HOOVER

DIGEST
R E SE AR C H + COM M E NTARY
ON P U B L IC P OL ICY
W I N TER 2 02 5 N O.1

T H E H O OV E R I N S T I T U T I O N • S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was established
at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, a member of Stanford’s
pioneer graduating class of 1895 and the thirty-first president of the United
States. Created as a library and repository of documents, the Institution
has entered its second century with a dual identity: an active public policy
research center and an internationally recognized library and archives.

The Institution’s overarching goals are to:

» Understand the causes and consequences of economic, political,
and social change
» Analyze the effects of government actions and public policies
» Use reasoned argument and intellectual rigor to generate ideas that
nurture the formation of public policy and benefit society

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

University continues to guide and define the Institution’s mission in the
twenty-first century:

This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States,

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

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

But with these purposes as its goal, the Institution itself
must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace,
to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American
system.

By collecting knowledge and generating ideas, the Hoover Institution seeks

to improve the human condition with ideas that promote opportunity and
prosperity, limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals, and
secure and safeguard peace for all.
 HOOVER DIGEST
RE S E A R C H + COMME N TA RY ON PUBLI C PO LI CY
W in t er 2 02 5 • HOOV ERD I G E ST.O R G

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S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
HOOVER DIGEST
RESEARCH + COMMENTARY ON PUBLIC POLICY
Win ter 2025 • HOOV ERD I G E ST.OR G

The Hoover Digest explores politics, economics, and history, guided by the
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scholars and researchers of the Hoover Institution, the public policy research DIGEST
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ON THE COVER
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Immigrants arrive in New York Harbor Tad and Dianne Taube Director
in this poster promoting a World War
I bond drive. Bond campaigns sounded ERIC WAKIN
many stirring themes—this one connects Deputy Director,
the “first thrill of liberty” to a duty to Everett and Jane Hauck
support the war effort. What complicates Director of Library & Archives
this patriotic image is another event of
1917: the passage of legislation laying out
strict rules for who deserved to have the
thrill of immigrating to America in the
first place. It and another sweeping law,
passed in 1924, had profound demograph-
ic effects during the twentieth century.
See story, page 204.

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 Winter 2025
HOOVER D I G E ST

F O R E I GN P O L ICY
9 Perils of Isolationism
The United States, and especially its new president, must face
threats abroad and reaffirm America’s role as a force for good
throughout the world. By Condoleezza Rice

T HE E CO N O M Y
28 In Praise of “Price Gouging”
“Gouging” is an accusation politicians enjoy flinging about.
But the remedy they so often propose—fixed prices—only
makes for scarce goods. By John H. Cochrane

34 Taxes up for Grabs

Why does our own government encourage foreign bureaucrats
to tax American companies? And how can we stop it?
By Aharon Friedman and Joshua D. Rauh

38 A Better Globalism
A bad idea that never seems to die, “industrial policy,” often
in the form of tariffs, now has champions across the political
spectrum. The problem? Governments are no better at
picking economic winners than they ever were. By Raghuram
G. Rajan

41 Euro Vision
The European Union still matters. It must recommit itself to
growth, innovation, and self-defense. By Michael Spence

H O O V ER D I G E ST • W inter 2025 3
 F E D ER A L ISM
47 American Federalism Today
The founders gave us a way to harmonize federal and state
authority. How is their plan holding up? By Michael W.
McConnell

57 States and Borderlines

The federal government has jurisdiction over immigration and
borders. But states wield their own power to help Washington,
hinder it, or ignore it outright. By Paul E. Peterson

C H I N A AN D TA IWA N
62 Time Is Running Out
Chinese leaders see the subjugation of Taiwan “not as the
endpoint of their security policy, but as the beginning.” A
discussion with Hoover fellow Matt Pottinger. By Jonathan
Movroydis

71 Flank Speed
Now that the Chinese economy is by some measures
bigger than our own, Xi Jinping is using it to build a vast,
sophisticated military that reaches across oceans and even
into space. By Gordon G. Chang

4 H O O VER DIGEST • Wi n ter 2025

75 Red Thread
What explains Beijing’s ambitions and its contempt for
Western ideas? The People’s Republic of China is a communist
state and has never been otherwise. By Miles Yu

R U SS I A A N D UK R A IN E
81 A Time for Terror
Hoover fellow Robert Service compares Russian behavior in
Ukraine to Bolshevik behavior during the revolution. Leaders
in both cases served a cruel, blind ideology. By Andrew
Roberts

90 “My Village Is No More”

Survivors in a ruined Ukrainian town describe the brutal
behavior of Russian soldiers. An eyewitness account. By Paul
R. Gregory

EUROPE
94 To Arms
Britain and the rest of Europe have disarmed as if there were
no tomorrow—and no Vladimir Putin. But no amount of
wishful thinking can wish away the war in Ukraine. By Niall
Ferguson

104 Illusions of Germany

After two ruinous wars, Germany for some seven decades
devoted itself to being good and doing well. Today? There are
entirely new “German questions.” Europe awaits answers.
By Timothy Garton Ash

H O O V ER D I G E ST • W inter 2025 5
 D E F EN S E A N D N ATIO N A L SECURI TY
117 Knowledge Is Power—and It’s Portable
What we don’t know definitely can hurt us. That’s why
education and technology—research, talent recruitment,
innovation—will prove indispensable to American security.
By Amy B. Zegart

128 The New Killer Apps

Cheap, high-tech weapons introduced “creative destruction”
to the battlefield. When will the Pentagon’s creaky
procurement come in for “creative destruction” itself?
By Bing West

T HE E NVIR O N ME N T
137 More Hot Air
Global-warming activists exaggerate the relatively small
number of deaths that result from hot weather and ignore the
greater number that result from cold. If we produced more
energy, not less, we could address both problems. By Bjorn
Lomborg

F R E E S PE E C H
140 Left Unsaid—or Else
Censorship has a long and disreputable history in the United
States. Can free people be trusted to think or speak for
themselves? By Peter Berkowitz

6 H O O VER DIGEST • Wi n ter 2025

146 Submission and Silence
Out-of-control surveillance and political intolerance—in
Britain, free speech is dying. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

E D U C ATIO N
150 The Family Way
Of all the things that help students achieve success and
economic mobility, the two-parent family is the most powerful.
A new study proves it. By Paul E. Peterson

C AL I FO R N IA
154 The Camps Never Close
Homelessness in California: billions spent, little achieved. It’s
about time Californians demanded accountability. By Lee E.
Ohanian

I N T E RVIE WS
159 “Play the Role Assigned You”
In his new memoir about serving in the Trump White House,
Hoover fellow H. R. McMaster recalls how duty drew him to
Washington—and “power games” ultimately drove him away.
By Peter Robinson

169 “Poverty Is the Elemental Foe”

Economist Noah Smith describes the long struggle of
humanity against its oldest enemy. What finally led to victory?
As he sees it, “industrial modernity.” By Russ Roberts

HI STORY A N D C ULTUR E
180 Still His Finest Hour
A new surge of revisionists attack Winston Churchill for—
unbelievably—defying Hitler. Hoover fellow Andrew Roberts,
author of a magisterial Churchill biography, finds the attacks
ignorant and unpatriotic.

H O O V ER D I G E ST • W inter 2025 7
185 The Decade that Roared
The 1920s brought transformation—including a dramatic
improvement in the economic condition of most Americans.
How much of it was government’s doing? Almost none. By
John H. Cochrane

HO OV E R A R C HIVE S
193 “Hatelessly Yours, Joseph”
The work of Russian exile poet Joseph Brodsky was “brought
into English” through the patience and skill of his longtime
translator, George L. Kline. The latest addition to Hoover’s
remarkable Brodsky archives showcases their artistic
partnership—sometimes exasperating, always in pursuit of
the perfect word. By Cynthia L. Haven

204 On the Cover

8 H O O VER DIGEST • Wi n ter 2025

 FOR E IGN POLICY

Perils of
Isolationism
The United States, and especially its new
president, must face threats abroad and reaffirm
America’s role as a force for good throughout the
world.

By Condoleezza Rice

I
n times of uncertainty, people reach for historical analogies. After 9/11,
George W. Bush administration officials invoked Pearl Harbor as a
standard comparison in processing the intelligence failure that led to
the attack. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to imperial Japan’s
attack in making the case that Washington should deliver an ultimatum to
the Taliban, saying, “Decent countries don’t launch surprise attacks.” And as
officials in the Situation Room tried to assess progress in Afghanistan and,
later, Iraq, another analogy came up more than a few times: US President
Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous reliance on body counts in Vietnam. Even if his-
tory doesn’t repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes.
Today’s favorite analogy is the Cold War. The United States again faces an
adversary that has global reach and insatiable ambition, with China taking
the place of the Soviet Union. This is a particularly attractive comparison,

Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director and the Thomas and
Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the Denning
Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford University’s Graduate
School of Business as well as a professor of political science at Stanford. She served
as secretary of state from 2005 to 2009.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 9
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
MONEY TROUBLES: Elvira Nabiullina, chief of Russia’s Central Bank,
has worked hard to compensate for Russia’s financial vulnerabilities. But
cracks in the Russian economy are showing. [Artem Priakhin—ZUMA Press/­
Newscom]

of course, because the United States and its allies won the Cold War. But the
current period is not a Cold War redux. It is more dangerous.
China is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was self-isolating, preferring
autarky to integration, whereas China ended its isolation in the late 1970s. A
second difference between the Soviet Union and China is the role of ideology.
Under the Brezhnev Doctrine that governed Eastern Europe, an ally had to
be a carbon copy of Soviet-style communism. China, by contrast, is largely
agnostic about the internal composition of other states. It fiercely defends the
primacy and superiority of the Chinese Communist Party but does not insist
that others do the equivalent, even if it is happy to support authoritarian states
by exporting its surveillance technology and social media services.
So, if the current competition is not Cold War 2.0, then what is it? Giving
in to the impulse to find historical references, if not analogies, one may find
more food for thought in the imperialism of the late nineteenth century and
the zero-sum economies of the interwar period. Now, as then, revisionist
powers are acquiring territory through force, and the international order is
breaking down. But perhaps the most striking and worrying similarity is that
today, as in the previous eras, the United States is tempted to turn inward.

H O O V E R D IG E S T • W inter 2025 11
NO LIMITS? Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian leader Vladimir Putin pre-
pare to speak at a 2023 summit. Beijing can’t let Putin lose in Ukraine, but it
likely has no real enthusiasm for his adventurism on behalf of a new Russian
Empire—particularly if it puts China in the crosshairs for sanctions. [Presidential
Executive Office of Russia]

THE REVENGE OF GEOPOLITICS

While previous eras of competition were characterized by great-power clashes,
during the Cold War, territorial conflict was fought largely through proxies, as
in Angola and Nicaragua. Moscow mostly confined its use of military force to
its own sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, as when it crushed uprisings in
Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan crossed
a new line, but the move did not fundamentally challenge US interests, and the
conflict eventually became a proxy war. Where Soviet and US forces did face
each other directly, across the German divide, the extreme danger of the two
Berlin crises gave way to a kind of tense stability thanks to nuclear deterrence.
Today’s security landscape features the danger of direct military conflict
between great powers. China’s territorial claims challenge US allies from

12 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

Japan to the Philippines and other US partners in the region, such as India
and Vietnam. Long-held US interests such as freedom of navigation run into
direct conflict with China’s maritime ambitions.
Then there is Taiwan. An attack on Taiwan would require a US military
response, even if the policy of “strategic ambiguity” created uncertainty about
the exact nature of it. For years, the United States has acted as a kind of rheo-
stat in the Taiwan Strait, with the goal of preserving the status quo. Since 1979,
administrations from both parties have sold arms to Taiwan. President Bill Clin-
ton deployed the USS Independence to the strait in 1996 in response to Beijing’s
aggressive activity. In 2003, the Bush administration publicly chastised Taiwan-
ese President Chen Shui-bian when he proposed a referendum that sounded
very much like a vote on independence. All along, the goal was to maintain—or
occasionally, restore—what had become a relatively stable status quo.
In recent years, Beijing’s aggressive military activities around Taiwan
have challenged that equilibrium. In Washington, strategic ambiguity has
largely given way to open discussion of how to deter and, if necessary, repel
a Chinese invasion. But Beijing could threaten Taiwan in other ways. It could
blockade the island, as Chinese forces have practiced in exercises. Or it could
seize small, uninhabited Taiwanese islands, cut underwater cables, or launch
large-scale cyberattacks. These strategies might be smarter than a risky and
difficult assault on Taiwan and would complicate a US response.
The overarching point is that Beijing has Taiwan in its sights. Chinese
leader Xi Jinping, who views the island as a rogue province, wants to com-
plete the restoration of China and take his place in the pantheon of leaders
next to Mao Zedong. Hong Kong is now effectively a province of China, and
bringing Taiwan to heel would fulfill Xi’s ambition. That risks open conflict
between US and Chinese forces.
Alarmingly, the United States and China still have none of the decon-
fliction measures in place that the United States and Russia do. During
the 2008 war in Georgia, for instance, Michael Mullen, the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had ongoing contact with his Russian counter-
part, Nikolai Makarov, so as to avoid an incident as the US Air Force
flew Georgian troops home from Iraq to join the fight. Compare that with
2001, when a hot-dogging Chinese pilot hit a US reconnaissance plane and
forced it to the ground. The crew was detained on Hainan Island, and for
three days, Washington was unable to make high-level contact with the
Chinese leadership. I was national security adviser at the time. Finally, I
located my Chinese counterpart, who was on a trip in Argentina, and got
the Argentines to take a phone to him at a barbecue. “Tell your leaders to

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 13
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: Pope John Paul II meets Polish leader Lech
Walesa during the pope’s trip to Poland in June 1997. The US response to the
rise of Solidarity, the Polish trade union, provides an important lesson in how
to nurture antiauthoritarian movements—as hard as that might be to do in
Putin’s Russia. [Giancarlo Giuliani/IPA via ZUMA Press]

take our call,” I implored. Only then were we able to defuse the crisis and
free the crew. The reopening of military-to-military contacts with China
earlier this year, after a four-year freeze, was a welcome development. But
it is a far cry from the types of procedures and lines of communication
needed to prevent accidental catastrophe.
China’s conventional military modernization is impressive and accelerating.
The country now has the largest navy in the world, with over three hundred
and seventy ships and submarines. The growth in China’s nuclear arsenal is
also alarming. While the United States and the Soviet Union came to a more
or less common understanding of how to maintain the nuclear equilibrium
during the Cold War, that was a two-player game. If China’s nuclear modern-
ization continues, the world will face a more complicated, multiplayer scenar-
io—and without the safety net that Moscow and Washington developed.
The potential for conflict comes against the backdrop of an arms race
in revolutionary technologies: artificial intelligence, quantum computing,
synthetic biology, robotics, advances in space, and others. In 2017, Xi gave a

14 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

speech in which he declared that China would surpass the United States in
these frontier technologies by 2035. Although he was undoubtedly trying to
rally China’s scientists
and engineers, it may be
a speech he has come Revisionist powers are taking territo-
to regret. Just as it was ry through force, and the international
after the Soviet Union order is breaking down.
launched the Sputnik
satellite, the United States was forced to confront the possibility that it
could lose a technological race to its main adversary—a realization that has
spurred a concerted pushback from Washington.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the United States suddenly
understood further vulnerabilities. The supply chain for everything from
pharmacological inputs to rare-earth minerals depended on China. Beijing
had taken the lead in industries that the United States once dominated, such
as the production of batteries. Access to high-end semiconductors, an indus-
try created by American giants such as Intel, turned out to depend on the
security of Taiwan, where 90 percent of advanced chip making takes place.
It is hard to overstate the shock and sense of betrayal that gripped US
leaders. US policy toward China was always something of an experiment,
with proponents of economic engagement betting that it would induce politi-
cal reform. For decades, the benefits flowing from the bet seemed to out-
weigh the downsides. Even if there were problems with intellectual-property
protection and market access (and there were), Chinese domestic growth
fueled international economic growth. China was a hot market, a good place
to invest, and a valued supplier of low-cost labor. Supply chains stretched
from China across the world. By the time China joined the World Trade
Organization, in 2001, the total trade volume between the United States and
China had increased roughly fivefold over the previous decade, reaching
$120 billion. It seemed inevitable that China would change internally, since
economic liberalization and political control were ultimately incompatible.
Xi came to power agreeing with this maxim, but not in the way the West had
hoped: instead of economic liberalization, he chose ­political control.
Not surprisingly, the United States eventually reversed course, beginning
with the Trump administration and continuing through the Biden administra-
tion. A bipartisan agreement emerged that China’s behavior was unacceptable.
As a result, the United States’ technological decoupling from China is now
well under way, and a labyrinth of restrictions impedes outbound and inbound
investment. For now, American universities remain open to training Chinese

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 15
 graduate students and to international collaboration, both of which have signif-
icant benefits for the US scientific community. But there is far more awareness
of the challenge that these activities can pose for national security.
So far, however, decoupling does not extend to the full range of commer-
cial activity. The international economy will still be well served by trade
and investment between the world’s two largest economies. The dream of
seamless integration may be dead, but there are benefits—including to global
stability—if Beijing continues to have a stake in the international system.
Some problems, such as climate change, will be difficult to address without
China’s involvement. Washington and Beijing will need to find a new basis for
a workable relationship.

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE REBORN

In the final 2012 presidential debate, US President Barack Obama argued
that his opponent, Mitt Romney, was overhyping the danger from Russia,
suggesting that the country was no longer a geopolitical threat. With the 2014
annexation of Crimea, it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin
begged to differ.
The next step, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has brought his ambi-
tion to restore the Russian Empire face to face with the red lines of Article
5 of NATO’s founding treaty, which stipulates that an attack on one member
is treated as an attack on all.
Early in the war, NATO worried
Beijing has Taiwan in its sights.
that Moscow might attack supply
lines in Poland and Romania, both members of the alliance. So far, Putin
has shown no appetite for triggering Article 5, but the Black Sea (which the
czars considered a Russian lake) has again become a source of conflict and
tension. Remarkably, Ukraine, a country that barely has a navy, has suc-
cessfully challenged Russian naval power and can now move grain along its
own coastline. Even more devastating for Putin, his gambit has produced
a strategic alignment among Europe, the United States, and much of the
rest of the world, leading to extensive sanctions against Russia. It is now an
isolated and heavily militarized state.
Putin surely never thought it would turn out this way. Moscow initially
predicted Ukraine would fall within days of the invasion. Russian forces
were carrying three days’ worth of provisions and dress uniforms for the
parade they expected to hold in Kyiv. The embarrassing first year of the war
exposed the weaknesses of the Russian armed forces, which turned out to be
riddled with corruption and incompetence. But as it has done throughout its

16 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

ON GUARD: US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, right, meets with British
Secretary of State for Defense John Healey, center, and Australian Deputy
Prime Minister and Defense Minister Richard Marles at an AUKUS confer-
ence in London last September. The three-nation group represents one of
the responses to the behavior of China and Russia in the Asia-Pacific region.
[Polaris/Newscom]

history, Russia has stabilized the front, relying on old-fashioned tactics such
as human wave attacks, trenches, and land mines. The incremental way in
which the United States and its allies supplied weapons to Ukraine—first
debating whether to send tanks, then doing so, and so on—gave Moscow
breathing room to mobilize its defense industrial base and throw its huge
manpower advantage at the Ukrainians.
Still, the economic toll will haunt Moscow for years to come. An estimated
one million Russians fled their country in response to Putin’s war, many
of them young and well educated. Russia’s oil and gas industry has been
crippled by the loss of important markets and the withdrawal of the multina-
tional oil giants BP, Exxon, and Shell. Russia’s talented central banker, Elvira
Nabiullina, has covered up many of the economy’s vulnerabilities, walk-
ing a tightrope without access to the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets
held in the West, and China has stepped in to take off some of the pressure.
But the cracks in the Russian economy are showing. According to a report

H O O V E R D IG E S T • W inter 2025 17
ON THE NORTHERN LINE: Finnish Defense Forces parade in 2022 in the city
of Hamina. Finland’s accession to NATO, along with that of Sweden, brings
meaningful military capability to the alliance’s arctic flank and helps secure
the Baltic states. [Marina Takimoto—ZUMA Press/Newscom]

commissioned for Gazprom, the majority-state-owned energy giant, the com-

pany’s revenue will stay below its pre-war level for at least ten years thanks
to the effects of the invasion.
Thoughtful economic players in Moscow are worried. But Putin cannot
lose this war, and he is willing to sacrifice everything to stave off disaster. As
Germany’s experience in the interwar period suggests, an isolated, milita-
rized, declining power is exceedingly dangerous.
The challenge is complicated by Russia’s growing cooperation with China,
Iran, and North Korea. The four countries have a common cause: to under-
mine and replace the US-led international system that they detest. Still, it is
worth noting that their strategic interests are not easy to harmonize. Beijing
cannot let Putin lose but likely has no real enthusiasm for his adventurism on
behalf of a new Russian Empire—particularly if it puts China in the cross-
hairs for secondary sanctions on its own struggling economy.
Meanwhile, the growth of Chinese power in Central Asia and beyond is
not likely to warm the hearts of the xenophobes in the Kremlin. China’s
ambitions complicate Russia’s relations with India, a longstanding military

18 H O O VER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

partner that is now turning more toward the United States. Russia’s dalli-
ance with North Korea complicates its own relationship with South Korea—
and China’s, as well. Iran terrifies both Russia and China as it moves closer
to developing a nuclear weapon. Tehran’s proxies are a constant source
of trouble in the Middle East: the Houthis endanger shipping in the Red
Sea, Hamas recklessly
launched a war with
Israel, Hezbollah in If China’s nuclear modernization
Lebanon threatened a continues, the world will face a
regional conflagration, multiplayer scenario—without the
and militias in Iraq and safety net Moscow and Washington
Syria that Tehran does
developed.
not always seem to con-
trol have carried out attacks on US military personnel. A nasty and unstable
Middle East is not good for Russia or China. And none of the three powers
really trusts North Korea’s erratic leader, Kim Jong Un.
That said, international politics has always made for strange bedfellows
when revisionist powers seek to undo the status quo. And they can do a lot of
collective damage despite their differences.

THE CRUMBLING ORDER

The post–World War II liberal order was a direct response to the horrors of the
interwar period. The United States and its allies looked back on the economic
depression and international aggression of the 1920s and 1930s and located
the cause in beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism, currency manipulation, and
violent quests for resources—for example, leading to the aggressive behavior
by imperial Japan in the Pacific. The absence of the United States as a kind of
offshore mediator also contributed to the breakdown of order. The one effort to
build a moderating institution after World War I, the League of Nations, proved
to be a pathetic disgrace, covering aggression rather than confronting it. Asian
and European powers, left to their own devices, fell into catastrophic conflict.
After World War II, the United States and its allies built an economic order
that was no longer zero-sum. At the Bretton Woods conference, they laid
the groundwork for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the predecessor of the World
Trade Organization), which together promoted the free movement of goods
and services and stimulated international economic growth. For the most
part, it was a wildly successful strategy. Global GDP grew and grew, surpass-
ing the $100 trillion mark in 2022.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 19
 The companion to this “economic commons” was a “security commons”
that was also led by the United States. Washington committed to the defense
of Europe through NATO’s Article 5, which, after the Soviet Union’s success-
ful nuclear test in 1949, essentially meant pledging to trade New York for Lon-
don or Washington for Bonn. A similar US commitment to Japan allowed that
country to replace the legacy of its hated imperial military with self-defense
forces and a “peace constitution,” easing relations with its neighbors. By 1953,
South Korea also had a US security guarantee, ensuring peace on the Korean
Peninsula. As the United Kingdom and France stepped back from the Middle
East after the 1956 Suez crisis, the United States became the guarantor of
freedom of navigation in the region and, in time, its major stabilizing force.
Today’s international system is not yet a throwback to the early twentieth
century. The death of globalization is often overstated, but the rush to pursue
onshoring, near-shoring, and “friend shoring,” largely in reaction to China,
does portend a weakening
of integration. The United
US policy toward China was always States has been largely
something of an experiment. Some absent from negotiations
bet that it would induce political on trade for almost a
decade now. It’s hard to
reform.
recall the last time that an
American politician gave a spirited defense of free trade. The new consensus
raises the question: can the aspiration for the freer movement of goods and
services survive the United States’ absence from the game?
Globalization will continue in some form. But the sense that it is a positive
force has lost steam. Consider the way countries acted in response to 9/11 ver-
sus how they acted in response to the pandemic. After 9/11, the world united
in tackling terrorism, a problem that almost every country was experiencing
in some form. Within a few weeks of the attack, the UN Security Council had
unanimously passed a resolution allowing the tracking of terrorist financ-
ing across borders. Countries quickly harmonized their airport security
standards. The United States soon joined with other countries to create the
Proliferation Security Initiative, a forum for sharing information on suspicious
cargo that would grow to include more than one hundred member states.
Fast-forward to 2020, and the world saw the revenge of the sovereign
state. International institutions were compromised, the chief example being
the World Health Organization, which had grown too close to China. Travel
restrictions, bans on the export of protective gear, and claims on vaccines
complicated the road to recovery.

20 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 With the growing chasm between the United States and its allies on one
side and China and Russia on the other, it is hard to imagine this trend
reversing. Economic integration, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union
was thought to be a com-
mon project for growth
and peace, has given way No one knows how long the shell of
to a zero-sum quest for Russian greatness can survive, but it
territory, markets, and can do a lot of harm before it cracks.
innovation. Still, one
would hope that humankind has learned from the disastrous consequences
of protectionism and isolationism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. So how can it avoid a repeat of history?

ANOTHER TWILIGHT STRUGGLE

The United States might take the advice that the diplomat George Kennan
gave in his famous “Long Telegram” of 1946. Kennan advised Washington
to deny the Soviet Union the easy course of external expansion until it was
forced to deal with its own internal contradictions. This was prescient, as
four decades later, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform a
fundamentally rotten system wound up collapsing it instead.
Today, Russia’s internal contradictions are obvious. Putin has undone thir-
ty-plus years of Russian integration into the international economy and relies
on a network of opportunistic states that throw crumbs his way to sustain his
regime. No one knows how long this shell of Russian greatness can survive,
but it can do a lot of harm before it cracks. Resisting and deterring Russian
military aggression is essential until it does.
Putin counts on a cowed and poorly informed population, and his regime
indoctrinates young people in ways reminiscent of the Hitler Youth. The
announcement last June that Russian children would attend summer camps
in North Korea, of all places, is stunning. Russians, once able to travel and
study abroad, now face a different future. They must make sacrifices, Putin
tells them, in the service of “Mother Russia.”
Yet Russia’s human potential has always been great, despite what often
seems like a deliberate plot by its leaders to destroy it. It is incumbent on the
United States, Europe, and others to keep some connection to the Russian
people. Russians should be allowed, when possible, to study and work abroad.
Efforts, open and covert, should be made to pierce Putin’s propaganda,
particularly in the cities, where he is neither trusted nor liked. Finally, the
Russian opposition cannot be abandoned. The Baltic states house much of

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 21
 the organization built by the activist Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian
prison last February. He was one of the few leaders who had a real following
in much of Russia. His death cannot be the end of his cause.
Isolation has never been the answer to the United States’ security or
prosperity.
The case of Solidarity, the Polish trade union, provides an important les-
son in how to nurture antiauthoritarian movements. When Poland’s Soviet-
aligned regime declared
martial law in 1981, Soli-
China’s one-child policy, brutally darity’s leader, Lech Wale-
enforced for decades, was the kind of sa, went underground
mistake only an authoritarian regime with his organization. The
group was sustained by
could have made.
an odd troika: the Rea-
gan administration’s CIA, the AFL-CIO, and the Vatican (and its Polish-born
pope, John Paul II). Solidarity received relatively simple support from abroad,
such as cash and printing presses. But when a political opening came in 1989,
Walesa and company were ready to step in and lead a relatively smooth tran-
sition to democracy. The main lesson is that determined efforts can sustain
opposition movements, as hard as that might be in Putin’s Russia.
China’s future is by no means as bleak as Russia’s. Yet China, too, has inter-
nal contradictions. The country is experiencing a rapid demographic inver-
sion rarely seen outside of war. Births have declined by more than 50 percent
since 2016, such that the total fertility rate is approaching 1.0. The one-child
policy, put in place in 1979 and brutally enforced for decades, was the kind of
mistake that only an authoritarian regime could have made, and now, millions
of Chinese men don’t have mates. Since the policy ended in 2016, the state has
tried to browbeat women into having children, turning women’s rights into a
crusade for childbearing—yet more evidence of the panic in Beijing.
Another contradiction stems from the uneasy coexistence of capitalism
and authoritarian communism. Xi has turned out to be a true Marxist. Chi-
na’s golden age of private sector–led growth has slowed in large part because
of the Chinese Communist Party’s anxiety about alternative sources of power.
China used to lead the world in online education startups, but in 2021, the
government cracked down on them because it could not reliably monitor
their content. A once-thriving entrepreneurial culture has withered away.
China’s aggressive behavior toward foreigners has exposed other contradic-
tions. Xi knows that China needs foreign direct investment, and he courts
corporate leaders from across the world. But then, a Western firm’s offices

22 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

are raided or one of its Chinese employees is detained, and, not surprisingly,
a trust deficit grows between Beijing and foreign investors.
China is also suffering a trust deficit with its youth. Young Chinese citizens
may be proud of their country, but a 20 percent youth unemployment rate
has undermined their optimism for the future. Xi’s heavy-handed propaga-
tion of “Xi Jinping Thought” turns them off. This has led them to adopt an
attitude of what is known colloquially as “lying flat,” a passive-aggressive
stance of going along to get along while harboring no loyalty or enthusiasm
for the regime. Now is thus not the time to isolate Chinese youth but the time
to welcome them to study in the United States. As Nicholas Burns, the US
ambassador to China, has noted, a regime that goes out of its way to intimi-
date its citizens to discourage them from engaging with Americans is not a
confident regime. Indeed, it is a signal for the United States to keep pushing
for connections to the Chinese people.
Meanwhile, Washington will need to maintain economic pressure on the revi-
sionist powers. It should continue isolating Russia, with an eye toward arrest-
ing Beijing’s creeping
support for the Kremlin.
But it should refrain from The United States and other democ-
imposing blunt sanctions racies must win the technological
against China, since they arms race.
would be ineffective and
counterproductive, crippling the US economy in the process. Targeted sanc-
tions, by contrast, may slow Beijing’s military and technological progress, at
least for a while. Iran is much more vulnerable. Never again should Washington
unfreeze Iranian assets, as the Biden administration did as part of a deal to
release five imprisoned Americans. Efforts to find moderates among Iran’s
theocrats are doomed to failure and serve only to allow the mullahs to escape
the contradictions of their unpopular, aggressive, and incompetent regime.

WHAT IT TAKES
This strategy will require investment. The United States needs to maintain
the defense capabilities to deny China, Russia, and Iran their strategic goals.
The war in Ukraine has revealed weaknesses in the US defense industrial
base that must be remedied. Critical reforms need to be made to the defense
budgeting process, which is inadequate to this task. Congress must strive to
enhance the Defense Department’s long-term strategic planning process, as
well as its ability to adapt to evolving threats. The Pentagon should also work
with Congress to gain greater efficiencies from the amount it already spends.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 23
 Costs can be reduced in part by speeding up the Pentagon’s slow procurement
and acquisition processes so that the military can better harness the remark-
able technology coming out of the private sector. Beyond military capabilities,
the United States must rebuild the other elements of its diplomatic toolkit—
such as information operations—that have eroded since the Cold War.
The United States and other democracies must win the technological arms
race, since in the future, transformative technologies will be the most impor-
tant source of national
power. The debate about
Moscow needs to know this: NATO the balance between
does not intend to leave a vacuum in ­regulation and innova-
Europe. tion is just beginning. But
while the possible down-
sides should be acknowledged, ultimately it is more important to unleash
these technologies’ potential for societal good and national security. Chinese
progress can be slowed but not stopped, and the United States will have to
run fast and hard to win this race. Democracies will investigate these tech-
nologies, call congressional hearings about them, and debate their impact
openly. Authoritarians will not. For this reason, among many others, authori-
tarians must not triumph.
The good news is that given the behavior of China and Russia, the United
States’ allies are ready to contribute to the common defense. Many coun-
tries in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, the Philippines, and
Japan, recognize the threat and appear committed to addressing it. Rela-
tions between Japan and South Korea are better than ever. Moscow’s recent
agreements with Pyongyang have alarmed Seoul and should deepen its
cooperation with democratic allies. India, through its membership in the
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—also known as the Quad, the strategic
partnership that also includes Australia, Japan, and the United States—is
cooperating closely with the US military and emerging as a pivotal power in
the Indo-Pacific. Vietnam, too, appears willing to contribute, given its own
strategic concerns with China. The challenge will be to turn the ambitions of
US partners into sustained commitment once the costs of enhanced defense
capabilities become clear.
In Europe, the war in Ukraine has mobilized NATO in ways unimaginable
a few years ago. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO’s Arctic flank
brings real military capability and helps secure the Baltic states. The ques-
tion of postwar security arrangements for Ukraine hangs over the continent
at this moment. The most straightforward answer would be to admit Ukraine

24 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

to NATO and simultaneously to the European Union. Both institutions have
accession processes that would take some time. The key point is this: Moscow
needs to know that the alliance does not intend to leave a vacuum in Europe.
The United States also needs a strategy for dealing with the nonaligned
states of the global South. These countries will insist on strategic flexibil-
ity, and Washington should resist the urge to issue loyalty tests. Rather, it
should develop policies that address their concerns. Above all, the United
States needs a meaningful alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s
massive global infra-
structure program. The
BRI is often depicted Generating support for an interna-
as helping China win tionalist foreign policy requires the
hearts and minds, but in president to paint a vivid picture of
reality it is not winning what that world would be like without
anything. Recipients are
an active United States.
growing frustrated with
the corruption, poor safety and labor standards, and fiscal unsustainability
associated with its projects. The aid that the United States, Europe, Japan,
and others offer is small by comparison, but unlike Chinese aid, it can attract
significant foreign direct investment from the private sector, thus dwarfing
the amount provided by the BRI. But you can’t beat something with nothing.
A US strategy that shows no interest in a region until China shows up is not
going to succeed. Washington needs to demonstrate sustained engagement
with countries in the global South on the issues they care about—namely,
economic development, security, and climate change.

WHICH WAY, AMERICA?

