Hoover Digest, 2023, No. 4, Fall

HOOVER
DIGEST
HOOVER DIGEST RESEARCH + COMMENTA RY
FA L L 2 0 2 3 NO. 4 ON PUBLIC POLICY
HOOVER DIGEST
FALL 2023 N O. 4
The Economy
Russia and Ukraine
NATO
China and Taiwan
India
|
Africa
FA L L 2 0 2 3
Education
Politics
Health Care
California
Interviews
» Dr. Jay Bhattacharya
» John F. Cogan
» Daniel L. Heil
» Matthew Pottinger
Race
History and Culture
Hoover Archives
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ON THE COVER
CONDOLEEZZA RICE
Tad and Dianne Taube Director
This bird’s-eye Russian map from 1915
shows the Dardanelles, the narrow ERIC WAKIN
waterway controlling access to the Sea Deputy Director,
of Marmara and the Black Sea. Together Director of Library & Archives
with the even-narrower Bosporus, the pas-
sage divides Europe from Asia—and Istan-
bul from itself—and figures prominently
in history, both ancient and modern. The
Trojan War was fought here. The map il-
lustrates a bloody campaign fought during
the first years of the First World War that
proved significant to the birth of modern
Turkey, which this month is a hundred
years old. See story, page 169.
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Fall 2023
HOOVER D IG EST
T HE E CO N O M Y
9 Gulliver’s Economy
Hoover fellow John H. Cochrane laments America’s lost
economic growth: “We are a great Gulliver, tied down by miles
of Lilliputian red tape.” By John H. Cochrane
16 (Don’t) Play It Again

Economic problems don’t go away forever. Nor do the bad
ideas about how to solve them. By Michael J. Boskin
22 Security in Numbers
According to research by Hoover fellows John F. Cogan and
Daniel L. Heil, older Americans’ income has soared. Good
news on its own, this could enable us to avoid the looming
entitlement debt. By Jonathan Movroydis
R U SS I A A N D UK R A IN E
30 Putin the Stalinist
The end of the Soviet Union promised a new day. Instead,
Russia’s thousand-year pattern of autocracy re-emerged. By
Norman M. Naimark
38 Between East and West

Whoever wins the war, Ukraine will remain a buffer state on
Europe’s borderlands. The country’s future points to “fortified
neutrality.” By Jakub Grygiel
H O O V E R D IG E ST • Fall 2023 3
43 Putin Plays the Long Game
The place of NATO in Europe—for that matter, the place of
democracy everywhere. Everything depends on Ukraine. By
Hy Rothstein
NATO
49 The Alliance Strikes Back
When Russia attacked Ukraine, NATO seemed just short of
irrelevant. So, Vladimir Putin gambled. He wasn’t the first
dictator to bet the West would appease him. By Andrew
Roberts
C H I N A AN D TA IWA N
52 “We Kept Feeding the Shark”
Hoover fellow Matthew Pottinger reflects on the hope—in his
words, “almost a religious faith”—that if only the West treated
the country as a partner, China would become pluralistic and
peaceful. By Ken Moriyasu
56 The Meaning of Taiwan

Defending Taiwan isn’t just about defending territory. It’s
about the fate of the democratic world. By Miles Maochun Yu
4 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

INDIA
61 Time to Shift out of Neutral
India is finding the limits of nonalignment. A strong alliance
with the United States offers a better future for New Delhi,
particularly as China rises. By Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha
Mistree
AFRICA
67 Data to Live By
Investment in Africa has long been scattershot and ineffective.
The reason: a lack of good data about how the investment
would pay off. The World Bank can fix that problem. By
Jendayi E. Frazer and Peter Blair Henry
74 A Wider Shade of Terror

Jihadist violence in the Sahel represents a local tragedy—and
a geopolitical crisis. Why China, Russia, and the United States
all care. By Russell A. Berman
80 ISIS Can Pivot, Too

Pressured in Iraq and Syria, jihadist extremists have found a
new welcome in Africa and Central Asia. By Cole Bunzel
88 Governance First
Coups are unraveling many US efforts to bring security and
democracy to Africa. It’s time to emphasize political stability
over weapons. By Alexander Noyes
93 Power and Persuasion

Russia and China deploy both carrots and sticks to increase
their wealth and influence across Africa. By Thomas H.
Henriksen
E D U C AT IO N
99 Triage Teaching
Students struggling with pandemic learning loss desperately
need better instruction—not just more of it—to make up
for lost time. Most students will never get it. By Margaret
Raymond
103 A Few Critical Omissions

Most of those who support teaching “critical race theory”
(CRT) to children don’t realize it rejects the values of the civil
rights movement. CRT activists profit from that confusion. By
Max Eden and Michael T. Hartney
POLITICS
106 No Spoiler Alert
Third-party presidential candidates are always accused
of being spoilers. Here’s how the right one could bring
meaningful change to our moribund politics, even if the
candidate doesn’t win. By Morris P. Fiorina
HE ALT H C A R E
109 Medicaid: We Must Do Better
Medicaid denies poor Americans the best aspects of American
health care—the kinds of competitive, high-quality plans that
would serve their needs. By Scott W. Atlas

C AL I FO R N IA
114 This Bud Isn’t for You
Taxes, regulation, and local politics threaten to snuff out
California’s legal marijuana industry. By Bill Whalen
120 Power Corrupted

Citing climate change, central planners in Sacramento and
Washington are forcing consumers to pay burdensome energy
penalties, to no good end. By David R. Henderson
I N T E RVIE W
126 The Man Who Talked Back
When COVID struck, public-health officials closed down the
country. Hoover fellow Dr. Jay Bhattacharya believed they
were making a catastrophic mistake—and said so. By Peter
Robinson
R AC E
136 A Grievous Error, Corrected
Race-based college admissions violate the Constitution. The
Supreme Court—and the nation—have now ended a long
deviation from American values. By Robert J. Delahunty and
John Yoo
143 The Wages of Victimhood

Reparations for slavery, like countless other failed government
programs for black Americans, would ignore the real
problems. By Shelby Steele
HI STORY A N D C ULTUR E
146 To Equality
Equality of opportunity, a fundamental American value, has
long been under attack. Why it must be preserved. By David
Davenport
HO OV E R A R C HIVE S
155 Home at Last
Fifty years after North Vietnam released the last US
prisoners of war, Hoover has opened the letters of former
POW and Hoover fellow James B. Stockdale and his wife,
Sybil, who worked tirelessly to bring the captives home.
By Jean McElwee Cannon
169 On the Cover

T HE E CON OM Y
Gulliver’s
Economy
Hoover fellow John H. Cochrane laments
America’s lost economic growth: “We are a great
Gulliver, tied down by miles of Lilliputian red
tape.”
By John H. Cochrane
Hoover senior fellow John H. Cochrane has been awarded the 19th annual Bradley
Prize, an honor bestowed on “scholars and practitioners whose accomplishments
reflect the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s mission to restore, strengthen,
and protect the principles and institutions of American exceptionalism.” He shared
the honor with Nina Shea and Betsy DeVos. Here is the text of his remarks at the
May ceremony.
C
reeping stagnation ought to be recognized as the central eco-
nomic issue of our time. Economic growth since 2000 has fallen
almost by half compared with the last half of the twentieth
century. The average American’s income is already a quarter less
than under the previous trend. If this trend continues, lost growth in fifty
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy,
and a contributor to Hoover’s Conte Initiative on Immigration Reform. He is also
a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a
research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an adjunct
scholar at the Cato Institute.
years will total three times today’s economy. No economic issue—inflation,
recession, trade, climate, income diversity—comes close to such numbers.
Growth is not just more stuff, it’s vastly better goods and services; it’s
health, environment, education, and culture; it’s defense, social programs,
and repaying government debt.
Why are we stagnating? In my view, the answer is simple: America has the
people, the ideas, and the investment capital to grow. We just can’t get the
permits. We are a great Gulliver, tied down by miles of Lilliputian red tape.
How much more can the United States grow? Looking around the world,
we see that even slightly better institutions produce large improvements in
living standards. US taxes and regulations are only a bit less
onerous than those in Canada and the United Kingdom,
but US per capita income is 40 percent greater. Big-
ger improvements have enormous effects. Unless
you think the United States is already
perfect, there is a lot we can do.
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

How can we improve the US economy? I offer four examples.
Health care. I don’t need to tell you how dysfunctional health care and
insurance are. Just look at your latest absurd bill.
There is no reason that health care cannot be provided in
the same way as lawyering, accounting, architecture,
construction, airplane travel, car repair, or
any complex personal service. Let a bru-
tally competitive market offer us better
service at lower prices. There is no
reason that health insurance can-
not function at least as well as
life, car, property, or other
insurance. It’s easy
to address
standard objections, such as pre-existing conditions, asymmetric informa-
tion, and so on.
How did we get in this mess? There are two original sins. First, in order to
get around wage controls during World War II, the government allowed a tax
deduction for employer-based group plans, but not for portable insurance.
Thus, pre-existing conditions were born: if you lose your job, you lose health
insurance. Patch after patch then led to the current mess.
Second, the government wants to provide health care to poor people, but
without visibly taxing and spending a lot. So, the government forces hospitals
to treat poor people below cost and recoup the money by overcharging every-
one else. But an overcharge cannot stand competition, so the government
protects hospitals and insurers from competition. You’ll know health care is
competitive when, rather than hide prices, hospitals spam us with offers as
airlines and cell phone companies do.
There is no reason why everyone’s health care and insurance must be so
screwed up to help the poor. A bit of taxing and spending instead—budgeted,
appropriated, visible—would not stymie competition and innovation.
Banks. Banking offers plenty of room for improvement. In 1933, the United
States suffered a great bank run. Our government responded with deposit
insurance. Guaranteeing deposits stops runs, but it’s like sending your
brother-in-law to Las Vegas with your credit card—what we economists call
an “incentive for risk taking.” The government piled on regulations to try
to stop banks from taking risks. The banks got around the regulations, new
crises erupted, new guar-
antees and regulations
America has the people, the ideas, and followed. This past spring,
the investment capital to grow. We just the regulatory juggernaut
can’t get the permits. failed to detect simple
interest-rate risk and
Silicon Valley Bank had a run, followed by others. The Fed and FDIC bailed
out depositors and promised more rules.
This system is fundamentally broken. The answer: deposits should flow
to accounts backed by reserves at the Fed, or short-term treasuries. Banks
should get money for risky loans by issuing stock or long-term debt that
can’t run. We can end private sector financial crises forever, with next to no
regulation.
There is a lesson in these stories. If we want to improve regulations, we
can’t just bemoan them. We must understand how they emerged.

As in health and banking, a regulatory mess often emerges from a continual
patchwork, in which each step is a roughly sensible repair of the previous regula-
tion’s dysfunction. The little old lady swallowed a fly, a spider to catch the fly, and
so on. Now horse is on the menu. Only a start-from-scratch reform will work.
Much regulation protects politically influential businesses, workers, and
other constituencies from the disruptions of growth. Responsive democra-
cies give people what they want, good and hard. And in return, regulation
extorts political support from those beneficiaries. We have to fix the regula-
tory structure, to give growth a seat at the table.
Economists are somewhat at fault too. They are taught to look at every
problem, diagnose “market failure,” and advocate new rules to be implement-
ed by an omniscient, benevolent planner. But we do not live in a free market.
When you see a problem, look first for the regulation that caused it.
Taxation. Taxes are a mess, with high marginal rates that discourage work,
investment, and production; disappointing revenue; and massive, wasteful
complexity. How can
the government raise
revenue while doing If we want to improve regulations,
the least damage to the we can’t just bemoan them. We must
economy? A uniform understand how they emerged.
consumption tax is the
clear answer. Tax money when people spend it. When earnings are saved,
invested, plowed into businesses that produce goods and services and employ
people, leave them alone.
Bad incentives. These are the unsung central problem of our social pro-
grams. Roughly speaking, if your income is zero to about sixty thousand
dollars, if you earn an extra dollar, you lose a dollar of benefits. Fix the incen-
tives, and more people will get ahead in life. We will also better help the truly
needy, and the budget.
Some more general points unite these stories.

Focus on incentives. Politics and punditry are consumed with taking from
A to give to B. Incentives are far more important for economic growth, and
we can say something objective about them.
Find the question. Politics and punditry usually advance answers with-
out stating the question, or shop around for questions to justify the same
old answers. Most people who disagree with the consumption tax really
have different goals than funding the government with minimum economic
damage. Well, what do you want the tax system to do? State the ques-
tion, let’s find the best answer to the question, and we can make a lot of
progress.
Look at the whole system. Tax disincentives come from the total difference
between the value your additional work creates and what you can consume
as a result. Between these lie payroll, income, excise, property, estate, sales,
and corporate taxes, and more, at the federal, state, and local level. Greg
Mankiw figured his all-in marginal tax rate at 90 percent, and even he left
out sales, property, and a few more taxes. Social-program disincentives come
from the loss of food stamps, housing subsidies, Medicaid or ObamaCare
subsidies, disability payments, tax credits, and so on, down to low-income
parking passes. And look at taxes and social programs together. A flat tax
that finances checks to worthy people is very progressive government, if you
want that. Looking at an individual tax or program for its disincentives or
progressivity is silly.
The list goes on. Horrible public education, labor laws, licensing laws, zon-
ing, building and planning restrictions, immigration restrictions, regulatory
barriers, endless lawsuits, prevailing-wage and domestic-content rules, are
all sand in the productivity gears. Oh, and I haven’t even gotten to money and
inflation yet!
And that just fixes our current economy. Long-term growth comes from
new ideas. Many economists say we have run out of ideas; growth is ending;
slice the pie. I look out the window and I see factory-built mini nuclear power
plants that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is strangling; I see a historic
breakthrough in artificial intelligence facing an outcry for the government to
stop it. I see advances in biology that portend much better health and longev-
ity, but good luck getting FDA approval or increasingly politicized research
funding.
Many conservatives disparage this “incentive economics” as outdated and
boring. That attitude is utterly wrong. Incentives, and the freedom, rights,
and rule of law that pre-
serve incentives, remain
“Fix regulations” is a tougher slogan the key to tremendous
than “free money for voters.” and widespread prosper-
ity. And it is hard work to
understand and fix the incentives behind today’s problems.
Yes, supply is less glamorous than stimulus. “Fix regulations” is a tougher
slogan than “free money for voters.” Efficiency requires detailed reform in
every agency and market, the Marie Kondo approach to our civic life. But

it’s possible. And we don’t need to reform all the dinosaurs. As we have seen
with telephones, airlines, and taxis, we just need to allow new competitors, to
allow the buds of freedom to grow.
Many people ask, “How can we get leaders to listen?” That’s the wrong
question. Believe in democracy, not bending the emperor’s ear. Take action.
My fellow prizewinners have grabbed the levers of influence that belong to
citizens of our free society and have done the hard work of reforming its
institutions. And ideas matter. The Hoover Institution motto is “ideas defin-
ing a free society.” The Bradley Foundation tonight celebrates good ideas and
is devoted to spreading them. When voters, media, the chattering classes,
and institutions of civil society understand, advance, and apply these ideas,
politicians will swiftly follow.
Special to the Hoover Digest.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Central

Bank Governance and Oversight Reform, edited by
John H. Cochrane and John B. Taylor. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
T H E ECO N O M Y
(Don’t) Play It
Again
Economic problems don’t go away forever. Nor do
the bad ideas about how to solve them.
By Michael J. Boskin
W
atch the news, and you may find
yourself feeling as if you are watch- Key points
ing the past on playback. We see »» Profligate mon-
etary and fiscal
replays of high inflation, soaring policies are the
public debt, a brutal ground war in Europe, a new main drivers of
today’s inflation.
cold war, and the rise of potentially destructive
»» Amid friction
technologies.
with Russia and
Readers might recall that I predicted rising inflation China, the world
and slower growth as early as spring 2021. Former US seems to be on the
brink of a new cold
treasury secretary Larry Summers did so even earlier. war.
Yet today’s inflation—the worst since the early 1980s— »» Technological
caught most people by surprise. advances, espe-
cially artificial
Supply-chain snarls, including energy-market and intelligence, are
food-system disruptions linked to Russia’s war on disrupting econo-
mies and upend-
Ukraine, contributed to the initial surge in prices. But
ing expectations.
the main driver of today’s inflation has been profligate
Michael J. Boskin is the Wohlford Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
and the Tully M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is a
member of Hoover’s task forces on energy policy, economic policy, and national security.

monetary and fiscal policies, which were upheld despite quicker-than-
expected recoveries from pandemic lockdowns.
For example, President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan,
implemented in March 2021, was nearly three times as large as the Congres-
sional Budget Office’s estimate of the GDP gap that still needed to be closed
for the economy to reach its potential. One cannot but notice the echoes of
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s use of debt to finance the Vietnam War and
the War on Poverty in the late 1960s.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve kept its target interest rate close to
zero for too long, and started to unwind its balance sheet too late—an
approach that recalls the monetary-policy mistakes it made under
chairman Arthur Burns in the 1970s. Central bankers thought that it
would not hurt to let inflation run above the 2 percent target for a while
before bringing it back down, because they had undershot the target
previously.
There are short-term benefits to running the economy “hot.” Just before
the COVID-19 pandemic, US unemployment was low, minority groups had
the lowest poverty rate in history, and wages were rising fastest at the
bottom of the distribu-
tion. For the first time in
decades, inequality was A perceived demise of the “American
declining. dream” has left the public—and
But the economic and politics—deeply unsettled.
political price has come
due. Core inflation (which excludes food and energy prices) in the United
States was 5.3 percent as of May 2023. While it is down a bit from its peak,
it has rotated to stickier services prices, and remains almost three times
the Fed’s target. The central-bank creed is that the short-run interest rate
must run above inflation for some time before inflation—after a “long and
variable lag”—falls toward the target rate.
Wages have not kept pace with inflation, and most households, especially
those which expansionary policies were supposed to help, have been expe-
riencing a decline in real income for two years. Though unemployment
remains very low and the US economy has outperformed much of the rest
of the world, a poll last spring showed that almost half of the US population
thinks the county is already in a recession, and most Americans expect their
children and grandchildren to be worse off than their elders. This perceived
demise of the “American dream” has left the public—and politics—deeply
unsettled.
CONFLICTS TO COME
Another replay that caught most of the world by surprise is the fero-
cious ground war in Europe. But Russian President Vladimir Putin had
clearly telegraphed his plans for Ukraine. Beyond lamenting in 2005
that the Soviet Union’s demise was the greatest tragedy of the twentieth

century—worse than World War II, apparently, when twenty million
Russians died—he had seized part of Georgia in 2008 and annexed Crimea
in 2014.
Then, despite all the global economic integration of recent decades, the
world seemed to be on the brink of a new cold war. China’s increasing eco-
nomic, diplomatic, and military assertiveness, together with its deepening
ties with Russia, has raised fears about a realignment in international rela-
tions, and even a new clash of systems.
The original Cold War pitted totalitarian regimes with centrally planned
economies against mixed-capitalist democracies, led by an economically and
militarily dominant United States. This time, it is autocratic state capitalism
versus social-welfare democracies, and America’s resolve and capabilities are
in doubt.
Particularly worrisome, nonaligned actors are hedging their bets, and
the United States appears to be asleep at the wheel. The China-brokered
rapprochement between
Saudi Arabia and Iran, a
Particularly worrisome, nonaligned sponsor of terrorism and
actors on the world stage are hedging a supplier of advanced
their bets. military drones to Rus-
sia, stands out. Does this
mark a return to traditional balance-of-power geopolitics, or is it a prelude to
conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan?
TECHNOLOGICAL WORRIES
Finally, technological advances are disrupting economies and upending
expectations about the future. Technology has been transforming economies
and displacing workers since well before we had a term—Schumpeterian
“creative destruction”—for the phenomenon. But economies have generally
adjusted: computers, for example, did not end up causing massive structural
unemployment because the workforce was redeployed to other jobs. In any
case, standards of living rose.
Will this be the case for artificial intelligence? Even tech leaders are not
so sure. In March, a group including Elon Musk called for a six-month (or
longer) pause on advanced AI development to gain a better understanding
of the risks the technology poses and devise ways to mitigate them. Musk
thinks those risks include the very destruction of human civilization, and
claimed in an interview that Google co-founder Larry Page once called him a
“speciesist” for wanting to safeguard humanity from AI.

Ultimately, AI is a tool. It can be used for good, for example, to develop
new drugs and diagnostics. But it can also be used to do great harm, such
as to abet repression in China. I remain cautiously optimistic that we can
overcome, or at least sufficiently manage, this challenge, as well as the others
mentioned here. But, given widespread nuclear proliferation, the costs of
failure could bring the most unwelcome replay of all.
Reprinted by permission of Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.

org). © 2023 Project Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is New

Landscapes of Population Change, by Adele M.
Hayutin. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
T H E ECO N O M Y
Security in
Numbers
According to research by Hoover fellows John F.
Cogan and Daniel L. Heil, older Americans’ income
has soared. Good news on its own, this could
enable us to avoid the looming entitlement debt.
By Jonathan Movroydis
R
esearch by Hoover senior
fellow John F. Cogan and Key points
policy fellow Daniel L. » The median senior household
income is now about the same as
Heil has uncovered a sub- the median household income
stantial growth in income of Ameri- among younger generations. This
is profoundly different from forty
can senior citizens over the past
years ago.
four decades. From 1982 to 2018, the
» Social Security, Medicare, and
median income of households headed other programs for elders make
by people sixty-five and older rose 85 up an ever-rising part of federal
spending growth.
percent, after adjusting for inflation.
» One option for making federal
This growth was four times as fast programs solvent is to slow the
as the increase among households rate of growth in Social Security
benefits.
headed by younger people. Cogan
John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Insti-
tution and participates in Hoover’s task forces on energy, the economy, and health
care. Daniel L. Heil is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. Jonathan
Movroydis is the senior content writer for the Hoover Institution.
22 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

and Heil found that the biggest drivers of senior income growth were private
retirement savings and changes in work patterns; they found a remarkable
rise in employment among older people, as well as in participation in defined-
contribution plans. For most seniors, Social Security played a surprisingly
small role. The data demonstrate that the median senior household income,
adjusted for household size and taxes, is now about the same as the median
household income among
younger generations, a
drastic difference from “Both Medicare and Social Security, the
forty years ago. two main programs for senior citizens,
These findings have will become insolvent within the next
important policy impli- decade.”
cations for addressing
the rising costs of Social Security and Medicare. The increased income among
seniors from private sources, Cogan and Heil say, presents an opportunity to
reduce the growing fiscal burden—in particular, by reforming Social Security and
Medicare to make them more progressive to the benefit of lower-income seniors.
Jonathan Movroydis: What prompted you to conduct this research?
John F. Cogan: Two challenges that concern us most are, first, the cost of
senior citizen federal entitlement programs. The other is that both Medicare
and Social Security, the two main programs for senior citizens, will become
insolvent within the next decade. Let me talk about the budget problem first.
Reining in the growth of the national debt is the central fiscal challenge
facing the country. It can’t be done without slowing the growth in expendi-
tures on programs for the elderly or imposing a very large tax increase on
the middle class. Social Security, Medicare, and other programs for senior
citizens now account for 40 percent of all noninterest federal spending. In
the next ten years, if these programs aren’t reformed, they will account for
almost 80 percent of the growth in federal spending. Stopping the growth in
the national debt without altering these programs would require an across-
the-board tax increase of around 70 percent.
Daniel L. Heil: The Social Security trustees just released new numbers. The
trustees’ report showed that the trust fund is due to be insolvent by 2034.
Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is going to be insolvent by about
2028. When those days arrive, Congress better have a plan in place to reform
those programs. And it’s important that our policy makers enact reforms soon,
because if they wait until 2028 or 2034, then the only options are higher taxes
H O O V E R D IG E ST • FALL 2023 23
or draconian spending cuts. In our research, we highlight who is currently
being helped by these programs and who still needs help, and we provide
policy makers a close look at recipients’ incomes—information policy makers
need when they consider how they should reform these two programs.
Cogan: The issues surrounding Social Security and Medicare, which account
for the lion’s share of federal spending on the elderly, are politically explosive. A
few months ago, President Biden, in his State of the Union address, said that the
Republicans were going to cut these programs. Immediately, the Republicans
shouted out, “No, no!” What Danny and I hope to accomplish with the publica-
tion of this paper is to inform the debate with facts to allow for a dispassionate
analysis of the options for making Social Security and Medicare solvent.
Movroydis: What are the biggest drivers of the senior income growth?
Cogan: There have been two main drivers behind the growth in the median
income of senior households: income from private retirement plans, and
income from employment.
Income from retirement plans over the past forty years has increased by
about 300 percent; that’s a fourfold increase. Labor earnings have nearly tri-
pled. There is a policy reason for both dramatic increases. In the early 1980s,
the two main types of defined-contribution plans were just coming of age:
individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans, which had been enacted
in 1974 and 1978, respectively. The growth of participation in those defined-
contribution plans has boosted private retirement income for seniors.
For employment, the situation is a little bit different. Since the m id-1990s,
there has been a historic change in the employment p atterns of seniors.
Employment among both senior men and women has been steadily
rising. This is a reversal of a trend since at least the end of World War
II for men and at least since the beginning of the 1960s for women.
Heil: For low-income seniors, we see the growth in both employ-

ment earnings and in retirement income, but still about half of
the growth is from increases in Social Security benefits. Among
the upper half of the income distribution, we find higher growth
in Social Security income than in the bottom half, but Social
Security is much more important to low-income seniors, as you
would expect.
Movroydis: What is the factor driving that income growth among

older seniors?

Cogan: Their Social Security income growth wasn’t a significant factor. In
fact, the factors were increased employment among this group, private
savings plans, and overall asset accumulation over their lifetimes.
Movroydis: When adjusted for household size, how

do seniors’ earnings compare to non-
seniors’?
Cogan: One of the more remarkable findings of our work is that the median
senior household income is now about the same as the median household
income among younger households, after adjusting for household size and
taxes. This is a drastic difference from forty years ago.
This convergence of senior and non-senior adjusted income occurs across
the income distribution. An especially important finding is that incomes
among low-income seniors have risen much faster than the incomes among
low-income younger populations.
Heil: There are also other costs that we haven’t included, such as health
care. But generally, the point stands that once you control for taxes and
household size, you
really don’t see a differ-
“Incomes among low-income seniors ence in median incomes
have risen much faster than the between seniors and
incomes among low-income younger non-seniors. This trend
populations.” started in the late 1990s,
and the adjusted incomes
converged by 2012. In the past ten years, there has not been a whole lot of
difference between seniors and non-seniors, at least around middle-income
levels.
Cogan: One additional point: the growth in senior incomes has been broad-
based. The purchasing power of income among seniors at the 25th and 75th
percentile of the senior household income distribution nearly doubled, after
adjusting for inflation. Seniors today who are at the 25th percentile of the
income distribution have as much purchasing power as a median-income
senior household in 1982. So low-income seniors today are living just as well
as the typical senior forty years ago.
There is a particular concern in policy circles about income levels of very
old seniors. However, we found that over the past forty years, incomes of
seniors in households headed by persons seventy-five years or older grew
faster than those in the households headed by persons sixty-five to seventy,
and seventy to seventy-four.
Heil: This isn’t just in percentage terms, but in the absolute dollar value.
So, it wasn’t that they were just starting at a lower base.
Cogan: Right. This comes back full circle to our original point, just how
broad-based the income growth was among seniors.

