Hoover Digest, 2015, No. 3, Summer

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RESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICY

SUMMER 2015
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ON THE COVER
Many peoples and nations are known
by their symbols. This oak tree and the
colors red, green, and white symbolize the
Basques, a people without an independent
nation of their own. The Basques do,
however, have a treenot just a symbolic
one but an oak actually growing in the
town of Guernica, Spain, and celebrated in
poetry and song. The oak and its forebears
have seen centuries of war, revolution, and
peace, and only time will tell if the tree will
witness lasting peace in todays Basque
Country. See story, page 186.
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Summer 2015
HOOVER D IG EST
T E R R OR ISM
9
Sledgehammers of Ideology
Jihadists are trying to destroy historyin the halls of Iraqs
museums, quite literally. Standing in their way: a civilization
that cherishes both political and artistic freedom. By Charles
Hill.
18
State of Terror
Jessica Stern, a member of Hoovers Task Force on National
Security and Law, shows how ISIS uses a slick, media-savvy
campaign to lure vulnerable youth to its end-times army. By
Christina Pazzanese.
26
Escape from Gitmo

The legal path out of our long Guantnamo nightmare. By
Jane Harman and Jack Goldsmith.
F OR E IGN P OL ICY
30
Weak, in Review
When the Cold War ended, strategists became distracted by
the dangers of the weak state. Powerful adversaries used the
opportunity to grow even more powerful. By Amy B. Zegart.
37
Flip the Script

Abandoned friends and defiant foes: what the presidents
foreign policy has wrought. By Kimberly Kagan.
H O O V E R D IG E ST S U M M E R 2015
IRA N
41
No Sign of Restraint
Properly understood, the Iran nuclear deal is at best only a
beginning, not an endand regional stability may be farther
away than ever. By George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger.
49
Digital Defiance
The Iranian people are challenging the theocracy that governs
them with a quiet revolution of their own, much of it online. By
Abbas Milani.
55
Memo to the Great Satan

Iran isnt reasonablerevolutionary states never are. The
United States should seek not to appease Iran but to contain
it. By Josef Joffe.
T HE ECO N OMY
58
Making the Poor Richer

When the free market benefits people of all incomes,
inequality becomes a red herring. By Edward Paul Lazear.
61
Minimum Wages as Stealth Tax

Higher minimum wages help almost nobodybut raise
prices for everybody. How is that a good idea? By Thomas E.
MaCurdy.
H O O VER DI GEST SUMMER 201 5
65
The Wages of Stagnation

Average pay has remained in the doldrums even as the
economy has grown. Heres why. By Edward Paul Lazear.
68
Lyft Out
A bad legal ruling in California could impede ride services, one
of the most promising offspring of the sharing economy. By
Richard A. Epstein.
S C IENC E A N D T HE E N VIRO NMENT

73
Green Allies
What would bring conservationists and conservatives
together? Environmental solutions that really work. By Terry
L. Anderson.
78
To Market, to Market
The FDA finally admits genetically enhanced potatoes and
apples are safe. A sorry tale of bureaucratic timidity and
inertia. By Henry I. Miller.
L AW
83
Law Schools Are Flunking

Enrollment is sagging and student debt climbing. Law schools
are a businessand in desperate need of a new business
model. By James Huffman.
CA L IFORNIA
91
A (Dry) Winters Tale

In parched California, the well of political foresight ran dry
years ago. By Victor Davis Hanson.
E DUCAT I ON
104
Human Capital 101

Why does college enrollment boom when the economy goes
bust? Hoover fellow Caroline M. Hoxby explains. By Clifton
B. Parker.
107
A Degree of Difficulty
Not every job requires a college degree. Employers are
shrinking the labor pool unfairlyand unwisely. By Michael J.
Petrilli.
DE M O CRACY
111
Trust Me, You Fool

That gibe about the stupidity of the American voter is as old
as Athens and as modern as a federal technocrat. By Bruce S.
Thornton.
116
Still Springing Forward

Despite terrorism in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab
Spring, the democracy movement in the Arab world lives on.
But its successes are fragile. By Larry Diamond.
WAR FARE
121
The Drone Age

The drone revolution will pose new threatsbut also better
ways to counter them. By Amy B. Zegart.
E UR OP E
125
Medicine for What Ails Europe

Five steps toward restoring economic sanity in the eurozone.
By Michael J. Boskin.
R USS I A
128
Autocrat for Life

Vladimir Putin, with his genius for tapping the countrys
pathologies, has come to embody Russia itself. By Stephen
Kotkin.
141
Putins Recipe for Power

Large parts aggression and calculation, a helping of insecurity,
and many dollops of resentment. By Victor Davis Hanson.
146
Sanctions Arent Working

Economic pressure is a slow, unpredictable weapon at best.
Sanctions not only have failed to deter Putin but might
prompt him to behave even worse. By Mark Harrison.
152
A New Economic Web

Russias new Eurasian Economic Union is also an instrument
of Putins political power. By Sam Rebo and Norman M.
Naimark.
IN T E RVIE W
158
Find Your Fit

Born creators, people are everywhere in creative chains:
David Kelley, founder of the Stanford design school, wants to
free your inner innovator. By Peter Robinson.
VA LU E S
168
The Honesty Gap

The clamor over male-female pay disparities persists not
because the clamor accomplishes anything but because its
politically useful. By Thomas Sowell.
HISTORY A ND C ULT URE

171
One of the Very Few

A review of Shame, the new book by Hoover fellow Shelby
Steele, which presents a portrait of Steele himself. By Joseph
Epstein.
HOOV E R A R C HIVE S
178
Chiangs Secret Advisers

Driven from the Chinese mainland, Chiang Kai-shek turned to
Japanese and German military officers, once his bitter foes, to
help him defend Taiwan. By Hsiao-ting Lin.
186
On the Cover
T E R R OR I SM
Sledgehammers
of Ideology
Jihadists are trying to destroy historyin the halls
of Iraqs museums, quite literally. Standing in their
way: a civilization that cherishes both political and
artistic freedom.
By Charles Hill
cenes of Islamic State smashing ancient statuesone a winged bull

from ninth-century BC Assyriain a museum in Mosul and in the
ancient city of Nimrud reveal a profound new dimension in radical
Islams twenty-first-century war on world civilization. When the
slaughter, enslavement, and genocidal designs on other religious groups are

joined by culturally catastrophic destruction of non-Islamic arts and artifacts,
then the world faces a fully totalitarian enemy whose rationale is directly
declared: Oh, Muslims, these artifacts that are behind me were idols and gods
who lived centuries ago [and were] worshipped instead of Allah, the smasher
said to the camera. Our Prophet, he continued, ordered us to remove all
these statues as his followers did when they conquered nations.
Such cultural devastation has been evident all across this new twenty-first
century, from the Talibans mortaring and dynamiting the giant sculpted
Buddhas carved into the rock face at Bamiyan on the ancient Silk Road
to the Islamist devastation of the mausoleum, shrines, and library of the
Charles Hill is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoovers
Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muslim center of learning at Timbuktu,

a world cultural heritage site. The devastation is also apparent in Saudi
Arabias systematic destruction of the traditional surroundings of the Kaaba
and the Grand Mosque of Mecca. The government has obliterated significant
Ottoman-era structures to put up high-rise glass and steel hotels of indistinguishable modern facelessness, a demonstration that such cultural ravages
can be carried out by legitimate, internationally recognized Muslim state
regimes as well as by the radical jihadis who aim to overthrow those same
state regimes as abominations in the eyes of Islamism.
If these depredations of Islamism are an atavistic reawakening of the
seventh-century Islamic rise in order to command the future, it is necessary
to review the devastations generated by the modern age itself all through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the Enlightenment, as Kant and
Hegel made clear, history replaced theology and religion as the arena where
the greatest challenges of the human condition would have to be played out.
With religion relegated to the sidelines, ideology was invented as its substitute. Ideology became a totalistic, answer-all-questions compulsory atheistic
[Taylor Jonesfor the Hoover Digest]

10
H O O V ER DI GEST SUMMER 201 5
faith. Like most religions, once inaugurated, the ideology begins the world
anew: the French Revolution as the year zero, or Maos Tiananmen architecturally declaring that nothing good happened before 1949. Thus history itself
was destroyed or transformed with a scientific certainty, a railroad along
which the ideology would inevitably ride.
THE TYRANNY OF IDEOLOGY
The zenith of ideologys catastrophic destruction of culture came in Maos
Cultural Revolution, launched to eradicate traditional Chinese culture by
burning books, outlawing the Peking Opera and all theatrical productions,
suppressing academic and intellectual life, and tearing down pagodas and
temples. Any structure or creative-arts manifestation had to be destroyed.
All this was produced in accordance with Maos perception that Marxism
had to be turned upside down. Materialism, the economic base that, when
communized, was supposed to change the culture, had not worked. Mao saw
cultureand he was correctas the determinative human factor, so Chinas
great cultural past had to go. Confucius was reviled; Mao reveled in being
compared to Chinas first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, who burned books and
buried scholars alive.
What we are witnessing today in Islamisms war on the worlds cultures is
not unconnected to this modern revolutionary upheaval. The history that
replaced religion in the
Enlightenment and which
The museum met Edmund Burkes
was in turn commandefinition of the social contract: a
deered by ideology has,
with the Islamic Republic partnership among the dead, the living,
of Irans revolutionary
and those yet to be borna gain for the
seizure of state power
common good of humanity.
in 1979 and the Islamic
States taking of extensive territorial power in 201415, amalgamated religion
and ideology as a new stage in the war against history. No wonder, therefore,
that the radical jihadists revel in their conviction that the ultimate apocalyptic moment has been placed in their hands.
However grotesque and despicable is Islamist vandalism in the service
of imagined divine instructions, there is more at stake in this phenomenon.
Something of world-historical consequence is going on, because this jihadi
assault threatens a global development which may stand comparison with
the axial age, a transformation in human consciousness discerned by the
philosopher Karl Jaspers (18831969). In the middle centuries of the first
11
millennium BC, a trans-civilizational shift in mentalities took place across a

great swath of the globe from the Eastern Mediterranean to Persia to South
Asia to China. Sharply contested, the axial theory nonetheless does provide
coherence to the emergence of cultural expressions that contain both individualist and universalist characteristics at the same time. A new axial age,
which can at least hypothetically be tracked from the early modern age to
the present, is still in an emerging phase of development, one that centers on
cultural art and artifacts.
Start with the reality that the sixteenth-century Reformation, a key
moment in the history of modernity, produced religiously driven iconoclasm;
a smashing of the images, altars, and sculptures on the grounds that such
idolatry had caused humanity to be afflicted by the wrath of God.
The 1648 Westphalian settlement of the Thirty Years Wara war of
religionswould subdue this inclination to cultural mayhem by gaining an
informal international understanding that religious convictions should
be sidelined when it came to diplomatic negotiations among
states. The Treaty of
12
Westphalia would lead to an international system based on procedural rather

than substantive requirements; it thus could, and did, evolve into a light
structural framework for interactive world affairs while leaving each nations
culture, religion, and politics legitimately its own business.
Countervailing events followed. Lord Elgin (the seventh earl) in the early 1800s
removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon to England for safekeeping
in the British Museumotherwise they certainly would have been destroyed.
Lord Elgin (the eighth Earl) invaded China and burned and plundered treasures
of the Summer Palace for the larger purpose of forcing the Qing court to accept
the proceduresresident ambassadorsof the Westphalian international state
system; this was certainly a cultural crime of great magnitude.
Yet a parallel and positive cultural course was also emerging. British
scholar-adventurer-archeologists discovered lost or discarded sites and
images of the Buddha in northern India; it is not too much to say that Buddhism itself might have
vanished without this project
The great civilizations of the world,
and subsequent British preshowever remote to each other in
ervation and interpretation
time and place, each expresses in
of ancient Buddhist scrolls.
A similar story can be found
art, literature, philosophy, and spiriregarding Islam, as in Oxford
tuality some foundational truths of
Universitys study of the
the human condition.
Amiriya at Rada, a sixteenthcentury madrasah in Yemen, the archeological interpretation of which
revealed commercial-religious-civilizational contacts between India and the
Arabian Peninsula. And some cultural scholarship and preservation efforts
were cross-culturally collaborative, notably the use by Chinese scholars of
Western training and techniques gained at the University of Pennsylvania to
initiate the study and preservation of Chinas architectural heritage, identifying the Tang dynasty era wooden Buddhist temple in the Wu Tai mountains,
later a victim of Maos Cultural Revolution.
Such measures were accompanied by the Western institutionalization of
the museum, an idea as old as fifth-century BC Delphi but emerging as a
globe-spanning phenomenon in the modern eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, places where an unlimited diversity of works of art would be gathered
and available to the public as the object of study and comparison for an evergreater understanding of mankind. Here was Edmund Burkes definition of
the social contract: a partnership among the dead, the living, and those yet to
be born, a gain for the common good of all humanity.
13
AN EXPANDING MOSAIC
Notable figures in modern intellectual history caught the importance of this
expanding mosaic of the artworks of the worlds cultures. How could Burke be
for the American Revolution and against the French Revolution? The answer is
that each culture must be seen as its own intelligible field of study. In describing the American whaling ships and crew, Burke notes that while seemingly
indistinguishable from the English, the Americans had formed their own
unique culture. Like the ancient Athenians, they
were born to take no rest and to give none to
others and so were ungovernable from London.
In contrast, the French Revolution had torn off
all the decent drapery of French culture and
replaced it with blood running in the gutters,
hangings from lampposts, and, to come, a military dictator on horseback.
14
As for India, the historian Thomas Macaulay described Burkes appreciation for Indian culture and the impact he made on the House of Commons:
India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen,
mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people.
The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the coca
tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul
empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched
roof of the peasants hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the
imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and
gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden,
with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the riverside, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect,
the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces,
the elephants with canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the
prince, and the close litter of the noble lady, all these things were to
Burke as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield
and St. Jamess Street. . . . Oppression in Bengal was to him the
same thing as oppression in the streets of London.
Here may be sensed the opening of a new axial age, a general elevation of
consciousness that the great civilizations of the world, however remote to
each other in time and place, each expressed in its art, literature, philosophy,
and spirituality some foundational truths of the human condition of all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson explicitly caught this new age in his essay History. Emerson realized that it now was possible, for the first time ever, to
survey something close to the full range and corpus of historys multiplicity
of civilizations across time and place. He and Henry David Thoreau already
had been sending away for boxes of the classic texts of India (for example,
the Rig Veda) and China (Confuciuss Analects). These works made a powerful impact: How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,
of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity
in them. They are mine as much as theirs. Here Emerson is conducting a
reconnaissance of the works of the first axial age to set forth a manifesto for
the new axial age:
There is ONE MIND common to all individual men. . . . Who hath
access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be
done. . . . Of the universal mind each individual man is one more
incarnation.
15
The opportunity and responsibility presented by the new availability of the

