,
purportedly in the interest of the common man.
The difference between market-based and socialist economies is not the
presence of redistributive policies per se. For over a century, market-based
economies around the world have taxed and redistributed wealth and
provided a host of services such as public education and care for the poor,
sick, and elderly. But in market-based systems, taxation is regarded as an
unfortunate burden, employed out of necessity to ensure other priorities
are achieved. Socialist regimes, by contrast, do not see taxation as undesir-
able—it is as a means to prevent individuals from controlling their collective
economic destiny.

EMPTY PROMISES, FAILED PROPHECIES

Socialism’s appeal has always been its false promise to create wealth better
than capitalism can. Advocates of socialism promise great economic achieve-
ments, which they argue are worth the price of reduced individual economic
liberty. It is worth remembering that Karl Marx regarded socialism as an
economic necessity that would emerge out of the ashes of capitalism pre-
cisely because capitalism would fail to sustain wealth creation. Marx made
many specific, erroneous predictions about capitalism, including its declining

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 33
 profitability and rising unemployment. His analysis did not consider perma-
nent economic growth in a capitalist system to be possible. And his “histori-
cal materialist” view of political choice claimed that the rich and powerful
would never share power voluntarily with their economic lessers or create
social safety nets. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx fundamen-
tally failed to understand the huge changes in technology, political suffrage,
or social safety-net policies occurring around him.
Socialist theory not only was wrong about the economic and political fruits
of capitalism, it failed to see the problems that arise in socialist governments.
Socialism’s record has been pain, not gain, especially for the poor. Socialism
produced mass starvation in Eastern Europe and China as it undermined
the farmers’ ability to grow and market their crops. In less-extreme incarna-
tions, such as in Britain in
the decades after World
Socialism’s record has been pain, not War II and before Mar-
gain, especially for the poor: hunger, garet Thatcher came to
malnutrition, corruption. power, it stunted growth.
In most cases, socialism’s
monopoly on economic control also fomented corruption by government
officials, as was especially apparent in Latin American and African socialist
regimes. The adverse economic consequences of socialism led the Scandina-
vian countries to dial back their versions in the past decades. If the United
States had imitated Scandinavian-style socialism, the CEA study estimates,
our GDP today would be 19 percent lower.
Virtually all the developing world has abandoned socialism. Countries
today do not seek to emulate the disasters of North Korea, Cuba, or Venezu-
ela. They also avoid high taxation of the rich, which reflects the recognition
that countries compete with each other for capital. Expropriating the rich
tends to make them leave, and when they leave they take their wealth with
them.

WAKING UP FROM SOCIALIST FAILURES

This philosophical shift in the developing world is a major change since the
1980s, when socialism was still fashionable among some. The shift away from
socialist thinking was grounded in the growing body of empirical evidence
about the kinds of policies that produced growth and poverty alleviation—
that is, policies that used markets as a lever of economic development. Now
developing countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, India, China,
South Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia are known as “emerging

34 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

BUSTED: A bust of Karl Marx, coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, stands
in Chemnitz, Germany, a city that in communist times was known as Karl-
Marx-Stadt. Lines from the Manifesto are inscribed behind the bronze monu-
ment, dedicated in 1971, which remained intact after German unification. [Dirk
Liesch, Initiative Lebenswertes Chemnitz—Creative Commons]

economies,” a description that recognizes their need to emerge from state

control of their economies through privatization, free trade, and the creation
of viable private financial intermediaries to promote growth and poverty
alleviation.
All around the developing world, socialism is understood as a false prom-
ise, an ideological opium that repressive elites use to keep and expand power.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 35
 Capitalism, in contrast, is seen as the force that has lifted more than a billion
people out of poverty worldwide since 1990.
To historians, that was obvious long before the 1980s. Socialism has never
conquered poverty. It has never competed with capitalism as a means of
effectively allocating resources and promoting sustainable growth. Over
the past half century, scores of economic historians have sought to explain
what produced the economic progress that Europe and some of its offshoots
enjoyed in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. This group of scholars,
which includes Angus
Maddison, Joel Mokyr,
Capitalism is the force that lifted a Eric Jones, David Landes,
billion people out of poverty. Deirdre McCloskey, and
Douglass North, tend to
hold quite diverse political preferences, but they universally agree on the
facts: government policies that safeguard a combination of personal eco-
nomic freedom, secure property rights, and the ability of individuals to gain
personally by participating in markets have promoted the effort and innova-
tion that conquered poverty and promoted growth through the ages.
The facts about socialism and capitalism may shock the young people of
America, many of whom lionize Senator Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic
socialist who honeymooned in the USSR, as the new conscience of our
nation—and many of whom, 51 percent, according to Gallup, hold a positive
view of socialism. Only 45 percent have a positive view of capitalism. That
represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views about capitalism
in just the past two years. Many of these young people are thoughtful and
intelligent—but also ignorant about the history and economics of the systems
they favor or condemn.

Reprinted by permission of e21. © 2019 Manhattan Institute for Policy

Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

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
visit www.hooverpress.org.

36 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 regulation

REGUL ATI O N

When
Deregulation
Really Took Off
Airline deregulation remains one of the triumphs
of sound economic thinking. But for a while it was
touch and go . . .

By David R. Henderson

W
hen Democrats Loved Deregulation” is the title of a recent
article by Matt Welch and Alexis Garcia on the Reason
Foundation’s Hit & Run blog. Welch and Garcia recount how
President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy were
leaders in the drive to deregulate major sectors of the economy, including air-
lines, trucking, and railroads. Welch and Garcia bemoan the fact that no current
major Democratic politician supports measures to deregulate the economy. And
this is at a time when, aside from those three sectors and a few others, the US
economy is, in many respects, more regulated than it was in the 1970s.
A closer look, though, at the deregulatory movement of the 1970s offers
some grounds for optimism. Neither Carter nor Kennedy was particularly
ideologically opposed to regulation. Rather, the deregulation was due to a
confluence of circumstances, not all of which could be predicted but which

David R. Henderson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an emeritus

professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 37
 one can imagine being imitated. The circumstances behind airline deregu-
lation, which I’ll focus on here, were ideas on the shelf; dissent within the
regulatory bureaucracy; a budding consumer movement; in Kennedy’s case,
the hiring of a political entrepreneur, Stephen Breyer; and a fracture within
the organized defend-
ers of regulation. Few of
Any new deregulator would do well these factors, other than
to hold hearings, as Kennedy did, to the first, could easily
make Americans aware of the harm have been predicted and,
done by regulation. by and large, were not
predicted.
A key ingredient in political reform is reform proposals thought out in
advance. When those ideas are first spelled out and backed by credible
research, they don’t typically have much effect. But they are there, ready to
be drawn on when circumstances are ripe. Without those ideas, well-articu-
lated and -backed, the prospects for reform are weaker.
Martha Derthick and Paul J. Quirk, in The Politics of Deregulation, the
definitive book on the 1970s deregulation movement, make the point well:

When events occur that call for a political response—an urgent

public problem such as severe inflation, or a tide of public
opinion—officeholders tend to cast about quickly for suitable
responses and to make a choice from the current stock of political
wisdom. They look to the latest and best thinking because events
occur too fast and ideas mature too slowly for responses to be
devised anew for each pressing situation.

The case of airline deregulation is Exhibit A. As early as 1949, economist

Lucile Keyes had argued in the Journal of Air Law and Commerce that gov-
ernment restrictions on entry of airlines into the commercial air passenger
business was a mistake. Then, in 1962, Harvard economist Richard E. Caves
published Air Transport and Its Regulators: An Industry Study, in which he
showed that there was no “natural monopoly” case for regulating entry into
the airline industry or for regulating fares. On this basis, he called for “rela-
tively free competition.”
The major breakthrough came in 1965, when law professor Michael Levine
published an article in the Yale Law Journal showing that airfares within Cali-
fornia, which were not subject to regulation by the Civil Aeronautics Board
(CAB), were approximately half the fares charged on similar-length routes
that crossed state borders. From then on, those who argued for deregulation

38 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

drew on his comparison and on a similar finding in 1970 by William A. Jordan
of Canada’s York University.
Also helpful was a 1974 finding by economists George Douglas and James C.
Miller III that airlines were not big gainers from regulation. One might expect
that with the CAB enforcing a legal cartel that made it difficult to cut fares,
the airlines would have made above-normal profits. But that expectation
ignores a pillar of economic wisdom: competition is a hardy weed, not a deli-
cate flower. If airlines are constrained on cutting prices, they will compete in
other dimensions. One such dimension is frequency: they will fly more planes
in a day with fewer seats occupied. A jingle from Delta’s ads in the early 1970s
sums it up: “Delta is ready when you are.” Douglas and Miller found that air-
lines competed away the profits by providing more frequent flights.

CREATIVE TURBULENCE
One of the most fascinating parts of the story of deregulation, which Der-
thick and Quirk tell very well, is the role of regulators within the CAB who
were becoming uncomfortable with their role. One was lawyer J. Michael
Roach, who, from 1967 to 1974, worked for the CAB and came to oppose regu-
lation in what he described as a “Paul on the road to Damascus” experience.
What turned him was his assignment to write the basis for the CAB’s deci-
sion to give a route to a particular airline. He was given no instructions other
than the name of the airline. Roach made up reasons for the board’s decision,
and the board changed not a single word. This was corrupt, not in the narrow
sense of someone being bought off, but in the wider sense that the reasons
were made up: there was
no good reason other
than sharing the gains In the Ralph Nader era, convincing
and giving this particu- consumers that airlines were taking
lar airline its turn. That advantage of them was a relatively
made no sense to Roach.
easy sell.
He left the CAB in 1974
but came back in 1977 to work with President Carter’s new choice for chair-
man of the CAB, Cornell University professor Alfred Kahn.
While we now think of Kahn as someone who arrived at the CAB ready to
deregulate, that was not the case. Kahn was an open-minded economist who
read the economics literature, saw the CAB up close, and decided that mov-
ing in the direction of deregulation was a good idea.
Another deregulator within the CAB was Roy Pulsifer, assistant director
of the CAB’s Bureau of Operating Rights. He read the economics literature

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 39
and found himself convinced. In 1975, the CAB asked him to do a “self study.”
He chose three CAB staff members plus the aforementioned economist
Lucile Keyes, and, in July 1975, the group recommended changing the law to
eliminate restrictions on entry, exit, and fares over a period of three to five
years. Note that this was under CAB Chairman John Robson during the Ford
administration.

40 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

TAKING OFF
Starting in the 1960s and extending through the 1970s, there was a strong
consumer movement in the United States. Ralph Nader was certainly the
most well-known “consumerist,” and he and his “Nader’s Raiders” analyzed
(often superficially) the actions and effects of various regulatory bodies.
Nader advocated abolishing the CAB, although his efforts to abolish such
agencies were less energetic than his efforts to enact consumer protection
laws. Still, he was not just an instigator of the con-
sumer movement. His rising star was in
part a result of that movement.
Consumers were ready to
believe that large, greedy
businesses were taking
advantage of them. So, while
that wasn’t true in many
cases, convincing them that
the airlines really were tak-
ing advantage of them was
a relatively easy sell.
At the same time, it’s
quite conceivable that
airline deregulation
by the US Congress
would not have taken
place if Senator
Kennedy had not
hired Harvard
law professor

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 41
Stephen G. Breyer, now a US Supreme Court justice. In 1974, when Kennedy
learned that he would chair the relatively unimportant Subcommittee on
Administrative Practice and Procedure of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
he needed someone to direct the subcommittee’s staff. Breyer, a professor of
administrative and antitrust law, seemed like a natural.
Breyer accepted and, presumably aware that Kennedy was making plans
to run for president, gave Kennedy a choice between two issues to pursue:
airline regulation and competition; and procedural changes suggested by
the Watergate scandal. Kennedy chose the first option, and I often wonder
whether Kennedy did so in part because he was worried about possible scan-
dals in his own background. We may never know.
Breyer, aware of the economics literature, set up seven days of hearings to
which he invited consumer advocates, CAB officials, and airline executives.
As Robert E. Litan writes in Trillion Dollar Economists, the only witnesses
who favored the status quo “were those who benefited from it, the industry
and its regulatory agency.” According to Litan, that fact, plus the economists’
findings, convinced Kennedy that something needed to change.
Interestingly, legislation to change airline regulation was not in Kennedy’s
subcommittee’s bailiwick. But Howard W. Cannon, chairman of the Subcom-
mittee on Aviation of the Senate Commerce Committee, presumably not
wanting to be upstaged, held his own hearings. Although Cannon started
off neutral, bit by bit he became a deregulator. When Jimmy Carter became
president in 1977, the stage was set.

READY FOR DEPARTURE?

Even with the first four factors converging, deregulation was not a done deal,
for an obvious reason: the concentrated gainers from regulation—the airlines
and the airline unions—were dead set against deregulation. Even though air-
lines were not making impressive profits from regulation, they had learned
to live within a regulated environment, and the unknown was probably scary.
Airline workers’ unions, we now know, were capturing many of the monopoly
rents and opposed relaxing the regulations. In a fight between concentrated
interest groups whose members gain a lot per person and dispersed interests
whose total losses exceed the gains to the concentrated groups but whose
per-person losses are small, the concentrated groups usually win.
Why the difference in this case? Two factors seem important. One was that
in 1975, United Airlines, the largest airline at the time, endorsed deregulation.
United complained that it was getting a raw deal, having been granted almost
no new route authority for the previous eight years. The second was that the

42 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

Air Line Pilots Association, which had much to lose from deregulation, had
no full-time lobbyists on its staff. Gary McDonnell, an economist at Northern
Michigan University, speculated in a 2015 article that “perhaps the unions felt
that the industry would lobby on their behalf.”
Occasionally, a confluence of events makes deregulation possible. One
tempting target is occupational licensure—government restrictions on prac-
ticing various occupations. According to economists Morris Kleiner and Alan
Krueger, about 35 percent of employees are licensed or certified by government.
The results are not just more difficulty for people to get into those occupations,
but also higher prices for consumers, whether they are getting a haircut, a
manicure, or a coffin. Could there be a consumer push for deregulation? Pos-
sibly. The evidence about the negative effects exists, and even former president
Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers issued a study critical of licensure.
If someone in Congress wants to push it, the issue is ripe for the taking.
Whoever does so would do well to hold hearings, as Senator Kennedy did,
that make more Americans aware of the harm done by regulation. This seems
obvious, but it would come as news to Republicans in Congress. Health econo-
mist John Goodman points out that in their attempts to overturn ObamaCare
in the past two years, Republicans held exactly zero hearings. They gave up
an obvious opportunity to tell the ObamaCare horror stories.
The lessons from airline deregulation are there for anyone who cares to
look. The groundwork needs to be laid with ideas that can be put on the shelf.
Beyond that, other factors need to come together and these factors are hard
to predict. Who, after all, would have said in 1973 that Ted Kennedy would be
a hero of deregulation?

Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-

ideas), a Hoover Institution online journal. © 2019 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Milton

Friedman on Freedom: Selections from The Collected
Works of Milton Friedman, edited by Robert Leeson
and Charles G. Palm. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 43
ED U CATI ON

ED U CATI ON

“End of History”
Lessons
The big education battles seem to have settled
down, but history suggests they won’t stay settled.
It’s time to consolidate gains and push the next
wave of education ideas.

By Michael J. Petrilli

T
hirty years ago, in February 1989, the political scientist Francis
Fukuyama gave a talk that was later turned into an article that
was later turned into a book, with the provocative title “The End
of History?” With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of
the Cold War, Western-style liberalism had triumphed over communism, and
had already fended off fascism. As a recent article in the New Yorker noted:

If you imagined history as the process by which liberal institu-

tions—representative government, free markets, and consumerist
culture—become universal, it might be possible to say that history
had reached its goal. . . . There would be a “Common Marketi-
zation” of international relations and the world would achieve
homeostasis.

It’s a strange time to be using “the end of history” as an analogy because,

as we now know, the end of the Cold War was not the end of history at all, but

Michael J. Petrilli is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, executive editor

of Education Next, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

44 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

the end of just one chapter. But it is fair to say that for a decade or two the
world did achieve some sort of homeostasis, perhaps a break from history
instead of its end. Democracy was on the move, global trade boomed, and the
world became a freer, more prosperous place.
So what does this have to do with education?
We are now at the “end of education policy,” in the same way that we
were at the end of history back in 1989. Our own Cold War pitted reformers
against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw,
and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education
reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there
have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily
undone, at least for the next decade.

HOLD ON TO WHAT WORKS

For instance, we are not going back to a time when urban school districts had
the exclusive franchise to operate schools within their geographic boundaries.
Public charter schools now serve over three million students, many of them in
our large cities, cities where 20, 30, 40, and even 50 percent of the students are
now in charter schools. These charter schools are not going away. Another half
million students are in private schools thanks to the support of taxpayer fund-
ing or tax credit scholarships. Those scholarships are not going away either. At
the same time, the meteoric growth of these initiatives has slowed. Numbers
are no longer leaping forward but are merely ticking up.
Meanwhile, alternative certification programs now produce at least a fifth of
all new teachers. We are not going back to a time when traditional, university-
based teacher preparation programs had the exclusive right to train teachers.
And even testing—that hated policy with no natural constituency—is now
entrenched, at least until the Every Student Succeeds Act comes up for reau-
thorization. It appears, knock on wood, that the testing backlash is starting to
recede, thanks, I would argue, to policy makers addressing many of the con-
cerns of the testing critics. The underlying academic standards are stronger
and clearer; the tests are more sophisticated and rigorous, and encourage
better teaching; the state accountability systems that turn test results into
school ratings are fairer and easier to understand; and teacher evaluation
systems have been mostly defanged. And truth be told, school accountability
systems no longer have much to do with “accountability,” but are really about
“transparency”—telling parents and taxpayers and educators the truth of
how their schools and students are performing, but mostly leaving it to local

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 45
communities to decide what to do about underperformance, if anything. All of
this has made testing and accountability, if not popular, at least less unpopular.
So we have reached a homeostasis in education policy, characterized by
clearer and fairer but lighter-touch accountability systems; the incremental
growth of school choice options for families; but no appetite for big and bold
new initiatives.
To be sure, there are still fights—battles in state legislatures between
reform advocates and their opponents, and sometimes little skirmishes in
Congress—but they are at the margins. Should we spend a little more or
a little less? Grow the charter sector a bit or shrink it a smidge? Add some
regulations or reduce some? Throw out PARCC or keep it? Use A–F grades or
something less clear? Add indicators around social and emotional learning or
stick mostly to test scores?
Those are important but, compared to the broad policy shifts of the edu-
cation reform era, small ball. What’s important to acknowledge is that the
period of big new policy initiatives stemming from Washington or the state
capitals appears to be over, at least for now.
Our “end of history” will not last forever. It is fleeting. But it provides a real
opportunity while it is here.
The opportunity is, for us as a field, to finish what we started, for us to
usher in a golden age of educational practice. To implement the higher
standards with fidelity. To improve teacher preparation and development.
To strengthen charter school oversight and quality. To make the promise of
high-quality career and technical education real.
It’s not a moment too soon. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio has long
argued, a focus on education practice is sorely needed. That’s because, despite
real progress in recent decades, we are still so far from where we need to go.
Reading and math achievement rose dramatically in the late 1990s and early
2000s, especially for the lowest-income and lowest-performing students. But
it’s been mostly flat since then; the latest NAEP scores marked a lost decade
for educational progress. And while high school graduation rates are higher
than ever—in part because of those achievement gains ten or fifteen years
ago—more than half of our students graduate from high school without the
academic preparation to succeed in what’s next. More than half. They aren’t
ready for a four-year university program. They aren’t ready for a one- or two-
year technical training program. They aren’t ready to take a well-paying job.
They are not ready.

46 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

THINK BIG
So while policy makers might be taking a break from education policy, we
cannot afford to take a break from educational improvement.
But how? How can we get fourteen thousand local school systems, and
seven thousand charter schools, rowing in the direction of better outcomes
for kids, if big new policy initiatives are off the table?
The challenge is to think big enough so that initiatives might have an
impact at scale—to move the needle on the Nation’s Report Card; or to lead
to a significant increase in postsecondary completion rates, especially for
low-income students and students of color; or to boost the number of young
people prepared to earn a family-sustaining wage, thanks to strong education
and training. Once you start thinking about continental scale, and take policy
off the table, there are no easy answers. Though I do believe there are some
possibilities, especially if philanthropists are willing to come to the table.
But it can’t just be wishful thinking. Let’s go back to Francis Fukuyama.
Imagine if we had spent the 1990s helping Russia make a successful transi-
tion to a real democracy, or working to cushion the working classes in the
United States and Europe from the ill effects of global trade, or paying more
attention to the growing risks from radical fundamentalists around the
world. We might not face our current predicaments.
So too with our opportunity. If we take a break from the hard work of
educational improvement, if we accept another “lost decade” of academic
achievement, we will be giving up on the futures of millions of kids, and we
will set the stage for another era of top-down policies that may or may not
help our schools. We cannot afford to fritter away these years. We must
continue to act.
The leadership for this golden age of educational practice is not coming
from Washington, and it’s not coming from the states. It needs to come from
each of us.

Reprinted by permission of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. © 2019. All

rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Rugged

Individualism: Dead or Alive? by David Davenport
and Gordon Lloyd. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 47
H EALTH CARE

H EALTH CARE

No Free Lunch—
Or Health Care
“Medicare for all” promises nothing but crippling
expense, inefficiency, and delays.

By Scott W. Atlas

H
ealth care was a priority for voters in the recent midterm elec-
tions, and for good reason. In the nearly five years since Obama­
Care’s major provisions came into effect, insurance premiums
have doubled for individuals and risen 140 percent for families,
even while deductibles have increased substantially. Hospitals and doctors
continue to flee ObamaCare’s coverage network, to the point that almost 75
percent of plans are now highly restrictive. ObamaCare also encouraged a
record pace of consolidation among hospitals and physician practices. All these
developments will raise health care prices, as fewer hospitals compete for
payers.
The Democrats’ solution would make the problem far worse. Single-payer
health care is an alluringly simple concept: a government guarantee for all
medical care. Advocates insist that such care is “free.” The constitution
of Britain’s National Health Service states: “You have the right to receive
NHS services free of charge”—ignoring that the United Kingdom funds the

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He is the author of Restoring Quality Health Care: A Six-Point
Plan for Comprehensive Reform at Lower Cost (Hoover Institution Press,
2016).

48 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

program by taxing citizens some $160 billion a year, even with its severe
limits on access to specialists, drugs, and technology.
For California alone, single-payer health care would cost about $400 billion
a year—more than twice the state’s annual budget. Nationwide “Medicare for
all” would cost more than $32 trillion over its first decade. Doubling federal
income and corporate taxes wouldn’t be enough to pay for it. No doubt, that
cost would be used to justify further restrictions on health care access.
But the problems with single payer go well beyond cost. In the past half
century, nationalized programs have consistently failed to provide timely,
high-quality medical care compared with the US system. That failure has
countless consequences for citizens: pain, suffering and death, permanent
disability, and forgone wages.
Single-payer programs usually impose long waiting lists and delays
unheard of in the United States. In 2017, a record 4.2 million patients were
on England’s NHS waiting lists; 362,600 patients waited longer than four
months for hospital treatment as of that March; and 95,252 waited longer
than six months. By July 2018, 4,300 people had been on the wait list more
than a year—all after
receiving their diagnosis
and referral—accord- The United Kingdom funds its “free”
ing to NHS England’s program by taxing citizens some $160
“Referral to Treatment” billion a year.
waiting-times data.
In Canada in 2017, the median wait time between seeing a general practitioner
and following up with a specialist was 10.2 weeks, while the wait between seeing
a doctor and beginning treatment was about five months. According to a Fraser
Institute study, the average Canadian waits three months to see an ophthalmol-
ogist, four months for an orthopedist, and five months for a neurosurgeon.
In single-payer systems, even patients referred for “urgent treatment”
often wait months. More than 19 percent of patients in Britain’s NHS wait
two months or longer to begin their first urgent cancer treatment, while 17
percent wait more than four months for brain surgery. In Canada the median
wait for neurosurgery after seeing a doctor is about eight months. Canadians
with heart disease wait three months for their first treatment. And if you
need life-changing orthopedic surgery in Canada, like a hip or knee replace-
ment, you’ll likely have to wait a startling ten months.
America’s system is much quicker. Aside from transplants, one paper by
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development states, “wait-
ing lists are not a feature in the United States.”

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 49
 A study in Health Affairs found that “in contrast to England, most
United States patients face little or no wait for elective cardiac care.” The
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has said that low-risk US
heart patients “sometimes have to wait all day or even be rescheduled for
another day” for catheterization—that is, a wait for even one day is consid-
ered unusual.
Calls for reform were widespread in American media in 2009, though waits
for appointments at that time averaged twenty-one days for five common
specialties. With the exception of orthopedist appointments for knee pain,
those waits were for healthy checkups, the lowest medical priority. In the
United States, even waits for checkups are usually far shorter than waits for
seriously ill patients in coun-
tries with single payer.
Single-payer systems also A single-payer “guarantee” is no
impose long delays before promise of access to quality medi-
debuting the newest drugs cal care.
for cancer and other serious
diseases. A 2011 Health Affairs study showed that the Food and Drug Admin-
istration approved thirty-two new cancer drugs in the decade after 2000,
while the European Medicines Agency approved twenty-six. All twenty-three
drugs approved by both Europe and the United States were available to
American patients first. Two-thirds of the forty-five “novel” drugs in 2015
were approved in the United States before any other country.
These waits and restrictions have severe consequences for patients.
Single-payer systems have proved inferior to the US system in outcomes for
almost all serious diseases, including cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure,
stroke, and heart disease.
Meanwhile, the nations most experienced with single-payer systems are
moving toward private provision. Sweden has increased its spending on
private care for the elderly by 50 percent in the past decade, abolished its
government’s monopoly over pharmacies, and made other reforms. Last
year alone, the British government spent more than $1 billion on care from

WAITING ROOM: A 1948 pamphlet (opposite page) describes how national-

ized medicine would be carried out in Scotland. Single-payer programs typi-
cally impose long waiting lists and delays unheard of in the United States. For
instance, more than 19 percent of patients in Britain’s National Health Service
wait two months or longer to begin their first urgent cancer treatment. [Lothian
Health Service Archive]

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 51
private and other non-NHS providers, according to the Financial Times.
Patients using single-payer care in Denmark can now choose a private
hospital or a hospital outside the country if their wait time exceeds one
month.
A single payer “guarantee” is no promise of access to quality medical care.
If single-payer is brought to the United States, the only reliable promises
would be worse health care for Americans and higher taxes. America’s poor
and middle class would suffer the most from a turn to single payer, because
only they would be unable to circumvent the system.

Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2019 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Restoring Quality Health Care: A Six-Point Plan for
Comprehensive Reform at Lower Cost, by Scott W.
Atlas. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

52 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 POLI T I C S

POL I TI CS

Inconvenient
Billionaires
We can never keep money out of politics. But there
is a solution to the problem of hugely expensive
campaigns: eliminate the spoils of office.

By Richard A. Epstein

A
mid the increased democratization of American politics we see
a procession of billionaire candidates for high office, including
the current occupant of the White House. As the 2020 cam-
paign started to come into focus, it was rumored that former
New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg—net worth approximately $50
billion—was considering a run for president on the Democratic ticket. Last
year he committed some $80 million to help Democrats regain control of
the House of Representatives. Bloomberg is not the only wealthy Democrat
whose name cropped up: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz publicly
floated the idea of pursuing the White House as an independent.
Their political views aside, it is important to understand how campaign
finance laws have created this trend in American politics: self-funded cam-
paigns for high office.

Richard A. Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of the steering committee for Hoover’s Working Group
on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity. He is also the Laurence A.
Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer
at the University of Chicago.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 53
 Campaign finance law has bedeviled Supreme Court jurisprudence for
more than forty years, for it is no easy task to develop a legal regime that can
impose various restrictions on campaign finances without running afoul of
the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.
For instance, it would be wholly improper to say that anyone can use
wealth and influence as he pleases to advance his own business agenda.
To see why, think of the position of a corporate executive who is bribed by
one of his shareholders to take a position antithetical to the welfare of the
corporation as a whole. Freedom of speech should be read as creating a
presumption that people can use their own resources to advance their own
political causes. But the freedom of speech, like the freedom of contract, is
always subject to principled regulation, such as to protect against bribery
and extortion. In addition, there are situations so fraught with risk that the
safer course of action is to limit freedom of speech. This rationale underlies
the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from taking “an active
part in political management or political campaigns,” and which in 1973 the
Supreme Court upheld in US Civil Service Commission v. National Association
of Letter Carriers, AFL-CIO. The conflicts of interest that arise in these cases
are too pervasive to respond to on a case-by-case basis; only a blanket prohi-
bition would work.

