Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution shares videos intended to encourage discussion, generate ideas, and disseminate information related to peace, the human condition, and the role of government.
Charles Murray’s Evidence-Based Case for Taking Religion Seriously
Charles Murray, the social scientist and author of Taking Religion Seriously, argues that a lifetime of casual agnosticism has become intellectually untenable. In a conversation with Peter Robinson, he says evidence and questions that materialism does not resolve—especially consciousness, near-death experiences, the historical grounding of the Gospels, and the Shroud of Turin—have led him to take God and Christianity seriously, though not to claim settled faith. Murray’s case is cumulative: religious belief, he argues, should be judged for its truth rather than defended merely for its civic utility.
Industrialization Scaled When Parliament Made Land Rights Negotiable
Ben Southwood of Works in Progress argues that the Glorious Revolution accelerated British growth by making Parliament a dependable forum for untangling land rights that blocked investment. A legislature dominated by landowners used thousands of private acts to modify inheritance settlements, consolidate scattered holdings and authorize transport projects, while preserving claims for heirs and other affected parties. Southwood’s broader point is that industrialization depended not just on new ideas, but on institutions able to make their application—and agreement among those whose rights stood in the way—possible.
Education Reform Depends on Using Outcome Data to Make Hard Choices
Caroline Hoxby argues that education policy should use outcome data to make harder distinctions: paying teachers for measured effectiveness, underwriting student loans based on evidence of college progress, and judging institutions by the results they deliver. The main obstacle, she says, is usually not a lack of data or technical capacity but political resistance to unequal treatment and accountability. Hoxby also makes the case for state and local autonomy to test such policies, provided results can be measured and compared.
College Opportunity Requires Better Underwriting, Testing, and Information
Economist Caroline Hoxby argues that college opportunity is fairer when public policy distinguishes between early uncertainty and later evidence. She makes the case for front-loaded grants, better underwriting and institutional accountability in student lending, alongside admissions tests and targeted information that allow qualified students from less advantaged backgrounds to demonstrate ability and find colleges that match their potential.
Wisconsin’s Differentiated Teacher Pay Improved Achievement and Recruitment
Economist Caroline Hoxby argues that teacher pay remains tied to seniority and credentials even though teachers differ substantially in the value they add to student outcomes. She says value-added measures, supplemented by school-level judgment, can identify those differences well enough to support differentiated compensation—and points to Wisconsin districts that adopted more flexible pay as evidence of gains in achievement and recruitment of effective teachers.
Norway Treats Arctic Security and Energy Infrastructure as One Defense Problem
Ine Eriksen Søreide, leader of Norway’s Conservative Party, argues that Norway’s Arctic position, offshore energy infrastructure and maritime role place it on the front line of a broader contest over European security. She says NATO’s principal test is increasingly likely to come through cyberattacks, sabotage and other gray-zone coercion designed to expose political divisions before an Article 5 response is clear. In her account, sustaining Ukraine, securing critical infrastructure and reducing industrial dependencies are parts of the same long-term task: adapting allied defense to a durable confrontation with Russia and its partners.
Britain’s Wartime Diplomats Turned Declining Power Into Lasting Influence
Lord Peter Ricketts, former head of Britain’s Diplomatic Service, argues that the wartime Foreign Office was not a ceremonial adjunct to military power but an instrument for sustaining alliances, securing access and preparing the political order after victory. Unable to match American or Soviet scale, Britain used diplomats to keep de Gaulle aligned, hold Spain outside the Axis, support governments in exile and build the institutions through which it could retain influence after 1945. Ricketts also contends that this work exposed the costs of the service’s narrow recruitment and exclusion of women.
Terminal Illness Clarifies the Limits of Achievement and Power
Facing terminal pancreatic cancer, former senator and university president Ben Sasse argues that mortality strips professional achievement, online judgment and political performance of their claim to ultimate importance. In conversation with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, Sasse grounds that view in a Christian account of guilt, grace and gratitude, and extends it to a critique of institutions—from Congress and universities to digital platforms—that seek authority or attention while evading responsibility. What endures, he says, is embodied life: faith, family, service and accountable work.
