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.
California Wealth-Tax Deal Nears Deadline as Unions Split Over Revenue
In a Hoover Institution California update, Bill Whalen and Lee Ohanian argue that the state’s politics are being shaped by institutional strain more than any single scandal. They say the federal investigation of Gavin Newsom and Jennifer Siebel Newsom could help Newsom cast himself as a Trump target in a Democratic presidential race, while exposing family finances and behested payments to deeper scrutiny. They also frame California’s election rules, Xavier Becerra’s likely succession, and a possible deal to avert a billionaire wealth-tax ballot fight as evidence of a system increasingly governed by distrust, weak execution, and interest-group bargaining.
American Security Requires Strategic Competence, Not Military Power Alone
H.R. McMaster argues that the greatest danger to American security is not a lack of military power but a loss of strategic competence after the Cold War. In a Hoover Institution discussion, the former national security adviser says U.S. leaders mistook a temporary unipolar advantage for a lasting condition, underestimated the political nature of war, and failed to connect military action to achievable political outcomes. That failure, he argues, now meets a more dangerous environment in which China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are increasingly reinforcing one another.
American Strategy Fails When Untested Assumptions Become Policy
H.R. McMaster argues that American strategy often fails not for lack of information but because officials allow untested assumptions to become policy. In a Hoover Institution discussion, the former national security adviser says U.S. approaches to China, Iran, Russia and Afghanistan repeatedly projected Washington’s hopes onto adversaries rather than examining their motives, ideology and incentives. His remedy is a more disciplined process: define the problem on its own terms, test assumptions, present leaders with real options, and weigh the risks of inaction as seriously as the risks of acting.
Gulf States Still Anchor Security in the U.S. Despite China’s Rise
Jonathan Fulton tells Elizabeth Economy that China’s Middle East role is substantial but narrower than the recent hype suggests: Beijing is a major economic actor in the Gulf, yet remains a limited security and diplomatic player. In his account, the Iran crisis and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz underscored that regional governments may be frustrated with Washington but still rely on the U.S. security architecture because no other power can replace it. Fulton argues China is useful to Gulf states in trade, infrastructure, digital systems and energy, while its capacity to convert that influence into geopolitical power remains constrained.
U.S.-Iran Memorandum Trades Leverage for a Fragile Midterm Quiet
Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster, and John Cochrane argue that the draft U.S.-Iran memorandum looks less like a settlement than a political pause that gives Tehran money and time while leaving the nuclear question unresolved. In a Hoover GoodFellows discussion, they differ on whether unintended consequences could still weaken Iran’s regime, but largely agree that Washington had leverage in the Strait of Hormuz and failed to use it. They extend that concern to Ukraine and Cuba, framing the central problem as American pressure applied without follow-through.
U.S.-Iran Memorandum Trades Hormuz Relief for Unresolved Nuclear Questions
Hoover fellows Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster and John Cochrane read the reported U.S.-Iran memorandum less as a peace settlement than as a bid to reopen the Strait of Hormuz while postponing the nuclear dispute and front-loading concessions to Tehran. They largely agree the draft looks weak; their disagreement is over whether it buys time for a harder strategy later, creates space for pressure inside Iran, or signals a loss of U.S. will that allies and adversaries will now test.
Unwanted Sexual Texts to Officials Test First Amendment Harassment Limits
Eugene Volokh and Jane Bambauer use an Ohio harassment dispute over sexually explicit Shrek images allegedly texted to a state senator to examine a harder First Amendment question: when offensive political speech becomes punishable direct harassment. Volokh argues that the law often distinguishes speech about a person from unwanted speech to a person, but says the doctrine is unsettled when the recipient is a government official, the channel is a phone, and the content is sexual but not obscene. Bambauer presses whether punishment should require notice to stop and whether statutes broad enough to reach unsolicited explicit images may also capture protected political criticism.
Britain’s Race Debate Is Importing the Wrong American History
In a Hoover Institution conversation with Andrew Roberts, author and columnist Tomiwa Owolade argues that Britain’s race debate has become distorted by American categories that do not fit British history or demography. Owolade’s case in This Is Not America is not that Britain lacks racism, but that treating black Britons, American descendants of slavery, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, and other groups through a single imported racial framework produces bad analysis and weaker civic life.