A TANGLED WEB
Modern campaign regulation does more than reach for this low-hanging
fruit. Instead, its objective is to regulate the way in which private money
can be spent to influence the election campaigns that lie at the heart of the
political process. The key early case on this subject, the court’s 1976 deci-
sion in Buckley v. Valeo, had to consider three related provisions of the Fed-
eral Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA), which imposed what was, and
with modifications remains, the most comprehensive scheme of campaign
financing for the election of the president, vice president, and all members
of Congress.
In particular, FECA addressed First Amendment challenges to three
different forms of campaign finance limitations. The first imposed crimi-
nal sanctions on any individual whose contributions to political campaigns
exceeded $25,000 per annum for all candidates and $1,000 for any par-
ticular candidate. The second limitation concerned the amount of money
that independent groups could spend for “express advocacy of candidates
made totally independently of the candidate and his campaign.” The third
limitation covered expenditures that a candidate makes on his or her own

54 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
 behalf—the sort made by Bloomberg—to $50,000 for presidential candidates,
with lesser amounts for candidates for the Senate and the House.
Any sensible approach would treat each of these three types of expendi-
tures as close substitutes for the others, so that they all either stood or fell
together. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court split the difference so that the
First Amendment allowed the government to impose limits on campaign
contributions but not on independent bodies or self-financed campaigns.
Of immediate relevance here, the court held that individual candidates can
spend as much money as they please on their own campaigns, on the ground
that there was no risk of corrupt influence if a candidate were to spend a
small fortune “vigorously
and tirelessly” extolling
Campaign finance law has bedeviled his personal virtues and
Supreme Court jurisprudence for substantive positions. The
more than forty years. point shows a serious set
of institutional blinders,
for now the obvious risk is that the candidate will use his wealth to curry
favor from those who might otherwise be inclined to oppose his nomination.
The situation is even worse on the ground because the sharp limitations on
campaign contributions make it much more difficult for independent candi-
dates to put together the funds needed to mount an effective campaign. To be
sure, that serious obstacle need not be wholly insuperable, as candidates like
Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders were able to turn large numbers of small
contributions into considerable campaign war chests. But other candidates
with less public visibility will have to remain on the sidelines, while billionaire
candidates move ahead full tilt.
To fully grasp the implications of the court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo,
it’s important to understand the distinction between campaign contributions
and independent expenditures, those made by parties outside the candi-
date’s campaign organization. For the court, this distinction rested on what
I consider a dubious edifice: independent expenditures are fully protected
by the First Amendment. Without that constitutional protection, FECA
“necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of
issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience
reached.” In the court’s view, these expenditures are protected for the most
obvious reason. Money, after all, is needed to purchase the humblest circular
or smallest election hall. The evident dangers of implicit coordination were
shoved off to one side, and any risk in preventing corruption was thought too
marginal to matter.

56 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

DEEP POCKETS: Megadonor Tom Steyer, shown in January at a meeting in
Hanover, New Hampshire, has pressed for President Trump’s impeachment.
Steyer, who recently announced he would not seek the presidency himself,
poured millions of dollars into last year’s congressional midterm campaign,
which boosted Democratic representation in the House. [Marc Nozell—Creative
Commons]

The court refused to extend that same protective logic to campaign

contributions to candidates. Instead, it sustained these limitations on the
utterly implausible ground that “a limitation upon the amount that any
one person or group may contribute to a candidate or political committee
entails only a marginal restriction upon the contributor’s ability to engage
in free communication.” But there is no explanation whatsoever of why
the number of dollars spent does not count as much in the one context as
the other. If the point is that campaign contributions are valued solely for

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 57
 their symbolic effects, the same conclusion should apply to independent
contributions.
The untenable distinction thus has the powerful effect of undermining
party discipline through these independent expenditures that sometimes do
and sometimes don’t reflect the candidates’ wishes. Both should be treated
the same, and it appears that the better position is to let anyone make what-
ever contributions they choose.
The situation is even more skewed than it might appear because the basic
finance law also contains strict reporting and disclosure requirements, sus-
tained in Buckley and subsequent cases. These requirements are meant to let
the public know who is behind any particular candidate, even if they impose
high costs and ticklish compliance requirements. The individual candidate
faces no parallel burden with private expenditures.

HIGH-STAKES ELECTIONS
At one time, there was perhaps a credible case for upholding these statutes
on the ground that the public has the right to know who seeks to gain a can-
didate’s ear. But the rule never made any sense for small individual contribu-
tions that grant the donor no candidate access. And amid the rise of social
media, the disclosures have become a double-edged sword, since well-orga-
nized groups can single out contributors for retaliation and abuse. The secret
ballot is regarded as a critical safeguard precisely because it protects voters
from retaliation and abuse. It’s important to keep that idea in mind here, too.
Individual names should never be released even if a candidate is required
publicly to specify in general terms the interest groups from which he or she
has received support.
But the bigger point is that Buckley’s elaborate edifice of campaign finance
law is one we can do without. The progressives have long aspired to limit the
influence of money on
politics, both independent
Elections can literally create, destroy, and corporate, but that
or transfer trillions in wealth. Money is a pipe dream. FECA
and influence will fill that financial does not cover contribu-
void no matter what. tions used to lobby public
officials on particular
issues, to which some money will be redirected. Nor did the original version
of FECA cover the explosive question of corporate expenditures. That topic
was addressed only in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA),
which prevented corporations and unions from making any electioneering

58 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

contributions within sixty days of a general election or thirty days of a pri-
mary, including those for Hillary: The Movie. Then, Citizens United v. Federal
Election Commission pro-
voked an uproar when
limitations on corporate Money, after all, is needed to pay for
electioneering expenses the humblest circular or smallest
were rightly struck down election hall.
in 2010, on the simple
ground that the speech most deserving of protection is that made in anticipa-
tion of a primary or general election.
Citizens United should point the way. Quite simply, it is not possible to live
with the ideal that we can always keep money out of politics. We live in a
political environment of vast federal powers and weak individual property
rights. The president and Congress have more power and discretion than
ever. Elections can literally create, destroy, or transfer trillions in wealth.
Money and influence will fill that financial void no matter what ungainly
system of campaign finance is put into place.
Billionaires like Bloomberg and Schultz come and go. Some will actually
get lucky. But throughout it all, the only effective cure to the problem of
money in politics is to shrink the powers of the federal government, which
will require a thoroughgoing, if unlikely, constitutional revolution.

Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-

ideas), a Hoover Institution online journal. © 2019 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

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

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 59
P O L I TI CS

P O L I TI CS

Robespierre for
President?
The Jacobins of the left wing, like those of
revolutionary France, hunger for power—no
matter what it costs, no matter whose heads will
roll.

By Victor Davis Hanson

B
y the middle of 1793, the radical Jacobins had completed their
hijacking of the French Revolution. They openly enacted agendas
that might have seemed impossible in the heady days of 1787.
Long gone were the pretenses of the original idealism when the
revolution abolished feudalism, issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen, and wrestled with turning the ancien régime of Louis XVI
into some sort of constitutional or parliamentary monarchy analogous to
what had emerged in Great Britain.
Soon, executing the clerisy en masse was logically followed by Jacobins
guillotining thousands of surviving aristocrats and fellow revolutionaries for
supposed counterrevolutionary sympathies.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and the chair of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Mili-
tary History in Contemporary Conflict. He is the recipient of the 2018 Edmund
Burke Award, which honors those who have made major contributions to the de-
fense of Western civilization. His latest book is The Second World Wars: How
the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (Basic Books, 2017).

60 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 Most of the leaders of the Jacobins were themselves finally guillotined,
largely because their ascendant revolutionary zeal could end only in a sort of
cannibalism—given that no revolutionary could possibly meet their accel-
erating purist demands. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was similar, though he
slaughtered millions, not thousands.
In less melodramatic terms, we are watching a rare revolutionary phase
in American politics as strident liberals have devoured Democrats. Progres-
sives consumed liberals. And progressives are now being devoured by social-
ists, and soon no doubt socialists will be eaten by hard-leftists, communists,
anarchists, and nihilists. In such revolutionary logic, perhaps only Antifa will
emerge as pure.
The result is that the 2020 election will offer the starkest choices in the
past fifty years, far eclipsing the radical contrasts of 1972. The current
parade of would-be Democratic presidential hopefuls is already apologiz-
ing for their past sins of Democratic centrism, in fear of being politically
guillotined.

HOW GREEN IS MY POVERTY

Senator Kamala Harris has pledged to follow the “Green New Deal” current-
ly championed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In other words,
the Democrats, within ten years of passing such a bill, would favor ending all
“nonrenewable” sources of electrical generation (natural gas, oil, coal, and
nuclear)—or 83 percent of all the current ways that we produce electrical
energy. Would the government go after classic Corvettes, confiscate Priuses,
and electrify NASCAR? Outlaw gas lawn mowers and chainsaws? Confiscate
leaf blowers? Would
Nancy Pelosi board a
private solar- or battery- Strident liberals devoured Democrats.
powered jet? Would Progressives consumed liberals. And
Silicon Valley yachts rely progressives are now being devoured
on wind and sail? by socialists, with worse to come.
America is currently
the largest producer of gas and oil in the world. Energy production is a vital
source of national wealth, central to millions of American workers, and per-
haps the greatest subsidy of middle-class lifestyles, through inexpensive fuel.
Would fracking and horizontal drilling become like corn-mash stills during
Prohibition?
The Green New Deal would wipe out the economies of a broad swath of
states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Such legislation

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 61
 would make Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign blunder—“We’re going to put
a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”—seem not a major
gaffe but timid and counterrevolutionary.
“Medicare for all” will likewise become a 2020 rallying point, even though,
in addition to its multitrillion-dollar costs, it would destroy the fifty-five-year
compact of Medicare and indeed the eighty-five-year-old history of Social
Security itself.
The elderly are not historically illiterate. They grasp that all universal
“free” health care scams such as those proposed by the Democratic revolu-
tionaries eventually hinge on culling out the costly and bad investments, that
is, themselves. They know
that “Medicare for all”
Remember Bill de Blasio’s taunt: translates into “Medicare
“There’s plenty of money in this coun- for no one,” especially in
try, it’s just in the wrong hands.” an age of open borders,
another Democratic
priority. So they will rightly assume that in an era of euthanasia and “man-
aged” and “rationed” care, it makes more progressive social sense to “invest”
in our youthful future than to “prolong” already-spent lives—especially when
we will be adding more ethnic and racial fuel to the generational inferno. The
generational psychological bond forged at the creation of these programs
would be broken, and a new logic of Social Security as a war between old and
young would arise.
A society that approves of killing an infant shortly after it emerges from
the birth canal might similarly have little compunction about pulling the
plug on a ninety-year-old who was deemed “unproductive” or suffering from
“severe deformities”—albeit of course after a “conversation” with family and
their “doctor.” To the Margaret Sanger mind, abortion and euthanasia are
twins, and both are cost-effective means to free up dollars for more “moral”
purposes.

ENEMIES OF THE STATE

Another likely plank of the new Democratic Party will be a “you didn’t build
that” wealth tax. Many Democrats are talking seriously about an additional
2 percent or 3 percent tax on the accumulated wealth of particular large pri-
vate fortunes, wealth that has already been taxed as income or capital gains.
Income over $10 million (or lower) would be taxed at 70 percent—or per-
haps 90 percent, as Democrats’ race to Venezuela accelerates. Ocasio-Cortez
and her adherents point to prior high rates of American taxation without

62 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

DANGEROUS LIAISONS: A counterprotester displays the slogan of the French
Revolution at a January event in Madison, Wisconsin. Democrats seeking the
White House, fearful of being politically guillotined, have been swift to line up
to apologize for past sins of centrism. [Nima Taradji—Polaris]

noting that they were accompanied by an array of tax loopholes and deduc-
tions, many of them eliminated in the 1980s Reagan tax revolution.
In our Balzac world of “behind every great fortune is an equally great
crime,” assets of $10 million and up are prima facie proof of illegality. Talk
of new wealth taxes, higher income-tax rates, and soaring estate taxes will
make good on New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s taunt that “there’s plenty
of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands.”
A poorly disguised but predictable dislike of religion is also a feature of the
American political landscape, just as it was during the French Revolution.
Today we see a particular aversion to Catholicism and Judaism—at least if
one collates the various statements of Senators Dianne Feinstein, Kamala
Harris, and Mazie Hirono, and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
Hank Johnson, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. The mainstreaming of anti-
Semite Louis Farrakhan, television commentary by the likes of Marc Lamont

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 63
 Hill, and the growing anti-Israel foreign policy of the Democratic Party only
add to the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian hostility.
Revolutionary “scientific” socialism is historically agnostic, if not atheist.
Anywhere it has taken root in its multifarious forms—China, Cuba, North
Korea, Russia, Venezuela—it seeks to destroy or corrupt religion. We have
already seen attacks on Israel’s supporters within the Democratic Party,
attacks that are only thinly disguised anti-Semitic rants. One wonders how
the anti-Catholicism of the Democratic Jacobins will connect with millions of
first- and second-generation Latino Catholic voters.

REVOLUTIONS EAT THEIR OWN

Once revolutionary movements accelerate, they must devour their own to
ensure revolutionary purity. This was true in fifth-century Greece, republi-
can Rome, revolutionary France, Bolshevik Russia, or Mao’s China.
The new socialists have already begun consuming their aging progenitors.
Liberal television figure Tom Brokaw was forced to apologize for stressing
the value of assimilation and suggesting English should be re-emphasized
by the Latino immigrant community. During the nomination hearings for
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Senators Cory Booker and
Kamala Harris upstaged old-guard Democratic liberals with their televised
histrionics and this revolutionary creed: that if one in theory could have done
a crime, then one is guilty of in fact committing it. Male feminists are learn-
ing that “inappropriate” jokes, staring, or forbidden attitudes are grounds for
#MeToo ostracism.
In truth, there are far more revolutionary agendas to come. The Jacobins
will have to explain how they plan to abolish $1.5 trillion in aggregate student
debt, at a time of a likely
$22 trillion national debt,
The new Jacobins are busy demand- and how they will make
ing more transfers of riches and college “free for all” in
power to the federal government. the manner of health
care. Will adults who
have driven a truck since they were eighteen have to shoulder the debts of
students who dabble in six-unit semesters ad infinitum?
Will Representative Maxine Waters’s idea of racial “reparations” become
a mandatory position for Democratic candidates? If so, will Jay-Z, Oprah
Winfrey, Eric Holder, Louis Farrakhan, and LeBron James qualify?
Abortion is already being reconceptualized as a new Jacobin issue,
but new only in the sense of pushing back the limit when babies can be

64 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

“terminated”—oddly (or not so oddly) at a time when science is itself lower-
ing the age of fetal viability ever closer to the moment of conception. Will Dr.
Kermit Gosnell be granted post factum amnesty?
Gun control will likewise be de rigueur, but not just in the sense of more
paperwork and petty annoyances for the gun owner. In truth, eventual confis-
cation is the only way to “control” millions of guns Americans hold.
Finally, just as the eighteenth-century Jacobins transferred the wealth
and power of the church to the state, so the new Jacobins will demand more
transfers of riches and
power to the federal
government. We have Democratic candidates are apologiz-
already seen the wea- ing for their past sins of centrism, in
ponization—or rather, fear of being politically guillotined.
libération?—of the IRS,
the FBI, the CIA, and the NSC. Leftists like the idea of surveilling, unmask-
ing, and leaking the names of their ideological foes. And the Jacobins of this
new revolutionary age revere rogue bureaucrats who have warped their
enormous powers of surveillance and prosecutorial power to serve the cor-
rect agendas.
By the time November 2020 arrives, the Clintons will be seen as reaction-
aries and the Obamas as old fogeys.

Reprinted by permission of National Review. © 2019 National Review Inc.

All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is One Day

We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives under the
Soviet Police State, by Mark Harrison. To order, call
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H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 65
L AW

L AW

Discrimination
and the Ivory
Tower
The Supreme Court may finally get to clean up the
mess that race-based admissions have created at
our universities.

By John Yoo and James C. Phillips

A
merica has a race problem. It has always had a race problem.
Slavery, as many have observed, is America’s original sin. The
challenge that will confront the Roberts court is how far it will
allow government to make amends for that sin, while prevent-
ing a new elite of social engineers from jury-rigging the right racial balanc-
es—all in the name of a racial diversity that has suddenly became an end of a
just society, rather than merely a means. As with its passages on religion, the
Second Amendment, and the role of the courts, the Constitution’s command
is relatively clear. It is the Supreme Court’s past failures to live up to prin-
ciple that has kept the issue in doubt.

John Yoo is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Emanuel S. Heller
Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar
at the American Enterprise Institute. James C. Phillips is an attorney in private
practice and a nonresident fellow at Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law
Center.

66 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 More than one hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, sixty years
after the end of public school segregation, and two years after America’s first
black president left the Oval Office, accusations of racism fill our airwaves
and screens. Democrats fresh off a solid midterm victory in Congress still
claim that the suppression of minority voting cost them governorships and
Senate seats, despite voter turnout that reached heights not seen since 1914.
On the other hand, those same Democrats argue that governments should
use racial data to draw voter districts and hand out government contracts,
and argue that state and local police harbor such racial animus against
minorities as to shoot them at high rates.
Meanwhile, Asian students have uncovered evidence that Harvard
University has used ridiculous stereotypes to engineer the right racial bal-
ances in its admissions process. As a recent lawsuit against the Ivy League
school has revealed, Asian-Americans consistently make up just 19 percent
of the student body, despite an increasing percentage of Asian-American
college students nationwide. Asians score higher than any other group on
academic criteria and extracurricular activities. If academic merit alone
determined admissions, the university admitted that Asians would make up
43 percent of the student body, about the same level reached at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, after California ended affirmative action by
popular initiative.
So where are Asians getting dinged? Personality. To avoid having too many
Asians, Harvard has recycled a practice that Ivy League schools applied to
Jews in the first half of the twentieth century. According to Harvard admis-
sions, Asians trail far behind their peers in areas such as humor, sensitivity,
creativity, grit, and leadership. (Harvard’s judgment may come as news to
our military, which is preparing a strategy against the one billion Chinese
who currently present the greatest long-term challenge to American hege-
mony, or to our business leaders, who see the Chinese and one billion Indians
rising into economic power—both the products of civilizations that existed
when Europeans thought rocks made ideal weapons.) Apparently only those
working in college admissions offices can discern this race-wide personality
deficit.
Harvard’s racial and ethnic balancing is the poisonous fruit of the Supreme
Court’s jurisprudence on race and affirmative action. And higher education
isn’t the only place where racism rears its ugly head. Take the drawing of
districts for congressional elections, especially the practice of gerrymander-
ing, whereby legislatures create electoral maps to maximize their party’s
advantages. The Supreme Court has injected itself into this most political of

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 67
 activities, one that the Constitution explic-
itly assigns to state legislatures and
whose politically partisan use is as
old as the Constitution itself. (The
word gerrymander itself comes
from Elbridge Gerry’s draw-
ing of a Massachusetts state
senate district that resembled a
salamander; Gerry was a signer of
the Declaration of Independence,
a delegate to the Constitutional
Convention, and a contribu-
tor to the first Judiciary Act
and the Bill of Rights.)
Historically, Southern
state legislatures used
gerrymandering to reduce
the voting

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

68 H O O V ER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

strength of racial minorities, particularly African-Americans. But now the
Supreme Court has allowed the federal government and states to consider
race in drawing voting districts designed to maximize the voting strengths of
racial groups.

JUSTICE HASN’T BEEN SERVED

Throughout our nation’s sorry history on race, the Supreme Court has more
often than not served as enabler. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the court’s
first effort to solve the nation’s race problem proved a disaster. Chief Justice
Roger Taney thought he could head off a looming division between North and
South by striking down the Missouri Compromise, holding that blacks could
never become citizens, and forbidding congressional regulation of slavery in
the territories. By departing from the Constitution in the name of enlight-
ened policy making, Chief Justice Taney only further enflamed sectional
divisions, spurred the rise of the Republican Party, and hardened abolition-
ists and slaveholders in their
positions.
The court disgraced
itself again in its next
major encounter with race,
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896),
when it notori-
ously upheld
not just the
concept of

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 69
 “separate but equal” but the right of governments to enact policies based on
race. By denying the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on race-conscious poli-
cies, the court helped usher in the Jim Crow era. In yet a third case, Kore-
matsu (1944), the World War II court allowed the internment of Japanese-
American citizens because the government assumed their ethnicity indicated
disloyalty.
The court sought to restore its reputation in Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion (1954), which finally put an end to segregation in public schools. It then
undertook the difficult work of uprooting de jure racism in area after area,
from public facilities
to employment to gov-
Campus racial and ethnic balancing ernment contracts. To
is the poisonous fruit of the Supreme their credit, the elected
Court’s jurisprudence on race and branches helped promote
affirmative action. the end of official racism,
with President Harry S.
Truman desegregating the military, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helping
desegregate public schools, President John F. Kennedy prohibiting racial seg-
regation by government contractors, and Congress enacting the foundational
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Unfortunately, however, the American instinct to make up for past sins
mutated into a new ideology of racial diversity for its own sake. In the past,
the court has sensibly allowed the use of race to remedy actual discrimina-
tion. But in the hands of higher education, where many minority applicants
by the 1990s had not suffered the direct effects of segregation, racial diver-
sity became an end in itself. Faced with the zero-sum enterprise of having to
allocate a limited number of seats, colleges and universities followed admis-
sions priorities that sought to increase the number of students of some races
(usually blacks and Hispanics) at the expense of others (usually whites and
Asians).
It should come as no surprise that universities became the vanguard
for a new racial spoils system, when its administrators and many scholars
replaced the search for truth with Marxist ideologies that interpret reality as
the product of economic-class, and now racial, struggles.
Like universities, and then the media and Hollywood, and even now cor-
porations and the military, the Supreme Court accepted the new racism. In
Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), a fractured court struck
down the University of California’s use of actual quotas by race but allowed
the consideration of race among other factors in admissions. While hard

70 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

quotas became illegal, quiet ones took hold. Universities became expert at
hitting the racial numbers they want by manipulating soft, subjective criteria
such as “personality,” as the Harvard litigation revealed.
Although Republicans have appointed the majority of Supreme Court
appointees in the years since, the court has stuck to its guns. In Grutter
v. Bollinger (2003), a liberal majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race in admissions. In
allowing the official use of race for the first time since the Japanese intern-
ment cases, the court showed it had swallowed the new racism hook, line,
and sinker. Justice O’Connor wrote that the Constitution “does not prohibit
the law school’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to
further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow
from a diverse student body.” Now, instead of remedying past discrimination,
racial-diversity policies were good in their own right. Racial diversity, Justice
O’Connor argued, produced the wide spread of ideologies and backgrounds
that advanced the qual-
ity of education.
Of course, this theory The American instinct to make up for
would justify diversity in past sins mutated into a new ideol-
any number of other con- ogy: racial diversity for its own sake.
texts. Governments can
claim they need racial diversity to have the ideological diversity for better
policy debates; corporations will argue they need racial diversity to under-
stand racial groups so as to sell to them better; medical schools will argue
they need diversity to treat racial communities more effectively. But even
worse, it only reinforced the very racial stereotypes upon which past racial
discrimination had built. The court assumes that racial diversity equals
ideological diversity; that could only be true if the court believes that racial
groups hold uniform views. But this is offensive as well as unconstitutional.
Races are not homogeneous in their views, their culture, or their experience.
To believe otherwise is racist.

A CHANGE IN THE COURT

The Roberts court can finally put an end to the tangled relationship between
our government and race. As Chief Justice Roberts observed in a 2007 case
limiting racial-diversity plans in elementary and secondary schools: “The
way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on
the basis of race.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation can make all the
difference. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have joined Roberts

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 71
 in his stalwart opposition to race-based policies, and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s
affinity for natural law should make him a fellow traveler.
After Justice O’Connor’s retirement, Justice Anthony Kennedy became the
crucial fifth vote to uphold affirmative action, as he did in Fisher v. University
of Texas (2016). With Justice Kavanaugh’s replacement of Justice Kennedy,
the Roberts court can now stop this “sordid business” of “divvying us up by
race,” as Chief Justice Roberts has written.
Favoring a particular race—an immutable characteristic beyond one’s
control—hurts both the favored and the disfavored. For the favored,
there are two harms. One is that a racial preference can create doubt as
to whether the beneficiary is really good enough to succeed on their own
merits—“a badge of inferiority,” as Justice Thomas has called it. The other
harm, sadly, as the work of Richard Sander has shown, is that putting
people in an academic environment they would not have entered on pure
merit often sets them up for failure. It doesn’t matter what the character-
istic is that causes the boost—gender, race, sexual orientation, religion,
age, or anything else the ensuing mismatch often harms the very group the
affirmative action was meant to help. As for the disfavored groups, affirma-
tive action stokes racial resentment. That will prolong, rather than over-
come, any lingering racism.
But even if the consequences of racial preferences were exactly opposite,
the Roberts court would still have to strike the preferences down because
of the Fourteenth Amendment. Enacted during Reconstruction, the amend-
ment bolstered the constitutional support for federal civil rights laws that
required states to treat the new freedmen as equal citizens. The court has
based most of its deci-
sions forbidding govern-
As Justice Thomas has argued, sup- mental use of race on the
porters of racial preferences often equal-protection clause:
put forth theories similar to those of “nor [shall any State]
segregationists. deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.” Textually, we think that phrase speaks more directly
to executive-branch refusal to enforce laws on the books equally without
regard to race. If the court were to restore the original understanding of
the Fourteenth Amendment, it should root the prohibition on race more
directly in the privileges and immunities clause, which states that “no State
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immuni-
ties of citizens of the United States.” As we have argued earlier, that clause

72 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

recognizes a package of individual rights that inheres in each American; one
of those is the right to be treated the same by the government regardless of
skin color.
But regardless of whether the equal-protection clause or the privileges and
immunities clause supplies the textual basis, the Constitution establishes the
fundamental principle that the government cannot discriminate on the basis
of skin color. “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates
classes among citizens,” Justice John Harlan famously declared in his Plessy
dissent.
Amazingly, defenders of affirmative action object. They want to read the
Constitution to not be colorblind. Despite the government’s sorry history
on race, they now trust the state to hand out benefits to favored races and
inflict harms on its past
racial opponents. They
also argue that conser- Races are not homogeneous in their
vatives are hypocrites views, their culture, or their experi-
for supporting judicial ence. To believe otherwise is racist.
activism that overrules
the judgment of federal and state governments in favor of racial preference.
Some supporters of racial preferences even rely on historical examples of
segregation to justify their stance now—for example, they point out that the
congressional framers of the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation in
the public schools in the District of Columbia. As Justice Thomas has argued,
supporters of racial preferences often put forth theories similar to those of
segregationists. Yet there is no racial-paternalism exception to the equal-
protection clause: benign prejudice is just as unconstitutional as hostile
prejudice.
Perhaps sensing the internal contradiction of today’s new racism, Justice
O’Connor declared in Grutter that racial preferences should prove only tem-
porary; affirmative action in college admissions could last for only twenty-five
more years. But this makes no sense. Either something is constitutional or
it is not. The passage of time does not cure unconstitutionality. There is no
reason why, under O’Connor’s theory, racial diversity will no longer provide
intellectual diversity in ten years if it does so now.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL ANSWER IS CLEAR

So what is to be done? Simply prohibit the government from considering race
at all. That’s what the Constitution demands. The equal-protection clause
makes no exception for beneficial discrimination. One cannot pick up the

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 73
 stick of “helpful” discrimination without harming someone. And American
history sadly shows that government has discriminated invidiously against
minorities while facially pretending to be helping them.
Affirmative action is unconstitutional. Full stop. That doesn’t mean
that legislatures cannot craft solutions that will have the result of helping
minority students suc-
ceed or making business
When hard quotas became illegal,
more competitive; it just
quiet ones took hold.
means those solutions
cannot be based on race. Nothing in the Constitution, for example, pro-
hibits institutions from seeking diversity based on poverty or skills. It just
cannot use race. And if the court must use its power of judicial review to
override the considered judgment of the elected branches of government,
this is what the Supreme Court’s power is for: to refuse to carry into effect
the commands of the other branches that violate the higher law of the
Constitution. That is not activism; it is constitutional fidelity.
If the Roberts court does not want to return to the Fourteenth Amend-
ment’s original meaning, it could at least faithfully apply its strict-scrutiny
test to racial classifications. Scholars once observed that strict scrutiny was
“strict in theory, fatal in fact” because it requires a “compelling interest” for
the government program that is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that end.
Until Grutter, the only government interest that qualified was military neces-
sity in wartime, and even that was questionable (due to its origin in Kore-
matsu). It seems obviously wrong that achieving racial diversity is as impor-
tant a government interest as prevailing in wartime. And to the extent the
court wants to keep strict scrutiny for racial classifications, it must enforce it
vigorously against racial
discrimination that is
Benign prejudice is just as unconsti- allegedly beneficial as well
tutional as hostile prejudice. as discrimination that is
harmful.
There is no doubt that there are despicable aspects of our history when it
comes to race. But the constitutional solution to correcting our past is not
to perpetuate it under the guise of helping those once harmed. After all, as
Justice Thomas has noted, the Constitution protects individual, not group,
rights. Just because a particular racial group once suffered discrimination
does not entitle an individual who has not actually suffered discrimination to
claim a benefit based on race.

