Talks from the Hoover Institution

Reflecting On September 11th: 20 Years Later

Friday, September 10, 2021

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

The Hoover Institution hosts Reflecting on September 11th: 20 Years Later on Friday, September 10, 2021.

Please join a conversation with special guests Condoleezza Rice, General Jim Mattis, John B. Taylor and Karen Hughes as they recount their personal experiences, each from a different vantage point, on where they were during the deadliest terror attack on American soil in history. They will discuss what that day meant for America, how it changed us as a nation, and how we would move forward in the world in its aftermath. They will share their thoughts on the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan and what it means for our national security.

FEATURING PANELISTS
Secretary Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. Rice served as the sixty-sixth secretary of state of the United States, the second woman and first African American woman to hold the post. Rice was serving as National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush and was at the White House in her office when the plane hit the first tower.

General Jim Mattis, US Marine Corps (Ret.), is the Davies Family Distinguished Fellow, after having served as the nation’s 26^th Secretary of Defense in the administration. In December of 2016, President Donald J. Trump nominated Mattis for Secretary of Defense. He commanded at multiple levels in his forty-three year career as an infantry Marine. On 9/11, Mattis was serving in uniform as Brigadier General in the Marines at Camp Pendleton and heard of the attack on his car radio. Within 50 days, he would be leading an expeditionary brigade in Afghanistan.

Under Secretary John B. Taylor is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution and the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He chairs Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy and is director of Stanford’s Introductory Economics Center. Taylor was serving as Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs and was on a diplomatic mission to Japan on 9/11. He returned to America via military transport and began his work on the financial war on terror.

Ambassador Karen Hughes served as Counselor to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002 and was at the White House on September 11, 2001. She was also Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs where she led the U.S. State Department’s effort to communicate America’s values abroad and is currently the Worldwide Vice Chair at Burson Cohn & Wolfe.

MODERATED BY
Peter M. Robinson is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he hosts Uncommon Knowledge. Robinson spent six years in the White House, serving as chief speechwriter to Vice President George Bush and as special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan.

Nearshoring: Combating Chinese Influence In The Western Hemisphere

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

Congressman Mark E. Green, M.D. discusses with H.R. McMaster combating Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere on Wednesday, August 18 at 2:00 PM ET.

For more information go to: https://www.hoover.org/publications/capital-conversations 

The Difference Between Good and Bad Inequality: Office Hours with David Henderson

Hoover Institution research fellow David Henderson answers your most pressing questions about good and bad inequality from his video "The Inequality We Should Worry About."

 

Questions:

 

1. What is the difference between good and bad inequality? How can some inequality be good?

2. Do you have any estimate of how much inequality in the United States is good or bad? And how would you go about figuring that out?

3. Is it possible or likely that new advances to technology can occur at similar rates to what we have now without increasing the wealth gap?

4. Is there a better way to measure inequality than with income? Would it make identifying good and bad inequality easier?

5. Many people believe it is impossible to get extremely wealthy without exploiting workers or bending the rules in your favor. How true do you think that is?

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

Yll Bajraktari and Anshu Roy in conversation with Amy Zegart on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 2:00 PM ET.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she directs the Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows program. She is also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI) and Chair of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence and International Security Steering Committee. She has been featured by National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform. Most recently, she served as commissioner on the 2020 CSIS Technology and Intelligence Task Force and has advised the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Her forthcoming book is Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton 2022).

Yll Bajraktari is the Executive Director of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Prior to joining NSCAI, he served as Chief of Staff to the National Security Advisor LTG H.R. McMaster, held a variety of leadership roles for former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, and served as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey. Originally joining the Department of Defense in 2010, he served in the Office of the Undersecretary for Policy as a country director for Afghanistan, and later India. He is the recipient of the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Medal – the highest award given to career DoD civilian employees.

Anshu Roy, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Rhombus, a NASA Research Park startup. Rhombus is purposefully transforming the nation’s defense and national security enterprises with Guardian, its Artificial Intelligence platform for strategic, operational and tactical decision-making at the speed of relevance. Before starting Rhombus, he teamed up with Nobel Laureate Prof. Alan Heeger to set a world record in solar cell efficiency. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) at the intersection of Materials, Complex Systems, High Performance Computing and Turbulence. He also invented Mercury™ – Rhombus' patented platform for solid-state subatomic particle detection.