Jan Karski Carried Holocaust Evidence to Allies Who Would Not Believe It
Hoover Institution research fellow Katharina Friedla argues that Jan Karski’s wartime importance lay in both witnessing Nazi persecution firsthand and trying, unsuccessfully at first, to persuade Allied leaders of its scale. After entering the Warsaw Ghetto and a transit ghetto near Belzec in 1942, Karski carried reports of deportations and extermination to London and Washington, where some officials struggled to believe him. After the war, Friedla says, he helped preserve the documentary record of occupied Poland for the Hoover Library and Archives.
Iraq’s Sovereignty Depends on Fighting Corruption and Curbing Armed Groups
Former Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi argues that Iraq’s central threat has shifted from ISIS to the corruption, patronage, and armed networks that weaken the state from within. He says Baghdad should use the relative respite to strengthen the judiciary, bring wartime militias under legal authority, and prevent elite theft through more transparent institutions. In his account, a durable partnership with the United States and deeper regional economic links should support Iraqi sovereignty—not substitute for it.
US Chip Strategy Requires Fabs, New Architectures, and Skilled Workers
The Stanford Emerging Technology Review argues that US semiconductor policy must address a strategic dependence on Taiwan, which produces more than 60% of global chips and nearly 90% of the most advanced ones. It makes the case for expanding domestic manufacturing and diversifying supply chains while investing in new chip architectures, energy efficiency for AI workloads, and a workforce that can staff an expected 115,000 additional semiconductor jobs by 2030.
The Trump Doctrine’s Durability Depends on Institutions Beyond Trump
Kiron Skinner argues that the Trump Doctrine seeks to make U.S. power more durable by replacing aid conditioned on U.S. social and political preferences with trade and investment, pressing allies to bear more of their own defense, and abandoning Cold War assumptions about how to compete with China. She contends that China’s integration into global commerce makes a democratic coalition model inadequate, while U.S. institutions remain poorly equipped for long-term strategy. Skinner acknowledges that the doctrine’s soft-power framework and several of its policies remain unfinished, and says its durability will depend on whether the political coalition behind it outlasts Trump.
Containment’s Collapse Opened the Way for a Trump Doctrine
Kiron Skinner argues that U.S. foreign policy has lacked an organizing doctrine since Cold War containment, even as the postwar order built under exceptional American power has frayed. She casts Donald Trump as the political figure who, in her account, made a strategic break possible by recognizing the rise of competing powers and constituencies alienated from the old order. Skinner’s case identifies the exhaustion of that framework more clearly than it defines the commitments of an emerging Trump doctrine.
Sovereignty, Burden-Sharing, and China Define the Trump Foreign-Policy Doctrine
Kiron Skinner argues that Donald Trump’s foreign policy was organized around sovereignty: states should secure their own borders, bear a greater share of their own defense, and deal with one another on reciprocal terms rather than through open-ended U.S. commitments. In her account, that logic drove Trump’s pressure on NATO, preference for flexible regional partnerships over new permanent alliances, and rejection of nation-building. It also recast China as a strategic competitor rather than a country expected to converge with the liberal international order through economic integration.
Palestinian Victimhood Has Become a Global Political Resource
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, an Egyptian-born scholar, argues that Palestine has become a self-reproducing system in which real Palestinian suffering is converted into political legitimacy, institutional standing, regional leverage and moral meaning for actors far beyond Israel and the Palestinians. Drawing on his upbringing in Egypt and his essay on the political economy of the symbol, he contends that Arab regimes, Islamist movements, rival states, Western institutions and NGOs can all be both users and captives of a conflict whose continued centrality serves distinct interests.
Sowell Treated American Racial History as Part of a Global Record
Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Coleman Hughes argue that Thomas Sowell’s central contribution was a comparative historical method that treated American questions of race, slavery, migration, inequality, and political order as part of wider human patterns. They focus on Sowell’s culture trilogy and later work to contend that cultural practices, human capital, and institutions—not racial essence or American exceptionalism—better explain how groups rise, stagnate, or come into conflict. They also credit his plain prose with carrying those arguments beyond academic institutions they say largely excluded him.