Movroydis: Can we expect, though, when these non-seniors reach retirement
age, that their earnings will grow at the same rate that seniors are experiencing
today?
Cogan: Tough to say. One of the big disruptions in recent years, of course,
was the COVID-19 pandemic. Now certainly, if Danny and I were answer-
ing your question in 2019 or early 2020, we would have said that there is
absolutely no reason why the trends that we have observed in the data,
both for retirement income and for work patterns among seniors, wouldn’t
continue in the future. The pandemic, however, was a big disruption to
work patterns, not just among seniors, of course, but among the entire
population.
What we have seen so far is that there has been a very strong rebound in
employment among seniors since the falloff in 2020 that was a consequence
of the pandemic and the lockdowns. Employment hasn’t recovered all the
way back to its pre-pandemic levels, but I think it’s about three-fourths of
that level. Danny, is that right?
Heil: That’s about right. We certainly see the recovery among younger
people; they are back to their pre-COVID levels. But among seniors,
particularly around the age of sixty-five or so, you do see a drop-off. But the
important thing to remember is that is from a very high base. If you trace
employment rates back a decade, the 2023 level is higher than it was in 2016
or 2017. What we are
observing today is that
“Social Security benefits do not need
employment trends are
remarkably strong rela- to continue increasing annually in real
tive to recent history. terms in the future.”
Incomes are rising
over time for those close to retirement. The same can be said for assets. We
are planning to write a longer paper that will delve into asset trends over
time.
There is certainly some cyclicality in income and asset trends depending
on economic conditions, but overall, you are seeing the growth continue in a
way that suggests today’s seniors are doing well and that there is no reason
to believe that tomorrow’s seniors are going to be worse off.
Cogan: We don’t directly address how much of a person’s pre-retirement

income is replaced by Social Security and other forms of retirement income.
That is a subject of a separate analysis that we will be doing. But essentially
what Danny said is absolutely right. What we’re seeing is a substantial
amount of income being replaced in retirement years.
Movroydis: What types of policy reforms do you think could address the
expense of programs for the elderly in the next decade?
Cogan: On Social Security, there are two important implications of our work.
One is that the extraordinary growth in income sources other than Social
Security suggests to us that Social Security benefits do not need to continue
increasing annually in real terms in the future. Most people don’t know this,
but the benefits that
are promised to future
“Government would be wise to retirees are generally
continue to create incentives to higher, after adjusting for
encourage individuals to rely less inflation, than those that
on the public sector during their are received by today’s
retirees. Those increases
retirement years.”
have been automatically
taking place since the mid-1970s. Slowing that growth to the rate of inflation
is appropriate.
The other implication relates to the distribution of Social Security ben-
efits. Social Security now accounts for only about 18 percent of the $157,000
mean income among senior households in the upper half of the senior income
distribution. So, for them, Social Security has become relatively unimport-
ant. Therefore, some lessening of Social Security benefits and more reliance
on other forms of income is appropriate for them.
On the other hand, Social Security still accounts for about 80 percent of
benefits received by households in the lower half of the income distribution.
So, Social Security remains important for this group. Making Social Security
more progressive would be an appropriate policy direction for the program
to take.
Heil: There is certainly room for reform. Now politically, whether that’s
popular or not, that’s another issue.
I think we should be thinking about policy reforms that boost private
savings and labor earnings, which, as we mentioned, have been the two
biggest drivers of growth among median-income seniors. Policy makers
should be looking to strengthen those trends.
On the labor side, certainly tax policy reforms and deregulation are good
places to start.

On the retirement side, there are policies that can be achieved on a bipartisan
basis. Recently, Congress passed two different acts that have tried to strengthen
some of the defined-contribution retirement programs, the SECURE Act and
then the SECURE Act 2.0. Historically, there have been cumbersome regula-
tions that have prevented smaller businesses from offering defined-contribution
plans. These laws were intended to liberalize some of the rules, to allow small
businesses, in particular, to provide these plans to their employees.
Participation rates, among people who are not quite seniors yet, in defined-
contribution plans are plateauing. This suggests that we can do more to
encourage people to save. We will see within the next few years whether the
SECURE Act and SECURE Act 2.0 will make a substantial difference.
Cogan: Over the past forty years, good public policies have created and
expanded private retirement-savings vehicles. They’ve also improved work
incentives to allow workers to prepare better for their retirement years and
to be less reliant on government programs. Recognizing this, the implication
of our work is that government would be wise to continue to create incen-
tives to encourage individuals to rely less on the public sector during their
retirement years. If we don’t continue to allow private savings and employ-
ment to grow, we are going to end up imposing a very large tax on younger
households.
Heil: The fact that private savings and labor participation rates have grown
among seniors over the past forty years is a remarkable success. Meanwhile,
the indexing of Social Security in the 1970s to keep up with inflation was
more than enough to ensure that seniors maintain a standard of living to
which they were accustomed in their pre-retirement years. Our data show
these two points. This gives policy makers an opportunity to rethink the way
the federal budget looks while making sure seniors continue to experience
impressive income gains.
Available from Stanford University Press is The High

Cost of Good Intentions, by John F. Cogan. To order,
visit www.sup.org.
RUSSI A A N D UKRAINE
Putin the
Stalinist
The end of the Soviet Union promised a new
day. Instead, Russia’s thousand-year pattern of
autocracy re-emerged.
By Norman M. Naimark
T
he British historian E. H. Carr wrote that history is a dialogue
between past and present. These past months of war in Ukraine
have caused me to think more and more about Vladimir Putin
in the mirror of Josef Stalin, and Stalin in the mirror of Putin.
I resisted for a very long time the notion that Putin was a Stalin-like figure.
However, the similarity between the two of them, the historical dialogue,
seems to be growing too powerful to be pushed aside.
I have lived in Putin’s prewar Russia. I’ve worked in the archives of the
state and party and talked to friends openly about the pluses and minuses
of the regime—a freedom unthinkable in Stalin’s time or even today. Three
of my books were published in Russian by a small, friendly publishing outfit,
all of them openly critical of important parts of Soviet history. Not only
did I function well in Moscow—and my stays were mostly in Moscow—but
I liked being there, speaking Russian, going to comfortable coffeehouses
Norman M. Naimark is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member

of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Con-
flict. He is also the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European
Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli
Institute for International Studies.

and restaurants, and watching biased but sometimes interesting television
programs.
I had my hopes up for a better Russia. Sometimes those hopes would be
squelched by current events, but I still felt that one fine day the good guys
would win. The end of the Soviet system in 1991 was crucial. By the turn of
the century, I was ready for that new day to dawn.
INSISTENT PARALLELS
I should add that in addition to reading and watching video of Putin’s
speeches and interviews, I saw him in action at a meeting of the Valdai
Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank, in Sochi. I confess I was
impressed by his ability to speak cogently and comprehensively for hours
about a wide variety of
questions. Not that I
necessarily agreed with Motifs of sacrifice for the fatherland—
what he said—but he and the honor of shedding blood for
was a forceful speaker, the greater good of the Russian
sure of himself and con- people—loom large with both men.
fident, but also subtle
and not without a sense of humor. He was surely better on his feet dealing
with questions than most US presidents I have seen in similar situations.
He was much better at public speaking and interviews than Stalin, who
could be a deadly boring orator and whose interviews were clipped and
predictable, though by no means unintelligent.
Stalinist Russia was a scary, bleak place. The terror and purges swept up
millions of people. Of course, the population managed to find enjoyment in
life, dancing to new and fashionable swing bands, going to corny movies, and
reveling in a newly emerging consumer culture that was particularly notable
in the immediate post–World War II period. But still: the sheer weight of the
Gulag, the executions, the torture, the mass murders, the deportations, and
the fear—all promoted by the all-powerful and fearsome leader—were some-
thing quite different from the Russia I enjoyed visiting.
But Stalin and Putin have many of the same characteristics, starting with
their shared role as leaders of Russia at war. Putin does not wear a military uni-
form or pose as a generalissimo, but both he and Stalin project powerful images
of being in control, even when they may not be, of knowing what they are doing
(even when they don’t), of leading their respective armies, and of honoring the
service of their military subordinates. They both routinely replace generals
who fail to produce victories and rebuke subordinates who fail to supply the

military with what it needs in men and materiel. Putin’s injunctions to military
valor resonate with Stalin’s own wartime appearances before the people and
the troops. The motifs of sacrifice for the fatherland and the honor of shedding
blood for the greater good of the Russian people loom large with both.
Putin put up a statue of Stalin in Volgograd for the anniversary
of the 1942–43 Battle of Stalingrad, renamed the city Stalingrad
for a day, and praised Stalin as a great military leader. But I
also recall that when Putin spoke at the 2017 dedication of
a memorial for victims of terror, Stalin was not mentioned
at all. Stalin is the symbol of victory in the war—and of a
powerful state.
Both Putin and Stalin use the non-Russian peoples of Russia/
Soviet Union as cannon fodder. Both pay little if any attention to
the actual loss of life and casualties at the front. Part of this clearly
has to do with the way Russians fight wars, but it also has to do with the
Putin is a forceful speaker, sure of

himself and confident, but also subtle
and not without a sense of humor.
SEEMS FAMILIAR: Russian President Vladimir Putin examines a flag at a
factory in Ivanovo, Russia, that shows Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin in
profile. Stalin’s and Putin’s views of history harmonize, as do many of their
personal characteristics. [Mikhail Svetlov—Getty Images]
leaders themselves, and their lack of concern for minimizing casualties. We

could add to this other parallels between the way Stalin fought World War II
and Putin the war in Ukraine: the heavy use of artillery and tanks, the attempts
to wear down the enemy with updated trench warfare, and the bombardment of
civilian targets as if they were the same as military objectives.
The war crimes and crimes against humanity committed today by Rus-
sian troops in Ukraine are reflected in the Soviet World War II advances
against the Germans in Eastern Europe, in Germany, and in Berlin, the heart
of the beast itself, as Soviet posters portrayed it. Regardless of one’s justi-
fied contempt for the Nazi regime, it’s worth remembering the hundreds of
thousands of raped German women and girls, the innocent German civilians
who were attacked and murdered as they tried to escape the Soviet advance,
and the widespread pillaging of food, household goods, and other property, all
of which have also been widely reported in Ukraine.

This, of course, is not necessarily the direct result of Putin’s or Stalin’s lead-
ership. But it is the indirect result. Neither seems to exhibit much empathy
or pity for their enemies or innocent victims. Neither develops policies that
might limit damage to schools, hospitals, or maternity wards, much less the
civilian housing complexes that get destroyed in indiscriminate bombing and
shelling. Both are intensely aware of how important shaping the Russian side
of the story—really, the PR about the respective wars—is to public support
for the war and their political objectives. They both use religion and the
church to bless their military campaigns. Religious, cultural, and historical
motifs combine with political ones.
IDEOLOGICAL WAR
Neither Stalin nor Putin invented Russian “military-patriotic education,”
but both rely on its tenets—martial bearing, nationalism, patriotism,
athletic prowess, and
the use of weapons—to
promote the military Ukrainians are not Russians and don’t
among Russian youth, want to be Russians. That’s precisely
men, and women. Youth why they are dangerous for Moscow.
in particular are the
objects of intense training and the inculcation of militarist characteristics,
such as incessant saluting, following orders, marching in step, and not
questioning authority.
Another part of this Stalin-Putin story is their respective thinking about
the Soviet/Russian empire and Ukraine. Both adhere to the proposition that
Ukraine is integral to the strength of empire, be it Soviet or Russian. Yet
to both Stalin and Putin, Ukraine is the little brother, “Little Russia,” as it
was known under the czars. Russians should see themselves as superior to
Ukrainians: bigger, stronger, more powerful, more central to the imperial
project than the Ukrainians.
But Ukrainians are not Russians and do not want to be Russians. That
is precisely why they are dangerous for Moscow. Especially after the forc-
ible incorporation of western Ukraine in 1945, they pulled towards the West.
But even in a previous era, the period of the Holodomor, the death famine of
1932–33, Stalin constantly asserted that the Poles would use the Ukrainians to
destroy the Soviet Union. Putin now claims that Ukraine is being controlled by
the West, that the leaders are nothing but marionettes of the United States.
Putin’s accusation is remarkably similar to the language Stalin used
to talk about Polish ambitions in Ukraine. Then, the Ukrainians were all
“ Petliurites”—after Symon Petliura, who had been a major figure in trying to
establish an independent Ukrainian state during the Russian Civil War. Now
the Ukrainians, in addition to being called Nazis, neo-Nazis, and fascists, are
“Banderites”—followers of Stepan Bandera, who had an on-again, off-again
relationship with the Nazis during World War II in the name of founding an
independent Ukraine.
Interesting, too, is the psychological reaction of both Putin and Stalin to
the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians are ungrateful turncoats, people who refuse
to admit how much the Russians had done for them, how they had been pro-
tected and nurtured by Moscow. Only to turn on their big brothers!
Stalin’s and Putin’s views of history also harmonize. In their shared view,
the medieval princedom of Kyivan Rus was Russian, not Ukrainian. The
1654 treaty of Pereyaslav
demonstrated the
Putin would agree with Stalin: “The
readiness of the Russian
state demands that we are pitiless.”
empire to protect the
Ukrainians against their Polish enemies. It was certainly not an agreement
between equals with mutual benefits, as the Ukrainians assert. And for both
Stalin and Putin, the Holodomor was not genocide at all. Stalin denied the
existence of an all–Soviet Union famine altogether, while Putin admits there
was a famine but not that Ukraine suffered in particular. For both Stalin
and Putin, World War II was above all a victory of the Great R ussian People.
Ukrainians may have fought bravely, but there were too many Banderites
who sullied the reputation of the Ukrainians in the war.
PRIVATE AND “PITILESS”

Finally, the biographies of Stalin and Putin have some eerie similarities. Both
had hardscrabble, lower-class backgrounds. Stalin had a religious back-
ground; Putin did not, though he seems, maybe genuinely, to have taken up
Orthodoxy in recent years. Both rose to prominent positions by being respon-
sible bureaucrats, Putin in Anatoly Sobchak’s Leningrad city organization,
Stalin in the early Bolshevik party (in which, recent biographies have made
clear, he was more than the messenger boy described by Trotsky).
In their rise to supreme power, both maneuvered skillfully to oust opponents
and potential rivals. Both were effective in internal political wrangling. Stalin
murdered many tens of thousands of real and potential opponents. Putin may
well have been behind the murder of a number of his; the scale is clearly very
different. But he would agree with Stalin’s justification: “The state demands
that we are pitiless.”

Both leaders are intensely private, revealing little of their family lives.
Both seem to be friendless. Both have a security mania and are generously
endowed with streaks of paranoia and fear regarding the people around
them, as well as the outside world.
Both leaders relied heavily on the Russian secret police in their rise to power
and in maintaining their supreme positions. Stalin had his OGPU and NKVD,
Putin the KGB and the FSB. Stalin himself was not a secret policeman, as was
Putin, but he might as well have been. Both understood the power of the Chek-
ist “Sword and Shield” to control all of society. According to Andrei Soldatov,
a Russian émigré investigative journalist, Putin has used the FSB to solidify
his position in occupied Ukraine, as well as internally. Similarly, Stalin used the
NKVD to help him control Eastern Europe, as well as the Soviet Union.
In the end, both Stalin and Putin are essentially realists in their foreign
policy. They both have ideological lenses through which they see the world,
but ultimately they perform a careful weighing of national interest. And they
see the pursuit of that national interest as forwarding their own interests.
Stalin and Putin make mistakes. Stalin’s was in thinking that Hitler would
not attack. Putin’s biggest mistake, in my view, was attacking Ukraine. Their
calculations can be seen as tainted by paranoia, fearfulness, and xenophobia—
imbalances, in short, that made clear-eyed realism impossible.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Bread +

Medicine: American Famine Relief in Soviet Russia,
1921–1923, by Bertrand M. Patenaude and Joan
Nabseth Stevenson. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.
RUSSI A A N D UKRAINE
Between East
and West
Whoever wins the war, Ukraine will remain
a buffer state on Europe’s borderlands. The
country’s future points to “fortified neutrality.”
By Jakub Grygiel
T
ragically for its people,
Ukraine is on the path of Key points
Russia’s persistent westward »» There is very little chance
Kyiv will join the EU and NATO
push and thus it serves as the in the near future.
West’s rampart. Ukraine is the antemurale »» Ukraine would need to settle
of Europe. With Ukraine under Moscow’s “territorial disputes, including
irredentist claims,” to be con-
domination, Europe is directly threatened
sidered for NATO.
and likely to be torn by even deeper divi-
»» The best Ukrainians can do is
sions among its nations, which are likely to carve themselves a space of
to pursue divergent approaches toward liberty between the competing
great powers.
Russia. With Ukraine as an independent
and strong state, the West has a buffer on
its eastern frontier, protecting it from the assaults of Muscovite power.
The key question, then, concerns the nature of the connection
between Europe and Ukraine. Assuming that Ukraine survives as an
Jakub Grygiel is a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a

senior adviser at the Marathon Initiative, and an associate professor of politics at
the Catholic University of America.

MORE TO COME: Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, left, and Odesa
Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov, right, survey damage from a Russian missile
strike last summer. [Ukrainian Presidential Office]
independent state at the end of the current war, what should its rela-
tionship be with the West, in particular the institutions of NATO and
the EU underpinning it?
Despite pervasive rhetorical support for Ukraine’s EU and NATO mem-
bership, there is very little chance that Kyiv will join these institutions in the
near future. The Europe-
an Union is too unwieldy
Ukraine is likely to remain neither to accept such a large
anchored in Western institutions nor country, one of the largest
subjugated in the Russian sphere. agricultural producers in
the world. Were Ukraine
to join the EU, it would create massive problems for the Common Agricul-
tural Policy (CAP), one of the oldest EU policies, which gives money to its
members according to the size of arable land. Ukraine’s arable land is as big
as all of Italy, and thus Kyiv would automatically become the main recipient
of CAP funds, competing with farmers in the rest of Europe.
Moreover, Ukrainian agricultural products would flood Europe, displac-
ing local producers, something that already happened briefly late last year
when Ukraine redirected its grain exports to its Western neighbors as its

usual markets became less accessible because of the war. Hence, while now
there may be support for Ukraine’s EU membership among Western political
leaders, the politics of accession would be extremely difficult and divisive. In
brief, EU membership for Ukraine is highly unlikely.
NATO is equally hard to join. Even though Ukraine has now contributed
more to the defense of Europe than the vast majority of current NATO
members, to join NATO the applicants have to fulfill several requirements.
A particularly difficult one for Ukraine will be to resolve its territorial
disputes, even though they are not Kyiv’s fault. As the 1995 “Study on NATO
Enlargement” clarified, “States which have ethnic disputes or external
territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional
disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with
OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] principles.
Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to
invite a state to join the alliance.”
One of the effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014 is that it has
created hard-to-resolve territorial disputes. In order to end them, Ukraine
would have to either reconquer the lost lands (including Crimea) or give
up its sovereignty over
them, ceding them to
Moscow. Either option For Ukraine, the best solution is
is difficult to pursue for remaining nonaligned but with
Kyiv militarily or politi- sufficient arms, a defensible space,
cally, likely resulting in
and a viable economy.
a long-term territorial
problem with Russia. Consequently, it is highly unlikely that NATO mem-
bers would be willing to accept Ukraine into the alliance with this f estering
problem.
It may be desirable to have Kyiv in NATO, just as it is very beneficial
to have Finland as a new member, but it is also hard to conceive at the
moment.
The more likely outcome is that Ukraine will remain a buffer state: n either
anchored in Western institutions nor subjugated in the Russian sphere.
There are reasons to believe that this is a feasible outcome because the great
powers—Russia, Turkey, and the Western alliance—around Ukraine may
be interested in such a status as preferable to a clear alignment one way or
another. Turkey and the West do not want Ukraine to fall under Moscow’s
domination, for moral but also geostrategic reasons. At the same time, R ussia
has obviously demonstrated that it will use protracted brutal force to seek
Ukrainian subservience. And, as mentioned above, the West is unlikely to
extend its economic and security mantle to the Wild Fields of the Dnieper
basin. This “either-or” geopolitical dynamic—but with neither side willing or
capable of fully controlling the area—points to a stalemate of sorts, resulting
in Ukraine in neither camp.
This may, of course, be disappointing to Ukrainians who have expressed a
desire to join Western institutions and have clearly incurred heavy sacrifices
to avoid Russian rule. But all Ukrainians can do is to carve for themselves a
space of liberty between the competing great powers.
Russia will, of course, not give up its imperial aspiration to control
Ukraine. It will remain an enduring power, seeking to rebuild its status and
possessions on its western frontier, especially as the Asiatic region becomes
less permissive with a growing China. Hence, for Ukraine, the best solution
is a “fortified neutrality,” remaining nonaligned but with sufficient arms,
a defensible space, and a viable economy to deter and, if necessary, defeat
further Russian offensives. The role of the West and of Turkey, therefore, is
to arm Ukraine not just for the ongoing operations against Russian forces but
for the long term, creating a militarily robust, geopolitically independent, and
economically confident state on Europe’s frontier.
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RU SSIA A N D U K R A IN E
Putin Plays the

Long Game
The place of NATO in Europe—for that matter,
the place of democracy everywhere. Everything
depends on Ukraine.
By Hy Rothstein
T
he future of NATO, in almost every dimension imaginable,
depends on the outcome of the war in Ukraine. That outcome
is unknown. While there is reason to be optimistic, events, and
especially wars, can take unanticipated paths and generate unex-
pected results. Moreover, underestimating Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s
willingness to kill as many Ukrainians as possible—and to throw hundreds
of thousands of Russian men into the fray against Ukrainian bullets until
there are no more Ukrainian bullets left—would be a big mistake. Politicians
and politics change constantly in NATO’s liberal democracies, but in his own
mind, Putin is staying
forever. Time and math
Time and math may be on Russia’s
may be on Russia’s side.
side.
Many experts have
suggested that the invasion will be one of history’s greatest geostrategic
blunders. Putin clearly intended to show that Russia’s modernized military
would present a formidable capability against a country that had no right
Hy Rothstein (US Army, Ret.) is a former senior lecturer at the Naval Post
graduate School in Monterey.
DUTY CALLS: A Ukrainian soldier training in England gives a salute in Feb-
ruary 2023, one year after the invasion began. NATO takes the position that
the West will support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” but there are limits to the
amount of materiel and money Western countries can send. [UK Ministry of
Defense]
to exist, and that the West, as it had done in 2014 after the annexation of
Crimea and the seizing of territory in eastern Ukraine, would respond
feebly. The outcome was very different. The war revealed Russian military
incompetence as well as the defects of a corrupt, authoritarian political
system. The Ukrainians fought and kept the Russian invaders from entering
Kyiv. Putin’s plan for a quick and easy victory was shattered. Even Henry
Kissinger, who for decades cautioned against Ukraine’s membership in
NATO, concluded that “Ukraine is a major state in Central Europe for the
first time in modern history,” and that a peace process should link Ukraine
to NATO.
Putin generated the opposite of what he intended. More important, NATO,
having struggled for more than two decades to reach a shared view with
Moscow, finally acknowledged Putin’s expansionist agenda in Europe, and
as a result came together with a common purpose to arm Ukraine and stop
Russia.

STEP FORWARD
NATO’s initial reluctance to assist Kyiv in fighting Russia turned into a
massive military assistance program. The courageous actions of President
Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian fighters, contrasted with the barbaric,
genocidal actions of Russian leaders and their troops, certainly helped to
solidify NATO’s strong support.
During a visit to Kyiv earlier this year, President Biden expressed West-
ern resolve and unveiled an additional $460 million US weapons package,
for a total of $32 billion
in aid since Russia’s
invasion began. The NATO finally acknowledged Putin’s
West’s determination expansionist agenda in Europe, and
to support Ukraine has as a result came together.
been remarkable, though
gradual and measured. Though NATO has not put boots on the ground,
Western leaders’ words and deeds have made the war in Ukraine their war,
too, and their commitment brings its own risks.
After Biden’s address, Putin delivered his own message of undying com-
mitment to the fight. He addressed the Russian parliament, stressing the
stakes: “This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of
crucial historical events that will determine the future of our country and our
people, a time when every one of us bears a colossal responsibility.” In what
sounded like a wartime speech, Putin discarded the initial justification for his
limited “special military operation” to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine
and recast the conflict as a war against Western civilization. Putin has now
framed the conflict as imperial America and its allies launching the war
despite Russian efforts for peace. The West, according to Putin, has become
an existential threat—Russia against the West.
DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

The second year of the war will likely be more consequential than the first.
Moscow seems to have gotten smarter. Strategic decisions are starting
to make military sense. The partial mobilization of reservists that Putin
ordered in September 2022 strengthened Russian forces at the front. The
redeployment of forces to eastern Ukraine and the withdrawal of Russian
forces from Kherson in November saved units from destruction and made
them available for action elsewhere. Thousands of troops are receiving more
substantial training in Russia and Belarus. During the first year of the war,
Ukraine’s military achieved considerable success when Russia’s forces were
at their weakest and its leadership was at its poorest. Now the Ukrainian
army should expect to fight a better-led and -trained opponent.
Russia has also perpetuated a methodical bombing campaign against
Ukraine’s electrical system, aiming to turn the war into a struggle for
survival for Ukrainian civilians. This campaign has not proved decisive
so far, but like most strategic bombing campaigns, it imposes direct and
indirect military costs. For example, modern military air defense, command
and control, and intelligence-gathering systems all run on electricity. While
generators can fill the gap, making that transition degrades these systems’
performance. Moreover, the heat produced by generators is easily detected
by Russian intelligence,
facilitating further
This year, the Ukrainian army is targeting. The bombing
fighting a better-led and -trained campaign also affects the
opponent. Ukrainian weapons and
ammunition industry that
depends on electricity, as does much of the rail system that moves war mate-
riel around the country. NATO is helping Ukraine repair the grid, but from
the Russian perspective, this is good news—the repairs consume resources
that cannot be used to support fighting at the front.
Casualty figures are notoriously inaccurate. US intelligence estimates put
the number of total casualties after the first year of fighting at 100,000 for
the Russians and 100,000 for the Ukrainians, roughly comparable for both
sides. Russia has already mobilized 300,000 additional troops and routinely
recruits and trains 250,000 annually. So far, Ukraine has managed to replen-
ish its army relatively effectively, but the manpower arithmetic works to
Moscow’s advantage. Russia has 3.5 times Ukraine’s population. Russia can
lose twice as many soldiers as Ukraine and still have a manpower advantage.
Russia can likely do what Russia has always done—use sheer numbers to win
in the end.
The math on ammunition and weapons is also complicated. Ukraine is fir-
ing its Western-supplied 155mm artillery shells faster than they can be manu-
factured. The same problem exists with other munitions. Russian munitions
stockpiles seem to be plentiful, though old. NATO, in part worried about its
own war stocks, is investing in ammunition production but it may take until
next year to narrow the growing gap.
Even more troubling, Russia is pulling World War II–era T-60 tanks out of
storage and sending them to the battlefield; any tank is better than no tank.

Meanwhile, the United States and NATO have large numbers of tanks that
are ready to go but are not in Ukrainian hands.
How will the war end? NATO’s position seems to be that Western govern-
ments will support Ukraine “as long as it takes” to drive Russian forces out
of its territory. For all the bold rhetoric, it’s still uncertain how far NATO
can go. There are limits
to the amount of mate-
riel and money Western Russia is pulling World War II–era
countries can send. And tanks out of storage. Any tank is
while Biden may want better than no tank.
to support Ukraine for
the long haul, that could abruptly change, given that there is opposition to
doing much more to help Ukraine. Leadership changes in Europe could also
undercut support for Kyiv.
THE LARGER STAKES

The first year of the war found NATO joining to help Ukraine beat back a
poorly trained and poorly led Russian army. The second year may not be
favoring NATO and Ukraine, especially if Russia’s learning curve outpaces
NATO’s ability to get weapons into Ukrainian hands. Ukraine can sustain
its fight only with help from the West, and that help has generally been too
little and too unpredictable. What brought NATO together in 2022 may come
undone in 2023.
Something larger than Ukraine’s existence is at stake. Putin’s power is
based on historical fictions, the silencing of political opponents, and the out-
lawing of language contrary to official views. He has surrounded the Ukraine
invasion with false-
hoods: “de-Nazification,”
NATO’s drive to deny Ukrainians are dying to defend their
Russia its rightful place land. If Russia wins, the truth dies too.
in the world, Ukrainians
killing their Russian-speaking citizens, Ukraine’s lack of status as a legiti-
mate state, and so on. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will die defend-
ing Ukraine. If Russia wins, the truth dies too.
That is why the outcome transcends what happens to Ukraine. A Russian
victory would strengthen tyrants whose visions of geopolitics render any con-
cept of a liberal democratic order obsolete. The war is about the future of a
democracy, the principle of self-rule, and the rule of law. A Ukrainian victory
would rejuvenate sleeping democracies.
NATO must end the practice of trickling support into Ukraine to avoid
defeat but not to enable Ukraine to crush the invaders. Putin still expects
Western resolve to eventually crumble, or military stockpiles to become
depleted, negating NATO’s capacity to provide material assistance. R ussia
can, as in the past, use time and sheer numbers to prevail. If Putin gets what
he wants, NATO, democracy, and the rule of law will be diminished and
recovering will be difficult and costly.
Subscribe to the online Hoover Institution journal Strategika (hoover.

org/publications/strategika) for analysis of issues of national security in
light of conflicts of the past. © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the Leland
Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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and Its Islamic World: From the Mongol Conquest to
the Syrian Military Intervention, by Robert Service. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.
org.