74 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 Ending judicial approval of racial preferences won’t cure all of the nation’s
tensions on race. But at the very least, it will move the conversation out of
the courts and into society, where it belongs.
We can do better on race in this country. We must do better. We’ve come
a long way, though we’re not there yet. But we cannot hijack the Constitu-
tion in ways that are antithetical to its meaning. The court can reverse its
mistakes by making all racial discrimination constitutionally taboo, as the
Fourteenth Amendment requires.

Reprinted by permission of National Review. © 2019 National Review Inc.

All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Learning

from Experience, by George P. Shultz. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 75
I MMI GRATI ON

I MMI GRATI ON

Gimme Shelter
The definition of a “refugee” dates back decades
and has outlived its usefulness. Nations now need
a much more rigorous idea of just who deserves
refuge.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

T
he global asylum and refugee system
is no longer fit for purpose. As a ben- Key points
eficiary of that system, I do not make »» The 1951 convention
establishing refugee
such a statement lightly. The reality status was part of a
is that it is outdated and can no longer cope with temporary, practical
Cold War policy.
the challenges posed by mass violence and global
»» Today, the distinc-
migration today.
tion between a migrant
After the displacement of European Jews during and a refugee is un-
World War II, the 1951 Convention Relating to the workably blurred.

Status of Refugees was devised not out of idealism »» The crush of asylum
seekers has led to
but as a practical, Eurocentric Cold War policy. huge, costly bureau-
It’s been argued that the convention’s architects cracies.
intended it to provide a method of escape for those »» In many countries,
a backlash against
caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. It
unregulated immigra-
defined refugees as those outside their country tion has led to the rise
who could not return to it for fear of persecu- of populists.

tion “for reasons of race, religion, nationality,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the
AHA Foundation. She is the author of The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam
as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It (Hoover Institution Press,
2017).

76 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” The conven-
tion was a temporary solution to a postwar problem, not a long-term offer.
And it certainly wasn’t intended as a way of skipping the line to access a
better quality of life.
In 1967, the convention was extended universally. This afforded the West
further opportunity to thwart communism with the mass resettlement of
Vietnamese refugees. But this shift also invited broader interpretations of
the definition of a refugee to anyone living in a dangerous place, not just
those personally persecuted by the state. Millions—potentially hundreds of
millions—now hope to qualify, even those who are merely migrating to seek a
better quality of life.
Consequently, the distinction between a migrant and a refugee has blurred
to such an extent that it is no longer useful. In her analysis of Eurostat data
on asylum applications in the European Union between 2010 and 2017, the
French demographer Michèle Tribalat concludes that “the migratory crisis
has been converted into an asylum crisis. For an illegal migrant, asylum is
the only way to be taken care of legally.”
As Tribalat’s analysis
suggests, migrants who
did not meet the require- A new system should assess the
ments for asylum in one likelihood that migrants will abide by
jurisdiction, and thus the laws and adopt the values of their
are deemed “illegal” in host societies.
policy terms, have likely
tried applying again at a different border. The data show dramatic spikes in
new asylum applications in Germany and Sweden in 2015 and 2016, but while
these numbers subsequently fell in those two countries, they continued to
rise in France. The Schengen Agreement, which eliminated border checks
between twenty-six European countries in 1985, makes such movement
easy—as does the reluctance of countries to deport those whose applications
have been rejected.

STRETCHING ASYLUM TOO FAR

For many migrants, seeking asylum is their best chance to gain residency in
the West. Developed economies have less need for low-skilled labor than in
previous generations and the appetite for welcoming additional newcomers
is weak.
The best policy to cope with these issues is to work to repair the causes
that make people leave their homelands in such numbers in the first place.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 77
 Push factors include wars, natural disasters, gang violence, failed or failing
states, or economies so broken they cannot sustain their populations. The
pull factors in the West include political and economic freedoms, generous
welfare systems, and rule of law.
The economics of immigration is also a driving force, whether it’s the
big business of people smuggling and human trafficking or remittances
from successful immigrants, which encourage others to follow in their
footsteps.
The challenge of processing these migrants has given rise to an enormous
bureaucracy. Many countries are overwhelmed with asylum applications.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently reported 3.1
million asylum seekers waiting for decisions. Meanwhile, national govern-
ments must fund numerous programs and services for new arrivals and
for the longer-term task of integration. These include housing, health care,
social work, security, language training, formal education, job-skills training,
cultural values classes, and legal services—not to mention foreign aid and
development funding.
But resources in even wealthy societies are not infinite, and failed inte-
gration programs, as well as the resulting social problems, have turned
immigration into a vote-winner for populists in liberal democracies around
the world.

INTEGRATION
If we step back and take a dispassionate, long-term view, it is clear that
we need a better definition of what refugees are and how they can best be
helped. We must retain the core principle of providing refuge for individuals
or groups persecuted by intolerant movements or regimes—for example, the
Pakistani Christian Asia
Bibi, who is still threat-
“The migratory crisis has been con- ened with death despite
having been cleared by
verted into an asylum crisis. For an
the courts of blasphemy
illegal migrant, asylum is the only
charges.
way to be taken care of legally.” We need a better sys-
tem for admitting those
who do not qualify as refugees—one that builds integration considerations
into the process from the outset when the person applies for entry. Rather
than focusing on where people come from and what their motivations are
for leaving, I believe the main criterion for granting residence should be how

78 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

likely migrants are to abide by the laws and adopt the values of their host
society.
Like many migrants, I would have been better off if given an option to
prove my ability to adapt, rather than having to shoehorn my life story into
the convention’s framework. Priority should be given to those individuals
with the highest probability of entering the labor market, not the welfare
state, and those who genuinely wish to become American, Dutch, French, or
British, and live among, rather than just nearby, their fellow citizens.
The world’s population has tripled since 1951, when the refugee convention
was ratified in Geneva. And along with it, the number of those fleeing war,
persecution, and authoritarian ideology. But we must be frank: the refugee
convention and its amendments have served their purpose. They belong to
the era of the Cold War, not to the era of globalization and clashing civiliza-
tions.

Reprinted by permission of the WorldPost, a partnership of the Berg-

gruen Institute and the Washington Post. © 2019 Washington Post Co. All
rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Invisible

Slaves: The Victims and Perpetrators of Modern-Day
Slavery, by W. Kurt Hauser. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 79
N ATI ONAL S ECUR IT Y

N ATI ONAL S ECUR IT Y

Tech in the
Trenches
Silicon Valley has shown a remarkable
indifference to national defense, depriving the
Pentagon of both brains and technological brawn.

By Amy B. Zegart and Kevin Childs

A
silent divide is weakening America’s national security: the grow-
ing gulf between the tech community in Silicon Valley and the
policy-making community in Washington.
Democrats and Republicans share a growing alarm over the
return of great-power conflict. China and Russia are challenging American
interests, alliances, and values—through territorial aggression; strong-arm
tactics and unfair practices in global trade; cyber theft and information
warfare; and massive military buildups in new weapons systems such as Rus-
sia’s “Satan 2” nuclear long-range missile, China’s autonomous weapons, and
satellite-killing capabilities to destroy our communications and imagery sys-
tems in space. Since President Trump took office, huge bipartisan majorities
in Congress have passed tough sanctions against Russia, sweeping reforms

Amy B. Zegart is a Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-
chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and a
member of the Hoover task forces focusing on Arctic security, national security,
and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the co-director of the Center
for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Kevin Childs,
a lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force specializing in cyber operations, is a 2018-
19 national security affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution.

80 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

to scrutinize and block Chinese investments in sensitive American technol-
ogy industries, and record defense-budget increases.
In Washington, alarm bells are ringing. In Silicon Valley, not so much. “Ask
people to finish the sentence, ‘China is a (blank) of the United States,’ ” says
former National Economic Council director Keith Hennessey. “Policy makers
from both parties are likely to answer with ‘competitor,’ ‘strategic rival,’ or
even ‘adversary,’ while Silicon Valley leaders will probably tell you China is a
‘supplier,’ ‘investor,’ and especially ‘potential market.’ ”

DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
The rift is deep, and a long time coming, because it’s really three divides
converging into one.
A yawning civil-military relations gap exists between the protectors and
the protected. When World War II ended, veterans could be found in seven
out of ten homes on a typical neighborhood street. Today it’s two. Fewer than
half a percent of the US population serves on active duty. A senior executive
from a major Silicon Valley firm recently told us that none of the company’s
engineers had ever seen anyone from the military.
It should come as no surprise that when people live and work in separate
universes, they tend to develop separate views. The civil-military gap helps
explain why many in tech companies harbor deep ethical concerns about
helping warfighters kill people and win wars, while many in the defense
community harbor deep ethical concerns about what they view as the ero-
sion of patriotism and national service in the tech industry. Each side is left
wondering, how can anyone possibly think that way? Asked what he would
tell engineers at companies like Google and Amazon, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford said, “Hey, we’re the good guys. . . .
It’s inexplicable to me that we wouldn’t have a cooperative relationship with
the private sector.”
There’s a training gap between leaders in Washington, who are mostly
lawyers struggling to understand recent technological advances, and lead-
ers in Silicon Valley, who are mostly engineers struggling to understand the
age-old dynamics of international power politics. Congress has two hundred
and twenty-two lawyers but just eight engineers. On the Senate Armed Ser-
vices Committee, it’s even more stark. Of its twenty-five members, seven-
teen are lawyers and just one is an engineer. (He’s actually the only engineer
in the entire Senate.) In the past, policy makers didn’t have to work that
hard to understand the essence of breakthrough technologies like the tele-
graph, the automobile, and nuclear fission. Technology moved faster than

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 81
policy, but the lag was more manageable. Digital technologies are different,
spreading quickly and widely, with societal effects that are hard to imagine
and nearly impossible to contain. Understanding
these technologies is far more challenging, and
understanding them fast is essential to counter-
ing Russia and China.

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

82 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 At the same time, today’s brightest young engineers barely remember
9/11, view the Cold War as ancient history rather than lived experience, and
can get computer-science degrees at elite institutions without ever taking a
course about cyber security or thinking about what is in the national inter-
est. For technologists, technology holds the promise of a brighter future, not
the peril of dark possibilities. Their overriding challenge is getting a break-
through to function, not imagining how it could be used by
bad actors in nefarious ways.
Congressional hearings attended by Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg last April brought the two

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 83
perspectives—and the chasm between them—into full view. For the tech
community, it was a jaw-dropping moment that revealed just how little mem-
bers of Congress know about the products and companies that are trans-
forming global politics, commerce, and civil society.
Senator Orrin Hatch appeared surprised to learn that Facebook earned
the majority of its revenue through ad sales. “How do you sustain a business
model in which users don’t pay for your service?” Hatch asked quizzically.
“Senator, we run ads,” replied Zuckerberg, his aides grinning behind him.
Senator Lindsey Graham asked whether Twitter was the same thing as
Facebook.
Even Senator Brian Schatz, considered one of Congress’s tech aficiona-
dos, didn’t seem to know the difference between social media, e-mail, and
encrypted text messaging. As former secretary of defense Ash Carter wrote,
“All I can say is that I wish members [of Congress] had been as poorly pre-
pared to question me on war and peace in the scores of testimonies I gave as
they were when asking Facebook about the public duties of tech companies.”
For policy makers, the hearings were a jaw-dropping moment showing just
how much naiveté and profits were driving Facebook’s decisions, and just how
little thought Zuckerberg and his team had given to the possibility that all
sorts of bad actors could use their platform in all sorts of very bad ways. In his
opening statement, Zuckerberg acknowledged, “Facebook is an idealistic and
optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all of the good
that connecting people can do.” Zuckerberg added, “But it’s clear now that we
didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm.”

YOUTH WILL BE SERVED

The third divide is generational. In Washington, power runs vertically and
rests in the hands of gray eminences. In Silicon Valley, power runs horizon-
tally and rests in the hands of wunderkinds and their friends. Steve Jobs was
twenty-one years old when he started Apple with his buddy Steve Wozniak.
Bill Gates quit college in his junior year to start Microsoft. Zuckerberg
launched Facebook in his sophomore dorm room. Larry Page and Sergey
Brin were old men, starting Google at the age of twenty-five.
In the policy world, thirty years of experience usually makes you powerful.
In the technical world, thirty years of experience usually makes you obsolete.
It’s hard to overstate just how foreign the worlds of Washington and Silicon
Valley have become to each other. At the exact moment that great-power
conflict is making a comeback and harnessing technology is the key to vic-
tory, Silicon Valley and Washington are experiencing a “policy makers are

84 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

from Mars, tech leaders are from Venus” moment, with both sides unable to
trust or understand each other.
Closing this divide is a national-security imperative. And it requires think-
ing differently, generating inspiration rather than just regulation, and target-
ing the leaders of tomorrow, not just the leaders of today.
For starters, the Pentagon needs a messaging overhaul. It should stop
telling engineering students at top universities, “If you want to make money,
go into industry, but if you want a mission bigger than yourself, work for
me.” When Admiral Mike Rogers, who led the US Cyber Command and
the National Secu-
rity Agency, gave this
standard recruiting Congress has two hundred and twenty-
pitch to Stanford two lawyers but just eight engineers.
undergraduates a few
years ago, it fell flat. It still does. We recently held a focus group of Stanford
computer-science majors. When we tested the message on them, heads
started shaking in a “wow, you just don’t get it” kind of way. “One of the main
reasons people pick companies is they want to do social good,” said Anna
Mitchell, a senior. “People would laugh if the government said the only way to
be impactful is to work in government.”
For these students and their peers, the desire for impact is real and deep.
They believe that they can achieve large-scale change faster and better
outside the government than within it. “A message suggesting a dichotomy of
working in companies versus helping your country alienates a good portion of
people on the fence,” Michael Karr, a Stanford junior, told us. “If you’re work-
ing on autonomous vehicles, you could be saving lives by making cars safer.”
So what message does work? Giving them opportunities for impact at scale
that don’t take a lifetime of moving up the ladder. Deploying the best young
engineers against the toughest challenges, early. Telling them what one of the
authors of this essay tells potential recruits: If you do cyber operations for
anyone else, you’ll get arrested. If you do them for me in the Air Force, you’ll
get a medal.

A VIRTUOUS “REVOLVING DOOR”

The Pentagon also needs to create ambassadors, not lifers. More than get-
ting technical experts into government for their entire careers, we need to
get more national-security-minded engineers into tech companies. Winning
hearts and minds in the tech world starts early, with new college gradu-
ates who are more open to experiences that can last a lifetime. Imagine a

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 85
 technology fellows program like the White House fellows program, only
younger. It would select the fifty most talented American engineering stu-
dents graduating from college for a prestigious, one-year, high-impact stint
in government service, working directly for senior leaders like the Air Force
chief of staff, the secretary of defense, or the commander of US forces in the
Middle East.
Tech fellows would work on the most important projects and participate in
special programs for their cohort to bond and form a lifelong network. “Peo-
ple really care about their cohort,” said Andrew Milich, a Stanford senior
specializing in artificial
intelligence. Tech fellows
The Pentagon needs a radically new could defer company jobs
civilian talent model. or take a leave of absence,
knowing that all the other
fellows would be the best in the world who would also be heading back to
industry. The goal isn’t for them to stay in government. The goal is for their
government experience to stay with them. As one of our students told us,
“Everyone has a friend at Google.” Imagine the ripple effects if these friend
networks across the tech industry included tech-fellow alumni.
Doing it right won’t be easy. The tech fellows program would have to be
high on prestige and low on bureaucracy. Fellows would need flexibility
to select projects that align with their values, not just their expertise. As
sophomore Gleb Shevchuk told us, “There has to be a transparent discus-
sion of ethics. The program has to come off as a program that understands
the concerns of people who dislike certain things the government is doing.”
Google engineers may object to helping the Pentagon improve its targeting
algorithms, but they might jump at the chance to defend US satellites from
attacks in space.
In addition, the program would have to dramatically reduce logistical pain
points. Tech companies compete aggressively on quality-of-life dimensions
for their workforce—locating in cities where top talent wants to live, provid-
ing free housing and transportation, and offering exciting programs outside
of the job. The tech fellows program would need to do the same. The National
Security Agency has cutting-edge technological programs that would be a
natural fit for tech fellows, but that’s a hard sell. The hot cities for attracting
top engineers include Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, New York, and Den-
ver—but not Fort Meade.
In the longer term, the Pentagon needs a radically new civilian talent
model. Programs like the Air Force’s Kessel Run and the Defense Digital

86 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

Service are breaking new ground to bring technology and tech talent into
the Pentagon, but these programs are green shoots surrounded by red tape.
Will Roper, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technol-
ogy, and logistics, and someone who is no stranger to innovating inside the
Defense Department, would like to see a much more fluid pathway in and
out of industry and government. “I would invest to make the term ‘revolv-
ing door’ superlative instead of pejorative,” he told a Georgetown class. “The
people that we want are going to be people in industry that will want to come
in and help us, and be able to go back out and come back in and help us, [so]
that we’re continually refreshing the ideas, the creative thought . . . and right
now we make it damn difficult to get in and out of government.”
These challenges are substantial, but small steps could have big impact
over time. Congress could start by holding hearings with the goal of writ-
ing the best proposals into the National Defense Authorization Act. And if
Congress doesn’t act, then the Pentagon should, creating a Rapid Capabilities
Office dedicated to developing new civilian talent programs, just as it has for
developing new technologies.
In 1957, the launch of Sputnik spawned a fear that an underfunded educa-
tion system had allowed the United States to lose its technological advantage
to the Soviets. A year after the launch, Congress passed the National Defense
Education Act, increasing funding for science, mathematics, and foreign-
language education at all levels and allowing for substantially more low-cost
student loans. Within a decade, the number of college students in the United
States had more than doubled, supercharging US breakthroughs in the
space race. What our national leaders realized in 1957 is still true today: what
people know and how they think are just as important to the nation’s defense
as the weapon systems we deploy.

Reprinted by permission of the Atlantic. © 2019 Atlantic Monthly Group.

All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Moscow

Has Ears Everywhere: New Investigations on
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H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 87
J O URNAL I S M

J O URNAL I S M

Fake Newsies
This just in: journalists are people, too—
sometimes very dishonest people. The story of a
German journalist who told his readers a pack of
lies about the United States.

By Josef Joffe

F
ake news wasn’t invented by the Russians.
The New York Times had Jayson Blair, who faked dozens of
articles and interviews over the years. USA Today had Jack Kelley,
who made up sensational stories about events he had not witnessed
and places he had not seen. In both cases, the editors were forced to resign.
Now, it’s the turn of Der Spiegel. The fabled German news magazine’s
award-winning reporter Claas Relotius, a legend in his time, replaced facts
with fantasy. He quoted people he had not interviewed. He described streets
and buildings he had seen only on Google Earth. Painted in exquisite detail,
the scenes were nothing more than figments of his imagination.
For Spiegel, which prides itself on having the best fact-checking depart-
ment in the business, this was Armageddon. To salvage its honor, it launched
a top-to-bottom investigation of the publication, ruthlessly trying to answer
the Big Question that tortured the Times and USA Today as well: How could
this have happened—and to us, the best of the best?
The issue transcends continents and publications. As Juan Moreno, the
colleague who first raised suspicions about Relotius’s work, put it in a video

Josef Joffe is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of

Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict,
a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies, and a member of the editorial council of the German weekly Die Zeit.

88 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

interview on Spiegel Online: “People are people, and journalists are people.”
Basically, what we tend to forget is that journalists are human beings driven by
vanity, pride, and greed for fame and advancement. This may well be true, but
then the question becomes: Why did the system set up to corroborate every fact
and assertion, every quote and statistic, fail to expose and stop the fake artist?

BETTER THAN BEING THERE

Relotius was a most brilliant counterfeiter. His pieces are full of minute detail
so specific, so precise, as to appear necessarily authentic. And why doubt a
celebrated reporter who describes a small-town street corner as if it were
etched into his photographic memory?
“He could not have made it up,” his fact-checker might have surmised. “It
is so perfect, you feel as if you are standing there yourself.” Too bad Google
Earth can do that for you from five thousand miles away, as the all-seeing
camera captures the flowerpot on the stoop.
Like Jayson Blair, Relotius was a wunderkind of journalism. He won Ger-
many’s Reporterpreis, a
coveted annual award,
four times. Why would Why check facts if this is what we
you insult this giant have always known and what con-
by pestering him with firms our beliefs?
picayune questions? Only
small-minded tax officials running through an audit would probe and poke.
Something similar happened in 1983—when, in perhaps the biggest, most
memorable scandal of them all, German magazine Stern published the “diaries”
of Adolf Hitler. These sixty-three volumes—which the magazine trumpeted
would turn our view of Nazi history on its head—were fiction from beginning
to end, the product of a forger who pocketed millions from the publication.
How did it happen? The famed British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper certi-
fied the authenticity of the forged diaries—and the ennobling verdict clinched
the case, silencing the last doubters and convincing Stern to go ahead.

REDNECK FANTASY
In Relotius’s case, another, more insidious dynamic may have been at work:
the unarticulated expectations of editors as they send off their reporters, and
their anticipation the reported piece that comes back will confirm what they
already know to be true.
Among Relotius’s most celebrated articles were his pieces on Donald Trump’s
America. They paint a picture of the country Europeans love to despise.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 89
 “In This Small Town”—a 7,300-word story about Fergus Falls, Minnesota,
where “people pray for Donald Trump on Sundays”—confirmed what we all
“know.” It was a tableau of “redneck” America—a gun-toting, intolerant, anti-
immigrant, and irrationally religious nation.
The fact-checking work of two Fergus Falls citizens, Michele Anderson
and Jake Krohn, revealed
this to be a fabrication.
Among Claas Relotius’s most cel- Not only does Relotius’s
ebrated articles were his pieces on starring character, city
Donald Trump’s America. They paint administrator Andrew
Bremseth, not carry a
a garish picture of the country Euro-
Beretta 9mm to work, he
peans love to despise.
doesn’t even own one. Nei-
ther does the town have a sign that reads “Mexicans stay out.”
Relotius’s report was about perpetuating “an ugly and exaggerated ste-
reotype,” Anderson and Krohn concluded, unsurprisingly. “We are either
backward, living in the past, and have our heads up our asses, or we’re like
dumb, endearing animals that just need a little attention in order to keep us
from eating the rest of the world alive.” (Anderson added in a tweet, “Hey
Germany. We’re cool, no hard feelings to you as a country.”)
The scandal is a wake-up call to Relotius’s editors back home—and every-
one else. It’s unfortunately all too easy to fall into the same trap they did.
Why check carefully if this is what we have always known and what confirms
our beliefs? People are people, and journalists are people—with their unar-
ticulated prejudices and stereotypes.
We need these scandals, embarrassing and awful as they are. They teach
journalists that their first responsibility is to facts and the truth. Whatever
your politics, some stories are just too good to be true.

Reprinted by permission of Politico (www.politico.com). © 2019 Politico

SPRL. All rights reserved.

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90 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 E UR OPE

EUROPE

Europe Does Not

Exist
Brexit is just one vivid symptom of the Continent’s
failure to produce a true union.

By Josef Joffe

B
y the numbers, the European Union is a giant. Its economy
exceeds China’s by $7 trillion and is just a bit smaller than
America’s $20 trillion. Russia? Its GDP of $ 1.7 trillion is petty
cash. On paper, the EU nations marshal as many soldiers as does
the United States, and half a million more than Russia. Their combined popu-
lation dwarfs both.
But if one measures by its weight in world affairs, Europe is a runt. It does
not play in the superpower league, and it does not muster the will to do so, no
matter how splendiferous the rhetoric of “self-reliance” and “self-assertion.”
The cause is rooted in postwar history. Europe was shattered and had to
rebuild, and so came to rely for its existential safety on the United States. At
the height of the Cold War, up to three hundred thousand US troops, backed
up by thousands of tactical nuclear weapons, stood guard at the Iron Curtain.
Then at the end of the past century, its deadly foe, the Soviet Union, simply
vanished, committing suicide on Christmas Day 1991 and leaving behind Rus-
sia and fourteen orphan republics.

Josef Joffe is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of

Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict,
a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies, and a member of the editorial council of the German weekly Die Zeit.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 91
 Europe was now “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush famously pro-
claimed, and life was sweet. Why dabble in power politics when history had
ended, when capitalism and democracy were on a roll? For the next twenty-
five years, the nations of the EU cashed in their peace dividends, whittling
their armies down to the core. Europe now gloried in its avant-garde role as a
“civilian power” or “power of peace.”
Take Germany, Europe’s largest economy and the world’s fourth-largest.
After the Berlin Wall fell thirty years ago, the forces of the reunited coun-
try were cut by two-thirds. Its 2,800 tanks dwindled to 280. Today, its navy
has six U-boats, none of which is operational. When Europe acts, it does so
behind the United States, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia, and Libya or, if
alone, out of real harm’s way, as in Mali.
The halcyon days are over. Europe confronts new threats aplenty. Indeed,
at no time since the birth of European integration in 1952 has the Old Conti-
nent faced so many perils all at once, inside and out.

BESIEGED FROM ALL SIDES

Plotting to restore Russia’s grandeur, Vladimir Putin is pressing on Europe
from the east. He gobbled up Crimea, then sliced off Ukraine’s southeast with
his local surrogates. A new round of confrontation is unfolding in the Sea of
Azov, where the Russians intercepted three Ukrainian naval vessels late last
year, foreshadowing the blockade of Mariupol, Ukraine’s third-busiest port.
Putin’s purpose is to strangle Ukraine until it submits to Moscow’s impe-
rial ambitions. The Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany
(one is completed, the other under construction) are designed to tighten
the noose on Kiev, circumventing Ukraine by pumping gas directly across
the Baltic Sea. Dutifully
protesting, Europe has
Why dabble in power politics when neither the means nor the
history has ended, when capitalism will to defend Ukraine,
and democracy are on a roll? and economic sanctions
are not popular. The three
Baltic states, formerly Soviet possessions, are not amused. Though they are
NATO and EU members, the Baltics might be the next victims of Russian
hauteur.
From the south, Europe is besieged by vast civilian armies. North Africa
is the EU’s Mexico, serving as springboard for potentially millions of African
migrants in search of a better life. Muslim refugees from the Mideast keep
streaming into highly regulated economies that are far less equipped than

92 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

the United States to absorb “tired, poor, and huddled masses.” High mini-
mum wages and barriers to market entry undercut the greatest advantage of
immigrants throughout the ages, which is their willingness to work more for
less. New York’s all-night Korean markets would run afoul of mandated shop-
closing hours throughout
the European Union.
The pace of assimila- At no time since the birth of European
tion in Europe keeps integration in 1952 has the Old Conti-
lagging behind the rate nent faced so many perils all at once.
of immigration. The
market for anti-immigrant parties is booming. With the great exception of
Spain, they have captured seats in all of the Continent’s parliaments; in seven
countries, foremost among them Italy and Austria, they co-govern or vote
with the ruling coalition. Europe’s traditional parties are losing out to the
extremes. The moral of this tale: a munificent welfare state and open bor-
ders of the kind initially welcomed by German chancellor Angela Merkel in
2015 do not for a happy marriage make. They spawn resentment, envy, and
cultural pushback.
Meanwhile, President Trump is muscling in with his trade wars against
the EU. He thinks that Uncle Sam has been suckered into protecting wealthy
free riders who have outsourced their security to the United States. Shape
up or we ship out, his message runs. Naturally, the Europeans are nervous,
especially those on NATO’s eastern border. Don’t blame Trump alone, if you
want to blame someone; it was Barack Obama who brought down US forces
to some thirty thousand. During the Cold War, the number was ten times as
high. It was Obama who told the Atlantic: “Free riders aggravate me.” Trump
has actually boosted the US military presence in Europe. Nor should we ignore
that Europe’s NATO members have been increasing defense outlays since 2014
when Vladimir Putin grabbed Crimea. But money doesn’t buy everything.
In the end, the reason Europe isn’t rising to the moment is that “Europe”
does not exist—not as a state and not as a strategic actor that can hold its
own among the restive superpowers.