worlds vast diversity of thought is to encounter these works as a whole and
remake, retell them of oneself; not to be guided by them but to write our own
annals broader and deeper: I have no expectation that any man will read
history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose
names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.
What Emerson understood as the incorporation and reworking of creative
thought in philosophy, literature, and metaphysics would be recognized in the
visual arts as well. Walter Benjamin analyzed it negatively in his 1936 essay
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The ubiquity of
reproductions of past works of great art, Benjamin wrote, deprives them of
their unique authenticity in time and space; deprived of context, they lost
their aura and authenticity too.
Andr Malraux, the French adventurer, novelist, and minister of culture
in the time of Charles de Gaulle, gave the phenomenon a positive turn, doing
for works of art what Emerson had done for written classics. In his Museum
Without Walls, he granted that the effect of the museum was to divest
works of art of their function. . . . other than that of being a work of art.
But the assemblage of so many masterpiecesfrom which, nevertheless,
so many are missingconjures up in the minds eye all the worlds masterpieces. Malraux elaborates: It is in terms of a worldwide order that we
are sorting out, tentatively as yet, the successive resuscitations of the whole
worlds pas. . . . with the result that a large share of our art heritage is now
derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even
from people to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.
The next phase of recognition comes serendipitously in the Metropolitan
Museum of Arts bulletin depicting a selection of recent acquisitions. A random selection makes the point that a new realm of consciousness has opened
and calls for new interpretations:
Lakshmi, Goddess of Prosperity, India, Late 7th century;
Wall Painting, Mexico, 650750;
Appliqued Quilt, Illinois, ca. 1875
Shia Processional Standard for the martyrdom of Husain, ca.
1700;
Head of Demosthenes, Roman, 2nd century A.D.:
Photograph: Sojourner Truth, 1864
To move back and forth across these images is to encounter the worlds
cultures at a new level and scale for study by the humanities. The selection
16
amassed has a meaning of its own, yet the real object, its museum context, its
provenance, originating story, and particular civilizational significance draws
us in. The destruction of any one of these objects is an attack not only on its
own unique meaning but also on the newly emerging potential for a deepened
understanding of humanity through comparative art.
There is a democratic
dimension as well. DemocThe destruction of any of these
racy within a state is essenobjects is an attack not only on its
tial for human freedom
and cultural flourishing;
own unique meaning but also on the
the more democracies the
emerging potential for a deepened
better. A consensus holds,
understanding of humanity.
however, that the international system, with its organizations and processes, cannot and should not be
democratic; global governance would suffocate a nations cultural expressions. But the international heritage in artworks is otherwise, because the
artist is individual and aesthetic assessments cannot be confined or dictated;
Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist attempts to do so were risible and rejected. Thus
the new axial possibilities are democratic in an international way that
government cannot commandeer. Artistic and political freedoms go together;
their deadly, dark agesbringing enemy is the sledgehammer.
Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/definingideas), a Hoover Institution journal. 2015 by the Board of Trustees of
the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Weavers

Lost Art, by Charles Hill. To order, call (800) 888-4741
or visit www.hooverpress.org.
17
T ERRORI S M
State of Terror
Jessica Stern, a member of Hoovers Task Force on
National Security and Law, shows how ISIS uses
a slick, media-savvy campaign to lure vulnerable
youth to its end-times army.
By Christina Pazzanese
amily and friends describe them not as radicals but as wellbehaved, diligent students at a private high school in London.
So it came as a shock when the three British girls slipped their
passports into handbags, casually walked out of their homes, and
boarded a flight to Istanbul to join the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria.

British authorities believe that the teenagers, who disappeared in February, were probably aided by Aqsa Mahmood, a young woman originally from
Scotland who recruits for the extremist group.
The young womens highly publicized defection to Syria, as well as the
arrest of three young British men in Istanbul as they headed to join ISIS
in March, are among the latest cases of teenagers and young adults from
middle-class, educated, often suburban backgrounds in Britain, the United
States, Canada, and various European nations who have been enticed to
abandon their comfortable lives and join the Islamic State. In late February,
the Washington Post identified Jihadi John, the masked man seen in several
ISIS videos beheading hostages, as a college-educated computer programmer from a well-off family in West London. James Clapper, director of US
Jessica Stern is a member of the Hoover Institutions Jean Perkins Task Force on
National Security and Law. She is the co-author, with J. M. Berger, of ISIS: The
State of Terror (Ecco, 2015). Christina Pazzanese is a staff writer for the Harvard Gazette.
18
national intelligence, told Congress earlier this year that an estimated 3,400
citizens from Western countries have traveled to Iraq and Syria, presumably
to join ISIS.
Jessica Stern serves on the Hoover Institutions Jean Perkins Task Force on
National Security and Law and was a member of the National Security Council
staff during the Clinton administration. She is also fellow at the FXB Center for
Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
and a lecturer in government at Harvard. Stern has written extensively about
terrorism and violent extremists. Her latest book is ISIS: The State of Terror,
co-written with J. M. Berger. Stern spoke with the Gazette about how and why
ISIS has succeeded at luring young Westerners to its side.
Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette: We know that the so-called Islamic
State is extraordinarily media-savvy. What social media platforms have been
most effective in reaching Western recruits?
Jessica Stern: Theres been a lot of activity on Twitter. Aqsa Mahmood is a
good example. Shes been accused of enticing the three young women from
London who apparently left their homes to join the Islamic State. Shes also
known as Umm Layth, which means mother of the lion. She spoke to them
on Twitter, and then they
ended up moving to an
I think theres got to be an element
encrypted platform to conof thrill-seeking as well, perhaps
tinue their discussion, which
even an attraction to violence.
is a common recruitment
tactic. [Mahmood] also
answers questions on ask.fm. Somehow her postings are attracting young
women, some of them very high-achieving, to leave home to join the jihad.
Theres a big debate about what should be taken off Twitter and whether
Twitter is inadvertently facilitating terrorist recruitment. Twitters automated list of who to follow makes it easy for a person interested in ISIS
to rapidly find additional ISIS supporters. Sometimes, ISIS accounts are
suspended, but often, shortly afterward, a new account with a new name
appears, which serious followers can find.
Theres a debate among those who think we should allow those accounts to
remain active and those who think that Twitter should be suspending terrorist accounts. Those who say that the accounts should be left alone argue that
theyre a good way to gather intelligence, and that removing them would only
result in recruiters moving to a less-transparent platform. Those who want
the accounts shut down say that private companies should not allow ISIS
19
and other groups to use social media to recruit followers, and that terrorists
use of social media to promote violence does not constitute protected speech.
Twitter recently suspended over two thousand ISIS-related accounts. ISIS
has now declared war against Twitter, threatening the lives of its staff.
Pazzanese: What is the pitch to male and female potential recruits?
Stern: For the men, its Come and fight if you can fight; if you cant fight we
also need doctors, we need social-media experts, engineers. . . . Were running
a state, and so if you feel you cant handle fighting, we can still use you. The
women are often recruited to marry jihadists: You can participate in the jihad
by marrying. You can
be the mother of the
next generation. It
is a fairly traditional
female role.
There are tremendous social benefits
for recruits: youre
making the world a
better place, or so
the group claims,
which provides a kind
of spiritual reward.
Theres financial
reward for the fighters. ISIS actually pays
the fighters, gives
them free housing,
offers to provide them
wives. Hence, the
need to recruit young
women. Theres also
the tremendous lure
of extreme fundamentalism. I think we can
all understand the
appeal: wouldnt it
be nice to have easy
answers to every
20
morally complex question? Inside a group like ISIS, life becomes morally
simple. The rules are clear. Good and evil come out in stark relief.
IN SEARCH OF LOST YOUTH
Pazzanese: Whats the psychological profile of those people most susceptible
to their message?
Stern: We dont have a profile of the Westerners joining ISIS yet because there
havent been large studies. But I can tell you that [British intelligence agency]
MI5 did a study of Westerners who were involved in or closely associated with
extremist activity, prior to
ISISs recent recruitment
Twitter recently suspended over two
drive. They found that a
thousand ISIS-related accounts. ISIS
surprisingly high number
has now declared war against Twitter,
of them were converts to
threatening the lives of its staff.
Islam. Many in the MI5
study were relatively
ignorant of Islam, even if they were Muslim. Umm Layth is a good example.
She grew up in a secular Muslim family and went from relative ignorance
about Islam to recruiting for ISIS.
An important factor seems to be the desire to forge a new identity, an identity with dignity. I interviewed terrorists for many years and I can tell you
that identity is often absolutely key. We also know that there is a higher rate
of mental illness among so-called lone wolves, people who are inspired (often
online) to commit terrorist actions without physically joining an extremist
group. Studies of Westerners joining jihadi organizations, prior to ISISs
recruitment drive, have shown that foreign fighters tend to be alienated or
marginalized within their own societies; they may have had a bad encounter
with police or distrust local authorities. They tend to disapprove of their
nations foreign policies. If theyre living in an ethnic enclave, theyre likely
to be alienated from people living alongside them, as well as the country as a
whole, whether its the United States or the UK or elsewhere in the West.
For those who join ISIS, I think that theres got to be an element of thrillseeking as well, perhaps even an attraction to violence. Its hard for me to
imagine that anybody who gets recruited today doesnt know about ISISs
extreme brutality.
Pazzanese: Is the impulse to join the Islamic State very different from,
say, the idealistic impulse of young people to join the Peace Corps or a
21
nongovernmental organization, or any global organization they believe is

doing important and uplifting work?
Stern: Many of the people who join terrorist organizations believe they
are making the world a better place. They see pictures of [Syrian leader
Bashar] al-Assads brutality against his own people and they feel the desire
to help. That sense of righteousness is a very appealing aspect of joining a
terrorist group, for some. But I would say in some ways its more like joining
the Weather Underground than the Peace Corps. At this point, its hard to
imagine anyone joining without knowing that theyre going to be involved in
real atrocities.
Pazzanese: But in their minds, those actions are righteous.
Stern: Absolutely.
Pazzanese: How effective is Mahmood as
a recruiter, and what
makes these Western
recruiters so successful? Do they tend to be
true believers or mere
cynical mercenaries?
Stern: She is very
effective. My guess is
that its partly because
she knows how to
relate to young women
like herself. She knows
their lives. ISIS is
using Westerners to
run the social media
campaign to recruit
Westerners.
Pazzanese: The State
Department has
recently announced
that it has stepped up
its countermessaging
22
efforts. What are they doing, and is that likely to be sufficient, given the
sophisticated and prolific nature of the Islamic State?
Stern: They have a program called Think Again Turn Away, and if you look
at what theyve been doing and compare it with what ISIS has been doing, its
so boring. ISIS has professional cameramen . . .
Pazzanese: The ISIS production values are quite high. Its not like the old AlQaeda training videos we used to see.
Stern: No, its not. If you look at what the State Department puts out, sadly,
you can tell that they didnt have a lot of money. But the guy who ran that
program told me, Look, I know we cant compete with the video imagery
showing, Heres your chance to create this very pure state, and youre going
to get to kill infidels and Shiites.
Pazzanese: They cant compete on the messaging or on the production
values?
Stern: Both. ISIS has made an enemy of the entire world, other than those
who join it. I hope that were going to get much more seriouswe outside
the governmentto find ways to respond. There is a program that Id like to
bring to Harvard. Ive been advocating for years to have young people design
countermessaging programs, rather than State Department employees or
Madison Avenue. There is an organization, EdVenture Partners, that created a curriculum for students around the world to compete to create the
most effective countermessaging. The
We can all understand the appeal:
students will create
digital platforms to
wouldnt it be nice to have easy answers
amplify the messages
to every morally complex question?
of clerics who can
argue against ISISs interpretation of Islam, or of former members of ISIS
who turned against the organization. Those are just two examples; there are
all kinds of things that can be done. The initiative is called P2P: Challenging
Extremism. I would love to get students from across the university, students
in engineering, students in political science, students who speak languages,
or who are very good at communication. . . . ideally we want a completely
interdisciplinary group. Im just so excited about this.
Pazzanese: Besides better coordinating the State Departments fragmented
messaging efforts, I wonder if thats ever going to be sufficient compared to
23
the prolific nature of ISIS. I understand theyre sending out as many as two
hundred thousand social media messages per day.
Stern: No. Its never going to be enough. I think the private sector has to get
involved.
ISISS END GAMELITERALLY
Pazzanese: What is the Islamic States endgame? Is it to provoke global
Armageddon, or does it want to control the world and have everyone live
under its terms?
Stern: They want to establish a worldwide caliphate. The dream is to take
over the world. They are also obsessed with the Apocalypse. Although ISIS
claims to justify its actions by referring to religious texts, ordinary Muslims
have no idea what ISIS
is talking about. The
Ive been advocating for years to have
Quran is not an apocayoung people design countermessaging lyptic book, so ISIS has
programs, rather than State Department to borrow from different
apocalyptic narratives.
employees or Madison Avenue.
Their online Englishlanguage magazine is called Dabiq, which is the name of the town where ISIS
believes the final battle of the Apocalypse will take place.
They believe that sexually enslaving women who are from religious minorities is a good thing; its a sign that the end times are coming. They also justify
sexual slavery as a way of avoiding the sin of adultery or premarital sex,
because if you have sex with a slave, its not really sex, or so they claim. They
can be pedophiles.
Pazzanese: Why is religion such a useful framework or pretext for terrorism,
subjugation, and genocide?
Stern: ISIS is a millenarian movement. They want to create a new human
being the same way the Soviets wanted to create a new human being. They
want to re-create humanity and they want to create a purified world. Its a
cosmic battle to them. Its not totally different from communism or other
ideologies, but God is a pretty compelling citation.
Pazzanese: Does religion give it a patina of righteousness or defuse any accusations that this is a mere power grab?
24
Stern: I think religion is often a patina or marketing strategy for terrorists to