N ATO
The Alliance
Strikes Back
When Russia attacked Ukraine, NATO seemed just
short of irrelevant. So, Vladimir Putin gambled.
He wasn’t the first dictator to bet the West would
appease him.
By Andrew Roberts
T
here is no more iron commandment in politics and international
relations than the law of unintended consequences. Vladimir
Putin intended his invasion of Ukraine to strike a proxy blow
at NATO, exposing its rifts and leaving it crushed and humili-
ated after his blitzkrieg on Kyiv. Instead, the alliance is at its strongest, most
focused, and soon will be at its most territorially extensive.
As recently as November 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron
declared NATO “brain dead,” Germany was putting such anemic amounts of
money into her defense that her reservists were training with broom handles
instead of rifles, and Sweden and Finland pursued separate defense policies
outside NATO with no active plans to join.
The West’s humiliation during its scuttle from Afghanistan in late August
2021 was of course primarily the fault of the Biden administration, but the oth-
er nations of the coalition were humiliated in America’s wake and felt it. Small
Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military
History in Contemporary Conflict. He is the host of a Hoover Institution podcast,
Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts.
H O O V E R D IG E ST • fall 2023 49
wonder that Putin and Xi Jinping thought it an opportune moment further to
test NATO with the invasion of a European country, albeit the latter did stipu-
late that it was not to happen until after the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
It is extraordinary how often in history dictators have assumed weakness
and appeasement will be the automatic response on the part of democratic
Western countries. There is something endemic in dictatorships that, because
they entirely forbid them in their own societies, energetic debate and dissen-
sion in democracies are
regularly mistaken for
NATO has been revealed as a living, internal weakness and
vigorous, righteous entity. even stasis. The idea that
street demonstrations,
verbally violent TV and press altercations, angry parliamentary exchanges,
and so on, might actually be positive signs of a healthy democracy and a strong
country does not occur to foreign dictators like Putin and Xi. They therefore
make entirely incorrect deductions.
History is littered with examples of dictators underestimating the West’s
resolve, from Josef Stalin blockading Berlin in 1948 and giving Kim Il Sung the
green light to invade South Korea two years later, to Nikita Khrushchev believ-
ing he could take advantage of a young president to install nuclear weapons in
Cuba in 1962, to Saddam Hussein assuming he could keep Kuwait in 1990 and
ignore fourteen UN resolutions in 2003. Putin and Xi made exactly the same
false assumption over the West’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine
last year. (And Xi might well yet again, should China ever invade Taiwan, with
more devastating consequences even than we have seen in Ukraine.)
Had NATO failed the test in Ukraine and failed to supply President Volody-
myr Zelensky with the intelligence and materiel he needed, it would have
devastated the alliance. Instead, NATO has been revealed as a living, vigor-
ous, righteous entity fighting—necessarily vicariously due to the restrictions
imposed by mutual assured destruction—for the right of Ukrainian inde-
pendence and integrity, and the wider cause of national self-determination.
Finland and Sweden are
finally doing what they
NATO is carefully and so far remark- should have decades
ably successfully acting as the ago, and defense budgets
arsenal of democracy. are soaring across the
alliance.
Far from being “brain dead,” therefore, NATO is carefully and so far
remarkably successfully acting as the arsenal of democracy, punishing
50 H OOVER DI GEST • fa ll 2023

Putin’s hubris with supplies of ever more lethal weaponry to Kyiv. It is rare in
history for voluntary international organizations to become utterly indis-
pensable, but that is the case with NATO today, and it is all down to Vladimir
Putin ignoring the iron law of unintended consequences.
Subscribe to the online Hoover Institution journal Strategika (hoover.org/

publications/strategika) for analysis of issues of national security in light
of conflicts of the past. © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stan-
ford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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in the Crucible, by Deborah L. Hanagan. To order, call
C H IN A A N D TAIWAN
“We Kept Feeding

the Shark”
Hoover fellow Matthew Pottinger reflects on the
hope—in his words, “almost a religious faith”—that
if only the West treated the country as a partner,
China would become pluralistic and peaceful.
By Ken Moriyasu
F
or many years, the West believed that more engagement with
China would fundamentally transform the way Beijing governs.
“We saw a baby shark and thought that we could transform it into a
dolphin,” former US deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger
told Nikkei Asia in an interview. “We kept feeding the shark and the shark got
bigger and bigger. And now we’re dealing with a formidable great white.”
The West should have been heeding what Chinese President Xi Jinping
was saying internally, Pottinger says. In a 2013 speech to Chinese Communist
Party members, Xi said Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were still correct,
that capitalism will inevitably perish, and socialism will triumph.
Those comments contributed to the decision by Pottinger’s former boss,
President Donald Trump, to switch America’s strategy toward China, he
said. The administration of President Joe Biden has kept to Trump’s path.
Pottinger, now a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, sat
down with Nikkei in Tokyo.
Matthew Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Ken Moriyasu is a diplomatic correspondent for Nikkei Asia.

CAUTION: Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger testifies
during a House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party hearing in
February 2023. Pottinger points out how Chinese rulers carefully revealed their
plans to avoid opposition from democratic states. [Graeme Sloan—SIPA]
Ken Moriyasu, Nikkei Asia: China is providing less and less information to
the outside world. Journalists are denied visas, and Japanese businessmen
are being arrested. Why is China doing this, and where is the country headed?
Matthew Pottinger: Beijing’s grand strategy, which they have laid out in
important speeches and in the fourteenth Five Year Plan (2021–25), is one of
achieving almost total self-reliance for technology and food supplies. At the
same time, the strategy is to make the rest of the world increasingly depen-
dent on China for high technology. They want to use that for coercive leverage.
If you look at some of Xi’s speeches, he has different messages for exter-
nal audiences and for the internal Chinese Communist Party audience. The
Chinese government goes to great lengths to conceal his words from foreign
audiences and to try to substitute that with softer messages. Dual messaging
is a fundamental quality of that regime.
The fundamental tension in Beijing’s relations—not only with the United
States but with Japan, with industrialized democracies around the world—is
inherent in Beijing’s ambitions and strategy. What happened gradually over
Xi’s first decade in power was that he revealed, card by card, slowly, what that
strategy really was. It was not so much US policies that created this tension,
but US understanding of the actual strategy of the communist regime that led
to a counterstrategy by the United States and other industrialized democracies.
One of his most important speeches was on January 5, 2013. In this speech,
he said that Marx and Engels are still correct, that capitalism will inevitably
perish from the Earth, and that socialism will triumph. On socialism, he’s not
talking about a Scandinavian model. This is a single-party dictatorship with
one core leader.
In another important
“It was not so much US policies that speech, in late 2012, Xi
created this tension, but US under- told the story of the col-
standing of the actual strategy of the lapse of the Soviet Union.
communist regime.” He said the profound
lesson for the Chinese
Communist Party is that the core leader must control the tools of dictator-
ship, meaning unambiguous, full control of information, propaganda, ideol-
ogy, data, the economy, and the security apparatus. The next ten years was
the story of Xi implementing what he signaled in those speeches.
The 2012 speech leaked much earlier, so I was aware of some of it. But the
2013 speech was made public, and only in the Chinese language, only in 2019,
six years after he delivered that speech. I remember still being in the White
House when I read that speech for the first time, and I felt that this was an
amazing road map to Xi’s worldview and to the goals of his governance. And I
think that’s turned out to be true.
Moriyasu: What were President Trump’s reactions to those insights?
Pottinger: Until then, the collective strategies and policies of free countries
toward China was one of changing China into a more liberal system. The
irony was, in a funny way, it was a regime-change strategy. Some people refer
to it as peaceful evolution, but at its heart was a core belief, almost a religious
faith, in the idea that engagement would fundamentally transform gover-
nance in China.
The Chinese Commu-
“The Chinese Communist Party did nist Party did very careful
very careful homework to study how homework to study how to
to avoid the fate of the Soviet Com- avoid the fate of the Soviet
Communist Party. And it
munist Party.”
did a very good job of pre-
tending and fooling foreign interlocutors, particularly policy elites and wealthy
businessmen, that it wanted to transform into a more liberal system. This was

the great sleight of hand, the great magic trick, that Beijing was able to pull
off where internally, the Communist Party knew that it would never change its
fundamental nature and the single-party system. But it sent deceptive signals
through a very elaborate con to outside interlocutors that it wanted to and
might actually soon trans-
form itself into a more
pluralistic system. “An attack on Taiwan would be a
We saw a baby shark grave, some would say existential,
and thought that we threat to Japanese sovereignty.”
could transform it into a
dolphin over time, to become a friendly sort of system. Instead, what we did
was we kept feeding the shark and the shark got bigger and bigger and big-
ger and bigger. And now we’re dealing with a formidable great white.
With a shark you put up a shark cage. The shark doesn’t take it personally.
It bumps into the cage. It respects those barriers.
Moriyasu: What does this mean for America’s allies, like Japan?
Pottinger: An Asia dominated by China will be a very unpleasant place for

Japan. Japan’s mission has two parts.
One is to ensure that China does not acquire coercive leverage over Japan’s
economy. Its other mission is to acquire sufficient capability to deter China
from military adventures in the region, starting with an attack on Taiwan.
An attack on Taiwan would be a grave, some would say existential, threat
to Japanese sovereignty. Japan has a major role to play in demonstrating
to Beijing that an attack on Taiwan would be a fatal misstep for Xi and the
Chinese Communist Party.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. Reprinted by permission
of Nikkei Asia. © 2023 Nikkei Inc. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

American Exceptionalism in a New Era: Rebuilding
the Foundation of Freedom and Prosperity, edited by
Thomas W. Gilligan. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
C H IN A A N D TAIWAN
The Meaning of
Taiwan
Defending Taiwan isn’t just about defending
territory. It’s about the fate of the democratic
world.
By Miles Maochun Yu
I
n the seventy-four years since
the founding of the People’s Key points
Republic of China, its leaders »» The Republic of China is a
truly open society in the Chinese-
have always seen the Republic speaking world, embracing liberty,
of China in Taiwan as a thorn in their pluralism, and self-determination.
Beijing sees this as a threat.
side. The Chinese Communist Party
»» Japan, Australia, South Korea,
(CCP) has wished for nothing more
the Philippines, and even NATO
than to remove this thorn and fulfill insist that what matters to Taiwan’s
its vision of communist revolution. defense matters to theirs, too.
During the Cold War, Beijing couched »» Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has
galvanized support for Taiwan.
these ambitions in the language of
“liberating” Taiwan. Now it strikes
chords of national unity and sings the new propaganda line of unification of
the motherland.
Miles Maochun Yu is the Robert Alexander Mercer Visiting Fellow at the Hoover
Institution. He is a participant in Hoover’s Working Group on the Role of Military
History in Contemporary Conflict and Hoover’s project on China’s Global Sharp
Power.

KEEPING WATCH: A girl views an exhibit aboard a Taiwanese warship in
Kaohsiung. The United States continues to commit to Taiwan’s defense
through the Taiwan Relations Act and a series of executive orders and policy
statements. [Annabelle Chih—Getty Images]
But in those seventy-four years, the Republic of China has undergone

a r evolution of its own: a revolution of freedom establishing a truly open
society in the Chinese-speaking world, embracing liberty, pluralism, and
self-determination. Because of its values, its geography, and its centrality
to global trade, this beacon of freedom in East Asia has emerged from its
humble beginnings to become a linchpin in the international order. Defend-
ing Taiwan, therefore, has become a global endeavor. Ensuring its security is
essential not only for the United States, the Indo-Pacific region, and Europe,
but for the propagation of democracy worldwide.
DEFENDERS
The United States, the world’s superpower since World War II, has always
seen Taiwan as a bulwark against communism; defending it now is as impor-
tant as defending West Berlin was in 1948 and 1961. Hence, Washington reso-
lutely opposes any military invasion of the island. Even since the termination
of their Mutual Defense Treaty in 1980, the United States has continued to
commit to Taiwan’s defense through the Taiwan Relations Act and a series
of executive orders and policy statements. That neither side of the Taiwan
Strait is allowed to use force to change the status quo, and that both sides of
the strait must endorse any prospective settlement, have been central tenets
of trilateral relations among Washington, Taipei, and Beijing since the 1970s.
There is no strategic ambiguity in US policy: every American president
since Jimmy Carter has left no doubt that he would use military force to stop
the Chinese Communist Party’s invasion of Taiwan. As the CCP has acceler-
ated its military preparations and intensified its rhetoric, the current presi-
dent, Joe Biden, has remained unequivocal in his vows for Taiwan’s defense
through military intervention, so central is the island to American interests.
Other Indo-Pacific nations have also prioritized Taiwan’s security. Lead-
ers of both Japan and Australia have insisted that what matters to Taiwan’s
defense matters to theirs, too. The Philippine government, in dispute with
China over territorial waters in the South China Sea, also casts a wary eye
on the CCP’s ambitions and is determined to stand with its American ally.
To that end, Manila has
granted crucial basing
The defense of Taiwan has become rights to the US mili-
a global endeavor. tary on several strategic
islands close to Taiwan
near the Bashi Channel and Taiwan Strait. South Korean President Yoon Suk
Yeol has stated that the Taiwan problem is by no means regional, but global.
Europe is also keenly concerned. The leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization—whose primary mission is European security—assert that
Taiwan’s defense should also be one of NATO’s obligations. NATO Secretary
General Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly stated that Taiwan’s security is
linked to NATO’s security. At a time when the CCP’s military threats are in
full swing, Stoltenberg has met several times with Japanese Prime Minister
Fumio Kishida to discuss Taiwan’s security. Josep Borrell, the chief of foreign
affairs for the European Union, also published an article in April proposing
that the navies of EU countries send warships on strategic patrols in the Tai-
wan Strait in demonstration of the EU’s commitment to the island’s defense.
In recent years, legislators and politicians from other important EU coun-
tries, including France, Germany, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Poland,
have also visited Taiwan in solidarity. Whatever appeasement rhetoric that
has managed to escape the lips of European leaders, such as French Presi-
dent Emmanuel Macron, has been criticized in European public forums.
These nations have all been galvanized by the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. Beijing’s threats share Vladimir Putin’s logic of aggression. For-
merly great empires, Russia and China are inspired by revanchist dreams

of their once-unified nations. This logic of aggression disregards the sov-
ereignty and independence of neighboring countries that happen to share
linguistic and cultural traditions with the aggressor. If this irredentist
worldview is not defeated, world peace cannot be guaranteed. From this
point of view, defending
Taiwan’s democracy is
undoubtedly of univer- Europe has been galvanized by the
sal significance. Russian invasion. Beijing’s threats
The CCP, despite its share Russia’s logic of aggression.
reputation for shrewd-
ness, has also inadvertently unified the democracies of the world by mak-
ing clear that its conflict against Taiwan is only the first battle in a fight for
global domination. Beijing’s high-tech military is preparing for global war.
Its oceangoing navy, global strike and deterrence force, space command and
control capabilities, and acquisition of numerous deep-sea ports worldwide
are not all reserved for an invasion of Taiwan. They reflect the CCP’s global
ambitions. Because of this, the world has become more aware that defending
Taiwan is essential to defending against China. No entity has done more than
the Chinese Communist Party to globalize the defense of Taiwan.
Yet in many ways, it is only natural that Taiwan’s defense be international
in scope. Despite its tiny land area, the island is an outsize player in the world
economy, crucial to global supply chains for semiconductors and biomedicine.
It is located at a strategic chokepoint in key global trade routes abutting the
first and second island chains of the Western Pacific, routes that China covets.
If Beijing takes Taiwan, it will control commercial traffic through the South
China Sea, the East China Sea, and even the Strait of Malacca. This would be
an untenable outcome for leaders in Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul, for whom
defending Taiwan means safeguarding domestic economies reliant on interna-
tional trade.
Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, said as much at the European Parliament
last spring when he insisted, “Taiwan is clearly part of our geostrategic
perimeter to guaran-
tee peace. . . . It is not
only for a moral reason No entity has done more than the
that an action against Chinese Communist Party to
Taiwan must necessar- globalize the defense of Taiwan.
ily be rejected. It is also
because it would be, in economic terms, extremely serious for us, because
Taiwan has a strategic role in the production of the most advanced
semiconductors.” If Taipei falls, the world’s most advanced technologies
could quickly be at risk.
LIGHT OF DEMOCRACY
Yet much more than tech is at stake. The preservation of the universal
values of freedom and self-determination and the promotion of democracy
as a viable political model
hinge on the defense
If Taipei falls, the world’s most of Taiwan. In the Asia-
advanced technologies could Pacific region, the most
quickly be at risk. important trend of the
past several decades has
been that region’s gradual move toward democratization. As several authori-
tarian regimes of the Cold War collapsed in the wave of protests organized
with the support of the United States—beginning in 1986 with the overthrow
of the Marcos regime by the “People Power” revolution in the Philippines—
countries of the region began to see a future in democracy. South Korea, long
under dictatorship, became a strong, proud, modern democratic country.
The people of Taiwan embraced this vision too, making their country
a beacon for all of East Asia. The few remaining communist regimes that
take their cues from Beijing consider this beacon a threat. The democratic
practices of the people of Taiwan also inspire many of the 1.4 billion mainland
Chinese under the rule of the Communist Party.
China’s communist dictatorship reckons that its people would be easier to
control without the inspiration of their Taiwanese brethren. They know that
Taiwanese dreams are the dreams of their own people, too. For this reason,
as much as any, the millions in Taiwan who harbor aspirations to live perpet-
ually in freedom’s light will never be alone in their homeland’s defense.
Reprinted by permission of the Taipei Times (www.taipeitimes.com).

© 2023 Taipei Times. All rights reserved.

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

IN D IA
Time to Shift out

of Neutral
India is finding the limits of nonalignment.
A strong alliance with the United States offers
a better future for New Delhi, particularly as
China rises.
By Sumit Ganguly and Dinsha Mistree
T
he US-India relationship has not
Key points
lived up to its potential, and the
» With US support, India
United States must shoulder
can reassert control over
some of the blame for this failure. South Asia and emerge as
Successive US administrations ignored India’s a strong pole of regional
order in the Indo-Pacific.
warnings about negotiating with the Taliban in
» Even within India’s own
Afghanistan, and the Biden administration has borders, China represents
continued to pursue a relationship with India’s a threat to New Delhi’s
strategic autonomy.
rival Pakistan even after US priorities in Asia
» The United States is,
have shifted toward dealing with China. Wash- and will remain, the only
ington has also flubbed more routine diplomatic global power capable of
playing this supportive
issues such as visa processing, with record
role for India.
backlogs in US consulates in India that only
Sumit Ganguly is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and distinguished

professor of political science and Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations
at Indiana University-Bloomington. Dinsha Mistree is a research fellow at the
Hoover Institution, where he manages the Huntington Program on Strengthening
US-India Relations.
DIALOGUE: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken listens to Indian Prime
Minister Narendra Modi at the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum in
Washington in June. New Delhi’s relations with Moscow occupy a
shrinking portion of Indian foreign policy, but India continues to harbor
misgivings about a genuine partnership with the United States. [James Pan—
US State Department]
recently ebbed. And it took more than two years for the US Senate to confirm
former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India, hampering
Washington’s ability to advance its interests in New Delhi.
For their part, US officials seem to be waking up to the promises—and
the limits—of a strong relationship with India. It is unclear whether the
same can be said for Indian leaders. New Delhi continues to harbor a variety
of misgivings about forging a genuine partnership with the United States.
Despite ongoing clashes at the disputed border with China, India has resisted
embracing its security partnership with Australia, Japan, and the United
States—known as the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—designed
to protect the Indo-Pacific from Chinese aggression. At the same time, both
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam
Jaishankar, have been praised at home for their staunch refusal to condemn
the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This stance of neutrality, they have argued,
best serves India’s interests. Since the invasion in February 2022, India has
undoubtedly benefited from a steady supply of cheap Russian oil as the
Kremlin has scrambled to secure alternative buyers for its energy commodi-
ties. But New Delhi’s relations with Moscow occupy a shrinking portion of

Indian foreign policy. In the long run, Russia’s growing dependence on China
will make it an unreliable partner.
India rightly wants to guarantee itself strategic autonomy as it continues
to rise in the world. But such a vision will not be fully realized if India con-
tinues to imagine that it can indefinitely play to all sides. Nonalignment may
work in specific instances, but it will not serve India well in the long term.
Instead, India should forge a strong partnership with the United States. With
US support, India can reassert its control over South Asia and emerge as a
strong pole of regional order in the Indo-Pacific.
DATED THINKING
Most of India’s concerns about the United States hark back to another era in
global politics. New Delhi, it seems, is caught in a time warp. Key members of
India’s foreign policy elite remain fixated on the United States’ relationship with
Pakistan during the Cold War and fear its renewal. This belief, although perhaps
understandable given the record of US policy toward South Asia, is nevertheless
flawed: the United States
and Pakistan have never
been and are not now as New Delhi, it seems, is caught in a
close as Indian policy mak- time warp.
ers tend to imagine them to
be. It is to the credit of the Trump administration that the United States finally
called Pakistan’s bluff and terminated all military aid.
Since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, some in the Biden administra-
tion have proposed a limited strategic relationship with Pakistan focused
on counterterrorism. But Washington’s efforts to secure this new partner-
ship with Islamabad have been halting at best. Although some US foreign
policy thinkers still support Pakistan over India, the Beltway establishment
is finally recognizing India’s primacy in South Asia. There is little reason to
believe that the United States, whether under this administration or a future
one, would want to resurrect its old alliance with Pakistan, especially if it
comes at the expense of a partnership with India.
India’s supremacy in its neighborhood is not challenged by Pakistan or the
United States but instead by China. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka,
and even within India’s own borders, China represents an existential threat
to New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. Indian and Chinese soldiers have massed
along the disputed mountainous border between the two countries, with
bloody skirmishes breaking out sporadically. India currently possesses nei-
ther the domestic military capabilities (what scholars of international security
refer to as “internal balancing”) nor the foreign partnerships (“external bal-
ancing”) to guarantee its security interests and protect its northern borders
from the Chinese incursions that have been accelerating since 2019.
Some within India’s security establishment continue to believe that Rus-
sia may yet serve as a possible bulwark against China. These expectations
stem from the Soviet Union’s role during the Cold War and India’s continu-
ing dependence on Russia for defense equipment and spare parts. Recent
developments, however, suggest that this hope is rather fanciful. Russia,
preoccupied with its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, has already failed to
deliver some military supplies that it had contracted to provide India. And
New Delhi’s assiduously cultivated neutral position on the invasion has not
prevented Moscow from turning to Beijing, India’s long-term competitor and
adversary. Russia has grown only closer to and more dependent on China
since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. It
simply cannot play the role India wants it to in checking China.
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
If India cannot rely on Russia to serve as a counterweight to China, might it
be able to turn to other emerging and middle powers? India has strong rela-
tionships with several countries in Europe, but these countries don’t have the
diplomatic, economic, or military clout to guarantee India’s security inter-
ests. India cannot count on European countries or the European Union writ
large to assist it in containing China. And its ties with other Asian powers,
including Iran and Japan,
are of limited or no use in
India’s “external balancing” the context of its competi-
options—beyond support from the tion with China. Likewise,
United States—are quite limited. other emerging powers,
such as Argentina and
Brazil, are unlikely to choose India over China in the coming years. Bluntly
stated, India’s external balancing options—beyond support from the United
States—are quite limited.
India’s much-vaunted commitment to maintaining its neutrality is no
longer a viable option. This approach poorly serves India’s interests in
fending off the political and economic advance of China in South Asia and
the broader region. Without a reliable external partner that can help India
by sharing intelligence, shoring up its grossly inadequate defense capabili-
ties, and cooperating with it in other security areas, New Delhi will remain
woefully exposed to Beijing’s machinations.

The United States is and will remain the only global power capable of play-
ing this role. It has a compelling interest in keeping China, its principal chal-
lenger and rival, at bay. To that end, its interests clearly dovetail with those
of India. Across recent administrations, Washington has made repeated
efforts to persuade India that these overlapping interests make it an almost
ideal security partner in Asia. In 2016, the Obama administration declared
India to be a “major defense partner,” thereby better enabling defense sales.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, New Delhi and Washington signed the
Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement, further strengthening bilateral
military cooperation. And under President Joe Biden, the two parties have
agreed on the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, which will
promote cooperation in high-technology areas.
But what New Delhi urgently needs to realize is that there is a narrow
window to secure American support. As the political scientist Ashley Tellis
makes clear in his recent essay in Foreign Affairs, the United States can-
not possibly afford to expend both domestic capital and critical diplomatic
resources to continue to meet India’s needs without some form of tangible
reciprocity from New Delhi. By limiting its engagement with the United
States—while also pursuing deals with US adversaries such as Russia—India
is fundamentally compromising its long-term strategic autonomy rather than
guaranteeing it.
Equivocal Indian responses to the United States will, almost invariably,
lead Washington to simply bolster security ties with other partners and
allies, such as Australia and Japan. India, although strategically significant,
cannot continue to sit on the fence; to ensure peace and stability in Asia, it
has to throw in its lot with the United States. Indian vacillation will convince
US officials that despite their best efforts, New Delhi is either incapable of
mustering the requisite political will to build a long-term security partner-
ship with Washington or reluctant to do so.
BOTH NATI ONS BENEFIT

There is no doubt that both sides have in the past missed vital opportuni-
ties to transform the relationship. The exigencies of domestic politics, the
imperatives of the Cold War, and fundamentally different policy orientations
in both capitals prevented them from forging a strong, enduring partnership.
Despite these errors, current circumstances are perhaps the most propitious
for the future of the bilateral relationship. New Delhi, now more than ever,
needs to shed its hesitation about adopting a pragmatic and forward-looking
approach in its dealings with the United States.
The benefits that could accrue to both sides from a strong partnership
are considerable. India could build up its domestic defense industrial base,
access the most sophisti-
cated defense technologies,
Closer defense and security ties and gradually reduce its
with the United States would help dependence on Russia, an
India ward off the inexorable threat increasingly unreliable
from China. defense supplier. Most
important, closer defense
and security ties with the United States would enable it to ward off the inexo-
rable threat from China.
A closer security partnership could also have significant spillover effects in
other arenas. A secure, stable, and confident India would become a more attrac-
tive destination for American investment. At a time when the United States
is increasingly concerned about the viability of important supply chains, India
could become an important manufacturing hub for a variety of components in
various industrial products. The United States, in turn, would be able to count
on India as a bulwark against China’s growing assertiveness across Asia. Fur-
thermore, Washington could be in a better position to eventually elicit and count
on Indian diplomatic sup-
port on fraught issues such
India could become an important as the future of Taiwan.
manufacturing hub for a variety of Over the past few decades,
industrial components. several US administrations
have prioritized the relation-
ship with India despite considerable diffidence on the part of New Delhi. Instead
of remaining content with incremental and fitful improvements in the bilateral
relationship, New Delhi must trust Washington and move forward in construct-
ing a multifaceted partnership that fosters peace and stability in Asia.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com).

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A FR IC A
Data to Live By
Investment in Africa has long been scattershot
and ineffective. The reason: a lack of good data
about how the investment would pay off. The
World Bank can fix that problem.
By Jendayi E. Frazer and Peter Blair Henry
E
very few years, the US government launches a new initiative
to boost economic growth in Africa. In bold letters and with
bolder promises, the White House announces that public-private
partnerships hold the key to growth on the continent. It pledges
to make these partnerships a cornerstone of its Africa policy, but time and
again it fails to deliver.
A decade after President Barack Obama rolled out Power Africa—his
attempt to solve Africa’s energy crisis by mobilizing private capital—half of
the continent’s sub-Saharan population remains without access to electricity.
In 2018, the Trump administration proclaimed that its Prosper Africa initia-
tive would counter China’s debt-trap diplomacy and “expand African access
to business finance.” Five years on, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Zambia
are in financial distress and pleading for debt relief from Beijing and other
creditors. Yet the Biden administration is once more touting the potential
of public-private investment in Africa, organizing high-profile visits, and
Jendayi E. Frazer is the Peter J. and Frances Duignan Distinguished Visiting

Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is also an adjunct senior fellow for Africa
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Peter Blair Henry is the Class
of 1984 Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford’s
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and dean emeritus of
New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.
holding leadership summits to prove that this time, the United States really
is “all in” on the continent.
There is a reason these efforts have yielded so little: goodwill tours, clever
slogans, and a portfolio of G-7 pet projects in Africa do not amount to a sound
investment pitch. Potential investors, public and private, need to know which
projects in which countries are economically and financially worthwhile.
Above all, that requires current and comprehensive data on the expected
returns that investment in infrastructure in the developing world can yield.
At present, investors lack this information, so they pass.
If the United States wants to “build back better” in Africa—to expand
access to business finance and encourage countries on the continent to
choose sustainable and high-quality foreign investment over predatory lend-
ing from China and Russia—it needs to give investors access to better data.

