Philip Zelikow
Philip Zelikow is the Botha-Chan Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a historian, attorney, and former career diplomat whose work focuses on statecraft, international diplomacy, national security, and critical episodes in world history. He previously served as counselor of the U.S. Department of State, executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and director of the Covid Crisis Group, and has written on AI-related national security policy.
China’s Communists Won Through Foreign Backing and Attritional War
At a Hoover Institution book talk, historian Frank Dikötter argued that the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949 was neither inevitable nor chiefly the result of mass peasant support. Drawing on archival research behind Red Dawn Over China, Dikötter presented the conquest as a contingent outcome shaped by Soviet sponsorship, Japan’s destruction of the Chinese Republic’s position, American pressure for truce and coalition in 1946, and the party’s use of coercion, forced conscription and attritional warfare.
China Could Pressure Taiwan Into Submission Without Invading
In Defending Taiwan, Eyck Freymann argues that U.S. strategy is too narrowly focused on deterring a Chinese invasion and is underprepared for a gray-zone crisis that could isolate Taiwan without open war. Freymann’s case, developed in discussion with Hoover Institution participants including Philip Zelikow, is that Beijing’s most plausible path may be legal, commercial, and coercive control over Taiwan’s external ties. Deterrence, he argues, will require Washington and its allies to integrate military power with political discipline, economic planning, technological leverage, and diplomatic coordination before such a crisis begins.