Thomas Sowell’s Comparative History Challenges American Racial Exceptionalism
Victor Davis Hanson argues that Thomas Sowell’s historical importance lies in his comparative method: *Race and Culture* places American slavery, Jim Crow, and their aftermath within patterns found across societies and eras, rather than treating the US as uniquely exceptional. Hanson says Sowell’s work relies on disciplined observation and reasoning from examples while resisting ideological orthodoxy. Coleman Hughes, who began reading Sowell as a teenager, says the books gave developed form to questions he had already begun to ask.
The Turkish Straits Stay Open Through Rules, Turkey, and Allied Vigilance
Hoover Institution researcher Ziyi Wang argues that the Turkish Straits’ relative stability during the Russo-Ukrainian war shows how maritime chokepoints can remain open when enforceable rules, capable regional authorities, and allied vigilance align. The 1936 Montreux Convention has allowed Turkey to limit wartime naval passage while preserving commercial traffic, including Black Sea grain exports, she says. But that arrangement remains vulnerable to Russian coercion or low-cost disruption, with consequences for global food, energy, and trade flows.
Southeast Asia Accepts Maritime Capacity Building, Not Quad Alignment
Southeast Asian states are open to maritime-security cooperation with Australia, India, Japan and the United States, but resist arrangements that make them appear to join a bloc against China, according to a Hoover Institution discussion featuring regional experts. Le Hiep, Sarah Teo and Muhammad Kharisma argue that Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia assess proposals by their leadership, purpose, location and degree of national control: capacity-building, information-sharing and disaster relief can be acceptable, while visible warfighting integration and Quad branding raise the political cost.
Political Systems Fail When They Cannot Absorb Pressure
Conrad Black argues that political systems and empires endure not through concentrated power alone but through their ability to absorb pressure, accommodate opposition, and weigh the long-term consequences of statecraft. In his account, France’s pre-revolutionary order and the autocracies of 1914 failed because rulers lacked meaningful checks on their judgment, while parliamentary governments were better equipped to recognize the costs of war. Black also contends that settlements designed to defeat an immediate enemy—from Napoleon onward—can create more dangerous strategic problems in their wake.
Decisive Force Now Depends on Distributed Precision and Rapid Replacement
Nadia Schadlow argues that cheap, precise drones are changing military mass from the physical concentration of forces at a single decisive point into coordinated pressure across a wider battlespace. But she contends that decentralized systems matter only if militaries can field, adapt and replace them at scale—and that they must complement, rather than replace, troops, logistics and high-end combined-arms capabilities.
Wilderness Is a Cultural Idea, Not Land Untouched by People
In *The Savage Landscape*, writer Cal Flyn argues that wilderness is not land untouched by people but a contested idea shaped by history, culture and power. Speaking with Russ Roberts, she examines how that idea influences conservation and predator reintroduction, including who gains from protected land and who bears its costs. Flyn also contends that the enduring appeal of wild places lies less in an escape from humanity than in encounters with fear, beauty and limits on human control.
Tax Pledges Aim to Prevent Deficit Deals From Raising Revenue
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, argues that federal deficits are a spending problem, not a case for higher taxes. He says tax-and-spending bargains repeatedly deliver permanent revenue increases while promised cuts disappear, making written anti-tax pledges a necessary constraint on lawmakers. His program pairs resistance to new federal revenue with lower taxes on investment, while relying on state spending caps and phased tax cuts to limit government growth.
Ukraine’s Winter Endurance Could Determine the Path to Peace
Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski argues that Ukraine’s ability to withstand Russia’s attacks on power and heating infrastructure this winter could determine whether peace becomes possible next year. He presents Poland’s response to Russian aggression as a wider strategy: strengthen NATO’s eastern flank with permanent U.S. forces, raise European defense spending, sustain Ukraine financially and militarily, and reduce dependencies that leave Europe vulnerable to coercion.