Fortunately, Washington
has just the right person
for the job: Ajay Banga,
whom the White House
picked to lead the
World Bank. Banga
knows the value of
the bank’s vast
but underused
repository of
data. In his
past work
as the
president and CEO of Mastercard, he built public-private partnerships that
offered people around the globe better access to the banking system—and he
did so by relying on data collected by the World Bank.
Banga should replicate that approach and marshal the bank’s extensive
data on developing countries’ electric grids, roads, ports, and railways.
Using those data, the
World Bank’s experts
The World Bank should estimate the should estimate the rates
rates of return on potential infrastruc- of return on potential
ture projects and give those data to infrastructure projects
investors. and make those estimates
available to investors.
Doing so would not require so much as an additional nickel from Congress,
and it would create the foundation currently lacking for data-driven invest-
ments that are profitable, efficient, and sustainable.
A DESPERATE NEED
The stakes of US economic policy in Africa are as high as the outlook is chal-
lenging. A decade of unproductive loans, a pandemic, and the fallout from the
war in Ukraine have left their mark on many African economies. Their gov-
ernments now face the daunting tasks of improving energy and food security
while also reducing dangerously heavy debt burdens. They must accomplish
all this even as they try to combat climate change and navigate rising ten-
sions among superpowers vying for the globe’s natural resources.
To meet these challenges, African governments must, among other things,
address an acute shortage of infrastructure. Only 43 percent of the conti-
nent’s rural population, for instance, has access to an all-weather road. What
little reliable infrastructure that exists is coming under further strain as
the continent undergoes a demographic explosion. Unlike the graying and
shrinking societies of the developed world, Africa is young and rapidly grow-
ing. Nigeria’s population, already the seventh-largest in the world, is project-
ed to expand by almost 3 percent per year until 2030.
The upside of that population growth is a booming supply of labor. Add the
right combination of power, railways, roads, and ports—plus the right poli-
cies and governance structures for using that infrastructure efficiently—and
higher economic growth will follow. That growth, in turn, is the most reliable
way to reduce debt burdens and increase food security.
As for energy shortages and climate change, the most efficient way to address
both concerns is to reduce the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP

produced. This, too, requires better infrastructure. Since most GDP is gener-
ated in cities, and because the United Nations forecasts that two billion people,
most of them Africans, will migrate from rural to urban areas by the end of
the decade, building and connecting cities with climate-friendly infrastructure
would improve energy security while also helping tackle the climate crisis.
BUILD THE DATA, TOO

None of this will happen, however, without public-private partnerships that
channel rich countries’ capital toward African economies. Multilateral devel-
opment banks have known this for decades. But their efforts on this front,
much like those of successive US administrations, have been characterized
by hyperbole and little follow-through.
In 2015, when the World Bank launched its own campaign on the issue,
in partnership with several other multilateral institutions, it claimed that
private investors could alleviate infrastructure shortages, achieve the United
Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and make money all at once. The
campaign’s “Billions to Trillions” tagline has since also been used by the
Biden administration and the G-7.
But there has been little to no uptake on the trillion-dollar pitch because
prospective investors have had nowhere to turn for reliable, up-to-date
information. The only explicit, comprehensive source of estimates of the
returns on infrastruc-
ture investments in
developing countries— Add the right combination of power,
specifically, investments railways, roads, and ports—plus good
in roads and electricity— policies and governance—and
is a dusty white paper economic growth will follow.
commissioned by the
World Bank in the year 2000, based on data from 1985. The bank’s leader-
ship has failed, inexcusably, to update and disseminate these estimates ever
since.
The good news is that the World Bank is unwittingly sitting on the neces-
sary information. The returns in its original 2000 white paper were esti-
mated using the bank’s own data. Given his track record of leading with data
at Mastercard, Banga is ideally positioned to inspire and drive his new col-
leagues to produce an updated set of estimates. Once independently vetted
and validated, the new estimates should be published in a format that is free,
user-friendly, and easily accessible. Governments and private investors, such
as pension funds, asset managers, and sovereign wealth funds, could then
make better decisions about which projects in Africa—and in the developing
world more broadly—are both socially beneficial and privately profitable.
To gather, verify, and disseminate the data is not enough. Stakeholders also
need an effective way to parse it—to distinguish those countries in which the
World Bank’s threefold promise of better, sustainable, and profitable infra-
structure is realistic from those in which it is not. A forthcoming article in
the Journal of Economic Literature, co-written by one of us (Henry), articulates
a practical approach by borrowing a concept from Banga’s own corporate
finance wheelhouse: the hurdle rate. When deciding whether to invest in a
given infrastructure project, corporate investors assess whether the project’s
expected return exceeds the return they could earn by investing their money
elsewhere, such as the stock market. If it clears that hurdle, so to speak, then
investing makes sense.
Investment in a public infrastructure project in a poor country has two
hurdles to clear: the expected return must exceed stock market returns both
within the same country and in the rich countries from which the financ-
ing would flow. Only if a given project clears both hurdle rates will investing
private savings from a rich country be profitable and socially worthwhile.
Applying the dual-hurdle test to the World Bank’s existing 1985 data reveals
a sobering reality. Contrary to the common refrain that poor countries abound
with efficient and profitable infrastructure investment opportunities, only
seven of the fifty-three states included in the bank’s white paper cleared the two
hurdles for both roads and electricity. There were, however, twenty-one coun-
tries that cleared both hurdles for roads. And in those twenty-one countries, the
average return on roads was ten times as high as the average return on private
capital in rich countries.
Moreover, the extreme
The infrastructure problem has shortage of infrastructure
ramifications for rich and developing that persists in the devel-
nations alike. oping world—along with
improvements in economic
policies and governance since 1985—suggests that returns could be even higher
today. But without updating the data and the estimates, it is impossible to know.
GET GOING
Free, user-friendly data on expected infrastructure returns would empower
all the relevant stakeholders. African leaders could prioritize infrastructure
projects with the best prospects for driving economic growth. Private inves-
tors could choose which infrastructure projects to finance. And members

of African civil society could hold their leaders accountable if those leaders
choose to pursue projects that are not economically sound.
Getting this right is critical. How—and how quickly—the infrastructure
problem is addressed has ramifications for rich and developing nations
alike. Without efficient, climate-friendly infrastructure, the demographic
and rural-urban shifts in Africa will lead to overcrowding and accelerating
carbon dioxide emissions. Without infrastructure as a solid foundation for
growth, governments in the region will struggle to generate jobs for their
growing populations, driving an ever-greater exodus, through legal and other
channels, of workers to the United States and other rich countries. Lending
to the wrong projects will send vulnerable countries further down a path of
default, leaving both Africa and the global economy worse off.
Banga has his work cut out for him at the World Bank. But the institution’s
new leader has a chance to unleash market financing for ecologically sound
infrastructure that generates inclusive growth, averts Africa’s looming debt
crisis, slows climate change, and curbs China’s hegemony. The bridge Banga
can build—from slogans to a data-driven reality—is truly worth building.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com).

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AFRICA
A Wider Shade
of Terror
Jihadist violence in the Sahel represents a local
tragedy—and a geopolitical crisis. Why China,
Russia, and the United States all care.
By Russell A. Berman
I
n the wake of the 9/11 attacks, US foreign policy understandably
shifted focus toward counterterrorism and a range of associated ques-
tions around Islamism. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ensued, in a
period soon to be marked as well by the tragedies of the Arab Spring,
especially the ongoing human rights catastrophe that the Assad regime
inflicts on Syria. Throughout this era, the touchstones of policy were terror-
ism, counterterrorism, and state-sponsored terrorism.
Yet when the 2017 National Security Strategy was issued, the primacy of
terrorism ceded ground to the challenges of great-power competition. The
prospects for different kinds of war developed in the face of a different kind
of enemy. Instead of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Russia and China emerged
as the new adversaries, particularly in light of Russia’s 2014 annexation of
Crimea and the Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. Recognizing
China as the key adversary made it appear prudent to draw down forces in
Russell A. Berman is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-chair of

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

the Middle East while “pivoting” out of the region and turning instead to the
presumed site of future confrontations: the western Pacific. That conclusion,
however, has proven to be deeply flawed in the spectrum of evolving prob-
lems throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
This history of a paradigm shift—from counterterrorism to great-power
competition—is too simplistic. The former never fully disappeared. It contin-
ues to exist side by side
with the great-power
model because the threat Economic emigration amplifies the
of Islamist terrorism has movement of refugees. Thus the
not vanished. Meanwhile, Sahel fuels domestic political crises
it is foolish to imagine in Europe.
that the rising chal-
lenge of China means that the United States should reposition its forces by
abandoning old theaters to regroup into the Pacific. While the most salient
competitions with today’s adversaries involve Ukraine and Taiwan, it makes
little sense to give up historical advantages in the Middle East in the name of
facing threats elsewhere.
COUNTERTERRORISM CONTINUES
This overlay of discrete frameworks—counterterrorism and great-power
competition at the same time—applies especially in the Sahel. This is a
region of poor, underdeveloped countries, often subject to problematic
governance that exacerbates a sense of grievance among the population. An
increasingly harsh climate undermines the local economy and contributes to
emigration flows. The United States has valid reasons to be concerned about
the scope of human misery in the Sahel, including violations of human rights.
Meanwhile, weak economies in the region point to another policy challenge
for the United States and the West. Because economic emigration amplifies
the movement of refugees into Europe, where an anti-immigrant backlash
has upset the political landscapes, the Sahel contributes to the domestic
political crises in many European countries. (Witness the rise of the National
Rally in France, formerly known as the National Front, where opposition
to immigration goes hand in hand with anti-Americanism.) In addition, the
fragility of the Sahel’s societies contributes to a deep disaffection that breeds
terrorism. Local jihadist groups, whether on their own or connected to larger
networks of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, continue to pose a threat to
Western interests and may gain the capacity to initiate attacks in Europe or
the United States. Counterterrorism policies therefore remain relevant.
Nonetheless, counterterrorism alone is an insufficient paradigm to
grasp the significance of Islamism in the Sahel, which is caught in a
matrix of complicated international relations in the age of great-power

competition. Europe, Russia, and China are all involved, posing a com-
plex challenge to US foreign policy. European countries want to stabilize
the region to minimize refugee emigration to Europe. Russia is trying to
expand its strategic footprint across the African continent. China, too,
is expanding its economic influence in Africa, with an interest in natural
resources, especially energy and minerals. At stake in the
Sahel are confrontations fed by indigenous problems but
with ramifications far beyond the local context.
Recent French military intervention in the
region began in 2013 in response to a
request from the government of
Mali and a UN resolution,
with the goal of
defending the country against Islamist militants. The campaign was initially
successful, expanded its regional scope, and came to involve other European
countries, as well as significant US support. Yet popular hostility to France,
the former colonial power,
grew, and the 2021 coup
Russia is trying to expand its strategic d’état in Bamako under-
footprint across Africa, while China mined relations with
expands its economic influence. France. Violence in the
region has grown: there
were 4,839 casualties in 2022, a 70 percent increase from 2021. France with-
drew its troops in 2022 and in November, French President Macron declared
the end of the operation. Despite this defeat in Mali, France and Europe more
broadly continue to have an important interest in trying to achieve stability
in the region because of their economic interests and in order to forestall
greater migration. About three thousand French troops are still stationed in
the Sahel region, in countries including Niger and Chad, to further an anti-
jihadist mission.
While France has depended on US support in the Sahel, it is noteworthy
that in April 2023, Macron argued against Europe’s serving as a “vassal” to
the United States with regard to the defense of Taiwan, thereby distancing
himself from supporting Washington in the competition with China. While
the remarks were no doubt an effort by Macron to distract from domestic
political problems, they also indicated the recurring French vision of autono-
my from the United States in international affairs.
Europe’s security
interests in the Sahel are
Europe’s security interests in the significantly greater than
Sahel are significantly greater than those of the United States.
those of the United States. A reasonable American
approach would link US
assistance to European efforts in the Sahel and European cooperation with
the United States in other regions. The price of US support should include
Europe’s commitment to supporting the United States toward China.
RUSSIA INTRUDES
American security concerns in the Sahel do not involve immigration as much
as do French security concerns. From a US vantage point, the key issues
are the incubation of terrorism, but even more so, great-power competition,
especially with Russia. Thanks to the intervention of the Wagner Group,

Russia has in effect displaced France as the key outside player in Mali, simul-
taneously wielding considerable influence in both Sudan and Libya. This Rus-
sian renaissance in Africa, reminiscent of the Soviet era, echoes the re-entry
of Russia into the Middle East, a transformation that occurred under the
Obama administration, when it accommodated the Russian role in Syria. It
remains one of the worst legacies of his presidency.
Framing the politics of the Sahel in terms of the rivalry between the
United States and Russia introduces a geopolitical perspective and raises
the stakes considerably. Jihadism in the region is a source of local instability,
giving expression to local grievances, but it also opens the door to Russian
intrusion, a new front in a grand global competition. A successful US foreign
policy should mobilize European engagement in the region, while providing
appropriate support, in order to push back both against jihadism and against
Russia.
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AFRICA
ISIS Can Pivot,

Too
Pressured in Iraq and Syria, jihadist extremists
have found a new welcome in Africa and Central
Asia.
By Cole Bunzel
F
or the past several years, the jihadi
terrorist group known as the Islamic Key points
State (IS) has been in decline in its » The Islamic State
has been hobbled in
original territorial base of Iraq and Iraq and Syria but is
Syria. Though continuing to posture as a state- spreading in parts of
Africa and Central
building enterprise—indeed, as the restored
Asia.
caliphate whose caliph is the ruler of all the
» IS’s “caliphate” idea
world’s Muslims—it has failed to establish lives on, especially in
control anywhere in the region since early 2019. Africa. Al-Qaeda also
has managed to main-
Where IS survives there it is an insurgency with tain a presence there.
cells that carry out assassinations, ambushes, » Investing in African
and bombings of security forces and civilian security is a way to
avoid terrorist plots
targets. In this sense the group remains alive, against US citizens and
but the momentum is not with the insurgents, as territory.
recent reporting has shown.
Cole Bunzel is a Hoover Fellow and contributes to Hoover’s Herbert and Jane
Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He is the editor
of the blog Jihadica (jihadica.com).

Emblematic of the decline is the failure of IS this year to launch its annual
Ramadan offensive in Iraq—a tradition going back almost two decades
to Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi’s Al-Qaeda in Iraq. In Syria, meanwhile, the IS
leadership has been under relentless assault from US Central Command
(CENTCOM), which seems to announce a special operation targeting a
senior IS leader almost monthly. Syria has ceased to be a reliable haven for
IS leaders, including the “caliph,” of whom two were killed last year. The
pseudonymous Abu al-Husayn al-Husayni al-Quarashi, who was announced
as the new caliph in November 2022, was killed in 2023.
Where IS has succeeded in the past several years, however, is in spread-
ing its ideology to the more far-flung areas of Africa and Central Asia, where
thousands of militants have taken up the cause of the caliphate, to the great
detriment of local populations. While one may question these local militants’
fidelity to IS as a centralized organization, the group does well in project-
ing organizational cohesion in its propaganda. In late 2022 and early 2023,
for instance, hundreds of militants in these locales were pictured pledging
fealty to the new caliph, despite being in complete ignorance of his iden-
tity or qualifications. The caliphate idea lives on, and especially in Africa,
which together with Afghanistan features the most dangerous and active IS
affiliates.
A FRANCHISE MODEL FOR VIOLENCE

These IS affiliates are given the name of “provinces” in keeping with the orig-
inal expansionary model introduced by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi back in 2014.
The smallest of the so-called “provinces” is the affiliate in Somalia, which
has some two hundred fighters and claims attacks only occasionally but has
proved effective as a
financial hub. (In Janu-
ary, a US special forces Syria is no longer a reliable haven for
operation killed Bilal IS leaders, including the “caliph,” of
al-Sudani, an IS leader whom two were killed this past year.
described by Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin as “responsible for fostering the growing presence
of ISIS in Africa and for funding the group’s operations worldwide, including
in Afghanistan.”) To the north, in Egypt, is the network of militants known as
the “Sinai Province,” which remains an active insurgency with hundreds of
fighters targeting Egyptian security forces.
It is farther south, in the Sahel region and in the Lake Chad basin of north-
eastern Nigeria, where IS has its most significant presence in Africa. These

are the so-called “Sahel Province” and “West Africa Province,” respectively.
The latter, which grew out of the once Al-Qaeda–aligned Boko Haram, boasts
some five thousand fighters and controls broad swathes of rural territory,
where it levies taxes, provides security, and imposes a harsh interpretation
of Islamic law. It frequently clashes with Nigerian military and African Union
forces seeking to suppress it.
The Sahel Province is a newer and smaller entity, having once been classi-
fied as a unit within the West Africa Province but since March 2022 emerg-
ing as a “province” in its own right. Based along the border between Mali
and Niger, the Sahel branch of IS formally began operations in 2019 with
assaults on security forces and mass atrocities carried out against per-
ceived heretics. While numbers of fighters are difficult to estimate, the Sahel
Province has been on an upswing in recent years, and especially since the
departure of French forces from Mali in mid-2022. As one recent analysis of
the group’s operations concludes, “IS Sahel is in the process of establishing a
pseudo-state encompassing the rural areas stretching from Gao in the north
to Dori in the south and from N’Tillit in the west to the border area of Tahoua
in the east.”
Beyond the Sahel and northeastern Nigeria, IS has also established itself in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Mozambique, where local jihadi
networks have rebranded as IS provinces (the “Central Africa Province” and
“Mozambique Province,” respectively).
WEAPONIZING INFORMATION
The activities of all these “provinces” are proudly trumpeted in IS pro-
paganda, and indeed it is team Africa that features most regularly and
prominently in IS’s centralized media network online. On the messaging
platform Telegram, for instance, where IS media are curated and distrib-
uted by semiofficial channels, most of the content these days relates to the
African “provinces.” On May 16, for example, the IS media feed included a
report on a double suicide attack carried out against African Union forces
in northeastern Nigeria and photos of an attack on a government outpost
in Beni in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The feed for the following day
featured photos of IS fighters in combat with the Nigerian army, photos of
IS fighters seizing control of a town in northeastern Mali and distributing
pamphlets on IS’s ideology, and four further claims of attacks in Nigeria.
The West Africa and Sahel “provinces” also regularly produce videos
highlighting their activities. A video from the Sahel affiliate in April showed
footage of battles against various enemies, executions, and the carrying out
of some of the hudud penalties in Islamic law, namely stonings and amputa-
tions. At one point a narrator proclaims the IS presence in the Sahel as an
“admission” of the West’s failure to destroy the caliphate project in Iraq
and Syria.
Similar sentiments appear in IS’s weekly Arabic newspaper, every issue of
which includes an editorial on a particular theme. Several of these have high-
lighted the importance of Africa in keeping the caliphate project alive, even
stating that Africa has replaced Iraq and Syria as the place where tamkin,
or territorial control, has been established and thus to where Muslims ought
to perform hijra (“emigration”). “The scenes that we are seeing today in the
land of Africa are the same that we were seeing before in Iraq and Syria,”
one editorial stated last year, going on to call on the faithful to make hijra to
Africa, “for today it is a land of hijra and jihad.”
Thus far, the call does not appear to have been heeded. We have not
seen the thousands of extremists flocking to Africa that we saw going

to Iraq and Syria in 2014 after the declaration of the caliphate. Perhaps
the semi-arid landscapes of rural Mali and the Sambisa Forest do not
evoke the caliphal dream quite like the Islamic heartlands of the Fertile
Crescent. Nonetheless, the prospect of increasingly robust IS territo-
ries in Africa is a strong likelihood, and one that the West ought to take
seriously.
IS, however, does not hold a monopoly over the African jihadi scene.
Al-Qaeda has also managed to maintain a presence on the continent. Much
as with IS, the central leadership of Al-Qaeda has been battered and bruised
to the point of marginality, but its affiliates in Africa have helped prop up the
brand name. Al-Qaeda has three active African affiliates, the most significant
being Al-Shabaab in Somalia, which according to the United Nations has
seven thousand to ten
thousand fighters and
generates $100 million to Sahel-based jihadi groups also fight
$150 million per year in each other, in a war fueled by
tax revenue in the vast religious animosity.
areas under its control.
Al-Qaeda’s oldest affiliate in Africa is the Algeria-based Al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghrib (AQIM), which has been operationally constrained in recent
years despite succeeding in sponsoring the third Al-Qaeda affiliate in Africa,
Jama‘at Nusrat al-Islam wa’l-Muslimin (JNIM).
JNIM, based in the Sahel, was announced in 2017 as the union of four
Mali-based extremist groups. It is more powerful than the IS affiliate in
the Sahel, holding more territory and carrying out three times as many
operations. It also proceeds with a lighter touch as regards its use of
violence and imposition of Islamic law and has even sought at times to
negotiate for strategic advantage with the state and nonstate entities it
considers heretical. Since 2019, JNIM and its IS rival have fought each
other in a war fueled by religious animosity, with JNIM branding IS
fighters as “Kharijite” extremists and IS describing JNIM as “the apostate
Al-Qaeda militia.”
AN EXPANDING THREAT
The rising specter of jihadism in Africa is no doubt concerning, and mitigat-
ing the threat ought to be a priority for US policy makers. To be sure, most
of these movements are focused on local objectives (i.e., the defeat of local
regimes and their replacement with Islamic states). Yet the threat to the
West, including the United States, is real. Even if just a small percentage of a
local jihadi group’s efforts are devoted to international acts of terrorism, this
creates the potential for a devastating terrorist attack that could derail US
foreign policy, distracting us from the important challenges of a rising China
and revisionist Russia.
As AFRICOM commander General Michael Langley recently noted in
testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, “As [these jihadi
groups in Africa] grow,
the risk of terrorist plots
Weak, poorly governed states against US citizens,
have allowed for the emergence embassies, and ultimately
of u
ngoverned spaces. The jihadis the homeland are likely
exploit this. to rise. . . . In In the late
twentieth century, Al-
Qaeda grew unchecked in Africa, culminating in the 1998 bombings of our
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.” Investing in African security, therefore,
ought to be of paramount importance, all the more so as Russia and China
seek to compete with the West by offering their own services in this and
other regards.
There are no easy solutions, and all the “provinces” and affiliates
described must be approached in their own particular contexts. This could,
in the case of JNIM, include a mix of counterterrorism pressure and nego-
tiation with the aim of peeling off those militants less committed to global
jihad than others. With the French departure, however, the window for such
an approach has likely closed. The principal means of constraining these
groups must be military force, together with support for good governance
and institution building, which are poorly lacking in many parts of Africa.
It is weak and poorly governed states that have allowed for the emergence
of ungoverned spaces that the jihadis exploit. The government of Burkina
Faso, for instance, controls only about 40 percent of the state’s territory.
The matter of military coups d’état has also complicated matters for the
West. After two coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, French forces departed
the country after a nine-year deployment, leaving Russia’s Wagner Group
mercenaries to fill the void.
In Africa, the United States finds itself at the intersection of counterter-
rorism and strategic competition. It must find a way to navigate both. After
the coups, Mali may be an impractical partner, but the West can still hold
the tide in the Sahel, and elsewhere in Africa, by committing itself to local
and regional counterterrorism missions that can, at a minimum, slow these
groups’ momentum.

Only through “relentless suppression and ultimate pacification,” as General
Langley put it, will the local peoples and international community be made
safe. That is what the United States and its partners aimed for in Iraq and
Syria, at great cost and with unbounded commitment. They should aim for
the same in Africa as well.

explores the contemporary dilemmas of the greater Middle East (www.
hoover.org/publications/caravan). © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the

Disruptive Strategies: The Military Campaigns of
Ascendant Powers and Their Rivals, edited by
David L. Berkey. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit
AFRICA
Governance First
Coups are unraveling many US efforts to bring
security and democracy to Africa. It’s time to
emphasize political stability over weapons.
By Alexander Noyes
B
oth terrorism and coups are on the rise in the Sahel, a troubling
trend that the United States should be working to reverse. To do
this, Washington needs to ramp up support aimed at improving
security governance, professionalizing militaries, and strongly
sanctioning all forms of military takeovers in the region. This will require a
serious shift from the current US security approach.
The Sahel is now the epicenter of terrorism globally. The region accounted
for 43 percent of global terrorism deaths in 2022, according to the latest data
from the Global Terrorism Index produced for the Institute for Economics
and Peace (IEP). Burkina Faso and Mali alone accounted for a huge chunk
of the 2022 violence, making up “73 percent of terrorism deaths in the Sahel
in 2022 and 52 percent of all deaths from terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa,”
the IEP reported. This recent spike of extremist violence in the region is in
line with longer-term trends, as terrorism rates increased more than 2,000
percent in the Sahel over the past fifteen years.
In addition to this worrying spike in extremist violence, coup plotters have
also launched a wave of successful military interventions in the region over the
Alexander Noyes participates in the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane

Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He is a political
scientist at the RAND Corporation and former senior adviser for security coop-
eration assessment, monitoring, and evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense for Policy.