A PHANTOM UNITY
To be sure, the EU has made magnificent strides toward “ever closer
union,” as the 1957 Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community
envisioned its future. It has installed various accoutrements of a state: a
European Parliament, a Court of Justice, a Commission as quasi-executive,
a common currency, a growing body of Community law, even integrated

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 93
battle groups. The EU has “Pesco,” or Permanent Structured Cooperation,
the pledge to pool defense resources and contribute combat units for EU
missions.
Unfortunately, these feats do not add up to a United States of Europe. Real
power is lodged in the national parliaments and executives. The EU-28 (soon
minus Britain) do not an e pluribus unum make.
Modern history knows no example where nation-states voluntarily
coalesced into one. The United Kingdom is the product of endless war
among the warring tribes of the Isles. Germany’s twenty-five city-states

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

94 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

and kingdoms were fused by “iron and blood” in 1871, to invoke Bismarck’s
famous phrase. In the beginning, the thirteen colonies did strike a peaceful
deal in Philadelphia. But in the end, it took a murderous civil war to fuse
North and South into one nation. In those four years, more Americans died
than in all wars thereafter.
Unification will not be achieved by committees hashing it out in Brus-
sels. Or by national parliaments emasculating themselves for the sake of
the greater European good. To bestride the world as a heavyweight like the

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 95
United States requires cracking the hard shells of sovereignty, notably in
matters of defense and public finance.
Never in our lifetime will this Europe go to war because a majority of
member states says so. Nor will elected governments hand over spending
and taxation to Brussels—not when their fate at the ballot box hangs on the
state of the business cycle. No national parliament will give up the power of
the purse, the Holy Grail of democratic governance.
Cracking these shells would require fusing twenty-seven post-Brexit states
into one, complete with a supreme legislature like Congress and an elected
executive like the US president. Yet power in Europe remains rooted in the
European Council representing twenty-seven governments jealously guard-
ing their turf.
To list such deficits is not to belittle how many chunks of sovereignty
the EU has already pried off. The largest is monetary union, which unites
nineteen of the twenty-seven in the eurozone. Still, the common currency
may well have been one bridge too far, as the recurrent crises of the euro
testify—first in Greece, now Italy. While the eurozone will continue to
muddle through, the “ever closer union” of the EU as a whole is receding as
we speak.

WHO LEADS AND WHO FOLLOWS?

Start with leadership. The engine of integration has always been the Franco-
German “couple.” This marriage has never been bliss incarnate; today it
yokes two governments at odds with each other and their electorates.
Who leads and who follows are the questions that govern all politics. For
a few years, Merkel was feted as uncrowned empress of Europe. Now she is
on the way out, paying the price of opening Germany’s gates to a million-plus
Mideast refugees in 2015–16.
As Merkel stumbled, France’s Emmanuel Macron stepped up in a blaze of
glamor. His rhetoric was as bold as his ambitions were grandiose. Elected in
a landslide, he would make France great again by recasting it and grabbing
the helm of the EU.
The nakedness of the new emperor, now in his second year, is visible to all.
Like so many French governments before him, his was denuded in the streets
of Paris by the usual suspects of French “expressive politics.” The “yellow
vests” were set off late last year by his “green” fuel tax. In truth, they went to
war against Macronism—the attempt to loosen up rigid labor markets and
fracture ancient group privileges.

96 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 It was street versus state again. Within three weeks, the government buck-
led, as it has done so often in the past when fishermen, truckers, farmers,
or students went on strike. So the government “postponed” the tax by six
months. Having shown their clout, the protesters kept exacting more conces-
sions. Say au revoir to reform and rejuvenation à la Macron.
Merkel was undone not in the streets but at the ballot box. In the fall, her
ruling Christian Democrats were trounced in two critical state elections,
while the Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigrant upstart on the far
right, improved its showing by up to 10 points.
In the national polls, Merkel’s Christian Democrats were down to 29
percent at the beginning of 2019, a deadly drop from the mid-40s of the past.
Reading the handwriting,
Merkel beat a tactical
retreat, resigning as Twenty-seven European govern-
head of her party. In ments jealously guard their turf.
December, the conven-
tion replaced her with Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, a Merkel protégée
hailing from the tiny state of the Saarland, where she had served as prime
minister. A Maggie Thatcher she is not.
It was an orderly transition, but Merkel may not last to the end of her term
in 2021. Either way, say auf Wiedersehen to the legendary stability of Ger-
many, which has gone through only eight chancellors while Italy has burned
through sixty-five governments since the end of World War II.
For decades, Germany was essentially ruled by the center-right and the
center-left. The Christian Democrats and Social Democrats either alternated
in power or governed in tandem, as they have been during the past nine
years. This duopoly is history. Long gone are the balmy days when these
two together netted 80 percent of the ballots. If there were a general elec-
tion today, polls say, they would haul in 43 percent. Their grand coalition
has shrunk to a petty coalition. While the Social Democrats, as elsewhere
in Europe, totter on the brink of oblivion, the system has splintered into six
parties, two of which represent the radical left and right. Look forward to
shaky coalitions and shorter-lived governments in a country that used to be
Europe’s rock of ages.

EUROFATIGUE
So the Franco-German couple is walking on crutches. Vying for leadership,
they have never agreed on the what and how of “ever closer union.” Emerg-
ing from centuries of absolutist rule, the French have become wedded to the

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 97
all-providing state. They distrust the free market and look to the government
for succor and shelter. This is why the yellow vests were able to cut Macron
down to size, clamoring for more spending, shorter workweeks, and higher wag-
es. Across the Rhine, the Germans hark back to the Holy Roman Empire, where
power was spread across myriad kingdoms, cities, and duchies. With memories
of twelve years of Nazi totalitarianism, Germans have come to cling to federal-
ism and states’ rights, be it in Europe or at home. Decentralization is as German
as Volkswagen and bratwurst. France remains the bastion of centralism.
Macron wants a European budget and a European finance minister to
spread the wealth from rich Germany to the stagnating south. With their
balanced budget, the Germans naturally insist on fiscal rigor, pushing the
members of “Club Med” to get their house in order. This tug of war between
the (Protestant) north and the (Catholic) south has always bedeviled the EU,
mimicking the religious divides of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth
century. Today, this cleavage is just one among many threats to ever closer
union. As the world is muscling in, the EU is drifting apart.
Brexit is the most blatant symptom of Eurofatigue. The United Kingdom
would rather face not-so-splendid isolation than submit to Brussels, and
damn the gargantuan costs of defection. For the UK it is not “ever closer,” but
simply “no union.”
Meanwhile, Poland and Hungary are marching to the beat of authoritarian
nationalism. They will gladly take the goodies—billions in subsidies—from
Brussels but refuse to obey its dictates of liberal-democratic virtue.
Italy is in a class of its own. In a historical first, it has voted right-wing
and left-wing populists into power. Hostile brothers, the League and the Five
Stars are held in harness by “Italy first” and anti-EU resentment. If they
don’t shrink the national debt, the eurozone’s largest as a fraction of the GDP,
the endless Greek euro crisis will look like a hiccup. With its tiny economy,
Greece can be saved. Italy, Europe’s fourth-largest, cannot.
Finally, there is the latter-day “Hanseatic League” that the Dutch are har-
nessing against the French, now that their natural ally Britain is absconding.
Informal members are the Scandinavians, the Baltics, and Ireland. These are
fiscally conservative and highly competitive economies. Germany is a silent
partner because it is loath to challenge France directly.

AN EXCESS OF DISCRETION
So much for the rifts inside. Now look at the wider world, where history has
not ended. Geopolitics and geo-economics are back. While Russia grabs land,
China pushes its “Belt and Road” across Asia and into Europe. In the tariff

98 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

wars, President Trump deploys raw power to change the terms of trade in
America’s favor. His contempt for Europe, especially for Merkel, is boundless.
For him, Europe is a fat mouse too timid even to roar.
The United States, China, and Russia are re-arming as they stake out
spheres of influence. Where does that leave those four hundred and fifty mil-
lion post-Brexit Europeans with the world’s second-largest GDP? The twenty-
first century does not favor this mighty “civilian power.” Its best weapons,
such as commerce, friendly persuasion, and institutionalized conflict resolu-
tion, are being blunted. For all the breathtaking advances of our time, the new
arena of world politics looks more like the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries than the second half of the twentieth, the Golden Age of the West.
When arms buy influence, economic strength trades at a discount. Unless
there is a mailed fist
beneath the white glove
of diplomacy, states To bestride the world as a heavy-
will not excel at power
weight—like the United States—
politics. Nor will the EU,
requires cracking the hard shells of
and then for reasons of
psychology rather than sovereignty, notably in matters of
lack of clout. Preceded defense and public finance.
by millionfold slaughter
in two world wars, seventy years under the strategic umbrella of the United
States have set in motion an unprecedented cultural transformation.
Once the Europeans were a race of warriors who conquered the four
corners of the world. But the millionfold slaughter that almost led to Europe’s
suicide in the twentieth century, not to speak of the industrial annihilation
of Jews and other peoples, may have cracked its collective soul. The spirit of
“Never again!” has overwhelmed the quest for booty, glory, and domination.
Heroism is out, discretion and pacifism are the better part of valor—and far
less costly to boot.
Maybe Tocqueville was right when he attributed to bourgeois society “that
coolness of understanding that renders men comparatively insensible to the
violent and poetical excitement of arms [and] quenches the military spirit.”
It is a “constant rule that among civilized nations the warlike passions will
become more rare and less intense in proportion as social conditions are
more equal.” The sage was writing about America, but his prediction fits
Western Europe to a T.
The signs abound. You have to look hard for oversized national flags flut-
tering above gas stations in Europe as they do in the United States. Once, an

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 99
 officer’s career was the quickest way to status and advancement in Europe.
Today, the military enjoys about as much prestige as the post office. Soldier-
ing is a job, not a national calling. Only France and Britain boast remnants
of an ancient warrior culture. Its values—honor, duty, self-sacrifice—have
dwindled in favor of civilian virtues like cooperation and compromise.

THE ESSENTIAL AMERICANS

How to re-establish moral worth in the face of an unspeakable past—con-
quest, colonialism, and exploitation, as the catechism of correctness has it?
Europe draws righteousness from its new incarnation as a moral superpower
that will study war no more. Setting an example as “light unto the nations,” it
will teach the world the wisdom of accommodation and rules-bound inter-
course and so transmute strife into win-win for all. That’s what “civilian
powers” do best; this is where the EU’s great comparative advantage pays off
most. Clausewitz, who preached the twinship of force and diplomacy, doesn’t
live here anymore.
For decades, acting
The United States isn’t doing the (and orating) in this
Europeans a favor by extending a manner was a marvelous
credible security guarantee. It’s doing business model, keep-
what interest and prudence demand. ing Europe out of harm’s
way and filling its coffers.
Today, the model is losing its luster because the cultural transformation
depended on a reliable American security guarantee. That pillar is not so
sturdy now. As Merkel puts it in the age of Trump, “we have to go some way
toward taking our destiny into our own hands.”
Well spoken. Yet Europe’s tragedy is the gulf between fabulous wealth and
feeble will, between its glorious past and a future now dimmed by the return
of power politics. The new threats are devaluing the EU’s abundant civilian
assets: trade and investment, suasion and cooptation. In the benign setting
of yore, the Union grew from six to twenty-eight nations. But it would take a
“United States of Europe” to play in the great-power league, where force is
the ultimate currency of clout.
To make Europe great again, the post-Brexit twenty-seven would have to
coalesce into a single state with a strong executive characterized by “deci-
sion, activity, secrecy, and dispatch,” as Alexander Hamilton famously argued
in The Federalist Papers. Alas, with their national histories dating back to the
days of Rome, the EU twenty-seven will not replicate the fusion of America’s
thirteen colonies in our lifetime.

100 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 Nor is time on their side, not with Putin pressing in and Trump threaten-
ing to move out. So it will help to buy some insurance by arming and training
a credible force embedded in NATO, history’s oldest alliance of free nations.
Why NATO? Cold-eyed analysis would impress on both Americans and Euro-
peans what a good deal the alliance has been.
For the Europeans, one big American umbrella is more reliable than lots
of little European ones, while a single European army remains a beautiful
dream. For the United States, it is all about being there. The North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, whose seventieth birthday is this month, has spared the
United States a remake of World Wars I and II, when it first hung back and
then had to pay with hundreds of thousands of fallen to restore the balance.
Staying in Europe after 1945 was a wondrous blessing. It is always more
economical to be in place than to have to fight your way back in. Try now to
dislodge the Russians from Syria.
The point is not to coddle Europe, but to stress America’s well-considered
interests. Squeezed by Russia and China, the United States would not want
to ditch Europe, not with its half billion people and the world’s second-largest
GDP. Even the greatest of powers will not thrive behind the walls of Fortress
America. Just like nature, international politics abhors a vacuum, and those
who wish America ill will be only too happy to fill it.
The United States would not be doing the Europeans a favor by continuing
to extend a credible guarantee. It would be doing what interest and prudence
demand in a world where Russia and China want to make America small
again. Without its older European cousins, the United States would be a
lonely giant with a limp. To let go of America’s largest strategic asset would
be an act of folly that would not even play in the long term in Trump’s red-
state redoubt.

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H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 101

AS IA

AS IA

Competence and
Confidence
“Strategic patience” in Asia has run its course.
Now we and our allies must prepare for whatever
comes next.

By H. R. McMaster

I
n East Asia, our free and open societies must re-enter arenas of
competition vacated after the end of the Cold War. We must also
demonstrate a much higher degree of strategic competence. As China
promotes a system of authoritarian capitalism while actively under-
mining our free and open societies, we must also demonstrate strategic
confidence—confidence in our principles and in our democratic institutions
and processes. Let’s focus on those three words—competition, competence,
and confidence—to think about how to cope with the significant challenges to
security and prosperity posed by China and North Korea.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse and at the end of
the Cold War, our free and open societies became complacent. Several flawed
assumptions about the nature of the post–Cold War world underpinned
American foreign policy and national security strategy. Many believed that
the collapse of the Soviet Union fit into an arc of history that guaranteed the
primacy of free and open systems over authoritarian and closed systems.
Others defined the emerging world order in aspirational terms: we would

H. R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution.

102 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

live in a world in which geopolitical competition was a phenomenon of the
past. The most optimistic predicted that a great-power condominium would
emerge in the post–Cold War period as international organizations fostered
cooperation to solve the world’s most pressing problems. And, drafting off
these winds of optimism, US policy toward China assumed that Beijing, after
being welcomed into global business and trade governance systems, would
liberalize, become a trusted partner, and welcome international businesses
into its immense market.
Unrealistic assumptions also affected our approach to North Korea, espe-
cially the belief that North Korea would change if we demonstrated “strategic
patience.” In a recent essay in the Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies,
Jinwook Choi observed that the North Korea nuclear crisis stems, in part,
from “wishful thinking regarding [North Korea’s] intentions” and “the failure
of the international community to speak with one voice on how to resolve it.”
I believe that today we are at the “end of the beginning” of a new era. And
the United States and the free and open societies of the world are lagging
because we have been too slow to abandon the wishful thinking and flawed
assumptions that have underpinned much of our foreign and economic policy
since the end of the Cold War. There is no arc of history that guarantees the
security and prosperity of our free and open societies.

NEW DANGERS
Geopolitical competition has returned. China’s land grab in the South China
Sea, in violation of international law, and its provocative behavior there and
elsewhere have created dangerous flashpoints and a high risk of military
confrontation. And even as China has succeeded economically because of
its integration into the global economy and membership in the World Trade
Organization, the Chinese Communist Party has not been a trusted partner.
Instead, the Chinese government has used mercantilist policies, the theft
and forced transfer of intellectual property, and heavy state subsidies for key
enterprises and industries to enrich itself at others’ expense.
China’s economic and security policies are integrated. For example, China
uses state profits to fund a significant military buildup, offers loans with
dubious terms for ports and other infrastructure in strategic locations
around the world, and then takes ownership of those same locations when
countries cannot service the debt. These debt-for-equity swaps appear to be
a deliberate feature of China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy. One Southeast
Asian leader compared Chinese loans to the “unequal treaties” that colonial
powers foisted upon China two centuries ago. Moreover, Beijing aims to

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 103

 dominate critical and emerging sectors of the global economy through the
purchase of technologies with state funds, overproduction and dumping of
goods to eliminate competition, forced transfer of intellectual property in
exchange for access to the Chinese market, and a sustained campaign of
industrial espionage.
And, while we all hope that Chairman
Kim Jong Un of North Korea is undergoing
a change of heart about nuclear weapons,
we must remain alert to the possibility
that his regime meant what it said on
numerous occasions: that Kim’s
nuclear arsenal would
constitute a

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

104 H O O V ER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

“treasured sword” designed to pry apart the alliance between the United
States and the Republic of Korea, by making America think twice about ever
coming to South Korea’s aid in time of war.
As we all know, Chairman Kim is the third in a succession of ultranational-
ist leaders in Pyongyang whose very legitimacy rests on the promise of “final
victory.” It’s no accident that Kim uttered the term “reunification” at least
eleven times in his 2018 New Year’s Day speech. We must consider that North
Korea may intend to hold on to its nuclear weapons
because they are instrumental to achieving
that final victory, which North Korean
propaganda clearly states is the reuni-
fication of North and South under the
Kim regime.
If we are to overcome these
challenges and take advantage of
opportunities such as those pre-
sented by the inter-Korean dia-
logue and the US–North Korean
talks, we must compete based on

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 105

a recognition of the world as it is, not as we might like it to be. This requires
a sober assessment of North Korean intentions. It also includes recognizing
Chinese Communist Party policies and practices as they are, not as we might
like to imagine them.

NEW COMPETENCIES
Competition, however, does not have to lead to confrontation. Indeed, if our
free and open societies are passive and complacent, confrontation will become
more likely as autocratic revisionist powers are emboldened and overreach.
Competition also entails communication—it is indeed good that Seoul and
Washington are talking with Pyongyang. And an honest dialogue with China
between governments and businesses will prove critical to convincing Chinese
leaders that China will benefit from behaving as a trusted partner and work-
ing to strengthen, rather than undermine, the international trade and busi-
ness system from which the Chinese people and the world have benefited.
That is what US officials mean when they cite the importance of competition.
To compete effectively, we have to improve our strategic competence,
especially our ability to integrate economic and security policy. It will be
important to work through international organizations such as the World
Trade Organization to address China’s unfair trade and economic practices.
The United Nations Security Council has been helpful in approving sanctions
in response to North Korea’s illegal nuclear weapons program, but it is past
time for like-minded nations to do more. We should expose China’s unfair
practices and refuse to bend to Chinese coercion. Succumbing to the lure of
easy money or paying for access to China’s market through the transfer of
intellectual property may generate profits in the near term, but it will com-
promise sovereignty and the long-term viability of industries.
And China and all responsible nations, recognizing the grave danger that a
nuclear-armed North Korea poses to the world, must refuse to relax sanc-
tions on North Korea until denuclearization.
A competent response to both North Korea’s nuclear program and Chinese
Communist Party policies that threaten security and prosperity requires a
high level of international cooperation. We must compete together, and we
must do so with confidence.
In recent years, experiences and the actions of strategic rivals have under-
mined the confidence of the United States and other free and open societies.
Those experiences include unanticipated difficulties encountered in what
were supposed to be fast, cheap, and efficient wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the 2008 financial crisis, and the inadequate international response to the

106 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

humanitarian and political catastrophe in the Middle East that began with
the Arab Spring and is now centered on the Syrian civil war. Russia and
China have taken advantage of, and worked to worsen, our loss of confi-
dence. Russia directs a sustained campaign of disinformation, propaganda,
and political subversion
against Europe and the
United States. China Confidence among nations that share
augments its form of eco- liberal democratic principles is vital
nomic aggression with
to preserving peace.
sophisticated influence
campaigns in the United States and across the globe.
To compete and respond competently to the threats to our free and open
societies, we might make a conscious effort to rebuild our confidence. We should
remember why Kim Il Sung decided to launch an invasion in June 1950. He did
so because he believed the South Korean people didn’t support their republic or
feel much solidarity with other democracies. He thought South Koreans would
put nationalism above their freedom. He was sure that once his troops took
Seoul, the rest of the country would welcome them with open arms. He also
thought America would not fight to preserve South Korea’s freedom.
It was a costly war that took the lives of too many Koreans, American
soldiers, and soldiers from other countries. But we remained confident in our
ability to prevail. My father was among the many veterans of that war. He
remained proud of his service in defense of freedom and the Korean people.

A TIME-TESTED ALLIANCE
Confidence in our principles and our free and open systems should not breed
complacency. I have seen in the news that some people say, “We don’t need to
station THAAD anti-missile batteries in South Korea because they protect
only the American troops.” They speak as if those American troops were
not there to protect South Korea. I also read that some South Koreans are
saying, “We shouldn’t fight, no matter what the North does.” In the 1950s we
fought a devastating war on this peninsula because the Pyongyang regime
thought the South lacked confidence and would not defend itself.
Some people seem to want to start an argument between friends that could
precipitate a breakup in the alliance that has prevented war on the peninsula
for the past sixty-five years. I assure you, America doesn’t want to keep any
country in a military alliance unwillingly. The partnership would then fail to
serve its purpose of deterring the enemy and keeping the peace. However, I
believe that most South Koreans remain committed to our alliance.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 107

 Making good on the opportunities associated with inter-Korean dialogue
and the US–North Korean talks will require a clear communication of confi-
dence to North Korea around three points:
»» Alignment between the Republic of Korea and the United States will
continue. Movement on inter-Korean relations cannot outpace concrete action
by North Korea to denuclearize. We must avoid past mistakes by adhering to
the joint pledge that there be no sanction relief absent the final, fully verified
denuclearization of North Korea. And together we should emphasize that
denuclearization would open the way to tremendous cooperation with North
Korea—if cooperation is what the North Korean regime wants.
»» The UN Security Council resolution obliges North Korean action, not
US and South Korean “confidence building measures” or other concessions.
»» Pyongyang has a fleeting opportunity in the alignment of four critical
constituencies prepared to support enhanced US–North Korean engage-
ment if North Korea denuclearizes: the US president, the Republican Party,
the Democratic Party, and the Republic of Korea. Our advice to Pyongyang
should be: do not lose this opportunity.
Even if we stay aligned and put forward our best effort, it is conceivable
that tension will increase. The North Korean program for weapons of mass
destruction is the issue most likely to cause conflict because it threatens not
only South Korea, Japan, and the United States but all nations. A nuclear
North Korea could collapse the nonproliferation regime in Asia and beyond,
and the North Korean regime has never developed a weapon or technology it
did not try to sell. It is for that reason that all nations, including China, must
make clear to the North that its nuclear program does not enhance secu-
rity—instead it makes North Korea vulnerable and would deprive Chairman
Kim of a tremendous opportunity for peace and prosperity.

Special to the Hoover Digest. This essay is adapted from a speech deliv-
ered at the 19th World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, South Korea.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Total

Volunteer Force: Lessons from the US Military on
Leadership Culture and Talent Management, by Tim
Kane. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

108 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 CHINA

CH I NA

The Empire
Strikes Back
Determined to hold all power, China is forcing its
minority Uighurs into re-education camps and
attacking their very culture. The Uighurs will not
go quietly.

By Michael R. Auslin

A
fter repeated denials, Chinese officials have finally admitted
to setting up internment camps in the far western province
of Xinjiang, where up to a million ethnic Uighurs, almost all of
whom are Muslim, are being held. Under China’s antiterrorism
law and “religious affairs regulation,” the government in the Xinjiang Autono-
mous Region publicly introduced the “Regulation on De-extremification.”
What it describes is a new gulag, where re-education and the suppression of
Uighur identity is its main goal.
There are approximately twenty-five million Muslims in China today, but
these draconian new laws in Xinjiang are aimed solely at the ethnic Uighurs,
of whom there are just over eleven million. Unlike the Hui, another major
Muslim ethnic group who have largely assimilated into Chinese society,
Uighurs have resisted intermarriage, speak their own Turkic language,
and have advocated for some level of autonomy, making them a target for

Michael R. Auslin is the Williams-Griffis Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the

Hoover Institution. He is the author of The End of the Asian Century: War,
Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region (Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2017).

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 109

 suppression. Over the decades, Beijing’s heavy-handed approach has helped
outside Islamist elements make inroads among Uighur youth and spurred
the formation of radical groups. As a result, the Uighurs have remained a
largely colonized people, and Xinjiang has become the center of Chinese
Muslim resistance to Beijing.
Uighur activists have conducted numerous violent attacks since 1990,
including bus bombings in Shanghai and Kunming, multiple sword and knife
attacks at train stations in major cities, and a car bombing in Tiananmen
Square, the symbolic center of China. Ties between Uighur radicals, previ-
ously known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and the Taliban
and Al-Qaeda are among the reasons Beijing has cracked down on them so
strongly.
It is undeniable that some Uighurs are extremists. But the new measures
introduced by the Chinese authorities do not just aim to prevent religious
violence. At first glance, many of the new regulations concern activities that
bedevil Western states,
such as the forced
China cannot allow successful inde- wearing of the burqa
pendence movements in any of its sub- in Muslim communi-
ordinate areas, for fear of contagion. ties; or which occur in
Islamist-run territories
around the Middle East, such as ethnic cleansing by forcing those of other
faiths out of their homes. Yet read a little further and the real objectives of
the regulations are soon revealed. In order to “contain and eradicate extremi-
fication,” the state will make “religion more Chinese . . . and actively guide
religion to become compatible with socialist society.” In other words, the goal
is to Sinicize Islam and make it serve the state.

POLICE STATE
To achieve this, those suspected of being extremists or being susceptible to
extremist ideology are interned in military-school-style camps, with regi-
mented daily schedules. The provincial regulation mandates Maoist-style
“ideological education, psychological rehabilitation and behavior correction”
and the use of informants throughout society. The totalitarian reach of the law
is shown by the fact that it is now illegal in Xinjiang to “reject or refuse public
goods and services such as radio and television.” Reminiscent of the Stalinist
era, it is now a crime simply to opt out of listening to state propaganda.
Xinjiang has become, in essence, a police state, controlled by a massive
paramilitary force; ubiquitous, intrusive surveillance, including advanced

110 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
 facial recognition technology; regular roundups of suspected radicals; and
a stifling of civil society. Sinification takes various forms, including cutting
short the dresses of Muslim women. More controversially, reports from Chi-
nese state media suggest mandatory “health examinations” in Xinjiang have
allowed the state to collect DNA from Uighurs, in order to build a genetic
database that will allow even tighter control. And then there are the intern-
ment camps.
To understand the driving motive behind the new laws, it is important to
remember that the People’s Republic of China is fundamentally an empire.
Over the centuries, China’s Han majority, which today makes up 91 percent
of the Chinese population, has pressured and actively suppressed ethnic
minorities. The Chinese Communist Party continued these assimilation-
ist policies as part of a
strategy for ruling one of
It is now a crime simply to opt out of the most linguistically and
listening to state propaganda. ethnically diverse polities
on earth. From Tibetans
to Tatars, and from Kazakhs to Uzbeks, today’s Chinese empire is built on
the control of dozens of minority groups and the tight monitoring of their
religions and cultures. Maintaining the integrity of the state is a top priority
for President Xi Jinping, second only to ensuring the party’s own survival,
and both aims are inextricably linked.
Uighurs portray themselves as freedom fighters, challenging Beijing for
their independence, little different from Tibetans or Taiwanese, other than
being ethnically distinct and Muslim. Any viable separatist movement in the
region alarms the central government, as other autonomy movements are
watching closely what happens in Xinjiang. If Xi relaxes his grip there, activ-
ists in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Tibet are sure to take advantage to press
their own claims.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

The Uighurs and Xinjiang pose another problem for the central government,
this one geopolitical. Xinjiang sits squarely along Beijing’s “One Belt, One
Road” (OBOR) corridor. Xi’s flagship foreign policy initiative, OBOR aims to
be a $1 trillion infrastructure development which will create land and mari-
time trade routes reaching all the way from China to Western Europe.
Xinjiang’s geostrategic location along the Belt and Road means it is the
access point to much of Central Asia. Just as important, Xinjiang contains
vast natural resources, with estimates of up to five billion barrels of oil and

112 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

up to thirteen trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Any effective resistance
to Chinese control over Xinjiang, let alone the formation of an independent
Islamic republic, would pose a huge threat to Beijing’s plans to increase its
influence throughout
Eurasia.
Ethnic separatism, The Uighurs have remained a largely
driven by religious radi- colonized people, and Xinjiang has
calization, is one of the become the center of Chinese Muslim
greatest fears of Xi and
resistance to Beijing.
his fellow rulers. As a
multiethnic empire, China cannot allow successful independence movements
in any of its subordinate areas, for fear of contagion. This political concern
is heightened by the transnational nature of the Islamist movement. Even
moderate Muslims in Xinjiang are perceived by Beijing as a threat, the lead-
ing edge of a radicalization movement that could challenge central control of
the strategic province as well as infect other Muslims in China and spill over
to other regions.
Xi will not soon ease his heavy-handed control over Xinjiang and its
Uighurs, and as a result is engendering more of the anti-Chinese sentiment
he is trying to stamp out. Such repression is becoming a hallmark of Xi’s rule
and is increasingly defining China’s direction over the next decade.

Reprinted by permission of the Spectator. © 2019 The Spectator (1828)

Ltd. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The War

that Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear
Deterrence, edited by George P. Shultz and James E.
Goodby. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 113

CH I NA

CH I NA

“Covert, Coercive,
or Corrupting”
Beijing has declared war—an information war. A
team of Hoover researchers sounds the alarm.