For more information go to: https://www.hoover.org/publications/capital-conversations 

Unshackled: Freeing America’s K–12 Education System

Monday, June 28, 2021

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

The Hoover Institution Press presents a discussion of the recent publication Unshackled: Freeing America’s K–12 Education System with authors Clint Bolick and Kate J. Hardiman, joined by Hoover Senior Fellow Chester E. Finn, Jr., on Monday, June 28, 2021 at 1:00 pm PT | 4:00 pm ET.

Unshackled explores how to leverage decentralization, school choice, and technology to further freedom and flexibility in education—issues that are more pressing than ever in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this conversation, Bolick, Hardiman, and Finn discuss proposals to bring K–12 education into the 21st century.

PARTICIPANT BIOS
Clint Bolick is a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court and research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a lifelong champion of educational opportunity.

Kate J. Hardiman is a legal fellow, law student, and former teacher who has experienced how school choice changes lives. She hopes to follow in the footsteps of her coauthor and mentor by litigating for educational change.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He previously served as assistant secretary for research and improvement, and counselor to the cabinet secretary at the US Department of Education; and as legislative director for Senator Daniel P. Moynihan.

Explaining the Turning Point of the First World War: The Road Less Traveled

Monday, June 14, 2021

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

Philip Zelikow discusses his new book, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917, which seeks to explain how it is that the First World War did not end midway through, but instead widened to embroil the United States and tip much of Eurasia into general catastrophe. The book has been described in the Times Literary Supplement as “enthralling … a masterpiece … a page-turning narrative based on meticulous archival scholarship yet a pleasure to read, the characters deftly drawn, the locations vividly realized … an instant classic of diplomatic history.”

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.  A former career diplomat, he was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and has worked on international policy in each of the five administrations from Reagan through Obama.  His scholarship focuses on critical episodes in American and world history. 

ABOUT THE PROGRAM
This talk is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

The Case for American Engagement Abroad: Office Hours with H.R. McMaster

Hoover Institution senior fellow H.R. McMaster answers the most frequently asked questions from his video series “The Fight to Defend the Free World.”

1. If the United States is interested in peace, why does our military remain engaged abroad? And why do we continue to build up our military?

2. What do you say to those who categorize any American involvement overseas as a form of imperialism or colonialism?

3. Can you explain the relationship that Shia Iran and Sunni Hamas have in the Greater Middle East? What is Hamas trying to accomplish and how does Iran fit into that?

4. In the video series and in your book you talk about the strategy of convincing North Korea’s Kim family regime that it would be more secure in its position without nuclear weapons than with them. Considering reports that they have tested nuclear weapons, is that still a viable strategy?

5. Is it possible that China’s Xi Jinping is overplaying his hand by acting too aggressively with his foreign policy agenda?

Fanning of the Flames Speaker Series: Anchors of History: The Long Shadow of Japanese Imperial Propaganda

Tuesday, June 1, 2021 to Thursday, June 10, 2021
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives and Hoover Institution Press Present the Fanning the Flames Speaker Series in Celebration of the Publication Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan edited by Kay Ueda.

Japan’s Meiji Restoration brought swift changes through Japanese adoption of Western-style modernization and imperial expansion. Fanning the Flames brings together a range of scholarly essays and collected materials from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives detailing how Japanese propaganda played an active role in fostering national identity and mobilizing grassroots participation in the country’s transformation and wartime activities, from with the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) to the end of World War II.

The Fanning the Flames Speaker Series highlights conversations with leading scholars of modern East Asian history, art, and propaganda and is presented in conjunction with the book and upcoming online and physical exhibitions. 