DISRUPTORS: Supporters of Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in Burkina
Faso in a 2022 coup, carry Russian flags as they ride around Ouagadougou,
the capital. Traoré has acknowledged help from Russia’s Wagner Group
mercenaries. [Sophie Garcia—Associated Press]
past three years, including two coups each in Mali and Burkina Faso alone. This
resurgence of such violent overthrows spurred United Nations chief António
Guterres to decry an “epidemic” of coups, a departure from a previous lull in
the region.
MIXED RES ULTS

The United States has responded to these dual developments in a number
of ways. To counter the terrorist threat, in addition to supporting regional
and international military operations, the United States has deployed a
wide range of security
assistance tools. The
United States has spent Terrorism rates increased more than
more than $3.3 billion 2,000 percent in the Sahel over the
in security assistance past fifteen years.
over two decades in the
Sahel, according to the Security Assistance Monitor. This assistance has
often led with tactical training and equipping partner militaries and elite
special counterterrorism units in the region, as well as large-scale military-
to-military exercises and smaller-scale advise-and-assist missions.
On the coup front, the US response has been decidedly mixed. The United
States condemned armed takeovers and has suspended some security assis-
tance in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea since 2021. But in Chad, a longtime
US security partner, the United States danced around the “coup” label and
did not apply sanctions or suspend assistance.
Because the United States has engaged so widely in the region, a few
recent coup plotters received US training, including in Guinea, where Green
Berets were actively training the soldiers who left to launch a coup in 2021.
The available evidence
suggests US assistance
An overly militaristic and repressive is highly unlikely to have
response only fuels grievances against directly contributed to
governments and security forces. any coup activity. But
the worrying actions of
US-trained partner forces do call into question the overall efficacy of US
assistance, specifically the degree of emphasis the United States places on
imparting democratic civil-military relations and rule of law.
Further complicating matters is an increased amount of engagement from
outside powers vying for access and influence in the region, namely China
and Russia. Research from the RAND Corporation has documented that
while US and Russian influence in sub-Saharan Africa has remained largely
the same over the past two decades, Chinese influence has grown significant-
ly. As the French have recently begun to pull back their military presence in
the Sahel, the Russians are actively trying to step into the void and increase
their influence with coup governments and other undemocratic leaders in
the region.
SMARTER SECURITY
So, what is to be done? To help turn the tide of these increasingly precarious
trends in the region—while also countering Chinese and Russian activity—
US security policy must present a clearer alternative to the aims of Beijing’s
and Moscow’s authoritarian expansion in the region.
To do so, the United States must first shift its security policy away from
the delivery of tactical weapons and toward a “governance first” policy.
Despite some recent steps in the right direction, the US model of military
assistance in the Sahel often defaults to tactical-level training and equip-
ping of unprofessional and often predatory security forces, which frequently

makes things worse. A policy shift would lead with support for institution
building aimed at fostering civilian control and responsible use of force
within Sahelian militaries.
The overwhelming evidence shows that an overly militaristic and repres-
sive response to terrorism is counterproductive. It only fuels grievances
against governments and security forces, and these grievances are the lead-
ing cause of extremism
in many African coun-
tries. Moreover, research The United States should condemn
shows that a more holis- coups and suspend assistance
tic, smartly sequenced to coup leaders.
security-assistance
approach can deliver soft- and hard-power results in Africa and beyond.
Indeed, a US and NATO focus on institution building and defense-
management reform in Ukraine before the full Russian invasion has
proven to be remarkably successful. This emphasis on good governance,
doctrine, and logistics helped to build more professional and effective
military forces in Ukraine, with clear outsize strategic payoffs for the
United States and its allies.
Second, the US response to all types of military takeovers must be much
stronger and consistent. An uneven coup response is counterproductive in
the short term, giving fresh coup governments initial room to breathe and
consolidate power. It is also unhelpful in the long term, creating an incen-
tive for future overthrows by the military. Prospective coup plotters see
that they too can avoid the coup label—and corollary sanctions—as long
as their country has
firm security ties with
the United States and Moving in this direction will require
other Western powers. strong coordination across the US
In addition to unequivo- government, particularly between the
cally condemning coups,
Defense and State Departments.
the United States should
also suspend assistance and apply visa restrictions on coup leaders, regard-
less of how “soft” (see Chad, Zimbabwe, Egypt) or hard the military action.
Moving in this direction will require strong coordination across the US
government, particularly between the Defense and State Departments.
The launch of the Twenty-first Century Partnership for African Security
in December 2022 is a start, but its future depends on the details and the
implementation. A fundamental shift toward a governance-first security
policy in the Sahel—leading with support for security governance and insti-
tution building—is likely to lead to more professional, democratic, and stable
partners, as well as pay strategic dividends for the United States.

explores the contemporary dilemmas of the greater Middle East
(www.hoover.org/publications/caravan). © 2023 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is A Hinge

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a

A FR IC A
Power and
Persuasion
Russia and China deploy both carrots and sticks to
increase their wealth and influence across Africa.
By Thomas H. Henriksen
A
second scramble for Africa is under way among the great
powers. Unlike in the first scramble, foreign powers now seek
access to Africa’s abundant mineral wealth without any of the
pretense, displayed by Europeans a century ago, of a civiliz-
ing mission. Russia and China are leading the current resource grab. Both
are content to exercise influence through weak autocratic and dependent
indigenous regimes, which welcome Russian mercenaries and Chinese state
economic enterprises to bolster their rule.
The first scramble for the continent escalated in the waning years of the
nineteenth century and lasted until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. This
partition of nearly 90 percent of the world’s second-largest continent by area
and population witnessed its conquest, annexation, and colonization by seven
European nations. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and other West
European countries dispatched soldiers, missionaries, officials, and even
settlers to take over land and grow sought-after crops like cotton and coffee.
Today’s “scramblers” have much less interest in planting their national flags
in colonies than did their nineteenth-century predecessors, who strove to
color the map with British red or French blue.
Thomas H. Henriksen is a senior fellow (emeritus) at the Hoover Institution.
BELT AND ROAD: Visitors walk past the exhibition hall at the third China-
Africa Economic and Trade Expo in Changsha last June. China has embarked
on a trillion-dollar infrastructure building spree around the world, focusing
on seventy developing nations, including almost every state in Africa. In
addition, China is now the chief exporter of arms to sub-Saharan Africa,
having elbowed aside Russia. [Chen Yehua—Newscom]
After World War II, Africa’s political class ousted the foreign occupa-
tions. By the late 1960s, much of Africa was nearly free of direct European
control. A number of former colonies emerged as democracies, but oth-
ers continue under despotic and kleptomaniac rulers, who need outside
support to hang on to
the spoils of office. Little
The first scramble for Africa wonder that undemo-
escalated in the waning years of the cratic and unscrupulous
nineteenth century. It focused on African presidents turn
conquest and colonization. to the dictatorial regimes
in Russia and China for
model and direction, as well as for military and financial help to prop up
their rule.
ARMS AND MERCENARIES

Moscow and Beijing exploit Africa’s vulnerability for their own ends. Neither
the Kremlin nor the Chinese leaders gravitate to honest democratic coun-
tries. They prefer under-siege despots who are despised by their citizenry or
threatened by Islamist extremists. Western leaders, on the other hand, tend

to eschew nondemocracies. France, for example, withdrew its five thousand
troops from Mali after the nation underwent a coup in 2022. The French
presence had kept Islamist terrorists at bay since 2013. Mali now relies on
Russian mercenaries to combat Islamist insurgents.
Russian commercial trade with Africa is minuscule compared with that
of the United States or China. As for armaments, China is now the chief
exporter of arms to sub-Saharan Africa, having elbowed aside Russia,
whose exports have suffered under the international sanctions imposed
after R ussia’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States is a distant third in
Africa, though still the largest arms exporter globally.
Africa serves to ease the Kremlin’s diplomatic isolation imposed by the
United States. For instance, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister,
visited Africa twice in ten days in early 2023. Diplomacy aside, Russia’s quest
for natural resources
and pursuit of question-
able business transac- A number of former colonies c ontinue
tions are furthered most under despotic and kleptomaniac
directly by its use of rulers, who need outside support to
quasi-military forces. hang onto office.
Take Russia’s Wagner
Group, the same band of mercenaries who inflict destruction and death on
Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. Formed in 2014, the Wagner Group has
contracts with several African leaders to fight their enemies and train the
regimes’ armed forces against opponents and Islamist infiltrators. Since
2018, the paramilitary group has signed military assistance and security
deals with Mali, the Central African Republic, and an armed faction in the
Libyan civil war.
In the Central African Republic, Wagner mercenaries train the national
army while taking over territories rich in diamond deposits. They export the
diamonds through local strongmen in neighboring Sudan and on to Dubai, a
mineral trading hub. Next door, in the Republic of Chad, Wagner operatives
have been accused by US intelligence of aiding Chadian rebels in their efforts
to destabilize the government.
Wagner’s mercenaries are a formidable and noxious presence on a
continent lacking modern and democratically oriented militaries that
abstain from politics. Wagner’s armed footprint is nearly the size of
America’s six thousand troops and advisers on the continent. The US
Treasury Department has designated the Wagner Group as a transna-
tional criminal organization for its warfighting activities in Ukraine.
And in Africa, citing reports from human rights groups and local author-
ities, Treasury officials have charged Wagner personnel with mass kill-
ings, torture, and rape.
CHINA PLAYS THE TRADE CARD

China presents an entirely different threat to the West. Its initial strategy
in various forms dates back to the early 1960s, when Beijing aligned with
African national liberation movements fighting European colonialism. The
anti-colonial struggles taxed Britain, France, and Portugal while opening
doors for Marxist impact on the continent. China’s gains, however, were
short-lived. China’s initial African intervention collapsed when Mao Zedong’s
Cultural Revolution (1966–76) convulsed his country.
When China returned to the African scene, it pursued commercial
engagement. In 2013, a year after Xi Jinping became paramount leader,
China launched its enormous and costly Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The BRI embarked on a trillion-dollar infrastructure building spree
around the world, focus-
ing on seventy develop-
The familiar Russian mercenaries ing nations in dire need
have military assistance and security of railways, dams, air-
deals with Mali, the Central African ports, highways, tunnels,
Republic, and an armed faction in the and pipelines. These
Libyan civil war. construction efforts
deepened commercial
relations and financial obligations between China and almost every state
in Africa, with special ties to Angola, Ethiopia, and Zambia.
China’s aggressive posture in the South China Sea is matched by these
assertive business activities in Africa. Africa figures prominently in Beijing’s
global commercial enterprises. In fact, China is Africa’s largest two-way
trading partner, reaching $254 billion in trade in 2021, a number four times as
high as US-Africa trade.
By themselves, China’s building and investment are not worrisome to
Washington so long as commercial projects do not restrict Western access
to strategic minerals and sources of bauxite, oil, and copper. Of greater
concern is China’s pursuit of a military base in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea,
on the west African coast, similar to the one China built in Djibouti, on the
Horn of Africa. And China’s championing of dictatorial regimes constitutes
a direct ideological confrontation with Washington and its democratic
allies.

In some countries, the goals of the two authoritarian powers collide. For
instance, Russian and Chinese tensions have flared over their dueling claims
over gold mines in the Central African Republic, a country plagued by
internal conflict since 2013. In March, for instance, nine Chinese nationals
were killed at a mine overseen by Chinese companies. The Russians, par-
ticularly the Wagner Group, come in for blame for training and arming the
pro-Russian government, which struggles against local rebel factions bent
on ousting the nation’s president. Despite words of global unity, Russia and
China do have their own agendas in Africa.
A HISTORIC THREAT REVIVED

Aside from great-power competition, the United States and the West face
another perilous challenge in Africa. This threat re-emerged from Islamist
extremists who had been active in the continent for centuries, going back
to their seventh-century origins in what is today Saudi Arabia. Such forces
have conquered, controlled, and proselytized both to spread their faith and
to resist Western encroachments. Militants from both the Islamic State (IS)
and Al-Qaeda, after having sustained defeats in the Middle East, now focus
on the Sahel region below the Sahara Desert. This strip encompasses parts
of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Mali; all those nations have felt
the threat of radical Islam once again.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States contributed to the resur-
gence of militant Islam in Arabia, Asia, and Africa. To combat militant move-
ments in Somalia, Mali, Niger, and other nations, the Pentagon deploys highly
trained special-operations forces, along with State Department officials and
nongovernmental organizations, to fight Islamist insurgents and help local
governments win over
their people to democ-
racy, development, and These are “forever wars,” without
human rights. US efforts a doubt. Nevertheless, they must
include implementing be fought.
population-centric civic
measures (medical and veterinary clinics, wells, and crop cultivation) as well
as protecting Africans from gunmen and other violence.
The bush warfare is intrinsically political. The shadow warfare carried
out by Islamist insurgents—blending in with the population after shootings,
bombings, and raids—is hard to defeat. No quick victories are likely, only
continual patrols and other security measures. Yet a military response alone
is not enough to support democracy and human rights. US personnel are also
helping African leaders master the skills and attitudes to entrench honest,
accountable administrations in desperately poor lands.
These are “forever wars,” without a doubt. Nevertheless, they must be
fought, or terrorism will return to US shores. The costs are low compared
to those of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. American casualties are
rare, and the yearly expenses take up roughly 0.3 percent of the Defense
Department’s personnel and budgetary resources.
Many African leaders resent being treated as pawns by competing
superpowers. They are simultaneously receptive to Chinese aid and
investment and to American trade and assistance, and they want to avoid
choosing one side over the other. Washington is aware of the need to favor
cooperation over confrontation, even as tensions with China and R ussia
demand more effort, resources, and diplomatic ingenuity to forestall
another scramble for Africa.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Eyes,

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

E D U C AT ION
Triage Teaching
Students struggling with pandemic learning loss
desperately need better instruction—not just more
of it—to make up for lost time. Most students will
never get it.
By Margaret Raymond
M
ost of the programs school
districts have implemented Key points
to address COVID learn- »» Education policies have
failed to consider students’
ing loss are doomed to fail. unique needs.
Despite well-intended and rapid responses, »» A “mastery”-based ap-
solutions such as tutoring or summer school proach, rather than the
current way of organizing
will miss their goals. Existing policies have
students by grade level,
failed to consider the unique needs of the could support learning
students these services seek to help, and recovery.
thus are destined to waste vast sums of relief »» The best teachers get the
best results. And, thanks to
funding in pursuit of an impossible goal. technology, the best teach-
How do we know this? Recent research ers could be widely shared.
from our team at the Center for Research

on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University looked at learning
patterns in sixteen states to see how recovery efforts will affect students’
academic careers.
Margaret Raymond is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

She is the founder and director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes
(CREDO) at Stanford University and the co-chair of the Hoover Education
Success Initiative.
Our partnerships with state education departments provide the means
to examine the experience of anonymous individual students as they move
through public schools. Their scores on standardized state tests reveal what
they know at the end of each school year and how that knowledge changes
over time. This level of insight is both wide (covering all tested students in
each state) and deep (the data illuminate students’ learning histories).
The COVID-19 pandemic has only magnified existing learning disparities.
If an average student typically gains a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s
time, then those with greater-than-average learning progress more quickly.
Conversely, those who do not learn as much as the average student gain less
than what’s expected. Reviewing these data over multiple years yields a pic-
ture of the pace of learning (POL) for individual students.
The differences in POL
are the missing factor in
The COVID-19 pandemic only policy decisions about
magnified existing learning d isparities. post-COVID efforts.
Our research assumes
that the pre-pandemic pace of learning for individual students is the best
that can be expected in the post-COVID years. Using longitudinal student
data, we calculated each student’s historical POL and, based on those
measures, projected outcomes under different learning loss scenarios.
We assume students have lost an average of ninety days of learning to
COVID-19, which other research has corroborated. We then considered
the effects of additional time, measured in extra years of schooling.
Without additional learning time, fewer than two-thirds of the students we
studied will attain average knowledge in reading and math by the end of their
senior year in high school. But more critically, even many years of additional
instruction would yield only a small improvement. Even if schools offered an
additional five years of education (assuming students would partake), only
about 75 percent of students would hit that twelfth-grade benchmark. One-
quarter will remain undereducated.
Of course, these estimates are theoretical. No district in the country is
capable of extending the years of schooling they offer by these amounts.
POSSIBLE ANSWERS
These findings reveal a lot about the future students face. Those who will reach
the twelfth-grade benchmark on time have POLs that are strong enough to
keep them on track. They are not the ones to worry about. It is the students
with smaller POLs who require the most attention and support. Currently,

for every day of instruction, they gain less than a full day of learning. Even a
full year of additional schooling may have little impact for them. Programs of
shorter duration are even less likely to produce their desired aims.
Current remedies are insufficient to solve the learning gaps for low-POL stu-
dents. High-dosage tutoring, for example, consists of four to six hours a week
of extra learning time. For average learners, that leads to an increase of about
8 percentile points on state achievement tests. But because students with low
POLs receive less benefit from every hour or day of instruction offered, they
will not progress to the same degree as the average student. At the end of a
school year, the total number of hours cannot produce the sustained impacts
needed for the low-POL population. Moreover, a large number of studies have
found that the benefits
from tutoring do not
survive into the future for Neither tutoring nor summer camps
any students. Summer is likely to make up the difference.
camps offer even less
cause for optimism: they provide lower dosages, and for a shorter time.
Ultimately, the accounting does not add up.
Still, against these discouraging findings, there are promising options for
addressing learning recovery. One is to allow students to progress at their
own pace toward established benchmarks rather than holding everyone to
a fixed timeline of learning. Shifting to a mastery-based approach, rather
than maintaining the current system of organizing students by grade
level, could achieve this. As long as students continue to progress and
demonstrate growth, their schooling could continue. High achievers could
reach the benchmarks faster than is usually allowed and move on to more
advanced goals. Releasing students from the traditional school year would
free up resources that could be devoted to helping lower-POL students.
Another option would be to change the pace of learning only for stu-
dents with slower rates of progress. Children need higher-quality instruc-
tion to realize greater learning gains, and the evidence is clear that the
best teachers get better results than average educators. Making sure
each classroom has excellent instruction should be the ultimate goal.
NEW IDEAS
Ways to find and deploy the most successful educators already exist. By
utilizing data from professional observations and student test scores,
schools could identify the instructors who truly make a difference in their
students’ learning and deploy those high-impact teachers in new ways.

One approach would be to offer incentives—bonus pay, for example, or
credit that could be put toward a sabbatical or other specialized train-
ing—to motivate higher-quality teachers to add students to their classes.
Offering extra support to teachers who take on extra tasks, such as class
aides or release from other duties, could also help. And placing lower-
performing students in classes with a high-quality teacher and higher-
performing peers can produce a jump in performance.
In places where the supply of high-need students outstrips the availability
of high-impact teachers, an alternative could be to find the best educator in
the state for a given subject, who would receive a substantial payment for
recording an entire year’s worth of lessons. The videos and all supporting
materials—lesson plans, worksheets, quizzes, etc.—would be posted online
for other teachers to use.
We call this approach
the Instructional Com-
Despite these discouraging find- mons. Building on the
ings, there are promising options for notion of Massive Open
addressing learning recovery. Online Courses, it offers
significant benefits: peer-
to-peer training, the opportunity for teachers to observe high-quality instruc-
tion in depth, a ready resource for their own lesson planning, and a common
standard for educators and administrators to employ for professional devel-
opment. If adopted successfully, this approach can elevate the caliber of the
existing teacher force at relatively modest cost and without political battles.
The country is at a pivotal moment in K–12 public education. It is time to
decide whether we are willing to make the necessary changes to the current
system for our students’ future. This will require deep alterations to the
existing organization and practice of K–12 public education. The alternative:
continued support of an institutional system that will almost certainly fail.
Reprinted by permission of The 74 (www.the74million.org). © 2023 The

74 Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Beyond

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

E D U C AT ION
A Few Critical
Omissions
Most of those who support teaching “critical race
theory” (CRT) to children don’t realize it rejects the
values of the civil rights movement. CRT activists
profit from that confusion.
By Max Eden and Michael T. Hartney
O
n a recent episode of his cable
television program, Bill Maher Key points
asked Bernie Sanders to »» A survey found that 90 per-
cent of Americans support the
explain the difference between idea that society should treat
equality and equity, and the long-winded people the same, regardless of
race.
senator was at an unusual loss for words.
»» Eighty percent of respon-
“I don’t know what the answer to that dents misunderstood the aims
is,” Sanders mumbled after an awkward of critical race theory.
pause. Pressed to clarify his position, »» News stories perpetuate the
misleading notion that CRT
Sanders composed himself and offered
continues the civil rights drive
only that he supports “equality of opportu- for equality of opportunity.
nity” over equal outcomes. He does?
Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Michael T.

Hartney is a Hoover Fellow, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute,
and an assistant professor of political science at Boston College. His first book is
How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American
Education (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

If this answer is sincere, it would put Sanders, a self-described democratic
socialist, substantially to the right of the “equity”-obsessed Biden administra-
tion and today’s public education establishment. If, on the other hand, Sand-
ers was merely being politically adroit, his answer demonstrates how quickly
the left’s language game
breaks down when basic
Most Americans, including most definitions are required.
Democrats, strongly favor equality of Sanders isn’t dumb. He
opportunity over a government goal knows what the legacy
of equitable results. media are loath to admit,
particularly on the issue of
racial inequality: most Americans, including most Democrats, strongly favor
equality of opportunity over a government assurance of equitable results.
One reason the left doesn’t want this debate can be seen in the fight over
teaching critical race theory (CRT) in American schools. Recall that CRT
bills itself as an academic theory that emphasizes how race intersects with
societal institutions to reproduce and sustain unequal outcomes observed
across racial groups today. Focusing only on whether CRT is formally being
taught in K–12 lesson plans, however, is a distraction. The left prefers to keep
the dispute focused on this point of contention, which boils down to precise
definitions, because it obscures a larger fight: a clash between politically
popular principles of colorblindness and nondiscrimination, on the one hand,
and deeply unpopular schooling policies and practices that emphasize race-
consciousness and equitable outcomes, on the other.
Don’t take our word for it. In a recent study, “A House Divided? What
Americans Really Think about Controversial Topics in Schools,” researchers
at the University of Southern California concluded that “despite the noisy
debate around CRT . . . we found broad agreement on certain racial beliefs,
especially that our goal as a society should be that all people should be
treated the same without regard to the color of their skin.”
The USC survey revealed even more. Most Americans know little about
the tenets of CRT. The largest source of public confusion is the mistaken
belief that CRT embraces the principle of colorblindness. Nine out of ten
Americans told the USC survey team that they favor treating all Americans
equally without regard to race, yet 84 percent also mistakenly said that CRT
proponents embrace this same colorblind ethos.
“Despite the explicit opposition of CRT to colorblindness,” the authors not-
ed, “more than 80 percent of [Americans] who claimed to have heard of CRT
either did not know that colorblindness is not aligned to CRT or were wrong

and thought that it was.” What’s more, “this was the only [survey question]
for which most respondents confidently answered but were incorrect.”
An even more intriguing finding lay buried in the survey. The researchers
asked Americans whether they supported teaching CRT in K–12 schools and
whether parents should be able to opt their children out of lessons contain-
ing content that they
disagree with. Except
for political party, the The largest source of public
biggest factor shaping confusion is the belief that critical
respondents’ answers race theory embraces the principle
to those questions was of colorblindness. It doesn’t.
whether they falsely
believed that CRT embraced principles of colorblindness. For example,
among those who mistakenly said that CRT was consistent with colorblind-
ness, nearly half favored teaching it in schools. Yet among the much smaller
group who understood that CRT stands against colorblindness, fewer than
20 percent were comfortable with teaching its tenets in K–12 schools.
Why such ignorance? The news media are part of the story here. Else-
where on the survey, the researchers asked what types of information sourc-
es respondents relied on to learn about what is being taught in schools today.
Americans who relied the most on television news and social media were
far more likely to believe, wrongly, that CRT embraces colorblind principles.
More than 90 percent who said that both sources were major influences on
their thinking about these issues made this mistake.
In other words, the manufactured belief that CRT is merely a continuation
of civil rights–era efforts to ensure equality of opportunity provides valuable
cover for those pushing race-conscious policies and practices that prioritize
equity in outcomes.
Bernie Sanders may not know the difference, but Americans deserve to know.
Reprinted by permission of City Journal (www.city-journal.org). © 2023

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. All rights reserved.

Unshackled: Freeing America’s K–12 Education
System, by Clint Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman.
To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit

P OL I TI C S
No Spoiler Alert
Third-party presidential candidates are always
accused of being spoilers. Here’s how the right one
could bring meaningful change to our moribund
politics, even if the candidate doesn’t win.
By Morris P. Fiorina
I
n 2016, I wrote an op-ed titled “Run, Mike and Jim, Run,” referring to
possible third-party candidacies by former New York mayor Michael
Bloomberg and former Virginia senator Jim Webb. (The article was
published under a less catchy title.) Today, I am even more concerned
about the state of American politics than I was then, so I was dismayed to
read reports of Democratic and (former) Republican operatives scheming
to torpedo the contingency plans of No Labels to give the 2024 electorate
an alternative to a choice between President Biden and—what now appears
likely—former president Donald Trump. The tens of millions of American
disheartened by that choice should welcome the activities of No Labels.
As a result of processes not fully understood, our two parties now contradict
decades of political-science scholarship about the centrist tendencies of two-
party competition. Historically, such competition produced diverse, “catch-all”
parties that competed for the political middle ground. No longer. Our parties
now resemble the ideologically distinct parties common in multiparty systems,
the critical difference being that the latter generally contain more than two par-
ties. Consequently, such ideological parties are forced to compromise in order
Morris P. Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family
Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He is the editor of Who Gov
erns? Emergency Powers in the Time of COVID (Hoover Institution Press, 2023).

to form a government. That is not so in the United States today. With only two
parties, each one attempts to win full control (a so-called trifecta) by itself.
The United States is the world’s largest, most diverse democracy. Our citizens
differ in their interests, beliefs, and values. Yet, as I argued in 2016, today’s parties
bludgeon these differenc-
es into two packages that
make no sense to many Today’s political parties bludgeon
of us. If a citizen favors voters’ differences into two packages
lower taxes and less that make no sense to many of us.
regulation, why should
she have to support restricting abortion, or vice versa? Those are the kinds of
restricted choices the two parties offer. Why should Ohio and Oregon Republican
candidates emphasize the same issues despite differences in their constituencies’
positions and priorities? Ditto for New Mexico and New Jersey Democratic can-
didates. That is a consequence of nationalized fundraising, among other things.
Why should parties seek to win narrow majorities and impose extreme
alternatives on a population that to this day remains considerably more
moderate—temperamentally and ideologically—than most of those who
occupy the upper echelons of the parties? That is the result of a politics that
privileges highly involved but highly unrepresentative activists. And why
should the goal of so many in our political class be to destroy the opposition
rather than reach an acceptable compromise and move on to address other
problems? That is one of several reasons that Americans’ trust and confi-
dence in their government have fallen to historic lows.
Contrary to his current view, New York Times columnist David Brooks once
opined that somewhere in the country there is an “updated, saner” Ross Perot.
That flawed candidate
received nearly 20 per-
Our politics privilege highly involved
cent of the popular vote
but highly unrepresentative activists.
in 1992. With majorities
today opposed to both the Biden and Trump candidacies, a competent, tempera-
mentally moderate third-party candidate—whether center-left or center-right—
might well exceed Perot’s showing.
Could such a candidate win? Probably not, although the common asser-
tion that third-party candidates can’t win the presidency is not quite correct.
Candidates in third place usually can’t win because their supporters desert
them rather than waste their vote. But should one of the two major-party
candidates be in third place close to the election, as Bill Clinton was earlier in
the summer of 1992, their votes would flow to the top two candidates, one of

whom is the third-party candidate (e.g., Theodore Roosevelt in 1912). Third-
party or independent candidates have won gubernatorial races, of course.
Assuming the more likely possibility that a third-party candidate does not
win, many observers seem to believe that a strong third candidate would throw
a Biden victory in a two-way race to Trump. The presumption that Biden will
beat Trump head-to-
head is overly optimistic.
Both Trump’s election in We’re past the point where we should
2016 and even more his let fear of the unknown dominate
defeat in 2020 hinged on fear of the known.
knife-edged outcomes
in a handful of states. Absent the pandemic, Trump likely would have beaten
Biden in 2020, and recent polls suggest that Trump might win in 2024 even in a
two-way race. Domestic or foreign developments in the months to come could
alter the situation in key states one way or the other.
Should a third-party candidate win some electoral votes, commentators
warn that the presidential choice would go to the House of Representatives,
where the Republicans currently control twenty-five state delegations com-
pared to twenty-three for the Democrats, with two ties. This is an extremely
close division that the 2024 elections could change (the new House would
choose the president), especially if No Labels could elect a few third-party
House candidates. All in all, the notion that a third-party candidacy would
give a likely Biden victory to Trump is beset with multiple uncertainties.
We are past the point where we should allow fear of the unknown to domi-
nate fear of the known. The known is that one party offers a candidate whose
capacities are trending downwards, backstopped by a running mate who
inspires little popular confidence. The other party offers a candidate with no
commitment to anything or anyone but himself. Such a choice is unworthy of
our country. Run, Joe or Kyrsten or Larry, run!
Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Markets. © 2023 RealClear

Holdings LLC. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Who

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

HE A LT H C A R E
Medicaid: We
Must Do Better
Medicaid denies poor Americans the best aspects
of American health care—the kinds of competitive,
high-quality plans that would serve their needs.
By Scott W. Atlas
M
edicaid, the govern-
ment’s ever-expanding Key points
single-payer insurance »» Socioeconomic differences
correlate to health outcomes.
for low-income Ameri- Medicaid deprives poor patients
cans, has ballooned by almost twenty- of high-quality health care.
four million beneficiaries since the onset »» Most physicians already refuse
to accept Medicaid, whose low re-
of the 2020 pandemic. Even though the imbursement rates limit patients’
COVID-19 emergency has officially end- access to doctors, treatments,
medications, and technology.
ed, many elected officials call for further
»» Medicaid should be a bridge to
expansion of Medicaid. At what point
private insurance.
should we finally heed the advice of
Milton Friedman, who observed, “One
of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions
rather than their results”? Instead of blindly continuing and expanding it,
shouldn’t we consider the actual access to care and results under Medicaid?
Scott W. Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health policy at the Hoover
Institution and participates in Hoover’s Health Care Policy Working Group.