The pre–World War II era was defined not only by great-power conflict and a
weak international order but also by a rising tide of populism and isolation-
ism. So is the current era. The main question hanging over the international
system today is, where does America stand?
The biggest difference between the first half of the twentieth century and
the second half was the fact of Washington’s sustained and purposeful global
engagement. After World War II, the United States was a confident country,
with a baby boom, a growing middle class, and unbridled optimism about the
future. The struggle against communism provided bipartisan unity, even if
there were sometimes disagreements over specific policies. Most agreed with
President John F. Kennedy that their country was willing to “pay any price,
bear any burden” in the defense of freedom.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 25
 The United States is a different country now—exhausted by eight decades of
international leadership, some of it successful and appreciated, and some of it
dismissed as failure. The American people are different, too—less confident in
their institutions and in the viability of the American dream. Years of divisive
rhetoric, Internet echo chambers, and, even among the best-educated youth,
ignorance of the complexity of history have left Americans with a tattered sense
of shared values. For the latter problem, elite cultural institutions bear much
of the blame. They have rewarded those who tear down the United States and
ridiculed those who extol its virtues. To address Americans’ lack of faith in their
institutions and in one another, schools and colleges must change their curricula
to offer a more balanced view of US history. And instead of creating a climate
that reinforces one’s existing opinions, these and other institutions should
encourage a healthy debate in which competing ideas are encouraged.
That said, great-power DNA is still very much in the American genome.
Americans carry two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. One side of the
brain looks at the world and thinks that the United States has done enough,
saying, “It is someone else’s turn.” The other side looks abroad and sees a
large country trying to extinguish a smaller one, children choking on nerve
gas, or a terrorist group beheading a journalist and says, “We must act.” The
president can appeal to either side.
The new Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—populism, nativism, isolation-
ism, and protectionism—tend to ride together, and they are challenging the
political center. Only the United States can counter their advance and resist
the temptation to go back to the future. But generating support for an inter-
nationalist foreign policy requires a president to paint a vivid picture of what
that world would be like without an active United States. In such a world, an
emboldened Putin and Xi, having defeated Ukraine, would move on to their
next conquest. Iran would celebrate the United States’ withdrawal from the
Middle East and sustain its illegitimate regime by external conquest through
its proxies. Hamas and Hezbollah would launch more wars, and hopes that Gulf
Arab states would normalize relations with Israel would be dashed. The inter-
national economy would be weaker, sapping US growth. International waters
would be contested, with piracy and other incidents at sea stalling the move-
ment of goods. American leaders should remind the public that a reluctant
United States has repeatedly been drawn into conflict—in 1917, 1941, and 2001.
Isolation has never been the answer to the country’s security or prosperity.
Then, a leader must say that the United States is well positioned to design
a different future. The country’s endlessly creative private sector is capable
of continuous innovation. The United States has an unparalleled and secure

26 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

energy bounty from Canada to Mexico that can sustain it through a reason-
able energy transition over the many years it will take. It has more allies than
any great power in history and good friends, as well. People around the world
seeking a better life still dream of becoming Americans. If the United States
can summon the will to deal with its immigration puzzle, it will not suffer the
demographic calamity that faces most of the developed world.
The United States’ global involvement will not look exactly as it has for
the past eighty years. Washington is likely to choose its engagements more
carefully. If deterrence is strong, that may be enough. Allies will have to bear
more of the cost of defending themselves. Trade agreements will be less
ambitious and global but more regional and selective.
Internationalists must admit that they had a blind spot for those Ameri-
cans, such as the unemployed coal miner and steelworker, who lost out as
good jobs fled abroad. And the forgotten did not take kindly to the argument
that they should shut up and be happy with cheap Chinese goods. This time,
there can be no more platitudes about the advantages of globalization for all.
There must be a real effort to give people meaningful education, skills, and
job training. The task is even more urgent since technological progress will
severely punish those who cannot keep up.
Those who argue for engagement will need to reframe what it means. The
eighty years of US internationalism is another analogy that doesn’t perfectly fit
the circumstances of today. Still, if the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries taught Americans anything, it is this: other great powers don’t mind their
own business. Instead, they seek to shape the global order. The future will be
determined by the alliance of democratic, free market states or it will be deter-
mined by the revisionist powers, harking back to a day of territorial conquest
abroad and authoritarian practices at home. There is simply no other option.

Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com).

© 2025 The Atlantic Monthly Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Asia’s

New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-
Pacific, by Michael R. Auslin. To order, call (800)
888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 27
T H E ECO N O M Y

In Praise of
“Price Gouging”
“Gouging” is an accusation politicians enjoy
flinging about. But the remedy they so often
propose—fixed prices—only makes for scarce
goods.

By John H. Cochrane

K
amala Harris delivered a policy
speech last summer that ignited Key points
a debate about “price gouging” » A sharply higher price
directs supply to those who
and what the government should really need it.
do about it. » Price gouging encour-
We should praise price gouging. Yes, pass a ages new supply, hold-
ing stockpiles for a rainy
new federal law, one that overrides the many
day, efficient use of those
state laws against price gouging. stockpiles, and the use of
What is price gouging and how could I substitutes.

possibly say that? The classic case of “price » The alternative to ration-
ing by price is rationing by
gouging” happens in a natural disaster or waiting in line or by politi-
pandemic. A hurricane is coming, so people cal favoritism.

run down to hardware stores and clean out

John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy,
and a participant in Hoover’s George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group. He
is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an
adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

28 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

RUNNING DRY: Gasoline pumps sit idle in Sutherlin, Oregon, in October
1973. The “oil shock” of 1973–74 was triggered by an Arab embargo meant to
punish US support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Consumers then, and
during similar crises, hoarded fuel and worsened shortages. [David Falconer—­
Environmental Protection Agency]

the four-by-eight sheets of plywood to board up their windows. Stores raise

their prices, people who have the plywood sell it at high prices to those that
don’t. After the storm, gasoline trucks can’t get in for a few days. Gas sta-
tions raise prices to $10 per gallon. During the COVID pandemic, you might
recall, people got worried about toilet paper and went out to buy it, cleaning
out shelves. Stores that raised prices were accused of “gouging.”
Price gouging is fundamentally different from monopoly pricing, collu-
sion, or price fixing. Price gouging happens in perfectly competitive markets.
There suddenly isn’t enough to go around, from either a surge in demand or
a contraction in supply. Prices rise sharply above what people are used to
paying. Those that have inventories, bought when prices were lower, can turn
around and make a temporary profit. Harris’s statement on “gouging” over-
looked the fact that price fixing is already illegal, and it’s abundantly clear
grocery stores are not doing it.

H O O V E R D IG E S T • W inter 2025 29
 WHO’S GOT PLYWOOD?
Price gouging is wonderful for all the reasons that letting supply equal
demand is wonderful. When there is a limited supply, then a sharply higher
price directs that supply to those who really need it. It’s day two after the
hurricane. Who really needs gas? An ambulance, police, or a fire truck? A
disabled person, needing to get to a doctor across town? Or someone who
could bike, take public
transit, or walk with just
Price gouging is wonderful for all a little effort to go see a
the reasons that letting supply equal friend?
demand is wonderful. Hoarding goes with
price controls, leading to
empty shelves. Why did people buy tons of toilet paper in the pandemic?
They were worried about not being able to get it in the future. If the stores
had not been worried about price gouging, they would have raised the pric-
es a lot more, and people with that idea would have gotten the message:
don’t bother to stock up now—and if you really need it, there will always
be some in the store later.
Laws limiting price gouging also reduce supply. If gas goes to $10 per gal-
lon, there is a huge incentive for anyone who has a gasoline tanker to fire it
up, buy some gas out in the sticks, bring it in, and sell it to local gas stations.
If you can’t sell it for a good price, and the gas station can’t recoup that price,
it doesn’t happen.
Supplies interact. A truck bringing in food really should get some of the
available gas. But if a price-gouging limit on gas means that truck can’t get
gas, then it can’t bring in food, either. A price-gouging limit on food means
the truck can’t afford the gas.
Inventory is a great source of supply. If you run a Home Depot in Florida,
how many four-by-eight sheets of plywood do you keep around? Well, if you’re
allowed to sell them for $100 each when the next hurricane is coming, a lot. If
you must charge only the regular price until the shelves empty out, then not
so much. Inventory is expensive.
“Windfall profits” belong in the pantheon of saints along with price
­gouging. In competitive industries, they are what encourages people to enter
markets and offer new supply.
Price gouging directs scarce supply to the people who really need it,
encourages new supply to come in, encourages holding stockpiles for a
rainy day, encourages efficient use of stockpiles we have sitting around,

30 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

and encourages people to substitute for less scarce goods when they
can.
Anti-price-gouging efforts also target resellers. Suppose you have twenty
four-by-eight plywood sheets in your basement, waiting for that big remodel.
In the day before the hurricane, you put them on eBay, or just outside the
front of the garage, for $100 each. That way, someone else gets to save his
house. But not if the cops are going to come arrest you for it.

WHEN IN DOUBT, HAND OUT CASH

But what about people who can’t “afford” $10 gas and just have to get, say, to
work? Rule number one of economics is don’t distort prices in order to trans-
fer income. First, take a breath. In the big scheme of things, even a month of
having to pay $10 for gas is not a huge change in the distribution of lifetime
resources available to people. “Afford” is a squishy concept. You say you can’t
afford $100 to fill your tank. But if I offer to sell you a Porsche for $100, you
might suddenly be able to “afford” it.
But more deeply, if distributional consequences of a shock are impor-
tant, then hand out cash, so long as everyone faces the same prices. Give
­everyone $100 to “pay for gas.” But let them keep the $100 or spend it on
something else if they look at the $10 price of gas and decide it’s worth
inconvenient substitutes like carpooling, public transit, bicycles, or not going
anywhere, and using the money on something else instead.
This is, mostly, what
our government did
during COVID. There In competitive industries, so-called
was a lot of noise about “windfall profits” are what encourage
price gouging then, too, people to enter the market and offer
but by and large the new supply.
government just handed
out checks so everyone could pay higher prices. (With the exception of rental
housing.) We got inflation, but we did not get the devastation that would have
been caused by price controls and rationing.
Yes, rationing. Nobody likes “price gouging,” but choices are always
between alternatives. How else but higher prices are we going to decide
who gets the short supply? The alternative to rationing by price is rationing
by waiting in line, or by political preference. Or by who you know.
Paying higher prices reduces your real income, and nobody likes that. But
with less to go around, our collective real income is lower no matter what the
government does about it. The government can only transfer resources, not

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 31
 create them. And all the fixes to price gouging make the shortage worse, by
discouraging people to cut back on demand or bring in new supplies.
Yet the cultural and moral disapproval of price gouging is strong. Going
back thousands of years, people (and theologians) have felt that charging
more than whatever they had gotten accustomed to is immoral, especially if
the merchant happened to have an inventory purchased in an earlier time.
This “just price” moral feeling surely motivates a lot of the anti-price-gouging
campaign. Economics has only understood how virtuous price gouging is in
the past two hundred and fifty years.
Indeed, companies are very reluctant to price gouge. Costco let the shelves
run out of toilet paper rather than raise prices. Other stores rationed: you
can have only four rolls—
no matter whether the
It is surely morally worthy to give cupboard is bare and
what you have to your neighbors you have a house of eight
in time of need. But we should not people with diarrhea, or
you’re stocking up your
demand gifts.
summer house just in
case. Their reluctance goes way beyond laws. Price gouging is terrible public
relations. And, to some extent, for good reasons. Stores want a reputation for
buying cheaply and passing on the low cost to the customer.
As much as the United States is the land of free markets—and it is, cultur-
ally, compared to other places—we have a ways to go in our cultural accep-
tance of market behavior. It should be, “You’re free to charge what you want
for your property, and I’m free to not buy. Everybody stop whining.” It is not.
Uber surge pricing was an important lesson for me. I loved it. I could
always get a car if I really needed one, and I could see how much extra I was
paying and decide whether I really did need it. I was grateful that Uber let
me pay other people to postpone their trip for a while, and that the system
sent a loud signal that more drivers were needed. But ride-share drivers
reported that everyone else hated it and felt cheated.

THE VERY LAST MOTEL ROOM

This cultural and moral disapproval came home to me strongly a few decades
ago. We were driving from Chicago to Boston in our minivan, with four young
children, the dog, and my mother. We got to upstate New York and needed to
stop for the night. This was before cell phones and the Internet, so the com-
mon thing was to pull off at a big freeway interchange—marked “food, phone,
gas, lodging”—and see what was available. Nothing. We tried hotel after

32 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

hotel. We asked them to call around. Nothing. It turned out that this was the
weekend of Woodstock ’94, a huge music festival. As the evening wore on, the
children were turning into pumpkins.
Finally, we found a seedy Super 8 motel that had two rooms left, for $400.
At the time, Super 8 rooms were about $50 at most. I said immediately,
“Thank you, we’ll take them!” My mom was furious. “How dare he charge
so much!” I tried hard to explain. “If he charged $50, or $100, those rooms
would have been gone long ago and we’d be sleeping in the car tonight. Thank
him and be grateful! He’s a struggling immigrant, running a business. We
don’t need presents from people who run Super 8s in upstate New York.” But
nothing I could do would persuade her that the hotel owner wasn’t being ter-
rible in “taking advantage of us.”
It is surely morally worthy to give what you have to your neighbors in time
of need, especially the less fortunate. But we should not demand gifts. And
appropriation of property by threat of force, turning off the best mechanism
we know for alleviating scarcity, does not follow. Moral feelings are a terrible
guide for laws.
Most politicians just supply what people demand. If the culture disap-
proves, they follow—supply and demand, cause and effect, logic, evidence,
and experience be damned.

Reprinted from John H. Cochrane’s blog, The Grumpy Economist (http://

johnhcochrane.blogspot.com).

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Getting

Monetary Policy Back on Track, edited by Michael D.
Bordo, John H. Cochrane, 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 • W inter 2025 33
T H E ECO N O M Y

Taxes up for
Grabs
Why does our own government encourage foreign
bureaucrats to tax American companies? And how
can we stop it?

By Aharon Friedman and Joshua D. Rauh

A
mericans are concerned as much as ever about consumer
prices and their ability to afford goods and services. One
policy that would certainly not help would be to encourage
foreign countries’ governments to place additional taxes on US
corporations, including on profits earned in the United States, which global
bureaucrats claim are not taxed heavily enough by Congress at home.
Corporations pass a large share of tax increases along to workers through
their compensation and to consumers through higher prices. So, workers and
consumers would surely feel the hit.
Is anyone seriously proposing that we allow foreign governments to place
excess taxes on US corporations that are supposedly “undertaxed” accord-
ing to a new global tax code that is largely out of US control? Yes—not only
is it being seriously proposed but it’s already happening, and with the active
encouragement of the Biden administration.

Aharon Friedman is a director and senior tax counsel at the Federal Policy
Group. Joshua D. Rauh is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Or-
mond Family Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of
Business. He leads Hoover’s State and Local Governance Initiative.

34 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Until recently, this was a project of the Organization for Economic Coop-
eration and Development, a multilateral organization of developed countries
that receives funding from member countries, including the United States.
But now, the United Nations is getting into the game of pushing for a global
tax cartel that would discriminate against US companies. The United
Nations’ version is potentially even worse than the OECD’s because its mea-
sures can be decided by a majority, not by consensus agreement.
A simple majority
of UN countries could
potentially vote to turn The United Nations is pushing for a
global tax agreements global tax cartel that would discrimi-
upside down, to the det-
nate against US companies.
riment of US companies.
Such standards would violate various agreements, which protect against
many types of extraterritorial and discriminatory taxation. But the agree-
ments are not self-enforcing.

TARGETING AMERICA’S TAX BASE

How did we get here? The OECD transformed its mission of publishing data
and encouraging economic development into prevention of corporate tax
avoidance. And then, what began as a project to combat tax shelters turned
into a project to create a global tax code to the detriment of the US Trea-
sury and American companies, and by direct extension to their workers and
consumers.
Indeed, once other countries in the OECD realized that American com-
panies were among the most profitable in the world, they developed agree-
ments at the OECD that would not only limit shifting of profits to tax havens
like the Cayman Islands but also allow countries, especially Western Europe-
an countries that dominate the OECD, to tap into the US corporate tax base.
These policies included a reallocation of taxing rights to be more closely
related to the location where a company sells its goods and services (as
opposed to where the company’s business operations are located), and a glob-
al minimum tax, designed so that companies headquartered in countries that
don’t tax their companies “enough” could be taxed by all the other countries
in the agreement. The OECD tax regime would also encourage countries to
circumvent the rules with various carveouts for politically favored activities,
a particularly harmful feature.
Has the United States actually agreed to this? The first Trump adminis-
tration was concerned about various unilateral discriminatory taxes other

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 35
 countries were imposing on US companies, but it feared that just saying no
to countries violating existing agreements in order to coerce concessions
out of the United States would cause a trade war. So, it instead engaged in
prolonged negotiations,
leading to a form of global
China could benefit from rules that minimum tax that largely
target supposedly undertaxed US exempted the United
companies, while effectively exempt- States as a practical
ing many Chinese companies. matter. But the Biden
administration has since
changed the project to try to force Congress to raise taxes on US companies
by threatening to have other countries do so if Congress refuses.
While many countries are already raising taxes on American companies
under the OECD project, some other aspects of the project have broken
down. Seeing that the Biden administration was willing to allow other coun-
tries to seize the US tax base, some countries decided to shift the process to
the United Nations, which is even more hostile to US interests.
But from the beginning it was practically inevitable that the OECD process
would cause the United Nations to become involved. The OECD in 2016
expanded its reach beyond the traditionally defined developed countries by
creating a so-called “Inclusive Framework” with membership of 150 coun-
tries, including China. But the non-OECD members naturally wanted their
own interests to be more
strongly represented, as
A global tax code robs citizens of each they are in the United
country of the fundamental sovereign Nations.
right to make their own laws. It’s bad enough that
China could benefit from
OECD rules that give it the power to tax supposedly undertaxed US compa-
nies, while effectively exempting many Chinese companies. The UN process,
however, would put China much closer to the driver’s seat, actively making
decisions on the design and implementation of such policies, in a major blow
to US sovereignty.

BILATERAL TREATIES
What is the alternative? Bilateral treaties are superior because they can
account for the needs of each of the two countries in a manner that a multi-
lateral treaty cannot. The United States should be expanding its network of
bilateral treaties (now at just sixty-six) in a manner that promotes American

36 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

sovereignty. Yet the Biden administration terminated the US-Hungary tax
treaty in retaliation for Hungary expressing concerns about the OECD
process.
The United States should also insist that other countries abide by their
tax and trade obligations to us. Increasing tax rates on business activities
through multilateral processes and global mandates while incentivizing
loopholes encourages inefficiency and corruption, and will harm workers
and consumers. More fundamentally, a global tax code robs citizens of each
country of the fundamental sovereign right to make their own laws.
The United States should vehemently oppose other countries imposing
discriminatory and extraterritorial taxes against American companies and
workers, including through an OECD or UN global tax code.

Reprinted by permission of The Hill (www.thehill.com). © 2025 Capitol

Hill Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Renewing Indigenous Economies, by Terry L.
Anderson and Kathy Ratté. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 37
T H E ECO N O M Y

A Better
Globalism
A bad idea that never seems to die, “industrial
policy,” often in the form of tariffs, now has
champions across the political spectrum. The
problem? Governments are no better at picking
economic winners than they ever were.

By Raghuram G. Rajan

T
he push for international openness to trade and capital flows has
always been an elite project, but typically with enormous bene-
fits to the domestic consumer and to poor countries that develop
by catering to foreign demand. But the great financial crisis of
2008 destroyed trust in the elite. One immediate casualty was globalization.
The obvious costs of inviting imports, for instance in terms of lost domestic
jobs, are easy for the public to see, while the benefits often require further
layers of explanation. Conversely, protectionism is an easy sell. It dominates
the discourse once trust is lost, even more so if one’s primary trading partner
has geopolitical ambitions.
Rather than pushing for a better globalization in which past mistakes
are addressed, too many of today’s elite are willing to hedge it with enough
caveats that it becomes rank protectionism. For instance, US national secu-
rity adviser Jake Sullivan’s evocative picture of shielding a “narrow yard” of

Raghuram G. Rajan is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the

­Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the
­University of Chicago’s Booth School.

38 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

security-relevant technologies with “high fences” has expanded quickly into
a much broader yard where any device or platform that collects information
can be banned on security grounds, whether it be Chinese electric cars or
TikTok in the United
States, or Apple and
Tesla in China. Protectionism is an easy sell. It domi-
Similarly, while it nates the discourse once trust is lost.
makes sense to examine
takeovers by geopolitical rivals of companies in defense-sensitive areas, we
now have the US subjecting to “serious scrutiny” the proposed takeover of
strategically inconsequential US Steel by friendly Japan’s Nippon Steel.
Once open borders are no longer the default, new impediments to competi-
tion proliferate. Europe wants to keep out Chinese EVs because of the heavy
state subsidies Chinese manufacturers enjoy. At the same time, Europe
subsidizes green energy heavily, so its manufacturers will have lower carbon
emissions, while it plans border tariffs on high-emission products made by
foreign manufacturers, many of whom don’t have access to subsidized green
energy. Everyone subsidizes today; the question is where and by how much.
Indeed, why bother with tariffs when one can handicap the foreign
competitor directly? Emerging markets compensate for the lower produc-
tivity of their workers with lower wages and longer hours. The renegoti-
ated USMCA (NAFTA’s replacement) requires a minimum hourly wage for
­Mexican workers who make cars for the United States. Mexican workers
ought to earn more over time, but should that not be determined competi-
tively in Mexico?
Protectionism is contagious. As the developed world turns its back on open
borders, poorer countries are succumbing also, with average tariffs rising in
least developed countries over the past decade.
The new elite project is industrial policy, with a focus on creating national
champions. Partly as a natural consequence of the market failures during the
financial crisis, partly
from drawing the wrong
lessons from China’s As the developed world turns its back
state capitalism, and on open borders, poorer countries are
partly from a desire for succumbing too.
national security, faith in
government’s ability to pick domestic winners has grown. A current focus is
subsidies to chip manufacturers, which allow political sponsors to claim they
are modernizing the economy even while protecting security interests.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 39
 Yet even if countries have the technological competence to manufacture
chips, very few can bring the entire chip supply chain within domestic
borders or reliably friendly shores. Thus, the tens of billions of dollars spent
on chip subsidies will neither buy them security nor, given the likely glut
in global chip manufacturing, deliver a viable modern industry. Put differ-
ently, Russia has found ways to make chip-reliant armaments without a chip
industry, even while being
subject to sanctions by
We need a dialogue on how the global major chip producers.
system of trade and investment can Cross-border invest-
accommodate rivals and subsidies. ment (as a fraction of
GDP) has already slowed,
so will trade and growth, especially in emerging markets and developing
countries. The IMF projected 7.2 percent growth for these countries in 2006,
but only 4 percent in 2023. Low growth could increase internal political frac-
tures within countries and possibly conflict between nations, triggering mass
migration and yet more protectionism and government intervention.
To break this vicious cycle, we need a dialogue, perhaps starting with the
United States and China, or initiated by more neutral countries, on how the
global system of trade and investment can accommodate geopolitical rivals,
subsidies, and new information-intensive products without breaking down.
This will require new rules of the game, more data, and possibly new inde-
pendent institutions. And, of course, countries will have to relearn the lesson
that governments are not good at picking winners.

Reprinted by permission of The Financial Times. © 2024 The Financial

Times Ltd. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is How

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

40 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 T HE E CON OM Y

Euro Vision
The European Union still matters. It must
recommit itself to growth, innovation, and
self-defense.

By Michael Spence

T
he global economic shocks of the
past few years have left Europe Key points
particularly vulnerable. While vir- » Europe’s principal
problem is that it’s falling
tually everyone has suffered from behind in technological
climate- and pandemic-related disruptions, innovation.

the European Union has also had the Ukraine » Funding for necessary
research is inadequate and
war unfolding on its doorstep, and its acute
unfocused. Infrastructure
dependence on energy imports has meant also is lacking.
that rising prices—and the need to shift » A blueprint for Europe’s
away from Russian fossil fuels—have bitten future might be inspired by
contemplating the likely
especially hard. Both growth and ­economic consequences of the status
security are under pressure. quo.

To be sure, some of these were short-term

shocks. The pandemic-related disruptions have largely resolved themselves,
and even inflation, which surged in the pandemic’s aftermath, seems to be
largely under control, thanks to the efforts of EU central banks, not least

Michael Spence is a senior fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution, the Philip
H. Knight Professor (Emeritus) of Management in the Graduate School of Business
at Stanford University, and a professor of economics at the Stern School at New
York University. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
in 2001.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 41
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
the European Central Bank, and the issue appears likely to be fully resolved
within the next year.
But the EU faces a number of formidable economic challenges that will
not simply go away. For starters, rising security risks in its neigh-
borhood, combined with growing doubts about the durability of
America’s commitment to European defense, have put pressure
on the EU to strengthen its own capabilities. This implies not only
more coordination across countries, but also a significant increase
in overall defense expenditure: the bloc’s total spending currently
amounts to 1.3 percent of GDP, well below NATO’s target of 2 per-
cent of GDP.
Moreover, productivity growth, which has been flagging in much
of the world, is especially low in Europe, and the gap between the
EU and the United States is widening each year. With the unem-
ployment rate averaging some 6.5 percent, there is a bit of room
for increased aggregate demand to fuel growth, but robust
long-term growth will be virtually impossible if Europe
cannot address lagging productivity.
This will be no easy feat. Long-term productiv-
ity growth in the developed economies depends significantly on structural
change, driven mainly by technological innovation. This is where Europe’s
principal problem lies: in a range of areas, from artificial intelligence to
semiconductors to quantum computing, the United States and even China
are leaving Europe in the dust.
The main reasons for the EU’s innovation deficit are well known. Both
basic and applied research and development have suffered from chronic
underinvestment. The effectiveness of funding for basic research is under-
mined by a decentralized approach, with uncoordinated and poorly targeted
national programs taking
precedence over EU-
level finance and admin- Both basic and applied research and
istration. In addition, the development have suffered from
integration of the single underinvestment.
market remains incom-
plete, particularly in services. This is especially important in digital fields,
where returns on investment in innovation depend on market size.
The EU faces other barriers to becoming an innovation hub. One is a lack
of the necessary infrastructure, especially the massive amounts of comput-
ing power required to train AI models. (At present, the EU relies largely
 on American tech giants for such capabilities.) Another is that the venture
capital and private equity needed to support innovation—investors with the
experience and motivation to help young entrepreneurs build innovative
enterprises—are not widely available, though there are promising entrepre-
neurial ecosystems in a
number of countries.
Barring a new vision, Europe’s pool But these barriers can
of human capital will grow shallower be surmounted. And
as top talent migrates to other if they are, the EU has
important strengths
opportunities.
on which it can capital-
ize, beginning with abundant talent coming from first-class universities. In
addition, Europe’s well-developed social services and social-security systems
deliver a level of economic security that can facilitate entrepreneurial risk
taking.
Unless the EU can capitalize on the technological drivers of structural
change, however, parts of its economy will remain dominated by tradi-
tional industrial sectors that have proven slow to adopt productivity-
enhancing innovations. In a global economy where value is increasingly
derived from intangible sources, the EU will continue to depend on tan-
gible assets to create value. And Europe’s deep pool of human capital will
grow shallower, as its top talent migrates to where opportunities are more
abundant.
Europe must decide: it can remain on its current course, which is sure
to lead to relative stagnation, or it can chart an entirely new path. The lat-
ter approach is riskier, but it also holds far more upside potential. There
is no shortage of people in government, business, policy, and academia
who understand the challenges Europe faces and are more than capable
of devising, debating, modifying, and implementing a creative forward-
looking plan.
Unfortunately, such a
Unfortunately, a plan for Europe’s plan does not appear to
future does not appear to be a high be a high priority within
priority. European
countries or at the
EU level. It does not feature in the political debates that surround
national elections. Perhaps what is missing is a clear picture of the likely
­consequences of maintaining the status quo, and, more important, a
­compelling vision that can inspire and guide policy and investment.

44 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 When a journey is challenging, a clear view of the destination is vital to
keep people motivated. Technocrats often fail to recognize this, but Europe
itself has experienced it firsthand in its quest to adopt sustainable growth
patterns and economic models, where there is a clear vision of the destina-
tion. Likewise, leaders in successful developing countries typically promote
a clear picture of their desired future, in order to encourage and enable the
difficult choices that are needed to build it.
There is no reason to think that the EU is incapable of devising a new
vision for its future and a roadmap for the digital and structural transforma-
tion it so badly needs. But first, Europeans must answer a simple but critical
question: what should the EU look like—in terms of innovation, the economy,
security, and resilience—in a decade?

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

org). © 2025 Project Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Mont

Pèlerin 1947: Transcripts of the Founding Meeting of
the Mont Pèlerin Society, edited by Bruce Caldwell.
To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 45
 FE D E R A LISM

American
Federalism Today
The founders gave us a way to harmonize federal
and state authority. How is their plan holding up?

By Michael W. McConnell

D
elegates to the Con-
stitutional Conven- Key points
tion in Philadelphia » The American federalist struc-
ture was an innovation, intended to
in the summer of 1787 confine the powers of the national
eventually emerged with a struc- government to certain enumerated
objects.
ture described by James Madison
» The new system aimed to “secure
as “partly national, partly federal.”
the public good,” protect “private
This contemplated a genuinely rights,” and “preserve the spirit and
national government, with rep- form of popular government.”

resentation from the people (and » Are smaller towns places of public
virtue and political accountability or
not just the states) and power to of narrow-mindedness and preju-
enforce its own laws through a dice? The debate continues.

vigorous executive and an indepen-

dent judiciary, but the states would retain political autonomy and authority
over the issues most significant to ordinary life. The powers of this national
government would be confined to certain enumerated objects, primarily

Michael W. McConnell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the

Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, where he
directs the Constitutional Law Center.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 47
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
foreign affairs and interstate commerce. This was an innovation; there were
no precedents in world history for such a mixed system.
The “natural attachment” of the people in 1787 to their states, as M ­ adison
described it in Federalist No. 46, was powerful—far more so than today. But
the framers of the federalist system were not content to rest on natural
attachments alone. They offered practical and theoretical arguments about
how the new system of dual sovereignty would promote three complemen-
tary objectives: (1) “to secure the public good,” (2) to protect “private rights,”
and (3) “to preserve the spirit and form of popular government.” Achieve-
ment of these ends, according to James Madison, was the “great object” of
 the Constitution. To understand the founders’ design, we must look again at
those arguments—not just in the mouths of the Federalists, who prevailed,
but of the Anti-Federalists, too. As the people of the twenty-first century, we
must evaluate these arguments in light of modern experience and knowledge
about political decision making. Many of the arguments of 1787 stand up
remarkably well, but others do not.

“SECURE THE PUBLIC GOOD”

Rejecting both pure confederation and consolidation, the “Federal Farmer”
(a particularly able and influential Anti-Federalist pamphleteer) argued
that a “partial consolidation” is the only system “that can secure the free-
dom and happiness of this people.” He reasoned that “one government and
general legislation alone, never can extend equal benefits to all parts of the
United States: different laws, customs, and opinions exist in the different
states, which by a uniform system of laws would be unreasonably invaded.”
Three important advantages of decentralized decision making emerge from
an examination ofthe founders’ arguments and the modern literature. First,
decentralized decision making is better able to reflect the diversity of inter-
ests and preferences of individuals in different parts of the nation. Second,
allocation of decision-making authority to a level of government no larger
than necessary will prevent mutually disadvantageous attempts by commu-
nities to take advantage of their neighbors. And third, decentralization allows
for innovation and compe-
tition in government.
In 1787, the “natural attachment” of One size does not fit all.
the people to their states, as Madison So long as preferences
described it, was powerful—far more for government policies
are unevenly distributed
so than today.
among the various locali-
ties, more people can be satisfied by decentralized decision making than by
a single national authority. This was well understood by the founding genera-
tion. States are preferable governing units to the federal government, and
local government to states. Modern public-choice theory provides strong
support for the framers’ insight on this point.
A second consideration in designing a federal structure is more equivocal.
The unit of decision making must be large enough so that decisions reflect
the full costs and benefits, but small enough that destructive competition for
the benefits of central government action is minimized. In economic lan-
guage, this is the problem of externalities.

50 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Externalities present the principal argument for centralized government:
If the costs of government action are borne by the citizens of state C, but
the benefits are shared by the citizens of states D, E, and F, state C will be
unwilling to expend the level of resources commensurate with the full social
benefit of the action.
This was the argument
in Federalist No. 25 States are preferable governing units
for national control to the federal government, and local
of defense. Because a government to states. Modern public-
Minuteman III missile in choice theory agrees.
Pennsylvania will deter
a Russian or Chinese attack on Connecticut and North Carolina as well as
Pennsylvania, optimal levels of investment in Minutemans require national
decisions and national taxes. Similarly, because expenditures on water pol-
lution reduction in Kentucky will benefit riparian zones all the way to New
Orleans, it makes sense to regionalize or nationalize decisions about water-
pollution regulation and treatment. Thus, as James Wilson explained to the
Pennsylvania ratifying convention, “Whatever the object of government
extends, in its operation, beyond the bounds of a particular state, should be
considered as belonging to the government of the United States.”
That significant external effects of this sort provide justification for nation-
al decisions is well understood—hence federal funding of defense, interstate
highways, national parks, and medical research; and federal regulation of
interstate commerce, pollution, and national labor markets. It is less well
understood that nationalizing decisions where the impact is predominantly
local has an opposite effect. If states can obtain federal funding for projects
of predominantly local benefit, they will not care if total cost exceeds total
benefit; the cost is borne by others. The result is a “tragedy of the commons”
for Treasury funds.
The framers’ awareness that ill consequences flow as much from exces-
sive as from insufficient centralization is fundamental to their insistence on
enumerating and thus limiting the powers of the federal government. Hence
the other half of Wilson’s explanation: “Whatever object of government is
confined in its operation and effect, within the bounds of a particular State,
should be considered as belonging to the government of that State.” This
stands in marked contrast to the modern tendency to resolve doubts in favor
of federal control.
A final reason why federalism may advance the public good is that state
and local governmental units will have greater opportunity and incentive to

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 51
 pioneer useful changes. Justice Louis Brandeis put the point most famously:
“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single coura-
geous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel
social and economic
experiments without risk
If states can win federal funding for to the rest of the country.”
projects of mostly local benefit, they A consolidated national
won’t care if total cost exceeds total government has all the
benefit. The cost is borne by others. drawbacks of a monopoly:
it stifles choice and lacks
the goad of competition. If innovation is desirable, it follows that decentral-
ization is desirable.
Perhaps more important is that smaller units of government have an incen-
tive, beyond the mere political process, to adopt popular policies. If a com-
munity can attract additional taxpayers, each citizen’s share of the overhead
costs of government is proportionately reduced. Since people are better able
to move among states or communities than to emigrate from the United
States, competition among governments for taxpayers will be far stronger at
the state and local than at the federal level. Since most people are taxpayers,
this means that there is a powerful incentive for decentralized governments
to make things better for most people. In particular, the desire to attract
taxpayers and jobs will promote policies of economic growth and expansion.
To be sure, the results of competition among states and localities will
not always be salutary. The most important example of this phenomenon is
the effect of state-by-state competition on welfare and other redistributive
policies. In most cases, immigration of investment and of middle- to upper-
income persons is perceived as desirable, while immigration of persons
dependent on public assistance is viewed as a drain on a community’s
finances. Yet generous welfare benefits paid by higher taxes will lead the rich
to leave and the poor to come. This creates an incentive, other things being
equal, against redistributive policies.
This is an instance of the free-rider problem: even if every member of the
community would be willing to vote for higher welfare benefits, it would be in
the interest of each to leave the burden of paying for the program to others.
Presumably that is why advocates of a more generous social safety net tend
to push for expansion of federal programs, while advocates of the opposite
policy tend to favor state-oriented solutions.
Thus, the competition among states has an uncertain effect: often salutary
but sometimes destructive. There are races to the bottom as well as races to

52 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

the top. And it is often impossible to know which is which; this will depend on
substantive policy preferences.