Soviet Power, Not Popular Support, Put Mao in Control of China
Hoover Institution historian Frank Dikötter argues that Mao’s conquest of China was not the triumph of a popular peasant revolution but the result of Soviet sponsorship, wartime opportunity, American misjudgment, and Communist coercion. Drawing on Chinese Communist Party internal materials and Russian Comintern records, Dikötter says the party was marginal for much of its early history, repeatedly sustained by Moscow, and later legitimized by myths that still shape Western accounts. He connects that history to the present, arguing that a regime unable to examine its origins remains governed by paranoia and insecurity.
Sunlight Advice Should Weigh Total Mortality, Not Skin Cancer Alone
Author Rowan Jacobsen tells Russ Roberts that public-health advice has treated sun exposure too narrowly as a skin-cancer problem, when the relevant question should be total health and mortality. Jacobsen accepts that sunlight can cause skin cancer and that burns should be avoided, but argues that moderate exposure may also confer benefits, especially through mechanisms such as nitric oxide and cardiovascular effects. Roberts presses the limits of the evidence, leaving the case as a tradeoff rather than a reversal: sunlight is risky, but zero exposure may not be the safest default.
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.
Exiled Russian Opposition Can Still Pierce Putin’s Information Monopoly
At a Hoover Institution screening of Lyuba’s Hope, Russian opposition figure Lyubov Sobol argued that exile has constrained but not ended her political work against Vladimir Putin’s regime. In discussion with filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya, producer Paul Gregory, Kathryn Stoner, and Larry Diamond, Sobol described a strategy built around reaching Russian audiences through blocked platforms, documenting repression and war support, pushing sanctions and visa cases abroad, and preparing for a democratic opening organized around institutions rather than revenge.
AI Demand Turns Western Energy Abundance Into an Affordability Test
Condoleezza Rice opened Stanford’s 2026 State of the West symposium by arguing that the American West’s energy abundance is becoming a test of affordability, infrastructure, and public trust. Rice said AI and advanced computing are accelerating electricity demand, putting pressure on the grid and making household energy costs part of the politics of technological adoption. Her case was that the region’s resources, institutions, and policy choices must now align economic growth, energy supply, and environmental responsibility rather than treating them as separate questions.
America’s Energy Advantage Can Strengthen Allies Before the Window Closes
James Ellis argues that U.S. energy abundance has become a strategic asset at a dangerous moment, not merely a domestic question of supply, prices, or technology. Speaking through the Hoover Institution’s George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group, he makes the case for American energy statecraft: using oil and gas production, nuclear and geothermal development, capital, technology, and allied partnerships to strengthen national security, support vulnerable partners, and counter adversaries. That opportunity, he warns, is rare and may be closing.
Huang Zhen’s Sketches Show the Long March at Ground Level
Hoover Senior Fellow Elizabeth Economy uses the Hoover Institution Library & Archives’ 25 original ink sketches by Long March survivor Huang Zhen to explain why the retreat became central to Chinese Communist Party history. She argues that the 6,000-mile march preserved the Communist movement after near-destruction, consolidated Mao Zedong’s leadership, and forged a surviving cadre through extreme hardship; Huang’s drawings matter because they show that political formation at ground level, in images of cooking, carrying, climbing, illness, and movement through punishing terrain.
NVIDIA’s GPU Bet Turned Parallel Simulation Into an AI Platform
In a Hoover Institution interview with Condoleezza Rice, NVIDIA founder and chief executive Jensen Huang argues that the company’s rise began with a contrarian bet that the CPU could not remain computing’s only serious architecture. He links that bet to a broader account of simulation, parallel processing, and artificial intelligence, while also making a civic claim: that NVIDIA’s improbable path, and his own immigrant story, depended on American institutions that supplied capital, talent, legal predictability, and tolerance for risk.
Germany’s Defense Shift Recasts Europe’s Role in NATO
Norbert Röttgen, a senior CDU/CSU lawmaker in the Bundestag, argues in a Hoover Institution discussion with H.R. McMaster that Germany has belatedly accepted that Europe’s peace now depends on deterrence, defense capacity and resilience against Russian coercion. He says Berlin’s post-Cold War assumptions about trade, Russian moderation and American security guarantees cost it crucial time, but that Germany’s sharp rise in defense spending marks a real strategic shift. Röttgen’s answer is not a looser transatlantic relationship, but a new division of labor in which Europe carries more of its own defense while preserving the United States as partner and backstop.