accomplish more worldly goals. In the case of ISIS, many of the leaders are
former Baathists, the secular political party that ruled Iraq prior to the 2003
invasion. [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, recruited
former military and intelligence personnel from Saddam Husseins Iraq.
They have important, useful skills. ISISs religious agenda is clearly intermingled with its more secular goals. ISIS is capitalizing on the feeling among
Sunni Muslims that they are under threat in the new Iraq, and that ISIS is
the only protection they have from the Iraqi leaderships anti-Sunni, sectarian policies.
Pazzanese: In human history, where does ISIS rank in terms of what theyve
been able to accomplishtheir lethality and their organizational strength
in such a brief amount of time?
Stern: Compared with modern terrorist organizations that we know, they
rank very high. However, compared with the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the
communists, they rank pretty low both in terms of their accomplishments
and even in terms of their brutality. Weve seen much worse. ISIS is not just
a terrorist group; it is also an insurgent army. While its shocking to see how
much territory ISIS acquired so quickly, were comparing it with terrorist
groups that werent necessarily trying to acquire large amounts of territory.
The ideology, the brutality of this groupI have to think theyre going to selfdestruct before they manage to spread as far as, say, the communists or the
Nazis. The Nazis werent advertising their atrocities; ISIS is publicizing its
atrocities, flaunting its brutality. Its part of the end-times narrative that ISIS
hopes to spin.
Reprinted by permission of the Harvard Gazette (http://news.harvard.
edu/gazette). 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. All
rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Struggle

for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent, by Fouad Ajami. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.
org.
25
T ERRORI S M
Escape from
Gitmo
The legal path out of our long Guantnamo
nightmare.
By Jane Harman and Jack Goldsmith
n his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama
reiterated his determination to shut down the detention facility at
Guantnamo Bay, Cuba. Some in Congress are resolved to stop him.
Even Senator John McCain, who has supported closing the prison in
the past, joined a recent congressional effort to slow releases from Guantnamo on the grounds that the president has never presented Congress with a
concrete or coherent plan.
Both sides are right. Guantnamo should be closed, but not until the president presents a realistic plan and makes his case to Congress and the nation.
Any blueprint must address very real issues related to the island facilitys 122
remaining detainees.
The easiest question is whether to release the 54 who the administration
has determined arent dangerous. Many in Congress worry that these prisoners will return to the fight. Since 2009, Congress has restricted transfers
from Guantnamo, and in recent years has required the defense secretary to
certify that they are no longer a threat to the national security of the United
Jane Harman is president and chief executive of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Jack Goldsmith is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of Hoovers Jean Perkins Task Force on National Security
and Law. He is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School.
26
States or, at a minimum, to craft a plan to substantially mitigate the risk

of a return to the battlefield. This insistence on individualized, security-protective releases has significantly reduced the recidivism rate that resulted
from bulk releases before 2009. But as the exchange last year of five Taliban
members for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl showed, this standard might need
tightening to limit releases to only those persons who pose no threat.
A tougher issue is where to send the remaining non-dangerous detainees.
Many come from Yemen, a cauldron of instability. The administration has
already persuaded third-party countries to take a hundred or so of these
detainees. Still, finding a place to send the remaining non-dangerous detainees will be hard; options have narrowed.
The biggest problem is a group of up to 68 higher-risk detainees. Seven are
being tried in military commissions. But as Obama noted six years ago, the
others pose a clear danger to the American people. The men in this category, the president explained, received extensive explosives training at AlQaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed
their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they
want to kill Americans.
Guantnamo cannot and should not be closed until there is a concrete plan
to prosecute these men, or, if necessary, detain them in a lawful way that
ensures they can never inflict grievous harm again.
Federal courts have ruled that these detainees can be lawfully held until
the end of the relevant conflict, whenever that might be. But many cannot be
criminally prosecuted because of
Legislation to bring Guantnamo detainevidence tainted by
abusive interrogaees to the United States could create a form
tions, limitations
of administrative detention akin to civil
in federal criminal
commitment, one that could apply even
law, and other
after the end of hostilities.
problems of fitting
the demanding standards of criminal justice to the messiness of the terrorist
battlefield. Scores of lawyers in two administrations have scoured the case
files and case law and (reluctantly) agree.
What to do? Closing Guantnamo must not mean ending detention of these
dangerous men, though the two are often confused. The main question is,
where will they be incarceratedin Cuba or in the United States?
The case for sending them to a secure but humane prison in the United
States is that keeping them in Cuba, on balance, hurts US interests.
27
Guantnamo was established to be beyond the reach of US law, a premise the

Supreme Court rejected in Rasul v. Bush and Boumediene v. Bush. The facility
is a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies, as former president George W.
Bush said in a memoir in
The remaining high-risk detainees
the course of explaining
why his administration
made it clear that they want to kill
worked to find a way
Americans, the president pointed out.
to close the prison. For
similar reasons, closing Guantnamo remains high on Obamas agenda.
There are no appealing solutions, but members of Congress who dispute
the national security assessment of two commanders in chief should consider
this: Transferring the detainees to the United States is an opportunity to
strengthen the legal basis for their long-term detention, which becomes more
fraught as the armed conflicts in Afghanistan and against some components
of Al-Qaeda wind down.
The legislation needed to bring Guantnamo detainees to the United
States could supplement the military rationale for holding non-prosecutablebut very dangerousterrorists with a form of administrative detention akin to civil commitment, one that could apply after the end of the
relevant hostilities. Such a statute could prescribe the definition of dangerousness that warrants detention, the processes for determining a continued
threat to public safety over time, and the standards for judicial review.
This approach is, in our view, the least bad option for dealing with detainees. Keeping hardened terrorists incarcerated is essential; keeping them
detained at Guantnamo Bay is untenable. The president and Congress must
be partners in finding a secure solution.
Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. 2015 Washington Post
Co. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is In Retreat:

Americas Withdrawal from the Middle East, by
Russell A. Berman. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.
29
F O R EI GN POLICY
Weak, in Review
When the Cold War ended, strategists became
distracted by the dangers of the weak state.
Powerful adversaries used the opportunity to grow
even more powerful.
By Amy B. Zegart
or twenty-five years now, a weak-state fixation has transfixed US foreign policy. It all
Key points
started with the humanitarian interventions
Weak states
arent the hotbeds
of transnational
terrorism they
once seemed.
of the 1990s, which advanced the idea that
American power in a postCold War world could and

should bring justice, peace, and prosperity to places
like Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Freed from the
security constraints of superpower conflict, US foreign
policy assumed a more muscular moralism during
Bill Clintons years. After the 9/11 attacks, shoring up
weak states became a vital security interest, not just
a humanitarian ideal. The Freedom Agenda of George
W. Bushs administration sought not only to strengthen
The worst cyberthreats come

from strong states
behaving badly.
Clashes
between strong
states can spread
harm far beyond
their borders.
states but to transform them, spreading democracy

abroad to protect democracy and security at home.
Amy B. Zegart is a Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, cochair of Hoovers Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and a
member of the Hoover task forces focusing on national security and law, Arctic
security, military history, and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the
co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University.
30
Today, this focus on weak states looks increasinglywhats the word?

weak. Sure, some weak states (Pakistan, Pakistan, and Pakistan) loom
large, posing serious challenges to US interests. But the vast majority of
weak states dont. Instead, the most serious threats to American interests
stem, as they always have, from states with sufficient capacity and power
to do bad things in the world, not from states so weak that bad things happen within them.
WHERE IS THE DANGER?
It is worth stepping back and asking: How exactly do weak states threaten
the global order or the United States vital interests? The weak-state crowd
has offered three related but distinct arguments.
Fragile states can become terrorist strongholds that pose existential
threats to Western ways of life. This is the most compelling argument. If
Al-Qaeda could carry out the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor by
setting up shop in the lawless rubble of Afghanistan, the thinking goes, other
lawless spaces could, similarly, devolve into sanctuaries for the recruitment,
training, and deployment of terrorists. Most frightening of all: the specter of
terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.
Poorly governed spaces function as incubators for other global
bads. This less-convincing argument focuses on disease, conflict, human
rights violations, drug and human trafficking, and criminal networks. In
this view, weak states generate unwanted outcomes, not existential threats.
Thats a big difference. The central purpose of US foreign policy is not to
eliminate global suffering, however horrible. It is to protect vital national
interests from grave dangers.
Globalization connects citizens throughout the world in unprecedented ways, binding the fates of strong states to weak states. This
fuzziest argument of the weak-state crowd is more aspirational than real.
Although it is certainly true
that ideas, goods, and people
can cross borders faster and
The worlds weakest states have
more densely than at any
not produced the worlds worst
time in history, we are still a
international terrorists.
long way from a world where
the well-being and security of Nashville hinges on the stability of Ngozi. Yet
Barack Obamas administration has been making this argument for years.
As candidate Obama wrote in a signature 2007 Foreign Affairs article, the
security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security
31
and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. . . . We have a significant stake in ensuring that those who live in fear and want today can live
with dignity and opportunity tomorrow. The administrations 2015 National
Security Strategy proclaimed yet again that weak states are one of the top
strategic risks to our interests, putting transnational organized crime right
alongside the use of nuclear weapons. Incredibly, the strategy proclaims that
it establishes. . . . a diversified and balanced set of priorities appropriate for
the worlds leading global power with interests in every part of an increasingly interconnected world.
But a diversified and balanced set of priorities is no priority list at all.
The United States does not have interests in every part of an increasingly
interconnected world. It does not risk American lives and spend American
political capital everywhere. Nor should it. Global leadership is about identifying what matters most and deploying resources to succeed. And evidence
increasingly suggests that weak states should not be so high on the list.
WAS 9/ 11 AN OUTLIER?
Even the strongest weak-state claims dont look so strong anymore.
Nearly fourteen years after 9/11, Islamist terrorism has yet to morph
into anything close to an existential threat. Thats not to say it couldnt
grow into onecatastrophic terrorist attacks may be black swan events
that defy easy prediction. And it is impossible to know whether we have
successfully countered terrorism thanks to the war on terror or because
terrorists were never such a big danger in the first place. Yet it is hard
to dismiss the gnawing, emerging evidence that 9/11 may have been more
outlier than harbinger.
In 2012, John Mueller, senior research scientist at the Mershon Center
for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, and Mark Stewart, director at the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability
at the University of Newcastle, noted that Islamist terrorism was responsible for two hundred to four hundred deaths worldwide each year, outside
of war zones. Thats roughly the same number of Americans who die from
drowning in bathtubs annually. Harvard Universitys Graham Allison darkly
warned in 2004 that there was at least a 50 percent chance the world would
suffer a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years. It has now been
eleven years and counting. The string of failed and foiled attacks on US soil
since 9/11, including shoe bomber Richard Reid, underwear bomber
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad,
more closely resembles the work of knuckleheads than masterminds.
32
PEACEFUL RISE: Chinese sailors aboard the destroyer Qingdao arrive for a
port visit at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 2006.Long-standing US security commitments to Japan and Taiwan make Chinas assertive military modernization
and posturing in regional waters a potential flash point. [US Navy / Mass Communication Specialist Joe Kane]
The connection between weak states and transnational terrorism