TO PROTECT “PRIVATE RIGHTS”

At the time of the founding, defenders of state sovereignty most commonly
stressed a second argument: that state and local governments are better
protectors of liberty. The most eloquent of the opponents of the Constitution,
Patrick Henry, declared that in the “alarming transition, from a Confederacy
to a consolidated Government,” the “rights and privileges” of Americans
were “endangered.” He was far from alone in this fear.
Madison’s most enduring intellectual contribution to the debate over
ratification is his challenging argument that individual liberties, such as
property rights and freedom of religion, are better protected at the national
than the state level. His argument, greatly simplified, is that the most serious
threat to individual liberty is the tyranny of a majority faction. Since any
given faction is more likely to be concentrated in a particular locality, and
to be no more than a small minority in the nation as a whole, it follows that
factional tyranny is more likely in the state legislatures than in the Congress
of the United States. This argument is supplemented by others, based on the
“proper structure of the Union”—deliberative representation, separation of
powers, and checks and balances—that also suggest that the federal govern-
ment is a superior protector of rights. Madison’s argument blunted the Anti-
Federalists’ appeal to state sovereignty as the guarantor of liberty. It was,
however, only partially successful. Why?
Madison’s theory gains support from robust modern social science evi-
dence that homogeneous groups will tend to adopt policies more radical than
those that individual members of the groups previously supported. Anyone
who has been in a one-sided political gathering (such as a faculty meeting)
will recognize the phenomenon. One-party states tend to go to unreasonable
extremes. Certain states
(California, Mississippi)
are overwhelmingly The modern tendency is to resolve
dominated by one politi- doubts in favor of federal control.
cal party. The United
States as a whole is very closely divided. Hence, the enduring plausibility of
Madison’s thesis. If we are concerned about the rights of politically unpopu-
lar minorities, we should locate rights protection at the national level.
Public choice theory has, however, cast some doubt on elements of
Madison’s theory. In particular, Madison’s assumption that the possibility

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 53
 of minority tyranny is neutralized by majority vote requirements and that
minority factions are inherently vulnerable to majority tyranny is under-
mined by studies showing that a small, cohesive faction intensely inter-
ested in a particular outcome can exercise disproportionate influence in
the political arena. If these theories are correct, Madison underestimated
both the dangers of minority rule and the defensive resources of minority
groups. Moreover, some observers have suggested that the conditions of
modern federal politics—especially the balkanized, issue-oriented conjunc-
tion of bureaucratic agencies and committee staffs—is especially suscep-
tible to factional politics. Political scientist Keith Whittington thus argues
that decentralization may be preferred because federal politicians are too
responsive to special-interest groups—the modern equivalent of Madison’s
“factions.”
But even taking Madison’s fundamental insight as correct—and surely it
has much to commend it—the argument on its own terms cautions against
total centralization of authority in Washington. It points instead to a hybrid
system in which states retain a major role in the protection of individual
liberties.
Madison’s argument demonstrates that factional oppression is more likely
to occur in the smaller, more homogeneous jurisdictions of individual states.
But it does not deny that oppression at the federal level, when it occurs, is
more dangerous. The lesser likelihood must be balanced against the greater
magnitude of the danger. The main reason oppression at the federal level is
more dangerous is that it is more difficult to escape.
Recognition of this feature of decentralized decision making does not
depend on any particular ideological understanding of the content of “lib-
erty.” All it takes is policy
diversity, which America
The competition among states has in spades. Some
is often salutary but sometimes may move to avoid high
destructive. There are races to the taxes, some to avoid anti-
bottom as well as races to the top. transgender laws, some to
escape coercion to join a
union, some to be eligible for welfare, some to be able to carry guns, some to
get protection from crime, some to live under more sensible pandemic regu-
lations (whatever those may be), some to find freedom to express themselves,
some to get an abortion.
Madison pointed out that there are two different and distinct dangers
inherent in republican government: the “oppression of [the] . . . rulers” and

54 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

the “injustice” of “one part of the society against . . . the other part.” Signifi-
cantly, while Madison argued that the danger of factions is best met at the
federal level (for the reasons familiar from Federalist No. 10), he conceded
that the danger of self-interested representation is best tackled at the
state level.
This insight strikes
this author as more Madison may have underestimated
questionable. As an both the dangers of minority rule and
abstract proposition, it is the defensive resources of minority
hard to know where the
groups.
danger of entrenched,
unrepresentative rule is worst. The idea of a “deep state” is likely exagger-
ated and to a degree paranoid, but it is hard to deny that the federal bureau-
cracy has its own interests and commitments, which are persistent over time
and largely impervious to elections. On the other hand, most big cities have
been in the grip of one-party rule for decades. Local journalism, and with it
the likelihood of popular accountability for city governments, has atrophied.
Particular ideological and economic factions seem to dominate at both levels.
Which are worse?

PUBLIC SPIRITEDNESS
Critics of governmental centralization warned that public spiritedness—then
called “public virtue”—could be cultivated only in a republic of small dimen-
sions. The only substitute for public virtue was an unacceptable degree of
coercion, compatible only with non-republican forms of government. There
were two reasons many founders believed that a centralized government
would undermine republican virtue. First, public spiritedness is a product of
participation in deliberation over the public good. If the citizens are actively
engaged in the public debate, they will have more of a stake in the commu-
nity. The federal government is too distant and its compass too vast to permit
extensive participation by ordinary citizens in its policy formulations. By
necessity, decision making will be delegated to agents. But as they are cut off
from active participation in the commonwealth, the citizens will become less
attached to it and more inclined to attend to their private affairs. Second, the
natural sentiment of benevolence, which lies at the heart of public spirited-
ness, is weaker as the distance grows between the individual and the objects
of benevolence.
Do these arguments still hold weight? It is a matter of contention. Are
smaller towns places of public virtue and political accountability, as the

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 55
Anti-Federalists thought, or of narrow-mindedness and prejudice, as Madi-
son’s theory might suggest? We are still debating this. They are opposite
sides of the coin. The very features that make smaller units of government
closer to the people are also the features that make minorities within those
communities uncomfortable.
We can have effective, responsive, majoritarian democracy or we can have
maximal latitude for minority deviation from majority norms, but we cannot
have both—except, perhaps, by the device of lodging power at one level for
one kind of decision and another level for other decisions.
Whatever our chosen theory of interpretation, it is good to cast our minds
back to the time of the founding, when popular attention was directed,
uniquely in our history, to the issues of self-government. It is the only way to
recall, and perhaps recapture, what we may have lost.

Excerpted by permission from American Federalism Today: Perspec-

tives on Political and Economic Governance, edited by Michael J. Boskin
(Hoover Institution Press, 2024). © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is American

Federalism Today: Perspectives on Political and
Economic Governance, edited by Michael J. Boskin. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.
org.

56 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 FE D E R A LISM

States and
Borderlines
The federal government has jurisdiction over
immigration and borders. But states wield their
own power to help Washington, hinder it, or ignore
it outright.

By Paul E. Peterson

F
ederalism affects the resolution of immigration policy even though
it is a matter over which Congress is said to be the controlling
authority. The key factor is the doctrine of dual sovereignty,
which says the federal government cannot order a sovereign
state to take any specific action. If California, for instance, does not want to
cooperate with efforts to track and arrest undocumented immigrants, the
sovereign state can defy the federal government with impunity. There may be
700,000 police officers employed in local tiers who can help enforce federal
laws, but when they refuse to do so, the federal government is hamstrung.
Not long ago, then-senator Kamala Harris expressed doubts about tough
border control. In 2018, she and other senators asked the Senate Appropria-
tions Committee to “reject President Trump’s . . . funding request for . . .
a large increase in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) per-
sonnel.” Previously, as a prosecuting attorney in California, she had refused

Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a participant in the

Hoover Education Success Initiative, and senior editor of Education Next. He is
also the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program
on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 57
 to give ICE the names of arrested migrants lacking documentation of legal
residence. As the Democratic nominee for president, she pivoted again,
promising in her campaign advertisements that she would “hire thousands
more border agents.”
It is no disgrace for a political figure to change her mind. In a democracy,
we expect leaders to respond to public opinion. But Harris’s turnaround
reveals the power that
states exercise over
The COVID pandemic provided Presi- national policy. They have
dent Trump with emergency powers the boots on the ground
needed to nearly shutter the border. to enforce—or not to
enforce—what the federal
government commands, and their decisions can shift the larger political
context.
When it comes to borders, boots count for a lot. When wars fail to end
decisively, borders are typically at lines drawn to match the locations where
armed forces stalled. Last summer, a North Korean deserter escaped to
South Korea across a demilitarized zone located almost exactly where two
armies faced one another seventy-two years ago. A similarly drawn border
may someday separate Russia from Ukraine when that conflict comes to an
unsatisfying conclusion.
Boots on the ground also make a big difference to law enforcement. In
2022, more than three-fourths of sworn law enforcement officers reported
to state or local government officials. The remaining fourth were under
the jurisdiction of eighty different federal agencies. Federal officers with
major border-control responsibilities had just 30,000 pairs of boots: ICE had
12,800, the FBI 13,500, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and
­Explosives (ATF), the agency that recently captured a notorious Mexican
narcotics ringleader, just 2,600.
The Constitution gives Congress the power “to establish a uniform rule of
naturalization,” which the Supreme Court interprets as including the power
to set the rules for entry into the country. The court also relies upon Con-
gress’s expansive power to regulate commerce as a constitutional basis for
assigning plenary power over immigration to the national government.
In 1987, Oregon became the first state to refuse cooperation with fed-
eral immigration authorities. Connecticut followed in 2013. The dam broke
after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. When Trump announced mea-
sures designed to tighten border control, a cluster of blue states, including

58 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey,
joined the sanctuary movement.
The Trump administration fought back by ordering cuts in federal aid
to police departments in states that were not cooperating with ICE. States
retaliated in federal
courts, a battle that
continued without reso- As immigration rates jumped, red
lution until the Biden states took their own turn at under-
administration withdrew mining federal policy.
the Trump regulations.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided Trump with emergency powers
needed to nearly shutter the border.
The Biden administration inherited those emergency powers. But even
before they ended in May 2023, border crossings had begun to climb
with more relaxed border control. During the 2023 fiscal year, 3.2 million
undocumented migrants entered the United States.
As immigration rates jumped, red states took their turn at undermining
federal policy. Governor Greg Abbott started to build a wall in Texas, thirty-
four miles long as of last summer, designed to frustrate unauthorized border
crossings. Even more important, perhaps, he bused undocumented migrants
to New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Florida governor, Ron
DeSantis, sent them to Massachusetts.
Suddenly, blue states were confronting a migration headache they thought
was somebody else’s problem. New York City welcomed the migrants but
found its shelters and social services overwhelmed and fiscal costs skyrock-
eting. Similarly overwhelmed, Massachusetts was forced to leave immigrants
at Boston’s Logan Airport. Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson attacked
Abbott for sowing “seeds of chaos.” Asking for a federal solution, Johnson
said it was “unsustainable” to ask “local governments . . . to subsidize” the
feeding and housing of undocumented immigrants.
As blue state lead-
ers asked Washington
for help, the Biden Federalism can help the losers in the
administration reversed game of national power.
course. In June 2024,
it restricted entry by 97 percent from its 2023 rate, falling to just 2,500
migrants per day. A red state gubernatorial play thus altered the direction
of a blue-controlled national government.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 59
 In sum, when a pro-migrant coalition failed to make headway in Congress,
it turned to states as sanctuaries for the undocumented. And then, when the
Biden administration implemented more welcoming policies, those in control
of state governments undermined public support.
Federalism is neither left nor right. Both Democrats and Republicans can
frustrate national policy via state action. But federalism befriends losers in
the big game of national power by giving resources to opposition groups and
interests otherwise pushed to the sidelines. That is not a bad thing for the
survival of a constitutional democracy.

Reprinted by permission of Paul E. Peterson’s Substack, The ­Modern

Federalist (https://paulepeterson.substack.com). © 2025 Paul E.
­Peterson. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Equality

of Opportunity: A Century of Debate, by David
Davenport and Gordon Lloyd. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

60 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 FRO M H OOVER INSTITU TION PR E SS

American Federalism Today

Perspectives on Political and Economic Governance

Edited by Michael J. Boskin

Expert scholars and practitioners examine the

relationship between the US federal and state and local
governments, in political theory and in practice, applied
to current social, economic, and fiscal issues.

For more information, visit hooverpress.org

C H IN A A N D TAIWAN

Time Is Running
Out
Chinese leaders see the subjugation of Taiwan
“not as the endpoint of their security policy, but as
the beginning.” A discussion with Hoover fellow
Matt Pottinger.

By Jonathan Movroydis

Jonathan Movroydis: How did The Boiling Moat come about?

Matt Pottinger: The book was an idea that Hoover fellow Larry Diamond
and I hatched while we were visiting Taiwan in late 2022. It occurred to me
that having a book that lays out several steps that we need to take in the
United States, that Taiwan needs to take for itself, and that Japan needs to
take to shore up deterrence would be welcome. Time is of the essence. So,
I hustled to bring together a terrific group of co-authors and to contribute
some chapters myself and edit this volume.
It’s a military strategy, in a sense: the steps we need to take to show that
we have the hard power available to credibly deter, or defeat, an attempt by
Beijing to coercively annex Taiwan.

Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and

a former deputy national security adviser. He participates in Hoover’s project
on Semiconductors and the Security of the United States & Taiwan, and the
Program on US, China, and the World. He is the editor of The Boiling Moat:
Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan (Hoover Institution Press, 2024). Jonathan
­Movroydis is the senior product manager for the Hoover Institution.

62 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 We talk about the diplomatic and the economic realms as well, but we
think that hard power has no substitute. There are things that can comple-
ment hard power, but you have to have hard power first to credibly change
the calculus of the dictator in Beijing who’s considering a war.

Movroydis: Taking Taiwan, or bringing Taiwan into the fold, was always a
goal for mainland China. In February 1972, during President Nixon’s historic
trip to China, the two sides essentially agreed that Taiwan was an internal
dispute and that the matter should be settled peacefully. How did this change?

Pottinger: US policy has been remarkably consistent on this question, going

all the way back to our formalization of diplomatic ties with the People’s
Republic of China during the Carter administration. A couple of things hap-
pened. We normalized ties with Beijing, but we did so on the understanding
that settling the question of Taiwan’s status would have to be something that
the people in Taiwan, which is a democratic society, would have to agree to,
as well as those in the People’s Republic of China. And not only would you
need consent on both sides for settling this question, but it would also have
to be peaceful and not something coerced by either side. That essence is
captured in the communiques and in other important documents. One is the
Taiwan Relations Act, where Congress made clear that it would be a matter
of grave significance for the United States if Beijing were to try to coerce
a change in Taiwan’s status, and that the United States would provide for
Taiwan’s defense. Others came from the Reagan administration—documents
declassified during the first Trump administration—and made clear how the
United States interprets its communiques with China and its obligations to
itself and Taiwan.
What has changed
is that China’s leader, “There are things that can comple-
Xi Jinping, rather than ment hard power, but you have to
settling for a peaceful have hard power first.”
status quo and for some
kind of negotiations with Taiwan, has instead refused to negotiate with the
elected government of Taiwan—now two elected governments in a row that
he’s been unwilling to talk with.
Xi has also made clear that he wants to change the status quo and is will-
ing to use force to get there. So, his impatience, his insistence that Taiwan
actively move toward a kind of political unification with the People’s Republic
of China, and his willingness to apply increasing levels of coercive threats are
a departure from his predecessors.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 63
 Movroydis: So, it’s a departure from Hu Jintao, Deng Xiaoping, even all the
way back to Mao Zedong.

Pottinger: Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both said they could wait cen-
turies, if necessary, to find a settlement with Taiwan. None of those leaders
ever renounced the possible use of force, but at the same time, they didn’t
apply increasing coercion through military activities around Taiwan and

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

 through efforts to wage what Beijing calls the three warfares—legal, psycho-
logical, and discourse—to such a degree that Xi Jinping has undertaken.

Movroydis: And what has that entailed? You document some public state-
ments by Xi Jinping that are markedly different from those of his predecessors.

Pottinger: When he met with President Biden almost a year ago in San
­Francisco, Xi Jinping said something that I’m not aware any Chinese leader
has ever said to an Ameri-
can president: Beijing
“Xi has also made clear that he wants now expects Washington’s
to change the status quo and is will- support for its policy of
“resolving” the Taiwan
ing to use force to get there.”
question. Previously, Bei-
jing had said, as you mentioned, that this is an internal matter and they don’t
want the United States in the middle of it. Now what Beijing is saying is, no,
actually, we want Washington to essentially collude with Beijing to subvert
Taiwan’s democracy and sovereignty.
He also told President Biden that peace is all well and good, but really, it’s
more important now to push this to a resolution point. So, prioritizing a so-
called resolution of the Taiwan question over peace in the Taiwan Strait is not
something we’ve heard from a Chinese leader in many decades.

Movroydis: The book’s subtitle is “urgent steps to defend Taiwan.” Why are
they urgent?

Pottinger: I think that the combination of Xi Jinping’s statements of intent,

along with the very formidable military capability China has amassed and is
continuing to amass quite rapidly, is what creates the sense of urgency. Those
capabilities constitute the largest peacetime buildup by a country since Nazi
Germany in the 1930s.
Also, the fact that Xi Jinping is now progressively eroding Taiwan’s sense
of its security and agency over the waters that it patrols is a very troubling
signal. For example, Beijing has now boarded a Taiwan-flagged vessel in at
least one instance. It increasingly sends Chinese government vessels inside
the restricted waters very close to the shore of Taiwan-administered islands.
Not just Kinmen and Matsu, which we remember from the famous Kennedy-
Nixon debate decades ago, but also islands that are closer to Taiwan, like
Dongyin. Dongyin is important to Taiwan’s defense, and Beijing has recently
sent ships into its restricted waters. Beijing has also sent coast guard ships
right off the east coast of Taiwan to hang out there for a couple of weeks at a

66 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

time. Those ships carry out exercises in which they board mainland Chinese
vessels to demonstrate that they might go further and start trying to board
Taiwan’s vessels.

Movroydis: You write that a coercive annexation of Taiwan, even in the

absence of a US intervention, would not alleviate Sino-American tensions,
but would in fact supercharge them. Why?

Pottinger: Because it’s clear from China’s military doctrine that they view
the subjugation of Taiwan as the first step in a regional and global hegemony
strategy, not as the endpoint of their security policy. For example, Chinese
military doctrine, as first discovered by Ian Easton, a researcher based in
Washington, shows that Beijing views Taiwan as an important prerequisite
to coercing Japan into sort of a vassal-state status.
In Beijing’s view, once China is able to set up submarine tenders, air bases,
and surface fleet bases in Taiwan, it will be easier to flank Japan on its east-
ern side and effectively threaten blockades to ensure that Japan is subor-
dinate to Beijing’s will. The same is true for Southeast Asian countries like
the Philippines, which is, like Japan, a treaty ally of the United States. What
you’re left with is Chinese doctrine that confirms the worries of G ­ eneral
Douglas MacArthur
back in 1950 when he
said that we cannot allow “They view the subjugation of
Taiwan to fall into the Taiwan as the first step in a regional
hands of a hostile power and global hegemony strategy, not as
because it would become the endpoint.”
“an unsinkable aircraft
carrier and submarine tender.” It would make America’s alliance commit-
ments untenable in places like the Philippines and Japan.
It’s essentially about pushing the United States out of the Pacific, even
though the Pacific has been central to American security and prosperity
since George Washington was president.

Movroydis: Do you think, from your perspective and those of your co-
authors, that China would risk invading Taiwan in the near future? And could
Taiwan deter a Chinese invasion on its own?

Pottinger: Taiwan does not have the capabilities on its own to win a protract-
ed war against the People’s Republic of China.
What Taiwan does have is a professional active-duty military. It has a
number of capabilities that it needs to add to and to supplement in order

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 67
 to threaten the Chinese navy so that China continues to understand that it
would be an extremely costly endeavor to try to coercively annex Taiwan.
I will say that Xi Jinping is not a reckless gambler, according to my read-
ing of his actions in the dozen years that he’s been supreme leader and in the
many hours that I’ve spent in meetings with him during my time working
at the White House. I don’t think he is as willing to gamble as, say, Vladimir
Putin. Xi Jinping is holding those iron dice, but he’s not going to fling those
dice across the table and engage in war unless he’s extremely confident in the
result ahead of time.
What that means is there’s still an opportunity, although the clock is wind-
ing down, for us to deter him, and deterrence is far preferable to war. Imag-
ine if we had done a better job as a NATO alliance of deterring Putin before
he undertook his 2014 invasion of Ukraine and then his much larger, full-scale
war in February 2022.
Deterrence is an act of psychology. It’s about persuading your adversary
that war will be highly unpredictable and far more costly than pursuing
means short of war. That has to be the sum total of the actions we undertake
as a government and in concert with our allies and partners. They should
add up to a fading sense of optimism in the mind of Xi Jinping about the
­utility of war.

Movroydis: What will that take?

Pottinger: Well, the good news is that even as China has spent trillions of
dollars on its military buildup since the turn of the century, the types of capa-
bilities that the United States, Japan, Australia, and Taiwan need to have
in their arsenals to foil
an invasion or blockade
“It’s essentially about pushing the are actually far cheaper
United States out of the Pacific.” than the capabilities that
Beijing has been painstak-
ingly building in order to impose its will on an island a hundred miles from its
shore. In warfare, a defender has a natural advantage. Numerically, it takes
roughly three times as many soldiers and forces to take a defended position
as it takes to defend that position.
When you add the factor of amphibious warfare and that Beijing would
have to send its fleets across the waters, the ratio actually is even more favor-
able to the defender. What that means is that we need to be acquiring capa-
bilities through increased, rapid investments in our collective defense that
put the very expensive, exquisite systems in the PLA arsenal at risk: things

68 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

like warships, large ferries that would be used as troop carriers and armored
personnel carrier ferries, and all that sealift. Taiwan doesn’t need to have air
dominance. It just needs to deny Beijing air dominance.
That is also a much better cost curve for the defender. You can find asym-
metrically cheap capabilities to hold expensive capabilities in the Chinese
arsenal at risk. My co-
authors and I, after this
whole exercise of trips “If our leaders were better armed with
to Taiwan, research, that knowledge, they would be less
interviewing, and timid about standing their ground in
­writing—we came away places like the Western Pacific.”
with a sense of opti-
mism that this is a deterrable conflict. Only, however, if we begin to take
more concerted, serious steps to acquire the capabilities to hold China at
risk. We also need to do more to respond to other aggressors in the world,
whether it’s Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine conflict, or Iran with its terrorist
proxies operating on Israel’s borders or in Yemen attacking shipping in the
Red Sea, or even Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who just stole an election
from his own people. We need to respond to these things to demonstrate to
Xi Jinping that we have the resolve to actually stand up for our interests
around the world.

Movroydis: What role do our allies play in this, specifically in the Indo-­
Pacific region?

Pottinger: We spent a lot of time looking at Japan’s role because Japan,

according to several of its own leaders, depends on Taiwan being a neutral
or friendly polity for Japan to feel secure about its own prosperity and secu-
rity. The good news is that Japan has a very professional navy; they have a
professional air force and ground force as well. And those are force multi-
pliers for the United States in both deterring China and possibly defeating
China in a war.
So, what we need to see now is more investment by Japan. And of course,
Japan has, under the current prime minister, Fumio Kishida, pledged
significant increases in its defense spending. That’s a very important step
and a powerful signal to Beijing. But I believe, and my co-authors believe,
that Japan needs to do more to prepare its society for what a conflict would
entail, so that the society is prepared. And the more prepared Japan is as
a society to wage war, the less likely it is that it will have to wage war. That
means putting civilian infrastructure at the service of US and Japanese

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 69
military forces that would be responding to a conflict. For example, hospitals,
airstrips, highways, and shipyards.
There is another point I would like to see circulate more widely. Matthew
Turpin and I made an effort to dispel the myth that there’s such a thing as
an accidental war. Historians including Geoffrey Blainey in Australia, the
late Michael Howard at Oxford and Yale, and others have been unable to
identify a true instance where someone initiated a war accidentally. If our
leaders were better armed with that knowledge, they would be less timid
about standing their ground in places like the Western Pacific—or we might
have done a better job of signaling to Vladimir Putin that we were going to
continue to provide lethal armaments to Ukraine in advance of the February
2022 invasion.
In other words, it’s a very powerful bit of knowledge to know that even
lethal accidents and mishaps do not turn into warfare, although they’re
sometimes used as a pretext for warfare. But there’s a big difference between
a cause of war and a pretext for war. We should be more and more confident
that our activities in defense of our sovereignty and in defense of our friends
and allies around the world do not cause wars. In fact, they make war less
likely by changing the calculus of would-be aggressors. This is encapsulated
in the old Latin phrase usually translated “peace through strength.”

Special to the Hoover Digest. This interview was edited for length and
clarity.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, edited
by Matt Pottinger. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
www.hooverpress.org.

70 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 CHIN A A N D TA IWA N

Flank Speed
Now that the Chinese economy is by some
measures bigger than our own, Xi Jinping is using
it to build a vast, sophisticated military that
reaches across oceans and even into space.

By Gordon G. Chang

T
he People’s Republic of China is in the midst of the fastest
military buildup since the Second World War. Expect the rapid
expansion to continue. China’s regime is building an industrial
base that will sustain that growth. For instance, Chinese ship-
yards, according to the US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence, now have a
capacity more than 232 times greater than America’s.
Once, the People’s Liberation Army was land-based and relied on a “Stalin-
like strategy of weight in numbers,” as Peter Robertson and Wilson Beaver
write. The Chinese military is still the world’s largest, but now it is also agile
and built around a navy and air force able to project power far from China’s
shores and even in the heavens.
For more than a decade, Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s general secre-
tary and also chair of its Central Military Commission, has accelerated the
modernization push. Today, his effort to strengthen an already fearsome-
looking military is nothing short of an all-of-society campaign.
China’s military-industrial complex, Richard Fisher of the Maryland-based
International Assessment and Strategy Center told me last year, is made up
of thousands of companies, some state-owned and others private. Fisher was

Gordon G. Chang participates in the Hoover Institution’s Military History in

Contemporary Conflict Working Group. He is a columnist, author, and lawyer.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 71
NAVAL DOMINANCE: From the bridge of the guided-missile destroyer USS
Mustin, Cmdr. Robert J. Briggs and Cmdr. Richard D. Slye monitor the move-
ments of the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning in the Philippine Sea. Xi Jin-
ping’s military procurement strategy is to buy as much as possible as soon as
possible. [Petty Officer 3rd Class Arthur Rosen—US Navy]

talking about only companies overtly military in orientation. In a broader

sense, the military-industrial complex includes all of Chinese society.
The Communist Party of China considers the nation to be totalitarian
in nature, seeing the country as a single entity with all components owing
“absolute” loyalty to
itself. It should come as
Xi’s effort to strengthen an already no surprise, then, that
fearsome military is nothing short of Xi enforces a doctrine
once called “civil-military
an all-of-society campaign.
fusion” but now known
as “military-civil fusion.” In short, in Xi’s China, every individual, company,
enterprise, university, and institution must hand over to the military what-
ever the generals and admirals think they need.

72 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 In 2022, a Chinese factory owner making medical equipment for consum-
ers told me that local officials had demanded he convert his production
lines in China to make items for the military. Communist Party cadres were
issuing similar orders
to other manufacturers.
The party, this entrepre- China set a GDP growth target of
neur said, was now oper- “around 5 percent.” The military’s
ating formerly privately budget will jump 7.2 percent.
owned factories because
the owners had fled China, not wanting to stick around for “Xi Jinping’s war.”
Xi, to support modernization of the People’s Liberation Army, has been
transforming the Chinese political system to achieve what the Financial
Times called his “Dream of a Chinese Military-Industrial Complex.” At the
Communist Party’s twentieth National Congress in October 2022, he engi-
neered “unprecedented” promotions for “a new group of political leaders in
the top echelons of power” who did not have “the usual careers in provincial
government or Communist Party administration.” Instead, the new group
had “deep experience in China’s military-industrial complex.”
Since then, the new leaders have solidified the military’s hold over the
Chinese regime. This disturbing trend is evident in increased spending on
the PLA.
That spending is gobbling up resources. In his most recent Work Report,
released last March at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress,
Premier Li Qiang announced an increase of general public expenditures of
4 percent for the year. Li also set a GDP growth target of “around 5 percent,”
but the economy will undoubtedly grow far slower than that. At the same
time, Beijing announced the military’s budget would jump 7.2 percent.
In all probability, actual military spending will outstrip public expenditures
and economic growth by
margins far larger than
reported last March. Xi’s procurement strategy is straining
Xi’s procurement China’s resources.
strategy is to buy as
much as possible as soon as possible. Critics have noticed. They point out
that Xi’s spending is straining China’s resources in much the same way that
large military budgets strained the finances of the Soviet Union. They also
think Xi’s procurement strategies appear designed to solidify his position in
the Communist Party, and observers note his accelerated spending pace has
resulted in procurement problems of all sorts.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 73
 For instance, General He Weidong, the second-ranked vice chairman of
the Central Military Commission and China’s number three military official,
railed last March against “fake combat capabilities.” Hong Kong’s South
China Morning Post reported that He, whose words were somewhat ambigu-
ous, appeared to target corruption in the procurement of military equipment.
There has been widespread publicity about this very ill. Some believe that
flagrant corruption led Xi to purge scores of officers in the Rocket Force, the
branch of the Chinese military responsible for most of the country’s nuclear
weapons, in the second half of 2023. Moreover, Xi sacked Defense Minister
General Li Shangfu, whom he had hand-picked just months before, appar-
ently over corruption concerns.
These revelations lead to questions: Is Xi Jinping’s military procurement
strategy as successful as it appears? And, more important, is his breakneck
pace of procurement undermining the military’s readiness to fight?
Outsiders do not know the answer to these questions, but Xi apparently
thinks his military is big enough. He may not yet have made the decision to go to
war, but his belligerent actions show he has made the decision to risk war.
And he now has a military to wage one.

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74 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 CHIN A A N D TA IWA N

Red Thread
What explains Beijing’s ambitions and its
contempt for Western ideas? The People’s
Republic of China is a communist state and has
never been otherwise.

By Miles Yu

A
s the world faces the
paramount threat of the Key points
Chinese Communist Party » China has always been deter-
mined to express a communist
(CCP), it’s imperative identity, and to impose its ambi-
to have a realistic perspective on the tions on the world.
party’s aspirations for global influence » Estrangement from the USSR in
the 1950s helped to convince Chi-
and to focus on its ideological underpin-
na of its own ideological purity.
nings. This perspective is structured
» American leaders were lulled
around two main parts: the historical into thinking that China’s leaders
evolution of the CCP as a process of were nationalists, not commu-
nists.
enriching and authenticating its ideo-
logical purity and orthodoxy, and the
party’s strategies to achieve its ambitions on the contemporary global stage.
First, consider the CCP’s ideological evolution and its innate ambitions for
global dominance. The party’s foundational ideology is an ecumenical, mil-
lenarian, and zealous system of communist theories pioneered by Karl Marx
and Vladimir Lenin. The CCP’s origins are linked to the global communist
movement spearheaded by the Soviet Union–led Comintern, which aimed for

Miles Yu is the Robert Alexander Mercer Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution
and a participant in Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in
Contemporary Conflict. He is a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 75
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
a worldwide communist society. This historical context is crucial for under-
standing the CCP’s long-term vision and objectives.
The early CCP saw
the Soviet Union as a Historical context is crucial for
model and leader in the
understanding the party’s vision
communist movement.
This acknowledgment
and objectives.
underlines the importance of Soviet influence in shaping the CCP’s strategies and
ideologies during its formative years between 1921, when it was founded by Lenin’s
agents in Shanghai, and 1953, when Lenin’s ideological inheritor and successor,
Josef Stalin, died. The subsequent perceived deviation from Lenin and Stalin’s
policies by the USSR’s new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, marked a significant ideo-
logical rift within the communist bloc, which influenced the CCP’s stance towards
the Soviet Union and its own commitment to Marxist-Leninist principles.
The severing of ties with the USSR in the early 1960s highlights the Chinese
Communist Party’s assertion of its own path towards party orthodoxy, under-
scoring its desire for global ideological leadership and strategic autonomy.
The survival of the CCP amid the 1989 worldwide anti-communist erup-
tions, via a brutal massacre centering on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, con-
trasted with the demise of communism in Eastern Europe by the end of 1989
and the Soviet Union’s collapse two years later. Both events reinforced the
party’s belief in its ideological purity and its strategic resilience, informing its
contemporary global outlook.
The post-1989 era saw the CCP doubling down on its commitment to
Marxist-Leninist principles, reinforcing its self-perception as the rightful heir
to the communist cause. The CCP aimed for global dominance through untra-
ditional means such as leveraging economic, technological, and diplomatic
engagement to create
global dependencies on
Old “China hands” dismissed the
the communist regime
communists as peasants in straw
in Beijing. No one can
say that the CCP has not hats, led by agrarian reformers.
accomplished much in this epic endeavor, even amid a global awakening to the
danger posed by the party—an awakening engendered by the political inter-
regnum of the first Trump administration.

DEMANDING RESPECT
Second, look at the CCP’s historical resentment and frustration with its global
vision of communism not being taken seriously, but instead underestimated

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 77
 by the West—especially by the United States. This animus toward the West,
and the United States in particular, has been a driving force in China’s foreign
policy and its efforts to assert its communist identity and its global ambitions.
This political psychology explains China’s military and ideological hostility
toward the West as part of a broader strategy to challenge Western perceptions
and assert global ideological pre-eminence. This hostility was manifested in the
1950s and 1960s by a series of landmark developments, including the party’s
dramatic revelation of its complete ideological symbiosis with Stalin’s Soviet
Union; the joint military actions by Russian, Chinese, and North Korean forces
in the Korean War; the CCP’s aggressive moves against the US-supported
Republic of China in Taiwan and its offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu dur-
ing the two Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954 and 1958; the explosive ideological split
with the Soviet Union; the anti-revisionist movement of Mao’s Cultural Revolu-
tion; and myriad other vengeful reactions against the US government’s stub-
born insistence that the CCP was essentially not communistic but nationalistic.
This stubborn insistence—a bizarre doctrine, in fact—was perpetrated by
many officials, including Ambassador to China John Leighton Stuart, and by
two generations of missionary-children-turned-“China hands” in the State
Department, who viewed the Chinese Communists as no more than peasants
in straw hats led by a progressive group of agrarian reformers. Also among
these officials was Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who warned against
the Soviet Union’s interference in Asian affairs, but nevertheless placed his
hope in a rebellion against
Soviet influence in North
After 1989, China doubled down on Korea and the Chinese
its Marxist-Leninist principles, even Communist Party, whose
as it sought advantages in the global leaders were deemed
economy. more nationalistic than
communistic.
It was President Richard Nixon and key adviser Henry Kissinger who
brought about a pivotal moment for the CCP to gain recognition as a formidable
communist power, with a global vision for influence and domination. In 1971 and
1972, Nixon and Kissinger correctly grasped the CCP’s desperate desire to be
treated as a global power and exhibited excessive respect both for the ailing and
fragile Great Chairman Mao Zedong—treated as a global strategist of far-reach-
ing insights—and Mao’s willing executioner, Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou was then
promoted in the West as China’s man of wisdom and prince of sagacity.
As a result, the Nixon/Kissinger certification of the party’s global impor-
tance created exceptional opportunities to march into the Western-dominated

78 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

international free market system and reap enormous economic, technological,
and military gains for nearly half a century. The result was the Frankenstein’s
monster that today torments its Western creators.

INTO THE WORLD

Even worse, today’s Russia, Iran, and North Korea, the three biggest rogue
states in the world—and unlike China, all virtually outside the global
“rules-based” economic system, and all heavily sanctioned by that sys-
tem—have become the dangerous proxies of the economically enriched,
technologically
advanced, and militar-
ily empowered Chinese Beijing uses pariah states to create
Communist Party. global strategic distractions and
Beijing uses these diversions for the United States.
pariah states to create
global strategic distractions and diversions for the United States, which,
since the first Trump administration, has shifted its strategic focus away
from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific region, where China
actively prepares for a military showdown with the United States. China’s
communist leaders envision a decisive victory that would mark the end of
the United States’ global leadership and the emergence of the CCP’s global
hegemony. Such a feat would move the world ever closer to the ideological
goal of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Xi: global communist leadership. No doubt this
new International would be under the dominant influence and power of the
world’s only remaining communist state of consequence—led by the forever
ideologically correct Chinese Communist Party.

Read Military History in the News, a Hoover Institution publication

that connects historical insights to contemporary conflicts (www.
hoover.org/publications/military-history-news). © 2025 The Board of
Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

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

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 79
 RU SSIA A N D U K R A IN E

A Time for Terror

Hoover fellow Robert Service compares Russian
behavior in Ukraine to Bolshevik behavior during
the revolution. Leaders in both cases served a
cruel, blind ideology.

By Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts, Secrets of Statecraft: Former professor of Russian his-

tory at Oxford and currently senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Robert
Service has written seventeen books on Russia, including biographies of
Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Bob, back in July 2021—so, seven months before
the invasion of Ukraine—Vladimir Putin wrote an essay, somewhat pomp-
ously titled On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians. Quite apart
from its use as propaganda, how does it stand up as history?