The COVID pandemic re-demonstrated a long-known fact: socioeconomic
differences correlate to health outcomes. Broad indicators affected by dozens
of factors outside of health care, like life expectancy and infant mortality, are
also significantly worse for certain minorities in the United States. Infant
mortality rates have been improving in the United States since 1995, with
the lowest in history for all races recorded in 2020, but infant mortality rate
by race of the mother for
blacks (10.38) remains
In study after study, Medicaid double to triple that of
patients fare worse than patients with infants born to whites
private insurance. (4.4), Hispanics (4.69), or
Asians (3.14). Similarly,
Hispanics and whites have a life expectancy six years longer than blacks, not
counting data since the pandemic.
That difference in health outcomes has been put forth as a key reason to
expand single-payer health insurance in the United States. An inexplicably
ignored logical flaw in that argument is that those very same health dispari-
ties for minorities are seen in the countries with the longest history of single-
payer health care systems. For instance, in the government-run system of
Canada, Inuit and First Nations infant mortality was two to four times that
of non-indigenous Canadians and Quebecois. The same goes for the United
Kingdom, where black Caribbean and black African infant mortality rates
are double those of whites.
POOR QUALIT Y, POOR HEALTH

The goal should be to increase access to high-quality health care and improve
health, not simply to label people as “insured.” But Medicaid patients fare
worse than patients using private insurance in study after study—even after
standardizing for medical differences among patients. Those bad outcomes
include more frequent complications and more deaths in treated cancers,
heart procedures, transplants, and major surgeries. The most striking
conclusion of a 2013 randomized study in Oregon was that Medicaid fails to
improve physical health beyond having no insurance at all.
Another truth hidden from the public is that a large fraction of doctors
already don’t accept Medicaid: the average rate of Medicaid acceptance is
only 54.1 percent in the surveyed fifteen metropolitan areas. Worse, 51 per-
cent of those doctors with contractual agreements to accept it, in practice
do not. This is especially true of family-practice doctors, pediatricians, and
psychiatrists, all of whom accept Medicaid patients at far lower rates than

they accept private insurance patients. While private insurance pays over
140 percent of the cost of care, Medicaid pays below the cost of administer-
ing the care. Unbeknownst to beneficiaries, that significant underpayment—
below the cost of administering those services—limits their access to doc-
tors, treatments, medications, and technology; hence, worse outcomes from
disease than private insurance, even for the most serious life-threatening
illnesses like cancer and heart disease.
The poor quality of Medicaid, now covering more than eighty-eight million
people at a cost of over $650 billion per year, falls squarely on the shoulders
of minorities. In contrast with the nation’s demographics of the 250 million
adults in the United
States—62 percent are
white, 12 percent black, The poor quality of Medicaid
and 17 percent His- falls squarely on the shoulders
panic—Medicaid users of minorities.
are heavily skewed to
minorities: 21 percent are black, 40 percent white, and 25 percent Hispanic.
Medicaid covers almost thirty million American children; most black kids
(57 percent) and most Latino kids (55 percent) depend on Medicaid, whereas
only 33 percent of white kids use it.
Instead of shunting poor Americans into a parallel, second-class sys-
tem with worse health outcomes and far less access to care, let’s change
Medicaid to a bridge to private insurance. Analogous to expanding school
choice for everyone, that would mean adding the same choices of health
care, with its superior access and higher-quality outcomes, for the poor as
for the rich.
Let’s provide private insurance options for all Medicaid enrollees—just like
the coverage offered to members of Congress. That should include cover-
age not bloated by expensive mandates for everything from acupuncture to
marriage counseling to wigs to in vitro fertilization; establishing and seeding
health savings accounts (HSAs); and providing new incentives for lower-
income families to consider quality and price and to seek good health through
wellness programs and healthy behavior. These reforms, including fixed fed-
eral grants to states, would also change the purpose and culture of Medicaid
bureaucrats from running government-administered plans to finding private,
high-value coverage for beneficiaries.
And let’s be clear: it is worse than arrogant—some might even say racist—
to claim that Medicaid beneficiaries are not as capable as congressmen and
other elites to seek out good health care for their own families.

Ignoring facts does not change reality. The Office of the Actuary of the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) calculated that most
hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and in-home health care providers already
lose money per Medicare patient, and Medicaid pays even less. By 2040,
approximately half of hospitals, two-thirds of skilled nursing facilities, and
more than 80 percent of
home health agencies will
Most hospitals, skilled nursing be operating at a loss,
facilities, and in-home providers even without any change
already lose money per Medicare toward single-payer,
patient. Medicaid pays even less. because of the influx into
Medicare of the aging
population. That did not include the massive expansion of Medicaid over the
past three years. Owing to the underpayment, future access to care for those
dependent on Medicaid is already at risk and will worsen if government
insurance is expanded further.
ANTICIPATE T HE SHOCK
We cannot continue to allow government elites to pretend to care about
the disadvantaged, yet repeatedly harm low-income families and minorities
with their policies. Let’s never forget that during COVID’s most dangerous
time, low-wage earners were deemed “essential workers” and delivered food,
staffed pharmacies and
grocery stores, cleaned
Future access to care for those nursing homes and
dependent on Medicaid is already at hospitals, drove public
risk. It can only worsen if government transportation—all to
insurance expands further. serve those who worked
from home. Low-wage
earners were required to assume exposure to the deadliest form of the virus,
in advance of any vaccine. In shutting down the economy, “low-wage workers
experienced much larger, more persistent job losses,” as shown by Harvard’s
Raj Chetty. Over the next twenty years, the unemployment “shock” alone
will cause 1.2 million extra American deaths—from the lockdowns, not the
virus—disproportionately affecting African-Americans and women.
The time is long overdue for a fundamental overhaul of Medicaid, a pro-
gram that isolates poor Americans from the excellence of US medical care
and forces them to uniquely suffer the brunt of single-payer care. Moreover,
it is illogical and morally indefensible to expand a program that is already

not accepted by most doctors, has worse outcomes than the alternative of
private insurance, costs hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and is frankly
coverage that none of the members of Congress who expanded it would
accept as coverage for their own families.
Reprinted by permission of Real Clear Politics. © 2023 RealClearHold-

ings LLC. All rights reserved.

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

C A L I FO RN I A
This Bud Isn’t

for You
Taxes, regulation, and local politics threaten to
snuff out California’s legal marijuana industry.
By Bill Whalen
T
his year’s “420 Day,” or April 20, has come and gone. In cannabis
culture, “420” is slang for marijuana and hashish consumption.
According to the lore, the coinage refers to the time of day when
a group of San Rafael high schoolers would meet to smoke in the
1970s. Now that it’s been seven years since voters approved Proposition 64
legalizing recreational marijuana use, it seems like a good time to examine
the state of California’s cannabis industry.
First, a little background on how legalization came to be in America’s most
populous state. (In all, twenty-three states—along with the District of Colum-
bia and three US territories—have legalized recreational marijuana use.)
In 2010, California voters rejected Proposition 19, which would have allowed
adults (age twenty-one and over) to possess up to one ounce of marijuana for
personal consumption (the intake restricted to nonpublic sites—i.e., homes
and cannabis dispensaries). One of the nonsupporters of that measure was
then–San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, also on the statewide ballot as a
candidate for lieutenant governor.
Bill Whalen is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Distinguished Policy Fellow in

Journalism at the Hoover Institution and co-author of California on Your Mind,
a Hoover online journal. He also moderates Hoover’s GoodFellows video series.

Six years later, and preparing for a gubernatorial run, Newsom was not
just pro-legalization, but a very public voice in support as he campaigned up
and down the state for the passage of Proposition 64, in the process laying
the groundwork for his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.
Not that all prominent
California Democrats
were on board with legal- Gavin Newsom campaigned up and
ization at the time. Sena- down the state for Proposition 64, in
tor Dianne Feinstein was the process laying the groundwork for
an opponent (she wor- his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.
ried about marijuana ads
on prime-time TV). Then-governor Jerry Brown likewise wasn’t a fan. (Years
before, Brown asked: “How many people can get stoned and still have a great
state or a great nation?”)
But such skepticism wasn’t the case with Newsom, who not only champi-
oned the cause but treated it as a “joint venture” (in the political sense) with
California’s cannabis industry. The future governor went so far as to tell Bill-
board magazine, “Put it this way: Everything that goes wrong, you’re looking
at the poster child.”
PROMISES AND PROHIBITION

As it turned out, plenty did go wrong. That’s because Proposition 64 con-
tained at least two design flaws.
First, as is the case with most other states that legalized recreational
marijuana, the government in Sacramento ceded control to local jurisdic-
tions. That opened the door to classic California NIMBYism—communities
arbitrarily deciding whether to allow marijuana dispensaries and other
“weedy” endeavors (for example, “cannabis consumption lounges” that are
spread across Los Angeles).
An example of this is Stanford University and upscale Palo Alto. One would
think an exclusive private university and a progressive-minded town where
median household income hovers around $200,000 would be prime turf for
cannabis. Instead, the city council “just said no” to marijuana dispensaries
and weed-related businesses (though deliveries from nearby towns are
allowed).
Second, as is true with many aspects of the California existence, the state
overdid it on taxes and regulation.
In California, marijuana growers looking to stay on the up-and-up with the
state government were asked to pay a cultivation tax of $9.25 per ounce of

flowers and $2.75 per ounce of leaves. On top of that, an additional 15 percent
tax was placed on the retail sale of marijuana products.
What soon occurred: a vibrant underground economy (especially in the
“Emerald Triangle” in the northwestern corner of the Golden State) in which
growers either don’t cooperate with the state or report only a portion of their
produce to the state while selling the rest on the black market.
Either way, it means lots of revenue that won’t be going into the state’s
coffers. Last year, legal
cannabis sales in Califor-
nia reached $5.3 billion, Sacramento ceded control of legal
which was 8 percent less cannabis to local jurisdictions, thus
than the previous year, setting loose the NIMBYs.
according to the Cali-
fornia Department of Tax and Fee Administration, the first decline in such
recorded sales.
And the black market? Closer to $8 billion, some industry analysts claim.
Enter Newsom and the state legislature with a market correction: in
2021, they agreed to kill the weight-based cultivation tax. It was part of a
broader package of sweeteners meant to give legal growers a boost ($20
million for certain storefront retail and microbusinesses; $20 million for
so-called cannabis “equity operators”). Missing from Sacramento’s rush
to mend an ailing cannabis industry: reform of the California Environmen-
tal Quality Act, whose regulatory hurdles have frustrated legal cannabis
growers.
Meanwhile, the powers-that-be in Sacramento also came up with sticks to
go along with the carrots. Newsom and lawmakers agreed to five-figure fines
and the threat of civil action for individuals caught running noncompliant
operations. The governor also created a Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task
Force (try this for gubernatorial gobbledygook: a “new multi-agency, cross-
jurisdictional task force to better coordinate agencies using a wide array of
statutory authorities as they work collectively to strategically address illegal
cannabis operations, including transnational criminal organizations”).
HOW GREEN? California’s legalization of cannabis (opposite) triggered a

black-market economy in which growers either don’t cooperate with state
taxation and regulation or report only a portion of sales. Billions of dollars
are at stake while Sacramento seeks ways to strengthen the legal marijuana
industry and suppress the illegal one. [Neeta Lind—Creative Commons]

The problem with such an approach: California’s G-men are in a situation
not unlike the federal agents who waged a losing war against Prohibition
nearly a century ago.
In October 2022, for example, members of the state’s Department of Can-
nabis Control’s Law Enforcement Division and the California Department of
Fish and Wildlife targeted unlicensed outdoor marijuana cultivators in rural
Tuolumne County, home to Yosemite. They succeeded in eradicating more
than 1,000 illegal cannabis plants and destroyed more than 5,200 pounds
of illegally processed cannabis flowers: in all, a retail value of $15 million.
However, that $15 million seizure constitutes but one-fifth of 1 percent of the
estimated $8 billion illegal market in California.
If economic stimuli and promises of enforcement measures fail to be a
cure-all for California’s cannabis industry, there’s a third avenue currently
under consideration:
create an export market.
In January, officials from California’s Department of Cannabis Control
sent an eight-page letter to state Attorney General Rob Bonta making
the legal argument for
California moving can-
The $8 billion illegal market easily
nabis products across
outweighs the legal industry.
state lines. That was
only a few months after Newsom signed a bill establishing criteria for
California entering into interstate cannabis commerce pacts.
But moving forward with such pacts assumes agreement from the federal
government not to meddle in the states’ affairs (an anti-legalization adminis-
tration, for example, could withhold state funds). And it assumes the Biden
administration would give the concept its blessing as a contentious presiden-
tial election approaches.
While some surveys show support for marijuana legalization at a record
high (no pun intended), it’s worth noting that it’s not as popular in the crucial
swing state of Georgia. While Arizona legalized cannabis in 2020, another
swing state, Wisconsin, is something of a nonlegal island.
SPUTTERING
Where does this leave California? For growers, the situation is anything
but a euphoric high. According to state data, California has 1,766 fewer cul-
tivation licenses (permission to grow) than it did at the beginning of 2022.
Over the same period, California lost 23 percent of its total legal canopy,
the combined size of all legal cannabis grown. That translates to about

19 million square feet of cannabis farming—roughly the size of 330 football
fields.
Does that mean that the Golden State’s legal cannabis industry is going up
in smoke? Probably not. But it is yet another reminder of the perils of smoke-
and-mirror ballot measures.
Read California on Your Mind, the online Hoover Institution journal that
probes the politics and economics of the Golden State (www.hoover.org/
publications/californiaonyourmind). © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the

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

C A L I FO RN I A
Power Corrupted
Citing climate change, central planners in
Sacramento and Washington are forcing
consumers to pay burdensome energy penalties,
to no good end.
By David R. Henderson
W
hen I organized a course on energy economics at the Naval
Postgraduate School in 2012, I put on the syllabus the story
of how I became an energy economist early in my career.
Here’s an excerpt:
In the late 1970s, I became an energy economist because I saw

just how destructive price controls on oil and gasoline were.
President Nixon’s price controls on oil, which were later affirmed
by P
resident Ford and then affirmed by President Carter, caused
shortages and line-ups. They also caused the government to
intrude heavily in our decisions about energy use. While the price
controls were slowly phased out by Carter in his last year in office
and then abruptly ended by Reagan in his first month in office,
many controls on usage remain. The particularly notable ones are
on appliances and, most important, cars and trucks.
That interest in energy economics led me to become the senior economist

for energy policy with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.
David R. Henderson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and an

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

If I were my twenty-seven-year-old self today, I would have even more
motivation to become an energy economist. The reason is similar: I see both
the federal government and various state governments, especially Califor-
nia’s, implementing energy policies that will impose huge costs on people but
have little effect on what many of those regulations are purported to achieve:
reducing or slowing global warming. And, like price controls, these regula-
tions fly in the face of basic economic wisdom.
WHAT ECONOMICS HAS TO SAY

First, let’s consider the reason given for most of the current and proposed
regulations: to forestall global warming. I will take as given that global warm-
ing will be a problem by the end of this century, although there are reasons to
doubt even that.
But with the assumption that it will be a problem, what does economics
have to say? A lot, actually.
Many economists argue that the most efficient response to global
warming is to tax the use of carbon because burning carbon creates car-
bon dioxide. But they
overlook something:
they haven’t proven that Government-imposed energy policies
reducing carbon usage will create huge costs but do little or
is the cheapest way nothing to slow climate change.
of dealing with global
warming. As I have written elsewhere, reducing carbon might be much
more expensive than “geoengineering,” or technological projects to remove
and sequester carbon dioxide.
Another response to global warming—adaptation—also could well be
cheaper than carbon taxes.
One thing we know from two centuries of experience is that if governments
don’t hobble economic growth with high taxes, heavy regulation, heavy
restrictions on property rights, and large incursions on the rule of law, we
will get economic growth. Adam Smith, whose three hundredth birthday we
celebrated earlier this year, put it succinctly:
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of

opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a
tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about
by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this
natural course, which force things into another channel, or which

endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point,
are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppres-
sive and tyrannical.
With regular economic growth over even a few decades, virtually all
economic classes, including the poorest, are better off. In their 2020 book,
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, economists Deirdre McCloskey and
Art Carden estimate that standards of living today in rich nations are thirty
times what they were in 1800. The wealthier people are, the more resources
they have to allow them to adapt.
Consider, for example, one potential effect of global warming: rising ocean
levels. For the past three decades, writes physicist and former Caltech pro-
vost Steven E. Koonin in his 2021 book, Unsettled, sea levels have risen by 0.12
inches per year. If sea levels continued to rise at that rate, then, by the year
2100, they would be about ten inches higher than now. That is not a large
problem, and we have a lot of time to adjust.
Moreover, even in the Netherlands where, a thousand years ago, the vast
majority of people were poor by modern standards, people had the resourc-
es to build dikes to keep
the ocean out. Since then,
The wealthier the people, the more technology has no doubt
resources they have to let them improved and, as noted
adapt. above, standards of liv-
ing are a huge multiple
of what they were a few centuries ago. That means that it should be even
easier and more affordable to build dams in, say, Miami, and other low-lying
areas.
Another way to adapt is to change where we grow food. Economist David
Friedman, writing in his Substack, recently quoted the EPA’s statement that
“overall, climate change could make it more difficult to grow crops, raise
animals, and catch fish in the same ways and same places as we have done in
the past.” That, he noted, is not the end of the story; although global warming
will make currently cultivated land somewhat less productive, it will make
land that is closer to the poles more productive. Friedman also points out
that people will adjust crops, change the amount of irrigation, and adjust in
several other ways. Here is his summary statement about what’s wrong with
the EPA’s approach:
If there is substantial climate change, we will not continue to

“raise animals and catch fish”—or grow wheat—“in the same ways

and same places as we have done in the past.” As I commented on
the same problem decades ago in response to the book Limits to
Growth, it is like trying to extrapolate the path of an automobile on
the assumption that the driver has his eyes closed.
WHY REGULATION FAILS

Where economists are united, whether or not they believe in carbon taxes,
is on the issue of regulation. When the government dictates which fuels
may be used, which fuel usages should be regulated or outright banned, and
which technologies should be allowed, it imposes solutions that are costlier
than even carbon taxes. The reason is that the government cannot know
the value people place on various uses and cannot know all the unintended
consequences that will result from its regulations and mandates.
The federal government and the California government, the two I know
best, have gone far in the direction of regulation. In 2022, California’s state
government announced its plan to ban, effective in 2030, sales of new natural
gas water heaters and furnaces. The government wants people to replace
natural gas furnaces with heat pumps that are run on electricity. The stated
purpose is to reduce emissions. One advocate of heat pumps told the San
Francisco Chronicle that installing his cost him a cool $27,000. Moreover,
because it runs on electricity, which is very expensive in California, due in
part to—you guessed it—regulation, running the heat pump can cost more
than using natural gas.
Similarly, if we can’t buy natural gas water heaters, we are stuck with
using heaters powered by electricity. What happens if your electricity is
cut off? That’s not a hypothetical question. In my part of California, there
are many trees. When we get a lot of rain, trees with shallow roots become
unstable and a heavy wind can push them over onto power lines. Then the
power goes out. Last winter, I calculated, my wife and I were without power
for more than a week’s worth of hours. At one point, we had no power for
three days.
This raises a more general point: diversification, whether in the stock mar-
ket or in fuel sources, is generally a good idea. Because we have a gas-fired
stove, which regulators in California also want to ban, we could at least use a
lit match to light the burner and heat soup.
Both the California state government and the federal government also
have put themselves in the position of choosing what kind of vehicles we may
drive in the long run. Those governments don’t have information about our
individual circumstances, and so they cannot make a good choice for most

of us. If they choose electric cars for people who would buy them already,
then they have no effect. But by choosing electric cars for the rest of us, they
are overriding all of our considerations and replacing them with their own
preferences.
EV mandates also will substantially increase the demand for rare miner-
als that go into battery production, driving the cost even higher. In a market
where people are free to choose, the higher price of EVs would discourage
their purchase, causing people to buy more gasoline-powered vehicles than
otherwise. A mandate
blunts that natural mar-
Governments don’t have data about ket constraint.
our individual circumstances, so they In the United States
can’t make a good choice for most and especially in Califor-
nia, governments have
of us.
used regulation to reduce
the role of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power to generate electricity and
to increase the role of solar and wind power. The California legislature
requires electric utilities to purchase 50 percent of their electricity from
renewable sources by 2026, 60 percent by 2030, and a whopping 100 per-
cent by 2045. What do coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy have in com-
mon? They’re incredibly reliable. What do solar and wind power, the two
main forms of renewable energy, have in common? They’re not. Moreover,
because wind and solar are intermittent, we still need a substantial amount
of standby capacity that uses natural gas to generate electricity.
A much better solution is to quit mandating how electricity is produced
and, furthermore, to radically deregulate nuclear power. Nuclear power is
very expensive now, but mainly because it’s so highly regulated. People’s fear
of an accident aside, nuclear is among the safest forms of power.
THE BOTTOM LINE

The main problem with government regulation of energy uses and of
the forms of energy production is that the government puts itself in the
role of central planner. It has neither the information about individuals’
values and circumstances nor the incentive to make good decisions. That’s
why we have such an energy mess in the United States and, especially, in
California.
It might make sense to impose a carbon tax. A carbon tax’s big advantage
over regulation is that it doesn’t put the government in the role of picking
and choosing uses and sources of power. Those who want to bear the tax and

have a gas guzzler can do so. Electricity producers who want to pay the tax
to have a steady source of inputs into power production rather than depend-
ing on intermittent wind and solar, can do so.
This is not controversial among economists. Unfortunately, as with price
controls during the 1970s, not enough policy makers are paying attention to
economists. The results are, and will be, at a minimum, pricey and intermit-
tent electric power and very expensive cars, furnaces, and water heaters.
Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-

ideas), a Hoover Institution online journal. © 2023 The Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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

I NTERVI EW
The Man Who

Talked Back
When COVID struck, public-health officials
closed down the country. Hoover fellow
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya believed they were making
a catastrophic mistake—and said so.
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: Beginning in March 2020, more

than three years ago, public-health officials locked this country down. One
man talked back, arguing that public-health officials were getting the fight
against COVID all wrong. That got him into trouble, and he’s still in trouble
today. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya came to Stanford University at the age of
seventeen and has never left. In addition to his undergraduate degree,
Dr. Bhattacharya earned a doctorate from the Stanford Economics Depart-
ment and an MD from Stanford Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya’s now a
professor of medicine at Stanford and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Jay
is also one of the three authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration.” Jay
and his co-authors wrote in that October 2020 document, “We have grave
concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the
prevailing COVID-19 policies.”
Jay Bhattacharya is a senior fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution and
a professor at Stanford University Medical School. Peter Robinson is the editor
of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and the Murdoch
Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

QUESTIONER: Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya says of the COVID-19
measures, “The people who conceived the lockdowns have an extent of
naivete about how societies work that just boggles the mind.” As for his
attempts to debate the public-health authorities behind the COVID measures,
“the high clerisy of science … you couldn’t contradict them without being
excommunicated.” [Tom Williams—CQ Roll Call]
Jay, let’s begin with a clip from your last appearance on this program, which
took place on October 13, 2021. My question to you was: what needs to happen?
Jay Bhattacharya [recorded in 2021]: I think the first thing that has to hap-
pen is that public health should apologize. The public-health establishment in
the United States and the world has failed the public.
Robinson: “The first thing that has to happen is that public health should apol-
ogize.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, now retired but, during the lockdown, the director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has he apologized?
Bhattacharya: No.
Robinson: Dr. Francis Collins, again, now retired but, during the lockdown,
director of the National Institutes of Health. Has Dr. Collins apologized?
Bhattacharya: No, unfortunately.

Robinson: Federal public-health officials, state public-health officials, county
public-health officials, put them all together, and you get several thousand
public-health officials in this country who are responsible for locking coun-
ties down, states down, the country down. As far as you’re aware, have any of
them apologized?
Bhattacharya: I think very, very few have acknowledged any errors at all.
Robinson: All right, what we know now. Last year, Johns Hopkins performed
a survey of the literature on lockdowns. We’re defining lockdowns here as
government mandates, “such as policies that limit internal movement, close
schools and businesses, and ban international travel.” The conclusion of
the Johns Hopkins study, that, on average, lockdowns caused a reduction in
COVID deaths of only two-tenths of 1 percent, does that sound right? And if
the benefit of locking down the country was a reduction in COVID deaths of
two-tenths of 1 percent, what do we know now about the costs?
Bhattacharya: Peter, it is absolutely right. I don’t know the specific number, but
the magnitude of the protective effect of the lockdowns, if it’s not zero, it’s very,
very close to zero. And for a very simple reason, you can see why it’s right. The
lockdowns, if they were to benefit anybody, benefited members of the laptop
class who actually had the wherewithal to stay home, stay safe while the rest of
the population served them. Our societies are deeply unequal. It’s a very small
fraction of the world popu-
lation that actually could
“The lockdowns, if they were to stay home and stay safe.
benefit anybody, benefited members And so, when the lock-
of the laptop class.” downs happened, a very
large number of people
essentially were left on the outside. They had to work to feed their families, to
take care of their elderly parents or whatnot, and that meant that the lockdowns
had no chance of actually working. The people who conceived the lockdowns
have an extent of naiveté about how societies work that just boggles the mind.
And you asked me about the harms from the lockdowns. They’re tremen-
dous, and we’re still just beginning to count them. So domestically, for instance,
I think there’s now a broad consensus that the lockdowns harmed our chil-
dren. In many places, including California, children did not see the inside of a
physical classroom for nearly a full year and a half. The consequences of that
play themselves out with deep learning loss. By the way, it’s concentrated on
minorities and poor populations who didn’t have the wherewithal to replace

the lost in-classroom learning, but it plays itself out over a long period of time.
The social-science literature from before the pandemic documented in detail
about how valuable investments in education are for the health of children. If
you deprive children of education for even short periods of time, it turns out it
leads to a lifetime of low-
er income, worse health,
even shorter lifespans. “If you deprive children of education
One estimate from for even short periods of time, it turns
early in the pandemic, out it leads to a lifetime of lower
published by the editor income, worse health, even shorter
of JAMA Pediatrics,
lifespans.”
found that just the
spring lockdowns in the United States alone cost our children 5.5 mil-
lion life years in expectation. That’s yet to come, but it’s coming. The toll
on skipped cancer screenings, again, the full extent is yet to come. In the
poorer parts of the world, the consequences have been absolutely devas-
tating, something like 100 million people thrown into dire poverty. The
estimate from the World Food Program is that one hundred million people
were put into dire food insecurity, near starvation. And the children in poor
countries . . . I’ll just take Uganda as an example. They don’t have Zoom
schools. They just had no school for two years, unless, again, they were in
the laptop class. Four and a half million Ugandan kids never came back to
school. We’re in a situation where the harms of the lockdowns are becom-
ing clearer and clearer every day, and the benefits, in terms of protecting
people from COVID . . . it’s becoming clearer that they did none of that.
Robinson: In March 2020, as the lockdowns were being announced, you felt
uneasy about them immediately. This leads me to the study that you con-
ducted, a seroprevalence
study right here in Santa
Clara County. You dis- “Four and a half million Ugandan kids
covered that the popula- never came back to school.”
tion was already much
more infected with COVID than public-health authorities had understood.
What happened?
Bhattacharya: That study, which I was the senior author on in early April
2020, found that about 3 percent of Santa Clara County had antibodies
already. There were several implications. One is that the mortality rate from
the disease was much lower than people were saying. The World Health

Organization had already said that the mortality rate was 3 or 4 percent. It
was technically something called a case fatality rate. That is a deeply mis-
leading number. Three or 4 percent of people who get COVID do not die from
COVID. What that seroprevalence study found was that it was 0.2 percent,
so two out of a thousand. Now, that’s still a big number. It’s not the flu. We
also found a very, very steep age gradient. Children just didn’t die at very
high rates from COVID, especially healthy children—one in a million, on that
order—whereas older people had much higher rates of death from COVID.
Another implication is that . . . it’s 3 percent, right? Very infectious disease.
That means we still have a long way to go before the pandemic’s over. We
did a very similar study in LA County the next week and then another, more
nationwide study. What we found in LA was 4 percent prevalence of infec-
tion. Four percent of the LA County adult population had evidence of having
had COVID already and recovered.
Robinson: By the way, if I may add, in subsequent weeks and months the find-
ings of these studies would be confirmed again and again and again and again.
Bhattacharya: One hundred-plus studies like this.
SHUTTING DOWN DISAGREEMENT
Robinson: There’s more to that story, but people will read that in the book you’re
going to write sooner or later; if I have anything to do with it, sooner. I’m going
to quote from the Great Barrington Declaration, which you co-authored with
two others: “As infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists,
we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts
of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach that we call
focused protection.” Instead of shutting the country down, you focus on people
who are at risk, particularly older people, because of this age gradient you
discovered. Very soon, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), spoke to the Washington Post about the declaration, saying: “This is
a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It’s danger-
ous.” Still later, Dr. Collins said on Fox News, “Hundreds of thousands of people
would have died if we had followed that strategy.” Jay, what’s going on here?
Bhattacharya: We wrote this Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.

We had already tried the lockdown in March and April of 2020, and the disease
had come back. The effective implied promise is two weeks to flatten the curve
and then we can figure out what to do about the disease, on the basis, it turns
out, of advice from people like Francis Collins and Tony Fauci to prominent

government actors, including President Trump. The lockdown strategy, in
part, was a reaction to observations of what happened in China in January of
2020. The Chinese had locked down their society, especially Wuhan and Hubei
province around it, and American bureaucrats, like Tony Fauci, looked at this
and thought, “OK, what the Chinese did worked. We need to do it, too.”
Robinson: How did they know that it worked? They believed Chinese data?
Bhattacharya: Yes. They’d already staked their reputations on this strategy.