appears more tenuous too. Terrorism experts have found that the vast
majority of terrorist attacks strike local targets, not foreign ones. Whats
more, the worlds weakest states have not produced the worlds most or
worst international terrorists. The 2014 Fragile States Index from Foreign Policy listed five countries in its worst-of-the-worst category: South
Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan. None is a major inspiration base, training
center, breeding ground, or exporter of terrorism directed at Western
cities. Indeed, the January attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie
HebdoFrances deadliest terrorist attack in fifty yearswas perpetrated
by two brothers born, raised, and radicalized almost entirely in the terrorist safe haven of France, which came in at number 160 of 178 countries on
the Fragile State Index.
Consider interstate war. Between weak states, wars can be destructive
and destabilizing for local populations. Between strong states, wars can be
H O O V E R D IG E S T S U M M E R 2015
33
destructive and destabilizing for the world. The war between Ethiopia and
Eritrea was one thing; World War II was quite another. Even in a twentyfirst-century interconnected world, conflict between powerful countries
with large economies poses far greater direct threats to the global economy,
international order, and American interests than wars between fragile states.
Ethiopia and Eritrea posted a combined GDP of $51 billion in 2013less than
the revenues of Google.
While the Cold Wars end led many to believe that wars between great
powers had been rendered to the dustbin of history, Russias recent invasion
of Ukraine and Chinas ongoing provocations in the South and East China
seas should remind us that great powers can still behave badly. Conflicts
between powerful countries are not such distant possibilities after all.
Had NATO enlargement grown a little larger,
The most important nuclear bomb
Ukraine would today be
ingredient, fissile material, cant be
a member of the alliance,
developed in remote terrorist hideand the United States could
outs in ungoverned spaces that lack
very well have found itself
locked in a European land
basic Internet or plumbing.
war with Russia. Similarly,
Americas long-standing security commitments to Japan and Taiwan make
Chinas aggressive military modernization and belligerent posturing in the
region a potential flash point for future conflict between the worlds largest
economies. Beijings naval maneuvering around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands
(also claimed by Japan), its aggressive claims to territory in the South China
Sea (contested by Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia),
its 2013 declaration of an air-defense identification zone, and its two decades
of double-digit defense spending increases all raise the odds of conflict with
the United States and its regional allies through deliberate action, miscalculation, accidental escalation, or some combination.
The specter of conflict between these powerful states may be unwanted,
but that doesnt make it unlikely. Russias invasion of Ukraine seemed
unimaginable until President Vladimir Putin imagined it. Chinas peaceful
rise may also turn out to be more wishful thinking. And thats to say nothing of the risk and impact of interstate war between India and Pakistan,
two nuclear powers with deep grievances and a history of miscalculation.
The most serious cyberthreats also appear to require substantial state
capacity. Sure, Russian criminal networks and teenage hackers are busy
stealing and selling millions of credit card numbers, and the Target and
34
Home Depot breaches were certainly serious threats to Target and Home
Depot customers. But not all cyberattacks are created equal.
Three types of cyberattacks most directly threaten US national interests:
large-scale theft of intellectual property, which can undermine national
economic competitiveness and sap the source of American power; disabling
attacks on military communications and operations that could impair the
countrys capacity to attack and defend itself; and attacks on critical infrastructure that could disrupt the US economy and society on a massive scale.
Evidence suggests that all three types require state capacity far beyond what
Cheetos-eating kids or criminals can muster.
The massive theft of intellectual property from American companies is
directed, aided, and abetted principally by the Chinese government. The
recent Sony hack was attributed to the government of North Korea. The
most damaging cyberattacks abroad have also been sourced to organized
states, not ungoverned spaces. The 2012 Saudi Aramco attack, which erased
data from thirty thousand computersthree-quarters of the companys
PCswas traced back to Tehran. And the Stuxnet virus that disabled Irans
nuclear centrifuges is estimated to have taken months to create, required
fifteen thousand lines of code (120 times longer than your typical malware),
and demanded the dedicated efforts of the best cyberwarriors in the Israeli
and US governments.
THE NUCLEAR DISTRACTION
Finally, even the most frightening weak-state scenario, nuclear terrorism,
isnt even really about weak
states. For years, Islamist
Russias invasion of Ukraine seemed
terrorist groups have
declared their fervent desire unimaginable until Vladimir Putin
to obtain and use nuclear
imagined it.
weapons. Why havent they
succeeded? Because the most important ingredient, fissile material, cannot be developed in remote terrorist hideouts in ungoverned spaces that
lack basic Internet or plumbing. Instead, readily usable fissile material rests
in the hands of a small number of states with substantial governance and
scientific capacity. Of the worlds nine nuclear-armed states, fivethe United
States, Britain, France, Israel, and Indiaare strong and stable democracies. China and Russia may lack democracy, but not the capacity to govern.
Pakistan and North Korea are worryingly weak and rightly rise to the top of
the counterproliferation agenda.
35
But the point is this: nuclear terrorism is not a weak-states problem.

It is a specific-states problem, where a handful of countries play an outsize
role in producing, spreading, and securing fissile materialwhether it is
Irans development of a covert nuclear weapons program, Russias efforts
to secure its loose nukes, Pakistans command and control of its mobile
nuclear weapons, or North Koreas nuclear recklessness. Some of the states
that we need to keep fissile material out of the hands of terrorists are weak.
Most are not.
Weak states pose a number of challenges, and Washington must do what
it can to address them. But the emphasis must be on do what it can. The
world is too dangerous a place to combat state weakness wherever it lives,
to conflate ideals with interests, or to make the analytical mistake of treating so many threats as weak-state problems. Increasingly, it appears that
the most serious threats to American national interests emanate from states
with capacity, not states without it.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com).
2015 Foreign Policy Group LLC. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The War

that Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear
Deterrence, edited by George P. Shultz and James E.
Goodby. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
36
F OR E I G N POLI CY
Flip the Script

Abandoned friends and defiant foes: what the
presidents foreign policy has wrought.
By Kimberly Kagan
he United States does not have an image problem in the Middle

East. It has a reality problem. The United States has lost credibility in the Middle East by abandoning its friends and reaching
out to its enemies.
The United States has also lost sight of its core interests as well as its prin-
ciples. Americas interests in the Middle East include countering Al-Qaeda,

its affiliates, and its major splinters such as the Islamic State; ensuring the
preservation of sovereign states and the states system; preventing Iran from
achieving regional hegemony and nuclear capability; and ensuring the free
flow of oil and other resources essential to the global economy. Its principles
include opposing genocide and other mass atrocities, opposing and punishing
the use of weapons of mass destruction, supporting international law, and
standing by its allies. We have abandoned all of these, to our great detriment.
Recovering our stature in the region requires recommitting ourselves to
pursue our values and our needs.
Iraq is one former friend the United States abandoned. The withdrawal of
US forces from Iraq in 2011, followed by more than two years of American
neglect of the country, allowed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)
to arise unchallenged. The United States took no action after ISIS captured
Kimberly Kagan is a member of the Hoover Institutions Working Group on the

Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. She is founder and president of
the Institute for the Study of War.
37
POWER BY PROXY: Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani is being hailed

as the savior of Iraq for his role fighting ISIS. Iranian trainers and proxies
are deeply interwoven within the Iraqi Security Forces, which has become a
highly sectarian Shia force. [AY-Collection / SIPA / Newscom]
Fallujah in January 2014, waited several months after the fall of Mosul to
assess the situation, and by August 2014 reactively targeted ISIS positions
in Iraq and Syria through airstrikes. These engagements have parried the
Islamic States offensive in Arbil, Iraq, and Kobani, Syria. But ISIS is still
fighting fiercely elsewhere.
The Syrian moderate opposition was another such potential friend.
American inaction in Syria led to the marginalization of Syrias moderate
opposition and its eclipse by
more effective and powerful
Iraq is one former friend the United
radical groups. The targeting of Islamic State and
States abandoned.
the internationally focused
Al-Qaeda-backed Khorasan group in Syria, in particular, have seemed to
opposition elements to empower the Assad regime, which continues its brutal targeting of its population.
The narrative throughout the region, indeed, is that the United States
is flipping its traditional alliance structure away from the Sunni and Arab
states and toward Iran and its Shia proxies. The Obama administration may
not have intended any such flip, but its policies in Iraq and Syria provide
ample evidence to prove to fearful allies that we have abandoned them.
The Iranian regime is the chief backer of Bashar al-Assad and has provided
advising, assistance, and proxy militias to stabilize the Iraqi Security Forces
(ISF). Iranian media daily hail Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard CorpsQods Force, as the savior of Iraq. Iranian trainers
and proxies are deeply interwoven within the ISF, which has become a highly
sectarian Shia force since the United States abandoned it in 2011. The stated US
policy of supporting and partnering only with the ISF looks to many Sunnis in
Iraq and throughout the region like a de facto alliance with Iran.
The integration of Iranian, Hezbollah, and other proxy elements in Assads
forces makes the American refusal to take any serious action against Assad
look like tacit support to Iran in that theater. One does not have to be a
conspiracy theorist to see in these policies a determination to back Tehran
against Americas traditional Arab partners.
The United States also has relaxed sanctions against the Iranian regime,
accepted the principle that Iran will have a significant indigenous uraniumenrichment capability, and allowed Iran to conceal the history of its nuclear
program. In doing so, the United States has adopted a negotiating position
at odds with numerous UN Security Council resolutions, the requirements
of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (to which Iran is a signatory), and
39
many agreements with other members of the P5+1 about the red lines to be
drawn in negotiations.
Again, to the eyes of worried Sunni Arabs, it appears that the Obama
administration is more concerned with some kind of rapprochement with
Iran than it is with standing by its commitments
under international law and
The American refusal to take any
treatyto say nothing of
serious action against Syrias Assad
standing by its alliances.
looks like tacit support to Iran.
The United States needs
to restore its credibility
by pursuing its interests with strength: actually defeating and destroying
Islamic State, supporting strongly the indigenous Iraqi and Syrian Sunni
resistance to this hateful ideology and militancy, targeting Assads capabilities to attack his people, leveraging its military assistance in Iraq to remove
Iranian military advisers from that country, and strongly supporting its
national interests in opposing the Iranian nuclear program in accord with
international law and UN resolutions.
We must wrench ourselves away from the policy of drifting toward a
chimerical rapprochement with Iran and reorient ourselves in support of our
traditional partners and allies.
Subscribe to the Hoover Institutions online journal Strategika (www.
hoover.org/publications/strategika), where this essay first appeared.
2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The

Consequences of Syria, by Lee Smith. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
40
I RA N
No Sign of
Restraint
Properly understood, the Iran nuclear deal is at
best only a beginning, not an endand regional
stability may be farther away than ever.
By George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger
he announced framework for an agreement on Irans nuclear program has the
Key points
potential to generate a seminal national
A proliferated Middle East

would demand
new, and yet
unknown, forms
of deterrence.
debate. Advocates exult over the nuclear
constraints it would impose on Iran. Critics question

the verifiability of these constraints and their longerterm impact on regional and world stability. The
historic significance of the agreement and indeed its
sustainability depend on whether these emotions, valid
by themselves, can be reconciled.
Debate regarding technical details of the deal has
thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regarding its deeper implications. For twenty years, three
presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an
No one knows
if the deal will
foster Iranian
moderation or
cooperation.
Ultimately, the
US must develop
a new strategic
doctrine for the
region.
Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and

George P. Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at
the Hoover Institution, the chair of Hoovers Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy, and a member of Hoovers Working Group on Economic Policy. Henry
A. Kissinger is chairman of Kissinger Associates.
41
NO REST: Secretary of State John Kerry and other US officials leave a meeting with the Iranian delegation in Montreux, Switzerland, in March. Under a
proposed agreement, Iran would permanently give up none of its equipment,
facilities, or fissile material. [EPA / Newscom / Jean-Christophe Bott]
global interestsand that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet
negotiations that began twelve years ago as an international effort to prevent
an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the
first ten years.
Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of UN resolutions, Iran has
gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Irans centrifuges have multiplied from about a hundred at the beginning of the negotiation to almost
twenty thousand today. The threat of war now constrains the West more
than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate
as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a
new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear
weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for ten years Iran will never be
further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be
significantly closer.
42
INSPECTIONS AND ENFORCEMENT