Robert Service: Very, very poorly. The problem with it is that he tries to
deny that the Ukrainian territorial entity ever existed before Lenin created
a f­ ederation called the Soviet Union and gave Ukraine a republican identity.
But that’s complete rubbish, absolute, total rubbish. In 1917, the provisional
government accepted the reality of Ukraine and allowed the formation of
Ukrainian armed units in order to win the war against imperial Germany.
And thereafter, after the October 1917 revolution, when the Communists
came to power, again, there were Ukrainian governments who spread

Robert Service is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Emeritus

­Professor of Russian History, St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Andrew Roberts
is the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History
in Contemporary Conflict, and a member of the House of Lords. He is the host of a
Hoover Institution podcast, Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 81
 NO DISSENT: A historic photo, printed from a glass-plate negative, shows
Leon Trotsky exhorting Bolshevik forces. Trotsky, who established the Red
Army, was as brutal and committed to the revolution as any other Communist
Party leader, according to scholar Robert Service. “If he had come to power, he
intended to collectivize the peasantry himself. . . . The overlap, in other words,
between Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky is bigger than the discrepancies between
the three of them. This is the key to understanding Soviet history.” [George
Grantham Bain Collection—Library of Congress]

their network of governance over the whole of roughly what we would call
Ukraine.
At the end of that civil war, in the whole of the former Russian Empire, the
decision had to be taken, should there be a place that they would call Ukraine?
And Lenin decided that there should be, because somehow the Communists
had to hold on to the loyalty, or at least the acquiescence, of the ethnic Ukrai-
nians who numbered many millions and who had gone through such terrible
times. And many of them had fought against the Reds, against Lenin’s own
Communists.

Roberts: In that essay, Putin refers to Lithuania no fewer than seven-

teen times. Do you think if Ukraine were to lose this war, that he would
start thinking about the “historical unity” of the Russian and Lithuanian
people?

82 H O O VER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

Service: I think that the Baltic States, generally, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithu-
ania, have good reason to fear for the future if the war is lost in Ukraine. And,
in fact, Putin was talking about the artificiality of the Estonian frontier with
Russia back in 1991. So, this is not a new way of thinking for him.

Roberts: And in some of

those Baltic states, there “The Baltic States, generally, Esto-
are large ethnically Rus-
nia, Latvia, and Lithuania, have good
sian populations, aren’t
reason to fear for the future if the war
there?
is lost in Ukraine.”
Service: There are
populations that got bigger after the Second World War, when Stalin wanted to
make sure that he held onto them after annexing them. That is a Russian resi-
dent population of whose interests he has long wanted to appear as the protec-
tor, and it would be the pretext for a further incursion into the Baltic states.

Roberts: Are those populations actually loyal to the Baltic states that they’re
part of?

Service: I think most Russians living in the Baltic states want peace; they
want peace and quiet. They’re not as prominent in those states as they were
in the Communist period. Many of the Russians in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithu-
ania are at the bottom of the social pile. But a good number of them appreci-
ate that they’ve got more freedom under Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian
rule than they would have in the much more chaotic and dangerous society
that Russia is today.

Roberts: How do you see the war in Ukraine at the moment? How do you see
it progressing as well?

Service: Well, it would be foolish to think that the Ukrainians are doing as
well now as they were doing in early 2023. It’s absolutely crucial, I think, that
the weaponry needed by the Ukrainian armed forces is given to them by the
West, short of provoking a catastrophic nuclear war. I think that as long as
the Ukrainians want to go on fighting, then they should be given the where-
withal to do that.

Roberts: You mentioned nuclear war. In your studies of Putin, do you see him
as the kind of person who might start one?

Service: I think he has a certain brittleness of temperament, a domineering

attitude to his subordinates, which has been increased by being in power for

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 83
 two decades and being able to put in positions of responsibility whoever he
wants to. He was very volatile when he met Tony Blair in the early 2000s and
barked at him at press conferences. I think generally, though, he is restrained
by the knowledge that a
nuclear war would be an
“I think that as long as the Ukraini- absolute catastrophe for
ans want to go on fighting, then they Russia. Anyone who lived
should be given the wherewithal to through the last days of
do that.” the Soviet Union remem-
bers very well what hap-
pened at Chernobyl and how the wind can blow nuclear dust west, but it can
also blow it east.
Also, I think the Chinese have warned him: do not touch the nuclear but-
ton. So, there’s a good deal of bluster, as we’ve seen with a lot of other dicta-
tors. When it comes to a crisis, the will to retain power can provoke decisions
that are much more dangerous than those dictators might consider desirable
in other times, in more peaceful times. But I don’t think he’s looking for a
nuclear war, no.

IDEOLOGICAL BLINDERS
Roberts: In the year 2000, you wrote a superb, definitive life of Vladimir
Lenin. What made him tick?

Service: Well, he was a Marxist fanatic, he was a brilliant intellectual, unre-

strained by the training of the mind that would have allowed him to see the
downside of what he was proposing. I don’t think that he imagined that he would
set up a totalitarian dictatorship before he seized power. But he very readily
descended into totalitarianism once the difficulties became clear of governing a
state where most people believed in God, where most people worked on the land
and weren’t living in a Marxist industrial utopia. Where most people—even the
people who had voted for the Communists in 1917—still wanted the freedom to
trade and keep their personal assets, to have private property.
So, I don’t think he had the imagination, because he was such a committed
Marxist, to think it would be a really difficult job to govern a society where
most people didn’t share his fundamental assumptions.
He had a burning conviction that he embodied the revolutionary impera-
tive. So, if people inside the Communist Party disagreed with him, he treat-
ed them as what he called ballast, and he didn’t mind if they left. He treated
some of the greatest intellectuals that Russia ever produced as “scum” and

84 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

deported them to Germany in 1922. Really, I think that’s when the totalitar-
ian system was completed, within a year or two after the civil war, when
Russia became hermetically sealed off by the will of the Communist leader-
ship from the rest of the intellectual world in which they had lived.

Roberts: And one of the ideas that the Bolsheviks had was that they could
actually change human nature itself. Talk about that a little.

Service: They assumed that under capitalism, human nature was channeled
in a particular direction that could be rechanneled when they had power in
their own hands.
Trotsky talked about how there had been only one Dante in history,
one Shakespeare in history, but soon there would be tens of thousands.
Through communist education, a whole new potential of humankind would
be released. The communalism inherent in every human being would be
released, and that would lead to a different sort of society, and the next gen-
eration would be brought up differently and would think differently and act
differently. They were utopians. They didn’t accept that some things about
the society which they had essentially conquered were deeply embedded.
After 1991, instead
of there having been a
communist civilization “They were utopians. They didn’t
in Russia, lots of trends accept that some things about the
rose up to the surface that society which they had essentially
had been suppressed for conquered were deeply embedded.”
seven decades into the
underground—religion, dissident literary culture, and ideas about the privacy of
the family. Ideas that say to me, anyway, that actually communism never truly,
utterly conquered Russia. And that’s why we see such a diverse society now.

Roberts: They admired the French Revolution, didn’t they? They look back
to it a good deal, with concepts such as abolishing Christianity and resetting
the entire calendar and having ten-day working weeks—these ideas that
seem pretty strange to us now actually worked because of their very revolu-
tionary context. It was something that the Bolsheviks sort of looked back to
with admiration, didn’t they? And the terror, I suppose.

Service: And the terror, yes. And they knew they were doing something
dangerous. They knew that there was a strong possibility of a counterrevolu-
tion. So, every day that they survived after October 1917, they almost pinched
themselves. They had a phrase that they were “living on their suitcases,” they

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 85
 were ready to make a run for it. They wanted to last at least as long as the
Paris Commune of the 1870s and, in fact, they lasted for seven decades.
But you’re right, they did think a lot about the French Revolution. They
were constantly comparing themselves with it and they were proud of having
gone beyond it. They were proud of having rethought things learnt from the
French Revolution, and said that this time we’re going to try to avoid some of
the mistakes.
Of course, some of
“Communism never truly, utterly the mistakes they didn’t
conquered Russia. And that’s why we recognize as mistakes,
see such a diverse society now.” such as mass terror. They
truly believed that holding
ex-policemen, former aristocrats, priests, mullahs in prison, killing them,
would shorten the schedule for the pathway to communism. They didn’t see
the terror of the French Revolution as counterproductive. They thought this
was the way forward. It’s a terrifying way of thinking.
But as the civil war went on, those Bolsheviks who didn’t envisage using
terror came around to thinking that this is the only way you deal with ene-
mies. So, totalitarian thinking came late to some of the Communists, but it
became deeply embedded in their mentality. And this made it more difficult
for the Communists who were later hostile to Stalin to have the intellectual
and practical cautionary attitude to prepare themselves to resist an even
worse terror in the late 1930s.

Roberts: Which, of course, they could have learned from the French Revo-
lution and the emergence of Napoleon ten years after the outbreak of the
French Revolution. The historical precedent was there for Stalin, wasn’t it?

Service: Yes. Indeed, when I was doing my biography of Trotsky, I was con-
stantly torn between thinking, this is a man who is about to have an ice pick
plunged into the top of his head, whose family is going to be persecuted.
The bits of his family that he left behind in the Soviet Union, they’re going
to be persecuted. But on the other hand, this is a man who wrote a book on
terror in the civil war, endorsing its use as a way of communizing a society.
Well, how sorry do you feel for him that he’d been such an idiot? Worse
than an idiot.

THE LATE, LAMENTED TROTSKY

Roberts: There are people on the left, aren’t there—the late Christopher
Hitchens was one—who essentially argued that had Trotsky defeated Stalin

86 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

in the internecine Bolshevik struggle in the Politburo after Lenin’s death, that
somehow communism would have been humanized. We know of the purges,
the collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, and so on. What do you think
about this argument that somehow, essentially, Trotsky was a good Commu-
nist, whereas Stalin was
a bad one?
“They didn’t see the terror of the
Service: There are French Revolution as counterproduc-
Trotskyists still today tive. They thought this was the way
who have a romantic
forward.”
view of the man; they’re
almost in love with him. They don’t appreciate either what he did when he
was in power—their excuse is a civil war was being fought—or, for example,
that he made very little comment indeed about the atrocities committed
during agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s to early 1930s,
when millions and millions of innocent peasants were bludgeoned into joining
collective farms.
There were famines and mass executions all over Ukraine and southern
Russia. So, the idea that things would have been hunky-dory under Trotsky
is completely beyond belief. And not just because he behaved very brutally
during the Russian Civil War, immediately after the October 1917 revolution.
But also, because he said so little in sympathy for the peasants, whom Stalin
even more brutally bludgeoned into joining the collective-farm system when
Trotsky was out of power.
He had the opportunity to say then that this is absolutely atrocious behav-
ior, this is inhumane as a policy, but he said almost nothing about it. If he had
come to power, he intended to collectivize the peasantry himself, he claimed
he would do it by “persuasion.” But what would he have done if the peasants
had said no, we don’t want these collective farms, we don’t want to give you
the grain quotas that you demand?
This was a man who had used force all the years when he had been in
power. I think it’s a failure of the imagination on the part of Trotskyists, some
of whom still exist today, to answer these questions. When my biography
came out over ten years ago, I had meetings and talks disrupted by them in
London; even worse, we had to have police protection in Berlin.
It’s so offensive to them, but they really have to face up to this. And I did
debate with Christopher Hitchens, actually, in this building twenty-odd years
ago. He who had ceased to be really a self-described Trotskyist still had a
romantic image of his former idol.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 87
Roberts: And by the time Trotsky died in 1940, he had endorsed the inva-
sion of the Baltic states by Stalin and the invasion of Poland from the east by
Stalin. I think he also didn’t denounce the Nazi-Soviet pact, did he?

Service: Trotsky had a very curious way of dealing with Stalin’s policies. He
emphasized the policies on which he disagreed with him. And I agree with
you, Andrew, that one should look at the things he didn’t much emphasize or
aren’t much emphasized by his supporters now.
The overlap, in other words, between Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky is bigger
than the discrepancies between the three of them. This is the key to under-
standing Soviet history, I think.

RECKONING WITH THE PAST

Roberts: You were a great friend and colleague of the late, great Robert
Conquest. Who also, of course, worked in this building here in the Hoover
Institution. He was a giant in Russian studies, and he pointed out that Stalin
had essentially started the Cold War. Today, there’s a big revisionist movement,
especially amongst historians of the left, to try to blame the West for the Cold
War. How do you feel the debate is going at the moment?

Service: Well, I think that there is a diversity of opinion about all of these
questions concerning the origins and the course of the Cold War. But
Robert Conquest was a very, very astute observer of the cracks inside the
Soviet Politburo. What attracted me to his way of thinking was that he was
always looking for ways in which this apparently monolithic system could
one day literally fall apart. And his first book, on the anti-party group of
1957, was an absolutely tremendous contribution. And then The Great Ter-
ror, which did more than anyone else had done to say that this is a whole
system of punishing dissent and even non-dissent, it’s a way of running an
entire society.
That book was a pillar of sensible investigation. What others were say-
ing at the time, they’re not really saying now, but they haven’t repented for
saying it. They were saying, “poor old Stalin, he was trying to run a rather
unruly political milieu, and he wasn’t as vengeful or as violent as people
imagine.” And that hasn’t totally gone away.

Roberts: Well, until recently, you had people like Eric Hobsbawm arguing
that. And Bob Conquest, of course, had the most terrible trouble. You did too,
with your Trotsky book. But his book The Great Terror was denounced in all
the bien-pensant magazines and literary outlets and so on, until it was proved

88 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

to be absolutely right. And if anything, it actually slightly underestimated the
number of people Stalin killed.

Service: One of the things I always thought after meeting him in the early
2000s was how jovial he was about the idiots who had said, against all the
evidence, that there was no reason to think that Stalin was an enthusiastic
mass murderer.

Roberts: Is there anything to the argument that the size of the country, the
natural sort of brutality, the lack of liberalism, mean that there’s no hope for
liberalism in the Russia? That basically, Russian history tells you that they
need a strongman.

Service: I don’t go along with all of that. I think I’d put it another way: that in
the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Russia has had such a lot of
fundamental economic, social, and political traumas that most Russians just
want a peaceful life. And I fear that this is the key to why so many Russians
sustain in popular opinion polls a positive image of Putin.
I know we can’t trust those opinion polls, but still there is a feeling that as
long as I’m not being conscripted into a war, I’ve got a more manageable life
now than I had in the 1990s, when all was utter chaos and immiseration, or in
the late 1980s, when things were going from bad to worse for most people.
So, I think if we take that into account, it’s not surprising that Russians
are currently content with a “great leader,” with a so-called great, and rather
oppressive, leader, rather than go back to the chaos of any earlier period,
including 1917. I don’t totally lose faith in the mentality of the Russian people.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Adapted from Secrets of
Statecraft with Andrew Roberts, a Hoover Institution podcast. © 2025
The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Documenting Communism: The Hoover Project to
Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives, by Charles
G. Palm. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 89
RUSSI A A N D UKRAINE

“My Village Is No
More”
Survivors in a ruined Ukrainian town describe the
brutal behavior of Russian soldiers. An eyewitness
account.

By Paul R. Gregory

I
n March 2022, Russian troops committed unrestrained atrocities
against Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war during an occupation
of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Bucha’s undisputable evidence of mass
executions, rape, torture, and the cynical mass deportation of children
prompted the civilized world to demand charges of war crimes reaching into
the upper echelons of Russian military and civilian power, even to Vladimir
Putin himself.
We know about the Bucha atrocities because Ukrainian troops retook the city
a month later. Now, as Ukrainian settlements fall to Russia’s eastern offensive,
we have little information about the myriad “Buchas” that are being absorbed
into the unrecognized “people’s republics” of Ukraine’s Donbas region by
­Russia. Are they receiving the same treatment as their compatriots in Bucha?
We do have horrific accounts of massacres by Russian forces in occupied
villages and towns in eastern Ukraine. One of these is the hometown of my

Paul R. Gregory is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is Cul-

len ­Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Economics at the University of
­Houston, a research fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research in
­Berlin, and emeritus chair of the International Advisory Board of the Kyiv School
of Economics.

90 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

daughter-in-law, Ryta. She spends much of her day in contact with friends
and relatives back home as they struggle to survive. She offers a grim litany
of accounts from friends and neighbors that confirm that “Bucha” is the rule
rather than the excep-
tion. Atrocities against
women, children, and “Such memories must remain just
the elderly are a Russian memories. My Mykhailivka is no
core strategy, not merely more.”
the result of untrained
recruits running amok. These atrocities are carefully planned and executed
by hardened combat soldiers, whose task is to annihilate the adult male
population of Ukraine.
Accordingly, I asked Ryta to describe the Russian takeover of her home vil-
lage in her own words as she recounts the horrific accounts told by survivors.
She writes the following:

In my imagination, I can picture my village of Mykhailivka (some 45 kilometers

from Donetsk City and 20 km from Pokrovsk). I can see in my mind’s eye our home,
much of it built by hand by my father, a coal miner, near blind from mining acci-
dents incurred during the Soviet era. I can still picture the lush vegetable garden
tended by my mother and father. I can hear the bubbling stream from which my
father brought home a bounty of fresh fish. In my dreams, I picture our village
school and conjure up the images of my “same-year classmates” (odnoklasnyky)
with whom I spent ten years of my life.
Such memories must remain just memories. My Mykhailivka is no more. It has
been wiped from the map, reduced to a pile of rubble and makeshift graves.
Here is what people from my village tell me: As the order to evacuate Mykhaili-
vka came down from the Ukrainian military command, villagers fled either in
their own cars, a communal van, or on foot to nearby Selydove or Pokrovsk, from
where they could be sent to the relative safety of western Ukraine by train—or
nowhere, because they lost everything. Many escaped thanks to a Dunkirk-like
operation in which brave volunteers shuttled villagers out of Mykhailivka, all the
while risking encirclement by advancing Russian troops. They had to cease rescue
operations before the evacuation was complete, leaving behind stragglers to fend
for themselves.
What the evacuees left behind was mainly rubble from protracted shelling of the
past weeks. It took only one bomb to wipe out the main street, which was paral-
lel to my parents’ street. The day before, the house of the person who worked in
the administration department of my village had been incinerated with her entire

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 91
 family inside by a smart bomb (she had helped Ukrainian soldiers a lot). I guess the
Russians knew whom to kill first. Located a little outside of town, our home was
also reduced to nothing more than a pile of rubble. Goodbye, childhood memories!
A few of my neighbors decided to stay, thinking that the occupation by Rus-
sian troops could not be worse than the nonstop shelling they had sustained. With
Russians occupying the village, the bombing should stop, they probably concluded.
A group of them hid—men and women—in an abandoned farm repair station
left over from Soviet times, hoping volunteers could reach them. They have not
been heard from. Most likely they are dead. Mykhailivka descended into an eerie
silence as remaining villagers watched for the first detachment of Russian forces.
The wait was not long; incoming Russian troops immediately got down to their
bloodthirsty business. The Pishuk family owned a grocery store in Mykhailivka.
The husband was shot in front of his wife, who pleaded for her husband to receive
a proper burial. They rejected her plea, saying, “His body will preserve better in
the cellar.” Seeing that, she walked out of the village alone toward Selydove. Along
the way, she encountered rubble, human bodies, and animal remains, victims of the
sustained bombardment of the region.
Back in Mykhailivka, the Russians shot the men of the Pavlov family, whose son
was a lifetime Down’s sufferer cared for by his father. The father was led away,
never to be seen again. I guess they thought that the Russians would take pity on a
severely handicapped person, who posed no harm to anyone. They even killed their
dog and cat.

Ryta’s account of the Mykhailivka massacre confirms several bitter points.

First, there are no real limits on Russia’s way of war in Ukraine. It is genocide.
And the indiscriminate execution of males is a conscious policy to reduce the
supply of men fighting to
halt the Russian advance.
“The wait was not long; incoming No questions are asked:
Russian troops immediately got just shoot, whether they
down to their bloodthirsty business.” are twenty or eighty.
Second, women are not
routinely executed unless they occupy some official position, such as mayor,
or are just unlucky. Perhaps Russian officers fear that the wholesale shoot-
ing of women would not sit well with their troops, some of whom are new to
the battlefield. Third, the leveling of all buildings and structures is specifi-
cally designed to prevent anyone from inhabiting the area in the near future.
Fourth, neighbors from nearby towns exhibited incredible courage, risking
their lives to rescue Mykhailivka residents before the Russian troops arrived.

92 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 We also recognize Russia’s strategy for the future. As Mykhailivka is
gradually rebuilt, Russian families will be moved in. Children will be deported
to Russia to receive “patriotic education.” At some point, the residents will
be asked to “vote” on whether they want to be a part of Russia. We need not
speculate on their forced
answer.
With mounting civilian “The world cannot turn a blind eye to
and military casualties, the ongoing violence and suffering; it
there is scarcely a Ukrai- must act decisively.”
nian family that has not
lost sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers in a war initiated by Russia for the
political benefit of its ruling class. Throughout Ukraine, the hatred of Russia
and Russians is palpable. This hatred will not dissipate through any conceiv-
able plan for “peace.” Any peace considered unjust by the Ukrainian people
(and Putin will demand such a peace) will lead to violent reactions, perhaps
resulting in a partisan war aimed at Russia and Russian interests. If Putin
thinks that he will achieve victory by way of a “peace” engineered by the Krem-
lin without the United States or Europe as guarantors, he is in for a surprise.
Here is Ryta’s plea:

It is time for the world to open its eyes, to throw away false optimism, and to
provide real help to Ukrainians to stop this genocide. The atrocities we witness
in Mykhailivka and beyond should not be forgotten or ignored. The international
community must unite to condemn these acts and support Ukraine in its struggle
for survival and justice. The world cannot turn a blind eye to the ongoing violence
and suffering; it must act decisively to help those in need, ensuring that the voices
of the victims are heard and that their stories lead to accountability and change.

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H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 93
EURO PE

To Arms
Britain and the rest of Europe have disarmed as if
there were no tomorrow—and no Vladimir Putin.
But no amount of wishful thinking can wish away
the war in Ukraine.

By Niall Ferguson

“Halfway up Wimbledon High Street . . . there was the blackened

shell of a Panzer IV, a monument to some unknown youth who—
with a Worthington beer bottle, filled from the service station at
the top of the hill, and a box of Swan Vesta matches—passed into
legend, and into songs that were sometimes crooned softly where
no German ears listened.”
—From Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB (1978)

L
osing a war on your own soil is the ultimate nightmare. It is a
nightmare England has been spared for nearly ten centuries. But
we had a close call in 1940. That was why, when Len Deighton’s
thriller SS-GB—set in a Britain occupied by Nazi Germany—was
published in 1978, it made so many shudder.
Britain avoided defeat in 1940 because enough of our soldiers were rescued
from Dunkirk, and enough had been done to prepare our air force for the
Battle of Britain. Defense spending had essentially flatlined from 1923 until

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
where he is chairman of the History Working Group and co-leader of the Hoover
History Lab. He also participates in Hoover’s task forces on military history,
­digital currency, global policy, and semiconductors.

94 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

1933. But between then—the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany—
and 1938, it rose by a factor of four.
Relative to gross domestic product, it rose from 2.6 percent to 7.4 percent.
We have come a long way since V-E Day 1945—mostly, but not always,
downhill. There is still much to be proud of. Today, Britain’s armed services
continue to punch above our economic weight compared with most Euro-
pean countries. In cash
terms, we have the
largest defense budget in We have come a long way since V-E
Europe—£52 billion last Day 1945—mostly, but not always,
year, ahead of France downhill.
and Germany. The previ-
ous year it was equivalent to 2.1 percent of GDP, making the United Kingdom
one of only eleven members of NATO spending more than 2 percent.
British soldiers, sailors, and airmen are active in multiple conflict zones
around the world. The army has trained more than sixty thousand Ukrainian
troops in the past ten years. The Royal Air Force has joined in American-
led attacks on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, whose missiles and drones have
chased so much merchant shipping out of the Red Sea. The Royal Navy’s
aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales played a leading role in last year’s NATO
exercise Steadfast Defender, the alliance’s biggest military exercise since the
Cold War.
All this is taking place after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s
attack on Israel, and perhaps on the eve of a US-China showdown over
Taiwan.
In a speech at Chatham House, the chief of the Defense Staff, Admiral Sir
Tony Radakin, tried to look on the bright side.
“We are not on the cusp of war with Russia”' he declared, reassuringly.
“We are not about to be invaded. No one in the Ministry of Defense is talking
about conscription. . . . Britain is safe. . . . We are safe because we are part of
NATO, the world’s largest and strongest alliance, and also because we are a
responsible nuclear power.”

TOO LEAN
If Britain truly is safe, however, it is despite a remarkable deterioration in the
state of our defense.
The navy has been embarrassed multiple times recently. Our lead
aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, had to withdraw from Steadfast
Defender (to be replaced at the last minute by Prince of Wales) after

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 95
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
problems with a propeller shaft. A Trident nuclear missile crashed shortly
after being launched from the submarine HMS Vanguard during an exer-
cise in January 2024 (the Ministry of Defense blamed “an anomaly of the
testing regime”).
In Bahrain in January 2024, two minesweepers—HMS Chiddingfold and
HMS Bangor—collided in broad daylight.
POISED: A British F-35 fighter on the deck of the carrier HMS Prince of Wales
is illuminated by the aurora borealis during a NATO exercise off the coast of
Norway. The vessel played a leading role in Steadfast Defender 2024, the alli-
ance’s biggest military exercise since the Cold War. But a former first sea lord
and chief of the naval staff, Admiral Lord West, warns that “chronic under-
funding over many years has impacted on the strength and capability of the
Royal Navy.” [AS1 Amber Mayall, RAF—UK MOD © 2024 Crown]

The former first sea lord and chief of the naval staff, Admiral Lord West,
is not alone in believing that “chronic underfunding over many years has
impacted on the strength and capability of the Royal Navy.” True, the navy
should start taking delivery of the first of its new Type-31 frigates in 2027, as
well as a new nuclear attack submarine. But two Type-23 frigates are to be
retired, cutting the frigate fleet to just nine ships.
Meanwhile, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the former chief of the general
staff, has warned that underfunding threatens “inadvertently” to reduce
the army to a “domestically focused land force.” And the harsh truth is that
the army has been already reduced as drastically as if the weight-loss drug
Ozempic had been mixed in with the rations.

98 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Back in 2021, then–defense secretary Ben Wallace announced a
10,000-member shrinkage in the size of the army, taking it down to
72,500 by this year. With recruitment in the doldrums, that target may
be overshot. A 70,000-member army can barely muster a single heavy
division.
True, an upgraded tank is on the way, the Challenger 3, but there will be
just 148 of them. Poland will have ten times that many modern tanks.
And matters are not helped by procurement fiascos including abandon-
ment of a key strand of the £3.2 billion Morpheus program—which aims to
deliver the next generation of tactical communication and information sys-
tems—and the bone-rattling Ajax armored fighting vehicle, which has been
subject to repeated technical difficulties and delays.
As for the RAF, it’s downright anorexic. We had thirty-one jet squadrons at
the end of the 1980s. We may soon be down to seven.
And yet, the Ministry of Defense could still find £1.75 million to spend on a
four-year diversity, equity, and inclusion program for the air force.

BUDGETS ARE TIGHT EVERYWHERE

A part of the military funding problem is the cost of our not-quite-indepen-
dent nuclear deterrent, (which in fact relies heavily on US support). Nukes
account for a fifth of the
total defense budget and
a third of the planned Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-­
equipment budget for rattling makes it clear that we still
the next ten years. need a nuclear deterrent.
As the Economist has
pointed out, strip out the nuclear weapons, and the true UK defense budget
is closer to 1.75 percent of GDP.
Yet Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling makes it clear that we still need
a nuclear deterrent. It has emerged that the Russians have plans to use tacti-
cal nuclear weapons in the event of a war with a major power, according to
leaked military files dating back to 2008–14. Since February 2022, Putin has
regularly threatened to use such weapons if Western Europe “escalates” its
support for Ukraine.
Almost as alarming to Britain’s defense establishment was Donald Trump’s
claim at a rally in South Carolina about what he might say to a NATO ally
spending less than 2 percent of GDP on defense: “You’re delinquent? No, I
would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [by implication the
Russians] to do whatever the hell they want.”

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 99
 Yet the broader problem is that we cannot easily afford to increase our
defense budget. For while defense spending has been going down, spending
on all kinds of civilian programs has been going up. The entire Western world
has been living in a fool’s paradise, imagining that the post–Cold War era
would never end. We have been living in the age of butter not guns, plough-
shares not swords.
Christoph Trebesch, director of the International Finance and Global
Governance Research Center at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy,
has tracked the secular shift away from defense spending towards spend-
ing on health, labor, welfare, and social and educational programs, as well as
nonmilitary public sector
pensions.
Most NATO countries have in effect Before World War I,
imposed the kind of demilitarization the countries that today
on themselves that was forced on belong to the G7 devoted
Germany at Versailles. on average around a
third of their central-
government budgets to defense, and less than 5 percent to nonmilitary
social programs. The world wars caused military expenditures to soar, but
did not prevent a sustained upward trend in social expenditures. After the
Korean War (1950–53), defense spending began an almost mirror-image
decline.
Today, social expenditures are on average above 40 percent of central-
government spending. Defense is down below 10 percent.
Expressed as shares of GDP, the G7 countries now spend above 10 percent
of GDP on social programs and a little over 3 percent of GDP on defense,
with the United States spending the largest share. Since 2006, various social
programs in the United Kingdom have accounted for more than half of gov-
ernment spending and 20 percent of GDP.
The reversal in central-government priorities is especially striking for
Germany. In the 1950s and 1960s, German defense spending averaged
3.8 percent. In 2023, according to NATO estimates, the German defense
budget was equivalent to 1.57 percent of GDP—two-fifths of the US figure
of 3.49 percent. More than two-thirds of total NATO spending—a stag-
gering 68 percent—is now done by the United States. No wonder Trump
blustered.
By the standards of the Cold War, most NATO countries have disarmed
themselves to an astonishing extent. They have in effect imposed the kind of

100 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

demilitarization on themselves that was forced on Germany by the Treaty of
Versailles in 1919.

THE DEBT MILLSTONE

There are other asymmetries within the alliance. If we look at effective aid to
Ukraine, as opposed to commitments, we see that support is highly skewed,
with the Baltic states,
Poland, and Scandinavia
doing much more than When a great power is spending
most relative to their more on interest payments than on
resources. defense, it’s in trouble.
Moreover, in a num-
ber of cases there is an additional problem. Exploding public debts since
the global financial crisis and the pandemic, followed by the inflation and
higher interest rates of 2022–23, have created an additional and irresistible
competitor for taxpayers’ money: the costs of debt service.
What I call Ferguson’s Law states that when a great power is spending
more on interest payments than on defense, it is in trouble. (True of Spain
in the seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth, the Ottomans in the
nineteenth, and Britain in the late twentieth.)
The United States is now perilously close to that predicament. The United
Kingdom has been in it for all but one of the past ten years. Indeed, the 2023
interest payments were precisely double the defense budget (£108 billion to
£54 billion).
This was not the case in the 1930s, when rearmament was imperative to
avoid the nightmare of defeat at Hitler’s hands and the cost of debt service
was falling.
For years, Europe
kept on disarming even There’s a very long way to go before
as geopolitical storm European “strategic autonomy”—a
clouds gathered. How- favorite phrase of French President
ever, the interruption of Emmanuel Macron—can become
US support to Ukraine,
a reality.
almost a year before the
presidential election, did seem to have woken Europeans up. Last year, Euro-
pean defense spending was finally going up. And even German politicians
were beginning to grasp that rearmament might be both prudent from the
point of national security and economically beneficial to the country’s ailing

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 101

 manufacturing sector. (Guess what? Germans are pretty good at making
weapons! Who knew?)
On top of these national efforts, the European Commission said it would
launch a €100 billion defense fund to boost armaments production.
In one interview, the
German Defense Minister,
The West plainly doesn’t want Boris Pistorius, pledged
Ukraine to lose. But does it want that Europe would soon
Ukraine to win? be producing more artil-
lery shells than the United
States. After long years of torpor, output at Rheinmetall, the German arms
manufacturer, is already surging. And there are promising signs of a lively
new defense-technology sector, stimulated by the advances in drone warfare
witnessed in Ukraine.
Yet there is a very long way to go before European “strategic autonomy”—
a favorite phrase of French President Emmanuel Macron—can become a
reality.

SLAYING THE MONSTER

Such a drastic step should not be necessary if a united NATO can maintain
its commitment to arming and aiding Ukraine. Unfortunately, that is now a
very big “if,” contingent on the wheeling and dealing within the US House
of Representatives, to say nothing of what might follow the US presidential
election.
The mood among Ukrainian troops at the front line is bleak, as you might
expect with ammunition being rationed and the Russians advancing. At an
international security conference in Munich, Yuliia Paievska—a Ukrainian
paramedic taken prisoner after the siege of Mariupol—described with unfor-
gettable, excoriating words the physical and psychological torture inflicted
by her Russian captors. She required six surgical procedures after her
return to Ukraine.
“We are the dogs of war,” she said, in one of the most electrifying speeches
I have ever heard. She had seen “streams of blood” in her work at the front
line. The war was like “a monster” with an insatiable appetite for blood. Only
by giving Ukraine the weapons to kill the monster could the West get this
war to stop.
The West plainly doesn’t want Ukraine to lose—to suffer the humiliation
Len Deighton imagined if Britain had been overrun in 1941. But does it want
Ukraine to win?

102 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Does it want Yuliia, and so many other victims of Russian brutality, to be
avenged? Does it want to see Putin defeated—without which there can be no
real security for Europe?
I wish I felt more certain that the answers to those questions were yes.

Reprinted by permission of the Daily Mail (www.dailymail.co.uk). © 2025

DMG Media. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is A Hinge

of History: Governance in an Emerging New World,
by George P. Shultz and James Timbie. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 103

EURO PE

Illusions of
Germany
After two ruinous wars, Germany for some seven
decades devoted itself to being good and doing
well. Today? There are entirely new “German
questions.” Europe awaits answers.

By Timothy Garton Ash

C
ountries, unlike human beings, can be old and young at the same
time. More than 1,900 years ago, Tacitus wrote a book about a
fascinating people called the Germans. In his fifteenth-century
treatise Germania, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, better known as
Pope Pius II, praised German cities as “the cleanest and the most pleasurable
to look at” in all of Europe. But the state we know today as Germany—the
Federal Republic of Germany—has celebrated only its seventy-fifth birthday,
on May 23 of last year. Its current territorial shape dates back just thirty-four
years, to the unification of West and East Germany on October 3, 1990, which
followed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
Yet already the post-Wall era is over and everyone, including the Germans,
is asking what Germany will be next. Not just what it will do; what it will
be. In his excellent Germany: A Nation in Its Time, the German-American

Timothy Garton Ash is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and partici-
pates in Hoover’s History Working Group. He is Professor of European Studies at
the University of Oxford and the Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s
College, Oxford. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe
(Yale University Press, 2023).

104 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

SWEPT AWAY: A visitor examines the Berlin Wall Memorial, a preserved
border strip on Bernauer Strasse. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the
largest war in Europe since 1945, reduced core assumptions of post-Wall
Germany—political, economic, and military, but also moral—to rubble.
[Arnulf Hettrich—Newscom]

historian Helmut Walser Smith reminds us just how many different Ger-
manies there have been over the five centuries since Piccolomini’s Germania
was first printed in 1496. Not only have the borders and political regimes
changed repeatedly; so have the main features identified with the German
nation.
Sometimes the dominant chord was cultural: the land of Dichter und Denker
(poets and thinkers); the patrie de la pensée (homeland of thought) described
by Madame de Staël in De l’Allemagne (1813); the Germany that according to
George Eliot has fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has pro-
duced the grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to sci-
ence, has given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music,
in the world.
After two world wars and all the horrors of the Third Reich, many people
naturally identified Germany with militarism. But Smith shows how first
Prussian and then German military expenditure has in fact been on a roller
coaster for the past two centuries.