American Achievement Depends on Institutions That Reward Risk and Reinvention
Hoover Institution’s trailer for Only in America presents Condoleezza Rice’s interview series as an inquiry into why innovation, leadership, and reinvention recur in the United States. Through clips from Jensen Huang, Indra Nooyi, Tom Siebel, Mary Barra, Fei-Fei Li, and Yo-Yo Ma, the series argues that exceptional achievement depends not only on individual talent but on American conditions: freedom, opportunity, risk-taking, education, limited government, and a culture that permits people to change their circumstances.
Healthy Communities Form People Through Tension, Not Conformity
Luke Burgis tells Russ Roberts that the central problem of identity is not choosing between individualism and belonging, but learning to remain in communities without being absorbed by them. In the EconTalk conversation, Burgis argues that families, schools, politics, religious groups, workplaces, and marriages form the self through tension — and that modern life too often promises escape from that tension through frictionless affinity. Roberts presses the implication: adulthood requires standing apart from one’s tribe without necessarily leaving it.
Wildlife Mandates Built for Scarcity Now Struggle With Abundance
At a Hoover Institution session on markets and mandates in conservation, Dominic Parker and James Workman argued that wildlife policy is now confronting problems created partly by its own successes. Parker said land-based mandates that helped restore game species such as deer are poorly suited to managing overabundance, shrinking hunter participation, and conflicts over predators such as wolves. Workman made the parallel case at sea: commercial catch shares rebuilt some fisheries, but recreational anglers increasingly sit outside the monitoring and incentives that made those systems work.
Subsidies, Permits, and Carbon Rules Shape Whether Conservation Markets Work
At a Hoover Institution session on “enviropreneurship,” Holly Fretwell and three environmental entrepreneurs argued that markets can finance conservation only when environmental benefits can be measured, paid for, and permitted. Maiky Iberkleid of RESILIFT, Grant Canary of Mast Reforestation, and Manuel Piñuela of Cultivo each described a different bottleneck: subsidized flood insurance that weakens demand for home elevation, reforestation constrained by supply chains and carbon-accounting rules, and grassland regeneration that becomes investable only after legal and underwriting risks are narrowed.
Tariffs Are a Weak Climate Tool Without International Coordination
At a Hoover Institution panel on tariffs, trade and the environment, economists Joseph Shapiro, Arik Levinson and John Cochrane argued over when trade policy can legitimately serve climate policy. Shapiro made the case that tariffs may help enforce international climate coordination in a world without a global carbon regulator, while Levinson warned that much of the case for environmental tariffs rests on overstated claims about outsourced pollution and becomes especially weak when applied to clean technologies. Cochrane pressed the standard economist alternative: price carbon, adjust at the border, and avoid using climate as cover for industrial policy.
Climate Policy Is Shifting From Net-Zero Mandates to Market-Led Adaptation
At a Hoover Institution session on climate policy, Steven Koonin argued that the net-zero mitigation agenda has failed to cut global fossil-fuel dependence and has overstated the evidence for catastrophe. Koonin, Matthew Kahn, Terry Anderson and other participants made the case for shifting attention toward adaptation: local, incremental responses shaped by insurance, real estate, migration, finance and property rights. Their shared claim was not that climate change is unreal, but that better information and market prices may guide resilience more effectively than mandates, subsidies and apocalyptic politics.
Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers Turn AI Growth Into a Local Fight
At a Hoover Institution discussion on the local effects of the AI boom, energy and policy experts argued that data centers have moved from routine commercial development to gigawatt-scale infrastructure fights. Dado Slezak of QTS said the projects can deliver jobs, tax revenue, grid investment, and local benefits, but Robert Bryce and other panelists warned that communities increasingly see them as vehicles for higher power costs, water risk, farmland loss, and big-tech intrusion. The central issue, the panel suggested, is whether developers and regulators can make the benefits credible before local opposition defines the projects as a loss of control.