The president deserves respect for the commitment with which he has pursued the objective of reducing nuclear peril, as does Secretary of State John
Kerry for the persistence, patience, and ingenuity with which he has striven
to impose significant constraints on Irans nuclear program.
Progress has been made on shrinking the size of Irans enriched stockpile,
confining the enrichment of uranium to one facility, and limiting aspects of
the enrichment process. Still, the ultimate significance of the framework will
depend on its verifiability and enforceability.
Negotiating the final agreement will be extremely challenging. The socalled framework represents a unilateral American interpretation. Some of
its clauses have been dismissed by the principal Iranian negotiator as spin.
A joint EU-Iran statement differs in important respects, especially with
regard to the lifting of sanctions and permitted research and development.
Comparable ambiguities apply to the one-year window for a presumed
Iranian breakout. Emerging at a relatively late stage in the negotiation, this
concept replaced the previous baselinethat Iran might be permitted a
technical capacity compatible with a plausible civilian nuclear program. The
new approach complicates verification and makes it more political because of
the vagueness of the criteria.
Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment,
facilities, or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places
them under temporary restriction and safeguardamounting in many cases
to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared
sites. The physical magnitude of the effort is daunting. Is the International
Atomic Energy Agency technically, and in terms of human resources, up to
so complex and vast an assignment?
In a large country with multiple facilities and ample experience in nuclear
concealment, violations will be inherently difficult to detect. Devising
theoretical models of inspection is one thing. Enforcing compliance, week
after week, despite competing international crises and domestic distractions, is another. Any report of a violation is likely to prompt debate over its
significanceor even calls for new talks with Tehran to explore the issue.
The experience of Irans work on a heavy-water reactor during the interim
agreement periodwhen suspect activity was identified but played down in
the interest of a positive negotiating atmosphereis not encouraging.
Compounding the difficulty is the unlikelihood that breakout will be a
clear-cut event. More likely it will occur, if it does, via the gradual accumulation of ambiguous evasions.
43
When inevitable disagreements arise over the scope and intrusiveness of

inspections, on what criteria are we prepared to insist and up to what point?
If evidence is imperfect, who bears the burden of proof? What process will be
followed to resolve the matter swiftly?
The agreements primary enforcement mechanism, the threat of renewed
sanctions, emphasizes a broad-based asymmetry, which provides Iran
permanent relief from sanctions in exchange for temporary restraints on
Iranian conduct. Undertaking the snap-back of sanctions is unlikely to be
as clear or automatic as the phrase implies. Iran is in a position to violate the
agreement by executive decision. Restoring the most effective sanctions will
require coordinated international action. In countries that had reluctantly
joined in previous rounds, the demands of public and commercial opinion
will militate against automatic or even prompt snap-back. If the follow-on
process does not unambiguously define the term, an attempt to reimpose
sanctions risks primarily isolating America, not Iran.
The gradual expiration of the framework agreement, beginning in a decade,
will enable Iran to become a significant nuclear, industrial, and military power
after that timein the scope and sophistication of its nuclear program and its
latent capacity to weaponize at a time of its choosing. Limits on Irans research
and development have not
been publicly disclosed (or
Under the proposed agreement, for a
perhaps agreed). Theredecade Iran will never be further than
fore Iran will be in a position to bolster its advanced
one year from a nuclear weapon. After
nuclear technology during
that, it will be significantly closer.
the period of the agreement and rapidly deploy more advanced centrifugesof at least five times the
capacity of the current modelafter the agreement expires or is broken.
The follow-on negotiations must carefully address a number of key issues,
including the mechanism for reducing Irans stockpile of enriched uranium
from ten thousand to three hundred kilograms, the scale of uranium enrichment after ten years, and the concerns of the International Atomic Energy
Agency regarding previous Iranian weapons efforts. The ability to resolve
these and similar issues should determine the decision over whether or when
the United States might still walk away from the negotiations.
LONG-TERM DETERRENCE
Even when these issues are resolved, another set of problems emerges because
the negotiating process has created its own realities. The interim agreement
44
TEST OF TIME: A guard stands in front of Irans nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

Tehran maintains that it seeks nuclear technology for peaceful purposes only.
Meanwhile, the gradual expiration of the framework agreement will enable
Iran to become a significant nuclear, industrial, and military powerwith a
latent capacity to weaponize at a time of its choosing. [Reuters / Newscom / Raheb
Homavandi]
accepted Iranian enrichment; the new agreement makes it an integral part

of the architecture. For the United States, a decade-long restriction on Irans
nuclear capacity is a possibly hopeful interlude. For Irans neighborswho
perceive their imperatives in terms of millennial rivalriesit is a dangerous
prelude to an even more dangerous permanent fact of life.
Some of the chief actors in the Middle East are likely to view the United
States as willing to concede a nuclear military capability to the country
they consider their principal threat. Several will insist on at least an equivalent capability. Saudi Arabia has signaled that it will enter the lists; others
45
are likely to follow. In that sense, the implications of the negotiation are
irreversible.
If the Middle East is proliferated and becomes host to a plethora of
nuclear-threshold states, several in mortal rivalry with each other, on what
concept of nuclear deterrence or strategic stability will international security
be based? Traditional theories of deterrence assumed a series of bilateral
equations. Do we now envision an interlocking series of rivalries, with each
new nuclear program counterbalancing others in the region?
Previous thinking on nuclear strategy also assumed the existence of stable
state actors. Among the original nuclear powers, geographic distances and
the relatively large size of programs combined with moral revulsion to make
surprise attack all but inconceivable. How will these doctrines translate into
a region where sponsorship of nonstate proxies is common, the state structure is under assault, and
death on behalf of jihad is a
Some senior Iranians describe nucle- kind of fulfillment?
ar negotiations as a form of jihad by
Some have suggested
the
United States can disother means.
suade Irans neighbors from
developing individual deterrent capacities by extending an American nuclear
umbrella to them. But how will these guarantees be defined? What factors
will govern their implementation? Are the guarantees extended against
the use of nuclear weaponsor against any military attack, conventional
or nuclear? Is it the domination by Iran that we oppose or the method for
achieving it? What if nuclear weapons are employed as psychological blackmail? And how will such guarantees be expressed, or reconciled with public
opinion and constitutional practices?
A MOST UNLIKELY PARTNER
For some, the greatest value in an agreement lies in the prospect of an
end, or at least a moderation, of Irans three and a half decades of militant
hostility to the West and established international institutions, and an
opportunity to draw Iran into an effort to stabilize the Middle East. Having
both served in government during a period of American-Iranian strategic
alignment and experienced its benefits for both countries as well as the
Middle East, we would greatly welcome such an outcome. Iran is a significant national state with a historic culture, a fierce national identity, and
a relatively youthful, educated population; its re-emergence as a partner
would be a consequential event.
46
But partnership in what task? Cooperation is not an exercise in good feeling; it presupposes congruent definitions of stability. There exists no current
evidence that Iran and the United States are remotely near such an understanding. Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has
declined to embrace common objectives. Irans representatives (including its
supreme leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept
of international order; domestically, some senior Iranians describe nuclear
negotiations as a form of jihad by other means.
The final stages of the nuclear talks have coincided with Irans intensified
efforts to expand and entrench its power in neighboring states. Iranian or
Iranian client forces are now the pre-eminent military or political element in
multiple Arab countries, operating beyond the control of national authorities.
With the recent addition of Yemen as a battlefield, Tehran occupies positions
along all of the Middle Easts strategic waterways and encircles archrival
Saudi Arabia, an American ally. Unless political restraint is linked to nuclear
restraint, an agreement freeing Iran from sanctions risks empowering Irans
hegemonic efforts.
Some have argued that these concerns are secondary, since the nuclear
deal is a way station toward the eventual domestic transformation of Iran.
But what gives us the confidence that we will prove more astute at predicting
Irans domestic course than
Vietnams, Afghanistans,
Previous thinking on nuclear stratIraqs, Syrias, Egypts, or
egy assumed the existence of stable
Libyas?
Absent the linkage
state actors. How will this translate
between nuclear and politiinto a region where the state struccal restraint, Americas
ture is under assault?
traditional allies will conclude that the United States has traded temporary nuclear cooperation for
acquiescence to Iranian hegemony. They will increasingly look to create their
own nuclear balances and, if necessary, call in other powers to sustain their
integrity. Does America still hope to arrest the regions trends toward sectarian upheaval, state collapse, and the disequilibrium of power tilting toward
Tehran, or do we now accept this as an irremediable aspect of the regional
balance?
Some advocates have suggested that the agreement can serve as a way to
dissociate America from Middle East conflicts, culminating in the military
retreat from the region initiated by the current administration. As Sunni
states gear up to resist a new Shiite empire, the opposite is likely to be the
47
case. The Middle East will not stabilize itself, nor will a balance of power
naturally assert itself out of Iranian-Sunni competition. (Even if that were
our aim, traditional balance-of-power theory suggests the need to bolster the
weaker side, not the rising or
expanding power.) Beyond
The Middle East will not stabilize
stability, it is in Americas
itself, nor will a balance of power
strategic interest to prevent
the outbreak of nuclear war
naturally assert itself out of Iranianand its catastrophic conSunni competition.
sequences. Nuclear arms
must not be permitted to turn into conventional weapons. The passions of
the region allied with weapons of mass destruction may impel deepening
American involvement.
If the world is to be spared even worse turmoil, the United States must
develop a strategic doctrine for the region. Stability requires an active
American role. For Iran to be a valuable member of the international community, the prerequisite is that it accepts restraint on its ability to destabilize
the Middle East and challenge the broader international order.
Until clarity on an American strategic political concept is reached, the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the worlds challenges
in the region. Rather than enabling US disengagement from the Middle East,
the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement
thereon complex new terms. History will not do our work for us; it helps
only those who seek to help themselves.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. 2015 Dow Jones &
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Iraq after

America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance, by Joel
Rayburn. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
48
I RA N
Digital Defiance
The Iranian people are challenging the theocracy
that governs them with a quiet revolution of their
own, much of it online.
By Abbas Milani
mid heated discussion about the intentions of Irans leaders

Are they capable of real compromise over the countrys nuclear
program? Can they be trusted to honor any eventual deal? Are
they permanent ideological adversaries of America?quiet
shifts in Iranian politics have escaped notice. In many ways the mundane
activities of everyday Iranians could determine the long-term future not just
of Irans nuclear program but of the country as a whole.
Iran is developing a new kind of politics, located not at the barricades but
in culture and ordinary life. This has become clear to me in recent years
from my reading of Iranian literature and journalism as well as conversations
with Iraniansnot least regarding my own books, which are banned in the
country but, Im told, sell briskly there even so. (Sadly, though I was born in
Iran and lived and taught there until 1986, today I cant visit because of what
some in the regime consider my support for the democratic movement. Yet I
maintain close contacts within the country and have researched and written
about its politics and people for decades.)
Abbas Milani is co-director of the Hoover Institutions Iran Democracy Project,

a member of Hoovers Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and
the International Order, and a Hoover research fellow. He is also the Hamid and
Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where he
is a visiting professor of political science.
49
The aim of this new politics, it seems to me, is not so much to challenge
the central apparatus of authority but to gradually transform the quality of the quotidian and negotiate new ways of living and thinking. It is a
cultural insurgency waged in the often-ignored little battles that decide
everything from the mundane minutiae of everyday existencelike how
much of a womans hair can show outside her scarfto the question of
who can publish a book or make a film. This new politics was born, in
part, from the recent defeats of the democratic movement, including the
brutal suppression of peaceful protests following the re-election, widely
believed to have been fraudulent, of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in
2009. The leaders of that movement have now spent more than four years
under illegal house arrest.
And yet it was Ahmadinejads second term, which was in many ways even
more destructive than his first for Irans economy and status in the world,
that helped bring about the election of the reformist Hassan Rouhani. No
less important, Irans new politics was born of the clerical regimes relentless effortstemming from the Islamic Republics founding principle of
velayat-e faqih, or rule of the Shiite jurist as the representative of Allah on
earthto micro-engineer life and culture in Iran. When a countrys rulers
try to dictate everything from sartorial style to sexual ethicsas Irans
Islamic conservatives have consistently done by, for example, mandating
that women wear headscarves in public and pressuring men not to wear
tiesthen every one of those details of daily life becomes a potential flashpoint of resistance.
BATTLES IN THE CULTURE WARS
The people of Iran have cleverly, and daringly, learned to turn these restrictions into tools for social and political resistance and changeso much so
that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his conservative allies
have repeatedly referred to what they call culture wars in the country. His
anxieties, it appears, are not just the paranoid fears of an authoritarian.
The trend is perhaps most visible in popular culture. Authors, for
example, need government permits before publishing their books, and
getting such permits requires excising any mention of sex, praise for Irans
pre-revolutionary government, or criticism of the current regime. Yet in
the past few years, a small but growing number of writers have opted to
publish limited copies of their books privately and distribute them through
informal networks without government approval. Though in function these
materials are similar to the samizdat literature of the Soviet erasecretly
50
TEXT ME: Young Iranian women share a mobile phone in Tehran. Many
Iranians are responding to the clergys attempts to micro-engineer daily
lifehow much of a womans hair can show outside her scarf, who can publish a book or make a filmby quietly asserting themselves. [Picture Alliance /
Newscom / Jochen Eckel]
distributed works by dissidents, which were often crudely and hurriedly