By Orville Schell and Larry Diamond

P
resident Trump insists that China
Key points
has been ripping off America for
»» China has ignored the
decades, but even if the two coun- principle of reciprocity for
tries manage to negotiate—and years.

honor—new terms for trade, basic reciprocity »» When China restricts

visas for US media compa-
will still be sorely lacking elsewhere in the rela-
nies or constricts public-
tionship and will continue to create tensions. diplomacy efforts, Wash-
Consider the stark imbalance in media ington should retaliate.

access. In the United States, Beijing has estab- »» The United States needs
to stop the hemorrhaging
lished both a radio network and a television of US technology through
network, which distribute state-controlled one-way deals with China.

programming to American audiences. China

also publishes newspapers and magazines

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations
at the Asia Society in New York. Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and is a
professor by courtesy of political science and sociology at Stanford University, as
well as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. They are co-chairs
of a Hoover Institution working group that recently published Chinese Influence
and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance, available for
download on www.hoover.org.

114 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

here in Chinese and English, Chinese websites are available to Americans
online, and the United States readily gives work visas to Chinese reporters,
who then feed content back to state-run propaganda organs at home.
By contrast, American media are not permitted to operate any television
or radio networks in China, and the government partially or completely
blocks the websites of most major US news organizations. The only Ameri-
can publications gener-
ally available focus on
such topics as lifestyle The idea of “engagement” was that if
and business, including the United States just kept interacting
Vogue, Elle, and special with China, the two countries would
“China editions” of find common ground.
Forbes and the Harvard
Business Review. The Chinese government also systematically blocks access
to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google.
As for life on the ground for US journalists, the veteran Washington
Post correspondent and author John Pomfret, who has spent decades
in China, told us: “I’ve been followed, tapped, taped, detained, and even
expelled. . . . Visas are denied or held up, sometimes for years. Interviews are
canceled at the last minute by ubiquitous ‘foreign affairs’ officers who work
to impede, not facilitate, news coverage. Chinese translators and fixers are
forced to report on all activities in their foreign bureaus or risk reprisals.”
Nor is this lack of reciprocity confined to the media, as we and a working
group of top China specialists show in a new report addressing these issues.
American scholars in China too often find themselves denied visas and
cut off from archives, libraries, fieldwork, and government officials, while
no such restrictions impede the work of their Chinese counterparts in the
United States, even those coming from think tanks sponsored by the gov-
ernment or the Communist Party. The Chinese government freely engages
American audiences and spreads its propaganda by buying expensive adver-
tising inserts in American newspapers, but it heavily constrains the public
diplomatic outreach of the United States in China.
At the same time, Chinese scientists and engineers obtain visas for
advanced study in the United States in fields such as semiconductors, robot-
ics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and gene editing that will increas-
ingly determine global economic leadership and military supremacy. There is
no equivalent American access to China’s most sensitive research.
Winston Lord, a former US ambassador to China and a contributor to our
report, suggested that the Chinese should heed a teaching from Confucius.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 115

“DO NOT IMPOSE”: A statue of the Chinese sage Confucius is polished before
the opening of an exhibition hosted by the Confucius Institute for Scotland,
based at the University of Edinburgh. The institutes are part of a worldwide
campaign of public diplomacy by China, an effort Beijing does not allow in its
own country. [David Cheskin—ZUMA Press]

When asked, “Is there a single word that can serve as a guide to conduct
throughout life?” the sage replied: “The one word is perhaps the word shu
(meaning ‘reciprocity’ or ‘forgiveness’). Do not impose on others what you
would not want them to impose on you.”

FOND HOPES FOR A “PEACEFUL RISE”

To a growing number of Americans, pushback against China’s lack of reci-
procity is both justified and overdue. But how did we reach this point, and
why has the United States accepted such unequal treatment across so many
key areas of the relationship for so long?
Both of us came of age politically in the era after Richard Nixon and Hen-
ry Kissinger made their breakthrough trip to China in 1972 and forged new
relations with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. It allowed many of us to dare
imagine that the United States and China could “peacefully coexist,” even
cooperate, despite their different political systems, values, and cultures.

116 H O O V ER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping not only unexpectedly returned
from political exile to lead China but soon went to Washington to normalize
relations. At the same time, he pressed forward a tectonic agenda of prag-
matic “reform and opening up” that gave rise to the notion of “engagement.”
The idea was that if the United States just kept interacting with China—
doing more business, facilitating more educational and cultural exchanges—
the two countries would find common ground, and China would slowly evolve
into a more open society.
For as long as China was progressing toward a more rules-based and
seemingly democratic future, Americans could justify staying engaged with
a Marxist-Leninist one-party state. The bloodbath in Tiananmen Square in
1989 interrupted such dreams, but Deng and his successor, Jiang Zemin, still
managed to rescue the
economic reform project
and even negotiated China continues to keep whole sec-
China’s entry into the tors of its economy off limits to US
World Trade Organiza- businesses.
tion in 2001.
While the hope of China as a more responsible “global stakeholder” had
life, American policy makers were willing to cut the country’s communist
leaders some slack on such issues as human rights, Tibet, and Taiwan. Prog-
ress might be slow, they rationalized, but as long as China was committed to
a “peaceful rise,” engagement still seemed like a sound bet.
What began upending this bargain was China’s turn over the past
decade in a more mercantilist, militarily aggressive, and politically
authoritarian direction, a trend that has only gained momentum since
the ascent of Xi Jinping in 2012. China continues to keep whole sectors
of its economy off limits to US businesses, while expropriating American
intellectual property and circumscribing the activities of American civil
society organizations, religious groups, media outlets, think tanks, and
academics. This glaring—and now growing—absence of reciprocity has
caused a range of Americans involved in US-China relations to reconsider
the viability of engagement.
The Chinese have long decried the “unequal treaties” forced on their coun-
try by Britain, France, the United States, and other colonial powers during
the nineteenth century. One might think that this history would give their
leaders greater sensitivity to the inequities now destabilizing relations with
the United States. Yet they still seem far away from understanding the peril-
ous nature of the unbalanced situation they have created.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 117

 HOW TO PUSH BACK
What to do? As a practical matter, if China is going to restrict visas for
American journalists and scholars, the United States should take this into
account when weighing visa access for Chinese media executives, and even
for journalists and scholars. If CNN and the Wall Street Journal cannot freely
broadcast and publish
in China, the ability of
“I’ve been followed, tapped, taped, Chinese companies to
detained, and even expelled.” invest in American media
and cultural enterprises—
including movie studios and theater chains—should be more closely scruti-
nized. If China heavily circumscribes US public-diplomacy efforts in China,
it should have implications for the scope of travel and activities allowed to
Chinese diplomats in the United States. Finally, America should redouble
its resolve to find and fund innovative means of disseminating independent
news and ideas in China.
Technology transfer in sensitive fields is now largely a one-way street. The
United States needs to stop the bleeding away of its technological prowess by
helping to defend American corporations against the appropriation of their
intellectual property. Visa applications by Chinese scientists and engineers
seeking advanced study and research in areas that touch on national security
should be more closely examined. At a minimum, the United States can stop
granting visas to Chinese scientists and engineers sponsored by or working
for the People’s Liberation Army.
Getting China to agree to a new level of fairness and reciprocity may be
exceedingly difficult and even create some risks, but it is the only path to a
healthier, more durable relationship between the two countries.

Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2019 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

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

118 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 CHINA

CH I NA

Stop, Thieves
“Trade war” is the wrong description for our clash
with China. Instead, it’s a campaign to halt the
stealing of American technology.

By Martin Feldstein

T
he current conflict between the United States and China is
not a trade war. Although the United States has a large trade
deficit with China, that is not why it is imposing high tariffs on
imports from China and threatening to increase them further.
The purpose of those tariffs is to induce China to end its policy of stealing US
technology.
The Chinese government refers to the conflict as a trade war because it
hopes that if it buys large quantities of American products, Washington will
end the tariffs. The Chinese negotiators have recently offered to buy enough
US products to reduce the trade deficit to zero by 2024. Tellingly, the US
negotiators have rejected that as a way to end the dispute.
The United States wants China to stop requiring American firms that
seek to do business in China to have a Chinese partner and to share their
technology with that partner. That policy is explicitly forbidden by World
Trade Organization rules, which China has been obliged to respect since
it joined the WTO in 2001. The Chinese deny that they are violating the
rule, arguing that US firms are not being forced to share technology: they
do so voluntarily to access the Chinese market and Chinese production

Martin Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the George F. Baker
Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and president emeritus of the Na-
tional Bureau of Economic Research.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 119

 opportunities. But American firms regard China’s behavior as a form of
extortion.
The United States also wants China to stop using cyberespionage to steal
technology and other industrial secrets from American companies. Chinese
president Xi Jinping agreed to end such digital theft of US industrial tech-
nology after he met with
President Obama in 2015.
US tariffs are clearly having an effect Unfortunately, the agree-
on China. ment reached at the time
was very narrow, refer-
ring only to theft by both governments. Although the agreement did lead to a
temporary reduction in cybertheft of industrial technology, cyberattacks on
US companies, possibly carried out by Chinese state-owned industries and
other sophisticated organizations, have increased again in recent years.
The Chinese use the stolen technology to compete with US firms in China
and in other parts of the world. The US trade representative recently esti-
mated that this technology theft costs the US economy $225 billion to $600
billion per year. And the FBI has asserted that China’s theft of American
technology is the most severe threat to US national security.
Likewise, a lengthy report on the US-China conflict by the US Chamber of
Commerce and the American Chamber of Commerce in China emphasized
the problem of technology theft. The report made no reference at all to the
trade balance. That, no doubt, is because the authors understand the basic
economic fact that the
overall US global trade
The United States wants China to imbalance is the result of
stop forcing US firms to share their economic conditions in
technology with Chinese partners. the United States—the
excess of investment over
savings. If the Chinese bought enough US goods to eliminate the bilateral
imbalance, the US imbalance would merely shift to other countries without
reducing the overall imbalance.
The US tariffs are clearly hurting the Chinese economy. The Chinese
stock market is down substantially and China’s economic growth has slowed.
Annual real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2018
dropped to 4 percent. The Chinese authorities are making statements
signaling their eagerness to conclude an agreement with the United States
to stop the economic slowdown and reverse the decline in the stock market.
The White House has also made positive statements about the negotiations

120 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

because doing so appears to boost the US stock market, but no progress has
yet been made in dealing with the fundamental problem of technology theft.
The US government has no desire to stop China’s economic growth or the
growth of its high-tech industries. But stealing technology is wrong. It has
gone on for too long and should not be allowed to continue.

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

org). © 2019 Project Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Puzzles,

Paradoxes, Controversies, and the Global Economy,
by Charles Wolf Jr. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 121

CH I NA

CH I NA

The Door Is
Already Open
A strong China can be a peaceable China.

By Elizabeth Cobbs

T
oday, China’s success often prompts gloom in the West. Yet it
shouldn’t. In fact, it’s what the West has always wanted, and
reiterating this principle strengthens our hand.
Britain and the United States have long supported the devel-
opment of a stronger, more prosperous China. This strategy has actually
promoted a more peaceable world order in the past, and could serve us far
better today than the confrontational approach to China that President
Trump has adopted.
The tale begins with the Opium Wars in 1839 and 1856, the nadir of rela-
tions between East and West. With the invention of steamships, the Royal
Navy took advantage of China’s weakness to force open its famously closed
market. In flowed opium and other products that allowed Western nations to
improve their chronic trade disadvantage.
Great Britain did not then colonize the giant nation, an aberrant choice for
a Western colonizer. China’s size made it a lot to swallow and Queen Victoria
already had a full plate. More important, the British did not want to take
China. They wanted to trade with it.

Elizabeth Cobbs is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and holds the Mel-
bern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. Her latest
book is The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers (Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2017).

122 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 Economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo had articulated theories
of free trade that guided British policy away from mercantilism over the
course of the nineteenth century. A functional, sovereign China could be a
useful partner. So instead of creating a closed sphere, Britain devised the
“open door” policy. It collected a low tariff from foreign traders in Chinese
ports, scrupulously turned the receipts over to the imperial government,
and advocated most-favored-nation treaties that encouraged equal access to
China for all nations.
This was the beginning of the so-called “century of humiliation,” when for-
eigners meddled in the internal affairs of the Chinese. But with the alterna-
tive being a complete loss of sovereignty for China, it wasn’t a bad bargain.
The “unequal treaties,” as they are known by historians, bought time for a
government struggling to stay on its feet.
At the end of the nineteenth century, China again came under pressure,
this time by France, Germany, Japan, and Russia, all seeking exclusive slices
of China for themselves. Now it was the United States, a growing power,
that stepped up and issued its own “Open Door Notes” in 1899 and 1900. The
United States advocated a policy of free trade and a guarantee of Chinese
sovereignty, reflecting an American tradition of opposition to further Euro-
pean colonization that dated back to the Monroe Doctrine.
The United States went further yet at the Washington Naval Conference
in 1921, renouncing the
unequal treaties with
China and organizing a No Western nation has ever had a
nine-power guarantee of major war with China.
sovereignty despite the
Chinese government’s continuing disarray. The complete loss of autonomy
experienced by India and most of Africa never happened in China—until
Japan tried to colonize its weak neighbor. In retaliation for British and
American resistance to this brutal process, Japan attacked Hawaii and
Hong Kong.
After World War II, the United States nominated China for a permanent
seat on the United Nations Security Council with the hope that it would sta-
bilize, strengthen, and become a great power. Today, that promise is fulfilled.
China has not become a democracy, but this is not something any country
may impose on or require of another, although outsiders have hoped for this
outcome. Even so, China has become strong enough to compete economically
and defend itself militarily, which is an extraordinary improvement in its abil-
ity to serve its people compared with preceding centuries.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 123

GREAT POWERS: A lithograph shows the 1900 attack on Beijing Castle during
the Boxer Rebellion. Western and allied soldiers attacked Chinese forces who
had been besieging foreigners in the citadel. The end of the nineteenth cen-
tury was a time when France, Germany, Japan, and Russia all sought exclusive
slices of China, while the United States pushed for an “open door” policy of
free trade and Chinese sovereignty. [Library of Congress]

So instead of fretting about China’s growing dominance in manufacturing,

envying the optimism of its people, or initiating a trade war over China’s rule-
breaking, Western leaders should take credit for their historical support for
China’s success while holding it to its agreements.
All nations act in ways others find objectionable. Today, many worry that
admitting China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 was a
mistake. They fret that multilateral institutions are increasingly useless for
forcing strong nations like China to follow the rules of international com-
merce. But the mistake wasn’t admitting China to the WTO. Rather, it has
been not using the WTO—and other multinational institutions—enough.
In fact, a recent study by the Cato Institute reveals China’s good record of
WTO compliance. Since 2004, twenty-seven formal complaints have been

124 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

leveled against China. Five cases remain pending and twenty-two have been
resolved. In all but one, where the matter wasn’t pursued, China modified its
behavior.
But, since Donald Trump became president, the United States has brought
no new complaints against China in the WTO. Instead, the administration
has tried to punish
China unilaterally.
Although this tech- After World War II, the United States
nique is peaceable nominated China for a permanent seat
compared with the
on the United Nations Security Council,
nineteenth-century
hoping it would stabilize, strengthen,
methods employed in
the Opium Wars, the and become a great power.
impulse is the same:
to fix a problem with brute force rather than diplomacy. Today it hurts the
economies of both nations.
Despite its enormous size, China is a country with which no Western
nation has ever had a major war or needs to. Bully China, and it will bully
back. Give respect, get respect.
Under Xi Jinping, China is more authoritarian than it was ten years ago.
That’s a pity, but it’s not our problem to resolve. While progress is halting,
only the Chinese can make it. When they do, we should applaud. Then pull
out the rulebook.

Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2019 Washington Post

Co. All rights reserved.

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
visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 125

T H E MI DDL E E AST

T H E MI DDL E E AST

The Road from

Damascus
The Trump administration’s timing may be
questionable, but the pullout of US forces from
Syria is not.

By Thomas H. Henriksen

P
resident Trump’s abrupt announcement in December that he
would yank US military forces from their fight against the
Islamic State in Syria plunged the American foreign policy
establishment into near-hysteria. The White House, appar-
ently having second thoughts about a hasty withdrawal, extended the
timetable. US military officials now project a withdrawal by the end of
April.
There is no need to retreat Dunkirk-fashion from the Syrian quagmire. But
withdrawal is inevitable.
The panicked reaction to Trump’s approach from both sides of the
congressional aisle, think-tank types, and the news media deserves brief
comment before reflecting on the possible consequences of leaving the war-
torn country. What made the anti-pullout reaction so noteworthy was the
lack of irony among the usual pundits. The mainstream media, as always,
were against Trump, no matter what his policy. Many foreign policy doves,
however, abruptly assumed a hawkish, pro-war stance.

Thomas H. Henriksen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

126 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 Even former president Barack Obama had noted in 2013 that “this war
(against terrorism), like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s
what our democracy demands.”
So shrill were the Trump critics that one sensed a desire to reverse
the intent of the original war powers resolution enacted at the end of the
Vietnam War by Congress over President Nixon’s veto. That act seeks
to curb presidential war making that lacks authorization from Capitol
Hill. Over the years, members of the legislative branch have indeed chal-
lenged presidents for what they deem unauthorized military actions, such
as President Reagan’s deployment of troops in Lebanon and Grenada,
and President Clinton’s dispatch of sixteen thousand troops to Haiti to
enforce its transition to civilian rule or twenty thousand peacekeeping
soldiers to Bosnia.
In today’s man-bites-dog scenario, the president wants to pull out military
forces while his critics want to persist in an unpopular and increasingly
purposeless conflict.

WHY WE’RE IN SYRIA

Obama’s limited intervention into the complex Syrian civil war was premised
solely on the mushrooming Islamic State threat. America’s forty-fourth presi-
dent evinced little interest in advancing human rights or democracy in the
fragmenting and ruined country.
Since then, the US incursion has erased the Islamic State’s territorial
gains and brought it to the brink of extinction. The current Syrian config-
uration, with its rivalry
among the warring par-
ties, will probably not Our defense structure needs new
endure as the conflict weapons, stronger forces, and a hard
against the Islamic look at priorities.
State winds down com-
pletely. Syria’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, will try to recover all the lands
held by his local opponents. Turkey might invade Syria to destroy the
Syrian Kurds who are linked to Kurdish terrorists inside Turkey. Iran will
push for wider influence. The Pentagon’s two thousand troops cannot halt
Iran from capitalizing on its singular role in buttressing Assad’s regime
during its darkest days.
Which brings us back to an American military extraction from Syria.
The Pentagon is working to implement Trump’s call for redeployment
out of Syria. Additionally, US commanders are seeking the White House’s

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 127

 approval for a proposal to allow Kurdish militias to keep weapons that the
Pentagon furnished. The military brass and civilian experts see an abandon-
ment of Syria as an unnecessary betrayal of the Kurdish forces, which led the
fight to destroy Islamic State in northeastern Syria. Realistically, regaining
antitank rockets, mortars, and armored vehicles is impossible in a conflict
zone.
Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member and ally of the Unit-
ed States, considers the Kurdish militias merely an extension of a decades-
old insurgency within its southeastern quadrant. Ankara yearns to destroy
the Kurds and their independence cause.
Washington would be better served to maintain its alliance with the Kurds,
for two reason. First, it ill serves America’s global standing to betray a long-
time ally. Second, Washington needs bases in the region. Military hubs within
the Kurdish populations inside Syria and even Iraq would afford the Penta-
gon the capability of striking back not only at terrorist elements but also at
Iran—America’s most implacable adversary in the greater Middle East.
The Kurds, the region’s odd man out, are natural allies of the United
States. Only the Israelis hold a similar distinction, and the two are aligned
openly and secretly.

FOCUS ON THE BIG PICTURE

President’s Trump’s instincts to lessen US military obligations among
backwater wars—in the face of looming big-power threats from China and
Russia—are correct.
Deterring and poten-
President Trump wants to withdraw tially even fighting those
military forces. His critics want to per- two revanchist nations
sist in an unpopular and increasingly demands an American
purposeless conflict. strategy different from
the US counterterror-
ism campaigns being waged in Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries. Our
defense structure needs new weapons and strengthened forces. A pell-mell
retreat from Syria, as well as Afghanistan, could of course result in chaos
in the immediate term. Even so, this cannot postpone the inevitability of a
pullback from distant insurgencies.
Competing interests in Syria render the neighborhood as stable as a house of
cards. The United States lacks the resources to reconcile and democratize this
violence-prone arena, as it did in post–World War II Germany and Japan—the
dream examples of many in the international relations establishment.

128 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 It is possible that Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus will experience a falling
out among their three cutthroat dictatorships, which managed to cooper-
ate to preserve Assad’s rule. With the American military presence gone, the
sharks may turn on each other. But there is no guarantee.
Meanwhile, America will still have friends and allies in near proximity to
Syria whom it must continue to keep secure. In the wake of a Syrian leave-
taking, more effort will be needed for the defense and well-being of Israel,
Jordan, Egypt, and the friendly Persian Gulf states against the machinations
and subversion of Iran.

Reprinted by permission of The Hill (www.thehill.com). © 2019 Capitol

Hill Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Eyes,

Ears, and Daggers: Special Operations Forces
and the Central Intelligence Agency in America’s
Evolving Struggle against Terrorism, by Thomas H.
Henriksen. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 129

 CA LI F OR N I A

CAL I FORNIA

Scorched Earth
Wildfires last year destroyed thousands of
homes and cost dozens of lives, and California’s
environmental policies bear some of the
responsibility. The Golden State needs less red
tape and smarter land management.

By Richard A. Epstein

L
ast year, California was ravaged by two of
the deadliest fires in its history: the Camp Key points
fire north of Sacramento and the Woolsey »» Too much empha-
sis on fire preven-
fire in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties. tion led, paradoxi-
The toll from these disasters included dozens dead, cally, to far worse
fires.
the destruction of thousands of homes, and seriously
»» A series of legal
unhealthy air even as far as the San Francisco Bay
rulings shifted the
Area, where the pollution closed some schools and environmental
led to the postponement of many events, including movement in the
wrong direction.
the “Big Game” between Cal and Stanford, which
»» Focused, well-bal-
was delayed by several weeks. anced policies are
Former California governor Jerry Brown pro- the antidote to the
misguided environ-
claimed that climate change deniers are “definitely
mental policies of
contributing” to the onslaught of new fires. The fifty years ago.
best evidence, however, says otherwise. Global

Richard A. Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of the steering committee for Hoover’s Working Group
on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity. He is also the Laurence A.
Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer
at the University of Chicago.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 139

 temperature increase has been nil over the past twenty or so years, notwith-
standing the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Similarly,
the repeated claims that we have had more unstable global climate patterns
within that period is likewise false. According to Professor David B. South of
Auburn University, “data suggest that extremely large megafires were four
times more common before 1940” than today, even though carbon dioxide
levels were lower.
Local variables have transformed California far more dramatically than cli-
mate change. Thanks to a large influx of new residents to California in recent
years, more homes have been built close to wildlands, as happened in the
now-torched town of Paradise, where the many homes burnt to the ground
were quite literally in
harm’s way. As explained
When a court threw open the door to in the Wall Street Journal,
costly, misguided lawsuits, the judge an accumulation of dead
looked forward approvingly to “a wood, coupled with too
flood of new litigation.” much new growth, sty-
mied the efficient growth
of healthy trees that are better able to resist fires.
Every bit as important is the major change in the philosophy of land use
management. Much of the forest land in California is now owned by the state
and federal governments. These lands have proved far more vulnerable
to forest fires than properties owned by private groups. Private lands are
managed with the goals of conservation and production. The management of
public lands, by contrast, has been buffeted by legislative schemes driven by
strong ideological commitments. Writing last year, Republican congressman
Tom McClintock noted that his air inspections revealed a distressing pat-
tern: “The [privately] managed forests are green, healthy, and thriving. The
neglected federal forests are densely overcrowded and often scarred by fire
because we can’t even salvage the fire-killed timber while it still has value.”

COLLABORATION PUSHED ASIDE

But why? The answer harks back to the onset of the environmental move-
ment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was broad agreement that
something had to be done about the rising threats of air and water pollution.
But the means chosen to address this vital mission resulted in federal and
state statutes that quickly went badly awry.
Two key federal statutes illustrate the dimensions of the basic problem:
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970 and the Endangered

140 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 Species Act (ESA) of 1973. These statutes have overlapping purposes. NEPA
has commonly been called a “procedural” statute whose main purpose is to
“encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environ-
ment” by taking steps to “prevent or elimi-
nate damage to the environment,” and
“to use all practicable means” to achieve
these efforts. NEPA required “all
agencies of the federal government”
to prepare detailed environmental
impact statements to implement
that mission.
NEPA was originally
conceived as a device to
encourage collabora-
tion among govern-
ment officials and
various public

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 141

 and private groups to achieve its ends. But in 1971, Judge J. Skelly Wright of
the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals added a new dimension to
the equation in Calvert Cliffs’ Coordinating Committee v. United States Atomic
Energy Commission, which held that in light of NEPA’s strong environmental
mission, any private party could bring an action in federal court to review
any administrative approval of a proposed project. He then celebrated this
development in no uncertain terms: “These cases are only the beginning of
what promises to become a flood of new litigation—litigation seeking judicial
assistance in protecting our natural environment.”
That judicial maneuver transformed the statute. Most parties did not want
to sue to block projects. It was only the activist environmental groups with
the strongest commitment that came forward. And when they did, there
was no longer a collaborative process that involved parties on all parts of the
political spectrum. Now the sole party before the court was the group most
determined to see the project or activity stopped.
Delay was always on their side. The additional time could financially wipe
out the private parties, whose projects were thrown into limbo. To make mat-
ters worse, the Supreme Court, in a 1983 case, Motor Vehicle Manufacturers
Association v. State Farm, insisted that in each case the reviewing court must
take a “hard look” at the proposed project to see that it conformed in every
respect with the substantive law. In most cases, any slip-up—a few of which
are highly likely in any comprehensive assessment—meant the process had
to be restarted with a supplemental environmental analysis. The whole mis-
guided process insisted
that all negative aspects
Court decisions have scuttled the of a project be evaluated
original ideas of cooperation and before any work on the
trade­-offs in environmental law. project could be done; in
so doing, environmental
law departed from the far more sensible common-law rules that grant an
injunction against certain activities only in the case of actual or imminent
harm. This sound approach allowed for project defects to be repaired during
the course of work, after all parties had acquired far greater knowledge of
the source of environmental concerns and their possible remedies.

TOO MUCH LEGAL DEADWOOD

The aggressive reach of NEPA is compounded by the high-level ambitions
of ESA, which requires all federal departments and agencies to “seek to
conserve endangered and threatened species and . . . utilize their authorities

142 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

in furtherance of the purposes of this act,” often by the designation of “criti-
cal habitat.” Critical habitat designation creates a weak system of private
property rights, and its validity as a matter of federal administrative law is in
dispute.
The successful management of any complex environmental system
requires complicated tradeoffs between various objectives like the preserva-
tion of diverse species, fire prevention, the construction of dams and water-
ways, and the harvesting of valuable timber. But any tempered approach
of balancing costs and
benefits of environ-
mental regulations was Since one key ruling, only the groups
effectively scuttled by most determined to see a project
the Supreme Court in stopped have been going to court.
Tennessee Valley Author-
ity v. Hill (1978), which took the position that the recent discovery of a new
endangered fish species, the snail darter, took priority over the completion of
the Tellico Dam, which was in the final stages of construction. The notion of
trade-offs was pushed emphatically to the back burner.
The combination of ESA and NEPA shifted the environmental movement
in the wrong direction. One result was, as Congressman McClintock noted,
an 80 percent reduction in the number of trees that were harvested and
sold on public lands in California and a reduction in the number of operating
sawmills there from one hundred and forty-nine in 1981 to twenty-seven in
2017. The added layers of bureaucratic oversight introduced state and federal
permit requirements before any new activity on land, such as logging, could
begin. The upshot of this change was that management questions, especially
on public lands, moved from managers who had local knowledge of the situ-
ation to bureaucrats in distant places who lacked it. Those bureaucrats also
tended to think in the same absolutist terms that informed the interpretation
of both NEPA and ESA in the courts: that preserving the environment was
the foremost goal no matter how strong the competing interests.
So began the restraint on the cutting of trees and the clearing of deadwood
and underbrush. At no point was the process guided by the insight that pro-
phylactic measures today might prevent greater environmental destruction
tomorrow. So, by preventing, for example, strategic burns that might protect
vulnerable sites, environmental policies created a situation in which minor
events, such as a spark from a power line or a stray cigarette butt, could
cause disasters in the form of large-scale loss of life and destruction of prop-
erty, coupled with thick blankets of pollution that endanger health even many

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 143

 miles away. Meanwhile, California and the federal government take immense
steps to stop tailpipe emissions, which at their worst did not cause a fraction
of the pollution that the forest fires have been creating throughout the state.
The overdue deci-
sion to rethink the
By preventing strategic burns, environ- logging policies in state
mental policies created conditions in and national forests is
which even minor events—a spark from welcome, but it is only
a power line or a stray cigarette butt— a first step. Statutes
could cause large-scale disasters. like NEPA and ESA are
filled with procedural
and substantive mistakes that should be rethought from the ground up, with
a suitable dose of modesty. Go after pollution; introduce sound management
policies; pay for the condemnation of critical habitat; don’t fret about global
warming. Focused, well-balanced policies are the effective antidote to the
grandiose, but misguided, environmental policies of fifty years ago.

Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-

ideas), a Hoover Institution online journal. © 2019 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Keeping

the Lights on at America’s Nuclear Power Plants, by
Jeremy Carl and David Fedor. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

144 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 CA LI F OR N I A

CAL I FORNIA

Red Ink in the

Golden State
California owes hundreds of billions of dollars in
pension obligations it can’t meet. Hoover fellow
Joshua D. Rauh says the overpromising needs to
stop—now.

By Clifton B. Parker

J
oshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a pro-
fessor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business,
suggests that governments in California need to either offer more
modest pension benefits—and fund those much more conservative-
ly—or start putting public employees into defined-contribution plans.
An economist, Rauh studies corporate investment, business taxation, gov-
ernment pension liabilities, and investment management. He recently wrote
about California’s pension situation for a Hoover Institution white paper and
discussed the subject in a PolicyEd video (https://policyed.org).
Rauh was recently interviewed about the issue.

Clifton B. Parker: How critical is the pension situation in California?

Joshua D. Rauh: The gap between what public pension funds in California
have saved up for public-employee pensions and the value of what is owed

Joshua D. Rauh is a senior fellow and director of research at the Hoover Insti-
tution, and the Ormond Family Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s
Graduate School of Business. Clifton B. Parker is director of public policy com-
munications at the Hoover Institution.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 145

to public employees is $769 billion, or more than $60,000 per California
household.
It is as though each household is carrying around a credit card balance
of $60,000 that is growing each year. At some point in the future, the gov-
ernment will make us pay, because the public-employee pensions must be
paid. How will the government make us pay? Either through higher taxes or
through the cutting of core public services.
Think about the essential public services that citizens pay for through
taxes and fees—like safety and education. Going forward, we’ll have fewer
resources available to pay for those actual services because taxpayer money
will increasingly be burdened with paying the pensions of the people who
performed those jobs in the past.
Another way to see the problem is that as of now, around 10 percent of all
public revenue generated in the state of California and its municipalities goes
to fund public-employee pensions. That sounds like a lot, but the real prob-
lem is that even this amount is not adequate to stabilize the $60,000-per-
household debt to the public employees! A contribution rate that would keep
the debt from rising would amount to more than 21 percent of every dollar of
public revenue generated within the state of California.

Parker: Why are assumptions about future pension returns often highly
uncertain?

Rauh: They used to be much more certain because pension funds used to
invest primarily in safe securities such as government bonds. US Treasury
bonds in the 1990s could generate 6 to 7 percent per year returns with a high
degree of safety. Now they generate less than 3 percent per year. State and
local governments have responded to this change over time by shifting their
asset allocation increasingly to riskier securities—the stock market, for one,
but also alternative assets such as private equity, venture capital, real estate,
and hedge funds. Overall, around 75 percent of every dollar in public-employ-
ee pension portfolios is invested in one of these risky asset classes. While the
pension funds typically assume they’re going to earn around 7.5 percent per
year in these investments, the fact is that the returns that might be earned
on these securities are highly uncertain, even over long periods of time.
Some people say, “Everything will be fine—the stock market and profes-
sional investors always do well enough over the long term.” That’s not what
the principles of finance say. We know that in eras where the stock market
has done well, it is because those returns were compensation for risk—for
the possibility of bad outcomes that we got lucky and avoided. Right now,

146 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

pension funds are taking a great deal of risk in order to keep their return
targets up. There’s no guarantee that it will go well, and in fact the funds are
more likely to fall substantially short of their targets than to achieve them.

Parker: What should the state and other entities in California do about their
pension problems?

Rauh: This problem is so blocked by political special interests and public-

employee unions. That said, I like to think about what I would advise a friend
who has racked up $60,000 in credit card debt that keeps growing every year
because he’s investing in risky assets that aren’t generating the returns he’s
hoping for. I would tell my friend that the first thing he needs to do is stop
the behavior that is leading to the growth in the credit card debt. In this case,
that behavior is promising public employees pensions without setting aside
sufficient funds to pay for them, and hoping that the stock market or private
equity investments will bail everyone out. That has to stop.
So governments need to either begin promising more modest pension ben-
efits that they fund much more conservatively or, failing that, they need to
put public employees into defined contribution plans, which are more like the
benefits private economy employees have. This won’t make the $769 billion
debt go away, but it will stop it from growing, and for a state like California it
is the explosive growth of this debt that should be more frightening than its
absolute level.

Parker: Is pension reform under way or being considered in California?

Rauh: Our previous governor, Jerry Brown, knew that pensions were a big
problem. In 2011, the first year of his second turn as governor, he proposed
a twelve-point pension overhaul. The California state legislature passed
some of these points, particularly those that affect new hires. These new
members of the workforce will face higher retirement ages, and there will be
more sharing of costs between them and their municipal employers. Unfor-
tunately, the true pension costs are far higher than the costs as reflected in
current budgets, which is the part that would be shared. It’s like my offering
to share costs with you in advance of your taking me out to dinner at a very
fine restaurant—but my contribution is based only on the expected cost of a
hamburger at a fast-food joint.
Other points in Governor Brown’s plan were passed but are currently
being litigated, such as the limitations against pension spiking—the practice
under which some public employees artificially inflate compensation in the
years before retirement to set themselves up for a higher lifetime payment on

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 147

the taxpayer dime. Believe it or not, many public employees assert that they
have a right to such practices.
These employees contend that the body of precedent informally called
the California Rule gives public employees a right to whatever benefit was
available to them on their initial day of employment, including the right to
manipulate the compensation that determines their lifetime pension benefit.
Recent appeals court decisions have upheld employees’ right to spike, but the
California Supreme Court has now taken up the issue.
While these attempts are better than nothing, they fall far short of what is
needed to stop the looming fiscal crisis that faces the state.

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

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

148 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 CA LI F OR N I A

CAL I FORNIA

Newsom Laces
Up His Shoes
California’s new governor is chasing a national
profile. By taking the lead on immigration, he
could earn attention and praise—or fail miserably.

By Bill Whalen

I
f you’re Gavin Newsom and fresh off a landslide victory in the Golden
State, you make staff choices, get cozy with the new crop of lawmak-
ers, and “get under the hood” of the budget process. Unlike in Wash-
ington, where a new president walks into a federal fiscal cycle that’s
begun a month before the election, Governor Newsom got to introduce his
own state spending plan, with a fiscal deadline of summer.
The governor has kept making campaign promises—for example, visiting
more-conservative Fresno to convince the locals that he won’t turn his back
on that less-welcoming stretch of California’s electorate. (Despite earning
nearly 62 percent of the November vote, Newsom lost six of the eight coun-
ties that make up the Central Valley.)
There are hints about how the incoming governor will handle matters
differently from his predecessor. Newsom dropped one such hint during his
Fresno visit, suggesting he might get more involved than former governor
Jerry Brown in the nation’s immigration conversation. (Newsom’s exact

Bill Whalen is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover
Institution and the host of Area 45, a Hoover podcast devoted to the policy av-
enues available to America’s forty-fifth president.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 149

 [Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

150 H O O V ER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

words: “I think this state has been missing in action a bit. . . . We need to
assert ourselves.”)

CHOICES T HREE
Here, Newsom has at least three options, if he wants to depart from the
norm of the previous eight years. First, Newsom can draw more atten-
tion to the choices being made by California’s government that constitute
thumbs in the eye to the Trump administration. Just as Brown had to
decide whether to be the first governor to sign a “sanctuary state” law
(he did so), one of Newsom’s early signature moves could be making
California the first state to expand Medicaid to illegal immigrants. But
unlike Brown, whose PR machine was the equivalent of a child’s scooter,
Newsom thrives on earned media. He could easily ramp up his print and
electronic appearances—at home and on the East Coast—to highlight the
California difference.
Newsom’s second
For Newsom, immigration reform
option, also along the
lines of demonstrating could be a springboard to establish-
differences between ing himself as a policy-centric, non-
Democrats and Repub- Washington problem solver. It worked
licans, would be to for Bill Clinton.
establish himself as the
most prominent of the nation’s twenty-three Democratic governors (sev-
en newly elected late last year). This would be interesting to watch. It
would potentially pit Newsom against the incoming chair of the Demo-
cratic Governors Association, Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo. She’s that
rarest of political creatures: a pro-growth Democratic moderate.
And that takes us to Newsom’s third option: as leader of the state with the
nation’s largest population of undocumented immigrants, he could attempt
to build a bipartisan coalition of governors to pressure a reluctant Con-
gress and White House into an immigration fix. The closest parallel to this
occurred twenty-five years ago, when seven states turned to Washington for
relief from the costs of illegal immigration such as education, health care,
and incarceration.
Early in 1994, the Clinton White House hosted a governors-only
meeting with the heads of Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois,
New Jersey, and Texas (New York sent a representative). At
the time, Arizona, California, Illinois, and New Jersey were
governed by Republicans; Democrats governed Florida, New

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 151

 York, and Texas. That was too much bipartisan firepower for a first-term
president to ignore—well, that and the realities of the political map. Bill
Clinton carried all of those states, except for Texas, in 1996; they account-
ed for 157 of his 379 electoral votes.
For the White House, the meeting was a no-brainer. The Clinton adminis-
tration could sympathize with the governors, knowing that the aid request
would die on Capitol Hill. The previous year, the White House had asked for
$400 million in immigration relief; the House passed the measure; it was
eliminated in a Senate compromise.
This year, Newsom could explore the feasibility of a bipartisan coalition
of the governors of the
nation’s border and most
A bipartisan coalition of governors populous states work-
might cooperate to pursue an immi- ing on, for lack of better
gration “bill of rights.” words, an immigration
“bill of rights.” Among
the articles: pathway to citizenship, workforce participation, access to public
services, and border security. Such an endeavor should include the governors
of California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas—collectively
about three-fifths of the nation’s unauthorized population. Add Arizona and
New Mexico, for border consideration. And also include Louisiana, Maryland,
and Massachusetts—three states whose undocumented populations rose
over the past decade.
Look closer: those eleven states have six Democratic and five Republican
governors, fifteen Democratic and seven GOP US senators, and nearly half of
the seats (208) in the US House of Representatives. In addition, four states—
Arizona, Louisiana, Maryland, and Massachusetts—qualify as “purple” (hav-
ing a blend of Democratic and Republican governors and senators).

TAKE THE LONG VIEW

Would Newsom undertake such an effort? A cynic might call it a fool’s
errand, given the failed experience of the US Senate’s “Gang of Eight” and
its bipartisan approach to immigration reform. On the other hand, it might
serve a very practical purpose for a governor presumed to have national
aspirations.
For Newsom, immigration reform could serve as a springboard to estab-
lishing himself as a policy-centric, non-Washington problem solver. That
approach worked well for then-governor Bill Clinton, who spent a good
portion of 1991 touring the nation as the chair of the Democratic Leadership

152 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

Council, giving speeches about how to rejuvenate the Democratic Party after
three crushing presidential losses. And it paid off handsomely for Clinton in
the 1992 election.
The choice for Newsom, assuming he also covets presidential glory, is to
lead on immigration, follow another governor’s lead, or get out of the way of a
problem that seemingly punishes those who offer solutions.
One wonders what they think in Fresno.

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). © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Beyond

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

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 153

I N TERVI EW

I N TERVI EW

Loners and Lost

Tribes
In war or in peace, who has your back? Author
Sebastian Junger explores the tension between
freedom and the ancient longing for community.

By Russell Roberts

Russell Roberts: My guest is journalist and author Sebastian Junger. His

latest book, from 2016, is Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. It’s a very
short book, but it really is powerful and extraordinary, and I recommend it to
everybody.
At the end of the introduction to your book, you write something that I
found very thought-provoking: “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they
thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has per-
fected the art of making people not feel necessary.” And certainly, in primi-
tive, less-developed societies, everybody was pretty necessary.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. And you can see that in modern Western socie­ties
that experience a crisis, a catastrophe. All of a sudden, the hurricane, the
tornado, the 9/11 attack, whatever it may be: a few things almost always seem
to happen. People very quickly come together and share their resources. They
offer cooperation and help to the group. They depend on the group for their
own survival. And very instinctively, they start putting other people first. They

Sebastian Junger is the author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

(Twelve, 2016). Russell Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow
at the Hoover Institution.

154 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

stop thinking about themselves. And there’s a very good evolutionary reason
for that. Humans are social primates. Humans do not survive alone in nature;
they die almost immediately. The reason we survive and thrive is because we
work in groups, where the individual contributes to the common good and the
group ensures the safety of the individual. And that basic reciprocal arrange-
ment has allowed humans to thrive for hundreds of thousands of years.
So, in a crisis, whatever the crisis may be—and I would argue that the
hunter/gatherer economy is an ongoing low-level crisis of survival—people
put others first because their survival depends on the goodwill of others. I’ve
seen this in combat with soldiers. There is no survival without the group. So,
all of a sudden, everyone is thinking in group terms. And you can see that in
crisis after crisis in this country. White, black, rich, poor—all those distinc-
tions fell away in Manhattan right after 9/11. As a result, the suicide rate went
down and the violent crime rate went down. People really stuck together, and
they stopped making those ghastly distinctions of affluence and race that are
such a curse on our society today.

Roberts: Also, taking physical risks to enhance the group’s security or the
safety of individual members—economists might call this irrational, if they
are bad at defining what rational really is, and I think that’s a big problem for
our profession. You know, acting in a self-interested way is often equated with
rationality. And there are many times in life that doing what’s self-interested is
wrong. It might be better for you in the short run—it might even be better for
you in the long run—but it’s immoral in certain settings. I think the ability to
recognize that, especially in a crisis, and do what’s “right” is deeply fulfilling.

Junger: I think there are

two things going on here “The individual contributes to the
in evolutionary terms.
common good and the group ensures
It’s clearly adaptive to
the safety of the individual. And that
think in group terms
because your survival basic reciprocal arrangement has
depends on the group. allowed humans to thrive for hun-
And the worse the dreds of thousands of years.”
circumstances, the more
your survival depends on the group. And, as a result, the more pro-social
the behaviors are. The worse things are, the better people act. But, there’s
another adaptive response, which is self-interest. So, if things are OK—if the
enemy is not attacking; if there’s no drought; if there’s plenty of food; if every-
thing is fine—your need for the group subsides a little bit, and it’s adaptive to

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 155

CONNECTION: Bestselling author Sebastian Junger says, “What you have in
our species is this constant toggling back and forth between group interest—
selflessness—and individual interest and autonomy.” [Lauren Gerson—National
Archives]

attend to your own interests and needs. And all of a sudden, you’ve invented
the bow and arrow, the iPhone, or whatever. Having the bandwidth and the
safety and the space for people to sort of drill deep down into an idea—a
religious idea, a philosophical idea, a technological idea—clearly also benefits
the human race.
So, what you have in our species is this constant toggling back and forth
between group interest—selflessness—and individual interest and autonomy.
When things are bad, you’re way better off investing in the group and forget-
ting about yourself. When things are good, in some ways you’re better off
spending that time investing in yourself; and then it toggles back again when
things get bad. In a traditional, small-scale tribal society, in the natural world,
that toggling back and forth happened continually. There was a dynamic ten-
sion between the two that had people winding up more or less in the middle.
The problem with modern society is that we have, for most of the time, for
most people, solved the direct physical threats to our survival. So, what you
have is people—and again, it’s adaptive: we’re wired for this—attending to

156 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

their own needs and interests, but almost never getting dragged back into
the sort of idea of group concern that is part of our human heritage. The iro-
ny is that when people are part of a group and doing something essential to a
group, it gives an incredible sense of well-being. We have this great autonomy
from the group and from the needs of survival, and that has a lot to say for
it. But what we lose is this basic human experience: “Wow, I’m needed. And
I would do anything for these people. These are my people.” That feels very,
very good. When you deprive people of the chance and the necessity of acting
heroically and generously for other people, you deprive them of a funda-
mental part of what it means to be human and to have a meaningful life—a
fundamental way of feeling content and happy in your life.

Roberts: I would phrase it as we have a longing to belong. That’s adaptive

in a crisis, but it’s still there even when there’s not a crisis. And we ignore
that, I think, at our peril. So, it’s not just that in crisis people get along better.
They have more meaningful lives. Which is ironic. I heard this great proverb
recently. I’m not going to do it well in English; it’s Chinese, evidently: “No
food, one problem. Lots of food, many problems.”

Junger: That’s great.

Roberts: That’s our Western dilemma, I think, to some extent. I think we

have lots of problems. That’s the good news. But we don’t have one prob-
lem. When you have one problem and it’s food, then life is very hard. But
crisis, challenge, and hardship bring a vividness to life that we’ve lost. And,
of course, we seek it in many ways outside of our normal schedule of life,
because we miss it.

Junger: Absolutely. And you can see that sort of grouping behavior in sports
fans, neighborhood committees and watch groups, or whatever. People
instinctively do it all the time; they long for it. If you go to a coffee shop, the
seats are not pointed towards the wall—that’s where you can have your pri-
vacy—they’re all pointed towards the middle. Because people go out partly to
encounter other people and have even a fleeting sense of, “Oh, OK, we’re here
right now. I don’t know who these people are, but we’re all having coffee in
the same place and maybe I’ll meet someone nice.” That’s just wired into us.
And I’ve got to say, the most connected and part of a group that I’ve ever
felt was in the most dangerous circumstances I’ve ever been in, which was
in combat, in war. I wasn’t a soldier; I was a journalist. I was with an Ameri-
can platoon of combat infantry in a remote outpost in eastern Afghanistan
called Restrepo, and the closeness, both emotional and physical, in that little

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 157

 outpost was amazing. It was twenty or so men and we were in combat con-
stantly—you were never farther than a few feet from another human being.
Ever. So, it was this wonderful feeling of closeness and belonging and being
needed, and needing, and all that good human stuff. But one thing I longed
for in those circumstances was just to be alone for a while. Like, “Just give me
half an hour, guys.” But, of course, to be alone in that environment means you
were in mortal danger. You just can’t go for a nice walk up the mountainside.

Roberts: Yeah. We want

to be careful not to
“We have a surplus of everything. So
romanticize some of the
our wiring will have us continue to
nature of primitive-crisis
acquire and consume and acquire situations. Also, small-
and consume.” town life has that feeling
of connection. The movie
It’s a Wonderful Life captures that beautifully. But most of us don’t want to
live there, or we struggle to want to live there. And small-town life can be
oppressive. People know all your business. You don’t have privacy. It can be
very hard for lots of people.

Junger: Absolutely. Let’s not romanticize group life. My point is that, as a

species, as social primates, our evolutionary heritage is that we evolved to
live in small groups of thirty or forty individuals—exactly the size of a chim-
panzee troop, by the way. And we are clearly adapted to feel at our safest
and arguably most meaningful and content in the close proximity of others.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t stresses that come with that—of course there
are. I would argue that there are even greater stresses that come with being
isolated. We know that as affluence rises in a society, the suicide rate tends
to go up; the depression rate tends to go up; post-traumatic stress disorder
rates tend to go up; child abuse rates tend to go up; addiction rates tend to go
up. All these things that are bedeviling America right now are partly a func-
tion of affluence. And affluence brings great things, too. So, the point is, you
cannot actually have it all. You have to be cognizant of what you’re giving up
and getting for whatever level or kind of life in society that you’re in.

THE PROBLEM OF PLENTY

Roberts: So, what does economics have to say about this? I think the answer
right now in this discipline is: precisely nothing. We have these strange
models where people get utility—which is a vague term to mean satisfaction,

158 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

pleasure, delight, or meaning—out of stuff. And I think if you’re not care-
ful, you might study that and think it’s right. It’s true that people strive for
things. They do generally take jobs that pay more than jobs that pay less. But
this human connection idea, and the need to have social connection, I think
is the weak spot of economics. Adam Smith was really interested in it. And
around 1759 it was a big part of our field, but it seems to have gone away. So,
I hope some people think about that. In terms of what people care about, I
think it belongs in our utility function, but I don’t think necessarily that’s the
right way to deal with it.

Junger: In an environment of scarcity, which of course is the environment

that the human race spent most of its history in, that sort of compulsively
acquiring, hoarding behavior of resources makes perfect sense. Likewise,
eating as much sweet stuff or as much fat as you can makes perfect sense
in an environment where there’s not often a lot of food or resources. While
it’s there, consume as much as you can, because you don’t know when you’re
going to eat again. It’s adaptive. The problem with modern society, I think,
in that sense, is that we have these adaptive behaviors that are attuned to a
low-resource, high-activity, high-intensity environment. Our metabolisms,
as it were, are attuned to that. And now we have a surplus of everything. So
our wiring will have us continue to acquire and consume and acquire and
consume. What we’re not adapted to is a situation where there are infinite
resources and we don’t know how to stop. That sort of utilitarian principle of
“get as much stuff as you
can” has great evolution-
ary roots; it got us here. “No one wants to sleep in a barracks
But we’re not a slave to for the rest of their lives with a bunch
our wiring. We have to of other people, right?”
understand that’s a trait
that was adaptive and useful, and we have to know when it must be overrid-
den, or it’s actually going to start damaging us. That’s true for material goods,
for sort of commercial culture, but it’s also true for food. At the end of the
day, if that’s where your energy’s going, it’s probably not going towards other
people. And we know—psychologists will tell you—it’s our connection to oth-
ers that makes people live longer and have more meaningful, happier lives.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR US?

Roberts: Religion historically has played some role in tamping down and
tempering both the self-interested urge and the pursuit of material things.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 159

 And yet, we live in a time when religion is, I think, very much on the wane
and getting less persuasive to most people. And I think about David Foster
Wallace’s fabulous line: “Everybody worships.” He says there’s no atheism,
and I think that’s correct. We all worship something. It may not be God. It
may be beauty, art, your looks, or money. It may be various forms of addic-
tion that we find
ourselves in. We’re sit-
“When you deprive people of the chance ting here complaining,
and the necessity of acting heroically to some extent, about
and generously for other people, you the flaws of modern
deprive them of a fundamental part of Western society. No
one’s in charge of
what it means to be human.”
Western society. It has
emerged through the Enlightenment, through our creativity, through free
market capitalism, most of which I think has been phenomenal in eliminating
poverty. And at the same time, we’ve had trouble maintaining our connec-
tion to something larger than ourselves traditionally, which was religion. And
we’ve looked for other things. Sports is one of them. You mentioned it earlier.
People are into sports in a way that even fifty years ago would have struck
most people as unhealthy or odd. So, what’s next for us? Is there anything we
can do about it? Anything positive we can say?

Junger: To return modern society wholesale to a more communal, small-

scale, connected society, you’d have to turn off the Internet and ban the car,
basically. And, essentially, it would be a natural disaster that wiped out the
grid, and the grid stayed wiped out. And eventually we’d blunder our way
back to a more human and connected—and much poorer—way of living.

Roberts: And shorter life spans. Lots of negatives—that’s the challenge here.
We’d have a lot of meaning in our life, but a lot of suffering.

Junger: Exactly. Like I said, no one gets to have it all. But I think what we
can do as a modern, wealthy society is understand the dangers of moder-
nity and wealth, and work very hard to counteract them. So, for example,
Japan evidently can be pretty hard on the elderly, and some older women are
shoplifting so they can be put in prison and have the company of other older
women. That’s an awful solution to a problem. But, also in Japan, they’ve
started putting schools and child care centers next to old folks’ homes. So,
the people in the old folks’ homes go visit the schools, and vice versa. Young
children don’t make distinctions of race, age, or anything; it’s just how you

160 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

treat them. That’s wonderful. So, that sort of cross-pollination of youthful
and older energy was great for both groups.
I think society is starting to come up with small-scale solutions that actu-
ally work for people. There are now, I think, in San Francisco and New York
buildings you can buy into, where you can get a bedroom in a building that’s
basically a huge collective space with shared kitchens and living areas and
your own bedroom. You’re basically buying into a concrete village—a village
of thirty or forty people, which is a typical human group in our evolution-
ary past. It’s a village with common areas but your own privacy. People are
actually starting to develop buildings and projects that attend to that basic
human need of balancing privacy and communality. You do have to balance
them. No one wants to sleep in a barracks for the rest of their lives with a
bunch of other people, right? But, having those common spaces where you
can interact with other people—not just people that you know really well but
people that you just kind of recognize. Like, “Hey, how’re you doing? What’s
your name again? Oh, yeah. Nice to see you.”
That kind of connection with someone that you know is part of your group
but you don’t know them really well—people love that. That’s why people go
to coffee shops. I mean, everyone can make coffee at home. But they don’t.
They pay $5 for a coffee at Starbucks. It’s partly so they can be in a brief,
small community.

Roberts: One of my sources of optimism is the way that culture and free
markets give us what we want. And if we want to live with other people and
interact with other people, we’ll find ways of doing that, whether it’s that
developer who develops
a building that’s a little
bit different or where we “Everyone can make coffee at home.
choose to live. Do you see But they don’t. They pay $5 for a cof-
any examples of that in
fee at Starbucks. It’s partly so they
terms of cultural norms
emerging that recognize
can be in a brief, small community.”
the importance of our
tribal past and that help us connect to other people? Are things changing
that might be a little source of optimism?

Junger: I see it all over the place. I think the whole mirage of social media
is that if we follow it, it will lead to a sort of blissful community we can all be
part of. I think it’s a mirage and a lie. But we clearly are—at least we think we
are—pursuing something healthy. You know, you see in advertising groups of

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 161

people having a good time, being nice to each other, drinking a beer around
a barbecue, and so on. It’s just this constant re-enacting of ancient human
behaviors of communal life. And clearly, the point of the ad is: whatever it is
people are eating or drinking while they are having a good communal time,
people will go buy it, because they want to be part of that experience. So, we
see it all the time. And I think we see it because it’s so lacking in a substan-
tive form in our society. So, you just have to go the next step and say, “Oh,
this is actually something, and I don’t need Coca-Cola to give me this.” You
don’t need Facebook to give you this. You can get this, but you have to know
it’s something you want. And you have to deliberately set out to try to create
it, to try to make it happen.
We’re not going to completely restructure modern society back to some
sort of small-scale tribal norm. It’s not happening. We’d have to give up too
much good stuff. But within our society, if we are at least aware of what’s pain-
ing us—of what we’re missing, what we’re lacking, what we’re longing for—at
least understand it and bring it to our conscious mind, we can seize on these
opportunities where the chance presents itself to act like that, to experience
that, to hold on to it, and to develop it. And I think if we do that, like the genius
in Japan who is putting a nursery school next to an old folks’ home, I think
these things will happen. And as they become norms in our society, our soci-
ety will change incrementally. I really think that not only can it happen, I think
it must happen. Because clearly our society is in an enormous amount of pain.
Look at the addiction rates and murder rates and suicide rates, and mental
health generally. We are in agony as a society. We need to save ourselves. And
we’re only going to do that by connecting to each other.

Excerpted by permission from Russell Roberts’s podcast EconTalk (www.

econtalk.org), a production of the Library of Economics and Liberty. ©
2019 Liberty Fund, Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Warriors

and Citizens: American Views of Our Military, edited
by Kori N. Schake and Jim Mattis. To order, call (800)
888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

162 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 I N T E RVI E W

I NTERVI EW

Churchill:
Walking with
Destiny
Biographer and historian Andrew Roberts, granted
exclusive access to archives about Winston
Churchill (including the diaries of King George VI),
paints a portrait both familiar and fresh.

By Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: Historian Andrew Roberts is the

author of more than a dozen major works of history, including Masters and
Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945; Napoleon:
A Life; and The Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax. His new book is Churchill:
Walking with Destiny. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Roberts: Thank you. It’s great to be back on the show, Peter.

Robinson: A mandatory first question. Hundreds of Winston Churchill biogra-

phies are already in existence. You have pulled it off—your book is getting rave
reviews. But before you began work, what on earth were you thinking? What did
you see that led you to believe there was an opportunity for something fresh?

Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a professor at King’s College London. Peter Robinson is the edi-
tor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and a research
fellow at the Hoover Institution.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 163

Roberts: You’re quite right. There are, in fact, 1,009 biographies. I’ve counted
them. This is the 1,010th. Actually, what I realized four years ago when I
started to write this book was that in the previous six years or so—so for the
last decade from now—there has been an avalanche of new sources about
Churchill, which one wasn’t really expecting. The queen allowed me to be the
first Churchill biographer to use her father’s diaries.

Robinson: He kept good diaries?