UPCOMING EVENTS IN THE SERIES

Anchors of History: The Long Shadow of Japanese Imperial Propaganda

Tuesday June 1, 12:00 pm PDT

Speaker: Barak Kushner, professor of East Asian History, University of Cambridge

Moderator: Michael R. Auslin, the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution

“War Fever” as Fueled by the Media and Popular Culture: The Path Taken by Meiji Japan's Policies of “Enrich the Country” and “Strengthen the Armed Forces”

Thursday June 10, 4:00 pm PDT

Speaker: Toshihiko Kishi, professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

Moderator: Kay Ueda, curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives

Additional Lectures in the Series

Featured Speakers:

Yuma Totani, professor of Japan, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Alice Tseng, Professor of Art History, Boston University

Dates and titles to be announced

PARTICIPANT BIOS
Barak Kushner is professor of East Asian history and the chair of Japanese Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has edited numerous books and written several monographs, including the award-winning Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). In 2020 he hosted several episodes of a major Chinese documentary on Japanese war crimes and is currently writing a book titled The Construction of Injustice in East Asia: Japan versus Its Neighbors.

Michael Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian by training, he specializes in US policy in Asia and geopolitical issues in the Indo-Pacific region. His publications include Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2020). Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo.

Watch This Space: Beijing’s Push To Close Off Taiwan’s International Space And The U.S. Response

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Hoover Institution, Stanford University

 

The project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, and the National Security Task Force the Hoover Institution hosts a conversation on Watch This Space: Beijing’s Push to Close Off Taiwan’s International Space and the U.S. Response on Thursday, May 27, 2021 at 4:30 PM PT.

As the World Health Assembly convenes amidst the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, it does so again without Taiwan’s participation. That the WHA would exclude Taiwan—whose democracy has deployed perhaps the world’s most effective response to COVID-19—puts into sharp relief the costs for populations around the globe of China’s broader attempt to close off Taiwan’s international space. On the occasion of the 74th WHA, it’s worth examining the impetus behind China’s campaign to isolate Taiwan, the threat that campaign poses to the stability fostered by the U.S. One China policy, and how the United States can respond to bolster Taiwan’s international space and maintain balance in the cross-Strait situation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Alex Wong, an expert in East Asia & the Pacific National Security International Relations at Hudson Institute, a think tank and research center dedicated to nonpartisan analysis of US and international economic, security, and political issues. Alex Wong is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, with a focus U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific region and the future of the Korean Peninsula.

Kharis Templeman is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific, and a lecturer at Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies. His areas of expertise include democratic transitions and consolidations, comparative parties and elections, and the politics of Taiwan. He is the editor (with Larry Diamond and Yun-han Chu) of Taiwan’s Democracy Challenged: The Chen Shui-bian Years (2016) and Dynamics of Democracy in Taiwan: The Ma Ying-jeou Years (2020). His other peer-reviewed research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Ethnopolitics, The Taiwan Journal of Democracy, International Journal of Taiwan Studies, and The APSA Annals of Comparative Democratization, along with several book chapters.

Click the following link for more information about the Hoover Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/hoover-institution-project-taiwan-indo-pacific-region 

 

Making Congress Work: A Bipartisan Policy Discussion With Senator Jack Reed

Wednesday, May 26, 2021
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Senator Jack Reed in conversation with Kevin Hassett on Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 4:00 PM ET.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kevin Hassett is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and Vice President and Managing Director of the Lindsey Group. He served as the 29th Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019, and returned to the White House in 2020 as a Senior Advisor to the President to manage the economic policy response to the pandemic. He served as Director of Research for the American Enterprise Institute for almost two decades, and prior to that was Senior Economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. 

U.S. Senator Jack Reed is Rhode Island’s senior senator and the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee.  He is also a member of the Appropriations Committee, where he serves as Chairman of the Legislative Branch Subcommittee; the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee; and an ex-officio member of the Intelligence Committee.  A leader on national defense, housing, unemployment, and consumer protection issues, Senator Reed was part of the bipartisan working group that drafted the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and successfully led efforts to create the $150 billion Coronavirus Relief Fund to help states combat COVID-19.  Reed graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1971 and served in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves until 1991, when he retired with the rank of Major.  Reed also earned a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a law degree from Harvard Law School.  He served on the faculty at West Point, teaching cadets about economics and international relations as an Associate Professor within the Department of Social Sciences, and also worked in private practice as an attorney for Edwards & Angell, where he specialized in banking and securities law.

For more information go to: https://www.hoover.org/publications/capital-conversations