H O O V E R D IG E S T • W inter 2025 105

IN DOUBT: Former German chancellor Angela Merkel dramatically mis-
judged Vladimir Putin’s intentions. Germany increased its dependence on
Russian energy supplies at the same time that it failed to increase defense
spending, forcing an even greater dependence on the United States for
protection. [European People’s Party]

Very often, however, German nationhood has been identified with eco-
nomic development and prowess. This point was powerfully made by the
Princeton historian Harold James in a book called A German Identity, pub-
lished the year the Wall came down. And James wrote presciently that Clio,
the muse of history, “should warn us not to trust Mercury (the e­ conomic
god) too much.”

ECONOMIC POWER
Post-Wall Germany trusted to Mercury. After West Germany under Chancel-
lor Helmut Kohl unexpectedly achieved its goal of unification on Western
terms, the old-new Federal Republic moved its capital from the small town
of Bonn to previously divided Berlin and settled down to be a satisfied status
quo power. Very much in the wider spirit of those times, it was the economic
dimension of power that prevailed.

106 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 The historian James Sheehan has characterized this as the Primat der
Wirtschaftspolitik (the primacy of economic policy), but it was also, more spe-
cifically, the Primat der Wirtschaft (the primacy of business). “The business of
America is business” is a remark attributed to US president Calvin Coolidge.
If one said of the post-
Wall Berlin republic that
“the business of Ger- German nationhood has long been
many is business,” one identified with economic develop-
would not be far wrong.
ment and prowess.
This involved the very
direct influence of German businesses on German governments, enhanced
by the distinctive West German system of cooperative industrial relations
known as Mitbestimmung. If it was not the big automobile or chemical compa-
ny bosses on the telephone to the Chancellery, it was the trade union leaders,
all urging some lucrative commercial deal. (Bosses and labor leaders could
argue between themselves afterward about how to divide the resulting pie.)
By 2021, a staggering 47 percent of the country’s GDP came from the
export of goods and services. The most spectacular growth was in business
with China, on which Germany became significantly more dependent than
any other European country. And while it self-identified as a civilian power,
it exported a lot of German-made weapons, including nearly three hundred
Taurus missiles to South Korea between 2013 and 2018—the very make
of missile that Chancellor Olaf Scholz has stubbornly refused to send to
embattled Ukraine. In the years 2019–23, Germany had a 5.6 percent share of
global arms exports, ahead of Britain although still behind France. Mars in
the service of Mercury.
With the eastward enlargement of the EU and NATO, Germany no longer
had the insecurities of a front-line state. As former West German president
Richard von Weizsäcker put it, this was the country’s liberation from its
fateful historic Mittellage (middle position) between East and West, since it
was now blessedly surrounded by fellow members of the geopolitical West.
Accordingly, its defense expenditure sank as low as 1.1 percent of GDP in 2005.
Particularly in the angry polemics between Northern and Southern Europe
during the eurozone crisis that became acute in 2010, Germans tended to
attribute their economic success to their own skill, hard work, and virtue. After
all, they had not piled up debt like those feckless Southern Europeans. Ger-
man industry does indeed have extraordinary strengths, as anyone knows who
drives a BMW, does their laundry in a Miele washing machine, cooks dinner in
a Bosch oven, or wears Falke socks. And in the early 2000s, faced with the huge

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 107

 costs of German unification, the government of Gerhard Schröder had worked
with business and trade union leaders to push through a painful set of reforms
that kept German labor costs low while they soared in Southern Europe.
Yet this economic success was also the result of a uniquely favorable set of
external circumstances. The single European currency, which many Germans
regarded as a painful sacrifice of their treasured deutschmark, brought con-
siderable economic advantage to Germany, since its companies could export
to the rest of the eurozone without any risk of currency fluctuation and to the
rest of the world at a more competitive exchange rate than the mighty deutsch-
mark would have enjoyed.
Meanwhile, the eastward
Germany, wrote one commenta- enlargement of the EU
enabled German manufac-
tor, outsourced its security needs to
turers to relocate produc-
the United States, its energy needs
tion facilities to countries
to Russia, and its economic growth with cheap skilled labor
needs to China. like Poland, Hungary, and
Slovakia while exporting
freely across the entire EU single market. In a sense, this was the achieve-
ment of the liberal imperialist politician Friedrich Naumann’s 1915 vision of
­Mitteleuropa as a German-led common economic area, but it was done entirely
peacefully, for the most part to mutual advantage, and within the larger legal
and political structure of the EU.
Even more important were the external conditions beyond Europe. The
Washington-based German commentator Constanze Stelzenmüller summed
this up in a sharp formula. Post-1989 Germany, she wrote, outsourced its
security needs to the United States, its energy needs to Russia, and its
­economic growth needs to China.

DEEP CURRENTS
Countries change but still manifest deep continuities. The French long
for universalism; the British cleave to empiricism. Germans were good at
making things in the fifteenth century—the Mainz entrepreneur Johannes
Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press, for example—and they still are.
Another of those deeper German continuities is what the German-British
social thinker Ralf Dahrendorf identified as a yearning for synthesis.
With these growing external dependencies, however, synthesis became not
just an intellectual preference but a political imperative. Everything had to
be not merely connected to but also compatible with everything else. German

108 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

interests had also to be European interests. Beyond Europe, Germany had
to be friends with the United States but also with Russia and with China, all
at the same time. The country’s export-based business model must also be in
harmony with its values-based political model. The Germans could do well
while also being good.
In the case of the Federal Republic, being good has a specific meaning: to
have learned the lessons from the Nazi past, and hence always standing for
peace, human rights, dialogue, democracy, international law, and all the other
good things we associate with the ideal of liberal international order. How
Germany has fared in this respect is the subject of another outstanding book,
Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942–2022, a probing
moral history with a distinctly mixed verdict. “When moral principles served
German interests they were flaunted,” Trentmann writes at one point, “when
they stood in the way they were ignored.”
These claims for synthesis were framed within a larger view—prevalent in
much of the West in the post-Wall years, but nowhere more so than in Ger-
many—of the way history was headed. “The end of history” was an American
idea, but it was the Germans who lived the neo-Hegelian dream.
So, history was going our way. Germany, Europe, and the West alto-
gether had a model on which others would eventually converge. Globaliza-
tion would facilitate
democratization. True,
Russia and China The country in which the Berlin Wall
didn’t look terribly like had come down enjoyed the greatest
liberal democracies, but successes—but also nourished the
as they modernized, greatest illusions.
they would get better.
Western investment and trade would help them down history’s preor-
dained track, while economic interdependence would underpin a Kantian
perpetual peace.
Thus, the country in which the Berlin Wall had come down enjoyed the great-
est successes but also nourished the greatest illusions of Europe’s post-Wall era.
Over the past sixteen years this model has collapsed in two ways: gradu-
ally, then suddenly—to recall Ernest Hemingway’s description of how one
goes bankrupt. The gradual phase coincided with a general crisis of Europe’s
post-Wall order that started in 2008 with two near-simultaneous events: the
eruption of the global financial crisis and Vladimir Putin’s military seizure of
two large areas of Georgia. The sudden arrived on February 24, 2022, with
his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 109

 The direct primacy of business meant that there wasn’t even a proper
primacy of economic policy, since the effect was to privilege the immedi-
ate interests of existing
German businesses, such
For neglecting innovation, Germany as the automobile and
(along with the rest of Europe) is far chemical industries, over
behind the United States and China the industries of tomor-
in artificial intelligence. It even faces row. As a result, Germany
(along with the rest of
competition from China’s electric
Europe) is far behind the
cars.
United States and China
in AI and other innovative technologies, and faces competition from Chinese
electric cars that may be both cheaper and better than German ones.
Two extreme manifestations of fiscal conservatism—a “debt brake” writ-
ten into the constitution in 2009 and the so-called “black zero,” the finance
ministry’s insistence for many years on running no budget deficit—have
left the country with exceptionally healthy public finances but also chronic
underinvestment in infrastructure.
A panicky choice to abandon all civil nuclear power after Japan’s Fuku-
shima nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 has made it even more difficult
to make the transition to green energy, urgently required to address the
climate crisis, while at the same time weaning the country off Russian fos-
sil fuels. Angela Merkel’s decision to let in some one million refugees from
Syria and the wider Mid-
dle East in 2015–16 was
A panicky choice to abandon all civil admirably humane, and
nuclear power made it more difficult most of the new arrivals
to transition to green energy. have been successfully
integrated into the Ger-
man economy, helping to ameliorate its acute shortage of skilled labor. But
the fear that this irregular immigration from faraway and often majority-
Muslim countries was “out of control” and would culturally transform the
country too fast gave a big boost to the hard-right nationalist party Alterna-
tive für Deutschland (AfD).
While there has been enormous investment and significant economic
growth in East Germany, the psychological divide between East and West
has increased rather than decreased—even while the chancellor was an East
German. Many East Germans feel an angry sense that they are treated as
second-class citizens.

110 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Change through consensus has historically been one of the keys to the suc-
cess of the Federal Republic, in politics as in industrial relations. But with the
fragmentation of the political landscape into seven or eight parties, felt at the
federal level also through the Bundesrat (the upper house, which represents the
federal states), and significant interventions by the powerful Federal Constitu-
tional Court, it has become more difficult to achieve either consensus or change.
Meanwhile, many of the countries that were meant graciously to converge
toward the liberal democratic ideal have moved in the opposite direction—
even in Germany’s immediate neighborhood. Since 2010, Hungarian prime
minister Viktor Orbán has systematically demolished democracy in a nearby
country where the German car industry is heavily invested. In China, the
turn has been even
sharper, from the high
hopes of gradual liberal- The psychological divide between
ization that accompanied East and West has increased rather
the Beijing Olympics than decreased. Many East Germans
in 2008 to the harsh feel like second-class citizens.
authoritarianism of Xi
Jinping’s rule today. Yet German companies have continued to make major
investments in these places, often turning a blind eye to any conflict with
their own country’s proclaimed values.
The most dramatic misjudgment was about Russia. Merkel, a fluent
Russian speaker who as chancellor had a portrait of Catherine the Great—
a Russian ruler of German origin—in her office, was by far the most influ-
ential European politician when it came to dealing with Putin. One might
argue that the Minsk II agreement, which Germany (along with France)
was instrumental in concluding in February 2015, following Putin’s annexa-
tion of Crimea and the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014, was
the best that could be done to stabilize the situation at a moment when
Ukrainian defenses were collapsing. Completely indefensible, however, was
the German failure to change tack thereafter, realistically reassessing the
Russian threat. The most telling evidence is that, far from decreasing its
energy dependence on Russia, Germany increased it: by 2020 a staggering
55 percent of its gas, 34 percent of its oil, and 57 percent of its hard coal
came from Russia.

PULLED IN ALL DIRECTIONS

To complete the trio of major extra-European dependencies, Germany
depended more than ever on the United States for its security. Even

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 111

Donald Trump’s challenge to European NATO partners during his presi-
dency produced only a slow and reluctant upward adjustment of German
defense spending. In a speech in Munich in 2017, Merkel did say that “the
times when we could completely rely on others are to some extent past.” But
there was no fundamental change of policy.
Then, on February 24, 2022, Putin launched his full-scale invasion of
Ukraine. The beginning of the largest war in Europe since 1945 reduced
core assumptions of post-Wall Germany—political, economic, and military,
but also moral—to rubble that was less immediately visible than that of the
Ukrainian city of Mariupol but no less real.
There was an appeal for Germany to initiate an immediate boycott of fossil
fuels from Russia. Scholz’s coalition government decided against taking this
radical step, and the way he made the argument was telling. It would plunge
Germany and Europe into a recession, he said. “Hundreds of thousands of jobs
would be in danger, whole branches of industry on the brink.” (The chemical
giant BASF alone guzzled some 4 percent of the country’s total annual con-
sumption of gas, delivered through its own special pipeline.) And then Scholz
said—for remember, everything must be in harmony with everything else—
“Nobody is served if, with eyes wide open, we put our economic substance at
risk.” But if Putin had suddenly been deprived of a principal source of funding
for his war machine, somebody would have been served: the Ukrainian people.
Instead, Germany would wean itself off Russian fossil fuel just as quickly
as was compatible with avoiding a recession. The choice may be defended on
the basis of what Max Weber called an “ethics of responsibility,” but it was
Ukrainians who paid a tragic human price for more fortunate people’s past
mistakes. According to the most careful independent assessment, by the
Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, in the first year of the full-scale
war Germany paid Russia some $30.6 billion for gas, oil, and coal. Some of this
money will actually have gone toward the production and transportation of
those fuels, but prices had soared precisely as a result of Putin’s war, making
much of this pure profit. Since the energy sector is an integral part of Putin’s
regime, we must conclude that these payments made a significant contribution
to funding Russia’s war against Ukraine. (To give a sense of scale, Russian mili-
tary expenditure in 2022 was estimated by the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute to be around $102 billion, up from $66 billion in 2021.)
In the meantime, and to its great credit, Germany has become one of the
leading supporters of Ukraine. According to the Kiel Institute for the World
Economy’s “Ukraine support tracker,” Germany committed some €22.1 billion
in military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Kyiv in the first two years of the

112 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

full-scale war, second only to the United States. It has taken a leading role in the
provision of air defenses. By 2024 the German chancellor was even lecturing
other European countries on how they must do more for Ukraine. Yet at every
stage, Scholz dragged his feet on sending more powerful weapon systems.
To explain Scholz’s stance, one needs to understand his cautious mana-
gerial personality and formative experiences as a Young Socialist peace
activist in the 1980s, as well as the presence of a Russia-fixated appeasement
tendency in his party and a domestic politics in which he hopes to win over
voters by positioning himself as a Friedenskanzler (“peace chancellor”). Yet in
a larger perspective Scholz can also be viewed as a representative figure of
Germany in this uncertain, transitional time.
A similar disorientation can be seen in other areas. Donald Trump’s
regaining the US presidency has called into question the US commitment to
NATO’s “all for one and one for all” guarantee to defend European member
states. At a campaign rally in February 2024, Trump boasted about how as
president he had told the leader of a large NATO member state that he would
“encourage” Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to countries that
didn’t pay more for their own defense. The response in Germany? For several
days, the media were full of speculation about how one might create a Euro-
pean nuclear deterrent to cover Germany. Thus, a country that had recently
completed its exit from civil nuclear power was now suddenly talking about
having nuclear weapons.

FROM ANGST TO ACTION

The Federal Republic is certainly the single most powerful country inside the
European Union. Berlin may not always get what it wants in Brussels, but very
little happens if Berlin doesn’t want it to. And which way Germany goes matters
more to Europe than the future course of any other European country.
In the seventy-five years of the Federal Republic, there have been three great
moments of German strategic choice: the so-called Westbindung, its founding
chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s decision to bind the fledgling Federal Republic
firmly into the transatlantic West in the 1950s; Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ost-
politik, the West German détente policy toward the Soviet bloc, implemented
in the 1970s; and Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s commitment to embed German
unification in further steps of European unification in the 1990s.
At each of these turning points, there were “Roads Not Taken,” the title
of an illuminating exhibition currently on view at the German Historical
Museum in Berlin. It was not obvious to the German public that this was the
right way to go, and the government’s policy was often fiercely contested.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 113

 The international setting today positively demands a strategic change. As
for leadership, Scholz looks like a transitional figure, but someone else can
emerge, at the latest after the national election due in autumn 2025. Adenau-
er, Brandt, and Kohl did not enter the chancellor’s office as great European
statesmen—they grew on the job.
German specialists on Russia and Eastern Europe have been outspoken
in their critique of Berlin’s failed Russian policy and half-hearted support for
Ukraine. In many ways, this reminds me of the intellectual ferment in the
1960s that gave birth to Brandt’s Ostpolitik. There is less evidence, unfor-
tunately, that the country’s politicians and business leaders are listening.
Yet Germany today needs open, critical thinking as badly as an overweight,
middle-aged man needs exercise. For the individual questions that together
make up this new German Question are very challenging.
Given the fragmentation of the party landscape, how can change through
consensus be achieved? If the old export-based business model is increas-
ingly incompatible with
the country’s values-based
Germany today needs open, criti- political model, what is the
cal thinking. There is little evidence, new business model? Or
unfortunately, that politicians and will Berlin, as the acerbic
economic commentator
business leaders are listening.
Wolfgang Münchau antici-
pates, “revert to its old practice of carving out deals with Eurasian dictators for
the sake of German industry”? Returning from a recent trip to China, the Bavar-
ian leader Markus Söder tweeted his satisfaction at having acted as a political
“escort” to German business, adding, “We do Realpolitik instead of Moralpolitik.”
Then there’s the military question. If Germany spends 2 percent of its GDP
on defense, it will have the fourth-largest defense budget in the world. If Donald
Trump were to drastically reduce the US presence in Europe, Germany would
soon become the continent’s leading military power outside Russia. What would
all these German soldiers and guns be there for? Where, how, and with what
ethos would they be deployed? How would Mars sit beside Mercury?
In German, the entire language of war has been poisoned by its association
with Nazism. In 2020, the head of the German army caused a stir when he
said the country’s armed forces should be siegesfähig—capable of winning.
The defense minister now says the armed forces must be kriegstüchtig—­
war-capable. It will require imagination and judgment to find an appropriate
new German vocabulary for the hard business of being ready to fight and die
so that that you don’t need to fight and die.

114 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 German society has been described as “post-heroic.” In a recent poll, only
38 percent of those asked said they would be ready to take up arms to defend
their country if it were attacked, whereas 59 percent said they wouldn’t. But
then, unlike Poles or Estonians, let alone Ukrainians, most Germans still
don’t really believe they might need to.
To talk of German angst is a hoary old cliché. But the German word angst
can mean either fear or anxiety. These are two very different things. Fear can
mobilize—to “fight or flight.” Anxiety paralyzes. It’s the latter kind of angst that
Germany is suffering from at the moment. The challenge for political and intel-
lectual leadership will be to carry an anxious public to a position that is more
realistic, morally consistent, and geopolitically, economically, and environmen-
tally sustainable, without any sudden lurch from one extreme to another.
Can Germany swing the balance of the European Union toward a genuine
strategic commitment to include Ukraine, Moldova, the Western Balkans,
and Georgia? Can it contribute the bold, innovative thinking needed to
reform the EU, making it ready both to make another big enlargement and
to face a dangerous world? Can it help shape a realistic new European pol-
icy toward Russia, not for the next twenty months but for the next twenty
years? And how is Europe as a whole—including countries like self-margin-
alized Britain—to defend its values and way of life in a world where often
reflexively anti-Western great and middle powers such as China, India, and
Turkey are increasingly influential, while the US interest in Europe has
diminished and will continue to diminish? Germany cannot do any of these
things on its own, but without Germany none of them will happen.
Here is today’s German Question, and the only people who can answer it
are the Germans themselves.

Originally published as “Big Germany, What Now?” The New York

Review of Books, May 23, 2024. © 2024 Timothy Garton Ash.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is New

Landscapes of Population Change: A Demographic
World Tour, by Adele M. Hayutin. To order, call (800)
888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 115

 DEFENSE AND NAT ION A L SE C U R IT Y

Knowledge Is
Power—and It’s
Portable
What we don’t know definitely can hurt us. That’s
why education and technology—research, talent
recruitment, innovation—will prove indispensable
to American security.

By Amy B. Zegart

Key points

W
hen Rus- » Countries increasingly derive power
sia’s invasion from intangible resources. The United
States risks squandering its many
of Ukraine ­advantages in technology and science.
appeared » A broken military procurement system
imminent in early 2022, US disproportionately hinders new, small,
and innovative companies that could
intelligence officials were so
create tomorrow’s technological edge.
confident that Russian tanks
» Educational proficiency is a ­critical
would roll quickly to victory that ingredient of knowledge power. It
staff evacuated the US embassy ­demands close attention.

Amy B. Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s working groups on national security
and on intellectual property, innovation, and prosperity. She is also co-chair of
Hoover’s Technology, Economics, and Governance Working Group. She is a senior
fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and associate di-
rector of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 117

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
in Kyiv. Based on traditional measures of power, the intelligence assessment
made sense. In 2021, Russia ranked fifth in the world in defense spending,
whereas Ukraine was a distant thirty-sixth, behind Thailand and Belgium.
Yet more than two years later, Russia and Ukraine are still fighting their
brutal war to a standstill.
Ukraine’s resilience is a telling indicator that power is not what it used
to be. The country’s surprise showing is in no small part a result of its
highly educated population and a technology innovation ecosystem that has
produced vast quantities of drones and other homemade weapons on the
fly. Ukraine has even managed to wage naval warfare without a navy, using
homemade drones and other devices to destroy nearly two dozen Russian
ships and deny Russia control of the Black Sea.
For centuries, a nation’s power stemmed from tangible resources that its
government could see, measure, and generally control, such as populations
that could be conscripted, territory that could be conquered, navies that
could be deployed, and goods that could be released or restricted, such as
oil. Spain in the sixteenth century had armies, colonies, and precious met-
als. The United Kingdom in the nineteenth century had the world’s strongest
navy and the economic benefits that emerged from the Industrial Revolution.
The United States and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century had mas-
sive nuclear arsenals.
Today, countries increasingly derive power from intangible resources—
the knowledge and technologies such as artificial intelligence that are
supercharging economic growth, scientific discovery, and military poten-
tial. These assets are difficult for governments to control once they are
“in the wild” because of their intangible nature and the ease with which
they spread across sectors and countries. US officials, for example, cannot
insist that an adversary return an algorithm to the United States the way
the George W. Bush administration demanded the return of a US spy plane
that crash-landed on Hainan Island after a Chinese pilot collided with it in
2001. Nor can they ask a Chinese bioengineer to give back the knowledge
gained from postdoctoral research in the United States. Knowledge is the
ultimate portable weapon.
The fact that these resources typically originate in the private sector
and academia makes the job of government even more challenging. For-
eign policy has always been a two-level game; US officials have to wrangle
both domestic actors and foreign adversaries. But more and more, the
decisions of private companies are shaping geopolitical outcomes, and
the interests of the US private sector are not always aligned with national

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 119

objectives. In the past year, American CEOs with vested Chinese business
interests have met face-to-face with Chinese leader Xi Jinping about as
often as Secretary of State Antony Blinken has. And when war erupted in
Ukraine, the billionaire Elon Musk singlehandedly decided whether, where,
and when the Ukrainian military could communicate using the Starlink
satellite network he owns.
At the same time, many of the US government’s capabilities are deterio-
rating. Its traditional foreign policy tools have withered: confirming presi-
dential appointments has become so fraught that at least a quarter of key
foreign policy positions sat vacant halfway through the first terms of the last
three US presidents. Thanks to spiraling federal debt, this year, for the first
time ever, the United States will spend more on interest payments than on
defense. Because Congress often cannot pass an annual budget, the Penta-
gon increasingly runs on stopgap budget measures that fund only existing
programs, not new ones, preventing new research and development initia-
tives or weapons programs from getting off the ground. This broken system
disproportionately hinders new, small, and innovative companies. As a result,
big, expensive weapons systems persist while new, cheap solutions wither.
If China were to design a budget process with the intent to stifle inven-
tion, send weapons costs through the roof, and weaken American defense, it
would look like this. In today’s knowledge- and technology-driven world, US
policy makers need to think in new ways about what constitutes US power,
how to develop it, and how to deploy it. Prosperity and security will depend
less on preventing adversaries from acquiring US technologies and more on
strengthening the country’s educational and research capacity and mobiliz-
ing emerging technologies to serve the national interest.

INNOVATE, ANTICIPATE
For decades, US policy makers have employed hard- and soft-power tools
to influence foreign adversaries and allies. To advance US interests with
hard power, they built military might and used it to protect friends and
threaten or defeat enemies. With soft power, they shared US values and
attracted others to their cause. Both hard and soft power still matter, but
because they do not determine a country’s success the way they once did,
the United States must work to expand its knowledge power—advancing
national interests by boosting the country’s capacity to generate transfor-
mational technology.
Knowledge power has two essential elements: the ability to innovate and
the ability to anticipate. The first relates to a country’s capacity to produce

120 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

and harness technological breakthroughs. The second has to do with intel-
ligence. Part of this work fits into the traditional mission of US spy agencies,
which are tasked with
discovering the inten-
tions and capabilities Knowledge power has two essential
of foreign adversaries elements: the ability to innovate and
to threaten US inter- the ability to anticipate.
ests. As the boundaries
between domestic industry and foreign policy blur, however, intelligence
agencies also need to help the government understand the implications of
technologies developed at home.
Innovation and anticipation are not merely ingredients that strengthen
the United States’ military and its powers of attraction. They may do both,
but the primary function of knowledge power lies closer to home. Whereas
traditional foreign policy tools aim outward—using threats, force, and values
to affect the behavior of foreign actors—building and using knowledge power
requires Washington to look inward. It involves marshaling ideas, talent, and
technology to help the United States and its partners thrive no matter what
China or any other adversary does.
Education and innovation are key to the United States’ ability to project
power.
The components of knowledge power can be hard to see and quan-
tify. But a good place to start is national educational proficiency levels.
Overwhelming evidence shows that a well-educated workforce drives
long-term economic growth. In 1960, East Asia nearly tied sub-Saharan
Africa for the lowest GDP per capita in the world. Over the next thirty
years, however, East Asia vaulted ahead, spurred in large measure by
educational improvements.
The geographic concentration of technological talent is another useful
indicator of knowledge power, suggesting which countries are poised to leap
ahead in critical areas.
There is a reason leading
scientists and engineers Physical proximity matters. The
congregate in labs and
world’s top minds working closely
recruit superstar teams
together is a recipe for breakthroughs.
instead of isolating them-
selves in their offices, designing experiments alone and reading research
papers online. Physical proximity matters; the world’s top minds working
closely together is a recipe for technological breakthroughs.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 121

 Gauging a nation’s long-term power prospects also requires measuring
the health of its research universities. Companies play an essential role
in technological innovation, but the innovation supply chain really begins
earlier, in campus labs and classrooms. Whereas companies must concen-
trate their resources on developing technologies with near-term commercial
prospects, research universities do not face the same financial or temporal
demands. Basic research, the lifeblood of universities, examines questions
on the frontiers of knowledge that may take generations to answer and may
never have any commercial application. But without it, many commercial
breakthroughs would not have been possible, including radar, GPS, and the
Internet.
More recently, what looked from the outside like the overnight success
of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was in fact the result of more than
fifty years of basic research in universities. Similarly, the cryptographic
algorithms protecting data on the Internet today stemmed from decades of
academic research in pure math. And many new advances in artificial intel-
ligence, from ChatGPT to image recognition, build on the pioneering work
developed at the University of Toronto, the University of Montreal, Stanford
University, and elsewhere.

BRAIN DRAIN
If education and innovation are key to the United States’ ability to project
power, then the country’s prospects are on shaky ground. American K–12
education is in crisis. Students today are scoring worse on proficiency
tests than they have in decades and falling behind their peers abroad. US
universities are struggling, too, as they face greater global competition for
talent and chronic federal underinvestment in the basic research that is vital
for long-term innovation.
In 2023, math and reading scores among American thirteen-year-olds were
the lowest in decades, according to the National Assessment of Educational
Progress. Half of US students could not meet their state’s proficiency
requirements. And scores on the ACT, the popular college admissions test,
declined for the sixth year in a row, with 70 percent of high school seniors not
meeting college readiness benchmarks in math and 43 percent not meeting
college readiness benchmarks in anything. Notably, these trends began
before the COVID-19 pandemic.
While students in the United States fall behind, students in other
countries are surging ahead. According to the Program for International
Student Assessment, which tests fifteen-year-olds worldwide, in 2022 the

122 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

United States ranked thirty-fourth in average math proficiency, behind
Slovenia and Vietnam. (Reading and science rankings were higher but
barely cracked the top ten and top twenty, respectively.) More than a third
of US students scored below the baseline math proficiency level, which
means they cannot compare distances between two routes or convert
prices into a different currency. At the top end, only 7 percent of Ameri-
can teens scored at the highest level of math proficiency, compared with
12 percent of test takers in Canada and 23 percent in South Korea. Even
pockets of excellence inside the United States don’t fare well internation-
ally. Massachusetts was the top-scoring US state in math in 2022 but
would rank just sixteenth in the world if it were a country. Most US states
rank near the global median. And the lowest-scoring state, New Mexico, is
on par with Kazakhstan.
Part of this story is the “rise of the rest”: the global population has become
vastly more educated in the past several decades, redrawing the knowledge
power map in the process. Since 1950, average years of schooling have risen
dramatically, and the number of college graduates worldwide has increased
thirty-fold. As the educational playing field levels, US universities and com-
panies increasingly rely on foreign talent to remain world-class. In 1980, 78
percent of doctorates in computer science and electrical engineering award-
ed by American universities went to US citizens or permanent residents. In
2022, it was 32 percent. About one million international students now study
in the United States each year. The largest share comes from China, at
27 percent.
The United States’ record of attracting talent from around the world
is an enormous asset. Nearly 45 percent of all Fortune 500 companies in
2020, including Alpha-
bet, SpaceX, and the
chip giant NVIDIA, Outdated immigration policies have
were founded by first- created a system that educates
or second-generation exceptional foreign students and
immigrants. About 40 then forces many of them to leave.
percent of Americans
awarded Nobel Prizes in scientific fields since 2000 have been foreign-born.
Yet here, too, the country is forfeiting its short-term advantage and creat-
ing long-term vulnerabilities. Outdated immigration policies have created a
self-sabotaging talent system that educates exceptional foreign students and
then requires many of them to leave the United States, taking everything
they learned with them.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 123

 What’s more, this talent supply chain works only as long as foreign stu-
dents want to study in the United States and their governments allow it. For-
eign universities have improved substantially in recent years, offering more
alternatives for the best and brightest. Already, polls show that the share of
Chinese students who prefer to study in Asia or Europe instead of the United
States is rising. If the Chinese government were ever to restrict the flow of
top students to the United States, many university labs and companies would
be in serious trouble.
Funding trends are also headed in the wrong direction. Only the US
government can make
the large, long-term, risky
China’s basic research spending is investments necessary for
due to overtake US spending within the basic research that
ten years. universities conduct. Yet
overall federal research
funding as a share of GDP has declined since its peak of 1.9 percent in 1964 to
just 0.7 percent in 2020. (By comparison, China spent 1.3 percent of GDP on
research in 2017.) The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act was supposed to reverse
this downward slide by investing billions of dollars in science and engineering
research, but these provisions were later scrapped in budget negotiations.
Basic research has been particularly hard hit. Although the United
States still funds more basic research than China does, China’s invest-
ment in research rose more than 200 percent between 2012 and 2021,
compared with a 35 percent rise in US investment. If current trends con-
tinue, China’s basic research spending will overtake US spending within
ten years.
The gravitational pull of the private sector is bolstering short-term inno-
vation and economic benefits, but it is also draining the sources of future
innovation. In one top-ranked US computer science department, nearly a
third of the senior AI faculty a decade ago have left academia. At another
top-ranked department, an AI scholar, who spoke on the condition of ano-
nymity, has estimated that half the AI faculty have gone part-time. Doctoral
students and faculty at an AI lab at another leading university do not have
the ability to discuss their research freely, which is vital for collaboration,
because some are working at OpenAI and have signed nondisclosure agree-
ments. Last year, more than 70 percent of newly minted AI PhD’s in the
United States went directly to industry, including a disproportionate share
of the top students. As a US government commission on AI put it, “Talent
follows talent.”

124 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 A generation from now, policy makers will lament, “How could we not have
seen this talent crisis coming?” But all they needed to do was look.

FIRST, TAK E STOCK

US policy makers need a new playbook that will help them assess, enhance,
and use the country’s knowledge power.
The first step is developing intelligence capabilities to gauge where the
United States is ahead in emerging technologies and where it is behind, and
to determine which gaps matter and which do not. The Pentagon has legions
of analysts comparing US and foreign military capabilities, but no office in
the US government does the same for emerging technologies. This needs to
change.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has already begun build-
ing stronger relationships with companies and universities to gain insight
into US technological developments. These efforts must be institutional-
ized, with channels to share expertise faster and more frequently. To spur
progress, Congress should hold annual technology net assessment hearings
with intelligence officials and academic and industry leaders. And universi-
ties must step up by sharing the details and implications of their latest lab
discoveries. For instance, my institution, Stanford University, along with the
Hoover Institution has launched an initiative called the Stanford Emerging
Technology Review to provide more accessible and regular information to
policy makers about key emerging technologies—including AI, bioengineer-
ing, space technologies, materials science, and energy—from leading experts
in those fields.
Washington also
needs to invest in the The Pentagon has legions of analysts
national infrastructure comparing US and foreign military
necessary for technolog- capabilities, but no office to do the
ical innovation. In the same for emerging technologies.
1950s, President Dwight
Eisenhower developed the Interstate Highway System to bolster US eco-
nomic growth and to make it easier to evacuate civilians and move troops
in the event of a Soviet attack. After the 1973 oil crisis, President Gerald
Ford established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the largest stockpile
of emergency crude oil in the world, so that a foreign oil embargo or
other disruption would never again cripple the US economy. The missing
national security infrastructure today is computational power. Progress
in nearly every field relies on artificial intelligence, which in turn requires

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 125

 advanced computational power to operate. Today, only large companies
such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft can afford to buy the mas-
sive clusters of advanced chips required for developing frontier AI models.
Everyone else struggles to afford the bare minimum.
A national strategic computational reserve would provide free or low-cost
advanced computing to researchers through competitive grants that lease
time on existing cloud-
based services or super-
A national strategic computational computing systems at
reserve could provide free or low-cost national labs. The reserve
advanced computing to researchers. could also build and oper-
ate smaller-scale comput-
ing clusters of its own. This infrastructure would be accessible to research-
ers outside large tech companies and well-endowed research universities. It
would facilitate cutting-edge AI research for public benefit, not just private
profit. And it would help stem the flow of top computer scientists from
academia to industry by offering them resources to do pioneering work while
remaining in their university positions.
Enhancing US knowledge power is not just about developing new
capabilities. Washington also needs to fix problems in the country’s
immigration system and defense budgeting. Congress must pass immigration
reforms to allow more of the world’s best and brightest students to stay and
work in the United States after they graduate from American universities,
provided measures are in place to protect US intellectual property and
guard against espionage. The secretary of defense should make reform of the
Pentagon’s weapons acquisition process a top priority, putting real funding
behind long-standing promises to embrace affordability and innovation and
making clear to Congress and the American people that budget dysfunction
makes the country less safe.
If US research universities are to remain engines of future innovation, the
federal government must also reverse years of chronic underinvestment in
basic research. Only the US government—which spends $125 million on a
single F-35 fighter jet—can invest on the scale that is necessary. And given
the pace and stakes of technological change, it is not enough for funding to
increase. It also needs to be delivered faster.
Finally, the United States needs to fix K–12 education. Warnings that edu-
cational decline threatens the country’s future prosperity, security, and global
leadership are nothing new, but education reform has not been treated as
the urgent national security priority that it is. Today, in most of the country’s

126 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

13,500 public school districts, teacher compensation is based on years of
experience and graduate education, which means that physics and physical
education teachers receive the same pay. So do the best and worst teachers.
Some cities are already piloting better approaches.
None of these changes will be easy, but without them, the United States’
knowledge capacity will continue to erode, and US power will grow weaker
in the years ahead. Washington has been clinging to the idea that restrictions
on China’s access to US technology through export controls and outbound
investment limits can preserve the country’s technological advantage. But
simply thwarting China will do nothing to spur the long-term innovation the
United States needs to ensure its future security and prosperity. Now more
than ever, Washington must understand that knowledge is power—and that
it must be cultivated at home.

Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com).

© 2025 The Atlantic Monthly Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Eyes on

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H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 127

DEFEN SE A ND NAT IONAL S ECUR IT Y

The New Killer

Apps
Cheap, high-tech weapons introduced “creative
destruction” to the battlefield. When will the
Pentagon’s creaky procurement come in for
“creative destruction” itself?