Roberts: Very good diaries. The king had lunch every Tuesday of the Second
World War with Churchill, who trusted him with everything: the nuclear
secrets, the Ultra decrypts, and so on. He wrote down everything Churchill
said, so we’ve got a fantastic cornucopia of new stuff: Churchill’s hopes, fears,
aperçus, and jokes, every Tuesday of the Second World War.
I was also very fortunate that since the last major biography of Churchill,
no fewer than forty-one sets of papers have been deposited at the Churchill
Archives in Churchill College, Cambridge. I used all of them.
The diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador from 1932 to 1943, are
available now. Also, the verbatim accounts of the War Cabinet, which I discov-
ered seven years ago. I knew that I would be able to use those quite heavily.

Robinson: No one else had made extensive use of those?

Roberts: Nobody had made any use of those. Quite extraordinarily. There
was something on pretty much every page of this book that’s never appeared
in a Churchill biography before.

Robinson: The sheer size of this book—a thousand pages—implies the

mastery of tens of thousands of pages of documents. How many research
assistants?

Roberts: I’ve never used one.

Robinson: That is just unbelievable. You’re at the studio of Rubens with only
Rubens.

Roberts: Having said that, I have got five million words of notes that I’ve taken.
This is the fifth book that I’ve written with Churchill in the title or the subtitle.
I’ve written literally hundreds of reviews and articles about him over the past
thirty years. So, if I don’t know it by now, I really shouldn’t be undertaking this.

Robinson: But still. You read all these new materials. I don’t know quite how
you got from one place to another. The Churchill Archives are in Cambridge?

164 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

HELMSMAN: Winston Churchill walks the deck of HMS Prince of Wales dur-
ing the August 1941 Atlantic Conference with President Roosevelt. Churchill,
says historian Andrew Roberts, “was irrational and romantic, and he was not a
sort of dry-as-dust Victorian aristocrat with a stiff upper lip. He actually was a
passionate, romantic figure driven by his emotions.” [Library of Congress]

Roberts: Yes.

Robinson: I’m assuming that the king’s diaries are in Windsor.

Roberts: Yes. They’re in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle.

Robinson: And one isn’t permitted to make photocopies, I suppose.

Roberts: No. Actually, if you want to go to the lavatory, you have to have
somebody escort you there and back again. They don’t let you wander
around the Royal Archives.

Robinson: What are your working methods?

Roberts: I’m a great believer in getting all the evidence before you write
a word of the book, because what happens if you discover something that

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 165

undermines your thesis? So, I bring it all together in note form, work out
in each of the chapters where I want my themes to fit into the overarch-
ing narrative. I stick with chronology, of course, because that’s how the
life was lived and also the way in which we look at it. And it’s also, I think,
impossible to understand a life any other way. And then I fit in the themes,
which will be in different files than the chronological files. It’s a pretty
straightforward process. It just requires an awful lot of time getting up
very early in the morning.

Robinson: So, you’re a very hard worker.

Roberts: I am when I’m writing a book. I wrote that book in one hundred
days, averaging 5,500 words a day.

Robinson: And do you write or rewrite or both?

Roberts: Yes. Once it’s done, then there’s another three weeks in which I
slimmed it down massively.

Robinson: You only took three weeks to rewrite and edit?

Roberts: Yes. Luckily, I can’t get writer’s block because: (a) I’m a historian;
and (b) I have a mortgage.

ENTITLEMENT AND EMPIRE

Robinson: You write: “Churchill was the last aristocrat to rule Britain. He
possessed the unconquerable self-confidence of his caste background.” Make
an American audience understand that. What did it mean to have been born
in Blenheim Palace as the grandson of a duke?

Roberts: Blenheim is the greatest of all the British palaces. Even the
royals envy the Dukes of Marlborough for Blenheim. And Churchill was
the grandson of not any old duke but the Duke of Marlborough, one
of the greatest and grandest people in the country. Therefore, he had
what today we would call a sense of entitlement that was massive, and
he didn’t care what people thought of him. This turned out to be an
extraordinarily useful asset, because the attacks that were made on him
throughout his life, really, you needed to have a rhinoceros hide. The
reason he did have that was partly because of his age, class, and back-
ground. He really didn’t mind what other people thought of him because
he was so grand.

166 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

TALENT AND DRIVE: Historian and author Andrew Roberts points out
Winston Churchill’s recognized mastery of public speaking: “Understanding
audiences—noticing the way that certain words will work with certain audi-
ences—was absolutely second nature to him. . . . He practiced his ad-libbing.”
[Uncommon Knowledge—Hoover Institution]

Robinson: To have been born an aristocrat in the last third of the

nineteenth century (1874) is to have been born into a world of utter
self-confidence.

Roberts: That’s right. But it was also, of course, a world where your privilege
imbued you with a responsibility to give back.

Robinson: Another vital piece of background that takes a bit of explaining

for an American audience is the British empire. Here’s a 1941 diary entry
from Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London. Churchill saw him
almost as much as he saw the king. It was a close friendship.

Roberts: It absolutely had to be, especially after the invasion of Russia by

Germany.

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 167

 Robinson: OK, so here’s Maisky: “Churchill has told me more than once over
the years, and I have no grounds to disbelieve him, that the British empire
is his alpha and omega.” (Shrewd old communist there—is it true or not?)
Now, today, even in Britain, speaking well of the empire is just a nonstarter.
How are Americans to understand this man whose alpha and omega was the
defense of the empire?

Roberts: Because the empire he wanted to defend was not some evil,
sinister, imperialist construct that 1960s Marxist professors talk about. It
was, in fact, a paternalistic concept—something that for 90 percent of the
history of the empire, for 90 percent of the native peoples of the empire,
was a good thing.
Churchill saw that himself in the North-West Frontier when he was pro-
tecting the empire from
the Pathans and the Afridi
“The king had lunch every Tuesday of and the Talib tribes. He
the Second World War with Churchill, saw an empire which
who trusted him with everything.” had given so much to the
people of India that it was
an entirely different concept from the kind of thing that we’re taught in our
schools today about the empire. It was something that had brought internal
peace for the longest period of time. It had doubled the life expectancy. It had
multiplied by eight times the amount of land under cultivation. It had given a
Western-style politics, which it still has to this day, and the English language
that is invaluable for India as the first-world language. It abolished evil and
sinister things like the sati, the throwing of widows onto funeral pyres, which
probably now would count as unacceptable interference in local culture. We
created railways, universities, and entirely new industries. To Churchill, that
seemed to be a good thing and something worth defending all his life, which
is what he did.

MAN OF DESTINY

Robinson: Particularly to Americans, Churchill seems to simply emerge in

the Second World War, fully formed. But where did all this come from?

Roberts: He was irrational and romantic, and he was not a sort of dry-
as-dust Victorian aristocrat with a stiff upper lip. He actually was a pas-
sionate, romantic figure driven by his emotions. During the war, he often
burst into tears, sometimes in the House of Commons. It must have been

168 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

tremendously off-putting for the prime minister to burst into tears, yet
people knew that was an aspect of Churchill. He was not about to make
peace with Hitler.

Robinson: One of the things that’s so striking about Churchill is he’s con-
stantly working the memorandum. He has a detailed knowledge of the mili-
tary situation every single moment. And one of the things that enables him to
bring the country with him is that he’s reporting on the military situation in
the House. And yet, for all that, he’s not calculating in the end.

Roberts: No. He’s driven,

as I say, by his emotions.
But, of course, when it
“He had what today we would call a
comes to the Defense sense of entitlement that was mas-
Committee of the War sive, and he didn’t care what people
Cabinet, when he talks thought of him. This turned out to be
to them, to the gener- an extraordinarily useful asset.”
als in particular and the
staff, he does go into the granular detail of where every battalion is. But when
it comes to politics, when people want to try and make peace with Hitler,
however bad the situation got, he managed to maintain a wonderful sense of
humor. He’s constantly making jokes throughout May and June 1940. I think
that comes from his personal sense of destiny, which I refer to in the book’s
subtitle, and it’s an incredibly powerful aspect of Churchill.

Robinson: Let me quote you again: “Churchill was indispensable during the
Second World War because he exuded a confidence in victory that no other
senior figure did, and was able to provide something that Neville Chamber-
lain could not: hope.”
And this brings us to the speeches. To this day, you listen to these speech-
es—they’re available on YouTube—three-quarters of a century after he
delivered them, and it’s still very difficult to avoid a certain emotional pull.

Roberts: Certainly. My back tingles and tears just come unbidden to my eyes
pretty much into the third sentence in some of the great speeches.

Robinson: The ear, the cadences, the sense of showmanship—but also this
amazing ability to combine the showmanship and the memorable phrase with
deep substance.

Roberts: Well, you’re right. He wrote in the last paragraph of the first volume
of his war memoirs, talking about the day he became prime minister: “I felt

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 169

 as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a
preparation for this hour and for this trial.”
When it came to his speeches, it was indeed a preparation. His love of
Shakespeare was highly influential in him. And the way in which he had
mastered the English language, as he called it, that noble thing: the English
sentence. The importance
he put on clarity: short
“The empire he wanted to defend was words, short sentences,
not some evil, sinister, imperialist Anglo-Saxon words that
could be understood going
construct that 1960s Marxist profes-
back a thousand years.
sors talk about.” These were things that he
used in his morale-boost-
ing speeches. But they, fascinatingly, all go back to an article that he wrote
back in 1897 when he was a twenty-three-year-old soldier who had never
given a speech before in his life. And yet he wrote out the five things you need
to do to bring over audiences. And then he followed them, and his actual col-
lection of speeches is eight thousand pages long. So, he had given hundreds of
speeches before the Second World War broke out and, therefore, it really was
a preparation for his hour and his trial.

Robinson: Radio came along when he was already in middle age; television
at the very end of his life. But speech after speech he’s giving to a crowd.
There’s a human contact. He can see their faces. He can hear them laugh.
Likewise, in the Commons, and the Commons is a very intimate atmosphere.
You have people facing you on the opposite benches. This is years and years
of actual training—finding out what works.

Roberts: Understanding audiences—noticing the way that certain words will

work with certain audiences—was absolutely second nature to him.

Robinson: So, it was easy. He was born with a gigantic talent and worked on
it all his life.

Roberts: Actually, he didn’t think he was born with it. He had a slight sibi-
lant “s,” of course, and he had to work hard to get rid of that. He also didn’t
believe that he could, as he said, fly on the unpinioned wing. He always
needed notes, on six-by-four-inch cards. He wrote out in what he called
“Psalm form” what he was going to say. Even in the easiest speeches just
to his local constituency association, for example, he would still have it all
written out.

170 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

Robinson: It stayed with him. Very little ad-libbing?

Roberts: He practiced his ad-libbing.

BREXIT: WOULD HE STAY OR WOULD HE GO?

Robinson: You also write on contemporary British politics. You’re a Brexi-

teer: you want out of the European Union. You supported the vote, which
passed narrowly, and now Britain is hung up and in chaos and so forth. I’d
like to quote Nicholas Soames, a prominent member of Parliament and one of
Churchill’s grandsons: “If you were to put . . . Winston Churchill here today,
does anyone really believe . . . with all his experience, that looking out over a
very unstable, fragile, uncertain world, he would think this was a good idea
for Britain to cut itself loose from the Continent?” Churchill himself implores
you to reconsider?

Roberts: No, Churchill doesn’t at all. This is an area where Nicholas and I
disagree. Of course, Churchill was one of the founders of the European move-
ment and said, “Let Europe arise.” He wanted to teach them never again to
fight Gaul, as he put it with regard to France and Germany.
But when it actually comes to it—and he was prime minister from Octo-
ber 1951 to April 1955, so just before the actual Treaty of Rome in 1957 that
created the European Community—he did nothing at all to bring Britain
toward that. He didn’t join the European army. He put out minutes, some
of which are quoted in
my book, saying that he
didn’t want to get Britain “Clarity: short words, short sentences,
involved. He very much Anglo-Saxon words that could be
wanted it to be a success, understood going back a thousand
and he just didn’t want years.”
to threaten what he saw
as our connections with the United States—the “special relationship”—and
the Commonwealth, and our ability to do trade deals with every other coun-
try in the world. Which was, of course, ultimately to end when we did join the
Common Market.

Robinson: And what about this notion that the “remainers” have? I don’t
want to put words in their mouths, but I think it would be the Cameron and
Osborne argument: this is bad economics. To which some of the Brexiteers,
and here I don’t want to put words in your mouth, say: “No, it’s not just a
matter of economics. By the way, we disagree with you on economics. We

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 171

 can trade with the rest of the world more easily. It’s about much more than
that. It’s about sovereignty. It’s about our national sense of identity. It’s about
whether we will rule ourselves or be ruled from Brussels.” And “remainers”
retort: “Ah, that’s Edwardian romantic nonsense.”

Roberts: I don’t have any problems explaining this to America. How would
you feel if a foreign body had the right to go over the heads of the Supreme
Court and over the heads of your Congress and decide your laws for you? It’s
something that I don’t think any American would put up with for ten seconds.
So, I never have any problem explaining why I’m a Brexiteer.

Robinson: Now explain to me why highly intelligent people such as David

Cameron, Nicholas Soames, and George Osborne would be “remainers”?

Roberts: Because they, obviously, don’t get too hot under the collar about
the European Court of Justice and the way in which Brussels, in my view,
impinges on British sovereignty.

“NEVER GIVE IN”

Robinson: Another quote from your book: “At the end of his life he consid-
ered his career a failure for not having defended the British empire success-
fully.” I think you argue that this was an error in his judgment.

Roberts: Well, we go back to this sense of it being the alpha and omega of
his career. He had, as a young man, defended it physically in war after war.
He had proselytized for it. He believed in it. He had nearly thrown away
his career in the 1930s by opposing self-government for India. He had said
in 1942 that he had not
become the king’s first
“However much we might think of minister in order to pre-
him as one of the great, successful side over the liquidation
politicians of all time, he thought of of the British empire. And
himself as having failed.” when he then became
prime minister again in
peacetime in the 1950s, he didn’t give back any of the colonies at all. So, he
had done his best for the empire, but by the time he was entering his last
years in the 1960s, the empire had been given away. Not just India in 1948,
but also the African colonies and other Asian colonies. So, he considered,
despite having been instrumental in helping win the Second World War, that
the thing that mattered most to him, which was the empire, having been lost,

172 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

meant that his career had been a failure. So, as he slipped into senility—how-
ever much we might think of him as one of the great, successful politicians of
all time—he thought of himself as having failed.

Robinson: We’ve discussed what a thorough aristocrat he was and how deep-
ly committed he was to the British empire. The aristocratic order is no more.
There are titled people tottering around desperate to keep their big houses
in operation. Blenheim is now a working museum—you can tour it for fifteen
quid. The House of Lords is filled with opportunists who have been given life
peerages. It’s over. The British empire is gone, and it’s unfashionable to say
a good word on behalf
of it, even in Britain.
Your book is a wonderful “He made lots of mistakes, but he
story, and every single
learned from each of them in a differ-
review says so. But what
ent way. He learned from every single
relevance does Churchill
have for us today? one of them.”

Roberts: He has more relevance today probably than ever before. He

is a figure who transcends all of the things you just mentioned like the
British empire and the aristocracy, because his story is one of extraor-
dinary physical courage combined with moral courage. He didn’t change
his stance when he was being attacked and shouted down in the House
of Commons, nearly deselected from his seat by the Conservative Party,
ridiculed and lampooned in the press, and so on. He carried on telling
some truths about Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s, and many other
examples.
He had extraordinary foresight, such as within thirteen months of Yalta
being able to warn the world about the true nature of Stalin and Soviet
communism. To have seen it, not to have cared what people said, and to
have told the truth. That is something. That’s a value in politics that isn’t
going to have a sell-by date. He also had, as well as this foresight, the
extraordinary eloquence we were discussing earlier. That again, I don’t
think is something that we have terribly much of today in our politics. And
sometimes I really do think that we need it. More politicians should read
the five things in his scaffolding of rhetoric—examples of how to win over
an audience.
And I think, finally, this whole idea of a figure who didn’t just have the fore-
sight but also was able to learn from his mistakes. He made lots of mistakes,
but he learned from each of them in a different way. He learned from every

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 173

single one of them. And that, too, is a true quality in a politician that I don’t
think is going to ever be out of fashion, any time in our lifetimes.

Robinson: Clare Boothe Luce used to say that in the end, history is only
going to have time for one sentence for every great man. Abraham Lincoln
freed the slaves. What is the one sentence that your great-great-grandchil-
dren will need to cling to about Winston Churchill?

Roberts: That’s such a difficult question because there are so many sen-
tences. If I was to come up with one, I would say the thing that he told the
Harrow schoolboys: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never . . .”
And that, thank God, is what he said in 1941. And it’s the reason I’m not
speaking German today. And it’s the reason that so much of the world is still
democratic.

174 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 H OOVE R A R C H I VE S

H OOVER A RCHIVE S

Siberian
Quagmire
As the First World War drew to a close, the
victorious Allies suddenly found themselves
clashing with Bolsheviks in Russia. How that
intervention went astray is a tangled, and
cautionary, tale.

By Kyle Duchynski

I
n recent decades, the American public has become increasingly
acquainted with, and opposed to, the idea of foreign intervention.
From Vietnam to Libya to Iraq, US forces have become stuck in mili-
tary quagmires. However, this pattern of American foreign interven-
tion is not new. In fact, one of the most prominent examples of the perils of
intervention, one that has largely been forgotten, took place a hundred years
ago when the Allies intervened in Siberia after Russia’s withdrawal from
World War One.
The intervention had two publicly stated goals: safeguarding Allied war
material from the Bolshevik revolutionaries and ensuring the safe transit
of the forty thousand members of the Czechoslovak Legion out of Russia.
Initially formed in 1914 to fight alongside the Entente powers (originally
France, Britain, and Russia), the Czechoslovak Legion hoped to garner sup-
port from the wartime Allies for the independence of Czechoslovakia from

Kyle Duchynski is a recipient of the Introductory Seminars Excellence Award for

his research at the Hoover Institution. He is a student at Stanford University.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 175

 the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Czechoslovaks fought valiantly along the
Eastern Front with the Russian Imperial Army for the first three years of
the war, but then the Russian armistice with Germany in December 1917 left
them stranded in Bolshevik-controlled Ukraine. Eventually, the Czechoslovak
National Council negotiated with the Bolsheviks for safe passage of the legion
from Ukraine to Vladivostok in the Far East, one of the few remaining open
Russian ports, with the
eventual goal of sending
The “rescue” of the Czechoslovak the legion to France to
forces proved unnecessary. continue to fight against
the Central Powers. How-
ever, the actual evacuation was fraught with delays and skirmishes with the
Bolsheviks. Thus, the Allies felt compelled to send soldiers to help escort the
Czechoslovaks out of Russia.
While the Allied intervention supposedly accomplished both of its stated
objectives, to call it a success would be misleading and inaccurate. Indeed,
examining the intervention from a broader perspective, its failures become
clear. Not only did the intervention anger the burgeoning Soviet government
and sow the seeds of distrust between the USSR and the West, but it also
failed to provide any effective help to Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak (1874–
1920), leader of the anti-Bolshevik White movement, in his resistance against
the Reds. The failings of the Allied intervention in Siberia run deeper than
a purely ideological conflict, and documents from the time illustrate a host
of other problems, including a war-weary public, competing ulterior motives
among Allies, and Allied soldiers more preoccupied with entertainment than
fighting the Bolsheviks.
While the story of the Allied intervention is not a new one to be told, the
goal of this article is to tell the story of the intervention through the lens of
those who lived it. This goal was made possible only thanks to the extensive
collections about the Allied Expeditionary Forces at the Hoover Institution
Library and Archives. From the papers of YMCA secretary Marmaduke
R. Clark to the collections of the American commander, General William S.
Graves (1865–1940), the papers at Hoover offer an excellent survey of the
experiences of people from all echelons of the Allied forces in Siberia.

A FATAL CONTRADICTION
The Allied forces were set up for failure from the very beginning. They
arrived in Siberia in August 1918 without a clear mission, amidst a deeply
fractured military and political landscape. In March 1917, the first revolution

176 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

AWAITING ORDERS: Soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion gather in a Siberian
forest. Initially formed to fight alongside the Allied forces in World War I, the
legion found itself stranded in Ukraine after Russia signed an armistice with
Germany. Protecting the Czechoslovak Legion’s evacuation was the osten-
sible motivation behind Allied intervention in Russia. [William S. Graves Papers,
1914–1932—Hoover Institution Archives]

in Russia resulted in the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the establish-

ment of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet in Russia. In
November 1917, amidst increasing unrest, a second revolution took place in
Russia, which culminated with the Bolshevik overthrow of the Provisional
Government and the beginning of the Russian Civil War. A month later, in
December 1917, the Bolshevik government signed an armistice with Germany,
and on March 3, 1918, agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which gave large
swaths of territory to Germany and marked the official withdrawal of Russia
from World War I.
In April 1919, nine months after American forces were sent to Vladivostok
by President Woodrow Wilson, US Army Captain Laurence Packard penned

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 177

 a classified report detailing the state of the Allied intervention on behalf
of General Graves, commander of all American forces in Siberia. Accord-
ing to Packard, the American public was told that the main purpose of the
intervention was twofold: “the ‘rescue’ of the Czecho-Slovak troops which
were . . . enroute [sic] to the European battle front” and the protection of
“the large quantities of materials . . . destined for the use of former Russian
establishments.” In reality, Packard writes, nearly half of the Czechoslovak
soldiers had already safely arrived in Vladivostok months before American
forces came, and “the remainder . . . were in no serious danger.” By July 1918,
the Czechoslovak soldiers had “abandoned any genuine effort to withdraw
from Eastern Russia” and instead were going about securing the Trans-
Siberian Railroad.
Concerning the protection of military supplies, Packard contends that
deploying soldiers was not necessary because “the presence of Allied war-
ships” alone was sufficient to prevent the supplies from falling into the
hands of the Bolsheviks or the Central Powers. In effect, the publicly stated
mission of the Allied intervention was thus already accomplished months
before any Allied soldiers even landed in Siberia. Packard argues that
instead, the true objectives of the Allied intervention were to support the
Czechoslovak forces in their attempt to gain control of the Trans-Siberian
Railway and to ensure “the retention of as much Russian territory as pos-
sible under anti-Bolshevik authority.” The Allied forces, however, failed to
develop any coherent long-term plan for establishing a stable opposition
government and neglected the fact that anti-Bolshevik forces were by no
means unified.
From the moment they arrived in Siberia, the Allies faced the impossible
task of supporting anti-Bolshevik forces while keeping up a public face of
noninterference and
impartiality with
The Siberian intervention angered the respect to Russia’s
new Soviet government and sowed the internal affairs. Allied
seeds of long-lasting distrust between commanders were
the USSR and the West. It also failed to initially given an alarm-
help the anti-Bolshevik forces. ingly small number of
soldiers: eight hundred
British soldiers, twelve hundred French soldiers, five thousand American
soldiers, and three thousand Japanese soldiers. In practice, this led to some
of the Allies, especially the Americans, providing more indirect support to
anti-Bolshevik forces rather than directly fighting the Bolsheviks.

178 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

PORT IN A STORM: Ships lie at anchor in Vladivostok, the Far Eastern port
from which troops of the Czechoslovak Legion were to be evacuated from
Russia—originally to continue fighting in France. Instead, the Czech troops
shifted to guarding the Trans-Siberian Railway and ran afoul of revolution-
ary forces, at one time seizing Vladivostok and skirmishing frequently with
the Bolsheviks. [William S. Graves Papers, 1914–1932—Hoover Institution Archives]

ESCALATION
Upon arriving in Vladivostok in April 1918, the Czechoslovak soldiers were
well received by the Soviets in control of the area, but relations worsened as
more members of the legion arrived. According to Packard, news came about
“clashes between the Soviets at Irkutsk and elsewhere, and the Czecho-
Slovak echelons” and the Soviets decided to take “a series of unfriendly acts”
against the Czechoslovaks in response. Consequently, the Czechoslovaks
decided to take Vladivostok. Emboldened by their successful capture of the
port city, the Czechoslovaks advanced as far north as the Ussuri River until
the Bolsheviks regrouped and forced them to retreat to the south of Shma-
kovka. Simultaneously, there was growing “unrest among the supporters of
the Soviet in Vladivostok” over Czechoslovak rule. The Czechoslovaks began
to look vulnerable, and not coincidentally, the Allied intervention began
shortly thereafter.

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 179

 Packard’s description of the evolution of the situation in Siberia emphasiz-
es that the Czechoslovaks’ deliberate decision to fight the Bolsheviks is what
ultimately compelled the Allies to intervene. Given that the Soviets initially
had “practically no effective troops” in Vladivostok, Packard believes that the
Czechoslovaks should instead have ignored the Soviets’ “unfriendly” acts and
not started a conflict. However, given the sheer size of the contingent, clashes
between the Czechoslovaks and Soviets were likely to occur no matter which
side instigated them. The ideologies of the Czechoslovaks and the Soviets
also were too opposed for conflict not to arise.
While Packard’s report has immense historical value, it exhibits a bias
towards the centrality and importance of the American Expeditionary Force.
For instance, Packard
conveys how well-received
The Allies faced an impossible task: the Americans were “by
supporting anti-Bolshevik forces all parties and all Allies.”
while keeping up a facade of nonin- These groups, he laments,
terference and impartiality. just could not see that
the Americans “might
actually intend to act unselfishly, ingenuously, and without prejudice,” and
were subsequently disappointed as the Americans remained impartial. While
there might be some truth to this claim, the degree to which Packard sug-
gests that the Americans were unbiased is exaggerated.
The fact that he wrote the report on behalf of Graves cannot be ignored.
Though not explicitly stated, the report appears to be an attempt to justify
the actions taken by Graves for the historical record as opposed to an objec-
tive report to the War Department on the state of the intervention. In one
instance, Packard praises “the conscientious efforts and good judgment of
men of understanding and ability” in guiding American forces, a not-so-sub-
tle nod toward his commander. Additionally, Packard himself clearly states
that his report should not be taken as authoritative because it ignores “such
matters as the negotiations for the operation of the Russian railroads, the
conduct of the Expeditionary forces of other powers . . . and the relations of
the American and Japanese forces.” Lastly, the report was written before the
intervention’s end, thus leaving out key developments such as the downfall of
Kolchak’s government.

A TRUST DEFI CIT

As Packard begins to suggest in his report, infighting among the Allies
made a complicated situation even worse and contributed to the failure

180 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

MISSION UNCLEAR: French troops line up on the docks of Vladivostok. Some
twelve hundred French soldiers initially were deployed to Siberia, a small
force that, even combined with other Allied contingents, proved unable to
significantly affect events in Russia. Friction among forces also contributed to
the failures of the Allied intervention. [Marmaduke R. Clark Papers, 1914–1975—Hoover
Institution Archives]

of the intervention. Chief among these conflicts were those between the
Czechoslovaks and the Americans and the Japanese and the Americans.
Though the Czechoslovak forces were the first to actively fight the Bolshe-
viks, they were also the first among the Allies to withdraw from Siberia.
In mid-November 1919, Dr. V. Girsa, the Czechoslovak high commissioner
in Siberia, wrote a letter to the Inter-Allied Railway Committee outlining
the Czechoslovaks’ reasons for withdrawal. Although the Czechoslovak
army, according to Girsa, “was ready to protect the railway in the sector
which was assigned to it,” continuing to do so would require the Czecho-
slovaks to betray their democratic beliefs and support the “arbitrary,
absolute power” of the Kolchak government. While others in this position
might have elected to oppose the Kolchak government rather than with-
drawing, Girsa argues that the Czechoslovaks did not have this option
because of their steadfast commitment to “neutrality and non intervention
[sic] in Russian internal affairs.”

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 181

 This argument, however, is riddled with contradictions. First, the Czecho-
slovaks were in their “intolerable situation” because they violated their
supposed commitment to neutrality by attacking the Bolsheviks and tak-
ing Vladivostok. Second, by withdrawing, the Czechoslovaks increased the
Bolsheviks’ chances of gaining control of Siberia. In light of the Czechoslo-
vaks’ commitment to democracy, this was a strange move, as the Bolsheviks
were no more concerned with the democratic process than was Kolchak’s
government.
The armistice signed on November 11, 1918, no doubt influenced the
Czechoslovak decision to withdraw. After all, without an ongoing world war,
the Czechoslovaks had little reason to continue expending lives in faraway
Siberia.
The Czechoslovak withdrawal frustrated the Americans, especially Gener-
al Graves. In a letter to Colonel George Emerson, commander of the Russian
Railway Service Corps, Graves orders the American railroad inspectors to
leave their posts since “it is not safe for Americans to remain in” the railway
sector that the Czechoslovaks had previously protected. A second letter by
Graves to the adjutant general of the War Department describes a series
of committees in the
Czechoslovak army that
The ideologies of the Czechoslovaks must approve officers’
and Soviets were too opposed for orders before the soldiers
conflict not to arise. follow them. Though such
committees are reminis-
cent of the Russian soviets, Graves does not explicitly make this connection,
suggesting that a deep opposition to communist ideas had yet to take hold.
Graves also writes in this letter that “the Czechs do not constitute a depend-
able force for use against the Bolsheviks,” illustrating a lack of the mutual
trust that is key to a strong alliance.
The Japanese and the Americans had even worse relations than did the
Czechoslovaks and the Americans, and from their disparate views on Rus-
sia arose conflicting intervention strategies. Japan had defeated Russia in
the war of 1904–5. Packard’s report suggests that the foundational problem
between the two allies was that the Japanese saw any strong Russian govern-
ment as a threat. The American forces under Graves were ordered to remain
apolitical, while a declaration by Japanese Major General Yamada ordered
that “all villages, irrespective of the size and number of inhabitants, in which
Red Guards will be found, will be burned down and destroyed by the Japa-
nese troops.”