And why “fringe epidemiology”? The problem was that you had thousands
and thousands of scientists—Stanford, Harvard, Oxford—saying that what
they were doing, their strategy, was a mistake, that there was no scientific
consensus in favor of their strategy.
Robinson: And by the way, when you say thousands and thousands of scien-
tists—you put up the Great Barrington Declaration online and invited anyone
who wanted to associate with it to sign, and you did have thousands and
thousands of signatures. [937,000 as of summer 2023—ed.]
Bhattacharya: It wasn’t actually a fringe idea. In fact, it was the stan-

dard policy for how to manage respiratory-virus pandemics that we’d
followed for a century. If you go back to March of 2020, you can see
op-eds in the New York Times, in the Washington Post, and elsewhere by
leading epidemiologists that look, for all the world, like the Great Bar-
rington Declaration. It’s the least original thing I ever worked on in my
entire life, Peter. The problem for Tony Fauci and Francis Collins was that
they had to solve a PR problem. You have prominent scientists saying,
“Look, what these guys are doing is not actually the right strategy.” That
normally should have led to a debate, a discussion, some sort of conver-
sation, because if you’re going to implement a policy as devastating as a
lockdown, you actually need to have scientific consensus. It’s not OK to say
that we should lock society down when only a part of scientists agree with
it, especially when it’s clear it didn’t work just a few months earlier, and it
was already clear that it had caused a lot of damage a few months earlier.
They had to make us into fringe characters, fringe actors—destroy us,
destroy our reputations, so they didn’t have to have that debate. They needed
to create an illusion of scientific consensus.
Robinson: So, in that incident, we’re not discussing science. We’re discussing
brutal bureaucratic politics.
Bhattacharya: Yes, it’s hubris.

A SECRET BLACKLIST
Robinson: You joined Twitter in 2021. Your first tweet, you linked to an article
that you had recently written on age-based risks, and you tweet, “Mass test-
ing is lockdown by stealth.” Very briefly, what’s the argument there?
Bhattacharya: Mass testing of children so that they stay out of school. You
test someone who’s come in contact with a child, and you keep the child out of
school for five, seven, however many days until you’re certain the kid’s nega-
tive. That essentially is a lockdown of that child, even though they’re actually
at lower risk of spreading the disease in the population. You already had, in
spring 2020, evidence from Sweden, which kept schools for kids under sixteen
entirely open: not one child died that spring from COVID, and teachers were
actually at lower risk of COVID than the population of other workers at large.
Robinson: And you continue to tweet. And then, late last year, Elon Musk
takes over Twitter and the company releases internal e-mails and docu-
ments, showing, among other things, that you had been intentionally
censored. Not long after that, Elon Musk gets in touch and says, “Come on
up here to headquarters and take a look.” What did you see?
Bhattacharya: It was
surreal, Peter. The
“They had to make us into fringe
blacklist they had put
characters, fringe actors—destroy us,
me on was insidious. The
destroy our reputations, so they purpose of my going on
didn’t have to have that debate. They Twitter was to engage
needed to create an illusion of with people who hadn’t
scientific consensus.” heard of my message
or about lockdowns or
COVID policy, who maybe disagreed with me. The blacklist made sure that
my tweets, my message, never reached that audience. It only reached people
who already followed me.
Robinson: And Twitter was banning you on its own initiative?
Bhattacharya: I don’t know for certain, but I very strongly suspect that it
was government actors that had me on a blacklist. There’s a lawsuit by the
Missouri and Louisiana attorney generals’ offices against the Biden adminis-
tration. We have deposed Tony Fauci, aides to the surgeon general, aides to
Jen Psaki, the former communications director of the White House. We’ve

found direct instructions and threats from the White House and many agen-
cies within Health and Human Services to Twitter and other social media
companies. Essentially threatening them unless they censored people and
ideas that they didn’t like.
When I met with Elon, I saw it with my own eyes. It literally said, “Blacklist.”
I saw prominent media people asking for tweets of mine to be brought down,
for me to be censored. It was a striking thing to know that there were actors in
the media environment and in the government who wanted to silence me.
BETTER MODELS
Robinson: Now we come to what we ought to learn. There was a study of three
states last spring by the Paragon Health Institute. It used an index of state
responses to COVID that were created at Oxford University, so we have an
objective set of indexing. Illinois, for example, has an average score. California,
which imposed some of the harshest lockdowns, has a high score. Florida, which
imposed lockdowns, but only very briefly and then opened up almost entirely, has
a low score. The finding, after adjusting for age and disease, California, Illinois,
and Florida: “all three states had roughly equal outcomes, suggesting that there
was no substantial health
benefit to more severe
lockdowns. Florida, “I very strongly suspect that it was
however, easily surpassed government actors that had me on a
California and Illinois in blacklist.”
educational and economic
outcomes.” The kids went to school. The economy remained open. You cam-
paigned against lockdowns throughout COVID. You have no reason to regret that?
Bhattacharya: No, I think that was the right thing to do. I’m not, by nature,
an activist.
But every aspect of lockdown just fills me with . . . It has nothing to do with
science. It’s damaging to the poor. It’s damaging to kids in ways that public
policy never ought to have done, and we did it out of ignorance and fear and
hubris. You know, the all-cause excess deaths in Sweden are something like
3 percent. It’s among the very, very lowest in all of Europe.
Robinson: And Sweden did not lock down. Schools stayed open.
Bhattacharya: Very famously.
Robinson: The economy continued to function.

Bhattacharya: And they have lower mortality than locked-down Germany,
locked-down UK, locked-down France. It’s almost no excess deaths. Imagine
that. Imagine if we’d followed a policy like Sweden’s. We could have avoided
all the harm to our children. We could have avoided all the suffering caused
by the lockdowns: the closed businesses, the unemployment, all of that, the
economic harm, where we’d spend trillions of dollars—the inflation is a conse-
quence of the lockdowns—and still protected our people better from COVID.
A QUEST FOR HONESTY
Robinson: So, the question remains: how do we do better next time around?
Bhattacharya: I think the head of the FDA, Robert Califf, did an interview
with some public radio station saying that misinformation is the number one
cause of death. It is irresponsible in the extreme and depressing to watch.
The problem is, if you don’t have an honest evaluation of what happened and
the disaster that happened, this will happen again.
Robinson: The lockdowns are largely imposed by county and state officials,
and now, some twenty states have enacted laws that curtail the powers of
those health officials. The laws vary from state to state, but they require
public-health officials to narrow the scope of their actions to achieve specific
health purposes. They call for expedited judicial review of such actions, and
they ensure that actions will automatically expire after a certain period of
time. Is that a good idea?
Bhattacharya: Yes. I think the problem is that you have the CDC, which
issues guidance; the NIH, which issues proclamations from on high, I guess,
of who’s fringe and who’s not; and then the local and state officials essentially
respond as if it were Holy Writ. It’s not formal regulation that’s been subject
to public comment or whatever. It’s just a CDC guidance. But during the pan-
demic, these kinds of guidance were used in court cases to defend indefensi-
ble things—lockdowns, closures of businesses—that had no real justification.
Robinson: And in most cases, that public-health official is appointed, not

elected. Most people have never even heard of them, and suddenly, it emerg-
es that they have . . . I’m going to say dictatorial powers. You have to live a
certain way because they say so, and there’s no redress. Does it bother you
that it’s only twenty states?
Bhattacharya: Public health, when it is partisan, is failed public health.

It’s not like politics. You can’t just win 50 percent plus one and say you’ve

done a successful job in public health. You need 95 percent of the public to
honor and respect what you’re saying or else you’ve failed, because public
health is for everybody. I’m in favor of the laws, and I wish that those laws
were extended to the rest of the states. At that point, public-health officials
couldn’t act as dictators. They would have to reason with the public and tell
them, “Look, here’s the evidence for why we’re asking you to do this,” and if
they’re persuasive, the public would agree. In Sweden, 95 percent of people
trust Swedish public health because they were honest about their mistakes,
honest about their reasoning. They treated adults like adults.
Robinson: What still could be done?
Bhattacharya: The response is coming. It’s unfortunate that we haven’t

had an honest evaluation. The extent of harm to people is so much that it
demands a political response, and what form it will take I don’t know. The
fact that public health did not actually end up protecting people, it ended
up harming people—that demands a political response, which, I think, will
inevitably come.
I just did this document with several of my friends, called the “Norfolk
Group Blueprint.” It’s a blueprint for what an honest COVID commission
would do, the questions
it would ask, so I’m going
“Public health, when it is partisan, is
to work very hard on
a failed public health.”
that. I still would like to
be a scholar. I am still interested in some of the research questions. I think
it’s very clear from how scientific institutions responded to COVID that sci-
ence is fundamentally broken.
I think [Great Barrington Declaration co-signer] Martin Kulldorff put it
well. During COVID, it felt like science had entered a dark age. Even though
there were all these advances, at the same time, you couldn’t say something
that the powers that be, the high clerisy of science . . . you couldn’t contradict
them without being excommunicated. We can’t have scientific institutions
operate that way and still have public confidence in science or expect science
to produce the kinds of advances it has. So, I’m going to work toward reform
of scientific institutions so those kinds of things don’t happen again.

RAC E
A Grievous Error,
Corrected
Race-based college admissions violate the
Constitution. The Supreme Court—and the
nation—have now ended a long deviation from
American values.
By Robert J. Delahunty and John Yoo
I
n every area of life, the
Constitution and federal Key points
civil rights laws forbid the »» In June, the Supreme Court finally
cut a cancer out of constitutional law.
government from using race
»» Even if colleges resist, litigants will
in making decisions. Government keep up pressure on the universities
cannot use race to distribute gov- to purge their selection procedures
of hidden, as well as overt, racial
ernment funds, provide benefits,
preferences.
deploy police, run prisons or hos-
»» The court restored the principle
pitals, or even protect the nation’s of “strict scrutiny,” in which govern-
security through “racial profiling.” ment must show a “compelling”
interest in interceding.
But the Supreme Court carved out
Robert J. Delahunty is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center

for the American Way of Life. John Yoo is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institu-
tion, the co-host of the Hoover Institution podcast The Pacific Century (https://
www.hoover.org/publications/pacific-century), the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of
Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the Ameri-
can Enterprise Institute. Delahunty and Yoo are the authors of The Politically
Incorrect Guide to the Supreme Court (2023, Regnery Publishing).

one area from this fundamental colorblind principle. In Grutter v. Bollinger
(2003), the justices created a special exception for admissions to colleges
and universities. A majority in Grutter accepted the claim that colleges
could use racial diversity as a proxy for intellectual diversity—which relies
upon the stereotyping assumption that a student’s mindset depends on his
or her race.
In June, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court
finally cut this cancer out of constitutional law. In a monumental 6–3 opinion
authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court invalidated the race-linked
admissions programs maintained by Harvard and the University of North
Carolina. The court affirmed the foundational constitutional principle of
equality under the law, regardless of race. If the court’s decision is respected
and enforced, it is unlikely that any race-linked college-admissions program
in any public university or federally funded private university would survive.
It is quite likely that no faculty hiring or promotion in which race played a
part will be legally permissible. The one sector in American society that had
been exempt from legal rules banning the use of race—higher education—
will be forced to transform itself.
Do not expect the universities to comply meekly with the court’s ruling.
Many of them had been planning how to evade the expected decision even
before it came down. But even if massive resistance is likely (as it was with
the Warren court’s desegregation orders in the 1950s), litigants will keep
up the pressure on the universities to purge their selection procedures of
hidden, as well as overt,
racial preferences. And
the court has laid out The one part of American society that
clear and firm guidelines had been exempt from legal rules
for the lower courts banning the use of race will be forced
to follow in adjudicat- to transform itself.
ing those cases. Racial
preferences—and any subterfuges designed to conceal such preferences—
are forbidden.
Several justices in the SFFA majority have long held racial preferences in
their crosshairs. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” Roberts
wrote in a 2007 case denying race-conscious policies in K–12 schools. “The
way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on
the basis of race.” The late Justice Antonin Scalia had even harsher words for
race-based affirmative action: “Discrimination on the basis of race is illegal,
immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic

society.” And according to the court’s sharpest critic of racial preferences,
Justice Clarence Thomas, “every time the government places citizens on
racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or ben-
efits, it demeans us all.”
In reaching its stunning conclusion, the court did not expressly overturn
any precedent (though it certainly disemboweled Grutter). Rather, it reaf-
firmed a standard of judicial review—“strict scrutiny”—for racial classifica-
tions that traces back to its decisions in the 1940s and that it has ostensibly
applied since then. Strict
scrutiny permits the use
Chief Justice Roberts wrote in 2007, of race only when (a) the
“The way to stop discrimination on government has a “com-
the basis of race is to stop discrimi- pelling” interest and (b)
nating on the basis of race.” nothing other than the
use of race provides a
means to achieve that objective. Judged by that standard, nearly all govern-
mental reliance on race is invalid. (There might be incidental exceptions, like
keeping certain statistics, say, for public-health purposes.) The strict-scruti-
ny standard, if honestly applied, ensures that our Constitution is colorblind.
Throughout the civil rights era, judges and lawyers would quip that strict
scrutiny is strict in theory, but fatal in fact. Beginning in the late 1970s, how-
ever, cases like Bakke, Grutter, and Fisher v. University of Texas purportedly
applied strict scrutiny, but in fact used a much more lenient standard toward
admissions policies. In June, the court returned to the classic interpretation
of strict scrutiny.
A LONG, INFAMOUS STRUGGLE

The colorblindness principle is a keystone of the American Constitution, as
the court’s opinion, and the historic concurring opinion of Thomas, demon-
strate at length. That principle found its roots in the Declaration of Inde-
pendence and the abolitionist movement, triumphed in the Emancipation
Proclamation and the Reconstruction amendments, and overcame legalized
segregation with Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement.
“The Constitution, as well as the Declaration of Independence, and the
sentiments of the founders of the Republic, give us a platform broad enough,
and strong enough, to support the most comprehensive plans for the freedom
and elevation of all the people of this country, without regard to color, class,
or clime,” Frederick Douglass declared in criticizing the infamous Dred Scott
decision. As Justice Harlan famously wrote in dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson,

which upheld racial segregation: “Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither
knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all
citizens are equal before the law.” Or, as Scalia put it pithily in his Adarand
Constructors v. Peña concurrence, “in the eyes of government, we are just one
race here. It is American.”
The decision to prohibit the universities’ use of race will, as a matter of
constitutional law, mark the end of the Supreme Court’s misbegotten devia-
tion from colorblind-
ness. The court has
steadily banned racial The court has steadily banned racial
discrimination in every discrimination in every other part of
other part of public life. public life.
In Brown v. Board of
Education, the court began dismantling the pernicious government policy of
segregated schools. It recited arguments that pressed the “fundamental con-
tention” that “no State has any authority under the equal-protection clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational
opportunities among its citizens.” (Thomas’s opinion repeatedly cites the
government’s brief in the Brown case, in which the Eisenhower administra-
tion emphatically endorsed the colorblindness principle.) City of Richmond
v. J. A. Croson made clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s insistence on
colorblindness prohibited state and local governments from considering race
when spending money or awarding contracts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s
opinion explained that racial preferences present the serious “danger that a
racial classification is merely the product of unthinking stereotypes or a form
of racial politics.” Then, in Adarand Constructors v. Peña, the court made it
crystal clear that this bar also applied to the federal government.
In standing up for the colorblind Constitution, the Supreme Court has
finally closed the book on its own unfortunate history with race. In Dred Scott
v. Sandford (1857), the court’s first effort to solve the nation’s race problem
proved a disaster. Chief Justice Roger Taney thought he could head off a
looming division between North and South by striking down the Missouri
Compromise, holding that blacks could never become US citizens, and for-
bidding congressional regulation of slavery in the territories. By departing
from the Constitution in the name of enlightened elite opinion, Taney only
hastened the coming of the Civil War.
The court disgraced itself again in its next major encounter with race,
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy upheld not just the concept of “separate but
equal” but also the right of governments to enact policies based on race,

thereby ushering in the Jim Crow era. In yet a third case, Korematsu v. United
States, the court, despite adopting the strict-scrutiny standard, allowed the
internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II because the
government assumed that their ethnicity indicated disloyalty.
The court sought to restore its reputation in Brown v. Board of Education,
which finally put an end to segregation in public schools. It undertook the
difficult work of uprooting de jure racism in area after area, from public
facilities to employment to government contracts. The elected branches also
sought to end official racism, with President Harry Truman desegregat-
ing the military, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helping enforce Brown,
President John F. Kennedy prohibiting racial discrimination by government
contractors, and Congress enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
THE PERILS OF “DIVERSITY”

Unfortunately, however, the pursuit of racial equality and integration has
mutated into a new ideology of racial diversity. Both now and in the past,
the court has allowed the use of race to remedy discrimination experienced
by identifiable victims. But in the context of higher education, where many
minority applicants by the 1990s had neither suffered the direct effects of
segregation nor been victims of discrimination themselves, racial diversity
became an end in itself.
Justice Lewis F. Powell’s 1978 Bakke opinion defended racial diversity as
a way of promoting intellectual diversity in classroom discussion—a laud-
able end aligned with the First Amendment values of free speech and open
inquiry. But anyone
familiar with American
By the 1990s, when many minor- campuses today can see
ity applicants had neither suffered that free and open debate
the direct effects of segregation nor is getting harder to find.
been victims of discrimination, racial Even liberal academ-
diversity became an end in itself. ics, like former Yale Law
School dean Anthony
Kronman in his book The Assault on American Excellence (2019), acknowledge
and deplore the corrupting effects of the post-Bakke pursuit of racial diver-
sity for its own sake.
The Bakke court split 4–4 between the justices who would have upheld the
constitutionality of a quota for admission to a state medical school and four
who would have struck it down. Powell provided the decisive fifth vote, ruling

that the school’s racial set-aside was not constitutional but also upholding
the “Harvard Plan” as a model of constitutionally permissible racial prefer-
ences. Powell’s argument pivoted on distinguishing a numerical “quota”
from a “goal”: race could be considered as a “plus factor” in the admissions
process because it would contribute to creating greater “diversity” of opinion
in the student body. It was said to be a harmless feature of admissions policy,
like upgrading a candidate by a notch for being a saxophone player. Powell
erroneously maintained that all this was compatible with strict scrutiny. In
Grutter, a majority of the court tracked Powell’s Bakke opinion, declared the
time-limited use of race in college admissions, and hoped that such prefer-
ences would last no more than twenty-five years.
The Harvard template for racial preferences that was allowed under Bakke
is now ruled illegal under SFFA.
Nonetheless, history suggests that even the clear holding in SFFA—like
Brown nearly seventy years ago—will be, to paraphrase Winston Churchill,
not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Massive resis-
tance may arise from an entrenched educational bureaucracy that elevates
diversity above all other values, including excellence and merit. Here, just as
in Brown, parents and students—who overwhelmingly reject racial prefer-
ences—will not be able to eliminate the use of skin color in one fell swoop,
but only after a series of
cases across the nation.
Striking down the Massive resistance may arise from an
admissions programs entrenched educational bureaucracy
at Harvard and UNC is that elevates diversity above all
thus the easy part. Both other values, including excellence
schools admitted that
and merit.
they use overt racial
preferences. And the undisputed factual record in both cases confirmed
that racial preferences affected admissions decisions. At Harvard, Asian-
American applicants had lower acceptance rates than did white students at
every academic decile. An Asian-American applicant at the fourth-lowest
decile had less than a 1 percent chance of being admitted, while an African-
American applicant in the fourth-lowest decile had a 12.8 percent chance.
African-Americans in that fourth-lowest decile had the same chance of
admission as an Asian-American applicant in the top decile of applicants
(12.7 percent). The numbers at UNC were equally striking.
The campaign to enforce the colorblindness principle will not end here.
Many (though by no means all) universities are as committed to using race in

admissions as ever. The history of resistance to Brown suggests that univer-
sities will respond to a loss at the Supreme Court not by abandoning their
goal of an ideal racial balance but by covertly pursuing the same end through
less obvious means. Instead of openly considering skin color in admissions,
universities will shift gears to achieve the same racial proportions through
facially neutral proxies. Colleges will disguise their use of race behind pre-
texts such as personality and leadership scores, as Harvard tried to do. At
the end of his opinion, Roberts tries to extinguish some of these brush fires
before they can start.
Racial discrimination has been a deep stain on our country’s history
and a betrayal of its founding principles. But the constitutional solution to
overcoming racism is not to perpetuate it under the guise of helping those
once harmed. As Thomas concludes in his concurrence, we must share the
“enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enun-
ciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United
States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated
equally before the law.”
Published by the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life
(dc.claremont.org). © 2023 The Claremont Institute. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Milton

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

R AC E
The Wages of
Victimhood
Reparations for slavery, like countless other failed
government programs for black Americans, would
ignore the real problems.
By Shelby Steele
B
lack Americans endured four centuries of an especially mean and
degrading persecution. Slavery, and the regime of segregation
that followed it, was dawn-to-dusk, cradle-to-grave oppression.
No contemporary offer of reparation could ever undo that.
But since the 1960s, we blacks have been all but overwhelmed with social
programs and policies that seek to reparate us. Didn’t the 1964 Civil Rights
Act launch an era of reparation in America?
And didn’t that era continue with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great
Society and War on Poverty, two sweeping excursions into social engineer-
ing that he hoped would “end poverty in our time”? Then there was school
busing for integration, free public housing, racial preferences in college
admissions, affirmative action in employment, increasingly generous welfare
payments, and so on.
More recently, in American institutions of every kind, there has emerged
a new woke language of big-hat-no-cattle words like “equity,” “inclusion,”
“intersectionality,” “triggers,” “affinity spaces,” “allies,” and of course, the
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution.

all-purpose “diversity,” today both a mandate and a brand. America has had
some sixty years of what might be called reparational social reform—reform
meant to uplift not only the poor but especially those, like black Americans,
whose poverty meets
the bar of historical
America has already had sixty years grievance.
of what might be called reparational Today we can see what
social reform. we couldn’t in the 1960s:
that this vast array of
government programs has failed to lift black Americans to anything like
parity with whites. By almost every important measure—educational
achievement, out-of-wedlock births, homeownership, divorce rates—
blacks are on the losing end of racial disparities. The reparational model
of reform, in which governments and institutions try to uplift the formerly
oppressed, has failed.
But why such immense failure in a post-’60s America that has only grown
more repentant of its racist past? The answer, I think, is that the Great
Society was profoundly disingenuous. It was a collection of reparational
reforms meant to show an America finally delivered from the tarnish of its
long indulgence in racism. The Great Society was a gigantic virtue signal. It
was moral advertising when the times called for the hard work of adapting a
long-oppressed people to the demands of the modern world.
But an even greater barrier to black development turned out to be freedom
itself. In the mid-’60s, when the civil rights movement and Martin Luther
King Jr. were staples on the evening news, we black Americans stepped into
a vastly greater freedom than anything we had ever known. King’s rhetoric—
“Great God Almighty, we’re free at last”—portrayed freedom as heaven.
But freedom also had to have been scary. Oppression had conditioned us to
suppress our humanity, to
settle ourselves into a per-
The Great Society was a gigantic manent subjugation. Not
virtue signal. It was moral advertising the best preparation for a
when the times called for hard work. full life in freedom.
I believe it was this
collision with freedom—its intimidating burden of responsibility, its terror
of the unknown, its risk of humiliation—that pressured black Americans,
especially the young, into a terrible mistake.
In segregation we had longed for a freedom grounded in democratic
principles. In the ’60s we won that point. But then suddenly, with the ink still

wet on the Civil Rights Act, a new voice of protest exploded onto the scene, a
voice of race and color and atavistic longing: “black power.”
To accommodate, we shifted the overriding focus of racial protest in
America from rights and laws to identity. Today, racial preferences are used
everywhere in American life. Identity is celebrated almost as profusely as
freedom once was.
It all follows a simple formula: add a history of victimization to the identity
of any group, and you will have created entitlement. Today’s black identity is
a victim-focused identity designed to entitle blacks in American life. By the
terms of this identity, we blacks might be called “citizen-victims” or “citizens
with privileges.”
The obvious problem with this is that it baits us into a life of chasing down
privileges like affirmative action. In broader America, this only makes us
sufferers for want of privileges. Reparation can never be more than a dream
of privilege.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2023 Dow Jones &
Co. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is How

Public Policy Became War, by David Davenport and
Gordon Lloyd. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit

H I STO RY A N D CULT URE
To Equality
Equality of opportunity, a fundamental American
value, has long been under attack. Why it must be
preserved.
By David Davenport
A
mericans have consistently said they believe in the principle of
equality of opportunity. As the authors of a Brookings Institu-
tion study on the subject concluded: “Americans believe in
opportunity. . . . They are far more interested in equal oppor-
tunity than in equal results.” These days, however, that notion is under
constant challenge and even attack. Indeed, there are suggestions that it
be scrapped and replaced with newer ideas such as “equity” or equality of
outcome. Equality of opportunity is also challenged on the policy front, with
proposed new economic and social plans that would move America down a
very different path.
OPPORTUNITY VS. OUTCOME

The argument today seems to be that if equality of opportunity was once
the goal, it is no longer enough. In the 2020 presidential campaign, vice
presidential candidate Kamala Harris called for this kind of change, saying
in a campaign video about equality that “we should all end up at the same
place.” She argued that if two people had the same opportunity, but began
from different starting points, the results would not be equal. Equality of
outcomes has experienced a renewal of interest during the social-justice
David Davenport is a research fellow (emeritus) at the Hoover Institution and a

senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center.

movements of the 2020s. For example, Kent State professor of African-
American history Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor has written that equality of
opportunity may have worked for whites but is a myth for blacks, calling for
“equality of results” as “a more concrete response to our current yet long-
standing crisis.”
There is also a lively argument about the extent to which different out-
comes are necessarily unfair or are created by unfairness. Economists have
pointed out, for example, that much of the gap in earnings between white and
black workers is explained by variables such as education, test scores, and
work experience. If, as labor economist Harry Holzer suggested, “differences
in educational attainment and test scores together may account for most
of the racial differences in earnings,” that would suggest a different policy
approach from trying to equalize bottom-line incomes.
Then there are questions of fairness in a system of equality of outcomes.
Equality of outcomes requires that individuals and groups of people be
treated unequally, giving
more to some and less
to others, taking from To the American people, equality of
some to give to others. opportunity is the very definition of
Does government really the American dream.
belong in the business
of taking money from someone who devoted his or her life to developing
a particular talent or career and giving it to someone who did not make
such a commitment?
Is pursuing equality of outcomes consistent with the American under-
standing of liberty as well as equality? Is America ready to trade in being
“the land of opportunity,” still sought after by millions of immigrants, in order
to pursue only equality? Should government be in the business of equalizing
people’s economic or social status and could it even accomplish that if it
sought to do so?
A more current debate, but one that follows similar lines of argument,
concerns equity. Equity seems to be the new code word to describe the pur-
suit of a more just society and the new replacement for equality of opportuni-
ty as a goal. We need “equity” for people of color, for women, for transgender
individuals, and others—these are the claims of the day. Some say we need
it because equality of opportunity is no longer sufficient. Others say we need
both equality and equity.
The increasing and current use of the term equity is puzzling because it
is not clear what it means or how it may be different, if it is, from equality.