By Bing West

T
oday, millions of drones are battling in the Ukrainian sky, while
unmanned naval variants stalk Russian ships. Cheap unmanned
weapons have changed the twenty-first-century face of war.
This surprised the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and
its major defense contractors. Every Ukrainian infantry platoon employs
drones to kill any Russian soldier venturing into the open. Seaborne drones
sank so many warships that Russia pulled its fleet out of most of the Black
Sea, enabling Ukraine to resume grain exports deemed impossible when the
war began. President Biden, intimidated by Vladimir Putin, forbade Ukraine
to employ US-provided weapons to strike inside Russia; nonetheless,
Ukraine is employing its own patchwork drones to hit deep inside enemy
territory.
Over the past three years, the face of war has been forever altered by the
commoditization of digital technologies. This has enabled unmanned systems
to wreak destruction at a fraction of the previous costs—but these cheap

Bing West participates in the Hoover Institution’s Military History in Contempo-

rary Conflict Working Group and writes extensively about military affairs.

128 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

RICH TARGET: The Russian guided-missile cruiser Moskva, flagship of the
Black Sea fleet, sits at anchor in 2012. Ukrainian anti-ship missiles sank the
ship in 2022. Seaborne drones have sunk so many warships that Russia has
pulled its fleet out of most of the Black Sea, enabling Ukraine to resume grain
exports. [Public domain]

economies of scale are advantaging Iran, Russia, and China, because the
American military procurement system has not adapted.

A BLOATED, CLOSED SYSTEM

The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the memorable phrase creative
destruction to summarize how upstart companies, decade after decade, have
introduced manufactur-
ing innovations that
destroyed more estab- Cheap economies of scale are advan-
lished companies. Cars taging Iran, Russia, and China. The
bankrupted buggy-whip US military procurement system has
companies, digital pho- not adapted.
tography doomed Kodak,
and so on. In the free marketplace, millions of consumers choose what to buy.
If a company does not keep pace, its products fail to sell, and bankruptcy
follows.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 129

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]
 Over the past three decades, the number of large defense contractors
has plummeted from fifty-one to the current “big five”: Lockheed Martin,
Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. Because the
military was the sole customer that decided what products it wanted, the
shrewder corporations developed unique skills and bureaucratic acumen,
 accumulating comparative advantages that blocked out competitors. These
mega corporations subcontract to hundreds of small companies to manufac-
ture parts for weapons like an aircraft carrier. Scattering these subcontracts
ensures jobs for the politicians in their home districts.
For decades, this closed-system oligopoly produced fearsome weapons
that were also fearsomely expensive. This business model worked well
when defense budgets
accounted for 5 percent
For decades, the arms oligopoly pro- of GDP (a bargain for the
duced fearsome weapons that were world’s superpower) and
also fearsomely expensive. when the United States’
enemies were second-rate
armies or terrorists equipped with rudimentary technology. In our wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, there were ample funds for expensive items. Between
1980 and 2020, the United States possessed a monopoly on air power, over-
head surveillance, and precision strike ability. The Pentagon oligopoly didn’t
do cheap. The famous Global Hawk drone built by Northrop Grumman, for
instance, was projected to cost $10 million in 1994. Two decades later, the
cost had inflated to $131 million.
Congress paid that high sticker price because we were fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The White House released photos of top officials mesmerized
by precision drone strikes and bragging about killing any terrorist anytime,
anywhere, with no collateral damage. Left unspoken were the millions of
dollars spent on each strike package. Those wars ended badly.
As a consequence, the US defense budget has plummeted to 3 percent of
GDP, driving out any tolerance for error in procurement. At the same time,
the low-priced commoditization of digital military-applicable technologies
has left the Pentagon with a losing business model. Our exquisitely engi-
neered surveillance drones are too pricey; our offensive strike missiles are
too few; and we lack a streamlined manufacturing process to produce cheap
unmanned weapons. Just as embarrassing, our anti-drone defensive missiles
cost ten to fifty times more than the drones they intercept, as the Houthi
forces in Yemen demonstrate by persisting in drone attacks on ships sailing
the Red Sea.

STUBBORN DECISIONS
To date, the Pentagon’s efforts to adjust have been embarrassing. In fiscal
year 2022, unmanned systems (drones) were included in 140 procurement
line items, mainly for highly expensive, sophisticated surveillance platforms.

132 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

To remedy that, this year the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)
invested a billion dollars in “cheap drones” intended to be “attritable” on the
battlefield, as are bullets and shells.
But DIU then selected an established contractor that is to deliver those
drones at more than $50,000 per unit, pricing the Pentagon out of the
warfighting market. Impoverished Ukraine is producing a million drones
at $500 per unit, while Russia keeps pace with its own million drones.
China, controlling 70 percent of the worldwide commercial drone market,
is quite capable of annually producing well over a million attack drones.
The Pentagon’s oligopoly, with layers of executives, is producing several
thousand exquisite Lamborghinis instead of a million cheap but solid
Mustangs.
The Pentagon’s procurement system is too onerous and expensive to keep
pace. According to the Wall Street Journal, America can’t build drones fast
and cheap enough, or with better defenses against electronic warfare. “We
are further behind today than we were two and a half years ago,” said a proj-
ect manager at the DIU.
The potential consequences are perilous. “We are at an absolute pivot
point in maritime warfare,” retired admiral James Stavridis, former supreme
allied commander of NATO, said. “Big surface ships are highly at risk to air,
surface, and subsurface drones. The sooner great-power navies like that of
the United States understand that, the more likely they are to survive in
major combat in this turbulent twenty-first century. Like the battleship row
destroyed at Pearl Harbor, carriers are in the twilight of their days. It is abso-
lutely time to move the rheostat away from manned warships and toward
more numerous and far less expensive unmanned vessels.”
During the Civil War, the Union navy constructed an original coal-fired
steamship, the Wampanoag. When the war ended, the navy reverted to sail-
ing ships. Two more decades passed before sailing ships were replaced by
steamships. Admiral Stavridis is alarmed that today’s Navy is repeating that
mistake.
Drones guarantee that surface warships must stand farther and farther
from the conflict zone in order to survive, rendering them less effective. This
proven effectiveness of drones renders vestigial the ritualistic declaration
that America needs more warships. Why build more targets?
The Marine Corps offers an illustration of obsolete thinking. Not long ago,
the commandant decided Marines should be ready to sink Chinese warships
by shooting missiles from atolls in the South China Sea. Sixty-four missiles,
at $2 million per unit, with a hundred-mile range were purchased. To get

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 133

 within that hundred-mile range, the commandant then requested thirty-five
small amphibious ships, each costing $350 million.
At the same time, the Navy was designing a new, cheaper missile with a
range of three hundred and fifty miles, to be launched from an aircraft with-
out endangering the crew. Now there was no need for Marines, at exponen-
tially higher costs, to risk
ships and crews venturing
The new Marine Corps mission con- into well-defended Chi-
founds the Navy; why spend so much nese waters. But instead
for a mission already obsolete? of treating the missiles
already purchased as a
sunk cost and getting back to preparing to win land battles, the Marines have
persisted in requesting those thirty-five vulnerable ships, at a total estimated
cost in the billions of dollars. The new Marine mission confounds the US
Navy; why spend so much for a mission already obsolete?
The tenacity of Marine leaders in denying the laws of physics reflects
the obduracy besetting the leaders in all the military services. Profes-
sionally, they know cheap, AI-equipped unmanned systems armed with
missiles have changed warfare; but emotionally, they resist the divesting of
their pricey, vulnerable
legacy systems to free
Drones now reduce the threat of a up money for upgrades.
successful surprise attack and hold In land battle, drones
vulnerable all supply depots. now reduce the threat
of a successful surprise
attack and hold vulnerable all supply depots in the rear. All Army and
Marine platoons, like Ukrainian platoons, should be equipped with dispos-
able attack drones, just as they are equipped with bullets. Yet our ground
forces are not adapting to what is the daily reality of the land battles in
Ukraine.

CHEAP AND D EADLY

On balance, unmanned systems advantage the defense over the offense. This
should make a mockery of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s pledge to seize Taiwan,
a vow that constitutes the most dangerous near-term military challenge to
the United States.
To invade, China must mass a thousand ships or more. On a shoestring
budget, Ukraine is producing a million drones a year; if wealthy Taiwan did

134 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

the same, each Chinese ship would face a swarm of five hundred to a thou-
sand attack drones.
By immediately exploiting drone technology, for several billions of dollars
Taiwan can mount an impregnable defense. But instead of building drones at
low cost in its own factories, Taiwan is spending $360 million to purchase a
paltry thousand US-made drones. Unfortunately, Taiwan, like the Pentagon,
is resisting the cheap drone revolution, a mortal act of military malpractice.

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 T HE E N V IR ON M E N T

More Hot Air

Global-warming activists exaggerate the relatively
small number of deaths that result from hot
weather and ignore the greater number that result
from cold. If we produced more energy, not less, we
could address both problems.

By Bjorn Lomborg

T
he reason you heard a lot about extreme heat deaths last sum-
mer has more to do with demagoguery than data. Alongside the
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’s “call to
action” on the topic in July, mandarins across UN organizations
issued warnings that were heavy on emotion and light on facts.
In early August, the World Health Organization trumpeted a disturbing
figure: in Europe alone, more than 175,000 people die each year because
of extreme heat. That was about a fourfold exaggeration. When called out,
the organization quietly edited its online publication to remove the word
“extreme” from the statement’s title, a concession that these deaths are not,
as the WHO suggested, the result of a cataclysmic shift in temperatures.
Unfortunately, the media had already spread the WHO’s original, mis-
taken claim far and wide. Moreover, the edited version left out other impor-
tant context: while seasonal rises in temperature that have been the norm
for decades do kill people, it’s a far smaller toll than that taken by cold. In
Europe, cold kills nearly four times as many people as heat—a danger that a
warming climate helps ameliorate.

Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a contributor

to Hoover’s Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy, and president of the
­Copenhagen Consensus Center.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 137

 UNICEF—the United Nations’ dedicated child-welfare organization—also
rang a false alarm in July. It published a policy brief claiming that about
377 young people died in 2021 from high temperatures across Europe and
Central Asia. UNICEF didn’t mention that the data source it cites—“Global
Burden of Disease” statis-
tics from the Institute for
In Europe, cold kills nearly four times Health Metrics and Evalu-
as many people as heat. ation—shows annual heat
deaths of young people
have declined more than 50 percent over three decades, or that cold causes
about three times as many child deaths in these regions each year.
The brief also neglected to mention that heat is one of the least significant
causes of death for young people. Malnutrition claims 26,000 young lives
across Europe and Central Asia every year. In a world of limited resources,
you’d think that would be UNICEF’s priority.
The overwrought tone of the WHO and UNICEF claims matched
Guterres’s alarmism. In his call to action, he emphasized that heat deaths
of old people globally have increased 85 percent over the past twenty-two
years. He left out that almost all of this increase is because old people are
80 percent more numerous.
Guterres declared that “extreme heat is increasingly tearing through
economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Develop-
ment Goals and killing people.” He claimed there has been “a rapid rise in
the scale, intensity, frequency, and duration of extreme-heat events.”
This is misleading, to say the least. A landmark 2024 study on extreme
heat and its effects on mortality revealed that over the past thirty years the
annual global average of days with heat waves had increased from 13.4 to
13.7—hardly a rapid rise. While Guterres blames climate change for extreme
heat deaths, this makes clear that high temperatures are mostly a result of
seasonal changes that have long existed. Only perhaps a third of a day of
yearly heat waves is likely
attributable to climate
Most heat deaths are caused by change over the past
­moderate heat, not extreme heat. three decades.
Guterres’s image of a
fire-blasted planet is further belied by the fact that most heat deaths are caused
by moderate heat. While 334,000 people die each year from moderate heat,
according to a 2021 Lancet study, only 155,000 do from extremely high tempera-
tures. Cold deaths are a far larger problem, killing 4.5 million people annually.

138 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Most important, even though the planet is warming, that groundbreaking
2024 study found that the global death rate from extreme heat has declined
by more than 7 percent a decade over the past thirty years. When research-
ers adjusted for the increasingly older age distribution of the world popula-
tion, they found that the global extreme heat death rate has declined by
13.9 percent every ten years.
Falsely attributing heat deaths to global warming is likely to lead to more
heat deaths. The recent decline in heat mortality is largely thanks to greater
access to electricity and
therefore to air condi-
tioning. The best policy The policies promulgated by the
to avoid extreme heat United Nations would raise energy
deaths—or cold deaths prices and stifle growth.
for that matter—is to
ensure that more people can afford technology to control the temperature in
their homes. That necessitates economic growth and cheap, reliable energy.
The WHO’s four-step guide on how to avoid the dangers of extreme heat
suggests that people rely on “blinds or shutters” and “night air.” The closest
it comes to mentioning air conditioning is its recommendation to cool off by
spending a few hours in the supermarket.
Guterres is pushing policies that would jack up energy prices and undercut
economic growth. He insists the world’s “disease” is an “addiction to fossil
fuels” and demands that governments keep the average global temperature
rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That would cost quadrillions of dollars, spike elec-
tricity costs, and spread poverty.
All this raises the question whether Guterres and his cohort are more
interested in stopping heat deaths or ginning up support for climate activ-
ism. At the very least, they should get their numbers right.

Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2025 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.

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H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 139

F REE SPEEC H

Left Unsaid—
or Else
Censorship has a long and disreputable history
in the United States. Can free people be trusted to
think or speak for themselves?

By Peter Berkowitz

C
ensorship—the regu-
lation, suppression, Key points
and criminalization of » Modern censors consider them-
selves brave activists, and free
disfavored speech—has speech a threat to their aims.
mounted a comeback. Government » Americans, like most people
officials, social media content mod- throughout history, have struggled
to defend speech that is difficult,
erators and moguls, journalists, and
offensive, or troublesome.
professors have aligned to thwart
» Free speech is essential to Ameri-
dissemination of misinformation, can constitutional government, and
disinformation, malinformation, hate it fortifies rights such as freedom of
religion, conscience, and assembly.
speech, and harmful or offensive
remarks. They applaud themselves
as brave activists blazing a new path to the achievement of a truly diverse,
equitable, and inclusive democracy.
Yet they are throwbacks, as Jonathan Turley shows in The Indispensable Right:
Free Speech in an Age of Rage. A distinguished George Washington University

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

140 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

Law School professor, Turley is also an eminent columnist, television analyst,
and litigator. His book provides a bracing “history of the struggle for free
speech in America” and an incisive account of “the promise of free speech” in
the United States and
wherever basic rights
and fundamental free- Those who try to expand official
doms are protected. censorship are in tune with most of
Through his winning history’s political authorities.
combination of histori-
cal reconstruction, legal analysis, and philosophical exposition, Turley reveals
that the arguments for regulating speech that the contemporary censorship-
industrial complex touts as original have a long and disreputable lineage.
In the West, which developed exemplary principles of free speech, that lin-
eage of censorship stretches back to democratic Athens, which put Socrates
to death for teaching the young to ask hard questions about virtue and jus-
tice, human nature, and the cosmos. It encompasses the early modern Star
Chamber, which in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England prosecuted
the crime of seditious libel—speaking ill of public officials, the laws, or the
government—and the great eighteenth-century English jurist William Black-
stone, who insisted on seditious libel’s criminality. And despite America’s
founding promise and constitutional imperatives, government silencing of
criticism of government extends throughout the nation’s history. Those who
today undertake to expand the authorities’ power to determine what is and
what is not fit for the public to think, say, and hear give fashionable expres-
sion to the authoritarian impulses, aims, and actions that not only have beset
the West, but which also have marked most political societies throughout
most of history.
American constitutional government sought to break authoritarianism’s grip.
The Declaration of Independence stated that government’s primary task was to
secure unalienable rights,
starting with life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happi- Under the Constitution, the sover-
ness. In the original Con- eign people protected speech by
stitution, the sovereign declining to give Congress the power
people protected speech to regulate it.
by declining to delegate
to Congress the power to regulate it. The First Amendment, ratified two years
after the Constitution went into effect, explicitly denied Congress the power
to abridge free speech. This reinforced the fundamental freedom—as stated in

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 141

Cato’s Letters, widely read in eighteenth-century America—to “think what you
would and speak what you thought.”

WHY IS SPEECH FREE?

Free speech, Turley emphasizes, has two major justifications.
The first is functional: Free speech undergirds the liberal education and
robust public discussion that produce the informed citizenry on which a
rights-protecting democracy depends.
The second justification, grounded in natural-rights teachings, affirms that
speaking freely is inseparable from our humanity.
While both justifications are crucial to constitutional government in
America, Turley stresses that the tendency to rely exclusively on the func-
tional argument alone has proved calamitous. Protecting free speech sole-
ly because it is good for democracy invites the curtailment of this utter-
ance or that publication on the grounds that it undermines democracy.
Free speech fortifies the four other First Amendment freedoms. Religious
freedom includes the right to profess one’s faith, as well as the right not to
profess other faiths or any faith at all. A free press keeps citizens knowl-
edgeable about the news and circulates opinions and ideas. The freedoms
of assembly and petition enable citizens to communicate among themselves
and express their concerns to the government.
Free speech’s benefits go beyond the political. It honors our inherent
dignity as social and political animals who reason, speak, make moral
judgments, create, and pursue happiness.
Recent years have witnessed attacks on free speech from multiple
angles. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter and Facebook
cooperated with government to stifle discussion of the virus’s origins and
the efficacy of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines. And in October 2020, a few
weeks before the previous presidential election, social media blocked access
to a New York Post exclusive about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. The
laptop, which the FBI had possessed for ten months and had authenticated,
contained compromising materials about Hunter and his father, the
Democratic presidential nominee. Reports from internal Twitter documents
and a letter from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Jim Jordan, chairman of
the House Committee on the Judiciary, confirm these illicit collaborations to
stifle speech.
Meanwhile, the federal government, large corporations, and universities
worked to compel employees to affirm the goals of the diversity, equity, and
inclusion movement. DEI, as it is widely known, does not generally furnish

142 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

lessons in respecting others at the workplace and on campus regardless of
race, ethnicity, and sex—basic requirements in a free society. To the contrary,
DEI, as it is commonly practiced, downplays traditional conceptions of merit
in hiring, retention, and promotion and instead advocates advancing individ-
uals based in significant measure on their identity as members of historically
discriminated against groups.
As they stood over their children’s shoulders for Zoom classes during the
pandemic, many parents were stunned to observe that K–12 schools wielded
the curriculum as a weapon to promulgate progressive views: gender is
fluid, America is systemically racist and rapacious, and, not least, free
speech endangers individual well-being. Predictably, progressive indoctri-
nation generated a backlash on the right, provoking some conservatives to
overreach by endeavoring to ban books that espoused progressive notions.
However, the proper remedy to indoctrination in a free society, adopted
by leading conservative reformers, is not banning the teaching of progres-
sive books and ideas or requiring the teaching of conservative ones but
prohibiting schools from presenting any books or ideas as unchallengeable
orthodoxy.
Hamas’ October 7, 2023, massacre and kidnapping of Israeli civilians pre-
cipitated another public awakening to the erosion of and confusion surround-
ing free speech in America. On the nation’s campuses, especially elite ones,
students and faculty not only championed the jihadists’ genocidal cause—
destruction of the Jewish state—but disrupted academic programs and
threatened Jewish students for their faith and for supporting Israel. Notwith-
standing a few honorable exceptions, colleges and universities that would
swiftly shut down speech deemed harmful to women and many minorities
proved reluctant to prohibit harassment and intimidation that called for the
genocide of the Jews.

TWO WAYS TO DEFEND FREE SP EECH

The routinization of progressive censorship in America over the past few
years does not stem from a recent shift in the winds. Rather, it represents
the latest stage in a decades-long embrace by professors, teachers, and
administrators of the belief that education’s primary purpose is not to
transmit knowledge and cultivate independent thought but to promulgate
progressive values. Progressives, however, have all too many precursors in
the resort to censorship.
Crackdowns on free speech, Turley stresses, have recurred regularly in
America. They include the Alien and Sedition Acts signed into law in 1798

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 143

 by President John Adams, President Woodrow Wilson’s use of the Espionage
Act of 1917 and its expansion in the Sedition Act of 1918 to punish dissent
to America’s involvement in World War I, Supreme Court Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinions upholding the World War I criminalization of
political speech, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out and
destroy communists and their sympathizers.
Today, the academy leads the charge against free speech. Often an echo
chamber rather than a community of inquiry, universities feature prominent
professors who, according to Turley, reject objective knowledge, which they
deride as “reactionary
and harmful.” Many
Protecting free speech solely professors believe that
because it is “good for democracy” their job, both as scholars
leads to disaster. Speech can then be and classroom teachers,
suppressed for allegedly “undermin- is to construct narratives
ing democracy.” to advance social justice.
Influential law professors,
particularly critical legal studies scholars and feminist theorists, maintain,
Turley reports, that the “textual or historical interpretations that were once
the foundation of legal analysis” must be replaced by the unimpeachable per-
sonal experience of minorities and women. The reasoned analysis and hard
evidence of the oppressors—white men—must be silenced in favor of the fic-
tion, poetry, and dreams of the oppressed, who are just about everybody else.
Turley advances two major proposals for restoring free speech in America.
The first conditions federal funding—including research grants and student
loans—on universities’ protection of free speech. It follows the Title VI and
Title IX model. The former bars discrimination based on race, color, and
national origin at universities that receive federal funds. The latter bars sex
discrimination at universities that receive federal funds.
The second proposal would eliminate sedition prosecutions. Turley
cites James Madison’s 1798 letter to Thomas Jefferson condemning
the Adams administration’s censorship laws as the “monster that must
forever disgrace its parents.” In the determination to convert such serious
charges against January 6 Capitol rioters as criminal trespass, assault,
and conspiracy to obstruct congressional proceedings into sedition cases,
for example, Turley identifies an attempt to “amplify the culpability of the
defendants” by punishing their beliefs. Turley stresses that Donald Trump
“was wrong on his view of the election fraud claims and his view of the
authority of Vice President Pence to block certification” and underscores

144 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

that the “riot was worthy of universal condemnation.” At the same time,
Turley also sees Madison’s monster rearing its head in the portrayal
of Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech—entirely protected by the First
Amendment—as part of a criminal undertaking to obstruct Congress.
And Turley sees Madison’s monster as driving state efforts to keep Trump
off the 2024 presidential election ballot on the grounds that he engaged
in “insurrection or rebellion,” which would disqualify him from holding
federal office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (drafted and ratified
with the Civil War in mind).
The best protection against misinformation, disinformation, malinforma-
tion, hate speech, and harmful or offensive remarks remains liberal educa-
tion and open and vigorous public debate. Essential to both, free speech is a
human right as well as a constitutional imperative.

Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2025 RealClearHold-

ings LLC. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

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

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 145

F REE SPEEC H

Submission and
Silence
Out-of-control surveillance and political
intolerance—in Britain, free speech is dying.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I
n Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French
elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front
government. Ten years after its publication, submission seems more
imminent on the other side of the English Channel.
My American friends are surprised to learn there’s no equivalent to the
First Amendment in Britain. They have forgotten a free press was one of the
things their ancestors rebelled to establish in the United States. Free speech
is a much more recent thing in the United Kingdom. If it was born in the
1960s, it seems to be dying in the 2020s.
After riots last year, people were given prison sentences for posting words
and images on social media. In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence
was obvious. Julie Sweeney, fifty-three, got a fifteen-month sentence for a
Facebook comment: “Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” Lee Dunn,
fifty-one, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of
Asian-looking men with captions such as “Coming to a town near you.”
As these sentences were delivered, the government announced its inten-
tion to axe the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. Education

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the founder of
the AHA Foundation.

146 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the act, which requires universities and
students’ unions to protect free speech and academic freedom, would place
too much of a burden on universities and expose them to costly legal action.
But there’s been speculation the real motive for ditching it is to avoid antago-
nizing China, a country noted for the number of students it sends to the
United Kingdom and not for its commitment to free speech.
When I came to the West in 1992, free speech seemed a settled issue. From
defamation to fraud, perjury to libel, insult to incitement, the legal limits
were largely decided. Some European countries kept blasphemy laws, but
these were dead letters. We understood why Mein Kampf was banned in
Germany but not in the United States. Each country had taken a different
historical journey towards the liberal end of history.
Beginning in the 1960s, the United Kingdom moved away from a pater-
nalistic regime of censorship and censoriousness. The British were proud of
their newfound free speech, including their tolerance for lèse-majesté and
blasphemy. Think of the impotence of the BBC’s ban on the Sex Pistols’ “God
Save the Queen” or the success of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
But a triple whammy toward the end of the twentieth century upended
this: the arrival of fundamentalist Islam in the West, the rise of far-left
critical theories of social justice, and the advent of the Internet as the
public square.

THREE DANGEROUS DEVELOPMENTS

The clash between fundamentalist Islam and modern British values became
clear in 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran,
issued a fatwa against
Salman Rushdie for his
novel The Satanic Verses. In the early days after the Rushdie
At the time, Margaret fatwa, the message was clear: B ­ ritain
Thatcher provided wouldn’t submit to foreign actors
Rushdie with taxpayer- who threatened murder in pursuit of
funded protection. The
­censorship.
message was clear:
Britain wouldn’t submit to foreign actors who threatened murder in pursuit
of censorship. It wasn’t enough. The threat to Rushdie continued, very nearly
claiming his life in 2022.
Those who expressed concern about the cultural differences with fundamen-
talist Islam were condemned as xenophobic. Even the police feared confronting
Muslim men who ran grooming gangs for fear of being viewed as racist.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 147

 The second trend was the rise of far-left ideas within the Labour Party.
Though Jeremy Corbyn was too obvious a leftist for British voters, Keir
Starmer successfully presented himself as a harmless alternative to an
inept Tory government. Now his government seems intent on enshrining
a definition of “Islamo-
phobia” in law, using the
The Online Safety Act uses the All-Party Parliamentary
­troubling phrase “legal but harmful” Group (APPG) on British
to characterize certain content. Muslims’ definition as
“a type of racism that
targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” Starmer
reportedly intends to introduce the definition in a non-legally-binding
fashion, similar to Theresa May’s definition of anti-Semitism in 2016. But I
agree with those, such as Bob Blackman, the chairman of the 1922 Com-
mittee (formally the Conservative Private Members’ Committee), who
warn this is a move towards a blasphemy law. Blackman should know. He
was accused in parliament of Islamophobia for sharing a post critical of
sex gangs in the United Kingdom.
The third force at work is the Internet, which gave Islamists and the radi-
cal left the chance to reach impressionable youths. It particularly suited
them in 2020 when the most popular platforms made clear they would adopt
critical race theory and other elements of woke ideology, under the guise of
“content moderation.”
Of course, some Internet regulation is necessary to prevent it becoming a
bazaar for child pornography, drugs, and weapons. But conservatives under-
estimated how regula-
tion could morph into a
It suited the Islamists when p ­ opular regime of surveillance and
online platforms adopted woke censorship. The Online
­ideology under the guise of “content Safety Act was passed by
moderation.” the Tory government in
October 2023. As Fraser
Nelson argued, it could serve as a “censor’s charter” because of its inclusion
of the phrase “legal but harmful” to characterize certain content.

CENSORSHIP GROWS
Now the left wants more. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said after last year’s
riots that amendments are needed. He described the act as no longer “fit for
purpose.” Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, added that the

148 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

government is committed to “building on the Online Safety Act”—whatever
that means.
The losers in all this are not the hapless fools languishing in jail because of
their crude online posts. The losers are the millions of people who believe the
government exists to protect us from foreign enemies and criminals, not to
prohibit ideas, words, or images that might offend.
The winners? That unholy alliance of Islamists and leftists who want to use
the state to impose their dogmas on everyone else.

Reprinted by permission of The Spectator. © 2025 The Spectator. All

rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Choose

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

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 149

EDUC ATI O N

The Family Way

Of all the things that help students achieve
success and economic mobility, the two-parent
family is the most powerful. A new study proves it.

By Paul E. Peterson

L
et’s take a moment to celebrate the economic and social power of
­families. The prevalence of two-parent families in communities
­predicts their average level of student achievement and social mobil-
ity rates for those from disadvantaged backgrounds—even after
adjusting for income, education, ethnic composition, racial segregation, and
other community factors. Children learn more if they have two parents, and they
benefit as well from living in places where two-parent families are the norm.
Western Carolina University economist Angela Dills, Dany Shakeel of the
University of Buckingham, and I discovered the importance of families after
digging into county-level data on social mobility for children from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds, which has been made available by Opportunity
Insights at Harvard University.
As with many previous studies, including a recent book by Melissa Kear-
ney, we find that having two adults in the home creates more opportunity for
success than otherwise, even when money and other factors are taken into
account. As important as dollars is time, the scarcest resource of all. Adult
time is needed for a child to learn words and numbers, to receive emotional
support, to learn about learning resources, and to get a ride—or walk—to

Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a participant in the

Hoover Education Success Initiative, and senior editor of Education Next. He is
also the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program
on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

150 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

school. An opportunity for children to have twice as much time with a parent
counts for a lot.
Not all two-parent families make the best use of their time with children.
Conversely, many single parents find ways to make extraordinarily good use
of the limited time they have. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors
sometimes have their back. We have all witnessed single parents who
somehow succeed in raising capable children on their own. These heroic
accomplishments are to be celebrated as much as, perhaps even more than,
those of parents with partners to help them through the pleasures and
challenges of diaper changing, toddler minding, book reading, word learning,
birthday-party throwing, adolescent comforting, and more.
Yet the stark reality shining through the data we examined is that children
from low-income backgrounds who grow up in communities with a greater
density of two-parent families tend to earn more as adults. That’s partly due
to the fact that children in these communities are learning more at school,
as measured by their performance on state tests. The higher achievement at
these schools translates into higher rates of social mobility for children from
disadvantaged families.
Schools win the silver medal in the social mobility competition, but it is not
just learning at school that counts. The prevalence of two-parent families in
a community has a large, direct effect on children’s future incomes as adults
irrespective of their achievement levels in school. We do not have all the
information needed to
identify the mechanisms
at work. In all likelihood, A greater density of community orga-
learning skills needed for nizations, both religious and secular,
future success reflects also facilitates social mobility.
what happens in the
family and the family’s access to many community resources, not simply the
learning taking place within school buildings.
A greater density of community organizations, both religious and secular,
also facilitates social mobility: scouts, church groups, YMCAs, sports clubs,
and similar organizations. Social mobility rates are higher in those areas
where these kinds of groups are more densely concentrated. Still, the preva-
lence of community organizations wins the bronze, as it trails both the impor-
tance of good schools and a dual-parent presence in the county.
Adolescent friendships can help to boost social mobility as well. Low-income
students who have a higher proportion of friends from more advantaged
backgrounds in high school will be more likely to climb the social ladder, a point

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 151

 also made by Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights. This is more
common if students have higher achievement levels. More exactly, places with
higher levels of student achievement are the same places that have more friend-
ships across the social divide. We are unable to figure out which factor causes
the other. That’s a bit like
determining whether the
The mobility of the next generation frog or the tadpole comes
seems not to depend greatly on reduc- first.
ing political and social discord. We also looked into
whether trust in political
institutions affects children’s opportunities to move up the income ladder.
To our surprise, this factor, although given so much attention in contempo-
rary discussions, seems irrelevant to upward mobility once other factors are
taken into consideration. The mobility of the next generation depends more
on the preservation of dual-parent families, good schools, and beneficial com-
munity organizations than on reductions in political and social discord.
The gold medal goes to dual-parent families, which by a wide margin
contribute more to an equal-opportunity society than any other factor. If
preschool programs,
nutritious food in schools,
The successful single mother earned-income tax cred-
deserves our praise, but public policy its, and tax credits for
families with children all
should work to preserve as many two-
help to preserve two-
parent families as possible.
parent families, it means
they contribute to social mobility for the disadvantaged. The successful
single mother deserves our praise, but public policy should work to preserve
as many two-parent families as possible.

Reprinted from Education Next (www.educationnext.org). © 2025

­President & Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

Now available is A Republic, If We Can Teach It:

Fixing America’s Civic Education Crisis, by Jeffrey
Sikkenga and David Davenport. To order, visit
republicbookpublishers.com.

152 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

C A L I FO RN I A

The Camps Never

Close
Homelessness in California: billions spent, little
achieved. It’s about time Californians demanded
accountability.

By Lee E. Ohanian

S
ince 2019, California has
spent about $24 billion Key points
on homelessness, but » Oversight of California’s spending
on homelessness is severely lacking.
homelessness since
» Living in California—especially in
then has increased by about 30,000 coastal areas—is simply unaffordable
people, to more than 181,000. Put for many people. The social safety net
should not be used to alter this fact.
differently, California spent the
» California wastes money building
equivalent of about $160,000 per
over-the-top expensive shelter for the
person (based on the 2019 figure) homeless.
over five or so years. With this level
of spending, it was reasonable to
expect that homelessness would decline substantially. What went wrong?
Three major problems with California’s homelessness policies are facilitat-
ing this increase. One problem is a significant lack of oversight and informa-
tion about homelessness spending. The state auditor recently evaluated this

Lee E. Ohanian is a senior fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution and

­co-editor of California on Your Mind, a Hoover online journal. He is a profes-
sor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic
­Research at UCLA.

154 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

spending and submitted a report that highlights the failure of the state to
track spending and outcomes:

The state lacks current information on the ongoing costs and out-
comes of its homelessness programs, because [it] has not consistent-
ly tracked and evaluated the state’s efforts to prevent and end home-
lessness. . . . [The state] has also not aligned its action plan to end
homelessness with its statutory goals to collect financial information
and ensure accountability and results. Thus, it lacks assurance that
the actions it takes will effectively enable it to achieve those goals.

The auditor attempted to closely evaluate the costs and benefits for five
separate homelessness programs, though it found data that permitted this for
only two of those programs. More broadly, the failure to invest in adequate
information technology infrastructure and data collection within California’s
state government has been a chronic problem and has been very costly.
In 2020, California’s antiquated hardware and software within the Employ-
ment Development Department (EDD) was a key factor in about $32 billion
in unemployment benefits fraud. The department’s computer system is
based on 1980s architecture running 1950s software.
And not only was the EDD overrun with fraudulent claims, it also delayed
legitimate payments for months. The former deputy director of unemploy-
ment insurance described the EDD’s ability to deal with the high number of
COVID claims as follows:
“The best way I can
describe it is like going to Too many households simply do
a gunfight with a squirt not earn enough to live sensibly in
gun.” California.
California’s Depart-
ment of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is upgrading its system, but this follows a series
of tech upgrade failures over the previous thirty years that burned through
hundreds of millions of dollars. And the state’s annual report on its fiscal
soundness is chronically late because of an IT upgrade.

SAFETY NET MISUSED

A second key problem with California homelessness policy, one that is rarely,
if ever, discussed, is that there are too many California households who
simply do not earn enough to live sensibly in California, given the state’s
very high cost of living. For example, nearly half of California households
rent, and of this group, about 30 percent—about 1.9 million households—pay

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 155

 50 percent or more of their pretax income as rent. This is far too high, based
on the standard recommendation that a household pay a maximum of 30
percent of pretax income as rent.
This group of people, considered “extremely rent burdened,” are remark-
ably vulnerable to losing their housing. Given that the average household size
among renters is about 1.5 individuals, this group represents about 2.8 million
people. If just 1 percent of this group become homeless annually because they
lose their ability to pay, then the rolls of the homeless will rise 28,000 each year.
And it is not just this group who are financially vulnerable. About one-third
of California households live in poverty or near-poverty. This suggests the
possibility of many more people falling into homelessness each year. An esti-
mated 10,000 people became homeless between 2022 and
2023 in California. If this estimate is accurate, then Cali-
fornia has been dodging a bullet—the number of homeless
could be much worse than it is, based on the large number
of households on the cusp of financial exigency.

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

 These statistics about the number of Californians who don’t earn enough
realistically to live here, particularly in the expensive areas near the coast,
raise important questions about the state’s approach to homelessness and
how taxpayers should view its homelessness safety net. A social safety net
exists to provide support for those who experience an adverse event that
they cannot realistically insure themselves against. Our homelessness safety
net should exist for those who become homeless as a result of family crises,
such as a child running away or a family dissolution that results in a parent
and children with nowhere to go. It should also exist for those who suffer dis-
abilities and for seniors who may have a limited ability to relocate. However,
there is no justification for reliance on the safety net to pay for those who do
not have the resources to responsibly live in California.