producedin form they are far more polished. From nude sketches by a
prominent artist, to sensual or satirical poems, to experimental stories in
the vein of noir novels, a new and daring publishing domain has emerged
outside the regimes prescriptions.
Plays, too, need government permits before they can begin rehearsal,
and can be shut down even so, sometimes midperformance. But there has
emerged in response a small
industry of uncensored plays
When rulers try to dictate everything
staged in private houses
from fashion to sexual ethics, every
for audiences ranging in
size from a few dozen to a
detail of daily life becomes a potenhundred people. Similarly,
tial flashpoint of resistance.
Mehran Modiri, a popular
satirist whose programa kind of Persian Prairie Home Companion set in
rural Iranwas taken off the air, chose to privately finance the show and sell
it through the underground DVD market. This market has, in the past two
years or so, grown large enough that some of the producers and directors
who privately finance their programs to get around regime restrictions are
reported to be able to pay their actors well.
Meanwhile, the music scene has never been more vibrant, despite conservative clerics continued insistence that music is banned in Islam and their
emphasis on the three-decade-old prohibition on solo vocal performances
by women. In 2014, women defied this ban by putting solo performances
online. In the city of Meshedtraditionally one of the centers of Irans
religious conservatismthere is now a booming underground rap scene,
despite official restrictions on the genre. One of the bestselling albums in
Iran in recent months is called Neither Angel, Nor Satan. I dont have God
in my sleeve, the lyrics of one song declare, nor the sun in my control.
Those words are, in my view, an open challenge to the absolutism of the
theocracy.
New technologies have expanded the reach of these small cells of resistance. Just as the printing press was, in the fifteenth century, the indispensable technological catalyst for the Renaissance, today, social media
are both the arena for, and the irrepressible tool in, the new culture wars
in Iran. Estimates of Irans Internet usage vary widely, but as of 2013
the World Bank put the number of people with online access at about 31
percent of the population, which would mean about twenty-four million of
Irans seventy-seven million people are online. Among these are millions
52
of Facebook users, despite the fact that the site, along with Instagram
and many others, is officially banned (leaders social media accounts are
exempt).
MAKING ISLAM AN OPEN BOOK
Perhaps ironically from the perspective of conservative clerics, the spread of
Islamic ideas via the Internet has in some ways facilitated religious openness and tolerance in Iran. One crucial development in recent years has been
digital archives making available, often for the first time, virtually every
important religious book in the history of Islam. Laments of conservative
clerics regarding lapsed pietieswhich Ive seen with increasing frequency
in Iranian media over the past few yearshint that state-defined notions of
subservience to religious dogma are on the decline among ordinary Iranians.
In conversations with people in Iran, as well as the writings of leading
Iranian religious thinkers inside and outside the country, Ive observed
a kind of respect for the ambiguities in the human condition that do not
lend themselves to simpleminded dogmas. Prominent clerics have complained that even in Shiite seminaries, traditionally the most persistent
peddlers of philosophical certitude in the country, a posture of relativism is in vogue. The process apparently under way in Iran has parallels
with Haskalah, the movement among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
European Jewish intellectuals to incorporate Enlightenment values into
Jewish life. Just as that process was helped by the promotion of the
Hebrew language and the study of Jewish history, in part through the
press, a similar pattern, made possible by the new information age, may
be unfolding in Iran.
The digital age has also enabled broader access to educationvia, for
instance, an online university for members of the minority Bahai faith, who
are routinely denied access
to public schools in Iran
and facilitated contacts
Social media are both the arena for,
between Iranians in the
and the irrepressible tool in, the new
Islamic Republic and those
culture wars.
in the diaspora. As the liberating power of these technologies has become clear, conservative clerics have
demanded more and more draconian controls on social-networking tools.
One leading cleric declared that these networks are new instruments of the
devil, while many others have cautioned against them as potent tools of the
Wests cultural NATO. At the same time, President Rouhani has hitherto
53
positioned himself in opposition to the theocracy he technically serves by

resisting the worst of these demands, arguing that oppressive measures have
proven counterproductive in the digital domain.
In the 1960s, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse coined the term repressive
tolerance to describe the government practice of allowing certain freedoms
as a way of repressing real opposition. Regimes that engage in this practice,
he argued, tolerate only those forms of resistance that pose no structural
challenge to the system,
thereby cynically consolidatConservative clerics have demanded ing despotism rather than
more and more draconian controls on accepting genuine pluralism.
Some question whether the
social-networking tools.
sites of resistance emerging
in Iran are ephemeral and will disappear if, for example, Rouhani vanishes
and another hard-line president in the mold of Ahmadinejad wins election.
Here, too, history might provide a clue. In the 1960s and 1970s in Prague,
the underground cultural scenethe secret jazz clubs and theater groups
was one harbinger of the fall of totalitarian control in Eastern Europe.
In todays Iran, an insurgent culture, defiant of the regime, dismissive of
absolutism, may be poised to take the same role, whether or not the regimes
limited indulgence is merely a strategic ploy to hold on to power. In the long
run, the clerics by themselves wont get to decide the direction the country
takes. Iranians are showing, in the slow accumulation of small acts of resistance, that they intend to decide for themselves.
Reprinted by permission of the Atlantic. 2015 Atlantic Monthly Group.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The Myth

of the Great Satan: A New Look at Americas Relations
with Iran, by Abbas Milani. To order, call (800) 8884741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
54
I RA N
Memo to the
Great Satan
Iran isnt reasonablerevolutionary states never
are. The United States should seek not to appease
Iran but to contain it.
By Josef Joffe
hen historians look back on President Obamas foreign

policy, it will probably be defined by two shibboleths:
leading from behind and we dont have a strategy yet. Great
powers lead from the front, and they dont formulate strat-
egy on the fly. They must have a strategy beforehand, one based on power
and purpose that tells challengers what to expect. Nowhere is this truer
than with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a rival power playing for the highest
stakes: nuclear weapons and regional hegemony.
The retort from Obama, if he ever laid out a Middle East strategy, might
go like this: Iran is number one in the region, and we need its help against
Islamic State and sundry Sunni terror groups. Save for a massive assault
with all its incalculable consequences, we cannot denuclearize Iran; we can
only slow its march toward the bomb and guard against a rapid breakout.
Rising powers must be accommodated for the sake of peace and cooperation.
Josef Joffe is the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations
at the Hoover Institution, a member of Hoovers Working Group on the Role of
Military History in Contemporary Conflict, a senior fellow at Stanford Universitys Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and publisher-editor of
the German weekly Die Zeit.
55
So lets be good realpolitikers, especially since its time for a little nationbuilding at home.
Realism in foreign policy is the first rule, but whats missing in Obamas
vocabulary? Words such as balance, order, containment and alliance-cohesion
the bread and butter of realism. The dearth of such ideas in this administration is striking. But the problem goes deeper.
Iran is not a normal would-be great power, amenable to a grand bargain
where I give and you give and we both cooperate as we compete.
Realists should understand the difference between a revisionist and a revolutionary power. Revisionists (I want more) can be accommodated; revolutionaries (I want it all) cannot. Revisionists want to rearrange the pieces on
the chessboard; revolutionaries want to overturn the table in the name of the
true faith, be it secular or divine.
Napoleon was a revolutionary. He went all the way to Moscow and Cairo
to bring down princes and potentates under the banner of democracy. The
early Soviet Union changed
the banner to communism
but behaved similarly. Hitler
Unwilling to commit serious force
wanted to crush Europes
against Islamic State, President
nation-states in favor of the
Obama is allowing the Iranians to
German master race. All of
brag that they are doing Americas
them had to be defeatedor,
work in Syria and Iraq.
in the nuclear age, contained
for decades on end.
Iran is a two-headed creature, combining both revolution and revisionism. As revisionist, it seeks to unseat the United States in the region,
targeting Lebanon and Syria with proxies such as Hezbollah or directly
with its expeditionary forces. It reaches for nuclear weapons to cow the
United States, Israel, and the rest. As revolutionary, the regime in Tehran
subverts its neighbors in the name of the one and only true God, seeking
to impose Shiite supremacy from Beirut to Baghdad. Shiites shall reign
where Shiites live.
Revolutionary powers, driven by the consuming faith of being on the right
side of history, cannot be appeased. How do you compromise with Allah or,
earlier, with the worldly God of communism? How, indeed, could Protestants
and Catholics strike a deal in the religious mayhem of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? They fought each other to exhaustion.
Faith warriors have to be vanquished or contained, as in George Kennans
immortal words at the dawn of the Cold War: unceasing pressure until the
56
breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. It worked without war,

but it took forty years.
The first sinner against Kennans realism was George W. Bush when he
went to war against Saddam, removing the single most important bulwark
against Iran and liberating Shiite power throughout Iraq. Obama, what irony,
is going one worse. He has been counting on diplomacy to stop the Iranian
bomb but he has reaped stalemate. Unwilling to commit serious force against
Islamic State, he is allowing the Iranians to brag that they are doing Americas work in Syria and Iraq. Riyadh, Amman, and Jerusalem are neither
amused nor assured. The Russians, who have their advisers helping Syrian
dictator Bashar al-Assad, are eagerly watching for signs of American weakness, not just in the Middle East but also in Eastern Europe.
Yes, life is horrifyingly complicated in the Middle East. Sometimes the good
guys must sup with the devil, as the West did when it linked up with Stalin
against Hitler in 1941. But this dusty analogy holds a lesson: keep your powder
dry and your troops ready, as the United States failed to do after V-E Day in the
spring of 1945. Soviet armies stayed in Germany while Stalin subjugated Eastern
Europe and proceeded to subvert Greece, Turkey, France, and Italy.
Ultimately, Obama is confusing revolutionary Iran with a reasonable revisionist power. President Hassan Rouhani may be reasonable; his boss, Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is not. For Khamenei, the Great Satan is indispensable as a cosmic enemy who legitimizes Islamic rule. As the United States
tacitly collaborates with Iran against Islamic State and Al-Nusra, Tehran keeps
pushing its pawns forward while egging on Shiite revolutionaries all over the
Middle Eastin defiance of Western sanctions, no matter how hard they bite.
To borrow from Forrest Gump: power is as power does. Iran knows this.
Aside from a few exceptions like the killing of Osama bin Laden and the timid
reinsertion of American might in Iraq, the supposed realist Obama does not.
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57
T H E ECONOMY
Making the Poor

Richer
When the free market benefits people of all
incomes, inequality becomes a red herring.
By Edward Paul Lazear
resident Obama has called income inequality the defining challenge of our time. Many progressives blame the market economy
and doubt John F. Kennedys view that a rising tide lifts all
boats. In 2011 Obama chided those who believe the market will
take care of everything. Its a simple theory, he said. It fits well on a bumper sticker. Heres the problem: it doesnt work. Its never worked.
The president and those who side with him ignore two fundamental points.
First, the past three decades have seen a dramatic improvement in the standard of living of the worlds poor, most notably in China and India. Second,
there is little doubt that the cause for the improvement has been a move
toward markets and away from government-managed economies.
There are two ways that inequality can be reduced. The rich can be
made poorer or the poor can be made richer. While the most extreme
redistributionists might prefer the former, most reasonable peopleeven
in communist Chinaprefer the latter. And judged this way, the world
has done well.
Edward Paul Lazear is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution, co-chair of Hoovers Conte Initiative on Immigration Reform, and the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and
Economics at Stanford Universitys Graduate School of Business.
58
Consider some facts: in 2013, the World Bank reported that the number of
people worldwide living on less than $1.25 a day had decreased dramatically
since the early 1980s. In 1981 half those in the developing world had income below
this threshold. By 2011 only 17 percent lived on less than $1.25 a day. In China 84
percent fell below the level in 1981, a proportion that had shrunk to 6 percent by
2011. In India the figure fell to 24 percent in 2011 from 66 percent in 1979.
The fact that inequality within India and China has grown is of minor
consequence. Whats important is that the average citizen of these countries,
once among the poorest in the world, has seen income rise substantially.
Though China and India are the most striking examples because of their
size, smaller developing
countries have experienced
The improvement in the standard of
similar changes. In 1993,
living of the poor in China, India, and
Vietnam had 64 percent of
elsewhere is a direct result of letting
its thennearly 70 million
people in poverty. But by
markets work.
2008, after implementing
market-based reforms, and with a population of 85 million, the percentage of
Vietnamese in poverty had fallen to 17 percent, according to the World Bank.
In China, reduction of state control began in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping.
These reforms included domestic policies that replaced much of the centrally
planned economy with market-based activity as well as opening China to
international trade and foreign investment. Early reforms occurred in agriculture, where farmers were allowed to retain surpluses from their plots.
In 1986 Chinas Contract Responsibility System was enacted, allowing
enterprises to retain profits above quota requirements. In the same year China established the General Principles of Civil Law, which provided the basic
rules for a market economy. These included recognition of private-property
ownership through shares that could be transferred, creditor rights that
required the repayment of private debts, and intellectual-property protection
that defined authorship and patents.
In 1979 China established a law for foreign joint ventures and in 1986
applied to rejoin the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In 1988 the
government began allowing large private firms to operate in the economy;
even state-owned enterprises became autonomous entities, responsible for
their own profits and losses. In that same year, according to the International
Monetary Fund, 53 percent of retail sales in China occurred at market prices.
India undertook major reforms in the early 1990s after obtaining a bailout
from the IMF, conditioned on economic liberalization, which included reductions
59
in tariffs, deregulation, and lower taxes. By 1996 the average tariff in India was 26
percent, down from 87 percent in 1990. Licensing requirements, which restrict
entry and resource mobility, were eliminated in most industries.
In 1992 India liberalized capital markets and opened them to overseas investors. Reserve requirements, which were well above those for most developed
countries, were reduced in the late 1990s and banks were given more flexibility
in setting their own loan
rates. The share of bank
assets held by private banks
The average citizens of India and
grew to 17 percent in 1998
China, countries once among the
from 11 percent in 1992.
poorest in the world, have seen
In Vietnam, collective
income rise substantially.
farming ended in 1986 and
control over state-owned facilities was loosened. In 1989 reforms liberalized
all prices, including interest and foreign-exchange rates. The consequence has
been a sharp reduction in poverty and impressive growth rates that, according
to the World Bank, have averaged more than 6 percent over the past decade.
The improvement in the standard of living of the poor in China, India, and
elsewhere is a direct result of allowing markets to work. Still, these countries
are very different from rich, developed countries and it might be argued that
their lessons are not relevant for wealthier countries. Perhaps not, but there
is no compelling evidence that the poorest citizens of rich countries fare better when there is more government control of the economy.
Does this mean that we should ignore inequality? Not at all. Equality of
opportunity is a basic goal of every fair society, as is help for those who fall
on hard times. But the bulk of those who have moved out of poverty in the
recent past have done so because their governments have turned away from
state control and toward markets, not the reverse.
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60
T H E ECON OM Y
Minimum Wages
as Stealth Tax
Higher minimum wages help almost nobodybut
raise prices for everybody. How is that a good idea?
By Thomas E. MaCurdy
magine an antipoverty program with the following elements: a valueadded tax in which the effective rate increases as family income
declines. The tax revenue is distributed to families regardless of their
income. Families below twice the poverty level get only one-third of the
revenue, with only half of this amount going to families with children.
Most Americans wouldnt cheer this program, nor would most political
leaders champion it. Yet that is what happens when Congress raises the
minimum wage.
In a peer-reviewed study, How Effective Is the Minimum Wage at Supporting the Poor? (published this year in the Journal of Political Economy), I analyzed who won and who lost after Congress raised the minimum
wage in 1996 to $5.15 per hour from $4.25, a raise that occurred in phases
over the period 199697. In other words, I conducted a detailed study of a
minimum-wage hike that happened long enough ago to enable economists
like me to observe its full effects. Note that the minimum-wage hike of
1996 would be comparable to raising the current minimum wage of $7.25
to nearly $8.80. The results show the failure of minimum-wage hikes as an
antipoverty policy.
Thomas E. MaCurdy is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow

at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, and a professor of economics at Stanford University.
61
DOLLAR MENU: Diners at a Los Angeles McDonalds watch as pickets protest

inside the restaurant last December. The restaurants customers disproportionately come from low-income families, who would have to pay more if
workers pay increased. Moreover, higher minimum wages cause some workers to lose their jobs. [ZUMA Press / Newscom / Ringo Chiu]
To put it bluntly: if hiking the minimum wage didnt work when Bill Clinton
was president, then it wont work now.
To be sure, companies on their ownsuch as Walmartdo raise the
wages of their lowest-paid workers, typically when it is necessary to retain
a stable, productive workforce. But this isnt the same as a governmentmandated, economywide raise. Still, most Americans favor such mandated
increases because they believe it helps poor workers support their families.
One problem is that only about 5 percent of families have children and
are supported by low-wage earnings; another is that higher minimum wages
cause some workers to lose their jobs. Advocates of a higher minimum wage
argue that the number of workers who gain far exceeds those who lose.
Whatever the credibility of this calculus, there is yet another problem: if
someones income is arbitrarily increased thanks to a legislatively mandated
wage increase, someone else must pay for it.
62
Since economic evidence indicates that higher minimum wages dont

significantly affect employers profit rates, advocates instead say that
employers will pass on these increased labor costs by raising the prices of
their goods and servicesand that society, or more affluent consumers,
will pay these costs.
But will low-income families earn more from an increase in the minimum
wage than they will pay as consumers of the now higher-priced goods? My
research strongly suggests that they wont.
The first step in understanding why they wont is to recognize that minimum-wage workers are typically not in low-income families; instead they are
dispersed evenly among families rich, middle-class, and poor. About one in
five families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution had a minimumwage worker affected by the 1996 increase, the same share as for families in
the top fifth.
Virtually as much of the additional earnings of minimum-wage workers
went to the highest-income families as to the lowest. Moreover, only about
$1 in $5 of the addition went to families with children supported by low-wage
earnings. As many economists already have noted, raising the minimum
wage is at best a scattershot approach to raising the income of poor families.
The second step is to consider who actually bears the burden of higher
labor costs that are passed on through higher prices of goods and services.
My analysis, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure
Survey, showed that the 1996 minimum-wage hike raised prices on a broad
variety of goods and services. Food purchased outside the home, with an
average price increase of slightly less than 2 percent, bore the largest share
of the increased consumption costs, 21 percent; the next highest shares were
around 10 percent for such commodities
as retail services, groceries, and houseMore poor families were
hold personal services.
Overall, the extra costs attributable
losers than winners from
to higher prices equaled 0.63 percent of
the 1996 hike in the minithe nondurable goods purchased by the
mum wage.
poorest fifth of families and 0.52 percent
of the goods purchased by the top fifthwith the percentage falling as the
income level rose.
The higher prices, in other words, resembled a regressive value-added,
or sales, tax, with rates rising the lower a familys income. This is sharply
contrary to normal tax policy. A typical state sales tax has a uniform
ratebut with necessities such as food excluded, and this exclusion
63
(which exists as well in countries with a value-added tax) is adopted

expressly to lower the effective tax rate on consumption by people with
lower incomes.
My analysis concludes that more
poor families were losers than winners
Will low-income families
from the 1996 hike in the minimum
earn more from an increase
wage. Nearly one in five low-income
families benefited, but all low-income
in the minimum wage than
families paid for the increase through
they will pay as consumers
higher prices.
of the now-pricier goods?
Consider a McDonalds restaurant,
My research suggests not.
often cited as ground zero in minimumwage debates. To cover costs of a mandated increase in the earnings of the
lowest-paid workers at McDonalds, customers pay more for the companys
food. The distributional question becomes: which group comes from the leastwell-off families: the chains customers or its lowest-paid workers? Economywide evidence shows that the customers disproportionately come from
low-income families.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is NAFTA at

20: The North American Free Trade Agreements
Achievements and Challenges, edited by Michael J.
Boskin. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
64
T H E ECON OM Y
The Wages of
Stagnation
Average pay has remained in the doldrums even as
the economy has grown. Heres why.
By Edward Paul Lazear
he elation over wage increases in private business reported in

Decembers job report was soon replaced by disappointment.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on January 16
that average hourly earnings fell 5 cents in December, eating up
most of the 6-cent increase in November. Between 2010 and 2014, the average
real wage fell 1.1 percent, a poor showing after rising 3.4 percent between
2006 and 2010. What accounted for this performance?
There are basically two ways that the average economy-wide wage can fall.
There might be a shift in employment away from high-paying to lower-paying
industries; in other words, the economy is producing more bad jobs. The
other way is that the overall composition of work might be the same, but
wages for the typical job in most sectors have fallen.
Normally, economy-wide wage changes reflect what happens to the wage
of the typical job. But between 2010 and 2014 there were also significant
declines in the proportion of the workforce employed in two high-paying
Edward Paul Lazear is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution, co-chair of Hoovers Conte Initiative on Immigration Reform, and the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and
Economics at Stanford Universitys Graduate School of Business.
65
industries. Those declines contributed to overall wage declinesand they

may have been caused by policy mistakes.
The share of the private workforce employed in the BLS-defined industries
financial activities and hospitals decreased by about 5 percent between
2010 and 2014. Jobs in these industries pay 29 percent and 24 percent,
respectively, above the economy mean. Because a smaller share of labor is
working in those high-wage industries, the typical job in the economy is now
lower-paying than in 2010.
Nevertheless, the movement of workers out of these two high-wage sectors has been partially offset by increases in other high-wage industries. For
example, mining, which benefited from the transformation in oil and gas
extraction technology and which pays average wages comparable to those in
finance, grew significantly. But because mining employs only about one-tenth
the number of workers as finance, even large increases in mining dont make
up the difference.
So what accounts for the relative decline in jobs in high-wage hospitals and
finance? One obvious possibility is increased regulation. The Affordable Care
Act for hospitals and Dodd-Frank for finance both passed in 2010, the year
real wages began to decline. It might be a coincidence that the industries
most affected by these two laws suffered the most damage. But the following
facts lend some credence to regulation as a causal factor.
First, the decline in the share of workers in financial activities from 2006
10 was about one-fifth as rapid as that between 2010 and 2014. Given that
the financial crisis peaked
in autumn 2008, one would
Wages tend to move with productivhave expected the earlier
ityand tax hikes on capital, threatperiod to see the most rapid
ened or actual, arent helpful to busi- declines, not the reverse.
Second, the share of workness investment.
ers in hospitals increased
rapidly from 2006 to 2010, placing it among the top 10 percent of industries
in labor growth. That trend was reversed in the past four years. Nursing
and residential cares share of employment also grew in the early period and
declined in the latter one. Ambulatory health care services, whose share did
continue to grow from 2010 to 2014, slowed to one-fourth the pace of growth
that prevailed from 2006 to 2010.
Third, industries with educationally similar workforces to those in finance
and hospitals, like professional and technical services, enjoyed continued
growth in their share of the workforce during the latter period. Even the
66
construction industry, which was at the center of the recession and saw
substantial declines between 2006 and 2010, experienced slight increases in
share between 2010 and 2014.
Still, wage declines did not occur merely or even mostly because of movements out of hospitals and finance to lower-paying jobs. Even without the
changes, the economy would have witnessed about three-fourths of a percentage point decline in
wages from 2010 to 2014.
Between 2010 and 2014 there were
Wages tend to move with
significant declines in the proportion
productivityand tax hikes
of the workforce employed in two
on capital, threatened or
high-paying industries: hospitals
actual, were not helpful
and financial activities.
to business investment,
which spurs growth in labor
productivity. Higher taxation of dividends and capital gains, as has occurred
under President Obama, reduces incentive to invest and makes it more difficult to attract capital to the United States. The president called for even
more such increases in this years State of the Union address.
The labor market has improved in recent months, with employment rising
at a decent pace and unemployment continuing to fall. But the good news
is tempered by the changing mix of jobs. Evidence supports the view that
stagnant wages are a result of government policy.
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67
T H E ECONOMY
Lyft Out
A bad legal ruling in California could impede ride
services, one of the most promising offspring of
the sharing economy.
By Richard A. Epstein
reat advances in local transportation are being driven by innovative companies such as Uber and Lyft. Their technological platform allows for a scalable network linking drivers to consumers
in real time, supplying simultaneous two-way information on
such key matters as vehicle type, price, and anticipated place and time of
pickup and dropoff. The network is live, and thus able to make instantaneous
price adjustments to reflect changes in supply and demand. The apps are
easy to use and signing up is free. These services thus offer service superior
to that of ordinary cab and limousine services, whose fixed-rate structures
lead to systematic shortages in times of peak demand and systematic idleness in slack periods.
Superior that is, at least until two district court judges in San Francisco,
Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, weighed in on two class-action lawsuits
alleging that Uber and Lyft drivers are employees of their respective companies. The judges rejected the idea that drivers are independent contractors, as the two defendants had insisted. In this instance, the characterizationemployee versus independent contractorcarries with it enormous
Richard A. Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of the steering committee for Hoovers Working Group
on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity. He is also the Laurence A.
Tisch Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer
at the University of Chicago.
68
consequences. It could mean the difference between success and failure of

the two companies.
Under traditional law, an independent contractor receives a fee for the services he performs, but otherwise runs his own business as he pleases. In contrast, an employee works for an employer who pays him a wage in exchange
for a bundle of services that are subject to the employers close supervision.
In an unregulated market, this distinction has little effect on how new
businesses operate. The two parties to the agreement can decide to call
their business by one name or the other, and the only consequences are
on the terms of their contract. Nor in an open market are they confined to
structure their relationship in strict accordance with either of these two
pure forms. The forms are guides, not Procrustean beds. The parties are
free to fine-tune their relationships by adding some terms and eliminating others in ways that suit their business needs. Nor must all parties
march off in unison in the same direction; they can each use their own
separate modifications.
The job of judges is not to second-guess that choice of forms, but to enforce
the agreement as it is written.
LIFE IN THE SLOW LANE
The evolution of legal transactions is thus driven by market pressures rather
than judicial fiat. Now that labor markets are extensively regulated, the private evolution has been brought to a screeching halt. Destroying the contractor arrangement would carry enormous economic consequences. Under current law, the independent contractor arrangement is not highly regulated; in
stark contrast, every aspect of the standard employment contract is subject
to massive government regulation.
In the San Francisco class actions, the plaintiffs claim that they are really
employees and not independent contractors. As employees, they further
claim that they are now
entitled to reimburseUnder traditional law, an indepenment for their operating
expenses, which include
dent contractor receives a fee for
both maintenance and
services, but otherwise runs his busifuel. But not just costs
ness as he pleases.
are at issue. These newly
minted employees would be entitled to seek union representation, something
unavailable to independent contractors under the National Labor Relations Act. Congress and the states also have larded on additional burdens
69
ROADBLOCK? Lyft is a ride-sharing company initially known for putting

pink mustaches on its cars. Two judges in San Francisco have rejected the
idea that drivers for Lyft, Uber, and similar companies are independent
contractorsa step that could throw a wrench into an innovative business
model. [Lyft / Creative Commons]
including unemployment insurance, Social Security benefits, overtime pay,