The term has a history
of use in finances to
denote the building
of capital. The first
definition in the
Merriam-Webster
dictionary is
simply “justice
according to
natural law or
right.” Scholar
Shelby Steele,
reviewing its previous
meaning, says the cur-
rent use of the term
“has no meaning.”
Perhaps it derives
from a sense that a
new term is needed
for marketing purpos-
es, or because the term
“equality” hasn’t accom-
plished all it should.
WHAT GOVERNMENT
CAN AND CAN’T DO
At the same time we ask these
fresh questions, we continue to
face the question debated by the
founders and progressives about
the proper role of government
in equality. Conservatives argue
that America is fundamentally
built on individual liberty
and that the proper role
of government is

to protect that. Liberals, on the
other hand, argue that indi-
vidual freedom has led to too
much inequality, especially
inequality of income and
wealth, and that only
the government
has the power to
step in and correct
these inequalities.
In some ways, the
history of the past
century has been
one of increasing
the government’s
role in favor
of greater
equality, with
only occasional
returns to the
primacy of individual
liberty promoted by
the founders.
A series of initiatives
has empowered the gov-
ernment to bring about
greater equality for groups
of people: senior citizens,
those living in poverty, the
disabled, those who can-
not afford health care,
and so on. It began
with Franklin Roos-
evelt’s New Deal
and the devel-
opment of

Social Security to afford special protections for the elderly. But Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s greatly accelerated government
intervention by providing equalizing assistance to groups of people seen
as needing that boost. The Great Society premise was LBJ’s view that,
as he stated in his 1965 Howard University commencement address, it
wasn’t enough to open the gates of opportunity, but you had to have a
real chance to walk through them. This would require extra government
assistance if you had been held down by poverty or racism, and his Great
Society implemented many such programs, especially its War on Poverty
and related job and education efforts. Critics questioned whether gov-
ernment should be discriminating in favor of certain groups, as well as
whether government could actually accomplish any meaningful leveling of
the playing field in this way.
The president who tacked back in the direction of the founders’ under-
standing of equality of opportunity was Ronald Reagan. His view was that
government not only should not, but it could not effectively, create equality
of opportunity. He famously said that the government had declared war on
poverty but that poverty had won. Government was not, he said, the solu-
tion to the problem; “government is the problem.” Reagan’s understanding
of what he called “the opportunity society” was to shrink government and
its taxation so that it got
out of the way of people’s
Does government belong in the busi- individual freedom and
ness of taking money from someone choices, including the
who earned it and giving it to another? freedom to pursue their
own opportunities. In par-
ticular, Reagan objected to government planners who ran programs trying to
direct the choices and opportunities that individuals might make.
By and large, however, the policy debate since the time of Franklin Roos-
evelt has not been whether, but how much, government can and should help
those needing special assistance. The welfare state has continued to grow.
In the twenty-first century, however, the terms of the debate have shifted
dramatically. With proposals that government must tackle income inequal-
ity, or even wealth inequality, the pendulum is shifting away from equality of
opportunity to something else.
A DEMAND TO SEIZE WEALTH

French economist Thomas Piketty is the harbinger of an even more sweeping
view of equality in the twenty-first century. The new conception of equality

concerns itself primarily with income and wealth, arguing that until those
are addressed, there is no real equality in our society.
Piketty presents extensive data showing a dramatic rise in global wealth
since the 1980s, due especially to inherited wealth and investment gains,
unrelated to work or effort, which he calls “patrimonial capitalism.” Piketty
argues that government’s normal fiscal and social tools would not be enough
to address this new, sweeping inequality. Instead, he argues, there needs to
be “a progressive global tax on capital,” not so much to “finance the social
state but to regulate capitalism.” Piketty’s most recent book, A Brief History
of Equality (2022), argues that the whole idea of human progress is to move
toward greater equality.
Piketty seeks something well beyond equality of opportunity: he is pursu-
ing nothing less than a complete reordering of the economic system. He is as
much concerned with taking power and money from the wealthy as he is with
creating greater opportunity for the poor, if not more. The levers he would
push are power, justice,
capitalism, and wealth,
not mere opportunity. Ronald Reagan famously said that
And there are signs that the government had declared war on
some progressive politi- poverty but that poverty had won.
cians are paying atten-
tion. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, has advocated a special tax “on
the extreme wealth of the top 0.1 percent.” President Joe Biden has jumped
on this bandwagon, proposing his own new tax on billionaires (based not just
on income but also on wealth). These moves are short of Piketty’s call for an
economic revolution, but they advance his core thinking about power, wealth,
capitalism, and inequality.
CAN EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY BE SAVED?

One end of the spectrum is traditional equality of opportunity as envisioned
and embraced by the founders. In this view, men and women are created
equal and therefore have equal rights, especially political and legal rights.
From that starting point, people are free to make their own choices on how,
as the Declaration of Independence put it, to pursue happiness. Guarantee-
ing individual rights, so that people are free to choose, is the primary role
of g
overnment in this traditional view of equality of opportunity. Paring
back the role of government regulation in people’s lives, reducing taxes, and
promoting individual freedom was President Reagan’s path back toward this
more traditional view and many conservatives still advocate this today.

But liberals argue that the government must engage in programs to
increase equality of opportunity for the poor and disadvantaged, and also for
ethnic groups that have been left behind in society. Johnson’s Great Society
sought to move the federal government strongly in this direction, but his-
tory suggests that it is very difficult for government to move the needles on
opportunity and equality. Government keeps adding to the social safety net
and building out the welfare state in the hope of creating greater equality.
Do we need to add universal health care to the social and economic agenda?
Should we pay off everyone’s college debt?
Conservatives argue that this is not the proper role of government and
such programs do not work, but the debate and policy implementation
continue.
Now, several movements on the left have created a new end of the progres-
sive spectrum; perhaps we could call it a super-progressive stance on equal-
ity or “the new, new left.”
IMMIGRANTS KEEP THE DREAM ALIVE

Does America continue to be a land of opportunity? Interestingly, the
strongest answer comes from immigrants, who overwhelmingly state
that this American characteristic is why they have come to the United
States. Two economists,
Ran Abramitzky and
Second-generation immigrants find Leah Boustan, recently
strong job and economic opportuni- pulled together what
ties in the United States. In fact, they they call “the first truly
outperform native-born Americans. big set of data about
immigration” from cen-
sus records, presenting them in their new book: Streets of Gold: Ameri-
ca’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success (2022, PublicAffairs). They found
that second-generation immigrants, especially, found strong job and
economic opportunities in the United States and, in fact, outperformed
native-born Americans. As co-author Abramitzky told the New York
Times, “The American dream is just as alive now as it was a century
ago.”
The huge demand from immigrants to come to America and find greater
opportunity is strong evidence that opportunity still works and remains a
key to the American dream. Economic mobility offers more evidence. While
studies have shown growth in economic inequality, other studies have shown
that economic mobility—the ability to move from one quadrant of income

to another—is still alive in America. Perhaps the most important factor
in developing opportunity, and one that finds broad support in the middle
ground, is education. This is where both liberals and conservatives agree and
could work together effectively.
TOWARD THE GREATER GOOD

Equality of opportunity, rightly understood, is not a set of government
programs or policy prescriptions. Since we understand that complete equal-
ity is not possible, the
proper understanding of
equality of opportunity Equality of opportunity is a point of
is as a point of departure departure and an aspiration, both a
and an aspiration, both starting point and a goal.
a starting point and a
goal toward which the society is always working. The key question, then, is
not whether equality of opportunity is outdated as a goal but whether we are
continuing to make progress toward it. Measuring and discussing progress is
the key, not changing the finish line. This is especially so since, as it has been
since the founding, the goal of equality in American terms must also be bal-
anced with individual liberty.
There are reasons to be optimistic about the future of equality of oppor-
tunity. For one thing, the American people believe it describes the American
dream—and describes it better than equality of outcome or other goals. For
another, immigrants by the millions keep coming to America in search of
opportunity; they see something here that perhaps long-settled Americans
have lost. Then, too, young people keep looking for new frontiers and oppor-
tunities, finding new jobs, new careers, and other parts of the country that
support their dreams. There is cause for philosophical optimism in that some
are deeply committed to equality, others to liberty and opportunity, but the
combination—equality of opportunity—is still a middle ground upon which
they can gather.
We should acknowledge, however, that there are also reasons for pessi-
mism about the future of equality of opportunity. In this day of hyperparti-
sanship, those on the left could dig in ever deeper on equity, while those on
the right advocate liberty and opportunity. Compromise has become a dirty
word.
Whatever happened to equality of opportunity? It is alive and well,
but it needs to be appreciated for what it is—a point of departure and an
aspiration—not for what it is not, a set of policies or government programs.

Government can and will contribute to the pursuit of the goal, but not to the
exclusion of efforts by individuals, nonprofits, and the larger society.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Adapted from Equality of Opportunity: A

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

HOOV E R A R C HIV E S
Home at Last
Fifty years after North Vietnam released the
last US prisoners of war, Hoover has opened the
letters of former POW and Hoover fellow James
B. Stockdale and his wife, Sybil, who worked
tirelessly to bring the captives home.
By Jean McElwee Cannon
F
ifty years ago, US Navy aviator James B. Stockdale walked down
the ramp of a C-141 Starlifter—an aircraft nicknamed the “Hanoi
Taxi” by its passengers—and became one of the first American
prisoners of war to touch down on mainland American soil during
Operation Homecoming, a large-scale effort by the US government to release
591 POWs who had been held in squalid prisons in North Vietnam. As he left
the aircraft at Travis Air Force Base, Captain Stockdale said, “The men who
follow me down that ramp know what loyalty means because they have been
living with loyalty, living
off loyalty, for the past
“The men who follow me down that
several years. I mean loy-
ramp know what loyalty means.”
alty to our military ethic,
loyalty to our commander in chief, loyalty to each other.” The following day,
as spellbound onlookers watched both at San Diego’s Miramar airfield and on
television, Jim Stockdale was reunited with his wife and four sons after seven
and a half years in which he suffered torture and solitary confinement in the
Jean McElwee Cannon is a research fellow and curator for North American
Collections at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

ACE: Naval aviator James B. Stockdale earned twenty-six combat decorations
during his long military career. This snapshot shows him in an F-8 Crusader,
a naval fighter he flew extensively. As commander of an F-8 squadron in
August 1964, he led sorties during what came to be known as the Gulf of
Tonkin incident, the trigger for broad US involvement in the Vietnam War. On
September 9, 1965, he was flying an A-4 Skyhawk when it was shot down over
North Vietnam. Injured and held captive, he became the highest-ranking naval
officer held in the “Hanoi Hilton” prison, where he relied on Stoic philosophy
to maintain cohesion and morale among captured American servicemen.
[Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
hands of his enemy captors. He had been held since September 9, 1965, when
his A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over Vietnam.
The return of the POWs was due largely to the loyalty and galvanizing
energy of a woman who refused to remain passive while captured Ameri-
can soldiers suffered. While her husband was imprisoned, Sybil Stockdale,
wife of James Stockdale, organized the National League of Families of
American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, an activist group that
campaigned tirelessly both in the government and in the press for the
release of mistreated prisoners of war overseas. Author Heath Hardage
Lee, who used the Hoover Institution’s Sybil Stockdale collection to write
her 2019 book, The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who
Took on the US Government to Bring Their Husbands Home, reflected that
“Sybil Stockdale was the mother of the national POW/MIA movement.
Without her, there would have been no National League of Families to
bring the POWs home
and account for the
missing servicemen. The Stockdale collections are a
Sybil’s willingness to window into the political events in
break with the Ameri- the latter years of the Vietnam War.
can government and
military’s dictates at the time saved lives.” Sybil Stockdale’s papers tell
the story of a devoted wife turned determined activist who lobbied gov-
ernment leaders, conducted savvy media campaigns, held covert meet-
ings with antiwar groups, and coded secret messages to her imprisoned
husband.
This year, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Operation Homecoming, the
Hoover Archives has opened the collection of James B. Stockdale, which
contains a wealth of correspondence that illuminates the life and career of a
man who would not just survive the hated “Hanoi Hilton” prison but who was
also a scholar, daring test pilot and instructor, devoted father and husband
and son, vice presidential candidate, and eventually, in the 1980s and 1990s,
a Hoover Institution senior fellow and highly regarded lecturer in philosophy
at Stanford University.
Curators and archivists at the Hoover Archives have worked closely
with the Stockdale family in recent years to make the James B. Stock-
dale papers available to scholars and the public. Sid Stockdale, who has
just published his memoir A World Apart: Growing Up Stockdale during
Vietnam, commented, “The collections at the Hoover Archives are stun-
ning, and combined with their professional world-class staff they provide

ADVOCATE: Sybil Stockdale, shown accepting a military medal with her
sons, spent seven and a half years waiting for her husband to return from
captivity in North Vietnam. Alongside raising four boys—Jim, Sid, Stanford,
and Taylor—and working to support the family, she advocated for POWs both
in government circles and in the press, and established the National League
of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. The league
is still active today, as more than 1,500 American service members from the
Vietnam War remain unaccounted for. [Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
researchers an unrivaled experience. I am thrilled my father’s letters

are open and available to explore and can’t wait to see how academics
make use of them. I am confident they will be thrilled by the gems they
discover.”
Combined with the papers of Sybil Stockdale, the James B. Stockdale col-
lection at Hoover constitutes one of the most valuable archives in the nation
for understanding the experiences of American POWs and the unfolding
political events in the latter years of the Vietnam War.

FAMILY LETTERS, SECRET MESSAGES
Aside from its vast potential for future scholarship, the James B. Stockdale
collection has also been a resource for Operation Homecoming anniversary
events created to raise awareness of the history of the era. In May 2023, the
Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, opened its gal-
lery exhibition Captured: Shot Down in Vietnam, which featured loaned mate-
rials from Hoover’s Stockdale collections, including photographs, letters, and
memorabilia. The opening gala of the exhibition brought together dozens
of surviving POWs for a parade and a re-creation of the famous Operation
Homecoming White House dinner—the largest dinner ever served at the
White House—that was hosted by Richard and Pat Nixon on May 24, 1973.
The exhibition is complemented by a podcast of the same title that discusses
Jim Stockdale’s time in Vietnam and features an interview with his son Sid.
Many of the most illuminating letters now available in the James B.
Stockdale collection include those written by a young Jim to his parents,
Mabel and Vernon Stockdale, between 1933 and 1965. The future vice admi-
ral was born in Abingdon, Illinois, in 1923. He graduated from the US Naval
Academy in 1946. The letters from the 1950s and early 1960s in particular
reveal the intellectual and emotional growth of a talented young man mak-
ing a series of personal and career choices that would influence the rest of
his life. As a young test pilot at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Mary-
land between 1954 and 1957, for example, Stockdale toyed with taking his
aviation career in a new and possibly dangerous direction: outer space. At
that time, the most intrepid test pilots were being recruited for the Nation-
al Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that would be signed into
existence by President Dwight Eisenhower on July 29, 1958. Stockdale was
intrigued.
NASA’s creation caused an identity crisis among test pilots; some, such
as Chuck Yeager, believed that being shot out of the Earth’s atmosphere by
a rocket did not count as pure aviation (and he also resented his best pilots
being poached away from military service). Other pilots believed America’s
moonshot to be the most exciting opportunity the twentieth century could
provide aviators. As the conflict in Vietnam escalated, Stockdale eventually
decided to stay with the Navy instead of venturing to NASA, but during his
time at Patuxent River he tutored a young Marine Corps aviator in math-
ematics and physics who would become a lifelong friend: John Glenn. Glenn
would become the first man to orbit the Earth in 1962, applauded interna-
tionally for his feat just three years before Stockdale would be shot down
over North Vietnam.

STOIC: In captivity, James B. Stockdale refused to collaborate with the enemy
and encouraged his fellow imprisoned servicemen to do the same. When his
North Vietnamese jailers sought to parade him publicly to prove their humane
treatment of POWs, Stockdale slashed his own scalp with a razor rather than
be used as propaganda. Forced to wear a hat, he bruised his face. For this and
other insubordination, he would spend two full years in leg irons in the infa-
mous “Alcatraz” section of the prison. [Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
Though Glenn became a celebrity after his voyage to space, he main-
tained his friendship with the Stockdales and continued to intersect
with their history. For instance, in October 1966 Sybil Stockdale real-
ized that her husband’s North Vietnamese captors, in blatant defiance
of the Geneva Convention, had been denying packages to prisoners—
and both she and the other POW wives with whom she had begun hav-
ing monthly meetings
desperately wanted
Christmas packages to Stockdale tutored a young Marine
reach their husbands. pilot named John Glenn, who would
With the help of naval become the first astronaut to
intelligence officer orbit the Earth.
Robert Burroughs, she
composed a letter to Jim Stockdale (which she knew would be screened
by his captors) laced with confrontational knowledge of Geneva Con-
vention protocols.
She also reached out to her old friend John Glenn to obtain astronaut
rations for the prisoners. Dehydrated yet nutritious, astronaut food was
easy to pack in bulk for posting and could possibly provide—in prison
terms—a lavish holiday meal. Faithful to his old friends from test pilot days,
Glenn contacted the Pillsbury Company, the contractor that had developed
astronaut food for NASA. Pillsbury donated the equivalent of eighty meals
in airtight packets for the POWs. Unfortunately, the astronaut food did not
reach Stockdale; on Christmas Day 1966 he was dragged out of solitary con-
finement, and as a holiday gift (proffered by a guard “in accordance with
the humane and lenient treatment of the Democratic Republic of Viet-
nam”) he was given one banana and two letters, written and sent months
before by his wife. All was not lost on this grim holiday, however; hidden
on the back of a photograph inserted in one of the letters were instruc-
tions for using invisible
carbon to communicate
President Ford awarded Vice Admiral
with Sybil. Back in his
Stockdale the Medal of Honor in 1976.
cell, Stockdale discov-
ered the instructions and a “whole new world” of uncensored communica-
tions opened to him.
The Stockdale collections at Hoover include these coded letters. As they
attest, the couple’s correspondence became one of the primary means by
which the US government learned of the war crimes committed at Hoa Lo,
the “Hanoi Hilton.”

SUSTAINING HOPE: On Veterans’ Day 1970, the Los Angeles–based student
group Voices in Vital America launched a campaign of creating and selling
bracelets featuring the names and shoot-down dates of captured servicemen
as a way of raising money for the POW/MIA movement. The bracelets quickly
caught the attention of Sybil Stockdale and other POW wives; public response
grew swiftly, and within months the organization was receiving approximate-
ly 12,000 requests for bracelets per day. [Hoover Institution Library & Archives]
HALLS OF ACADEMIA
After his time as a test pilot in Maryland in the late 1950s, Stockdale had
been assigned to California—and in 1960, the Navy gave him the opportunity
to pursue a master of arts degree in international relations at Stanford Uni-
versity, which he earned in 1962. Sybil entered graduate school at Stanford

IVORY TOWER: After
Stockdale retired from the
Navy, he entered aca-
demic life. He became a
senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution and lectured
on philosophy. It was a
return to Stanford for both
the retired admiral and
his wife, who had earned
master’s degrees there in
the early 1960s while living
in Los Altos. The student
and naval aviator James
Stockdale had spent time
working with researchers
in Hoover Tower, including
a famous exile, Alexander
Kerensky.
[Kim Komenich—Getty Images]
REFLECTIONS: Jim and Sybil Stockdale were co-authors of a memoir, In Love
and War: The Story of a Family's Ordeal and Sacrifice During the Vietnam
Years, in which they wrote alternating chapters from their dual perspectives
of the long struggle. The book became a 1987 NBC made-for-television movie
of the same name, starring James Woods as the aviator and Jane Alexander as
his wife. The film and Woods were nominated for Golden Globe awards.
[Kim Komenich—Getty Images]
as well, enrolling in a master’s program in education. In their jointly written

book In Love and War: The Story of a Family’s Ordeal and Sacrifice During the
Vietnam Years, the Stockdales reflect upon their time at Stanford as a happy
one—an idyllic prelude to the hardship that would follow once Jim was sent
overseas to Vietnam in 1964. The couple bought a house in pastureland near
Los Altos, where their young sons were free to roam. The two enjoyed their
studies and their fellow students and instructors. On December 6, 1959, Sybil
gave birth to their third child, whom they named Stanford.
Jim, engrossed in his classes, entertained the idea of leaving the Navy
to pursue a career in academia. Perhaps most important, Jim became
enthralled with studying the Stoic philosophy of the ancient Greek thinker
Epictetus. Years later, after returning from the horrors of the Hanoi Hil-
ton, Stockdale would frequently claim that it was his study of Stoicism that

OLD ACQUAINTANCE: Fifty years after being released from captivity in North
Vietnam, Eugene “Red” McDaniel and Norman “Mac” McDaniel, two former
American POWs, embrace at the opening of the exhibition Captured: Shot
Down in Vietnam at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on May 23, 2023.
The exhibition features materials from Hoover’s newly opened James B.
Stockdale papers. [Richard Nixon Foundation]
allowed him mentally to endure the agony of incarceration, torture, and

starvation.
The Stockdales’ time at Stanford also established the groundwork for Jim
Stockdale’s connection to the Hoover Institution, where he would become a
fellow in 1981. His letters
to his parents, par-
ticularly those from 1961, The Stockdales reflected upon their
reveal that he was using time at Stanford as happy—an idyllic
his time at Stanford to prelude to the hardship that would
refine his views on poli- follow once Jim was sent to Vietnam.
tics, philosophy, religion,
and current affairs—often from the halls of Hoover Tower.
In a letter to his parents dated April 23, 1961, he reports that he has
been offered a desk and a job in Hoover Tower after being recruited by

a graduate student for a project on the history of the Taiwan Strait that
would involve reviewing documents such as translations of foreign radio
broadcasts produced by the CIA, US State Department files, Soviet docu-
ments translated by the British government, and transcriptions of Navy
hearings in Congress. Excited by access to archival documents, Stockdale
reports to his parents,
“This is ‘pure’ research,
The “Stockdale paradox” is a the way historians do it.”
belief that optimism must be Subsequently in the let-
counterbalanced by an appraisal and ter, he mentions he has
acceptance of grim realities. been studying European
history and develop-
ing a growing interest in the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
And whom has he met at Hoover Tower, which he reminds his parents
emphasizes the study of war, revolution, and peace? None other than a
rare-books curator: Alexander Kerensky. (Kerensky, exiled from his native
country, was the prime minister of revolutionary Russia who was driven
from power by Lenin in 1917.)
JOINING THE FELLOWSHIP

Despite lingering health concerns from his time in prison, Stockdale would
move on from his Vietnam experience to a long and fruitful career. He ful-
filled many of the dreams of pursuing research, writing, and participation in
politics that he expressed in his letters to his parents in the early 1960s. In
1976, he was awarded the Medal of Honor. After serving as president of the
Naval War College, he retired from the Navy.
In 1981, he became a Hoover fellow and a sought-after lecturer in phi-
losophy at Stanford. He wrote several books during his time as a fellow;
the four he published with the Hoover Institution Press remain among the
imprint’s bestsellers. In
1992, he gained nation-
Jim Stockdale prevailed through the wide attention as the vice
most harrowing circumstances of a presidential running mate
brutal war. of third-party candidate
Ross Perot.
And in 2001, Stockdale’s cherished Stoic wisdom became a main-
stream staple of business and personal growth strategies. Author and
Stanford Business School professor Jim Collins, in his book Good to
Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, defined the

HOME FROM SEA: The USS Stockdale, an Arleigh Burke–class guided-mis-
sile destroyer, flies the US and POW flags as it heads for its home port of San
Diego. The ship was christened by Stockdale’s widow, Sybil, and delivered to
the Navy in 2008. [US Navy]
“Stockdale paradox” as a belief that optimism must be counterbalanced by

an appraisal and acceptance of grim realities. In the book, Collins relates
that over lunch with Stockdale he asked him about strategies for surviving
hardships, and Stockdale replied, “You must never confuse faith that you
will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the dis-
cipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever
they might be.”
James Stockdale died in 2005; Sybil passed away in 2015. The newly
opened letters of James B. Stockdale will allow scholars to understand the
many decisive moments of an extraordinary life. Cultivating discipline,
will, knowledge, and valor, Stockdale prevailed through the most harrow-
ing circumstances of a brutal war. His letters, testaments to his philosophy
and endurance, await visitors to Hoover who will read them with the same
enthusiasm for “pure research” as a young Jim had in 1961. The Hoover
Archives is proud to add the opening of the letters to the many significant

commemorative events that will mark the anniversary of the Operation
Homecoming that Sybil Stockdale and countless other family members of
captured and missing servicemen struggled so hard to achieve.

Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, by Jim
Stockdale. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.

On the Cover
T
his bird’s-eye Russian map from 1915 shows the Dardanelles, the
narrow waterway controlling access to the Sea of Marmara and
the Black Sea. Together with the even-narrower Bosporus, the
passage divides Europe from Asia—and Istanbul from itself—
and figures prominently in history, both ancient and modern. The stylized
castle at the bottom of the map sits near the site of ancient Troy, today a
historical park. This map describes a bloody campaign during the early years
of the First World War that proved significant to the birth of modern Turkey,
which this month is a hundred years old.
That 1915–16 campaign was an Anglo-French landing on the Gallipoli Pen-
insula (the left side of the map), in which the Entente forces tried to “force
the gates” of the Dardanelles, which Ottoman Turkey had closed. Considered
the first large amphibious landing in modern military history, the Gallipoli
campaign was intended to push through Turkey, which had declined to stay
neutral after war broke out in the summer of 1914, and relieve the czar-
ist Russian Empire, including access to its Ukrainian grain fields. British
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill thought the strait was poorly
defended and that Gallipoli would lead to quick victory and ease pressure on
the charnel house of the Western Front.
The Entente forces were quickly checked. The Gallipoli campaign cost vast
numbers of lives on both sides, and it cost Churchill his position. G
allipoli
is remembered not just for the appalling sacrifices but for how the battle
helped shape the national identities of Australia and New Zealand, whose
“Anzac” forces were in the spearhead (other Commonwealth troops from
India and Africa fought here, too). Gallipoli drew a template for the Great
War’s bloodiest feature, stalemated trench warfare, and broadcast a harsh
warning to planners of amphibious attacks in future wars. It also brought
wide attention to a military commander there, Mustafa Kemal, who would
emerge as Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey.

The Ottoman Empire crumbled
after the war, and amid the carving
up of its territory came the Turk-
ish War of Independence. Kemal
established a stronghold in Ankara
and led nationalist forces against
European occupiers and a compli-
ant government led by the sultan.
In 1920, the Allies imposed the
Treaty of Sèvres to partition the
empire, a pact Kemal and his forces
rejected. He eventually expelled
a Greek army that had invaded
Anatolia; crushed the new Arme-
nian state; ended the sultanate; and
agreed to a new territorial division
in the Treaty of Lausanne.
Nationalist forces occupied
Istanbul, and on October 29, 1923,
proclaimed the Republic of Turkey.
The prominence of the “castle” on the map is worth noting. No structure
quite so magnificent existed in 1915 to menace the Allies, though it does
suggest Turkish fortifications that rained shells on the invading ships and
troops from both sides of the “gates.” The architecture is enhanced by the
mapmaker’s romantic imagination. The castle might also remind someone
viewing the map that twentieth-century battles and invasions were far from
the first to be fought on these shores. Xerxes I and his Persian army came
west into Thrace in 480 BC. Self-taught archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann
came looking for traces of Homer’s Trojan War and found them here in 1870.
He reported layer after layer of history, though some of his finds were fanci-
ful. Archaeologists continue to sift Troy’s ruins for signs of the war and peace
that have been pursued at the gates of the Dardanelles since antiquity.
Turkey has celebrated its centennial, in part, by dedicating the new 1915
Çanakkale Bridge (the year 1915 is part of the bridge’s name and celebrates
the naval victory). It is the world’s longest suspension bridge and the first
fixed crossing ever thrown over the Dardanelles.
—Charles Lindsey

HOOVER INSTITUTION ON WAR, REVOLUTION AND PEACE
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K. Rupert Murdoch James R. Wilkinson
George A. Needham Dede Wilsey
Thomas Nelson Richard G. Wolford
Laura O’Connor Yu Wu
Robert G. O’Donnell Jerry Yang*
Robert J. Oster David Zierk
Ross Perot Jr.
*Ex officio members of the Board
Joel C. Peterson
Stephen R. Pierce
Jay A. Precourt Distinguished Overseers
George J. Records Martin Anderson
Christopher R. Redlich Jr. Wendy H. Borcherdt
Samuel T. Reeves W. Kurt Hauser
Geoffrey S. Rehnert
Pam Reyes Peyton M. Lake
Kathleen “Cab” Rogers Shirley Cox Matteson
Robert Rosenkranz Bowen H. McCoy
Adam Ross Boyd C. Smith
Theresa W. “Terry” Ryan
Richard Saller*
Douglas G. Scrivner Overseers Emeritus
Park Shaper Frederick L. Allen
Peter O. Shea Robert J. Swain

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HOOVER

THE HOOVER INSTITUTION

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16 (Don’t) Play It Again

38 Between East and West

56 The Meaning of Taiwan

4 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

74 A Wider Shade of Terror

80 ISIS Can Pivot, Too

93 Power and Persuasion

103 A Few Critical Omissions

6 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

120 Power Corrupted

143 The Wages of Victimhood

169 On the Cover

8 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

10 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

12 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

Some more general points unite these stories.

14 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Central

16 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

18 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

20 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

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

New from the Hoover Institution Press is New

22 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

Jonathan Movroydis: What prompted you to conduct this research?

Heil: For low-income seniors, we see the growth in both employ-

Movroydis: What is the factor driving that income growth among

24 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

Movroydis: When adjusted for household size, how

[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest]

26 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

Cogan: We don’t directly address how much of a person’s pre-retirement

28 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from Stanford University Press is The High

Norman M. Naimark is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member

30 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

32 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

Putin is a forceful speaker, sure of

leaders themselves, and their lack of concern for minimizing casualties. We

34 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

PRIVATE AND “PITILESS”

36 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

Special to the Hoover Digest.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is Bread +

Jakub Grygiel is a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a

38 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

40 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

Subscribe to the online Hoover Institution journal Strategika (hoover.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is Cage Fight:

42 H OOVER DI GEST • Fa ll 2023

Putin Plays the

44 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

46 H OOVER DI GEST • FA LL 2023

THE LARGER STAKES

Subscribe to the online Hoover Institution journal Strategika (hoover.