STOP IGNORING AFFORDABILITY

Perhaps the most important reason that many Californians are financially
burdened is housing affordability. The sensible policy response to this is to
facilitate building housing in the state that low-income
households can realistically afford without significant pub-
lic assistance. This means building low-cost housing, which
likely means utilizing manufactured housing (housing
that is built from start to finish within a factory, and then
shipped to the homesite)—which can be built at only about
$100 per square foot—and building in areas where land val-
ues are not so high, which means outside of the state’s very
expensive coastal areas. For example, a 1,000-square-foot
manufactured home placed on a small lot outside of Califor-
nia’s highest-land-cost areas can likely be created for under
$200,000. A household earning $50,000 per year, which is far
below California’s median household income of over $90,000
annually, could realistically afford such housing on their own.
But the state’s policy toward building housing for the
homeless is the opposite of this approach and is the third
reason why our homelessness policies are not working
as intended. New housing for the homeless can cost over
$1 million per unit, such as a recently approved Santa
Monica 120-unit apartment complex that will cost $123
million to build and be located about three blocks from the
beach. The estimated cost of this complex does not include
the value of the land, which might approach $10 million.
 The state’s existing practice of building over-the-top expensive housing for
the homeless is not fiscally responsible, nor is it feasible within the context
of a realistic budget. And
reducing building costs
California’s practice of building over- to a level commensurate
the-top expensive housing for the with the budgets of those
homeless is neither fiscally respon- who are vulnerable to
sible nor feasible. financial risk also means
freeing up funds for men-
tal health, drug addiction, and physical-therapy services that can help many
homeless individuals get back on track.
Investing in adequate information infrastructure, reducing building costs,
and investing in low-cost housing outside of the most expensive coastal areas
could significantly advance the state’s goals of addressing homelessness
while respecting a reasonable budget. But I see no urgency within the state’s
political leadership to implement these ideas. In fact, Governor Gavin New-
som vetoed bipartisan leg-
islation that would have
New housing for the homeless can required his administra-
cost more than $1 million per unit. One tion to conduct an annual
project is a $123 million apartment evaluation of homeless-
complex three blocks from the beach. ness spending. Without
these changes, California
will continue to spend enormous sums on homelessness while the number
who are homeless remains very high.

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). © 2025 The Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Who

Governs? Emergency Powers in the Time of COVID,
edited by Morris P. Fiorina. To order, call (800) 888-
4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

158 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 IN T E RV IE W

“Play the Role

Assigned You”
In his new memoir about serving in the Trump
White House, Hoover fellow H. R. McMaster recalls
how duty drew him to Washington—and “power
games” ultimately drove him away.

By Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: A retired lieutenant general

in the United States Army and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, H. R.
McMaster served from 2017 to 2018 as national security adviser to Presi-
dent Donald Trump. General McMaster graduated from West Point, earned
a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
played important roles in the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, and the war
in Iraq. A warrior but also a historian, in 1997 General McMaster published
Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam, a book that remains essential reading
in much of the officer corps today. In 2020, General McMaster published

H. R. McMaster (US Army, Ret.), a former national security adviser, is the

Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member
of Hoover working groups including military history, Islamism, China/Taiwan,
and the Middle East. He heads the Hoover Afghanistan Research & Relief Team
and hosts the Hoover interview series Battlegrounds. His latest book is At War
with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House (2024, Harper).
Peter Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon
Knowledge with Peter Robinson, and the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow
at the Hoover Institution.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 159

“A LOT OF WORK TO DO”: Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, shown in 2016, remained
on active duty when he accepted the post of national security adviser in
the Trump administration in 2017. “I saw my role as helping the president
determine his foreign policy and national security agenda and then assisting
with the sensible implementation of his decisions.” [Chief Mass Communication
­Specialist James E. Foehl—US Navy]

Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World. Which brings us to Gen-
eral McMaster’s latest book, At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the
Trump White House.
I’m quoting from your book, H. R. “A few months after I departed the
White House, President Trump called me. ‘I miss you, General,’ the presi-
dent said. ‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ I replied, ‘If I had the opportunity, I
would do it again.’ We both knew, however, that we could never work together
again.” Why not?

H. R. McMaster: Well, Peter, you just get kind of used up with Donald Trump
at some stage.
And I felt, actually, that to do my duty effectively—and I tell many anec-
dotes related to this in the book—that I often had to tell President Trump
what he didn’t want to hear, and I had to try to guard his independence
of judgment. And in doing so, I think that over time that alienated me
from him.

160 H O O VER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 Also, our relationship was poisoned by those who really didn’t appreci-
ate my role in trying to give him multiple options. There were those around
me, and there are many
stories about this, who
would prefer to try to “I often had to tell President Trump
manipulate decisions what he didn’t want to hear.”
consistent with their
agenda, not Donald Trump’s agenda, but their agenda. And so, we got kind of
used up in that whole maelstrom. We parted ways amicably.

Robinson: But you were done?

McMaster: But I was done. Yeah, I was done.

Robinson: All right, the job. The national security adviser serves as the
principal adviser to the president on national security and foreign policy and
chairs the National Security Council. The position was founded during the
Eisenhower administration. So, we’re talking about a role in the government
that goes back decades. And the National Security Council itself was founded
during the Truman administration. What does it mean in an age of nuclear
proliferation, cyberwarfare?

McMaster: Well, it’s important to understand those historical roots

because the National Security Council was formed really as a reaction to
the intelligence failure
associated with Pearl
Harbor. And the lessons “Our relationship was poisoned by
of World War II were those who really didn’t appreciate
that we had to integrate my role in trying to give him multiple
all elements of national
options.”
power in an effort to
mobilize our society to fight that cataclysmic and vitally important war for
all humanity. The National Security Council institutionalizes some of those
lessons: the need for coordination and integration across the government
to provide the president with the best analysis, the best information.
And, I think, vitally important multiple options so the elected president
can determine his or her policy agenda.
And what’s unique about the position is the national security adviser
is the only person who has the president as his or her only client in
the areas of national security and foreign policy. The other cabinet
officials have other constituencies, they have their own departments,

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 161

 maybe ­agendas within their own departments, maybe some significant
­bureaucratic inertia associated with existing policies. So, there is a n ­ atural
tension there I tried to allay. This is a big part of the story of the book.

Robinson: It’s a staff job.

McMaster: Yes.

Robinson: You were a commander. Commanders typically don’t like staff

jobs.

McMaster: Yes.

Robinson: Why did you consider this one?

McMaster: Well, as Epictetus said, this is what is most important: to play

well the role assigned you. Right? And I knew that was my role. My role was
not to run foreign policy, my role was not to make decisions, my role was
not to centralize decision
making. I realized that
“It can be a very turbulent period in the decision maker is the
the transition of administrations.” president. Nobody elected
me. Actually, nobody
elected the secretaries of defense or state, either. I saw my role as helping the
president determine his foreign policy and national security agenda and then
assisting with the sensible implementation of his decisions.

Robinson: OK, one more piece of context as you begin. It involves Michael
Flynn—like you, three stars, United States Army, retired, takes over as
national security adviser and lasts a glorious twenty-two days. He resigns
over a controversy on information he may or may not have given to the
Russian ambassador.

McMaster: He was railroaded.

Robinson: Exactly. I was about to say, I think it’s very clear now that he’s
been completely exonerated. But the fact is, you replaced a man who had
lasted twenty-two days. What did you, walking into that job, intend to do?

McMaster: What I wanted to do is stabilize the team and do the best

job for the president. And as you know from your service in the White
House, it can be a very turbulent period in the transition of administra-
tions. Now you have the added level of complexity of a very fast change of
a national security adviser.

162 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 So, what I wanted to do was to make sure the president was getting
what he needed to determine his foreign policy and national security
­agenda. There’s a lot of work to do there. And as I mentioned in the
book, we had to put into place, in many cases, 180-degree changes
to what were, I think, destructive foreign policies from the Obama
administration.
A lot of work to do, no time for drama. But there had been a lot of drama,
so I was trying to stabilize the team, make sure everybody understood the
mission of the National Security Council staff. I also wanted to get around
and see all the cabinet secretaries, all the principals on the National Securi-
ty Council committee, and forge a very effective working relationship to get
the president the best analysis, best advice, and multiple options.

THE BEST ADVICE

Robinson: So, you’re permitted, indeed required, to develop opinions of your
own to advise him correctly. Take us through a case study. Donald Trump’s
instincts were that the war in Afghanistan, which, by the time he got to it,
had lasted for a decade and a half and had cost hundreds of billions of dollars,
was just going nowhere and he wanted out.
How did you handle that?

McMaster: Well, the first thing you have to do is listen to the elected presi-
dent. And then what I would tell the president is, I share your frustrations,
I agree with your frustra-
tions. I wanted to give
him multiple options. “President Trump wanted to know,
But to do that, you why do we care about this? Why
have to first lay a solid do the American people care about
foundation for decision
this?”
making by having a com-
mon understanding of the nature of the challenge that we’re facing, what’s at
stake. President Trump wanted to know, why do we care about this? Why do
the American people care about this?
We put into place what we called a principal small-group framing session
for these first-order national security challenges. And we put them in the
form of a problem statement; we convened the principles around a five-page
paper that framed this for the president. And I would bring that f­ raming
to him before I asked him to make a decision. Let’s come to a common
­understanding of what the challenge is.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 163

Robinson: So, you had a particular problem, and you’re very respectful of the
president, even when you get angry about those circumstances.

McMaster: Absolutely.

Robinson: By the way, the book is fascinating, and it is very clear that you
got very angry at a number of points, but it is respectful even of those people
who become antagonists. Overall, it’s the tone of a man attempting to analyze
his experience, to offer it to Americans for the future.
Now, I don’t mean to sound as though I’m denigrating Donald Trump.
I don’t know how to get an office building built in New York. But he didn’t
know why we were in Afghanistan, so your first job is to provide a kind of
rudimentary remedial education.

McMaster: Well, actually, he knew a lot. He’s not an incurious person. He’s
not familiar with history, and he’s given to certain impulses, and he’s a dis-
ruptive personality. I’ll tell you, that was very positive in many cases because
he was right about a lot of what had become sort of a routine approach to
some of the most significant challenges we faced.
He thinks it’s a bad idea that we should underwrite our own demise with
investments in China, for example, while China is weaponizing its mercantil-
ist economy against us. He was questioning the conventional wisdom that
China, having been welcomed into the international order and prospered,
would liberalize its economy and liberalize its form of governance. He didn’t
believe that.

Robinson: So, Donald Trump shows up, willing to break furniture, and part of
H. R. is thinking, yeah, there’s a lot of furniture that really should be broken.

McMaster: Yes. And to help him understand better how to break the furni-
ture effectively and put something in its place so it’s not just about disrupt-
ing. It’s about putting into place policies and approaches that will advance
American interests, that will strengthen our security, foster prosperity, and
extend our influence in the world. That’s what I was trying to help them do.

“CIRCULAR FI RING SQUAD”

Robinson: The title of the book is At War with Ourselves. You refer a n­ umber
of times to the circular firing squad inside the White House—instead of
helping each other out, there’s a lot of backbiting and interference, self-­
promotion, leaking to the press, dealings in bad faith among Trump’s own
staff and cabinet.

164 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

McMaster: Well, what they would do, to use the Shakespearean phrase, is poison
his ear. Poison the president’s ear with innuendo, with all kinds of false reports of
disloyalty and so forth, because what they wanted to do is solidify their influence
with Donald Trump. And
the best way to do that
would be to kind of play to “They wanted to create almost a bun-
his insecurities, his sense ker mentality, and they convinced the
of beleaguerment associ- president that hey, we’re the two reli-
ated with the Mueller able people in the bunker with you.”
investigation, for example.
They wanted to create almost a bunker mentality, and they convinced the presi-
dent that hey, we’re the two reliable people in the bunker with you.

Robinson: We’re your only guys.

McMaster: And so, when I was advocating for providing the president with
options, not trying to manipulate him into the decisions associated with
maybe Steve Bannon’s agenda, there was a lot of friction there. And what
they decided to do at one point, Bannon in particular, was to try to essentially
kneecap me and just get me out of the picture.

Robinson: OK, this is tricky material, because how did they get in the White
House? The president of the United States absolutely put them there. Why? I
can’t read Donald Trump’s mind, but it’s at least in part because they repre-
sented a part of his governing coalition.

McMaster: Sure.

Robinson: You refer to the alt-right, and I think that’s the term that’s gener-
ally popular.

McMaster: I’m not super enthusiastic about any of these labels.

Robinson: Right. But they had a certain kind of legitimacy in that White
House. They were there because the chief executive wanted them there. And
you say to yourself, I have to deal with these guys up to a point. How do you
draw the lines?

McMaster: I can take any kind of disparagement; I can take any kind of
leak. I mean, it doesn’t matter to me. That’s noise to me. When they begin to
affect policy, when they begin to affect national security, when they begin to
affect, really, the president’s job in a way that’s negative, that’s when I became
­concerned about it.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 165

 And I’ll tell you, Peter, this is in the book. There are many instances where
I tried to foster a working relationship with them. At one point, I invited
Steve Bannon to dinner, and then he texted me, “I’m sorry, I’m really busy.”
I’m like, OK, well, I’m national security adviser. I guess he was clearly blow-
ing me off. I tried. But
what they would rather
“What they would rather do, I think, do, I think, is to con-
is to continue to play these power tinue to play these power
games, and I just didn’t play those games, and I just didn’t
play those games. When
games.”
they began to impinge on
decisions, when they began to try to manipulate the president to make pre-
mature decisions or decisions that might cut against our national interests,
that’s when I became concerned about their tactics and their approach.
I’ve worked in some complex environments with foreign partners who have
different agendas. I’ve had the privilege of commanding multinational civil-mil-
itary task forces in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. So, I was used to trying to
lead and coordinate efforts and build a team. And despite all this friction, it has
a lot to do with your understanding of the role of the national security adviser.
What is the natural tension between that role and the role of cabinet officials?
Then you have the added dimension of Donald Trump, and the degree to which
Donald Trump creates these other motivations. And there are those who come
in with their own agenda. So, it’s a very complicated situation.
But I think the story is my effort to try to transcend that, and to do the
best job I could for the president. And I think that we succeeded in effecting
some fundamental and long-overdue shifts in policy. My attitude was, hey,
bring it on. I’ve been in real combat, Peter. And Bannon, he used to love to
use a battle metaphor for everything, but I was not really concerned by any
of it. I thought, OK, is that all you have?

PRESIDENTIAL TRAITS
Robinson: You get strong people who know a lot about their fields, and you
go up to Camp David and you fight it out in front of the chief executive.

McMaster: Sure.

Robinson: And he makes the decision at the end, and everybody says, got it.
Correct? It worked that way, and it doesn’t sound like chaos, does it?

McMaster: No, and my editor wanted “chaos” in the title; I didn’t want chaos
in the title. That’s the conventional wisdom.

166 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

And of course, it was chaotic at a certain level. You’re mentioning all the
frictions and interpersonal difficulties. But I think we succeeded in that first
year. I can’t really talk too definitively about what happened after that.

Robinson: Now to the man himself, although, of course, a portrait of Donald

Trump emerges from everything you write, such as “I saw in Trump traits
similar to those in Lyndon Johnson.” And later you write of a visit to Cali-
fornia during which you found yourself contrasting Trump with Reagan, the
differences between the two presidents who came into office with similar
agendas, including tax cuts, deregulation, increased military spending. Don-
ald Trump and LBJ, Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan? Explain this.

McMaster: Lyndon Johnson had some profound insecurities, especially in the

way he came into office.

Robinson: After an assassination.

McMaster: After the Kennedy assassination in November 1963. I wrote a

book about this.
I’ll tell you, by the way, so much of whatever ability I had to do this job
came from history. My ability to be kind of stoic in the job and understand
that the frictions I was encountering were not unprecedented. I was grateful
for the gift that the United States Army gave me, which was to study history.

Robinson: George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, these men put up with a lot.

McMaster: Absolutely. But Johnson was insecure for a number of reasons,

including that he was preoccupied with trying to get elected in his own right
in 1964. And he also had a sense of being beleaguered by the press, much like
President Trump.
President Trump, I think, has his own insecurities. I’m not a psychologist,
but he felt beleaguered by the false Russiagate collusion claims and the Mar-
a-Lago investigation. And so, these insecurities and this sense of beleaguer-
ment allowed people to kind of manipulate both presidents, right? Johnson
was very distrustful of those around him; so was Trump.
So, if somebody wants to kneecap me or somebody else, label them a
globalist, or say that they’re not supporting the president’s agenda or they’re
disloyal, or they called him a name or—ridiculous claims, right? All of those
in connection with me. He actually had a bit of a vulnerability there because
of that sense of beleaguerment.
And then with Reagan, I really talk about them both being extraordinary
communicators in the relatively new medium of television for Reagan, and

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 167

social media for Trump. And while Trump, I would say, was maybe not as
elegant in his form of communication as Reagan was . . .

Robinson: He got the points across.

McMaster: He got the points across, but also, if you look at his speeches,
I think they’re pretty darn good. They’re underappreciated.

ONE AND DONE

Robinson: All right, last question. You knew he’d never invite you back, but
I know you well enough to know that when you said, “if I had the opportunity,
I’d do it again,” you meant it. Endless hours, countless frustrations, a staff
job, which is torture in itself to a man who’s used to command. Constant
backbiting, politics of every description, and at the center of it all, a very,
very difficult chief executive. And yet you found it all worthwhile, why?

McMaster: I hope that one of the themes in the book is gratitude: gratitude
for the opportunity to serve. And national security adviser is a fantastic
job, it really is. You can have a positive influence on the course of the nation
and the nation’s security and prosperity, and that is a tremendous privilege.
I worked with some fantastic people, Peter, really dedicated, talented people.
Some of them are colleagues now at Hoover—Matt Pottinger, for example.
The National Security Council staff was running extremely well after my
first few months, I think, and doing a good job for the president. Maybe the
president didn’t always appreciate that, because we were always getting
disparaged by those who wanted to drive a wedge between him and me and
the NSC staff broadly.
But it was a privilege to work there and a privilege to help the president.
I wouldn’t go back now, because I do think I’m used up with Donald Trump.
I’m at peace with that. I had conversations with him, which I recount in the
book, months before I departed. I said, “Mr. President, listen, I want nothing
out of this job except to do it well until my last day. And when we’re no longer
effective working together, I want to leave.” So, I left with a good relationship,
which is unusual for most people who leave the Trump White House.

168 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 IN T E RV IE W

“Poverty Is the
Elemental Foe”
Economist Noah Smith describes the long struggle
of humanity against its oldest enemy. What
finally led to victory? As he sees it, “industrial
modernity.”

By Russ Roberts

Russ Roberts, EconTalk: Our topic for today is poverty, what Noah Smith
calls in an essay the “elemental foe.” Why do you call it the “elemental foe”?
It’s kind of grand, and I happen to think it deserves that grandeur, but why
did you use that wording?

Noah Smith: The phrase comes from Frankenstein. The narrator is on an

expedition to the Arctic, and he writes about data that he’s going to get
that will help humanity
against the “elemental
“The universe itself is always trying
foes of our race.” He
to kill us with rocks from space and
means the elements
diseases and even just hunger.”
themselves. And the idea
is that humans are born into a universe where the elements themselves are
against us. Poverty is the elemental foe, not just because it’s the fundamental

Noah Smith is a journalist and commentator who writes about economics on his
Substack, Noahpinion. Russ Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research
Fellow at the Hoover Institution, host of the podcast EconTalk, and the president
of Shalem College in Jerusalem.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 169

HUNGER FOR CHANGE: Hirsi Farah Ali, village chairman in Waridaad,
Somalia, describes the devastation of a severe drought in this 2012 photo.
Noah Smith marvels at how people in industrialized nations romanticize
the poverty and uncertainty of subsistence economies—whose inhabit-
ants are often eager to move to crowded cities. “They trade that eagerly.
And very few of them go back.” [Oxfam East Africa—Creative Commons]

or basic foe, but because the universe itself is always trying to kill us with
rocks from space and diseases and even just hunger.

Roberts: Early in the essay, you say the following: “To ask why some societies in
the world are still poor is the wrong question. Poverty is the default condition,
not just of humanity but of the entire universe. If humanity simply doesn’t build
anything—farms, granaries, houses, water treatment systems, electric power
stations—we will exist at the level of wild animals. This is simply physics.”
I think that’s undeniable. But you, with that stark language, make it very
clear what our challenge is as human beings living on a rock.

Smith: If you look at the planets out there in the solar system, they’re sterile.
Life is rare. Even on Earth, when life exists, most of it exists at a level of
absolute poverty. Animals are always on the verge of starvation or predation.
And when you look at human history, for most of human history, everybody
was living in grinding poverty. Even kings: they had enough to eat and they
had servants to do stuff for them, but because of a lack of modern technol-
ogy, they were still carried away by disease all the time. And they were still

170 H O O VER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

probably malnourished—subject to a heavy disease burden as kids that
stunted their intelligence and physical health.
The default state for much of the world is poverty. There’s only a tiny bit
of non-poverty in the universe. Everywhere else is constantly on the verge
of death.

Roberts: I never thought about it. The lion is king of the jungle, but the
lion’s standard of living is subsistence. If you find a nice herd, you might
have a good day. You
might even have a good
couple of days. But you “There’s only a tiny bit of non-poverty
can’t rise above the in the universe.”
minimum with any suc-
cess because you have no technology. I once heard George Will say some-
thing like, “Most of human history is a man, if lucky, a man standing behind
a horse, walking behind a horse, looking at the horse’s rear while it pulls a
plow.” That’s good times.

Smith: The reason you had Game of Thrones–type situations with people
trying to kill the king all the time is because you’re competing for the one
non-poverty position in society.

Roberts: Yes, which is why “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”
But let’s talk about the role of technology. You use an interesting phrase
to describe how we keep away poverty in the modern world: your answer is
industrial modernity. It captures in a pithy phrase what it is that sustains our
standard of living. What do you mean by it?

Smith: Industrial modernity is a system of technological edifices. Technology

itself is the knowledge of how to do a thing. You can have embodied technol-
ogy, which is like a thing itself, but industrial society is a bunch of technologi-
cal systems.
For example, roads: the roads system. We know how to make roads.
We have a bunch of roads. The roads go to a lot of places. You can drive
on one road, and you can get off onto another road to get where you’re
going.
Agricultural distribution centers: these big buildings full of food. From
those buildings, mostly trucks take the food to stores where you can buy
the food, or to places where we give away food to poor people. That network
includes a lot of logistics and spreadsheets, but it also includes the roads, the
trucks, the farms themselves.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 171

 That’s just part of industrial modernity. You have railroads, water treat-
ment plants, tap water, hospitals, and medical clinics. You have the Internet
and the telephone net-
work. You have the elec-
“All of these technological edifices trical grid, gas pipelines,
together are what keep us in that little mines, and warehouses
non-poverty bubble of the universe.” for all kinds of manufac-
tured goods, huge facto-
ries full of machine tools. All of these technological edifices together are what
keep us in that little non-poverty bubble of the universe.

Roberts: I want to add two things. One, of course, is Adam Smith’s division-
of-labor observation: that we specialize in the modern world. We don’t do
everything for ourselves. We rely on others through this web of transactions
that you’ve sketched out.
The other thing that’s remarkable is that the processes you’re describing are
a remarkable transformation over time of relentlessly reducing the amount of
human labor necessary to produce those things. You might think, “Well, that
can’t be good.” I mean, you’re getting rid of all these jobs. In 1900, 40 percent
of Americans worked on the farm, and they got replaced by bigger and bigger
farms as the world grew. The farms got bigger, the machinery that you could
use effectively on those farms got viable and then bigger, and fewer people
were needed to work on farms to make an immensely larger amount of food.
And that, to a farmer of 1900, would be a frightening thought: “Oh my gosh,
all those jobs are going to be lost.”
The joke, of course, is that in a modern factory, there are two employees:
the dog and the worker. The worker’s job is to feed the dog. And the dog’s
job is to make sure the worker doesn’t interfere with the technology that’s
producing whatever it
is—eggs, pencils, shirts,
“Why the Industrial Revolution didn’t shoes. Industrial moder-
start for so long is a question that nity is relentlessly focused
should haunt us.” on reducing the amount
of labor that’s involved in
producing more and more goods. Getting more from less is the mantra. And
it’s magical.

Smith: An interesting thing about that. There’s a theory that driving up the
cost of labor accelerates this process. And, when you suddenly have a flood of
cheap labor, it might actually slow the process of technology.

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 The first steam engine was a toy on the desk of a Greek guy living in the
Roman Empire. He had a little steam engine on the desk. He called it the
aeolipile. And it could spin around—woo!—with steam. You could have used
that to create the Industrial Revolution in Rome. So, there’s an argument
that cheap labor in Rome, because of the persistence of slavery, prevented
people from economizing on labor by automating, by looking for machines.
The economist Robert Allen argues this. He says the reason the Industrial
Revolution took off in Britain was very expensive labor—because so many
workers had left for the Americas, or there were laws driving up wages,
according to Allen. He says it forced people to go looking for alternatives, like
James Watt’s steam engine. And, once you’ve figured out the steam engine,
“Oh wow—we can use the steam engines to clear these mines or to move
stuff on a railroad.” Innovation bred innovation.
The question of why the Industrial Revolution didn’t start for so long is a
question that should haunt us because there were reasonably free markets
in many states. A lot of the basic technologies probably could have been
invented in Rome, in Song Dynasty or Ming Dynasty China, and a lot of these
old places. But they weren’t. We didn’t get a takeoff.
And that question should haunt every person who thinks about economics
because it lasted so many thousands of years. That’s kind of scary.

FABLES OF THE PAST

Roberts: You mention—one of my favorite themes— “fantasies of an imag-
ined past.” This is what I think of as the romanticization of poverty: that
human beings in ancient times avoided the alienation of industrial modernity
by living simpler lives, making more things for themselves, being closer to
nature, and so on. But you call that a fantasy. Why?

Smith: I actually don’t understand the psychology behind this nostalgia. I

think it’s not nostalgia for a place you were. There’s this nostalgia of, “I want
the world to be like it was when I was a kid, because being a kid is great, so, I
remember the world being great.” Everyone was kind of poorer in the 1990s
than now, or at least the 1980s. But I was just raring to go, just eating crappy
food, but I loved it. Just playing outside with a little red wagon. It was great! I
understand that kind of nostalgia.
But there’s a kind of nostalgia where people will look at an advertisement
from the 1950s and think, “OK, that’s how it really was. Everyone was flying
first class and people would just bring you drinks, and everyone had this giant
yard where you were always having barbecues, and everyone was very pretty

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 173

 and immaculate. And you could do all that on just one income from one hus-
band working at a factory job. You could support all of that, and all the kids
could go to college, and everybody had cars and big lawns, and that was so
great. And nobody played loud music and nobody cheated on their spouse.”
And it’s a fantasy. Those images from the 1950s that we have are not real.
They are not what the 1950s really were like. They are marketing images:
advertising created by talented fantasists of the day to get people in the
middle class to buy more stuff. And they did their job.
I’m not criticizing the advertisers and the marketers here. I’m criticizing
people who mistake that for reality. Because reality was that rivers in major cit-
ies caught fire because of the pollution. Reality was that houses for middle-class
families were half the size they are today. Reality is that if people even had a TV,
it would be one small black-and-white TV in one room that was kind of crappy
and had a bunch of programs on it that you wouldn’t even watch today.
And people lived in cities where coal smoke hung like a pall. The level of
poverty was much larger than what we’re used to now. If you go to a working-
class neighborhood in Los Angeles today, and you see first-generation immi-
grants from Honduras who are living in some far-flung suburb and working
at a CVS or something, they live a bit better than your middle-class family in
the 1950s that was the target of those advertisements.
Thinking the 1950s were economic paradise isn’t even the craziest thing.
People think the Middle Ages were economic paradise! There are people
who say, “Oh, peasants actually didn’t spend their time working. They
were indolent peasants.” I can show you “indolent peasants” in an agricul-
tural village in Nigeria or some parts of India. We can go. They’re sitting
there starving. They’re
sitting there with noth-
“The images of the 1950s that we ing to do. Yes, there’s
have are not real. They are marketing tons of work to do. You
images: advertising created by talent- could tidy up the house;
ed fantasists of the day to get people you could build a better
house. You could do all
in the middle class to buy more stuff.”
kinds of things. You could
be gainfully employed. But you don’t have the energy to get up and work
because you don’t have enough calories. All you can do is sit there. In the
agricultural age, we created negative stereotypes of people who are lay-
abouts and don’t work. The reality is that a lot of the people were disabled,
sick, hungry, old, and weak, and others were trying to extract labor from
them by saying, “Get up and work.”

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 This is why when you start the process of industrialization, everybody
moves from the farms to the cities. People trade their so-called indolent,
medieval-type lifestyle as a peasant for fourteen-hour days of backbreaking
work in some smoky sweatshop. They trade that eagerly. And very few of
them go back. And, yes, it sucks to work in a sweatshop. But it really sucks
to be an agricultural peasant. People kill themselves constantly in rural
areas. Peasants are just offing themselves in droves. Because poverty sucks.

PEASANTS DID NOT HAVE IT GOOD

Roberts: Well, you’ve gone from the 1950s to the Middle Ages. But of course,
many people want to go back further—to the hunter-gatherers—to romanti-
cize. You know, you spend a few hours a day, you might catch yourself a deer,
and then, the rest of the time you’re reciting Homer, which you’ve memorized
because you don’t have any books but which the oral tradition has passed
along. Or you’re playing a flute you’ve carved from a nearby tree. Ancient,
primitive people spent most of their day looking for protein and struggling to
find it because life is hard without modernity.

Smith: Exactly. It is a constant, desperate struggle for survival—also

extremely violent. It’s more violent to be a hunter-gatherer than to be a peas-
ant. And being a peasant is pretty violent.
Of course, all the pastoralists who believe that the hunter-gatherers had it
great say, “Oh, the hunter-gatherers that you see today in Papua New Guinea
or the Amazon, those people aren’t like the hunter-gatherers of yore, because
they’ve been pressured by capitalism and modernity and their resources
have shrunk.” Bullshit. We have archaeology. We know that the hunter-gath-
erers of the past lived pretty much like the hunter-gatherers today. It’s just
that more of humanity was subject to that crap.
I have many weaknesses and flaws as a person, but I think one of my
strengths has always been that I’m pretty damn good at recognizing fantasy
when I see it.

Roberts: Let’s shift to a topic you write about in passing, but I want to spend
a little more time on here, which is the degrowth movement. It’s another
form of romance. What’s the idea of that? What are people selling and what
do you think of it?

Smith: Degrowth is primarily a European movement, and I would say

more British and North European than elsewhere. There are various mani-
festations of it, but basically they say: “GDP is a bad indicator of human

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 175

flourishing. We need to be happy instead of making GDP go up.” And also,
“We’re destroying the environment with industrial society and technology, so
we need to degrow. The ideology of rampant growth keeps us destroying the
environment. If we stopped growth, then the environment would be saved.”
It’s all complete hogwash.

Roberts: I assume you don’t disagree with the claim that GDP is a flawed
measure of human flourishing. I think it is flawed, but I would agree with that
starting point.

Smith: I would say that the poorer a country is, the more GDP is everything.
That when you look at poor countries, GDP is just incredibly tightly corre-
lated with life expectancy, nutrition levels, and education levels.

Roberts: Let’s go back to the romance we were making fun of a minute

ago and try to take it a little more seriously. While I understand the case
for industrial modernity, I think it’s true that things are lost in the pursuit
of—not escaping poverty, perhaps, and not escaping subsistence standards
of living, but somewhere between there and what a good chunk of a modern
industrialized country has as a lifestyle.
I think about older conversations on this program about economic devel-
opment and the joke that’s not a joke: that the biggest way to fight poverty
is luggage. That uncontrolled emergent order—you want to be a part of it
because then you’re not going to starve to death. And if you’re not a part of
it, you’re going to have a tough time.
But certainly, as you move away from, say, where you were born or where
your parents or your siblings are—and Americans will forgo living near
home or near siblings for economic opportunity or career advancement or
flourishing in a different way—something is lost, I think. Do you accept that,
or do you think that’s just another kind of romance?

Smith: I don’t know about that. Honestly, I think Americans are pretty
family-oriented. I think Americans are more family-oriented than Japanese
people; that’s the other country where I’ve lived. That goes against some
old stereotypes, and I’m sure that in the long past, Japan was very family-
oriented, but it changed. Corporations pulled apart the Japanese family to a
large degree.
I think people in villages in less-developed countries are probably more
family-oriented than Americans, but a lot of that is family as a work unit. Yes,
your family is your work team, and yeah, that affords you a social circle that’s
the case your entire life—but it’s also a trap. I think that to some degree, the

176 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

constant living your entire life with this small group of people that you didn’t
get to choose was stifling and entrapping for a lot of people. It doesn’t mean
you don’t love your family, but it means that if your family are the only people
you spend your entire life with, that can be a bit confining.

Roberts: Fair enough.

BEDFORD FALLS ISN’T FOR EVERYONE

Roberts: I think the claim I’m making is that when you have a desperately
poor society, it’s good for everyone to be part of a move toward industrial
modernity—which I take is your main point. But when you live in an indus-
trial, modern society already, one has to face the trade-offs of lifestyle and—
whatever you want to call it—work/life balance.
You have to decide what you care about, and that’s a personal choice. I
don’t think the government should make it for you, or we should push people
in certain directions. All I’m suggesting is that what underlies some of the
romantic fantasies that you and I have been critiquing about primitive life—
whether it’s hunter-gatherers, the medieval peasant, the 1950s—is a thirst
for something that is harder to find in modern life than it might otherwise be,
which are these fundamental connections between kin and friends.
Now, I take your point. I like the example of George Bailey in It’s a Wonder-
ful Life. The movie romanticizes Bedford Falls—a certain version of it—but
a lot of people who grow
up in the Bedford Falls of
the world want to live in “I don’t want to be a Panglossian
the big city. They don’t about technology and say that every
want to live in the little, single technology that ever exists
tiny place where they see
makes us better.”
the same people every
day. But my point is a simple one: that this move to industrial modernity,
which is a fabulous one overall because it removes the threat of poverty and
hunger, which hangs over all human beings—and which you write so elo-
quently about—comes at some kind of cost that a thoughtful person should
be aware of in making choices about how to live within that modern world.

Smith: Yes. I think what happened with modernity in terms of social

changes is that we largely traded neighbors for co-workers and co-enthusi-
asts. I think we’re trading what I call a horizontal community for a verti-
cal community. Vertically being, for example, according to what company
you work for, what you’re interested in, things like that. In the case of

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 177

co-workers, you’d still be physically proximate to them, right? In the case
of co-enthusiasts, you’d still meet them on the basketball court. But now
your co-enthusiasts are just people who write similar memes, and you
have some notional connection with them online. I do wonder if something
important is lost.

Roberts: I’m not sure how that’s going to play out culturally over time. I don’t
know if we’re going to keep this going. I mean, I like you, Noah. I think I’ve
seen you physically once. I think we’ve been in the same room once. Twice?

Smith: Not very often.

Roberts: Most of the time we’ve talked on Zoom via EconTalk. And I think if
we spent an evening getting drinks and dinner and going to listen to music,
our relationship would be very different than a fifth EconTalk. It would just
be richer. I’m still a big fan of in-person interaction.

Smith: I am, too. I don’t want to be a Panglossian about technology and say
that every single technology that ever exists makes us better. Some technolo-
gies, if we had never invented them—stuff would be better. Certain military
technologies that just kill a lot of people. Maybe.