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IN A HARD PLACE: General William S. Graves, shown with his wife, Katherine,
commanded the American Expeditionary Force dispatched to Russia. Graves,
whose collected papers are housed in the Hoover Institution Archives, mis-
trusted the Czechoslovak soldiers he was supposed to support, saying they
did not “constitute a dependable force for use against the Bolsheviks.” He also
disliked Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, leader of the anti-Bolshevik movement.
[Marmaduke R. Clark Papers, 1914–1975—Hoover Institution Archives]

It was no empty threat. The Japanese actively searched for and destroyed
villages that they thought harbored Red Guards. This destruction prompted
grave concerns and complaints from Russian groups such as the Primor
Provincial Zemstvo Board. A complaint written by this board outlined the
“illegal actions on the part of the Japanese troops in the village of Ivanovka,”
which included killing many suspected Bolsheviks and razing property.
Though the complaint singled out Japanese soldiers as the perpetrators, it
was addressed to “the Staff of the Allied Command,” suggesting there was a
strong risk that the actions of the Japanese would harm the Russians’ opin-
ion of the Allied forces more broadly.
Incidents like these led to resentment between the Japanese and Ameri-
cans that at times boiled over into conflict. The epitome of such conflict was

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 183

 a brazen assault of American troops by the Japanese in November 1918. In a
sworn deposition, American Private Frank Werkstein recounts how Sergeant
Baelskiwith, his commanding officer, “was arrested by the Japanese soldiers
at Viazimska [sic]” after a Japanese civilian wrongfully accused him of bat-
tery. Surrounded by bayonets, Baelskiwith had no choice but to comply, even
though the accusation
was entirely made up.
Morale was low among US troops, a News of the arrest spread
reflection of not only the harsh Sibe- quickly. Graves himself
rian climate but also a lack of belief in was so alarmed that he
wrote to General Kikuzo
the mission.
Otani, commander of all
Japanese forces, to “request that the matter be investigated by Japanese
authorities.” Though Graves no doubt believed his soldier’s account, he also
recognized the importance of the Japanese-American alliance and thus asked
for the Japanese side of the story before leveling any accusations.
These documents about American-Japanese relations cover a range of
dates that span almost the entire Allied intervention, showing that the fric-
tion in Japanese-American relations was never fully addressed. Preoccupied
with settling disputes among themselves, the Allies had a drastically reduced
ability to effectively oppose the Bolsheviks and complete their assigned
objective.

POOR MORALE AND MISSION CREEP

Equally problematic were the American soldiers who were more concerned
with group activities and leisure time than fighting the communist threat.
The correspondence of Marmaduke R. Clark, senior secretary for the Young
Men’s Christian Association, during his time with the American Expedition-
ary Force is particularly insightful.
In a July 1919 letter to fellow YMCA secretary Ralph Hollinger, Clark men-
tions that the 27th American Infantry are “intrenching alongside railroad.
Attack imminent. Controversy over Seminoff’s Car.” Three lines later, Clark
urges Hollinger to accept his request for supplies for an upcoming “Athletic
and Military tournament on July 19th and 20th. 1000 men competing.” The
fact that matters of war and recreation are mentioned so closely to one
another is an alarming reflection of the little importance that the Americans
actually placed on their military mission.
In another letter to Captain Waite of American Infantry Company K, Clark
writes that he is sending “two men, one a carpenter and the other a painter

184 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

DISTRUST: Japanese forces in Siberia pursued their own national interests, at
times in conflict with US goals. The Japanese, for instance, actively searched
for and destroyed villages that they thought harbored Red Guards, provok-
ing complaints from the Russians. Friction in Japanese-American relations
was never fully addressed. [Marmaduke R. Clark Papers, 1914–1975—Hoover Institution
Archives]

and decorator,” to help spruce up a YMCA hut for Waite’s men. Moreover,
Clark attempts to assure Waite that he is “trying [his] damdest [sic] to get
you a piano and also [an] electric lighting plant and a movie machine.” If the
fighting had been more intense or the mission perceived as more significant,
Clark’s job would no doubt have been to acquire medical supplies and food
rather than arranging athletic competitions or acquiring a piano for the
soldiers’ enjoyment.
Clark’s correspondence with friends back home is also quite revealing.
Writing to his “Old Pal Jake,” Clark notes how the colonel “details to me as
many men as I ask for” to help plan activities for the troops. At the same
time, Clark observes that “we have the toughest morale situation to face here
that an expedition ever faced in the history of the US Army.” Indeed, the low
morale likely reflected not only the harsh Siberian climate but also a lack of
belief in the mission. Not once does Clark mention anything related to fight-
ing the Bolsheviks or supporting the Russian people—his primary concern
is the beleaguered state of the American forces. In turn, this suggests a lack

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 185

 of recognition by the American soldiers as to exactly how dangerous the
Bolsheviks and their communist ideas could become.
The poor morale of the American soldiers was certainly one reason why
the intervention failed to help Admiral Kolchak in his fight against the Bol-
sheviks, but it was not the only reason. By late May 1919, the Allied countries
had realized they needed a new policy towards Russia.
In an official dispatch to Kolchak, the Allied heads of state remarked that
“it has always been a cardinal axiom of the Allied and Associated Powers
to avoid interference in the internal affairs of Russia.” And while the Allies
still supported Russian self-determination through a democratically elected
Constituent Assembly, they believed reaching this goal was not possible by
cooperating with the Soviet government. As such, the Allies were prepared
to fully support Kolchak “with munitions, supplies, and food,” so long as he
agreed to hold democratic elections after defeating the Bolsheviks.
However, the less prominent parts of the agreement demanded “that
the independence of Finland and Poland be recognized,” that the Russian
national debt be honored, and that a “solution of the relations between Estho-
nia [sic], Latvia, Lithuania, and the Caucasian and Transcaspian territories
and Russia” be found. Moreover, the Allied heads of state did not offer the
support of their intervention forces in Siberia to Kolchak. In light of these
conditions, the agreement from the Allies appears to come more from a
desire to reap the benefits of stability in Russia rather than from any firm
belief in Russian self-determination.
Kolchak nevertheless immediately accepted the Allied nations’ offer of
support. While Kolchak promised that he “shall not retain . . . power one day
longer than is required by the interest of the country,” in reality he ruled like
a dictator.
Admiral Kolchak’s sub-
sequent fall from power
The publicly stated mission of the is best chronicled by
Allied intervention was thus already Constantin Pertzoff in a
accomplished months before any letter he wrote to former
Stanford professor Harold
Allied soldiers even landed in Siberia.
Fisher. Pertzoff was a sol-
dier attached to Kolchak’s train convoy in December 1919, just as “the whole
Central Siberia . . . was in a state of rebellion against” Kolchak’s government
over its authoritarian practices. Czechoslovak forces stopped the convoy “a
few miles west of Nijne-Oudinsk [sic],” and Kolchak was forced into negotia-
tions with the Allied High Commission. After these negotiations, Kolchak

186 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

SIBERIAN EXILE: Allied flags hang in a recreation center in Russia, where sol-
diers make music and play billiards. Low morale plagued the American forces.
Correspondence indicates an emphasis on leisure activities and recreation,
and a lack of focus on the Americans’ military mission. [Marmaduke R. Clark
Papers, 1914–1975—Hoover Institution Archives]

“resigned his office of Supreme Ruler and Commander in Chief” in exchange

for the Allied guarantee of his safe passage out of Russia. The Allies assigned
Czechoslovak soldiers to escort Kolchak to safety—the very same soldiers
who so despised him were then responsible for his life.
The journey began smoothly. When the convoy reached Innokentievskaya,
however, Pertzoff saw “the Czech guards being withdrawn and two lines of
numerous Red Guards taking their place.” Pertzoff himself escaped capture
but was furious, stating that the Allied surrendering of Kolchak to the Reds
“was an act without parallel in history.” In the letter he speculates that “the
admiral’s surrender was caused by strategic reasons and not by local condi-
tions,” remarking that it took place—suspiciously—the morning after an
armistice had been signed between the Reds and the Allies. Pertzoff’s recol-
lection is evidently biased by his role as a soldier for Kolchak, but his analysis
is consistent with evidence presented by earlier documents. Indeed, both
Pertzoff’s story and the correspondence between the Allied heads of state
and Kolchak underscore that although the Allies were willing to offer nomi-
nal support to Kolchak, they were only interested in doing so for their own

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 187

“STRANGE ADVENTURE”: Czechoslovak forces hold positions along the
Perm front. Years later, writers expressed lingering misgivings about US
involvement in Russia’s affairs, with war correspondent Guy Murchie Jr. refer-
ring to it as “a war to please our allies.” [William S. Graves Papers, 1914–1932—Hoover
Institution Archives]

benefit. Once the cost of supporting Kolchak—a fight with the Reds—became
greater than the value of his promises to the Allies, the Allies willingly turned
him over.
Moreover, after World War I had ended, justifying a foreign intervention in
Siberia to a war-weary domestic public became far more difficult for Allied
leaders. In the end, not only was the Allied intervention ineffectual in helping
Kolchak’s resistance, but it actively brought about his downfall and execution
at the hands of the Reds.

LOOKING BACK IN ANGER

Even though the Allies gave in to the Reds’ demands for Kolchak, the
intervention still greatly angered the Soviet government. After all, the
Allies’ supposed policy of nonintervention was essentially abandoned when
they deployed troops in Siberia and recognized Kolchak as head of state.

188 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

Regardless of their true mission, however, the mere presence of the Allies’
capitalist forces in Siberia was an existential threat to the Soviets. The last
American soldiers left Siberia in 1920.
Soviet anger over the intervention appears in the communist propaganda
of the day. One piece in particular, directed at the proletariat of the Allied
countries, called for them to oppose their governments’ intervention in Rus-
sia or “become the executioners of the Workers’ Revolution.” It warns that
“like a ferocious dog freed from its chain, the entire capitalist press of your
countries yowls at the intervention of your governments in Russian affairs
and hoarsely cries, ‘now or never’!” To the Soviets, the Allied governments
had no motivations for intervening except to wage “a campaign against the
Russian workers and peasants.”
While the Soviets were clearly exaggerating to goad workers into revolt,
they were not wrong in claiming that the Allies had ulterior motives for inter-
vening. This was later made abundantly clear to the American public by Guy
Murchie Jr.’s article about the intervention on the front page of the Chicago
Tribune on April 1, 1939. Even though it was written almost twenty years after
the end of the Allied intervention, its title, “A.E.F.’s Strange Adventure: A
War to Please Our Allies,” suggests an ongoing frustration. Murchie repeats
the idea reflected in other documents that there was a lack of clarity on the
mission’s purpose, claiming that “many even of those who took part [in the
intervention] have little
idea of what were its
objectives.” Murchie also In the end, the Siberian misadventure
quotes Secretary of War suggests that foreign intervention for
Newton Baker as saying the sake of stability and self-determi-
that “the reasons moving nation is full of contradictions from
the president [to sup-
the start.
port the intervention]
were diplomatic,” and that such support went against the advice of the War
Department. Thus both Murchie’s article and the earlier Soviet propaganda
agreed that the publicly stated reasons for the intervention were lies, but
disagreed about the true motives.
Though often forgotten, the Allied intervention and its failure reveal
a basic pattern with foreign intervention that is useful for historical and
contemporary foreign policy analysis. The Allied intervention in Siberia sug-
gests that foreign intervention for the sake of stability and self-determination
is full of contradictions from the start. To allow for self-determination, the
intervention forces must remain impartial, but to promote stability and

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 189

protect strategic interests they often have to take sides. Since the interven-
ing countries generally stand to gain only small benefits from the stability
of a foreign country, they are often quick to pull support once the situation
inevitably becomes more complicated and the costs of their intervention rise.
Foreign intervention can thus make the situation worse off than if it had not
occurred at all.
Primary sources from the time of the Siberian intervention indicate that
the mission was likely to fail merely because of these fundamental contra-
dictions. And this lesson remains immensely valuable to American policy
makers.

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Zhivago’s Secret Journey: From Typescript to Book,
by Paolo Mancosu. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.

190 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 H OOVE R A R C H I VE S

H OOVER A RCHIVE S

A Stitch in Time
Belgian women, backed by US aid during World
War I, thanked Americans by sending messages
made from traditional lace and needlework. Lou
Henry Hoover gathered those fragile reminders of
a historic humanitarian moment.

By Jean McElwee Cannon

T
he centenary of the First World War—and with it, this year’s
centenary of Herbert Hoover’s founding of a library at Stan-
ford dedicated specifically to the study of war, revolution, and
peace—has brought a great deal of attention to the trove of
items held in the Hoover Institution Library & Archives that relate to the
world’s first experiences of global diplomatic crisis, industrialized warfare,
mass humanitarian aid efforts, and the controversial treaty-making process
that brought fighting to a (albeit temporary) standstill in 1919. As many schol-
ars and patrons learn during their visits to Stanford, the cornerstone of the
Hoover Library and Archives’ collections on the Great War consist of records
kept by the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), a relief agency run by
Herbert Hoover that fed more than nine million citizens in occupied Belgium
and northern France during the war, and pamphlets created and distributed
by almost all the nations and interest groups that came to the bargaining
table during the Treaty of Versailles.
Hoover, part of President Woodrow Wilson’s delegation to the global
summit, immediately realized himself to be in the midst of one of history’s

Jean McElwee Cannon is the curator for North American Collections at the
Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 191

 most significant negotiations—a historic event for which supporting docu-
ments and ephemera should be preserved and studied. In April 1919 he
cabled Stanford to announce his donation of $50,000—perhaps a pittance
by today’s Palo Alto standards, but nearly twice the operating budget of the
entire Stanford library system at that time—with instructions to “collect
material on war.” From this telegram grew the astoundingly large archival
collection that is now a destination for those studying social, political, and
economic change in the twentieth century, particularly as it relates to the
First World War and its dramatic effect on the geographic, ethnic, and cul-
tural landscape we live in today.
In preparation for the centenary of the founding of the institution and
a forthcoming exhibition of materials that document one hundred years
of the research center’s development, staff members have investigated
the World War I–era collections at Hoover with a keen eye for undis-
covered stories, infrequently discussed events, or rarely viewed arti-
facts that illuminate the lived experience of the conflict and our library
founder’s contribution to negotiating aid and peace in a bitterly divided
world.
The collections of two women involved in the CRB’s aid efforts in Europe
bring to light one of the most interesting, and rarely studied, aspects of the
CRB’s activities: in addition to negotiating to bring food and clothing to the
starving populace of Ger-
man-occupied Belgium,
Sympathetic women in positions of the CRB also brokered
power went to work for the crippled a deal with the Allies
lacemaking industry. and the Central Powers
that allowed nearly fifty
thousand lace makers in Belgium to continue practicing their craft despite
wartime blockades that threatened to limit the supplies necessary to make
the world’s most revered needlework.
The collections of Herbert Hoover’s industrious wife, Lou Henry Hoover,
and also Charlotte Kellogg, a friend of the Hoovers’ and the sole female
delegate of the nearly two hundred delegates of the CRB, include accom-
plished, hundred-year-old pieces of lace needlework such as fans, doilies,
tablecloths, shawls, and flour sacks that were given as gifts to the two
women who rallied to the cause of lace makers in 1915–17. The tributes
tell the tale of thousands of women in Belgium sending gratitude to the
American women who helped them continue working despite the shells and
gunfire devastating northern Europe.

192 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

NATIONAL PRIDE: World War I brought hunger and privation to occupied Bel-
gium. Lace makers saw their supplies cut off and their livelihoods threatened.
Belgian lace had undergone a revival just a few years before the war began,
alongside a movement for improved working conditions and better wages for
lace makers. [Lou Henry Hoover Collection—Hoover Institution Archives]

THE SYMBOL OF BELGIUM

Long before the gunfire of August 1914 was unleashed on the Western Front,
the making of lace, a time-intensive combination of weaving and embroi-
dery that can be created by either a single needle and thread or by multiple
threads held in place by bobbins, was an iconic component of national iden-
tity in Belgium, particularly Flanders. Dating from the fifteenth century, lace
making served as a consuming task (sometimes a pastime; often a livelihood)
during the region’s long, cold, and rainy winters—the same winters which,
during 1914–18, would make fighting on the Western Front such a frigid,
muddy affair.
In fashion, lace reached its height of popularity during the Renaissance,
when aristocrats across Europe pined for collars, ruffles, caps, and cuffs
made of delicate lace from Belgium. During the seventeenth century Flan-
ders would become the international hub of lace production. Though most
lace was produced by peasants in villages far from the distractions of urban
cafes and theaters, cities such as Bruges, Turnhout, and Ypres (the latter
of which would nearly be destroyed during World War I) were known as

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 193

pilgrimage points for lace consumers; merchants flocked to these cities from
all over the world, keen to acquire fine needlepoint to sell at inflated prices in
their home countries.
Despite a craze for lace during the Renaissance, the needle art was
destined for a tumultuous future, as was the rest of Europe. “The French
Revolution killed lace!” exclaimed Jules Kliot—lace collector, expert, and
director of the Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in Berkeley—during a
recent interview. As Kliot explained, late eighteenth-century subversives in
Paris revolutionized not just politics but fashion—as monarchy went out of
vogue, so did all the sartorial vestments of nobility, including lace. Long a
staple trim of aristocratic outer wear, the finery was particularly despised
by the populist sans-culottes (“without breeches”), a political party whose
adopted name identified with defiance against the dandified (and frequently
lace-trimmed) knee breeches of noble lords.
While at sporadic times before the revolution lace had been restricted by law
to the nobility (French history is rife with anecdotes of commoners being pun-
ished for embellishing their ensembles with spuriously obtained bits of lace),
lace trim was entirely outlawed by the sans-culottes, who preferred the tri-
color cockade as a symbol of social, economic, and political equality. Sporting
simple, short jackets (the forerunners to the modern suit jacket), red Phryg­ian
caps (still the symbol of French liberty), and clogs (worn in camaraderie with
peasantry), these trouser-wearers stood in sartorial defiance to the decadence
of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the fashion of whom included silk, satin,
damask—and enormous amounts of lace made by poorly paid laborers.
Kliot emphasized, however, that French revolutionaries were perhaps
not the primary enemies of handmade lace: the most formidable foe of the
art was the Industrial Revolution. While handmade lace enjoyed a brief
resurgence of popularity under Napoleon and his ever-extravagantly-attired
Empress Josephine, factory-made lace flooded the market by the mid-
1800s. By 1900 handmade lace, both as an art and an industry, was nearly
obliterated.

ENTER QUEEN ELISABETH

Five short years before the outbreak of the Great War in Europe, Bavarian-
born Queen Elisabeth ascended the Belgian throne alongside her husband,
King Albert I. Hailing from an artistic family and the daughter of a medical
doctor, Elisabeth was known for both her appreciation of aesthetic beauty
and her advocacy for alleviating the sufferings of the poor. Immediately
upon being crowned she went to work to champion the causes of lace

194 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

DIGNITY IN ART: Queen Elisabeth of Belgium was a champion of lace makers
such as this woman. Elisabeth, who hailed from an artistic family, was known
for both her appreciation of aesthetic beauty and her advocacy for helping the
poor. The queen’s Amies de la Dentelle (“Friends of the Lace”) led a move-
ment before the war for improved working conditions and better wages. [Lou
Henry Hoover Collection—Hoover Institution Archives]

makers in Belgium—forming schools, creating archives of traditional pieces

of lace, establishing libraries to collect lace making instruction books, and
collecting important “prickings,” designs from which lace is made. She spon-
sored competitions with prizes for the best new lace designs, and organized
exhibitions to show the designs to the public. Attentive to the exploitation
of lace makers, Elisabeth established a committee of prominent women in
Belgium, called the Amies de la Dentelle (“Friends of the Lace”), who led a
movement for improved working conditions and better wages for Belgian
lace makers.
After war broke out and Belgium was occupied by Germany, the Belgian
lace trade was thrown into crisis: as the Allies surrounded the continent in
a choking naval blockade, lace makers were both kept from importing the
English and Irish needles and fine linen threads they needed to make lace,

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 195

 and denied the ability to export lace to their primary markets, England and
America. Nearly immediately, sympathetic women in positions of power went
to work for the crippled lace making industry. Lace committees sprang up
across Belgium, intent on helping starving lace workers.
Leading the charge was the Brussels Lace Committee, led by Comtesse
Elizabeth d’Oultremont (lady-in-waiting to Queen Elisabeth); Vicomtesse de
Beughem (the American-born wife of a Belgian aristocrat whose oral history
about her wartime experience is housed in the Hoover Archives); Madame
Josse Allard (wife of a Belgian banker); and Madame Kefer-Mali (a relation
of the Belgian consul general of New York). They were assisted by Lou Henry
Hoover and Nell Brainerd Whitlock (wife of the American ambassador,
Brand Whitlock), who was named honorary president of the committee. Also
central to the effort of helping lace makers was Charlotte Kellogg, CRB dele-
gate and the wife of Vernon Kellogg, a Stanford professor and former teacher
of Herbert Hoover’s who served as director of the CRB during 1915–16. Char-
lotte Kellogg, a lace enthusiast and tireless worker, was requested by Herbert
Hoover himself to travel to Belgium to document the struggles of women in
the war-torn region; in 1917 she published Women of Belgium: Turning Tragedy
to Triumph and in 1920 Bobbins of Belgium, perhaps the most extensive eye-
witness viewpoint of the lace trade in Belgium during wartime.
In 1915, after difficult negotiations with both the Allies and the Central
Powers, Herbert Hoover and the CRB forged the arrangement to import lace
making supplies and export finished lace pieces that would be sold abroad.
For every kilo of thread
imported, the same weight
One tribute tablecloth would have of finished lace would be
taken “as many as thirty women at exported, not more or less.
least three months to make.” The Germans demanded
that no patriotic themes
be included in the lace designs—a restriction that was soon artfully subverted
by a new visual rhetoric of animal symbolism: lions for Belgium, unicorns for
the United Kingdom, roosters for France, bears for Russia, eagles for America.
Evelyn McMillan, a lace expert and Stanford librarian whose recent article
“Gratitude in Lace” in PieceWork magazine is one of the most extensive stud-
ies of Belgian war lace to date, notes that the Lou Henry Hoover Collection
at the Library & Archives houses an outstanding example of animal imagery
worked into war lace: a fan-leaf of Point de Gaze needle lace designed by
artist Lucie Rothschild-Lambert. In addition to symbolic Allied animals, the
fan-leaf depicts the instruments of war: rifles, swords, battle kits, grenades, a

196 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

DEFIANT: Lacework depicts the American eagle and the slogan “E pluribus
unum.” German occupiers demanded that no patriotic themes be included
in the lace designs—a restriction that often was artfully subverted. [Lou Henry
Hoover Collection—Hoover Institution Archives]

gas mask. The representation of such modern war accouterments, according

to McMillan, is quite rare in war lace. (See following pages.)
The collection houses another “magnificent piece” that McMillan esti-
mated would have taken “as many as thirty women at least three months to
make”—a large and complex needle-lace tablecloth with design elements cre-
ated by Belgian sculptor Isidore de Rudder and his sister Maria de Rudder

H O O V E R D IG E S T • S p ring 2019 197

WAR STORY: This 1914 masterpiece in lace interweaves national symbols,
such as Belgium’s rooster and lion, with real and mythical animals, angelic
figures, flowers, and vines. The artist also has included unusual images such
as burning buildings (center) and modern weapons.
 and executed by Belgian women as a tribute to Lou Henry Hoover for her
patronage during wartime. The tablecloth, executed in Point de Venise,
features not only symbolic animals (eagles and lions) but the coat-of-arms of
Belgium, with the lion enchained. Such blatant defiance against the exist-
ing German censorship
of patriotic themes
invites questions as to After the cease-fire in November
its provenance: perhaps 1918, lace “armistice blouses” and
it was made beyond the “armistice collars” became popular
watchful eyes of occupi- for a time.
ers? Patriotic pieces of
needlework were sometimes created and smuggled out of the country for
sale or as gifts, but lace makers learned to be careful—their German occupi-
ers often planted spies in lace villages and schools to monitor the products
that left the country.

A SUCCESSFUL WARTIME CAUSE

Despite the immense time and complexity involved both in making lace and
exporting it during wartime, the CRB quickly began to experience success in
their support of lace makers. As Herbert Hoover tirelessly opined to lawmak-
ers and diplomats of the time, the problem of hunger in Belgium was linked
to the problem of unemployment—the more people the CRB could employ,
the fewer the mouths that would be entirely dependent on food shipped from
abroad and distributed at canteens. Thus lace, reinvented as a patriotic
fashion, underwent a remarkable renaissance—and the culture of lace mak-
ing did as well. As sales abroad rose, the CRB and lace committees estab-
lished new rules and regulations: no lace worker was allowed to work more
than thirty hours a week and apprentices (usually teenage girls) received a
wartime subsidy of 20 percent to their wages. The new restrictions on hours
not only curtailed exploitation but helped to spread work opportunities to as
many individuals as possible.

ART AND SURVIVAL: This British poster (opposite page) reminded civilians
in Allied countries that Belgium, once the international hub of the handmade
lace trade, was now a war zone. It encourages Allied consumers to consider
buying lace an act of patriotism. The artist, Lawrence Sterne Stevens (1884–
1960), was an American who had moved to Belgium before the war to study
fine arts. In later years he was known for vivid illustrations for pulp magazines
such as Argosy, Amazing, and Fantastic Novels. [Poster Collection—Hoover Institu-
tion Archives]

H O O V E R D IG E ST • S p ring 2019 201

 Soon, sympathy and support for the lace makers of Belgium became global
among Allied nations: CRB retail shops for fine tablecloths, linens, fans,
gloves, lampshades, and
collars opened in Paris,
As Herbert Hoover tirelessly pointed London, and New York.
out, hunger in Belgium was linked to Large department stores
unemployment. and fine linen and fabric
shops carried Belgian
war lace, marketing their inventory with patriotism. Exhibitions of lace were
arranged in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. Well-known
European artists contributed designs for lace; in all, close to two thousand
new designs were made during wartime. After the cease-fire was announced
in November 1918, lace “armistice blouses” and “armistice collars” (an
excellent example of which can be found in the fascinating Lace Museum in
Sunnyvale, California) became popular emblems of Allied victory.
Who made these works of art? The provenance of the maker is almost
always impossible to know: pieces are hardly ever signed by the makers and
a single piece, depending on its complexity, might be constructed by multiple
makers of differing expertise.
Needlework artists in Belgium also often redesigned flour sacks imported
to the country by the CRB, embellished them with embroidery stitches
and sometimes with lace, and returned them to the donors and institutions
who supported them in
wartime; dozens of these
Large department stores and fine touching tributes can
linen and fabric shops carried Belgian be found in the Hoover
war lace, marketing their inventory Archives and the Hoover
with patriotism. Presidential Library in
West Branch, Iowa. Lace
expert Evelyn McMillan estimates that in all Herbert Hoover was given
nearly five hundred decorated and repurposed flour sacks as gifts of appre-
ciation for the food sent to Belgium.
Sadly, the renaissance of Belgium’s national symbolic art was short-lived
after the war, though it cannot be denied that the patriotic popularity of lace
and the sale of lace abroad helped Belgium to recover from wartime devasta-
tion and famine. Often fine lace contains nearly ten thousand stitches per
square inch, making it one of the most demanding and time-consuming of
all textile arts and economically out of reach for the modern consumer of
fashion that is not couture.

202 H O O VER DIGEST • Spr i n g 201 9

 The pieces of war lace housed at the Hoover Archives speak strongly to
the perseverance of Belgian women to survive under the most miserable
conditions of occupation. Additionally, the tributes embedded in several of
the pieces attest to the compassion and organizational skills of the women
associated with the lace committees. Historian Jeffrey Miller, writing in a
recent study of the CRB titled WWI Crusaders, notes, “Unfortunately, most
of the CRB delegate stories have been long forgotten, innocent victims swept
away by the tidal wave of negative public opinion surrounding Hoover’s later
efforts as president. . . . Their stories deserve to be told.”
Complex and beautiful, lace emerges as one of the most surprising stories
of the relief effort that became a model for humanitarian aid in the twentieth
century—an ongoing remembrance of the women who chose to stitch instead
of starve, and a tribute to the female organizers who supported them.

Special to the Hoover Digest. Evelyn McMillan provided extensive com-

ments for this article.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Hammer, Sickle, and Soil: The Soviet Drive to
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