Roberts: Or maybe the smartphone. When it first came out, it was the great-
est thing since sliced bread. I still love it. I’m addicted to it. And there are
addictions that are not deadly. It’s just a transformative addiction. I don’t
know.
I want to close with a quote, which I think will tie some of what we’ve said
together. It’s from your essay: “Our intelligence has given us an opportunity
not afforded to other animals—the chance to conceive of our species as a
single team, fighting not individually but as an army united against the impla-
cable, elemental foe of poverty and desolation.”
That “single team” thing is a really cool, beautiful image. Most of us don’t
know we’re on that team and we don’t get any satisfaction. What I like about
that sentence is that it adds some romance to industrial modernity. It says
it’s not this decentralized, alienating, dog-eat-dog world of corporate capital-
ism we’re under the thumb of. We’re actually cooperating, often unknowingly,
in a rather extraordinary enterprise worth cherishing and honoring. Not just
surviving, but thriving materially, which allows us to do all kinds of things,
live longer lives, travel and see parts of the world we otherwise wouldn’t
see. A thousand things that make life lovely. And we choose which ones we
want to have, because we can. And we should use our intelligence not just to

178 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

expand the scope and effectiveness of industrial modernity; we could use it to
appreciate it.

Smith: I would like us to appreciate it more, and I don’t know how to get
people to do that yet. Children notoriously have difficulty telling fantasy from
reality. They live their lives swimming through a little fantasy world that they
partially make up themselves. And maybe the goal of human society should
be to return us to that existence. Perhaps fantasy is the ultimate form of
consumption.
Of course, at the same time, people who understand the danger of the
elemental foe of poverty lurking right outside our castle walls, we have to
be the adults in the room. We have to remember that stuff like degrowth is
stupid. And we have to remember the reality of what’s out there.
But maybe not everybody has to. Maybe the ultimate luxury—the ultimate
escape from poverty—is to not even remember that poverty is out there.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Reprinted by permission
from Russ Roberts’s podcast EconTalk (www.econtalk.org), a production
of the Library of Economics and Liberty. © 2025 Liberty Fund Inc. All
rights reserved.

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.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 179

H I STO RY A N D CULT URE

Still His Finest

Hour
A new surge of revisionists attack Winston
Churchill for—unbelievably—defying Hitler.
Hoover fellow Andrew Roberts, author of a
magisterial Churchill biography, finds the attacks
ignorant and unpatriotic.

W
ould Britain have done better to stay out of the Second
World War?
Ian Gribbin, the Reform UK candidate in Bexhill and
Battle, certainly thought so as recently as July 2022, when
he posted on UnHerd that “Britain would be in a far better state today had we
taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality.” It is a shame, he continued, that “Brit-
ain’s warped mindset values weird notions of international morality rather than
looking after its own people.”
Elsewhere, Gribbin stated that “we need to exorcise the cult of Churchill”
and to recognize that “in both policy and military strategy, he was abysmal.”
Although Gribbin has since apologized for these comments, Reform’s official
spokesman has not—preferring, instead, to double down on the sentiments
when speaking to, of all publications, the Jewish Chronicle. According to Reform,
Gribbin’s remarks were no more than neutral analysis, “written with an eye to

Andrew Roberts is the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fel-
low at the Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of
Military History in Contemporary Conflict, and a member of the House of Lords.
He is the author of the bestselling biography Churchill: Walking with Destiny
(Viking, 2018). He is also the host of a Hoover Institution podcast, Secrets of
Statecraft with Andrew Roberts.

180 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

STRAIGHT SHOOTER: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill tests an
American carbine during a visit with the US 2nd Armored Division in March
1944, three months before the D-day invasion of France. Churchill, writes
Andrew Roberts, was inspired by his moral loathing of Nazism, and the prime
minister’s decision to fight on when Hitler offered peace was his greatest
single act of statesmanship. [Major W. G. Horton—War Office Photography Department]

inconvenient perspectives and truths. That doesn’t make them endorsements,

just arguing points in long-distant debates. [Gribbin’s] historical perspective of
what the UK could have done in the 1930s was shared by the vast majority of the
British establishment, including the BBC of its day, and is probably true.”
Reform’s dismissive views of Churchill, Britain, and our wartime sacrifice are
troubling enough. This, after all, is a political party which openly seeks to rival
the Conservatives at Westminster. But Reform’s stance is positively disturbing
in the light of the recent revelation that no fewer than forty-one of its candidates
are Facebook friends with a man called Gary Raikes, the leader of a neo-Nazi
group called the New British Union which has called for a “Fascist revolution.”
That’s why it is now imperative that the party come clean. Just where does
it stand on Winston Churchill’s leadership in the Second World War—and on
Britain’s determination to oppose the Nazis?

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 181

 HITLER’S POISONED CHALICE
Reform pretends that Gribbin was taking part in a long-running debate about
appeasement in the 1930s, but in fact it appears that Gribbin was talking about
agreeing to a wartime truce with the Nazis. If Reform UK genuinely thinks
that Britain should have remained neutral in the Second World War, the case
deserves to be argued on its merits—if only to be dispatched more efficiently.
This is a well-known
trope that has been put
Hitler’s neutrality offer is a well- forward over the years by
known trope that has been put for- respected historians such
ward over the years. It doesn’t stand as John Charmley, the late
up to the facts. Alan Clark, and Professor
Maurice Cowling of Cam-
bridge University—but also, before that, by Oswald Mosley and his British
Union of Fascists.
It simply doesn’t stand up to serious investigation.
Adolf Hitler offered Britain neutrality on July 19, 1940, ten months into the
war and less than a year before he invaded Russia. He did so in the hope of
freeing dozens of German divisions guarding his western flank and trans-
porting them to fight against the Soviet Union in the east. If Britain had
declared neutrality—and had not conducted bombing missions on Germany
from August 1940 onwards—the Fuhrer would have been able to use the
totality of the Luftwaffe in his invasion of Russia rather than 70 percent of it.
Even so, Hitler got to within forty miles of Moscow.
A neutral Britain would have been in no position to help Russia with con-
voys of tanks and planes. Our refusal to fight would have fatally confirmed
the United States in its isolationism, and thus our country could not have
been used as the unsinkable aircraft carrier from which the British, Ameri-
cans, and Canadians launched D-Day—the start of the extraordinary cam-
paign that ultimately liberated Western Europe.
For half a millennium, British strategy has been to oppose the hungry
ambitions of European tyrants. This explains why we fought the Spanish
Armada, the War of Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, and the
Great War.
We took part not because, as Gribbin put it, “Britain’s warped mindset val-
ues weird notions of international morality,” but out of clear-sighted realpoli-
tik. We wanted to ensure British security.
Since Adolf Hitler ripped up every treaty he ever signed, no meaningful neu-
trality would have been possible. We can be certain that, once he had defeated

182 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

Russia, Hitler would have turned on us. And in doing so, he would not have
been fighting on two fronts—the weakness that eventually destroyed him.
Reform’s spokesman was correct to tell the Jewish Chronicle that Britain
lost “a massive amount of blood and treasure” because of Churchill’s deci-
sion to fight on, but it was a fraction of what she would have lost if she’d
had to confront the
Nazis later—and with-
out Russia and America For half a millennium, British ­strategy
as allies. has been to oppose the hungry
Britain did not go to ­ambitions of European tyrants.
war to save Jewry, but
Churchill was inspired by his moral loathing of Nazism. And Gribbin, who
points out that he has a Russian-Jewish maternal grandmother, probably
owes his life to this. His grandmother is unlikely to have survived had Hitler
controlled the entire European continent from Brest to the Urals throughout
the 1940s.
The cost for Britain was heavy: the loss of empire abroad and the rise of
socialism at home. But these things were the necessary price to pay for the
untarnishable glory of contributing to the crushing of Nazism. The empire
was on the way out by the mid-1930s, anyhow.
Equally, if the Soviets had defeated the Nazis, a neutral Britain would
also have been in a desperate situation, with Stalin—every bit as expan-
sionist as Hitler—as
the master of Europe.
Without a British and Britain’s decision to fight was clear-
American army in sighted realpolitik. Churchill wanted
France, there would to ensure British security.
have been nothing to
prevent the Red Army reaching Paris. We would have been faced with a
communist Europe, one that posed just as much of a long-term threat to
British security as the Nazis.
Winston Churchill’s decision to fight on when Hitler offered peace was his
greatest single act of statesmanship. And it is disgraceful that the Reform
Party’s official spokesman should denounce it.

CHURCHILL AND VICTORY

As it happens, Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, is a military history geek and,
like me, an admirer of Churchill. He, for one, knows that Churchill’s military
strategy, so far from being “abysmal,” was inspired.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 183

 It was Churchill who devised military strategies for North Africa and the
Mediterranean and then sold them to the Americans, ensuring the Germany
First policy—committing the United States to war in Europe—was adopted
by President Franklin
Roosevelt.
The cost for Britain was heavy: the
It was Churchill who
loss of empire abroad and the rise of ensured that D-Day did
socialism at home. But these things not take place until total
were the necessary price to pay for the air dominance had been
untarnishable glory of contributing to achieved and the Battle
the crushing of Nazism. of the Atlantic won, and
he who kept the Big
Three—himself, Stalin, and Roosevelt—together, bravely traveling a total
of 120,000 miles outside the United Kingdom to do so.
At the very least, Gribbin is historically ignorant—certainly too ignorant
to be a parliamentary candidate—and the Reform Party should sack him on
that ground alone.
But it also needs to root out other members who are more interested
in public relations and posturing than honoring the memory of Winston
Churchill.
How, otherwise, can Reform criticize Rishi Sunak over missing one part of
the D-Day commemorations—when its own spokesmen are suggesting that
D-Day should never have happened in the first place?
Is this the sort of “patriotism” British voters really want to choose?

Reprinted by permission of the Daily Mail (www.dailymail.co.uk).

© 2025 DMG Media. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An
Untold History of the 1930s, edited by Eiichiro Azuma
and Kaoru Ueda. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
www.hooverpress.org.

184 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 H ISTORY A N D C U LT U R E

The Decade that

Roared
The 1920s brought transformation—including
a dramatic improvement in the economic
condition of most Americans. How much of it was
government’s doing? Almost none.

By John H. Cochrane

T
he 1920s were the single most consequential decade for the lives
of everyday Americans. This is when the contours of modern life
emerged.
Technological innovations diffuse by an “S” shape. Something
is invented; it trundles along for a couple of decades; then it becomes a toy
of the rich, perhaps; then it spreads quickly through the population; finally,
we spend another couple of decades making it better. The S-curve applies
to airplanes, cars, or practically any other technology you can think of. The
middle of the S-curves of many important technologies coincided in the
1920s. Growth wasn’t about the accumulation of stuff; it was about changing
the way everyday people lived their lives.
At the beginning of the 1920s, about 30 percent of American homes had
electricity. By the end of the decade, nearly 70 percent had been electrified.

John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy,
and a participant in Hoover’s George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group. He
is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an
adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 185

 Famously, the Vermont home of Calvin Coolidge’s father had no electricity in
1923 when word arrived that President Warren Harding had died. That’s why
Coolidge took the oath of office by kerosene light.

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

 Electricity improved during that time, too, as alternating current, or AC,
became standardized. With that came electric lights instead of kerosene
lamps, and electric appliances such as the iron, the toaster, the washing
machine, and the vacuum cleaner. Electricity revolutionized home life,
removing much of the drudgery.
MOTOR MAN: In 1924, Henry Ford ponders his first car—the 1896 Quadri-
cycle—and, on the left, the ten millionth Ford automobile. In 1920, 20 percent
of people had automobiles; by 1929, 60 percent of families did. This transpor-
tation revolution can’t be credited to federal tax breaks and subsidies. [Everett
Collection—Newscom]

Electricity changed the economy as well. In 1914, only 30 percent of manu-

facturing was electrified; by 1929, that number had reached 70 percent.
How did electricity get to homes and factories? Was there a big federal
program to build the massive infrastructure of power stations and wires
needed? No, private utilities built it.
In 1920, 20 percent of people had automobiles; by 1929, 60 percent of
families owned cars. There were nine vehicles for every ten households. The
automobile revolution happened in one decade.
Cars weren’t just a convenience; they brought a massive change in how
people lived their lives. Previously, people needed to live right near a soot-
emitting factory where they worked. Now they could move somewhere
where they could have a more pleasant life. The car helped to make that
possible.
The automobile also eased rural isolation. By 1929, most farmers had cars
to get them to town. The car connected them.
The transportation revolution didn’t occur because the federal govern-
ment offered tax breaks and subsidies. There was no federal spending

188 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

CALL ME: A doctor relays medical advice via radio from the Seamen’s Church
Institute’s headquarters in New York in early 1920. The church’s radio service
gave assistance to merchant ships at sea in an early experiment in telemedi-
cine. During this decade, radio would become a pervasive feature of American
life. [Public domain]
 bill to build the network of gas stations motorists needed. No, the filling
stations came in on their own when people figured out that they could
make money operating them.
The 1920s saw a revolution in communications as well. The telephone, the
phonograph, radio, and movies became ubiquitous parts of daily life. Radio
went from essentially zero at the beginning of the decade to a pervasive fea-
ture of American life. Broadcast networks were born in the 1920s, creating
mass media.
How did these changes happen? As usual, pretty much everything
occurred despite the government.
Indoor plumbing, water, sewer, and gas all were practically absent in 1920
and close to universal in 1930. That meant the end of the outhouse, of fetch-
ing water from a pump, of cooking over a coal stove.
Infant mortality plunged. Doctors started to know what they were doing.
The 1920s also brought innovations in finance. Consumer credit was invented.
In 1926, 75 percent of new vehicle purchases were financed. Financing spread to
household appliances, helping people afford these wonderful new things.
Shopping used to mean going to the general store and negotiating the price
of your bread. Chain stores and fixed prices emerged in the 1920s. Sears
moved from catalogues to stores, and of course you could go to the store in
your car now. National chains had 7,500 outlets in 1920 and 30,000 in 1930—
15,000 of those by A&P alone.

DEFICITS VANISHED
Average earnings rose 30 percent in a decade. Gross domestic product (GDP)
rose by a third, but that figure understates the scope of the transformation.
It’s not that people now had three kerosene lamps instead of two, or his and
hers outhouses instead of a single outhouse. GDP vastly understates gains in
human welfare.
This great economic and lifestyle revolution for Americans of modest
means happened with basically no guidance from the federal government.
The government largely stayed out of the way. And the government did not
try to regulate improve-
ment in the name of
Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office “equity.” Is it terrible that
by kerosene light. rich people got to buy a
Model T Ford in 1924 and
poorer people waited until 1927 to buy one at half the price? Would we look
back and wish the government had slowed it all down in the name of equity?

190 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 All the growth and improvements occurred against a backdrop of a
pandemic, inflation, a large federal debt, revolution in Russia, and culture
wars at home, with a serious question whether our country would go the
same way.
In this context, President Coolidge and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mel-
lon engineered the first great supply-side tax cut, dropping the top rate from
77 percent in 1918 to 25
percent. Yet tax revenue
rose, including from Before cars were common, people
the rich people whose needed to live right near a soot-­
rates dropped most emitting factory where they worked.
dramatically. A lot of Now they could move somewhere
that revenue came from more pleasant.
compliance—getting rid
of tax loopholes. When you cut the tax rate and eliminate loopholes, you often
get more tax revenue.
Deficits disappeared. Thrifty Calvin Coolidge made sure of that. Congress
had plenty of ideas for spending, but each year in the 1920s, the federal gov-
ernment generated a surplus. Coolidge and Mellon and Congress reduced the
federal debt, and the economy boomed.
So much for stimulus.

RIGOR AND RESTRAINT

What did Coolidge do? He constrained mischief on spending, fought for tax
cuts, and made sure government stayed out of the way. He appointed com-
missioners to the Federal
Trade Commission and
the Interstate Com- Is it terrible that rich people could buy
merce Commission who a Model T Ford in 1924 and poorer
did little to restrict the people waited until 1927 to buy one at
activities of businesses half the price?
under their jurisdiction.
The regulatory state under Coolidge was thin to the point of invisibility. He
vetoed farm subsidies—twice. Lots of bad ideas came up, and Coolidge’s job
was to say no.
As others have demonstrated, Coolidge had some progressive policy pref-
erences. But his view was that those were state and local matters with which
the federal government was not allowed to interfere. He did what he did
largely out of respect for institutions.

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 191

 And that is a wonderful thing. If we would only respect the institutions, we
wouldn’t need to try to appoint somebody who shares all our ideas. Let’s fix
the institutions.
The humorist Will Rogers said of Coolidge, “He didn’t do nothing, but that’s
what we wanted done.” It’s a great line, but it’s utterly wrong. Coolidge did
hard work to beat back bureaucratic expansion, to cut tax rates, to restrain
spending, to say no to endless bad ideas, and to do the institutional reform of
putting in a budget process. He did a lot!
We often hear about “transformative leaders.” But too often that means
leaders who expand the size and scope of the federal government. What
about leaders who stay
out of the way, do their bit
Coolidge constrained mischief on to improve the machin-
spending, fought for tax cuts, and ery of government, work
made sure government stayed out of valiantly to fight the
weeds, and preserve and
the way.
strengthen the institu-
tions of American government? We should celebrate them as our greatest
leaders—the fixers, the quiet reformers, the minders of the store, the pre-
servers of our institutions.
Stop looking for transformative leaders. We don’t need another great
­government crusade. Once again, we need a return to normalcy.

Reprinted by permission of the Coolidge Review. © 2025 Calvin Coolidge

Presidential Foundation Inc. All rights reserved.

Available from Stanford University Press is The High

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

192 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 HOOV E R A R C HIV E S

“Hatelessly
Yours, Joseph”
The work of Russian exile poet Joseph Brodsky
was “brought into English” through the patience
and skill of his longtime translator, George L.
Kline. The latest addition to Hoover’s remarkable
Brodsky archives showcases their artistic
partnership—sometimes exasperating, always
in pursuit of the perfect word.

By Cynthia L. Haven

T
he devil is in the details, but sometimes the angels are, too.
Nowhere is that more evident than the world of writers and
writing, where the proof is on the page. In particular, translators
niggle over the tiniest details involved when moving one linguis-
tic world into another. They wrangle over the multiple meanings of a word,
the rarified nuances in a phrase. Meanwhile, layout designers and copy edi-
tors fret over the aesthetics of poem typography. All are forever seeking an
impossible perfection, and sometimes they veer close to it.

Cynthia L. Haven is the author of The Man Who Brought Brodsky into
­English: Conversations with George L. Kline (Academic Studies Press, 2021).
She was named a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar in 2021.
She was a Voegelin Fellow at the Hoover Institution and writes a literary blog,
The Book Haven (bookhaven.stanford.edu).

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 193

WORDSMITHS: A new Hoover collection gives insight into the working rela-
tionship between poet Joseph Brodsky, left, and translator George L. Kline.
The partnership survived arguments, estrangements, and the struggle of
creation. [Andre Berkin—Bryn Mawr Special Collections]

Then the proof sheets roar back from publishers, with a new set of ques-
tions, corrections, and last-minute repentances about the phrasing of a
translated stanza or the discovery of an overlooked error.
That is the story told in fourteen archival boxes recently arrived at the
Hoover Library & Archives. The “Cynthia L. Haven Papers” describe Russian
Nobel poet Joseph Brod-
sky’s long and often vexed
The collection describes poet Joseph relationship with his earli-
Brodsky’s long and often vexed rela- est translator to bring the
tionship with his earliest translator to émigré into English. It
also includes correspon-
bring his works into English.
dence with American poet
Anthony Hecht, Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, and British poet and trans-
lator Daniel Weissbort. In addition there are Brodsky scholar Zakhar Ishov;

194 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

FLEETING: A previously unknown letter by Joseph Brodsky, part of the lat-
est addition to the Hoover collection, discusses one of the most celebrated
poems in the Brodsky canon, “The Butterfly,” published in the New Yorker on
March 15, 1976. The lightness of the poem’s title is at odds with Brodsky’s own
comments, in which he explains that the poem sounds a note of despair and
death. [Brigitte Friedrich, Sueddeutsche Zeitung—Alamy]

an RFE/RL regional director; and Betty Kray, the first executive director of
the Academy of American Poets and co-founder of Poets House in New York
City; as well as many others.
The new Hoover collection focuses on the American years of Brodsky,
largely through the lens of George L. Kline, the Nobel poet’s first trans-
lator of note, and the subject of my book The Man Who Brought Brodsky
into English: Conversations with George L. Kline (Academic Studies Press,
2021). Kline in fact brought more of Brodsky’s poetry into English than
anyone else, excepting the poet himself. He was a Bryn Mawr Slavist and

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 195

 philosophy professor, widely considered to be the leading Hegel scholar in
the United States.
The collection will benefit literary scholars and Russianists trying to
determine the fine-grained details of how a line of a poem changed through
translations, and how his early books found their way to publication. Histo-
rians will get a different slant on Cold War tribulations, through the success
story of a man who left the Soviet orbit.

CREATIVE CLASHES
One of the Soviet Union’s foremost émigrés arrived in the United States with
nothing but his genius. He would leap to the top of the New York literary scene
within a year or two, and then the world. He received a Nobel Prize in Litera-
ture in 1987 and was appointed US poet laureate in 1991—“a reminder that so
much of American creativity is from people not born in America,” wrote the
New York Times on the occasion of his appointment. How did it happen?
The papers tell the story of a collaboration and friendship, and the struggle
of an exiled poet to get
recognition and acquire
a new language and a The new acquisition will illuminate
new cultural context. for literary scholars and Russian-
The tangle and cross ists the fine details of how a line of a
fire of two strong-willed poem changed through translations.
people, poet and transla-
tor, that survived arguments, estrangements, and creating is documented in
the papers.
Few translators could live up to the poet’s demands, but Kline, a professor
and philosopher, tried hard. He was caught in these linguistic machinations
and fascinated by Brodsky’s genius. Yet Kline was surprisingly accommodat-
ing about accepting Brodsky’s corrections, perhaps because he wasn’t a poet
himself. “I didn’t have a poet’s ego,” he said in The Man Who Brought Brodsky
into English. “I wasn’t attempting to impose my own verse forms on Joseph’s

INSPIRATION: A bronze figure of Joseph Brodsky (opposite), looks skyward

along Novinsky Boulevard in Moscow. The Monument to Joseph Brodsky,
created by sculptor Georgy Frangulyan and architect Sergey Skuratov, was
meant to highlight his individualism. “Some people go through life like a
shadow and some become individuals,” Frangulyan said. It was installed in
2011 facing the US Embassy, a deliberate choice of site. [Rashpeg—Alamy]

H O O V E R D IG E S T • W inter 2025 197

 formal cadences, rhymes, and metrical patterns. And I was working from the
original Russian, not a trot”—that is, a literal and non-idiomatic translation.
Sharing his translations with the poet, he recalled, “We found relatively
few flat-out errors, but several cases where I had missed literary allusions or
hidden quotations, and misread his intended tone. In more than one instance,
I had failed to detect his gentle irony.”
Few poets have been as demanding as Brodsky when it came to rendering
his work in another tongue. Here’s what he wrote in a New York Review of
Books discussion of Mandelstam translations: “Translation is a search for an
equivalent, not a substitute. . . . Logically, a translator should begin his work
with a search for at least a metrical equivalent to the original form. . . . Meters
in verse are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substi-
tuted. They cannot even
be replaced by each other,
Brodsky received a Nobel Prize in Lit- and especially not by free
erature in 1987 and was appointed US verse.”
poet laureate in 1991. And again: “A poem
is the result of a certain
necessity: it is inevitable, and so is its form. . . . Form too is noble, for it is
hallowed and illumined by time. It is the vessel in which meaning is cast;
they need each other and sanctify each other reciprocally. . . . Break the
vessel, and the liquid will leak out.”

BRODSKY AT STANFORD
The new Hoover acquisition includes a previously unknown letter about
Brodsky’s poetics, and also the original of a letter previously known only
through a photocopy. The trove joins the extensive Ramunas Katilius Family
papers from Vilnius at Stanford’s Green Library, and the Diana Myers Papers
at Hoover, which includes a surprising collection of Brodsky’s letters, photos,
holograph poems, drafts, manuscripts, drawings, doodles, and artwork
assembled by a Russian friend living in England, who married Brodsky’s
translator Alan Myers. A third, lesser-known collection, which documents
the life and career of the Russian Jewish poet Regina Derieva, a convert who
corresponded with Brodsky and had emigrated to Israel and then Sweden,
adds another perspective to the émigré history, in keeping with Hoover’s
commitment to preserving these stories of war, revolution, and peace. All
increase the importance of Brodsky studies at Stanford.
The biggest surprise within the new papers is the previously unknown
letter, from November 2, 1974, written from Northampton, Massachusetts. It

198 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

is revelatory and alive, bashed off on a Russian manual typewriter half a cen-
tury ago. And then it seems to have been forgotten altogether. The fragile yel-
lowing page in a neat Cyrillic script has aged half a century now. The impa-
tience of the poet is suggested in the lines that run over the righthand edge
on the manual typewriter, as if the words were typed in a rush. It discusses
one of the most celebrat-
ed poems in the Brodsky
canon, “The Butterfly,” “I didn’t have a poet’s ego,” said
published in the New ­translator George Kline.
Yorker on March 15, 1976,
only two years after Brodsky had arrived in America. Brodsky considered it
one of his two favorite poems in his own corpus, a meditation on brevity and
beauty, impermanence and death.
But where most were transported by the poem’s lightness, Brodsky gazed
into an abyss. He calls the poem “a half-choked monologue” and tells his
translator that the poem “codifies despair.” He continued, “That’s what the
poem is about, rather than wildflowers.” Brodsky wrote pages of detailed
comments for his translator. Criticism followed. He instructed Kline: “Just
think of Mozart and Beckett.” He knew Kline would be crestfallen and pos-
sibly hurt—hence the signature on the letter, “Hatelessly yours, Joseph.”
Yet the translation was Kline’s masterpiece. He claimed that it took him
several hundred hours to translate the fourteen stanzas—168 lines altogether.
Perhaps the greatest praise of all was the unspoken one: the 1976 New Yorker
version was the same as the one that appeared in the poetry collection A Part
of Speech—a rarity for Brodsky, who endlessly revised his poems, even after
publication.
He was not the first Russian genius to honor Lepidoptera in verse. In 1921,
Vladimir Nabokov had written his own poem, “Babochka” (Butterfly). Brod-
sky’s poem a half century later could be seen as one Russian legend calling to
another through time. Nabokov’s poem was written while he was a student at
Cambridge, so Brodsky’s 1973 poem is speaking to another era, after another
world war, though Kline felt that Nabokov’s effort fell far short of what Kline
saw as the Brodsky poem’s Mozartian delicacy and transparency.
Slavic scholar David Bethea pointed out that Brodsky had easily “topped”
Nabokov with “The Butterfly.” He noted that Brodsky’s poem has far more
precision: “Brodsky’s description is of a different order than that of Nabokov.
It has to do with inherent poetic qualities, with the elaborate stanza form and
metrical scheme, themselves as delicate and carefully wrought as the but-
terfly wing they mimic.”

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 199

 Bethea called it “arguably one of Brodsky’s greatest metaphysical cre-
ations . . . a verbal butterfly capable of competing with the flight of Mozart’s
musical notes.”
However, Nabokov’s strong suit was prose, not poetry. A key difference
between the two men’s poems, and a rather startling one, is that Brodsky’s
poem eulogizes a dead butterfly, not a living one—a creature who “touched so
brief a fragment/of time . . .”

I scarcely comprehend

the words “you’ve lived”; the date of

your birth and when you faded

in my cupped hand

are one, and not two dates.

Only one day. Gravity mingles with weightlessness. And the slightest death in
the world, for the duration of the poem, counteracts the world’s weightiness.
That may account for the melancholy key in the poem, as he described in
the previously unknown 1974 letter, especially when the poet’s doldrums met
the poem’s ethereality. Perhaps that prompted, or at least accelerated, the
despair he felt as he was writing.

IT BEGAN WITH A GIRL

But we don’t have to guess about the origins of Brodsky’s poem. In Joseph
Brodsky: Conversations, Brodsky explained that he was trying to combine
Beckett and Mozart. Many years before, in Russia, he said he had been “after
a girl”—apparently the artist Marina Basmanova, the mother of his son and
the dedicatee of many of his poems.
“We left a concert, a Mozart concert, and she told me as we walked down
the streets, ‘Joseph, everything is lovely about your poetry,’ et cetera. ‘Well,
you know that,’ et cetera, ‘except you never execute in a poem that has the
lightness and yet gravity which Mozart has.’ And that kind of got me.
I remembered that very well, and I decided to write that butterfly poem.”
Kline had his own recollections: “Later in that same letter, he wrote, ‘You
don’t have to include Beckett. The absurd is already there in Mozart.’ In
other words, he was saying Mozart was rich enough and strong enough . . .
so you didn’t have to appeal to Beckett. He was thinking about the classical
structure. Mozart: that’s of course the very shape, the butterfly shape, of the
stanzas and sort of the absurdity.”

200 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 He continued: “I remember somewhere, maybe in an interview, he said,
‘Well, you wanted to know about structure. Do you want to know about
organizing a poem? Study Mozart.’ Yes, he entirely agreed with you. He did
love finished structures, I think you could say that, in both music and in
architecture.”
Brodsky reproached Kline for letting “an overly ‘Romantic’ line or two” slip
into an early draft of his translation of “Babochka.” Brodsky said, in effect,
‘We don’t need that. There’s enough romanticism in the form of the poem’—
that is, with every short line centered on the page.”
Brodsky added—and it was as close as Kline was ever going to get to an
apology—“Well, I hope I managed. Actually, George Kline did an excellent
job translating the poem.” The poet’s words were a prized compliment to the
translator, and he treasured them.

“A SECOND CHRISTMAS BY THE SHORE”

Another original letter in the collection has long been known to scholars.
Brodsky’s letter to Kline about the poem “A Second Christmas by the Shore,”
was written in Yalta, 1971. A photocopy has long been held in the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, but the original was assumed to
be lost to time. It wasn’t.
Kline’s translation was the subject of Brodsky’s four-page letter in loopy
handwriting on May 20, 1976, “This is so lovely a poem in English that it’s
hard for me to be hard
on you. Still, there are
some things which are
“Meters in verse are kinds of spiritual
sheer misunderstand-
ings; also there are cer- magnitudes for which nothing can be
tain substitutions which substituted.”
hamper the meaning.”
“A Second Christmas” was one of the more contentious translations,
undergoing several iterations back and forth between poet and translator.
“On the whole, it seems that while Kline was striving for a smoother flow in
English, Brodsky was focused on re-creating a more literal version,” accord-
ing to Brodsky scholar Zakhar Ishov.
But even in that there was a purpose, as Ishov knew: “Brodsky’s comments
often help clarify obscure passages in his Russian poems. For his part, Kline,
whether due to personal humility or out of strong devotion to Brodsky, was
extremely indulgent, continually reworking his drafts as long as Brodsky
found something objectionable in them. Owing to Kline’s indulgence, these

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 201

 drafts provide a record of the earliest instances of Brodsky’s involvement in
self-translation.”
The parting of the prolific duo was peaceful and inevitable, and they remained
friends. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brodsky became more likely to override the
judgment of his translator:
“A few of his changes were
“This is so lovely a poem in English acceptable, but others
that it’s hard for me to be hard on you.” struck me as disastrous,”
Kline said. “I felt that col-
laboration with Brodsky had become impossible, and I assume that he felt that
way, too. At least he didn’t urge or invite me to translate anything else after that.
“A related point was, of course, that I didn’t feel as close to the poems he
was writing in that late period. Some of them I like and some had won-
derful lines and stanzas, but in general I didn’t feel ‘I’ve got to translate
that.’ The exception was ‘The Butterfly’ in 1973. When I saw that poem I
thought, ‘I’ve got to translate this.’ ”
Whatever friction happened during the year, they found a more harmoni-
ous collaboration in Christmas letters and cards; several are included in the
collection. (The following occasional poems appear in The Man Who Brought
Brodsky into English.)
Brodsky began spending his Christmases in Venice soon after his arrival
in the United States. Hence, in his 1975 Christmas letter, the modest scholar
Kline memorialized the events in a lighter vein:

According to The New York Times

Wet Venice has been saved from sinking.

So let your spirits with her climb,

While light heads banish heavy thinking.

The custom continued till the end of their lives.

“To Joseph on Turning Fifty”

S liubov’iu

If we take years to be the way

a life is measured, then – ok –

yours now stands firm at piat’desiat.

202 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

 But if it’s months we’re looking at,

seicento is the sum; and cal-

ibrating a life’s calendar

in weeks yields due mila e

seicento. Put such sums away!

Judge lives by daunting tasks achieved,

by honest thoughts and decent deeds,

and then the number has no limit:

the life holds endlessness within it.

Brodsky died of a heart attack, after a lifetime of heart troubles and

surgeries, in 1996. His translator survived him by eighteen years. Kline died
in 2014, six months after his beloved butterfly, Virginia, leaving behind a
mountain of letters, drafts, and manuscripts, some of them now at Hoover
Library & Archives, augmenting Stanford’s formidable Brodsky holdings for
future generations.

Special to the Hoover Digest. Excerpts used with the generous permission
of the Joseph Brodsky Estate. The author thanks Dmitri Manin for his
translation of the previously unknown letter and assistance with the
Russian language.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Bread +

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

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 203

On the Cover

I
mmigrants arrive in New York Harbor in this 1917 poster promot-
ing a World War I bond drive. Bond campaigns sounded many stir-
ring themes—this one connects the “first thrill of liberty” to a duty
to support the war effort. What complicates this patriotic image is
another event of 1917: the passage of legislation laying out strict rules for who
deserved to have the thrill of immigrating to America in the first place. It
and another sweeping law, passed in 1924, had profound effects on American
demographics in the twentieth century.
The Immigration Act of 1917, passed overwhelmingly over President Wil-
son’s veto, was the first to limit immigration from Europe. Entrants from Italy
and Southern and Eastern Europe were newly prominent. The act imposed an
entrance tax and a literacy test, and set up a “barred zone” from the Middle
East to Southeast Asia from which no one could come. It also spelled out a by-
then-familiar list of disqualified entrants: “feebleminded persons,” epileptics,
alcoholics, polygamists, vagrants and beggars, prostitutes, and many more.
A new element behind the 1917 law, according to Immigration History, was
the fear of “the spread of radicalism during World War I and the Russian
Revolution.” But radicalism was not all that animated this law and its sequel,
the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act). The 1924 law established
quotas based on national origin, reports the Office of the Historian, and “it
completely excluded immigrants from Asia. . . . In all of its parts, the most
basic purpose of the 1924 Immigration Act was to preserve the ideal of US
homogeneity.”
The law’s sponsor, Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, made this goal
explicit in a New York Times article headlined “AMERICA OF THE MELTING
POT COMES TO AN END.”
“Until now, we have proceeded upon the theory that America was ‘the
refuge of the oppressed of all nations,’ and we have indulged the belief that
upon their arrival here all immigrants were fused by the ‘melting pot’ into a
distinctive American type,” Reed wrote. But “new types of people began to
come. . . . Large numbers from Italy, Greece, Poland, Turkey in Europe, the

204 H O O V ER DI GEST • Win ter 2025

Balkan States, and from Russia. . . . The old sources in Northwestern Europe
seemed to dry up. . . . These new peoples spoke strange languages. . . . It was
natural that they should not understand our institutions, since they came
from lands in which popular government is a myth.”
“Thoughtful men began to apprehend that the United States was going the
way that Rome went.”
To Reed, America would be “overwhelmed” by immigrants who would drag
down wages and standards of living, burden taxpayers, and resist assimila-
tion. But also, “the races of men who have been coming” weren’t like native-
born Americans, he wrote. “Those groups of aliens . . . live a foreign life.”
Foreign to the thrill of liberty, presumably.
Eugenic beliefs, popular at the time, amplified this thinking. Prominent
eugenicist Harry Hamilton Laughlin, who helped Congress draft legisla-
tion, thought Italians and Jews especially degraded the genetic stock of the
American people.
The notion of an American “racial type,” as the Times put it, would linger
for many more years and through further lawmaking. Even the McCarran-
Walter Act of 1952, which eliminated the barred zone and allowed a few visas
from Asian countries, sought to “preserve the sociological and cultural bal-
ance of the United States.” Not until 1965 were racial and national discrimi-
nation eliminated, and disputes over just whom to admit continue today.
—Charles Lindsey

H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 205



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H O O V E R D IG E ST • W inter 2025 207

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