family leave, and much more.
Putting Uber and Lyft drivers into the employee box thus has two consequences. In the instant case, it would result in a large, one-time cash transfer
to the drivers. In the long run, the burden of regulations could cast massive
doubt on a successful business model, transforming it for the worse. At the
very least, the drivers base salary would go down to offset the additional
benefits the companies would need to supply. If that were the only effect,
the workers would get a lower base pay and higher fringes. The adjustments
would look like a reduction in base pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act,
as an offset for higher fringes over time.
Unfortunately, this scenario is unduly optimistic for at least two reasons.
First, the new employer relationship would put extensive regulatory duties
of supervision and oversight on Uber and Lyft, which will cost money. The
higher administrative costs will drive the customer rates higher, thereby
70
reducing aggregate demand for services, leaving both the companies and
the drivers worse off than before. It also will become important to decide
how long each of these workers is on the job to determine whether they are
eligible for health care benefits, minimum-wage increases, or anything else.
But the frequency of slip-ups in this labor-law swamp is high: workers are not
located on the plant floor but rather widely dispersed throughout the state,
making it difficult for anyone to track their movements and account for their
time.
Putting drivers into this employment relationship can only shrink the size
of the pie. It will be yet another instance of killing through regulation the
goose that lays the golden egg.
SOMETHING GENUINELY NEW
When put to an all-or-nothing choice, are these drivers employees or independent contractors? The judges declined to answer that question cleanly,
insisting that the factors are so complex, and the standardized legal tests so
inconclusive and outdated, that the entire matter must be thrown into the
hands of a jury. That gratuitous uncertainty only makes matters worse.
The problem is not an isolated one. Just the same tension between modern business forms and an obsolete employment law is now playing itself
out under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Recently, the National
Labor Relations Board announced that it is seeking an expanded interpretation of the NLRAs statutory
definition of an employer so
No firm can work effectively knowthat it can treatMcDonalds
ing that its basic business model will
and other franchisors as
statutory employers of their be constantly challenged.
franchisees workers. There
too the new definitions could upset the standard business model by making
it impossible for any franchisor to protect its brand without finding itself
burdened by the heavy statutory obligations of an employer.
In analyzing these business relationships, the standard list of criteria
does indeed cut both ways.There is certainly a need for Uber and Lyft to
vet drivers because they must impose uniform standards of fitness to protect their brands. Brand management always requires serious controls on
how service is provided. But it need not require the companies to specify
when drivers should accept calls or just go home, or to tell the drivers how
to prepare their cars for driving. The standards generally deal with measurable outputs, not inputs.
71
So let us suppose that any jury can decide this case either way. What
then should be done if one jury accepts the argument from Uber and Lyft
that they are platform technologies that link drivers with customers when
another finds that they are
employers? No firm can
Putting drivers into an employee
work effectively without
relationship can only shrink the size
knowing whether or not
its basic business model
of the pie.
worksacross the board.It
is inconceivable that the courts should invite a wave of costly litigation on an
issue that should be decided either one way or the other.
Sadly, there are now only two ways out of this mess. The first is that the
appellate courts can restore sanity by upholding the Uber and Lyft business
model, given that it is in the first instance for parties to define their own relationships unless there is some clear evidence of abuse, which is surely not the
case here. Second, if the courts refuse to make a clear rule, then Congress or
the states have to step in to clarify matters. Lawmakers will harm promising
new businesses if they impose an employee status on drivers. If they enact
laws to preserve the status quo, they will allow the market to flourish. The
choice may be theirs. It is also easy.
Special to the Hoover Digest.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The Case

against the Employee Free Choice Act, by Richard A.
Epstein. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
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72
SCIE N CE AND T H E E N VI R ON M E N T
Green Allies
What would bring conservationists and
conservatives together? Environmental solutions
that really work.
By Terry L. Anderson
f the Republican Party wishes to take the White House next year,
it will need to do more to win over generation X and generation Y.
Younger voters swept Obama into the White House searching for
hope and change. Despite the promise of fewer top-down regula-
tions, the revelations of NSA spying on ordinary Americans and the passage
of ObamaCare hardly suggest big brothers shadow is smaller.
Writing in the New York Times, Robert Draper noted that millennials were
raised on the ad hoc communalism of the Internet, disenchanted by the Iraq
War, reflexively tolerant of other lifestyles, appalled by government intrusion
into their private affairs, and increasingly convinced that the Obama economy is rigged against them.
The 2016 presidential campaign gives Republicans a chance to speak to
those millennials, and the Republican environmental policy message could
be a starting point. Command-and-control regulationsClean Air Act, Clean
Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, to mention a fewfrom Nixonera Republicans may have played to boomers, but millennials want results,
not regulations.
Terry L. Anderson is the John and Jean De Nault Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center
(PERC) in Bozeman, Montana. He is the co-author, with Donald Leal, of Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
73
The younger generations do care about the environmentmore than 80

percent are concerned about global warming and resource scarcitybut
they want environmental bang for their buck. For example, a Michigan State
University survey found that gen Y does have concern for the environment
when making purchases, but without an economic benefit in making ecofriendly choices, they would likely not make these purchases.
The same applies to government regulations. Once there were clear benefits from picking the low-hanging fruit: cleaning up Ohios burning Cuyahoga
River, for instance, or saving the bald eagle from poisoning, but todays environmental regulations add cost without benefit. The American Action Forum
reported in 2013 that federal environmental regulations imposed an estimated $216 billion in regulatory costs on the economy in 2012, nearly double
its previous record. Those regulations imposed eighty-seven
million hours of paperwork on the economy, amounting to a
years work for some forty-three thousand full-time employees.
The parade to Iowa of Republican presidential hopefuls courting the farm
vote shows some indications of change. On one hand, Lindsey Graham, Chris
Christie, and Scott Walker marched in step with Mike Huckabee, who said
they had better suck up to the farmers by supporting subsidies and federal
fuel mandates requiring ethanol in gasoline. Such policies continue despite
the fact that ethanol is not an alternative energy source that will reduce
global warming, that it has destroyed thousands of acres of wildlife habitat,
74
75
that it wastes water, and that it costs taxpayers billions. On the other hand,
the good news is that three of the hopefuls, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Rick
Perry, acknowledged that Washington is not good at picking winners and that
energy policy should be left to the marketplace.
Republicans could get some fresh ideas from the Breakthrough Institute, whose mission is to accelerate the transition to a future where all the
worlds inhabitants can enjoy secure, free, prosperous, and fulfilling lives on
an ecologically vibrant planet. It opposes
a carbon tax and renewable-energy subsiMillennials want results,
dies as ways of reducing global warming,
not regulations.
instead favoring more reliance on shale
gas and nuclear energy.
In their book Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking
America, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais describe millennials as the
north star for an entire new generation of entrepreneurs. That entrepreneurship can and does extend far beyond energy policy to all aspects of the
environment.
Here are some concrete examples of what the next generation of environmental entrepreneurs are already doing. Despite decades of federal and
state fishing regulations, ocean fish stocks continued to decline until a form
of property rightsindividual transferable fishing quotaswere introduced.
These fishing rights have improved both the environment and fishing economies. For example, in order to stop destruction of the ocean floor ecosystem
caused by trawl fishing near Morro Bay, the Nature Conservancy simply purchased commercial fishing permits and is leasing them back with contractual
limits on where and when fishing occurs. The conservancy says the partnership preserves livelihoods and fish stocks.
In Californias Central Valley, home to bitter fights over whether water
should be delivered to farmers or used to protect fish and wildlife, tech-savvy
bird lovers use the smartphone
app eBird to record shorebird
sightings. With these data, the
Entrepreneurship can and does
Nature Conservancy uses private
extend to all aspects of the envidonations to pay farmers to
ronment.
flood wetlands when and where
the birds need it. In 2014, BirdReturns, as the program is called, overcame
bureaucratic red tape on buying water for environmental purposes to create
over ten thousand acres of pop up wetlands with water from forty farmers. A millennial environmental policy: reduce the barriers to leasing water
76
from farmers who have contracts for water delivery from federal irrigation
projects.
A 2014 poll showed that half the voters between ages eighteen and twentynine are unwedded to either party. Environmental policies based on markets,
incentives, and entrepreneurship offer Republicans a chance to win them
over.
Conserve, the root of both conservative and conservation, means to watch
over or protect. To win the younger vote, conservatives in Washington will
have to stop protecting status quo subsidies and regulations and start promoting policies favoring environmental entrepreneurship.
Reprinted by permission of the Daily Caller. 2015 The Daily Caller. All
rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Greener

than Thou: Are You Really an Environmentalist? by
Terry L. Anderson and Laura E. Huggins. To order, call
77
S C I ENCE AND T HE E N VIRON ME NT
To Market, to
Market
The FDA finally admits genetically enhanced
potatoes and apples are safe. A sorry tale of
bureaucratic timidity and inertia.
By Henry I. Miller
n March the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certified that

several new varieties of genetically engineered potatoes and apples
are safe to eat, closely following the Department of Agricultures
approval of them for unlimited cultivation and sale. The new products
offer intriguing benefits. The newly approved Innate potato, for instance,
is bruise-resistant (promising less waste) and contains considerably less of
a chemical that is converted to a presumptive carcinogen when heated. The
Arctic apple is designed to resist browning when cut.
Such products will be welcome news to many consumers, but the bureaucratic ordeal was a tough row to hoe: the governments regulation of these
and similar products is a morass of unscientific policies, incompetence, and
politics. By withholding or delaying approvals of new products that offer
improvements in safety, agronomic traits, and appeal to consumers, federal
regulators for years have done their best to prevent US researchers and
companies from realizing transformative changes in American agriculture
using the most modern techniques of genetic engineering.
Henry I. Miller, MD, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and
Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.
78
In spite of the scientific communitys best efforts to educate them, the feds
have failed to appreciate that the particular genetic technique employed to
construct new strains is irrelevant to risk, as is the source of a snippet of
DNA that may be moved from one organism to another. What matters are
the traits that are related to risk, such as allergenicity or the presence of
toxins, not the use of one technique or another. But regulators have consistently chosen to focus on the latterand redundant, prolonged case-by-case
reviews are the rule for organisms modified with molecular genetic engineering techniques. This is a particular problem at gatekeeper agencies such as
the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which must grant an affirmative
approval before a product can be legally sold.
Based on data gathered by the US government itself, from January 2010
through June 2013, the average time from submission to decision for genetically
engineered plants was 1,210 days for the USDA (compared to 372 days for Brazil
and 771 days for Canada). Virtually identical products crafted with less-precise,
less-predictable genetic techniques undergo no regulatory review at all.
Regulatory disincentives are potent. It costs on average about $136 million
to bring a genetically engineered crop plant to market, far more than for
other new plant varieties. This is the primary reason more than 99 percent
of genetically engineered crop plants are those that are grown at huge scale:
corn, cotton, canola, soy, alfalfa, and sugar beets. Hawaiian papaya is a rare
example of significant acreage of a genetically engineered specialty crop
such as fruits, nuts, and vegetables.
SPOILING FOR A FIGHT
Unscientific, excessive, and hugely expensive regulation has discouraged innovation across the board and prevented research institutions, particularly those
in the public sector, from commercializing their innovations. As eminent plant
scientist and former federal official Roger Beachy testified before Congress,
There are a growing number of examples of new inventions developed through
genetic engineering that have good likelihood of success and that continue to be
delayed in reaching the marketplace because of regulatory processes that are
ill-defined and/or unpredictable, sometimes irrational, and always costly.
The blame and shame are shared by senior officials at USDA and FDA and in
the Obama White House. Kathleen Merrigan, deputy secretary of agriculture
during the first Obama term, was relentlessly opposed to genetic engineering
and obstructed its advances at every opportunity. The recently departed head
of the FDA, Margaret Hamburg, capitulated consistently to directions from her
political bosses even when they were unethical and even illegal.
79
Genetic engineering was a particular bte noire for Hamburg. She permitted the White House to hijack what should have been a routine, scientifically
uncontroversial approval of a fast-growing, genetically engineered farmed
salmon, the FDAs involvement with which began more than twenty years
ago. The result? An entire once-promising sector of biotechnologygenetically engineered food animalsis now dead, the victim of regulatory costs,
delays, and uncertainty.
Politically motivated delays also plagued the Innate potatoes and Arctic apples, both of which will offer palpable benefits to consumers. In fact,
research by Iowa State University economist Wallace Huffmanin an
experimental auction market designfound that there is a willingness
among consumers to pay more for genetically modified potato products that
reduce the formation of acrylamide than for conventional potatoes.
Innate potatoes contain 5070 percent less asparagine, a chemical that is
converted to acrylamide, a presumptive carcinogen, at high temperatures. The
advantage of lower levels of a carcinogen is obvious, but the resistance to bruising is also important because of the potential to decrease waste. Moreover,
J. R. Simplot, developer of the potato, is currently performing advanced field
testing of second-generation Innate potatoes that will contain an additional
trait: resistance to the destructive fungus called late blight, which caused the
Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century and is still a problem.
Environmentalists should take note: potatoes resistant to bruising and late
blight represent major advances in sustainability because every serving of
french fries and every potato chip made from them will represent less farmland and water consumption.
The Arctic apples are conceptually similar. Using genetic engineering
to reduce the level of the enzymes involved in enzymatic browningthe
unappetizing discoloration that occurs when an apple (or potato) is cut or
bruisedthe fruit is highly resistant to browning. The ingenious biology that
made this possible is far more precise and predictable than conventional,
older techniques that have been employed to create virtually our entire food
supply (including even heirloom varieties and overpriced organic foods).
Plants have long been modified for qualities attractive to consumers, such as
seedless watermelons and grapes and the tangerine-grapefruit hybrid called a
tangelo. One modification technique, wide cross hybridization, performed by
plant breeders since the 1930s, moves large numbers of alien genes from one
species or one genus to another to create plant varieties that cannot and do not
exist in nature. Common commercial crops derived from wide crosses include
tomato, potato, sweet potato, oat, rice, wheat, corn, and pumpkin.
81
DELAYS COST MONEY

The USDA deregulated the Innate potato varieties last November and the
Arctic apples in February. Those reviews were excruciatinglyand unnecessarilylong, but the voluntary consultations with the
Plants have long been modified for FDA were positively absurd:
the dossier for the potato was
qualities attractive to consumers.
at the FDA for two years, and
the agencys consultation on the apples took nearly four.
Neal Carter, president of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, the company that
developed the Arctic apple, calls the delays costly and unnecessary:
We expected our consultation to conclude years ago, and there
are very real costs from the uncertainty and demoralization that
stem from these delays. We would expect innovation from a small,
grower-led company like ours to be encouraged, rather than
stifled, yet here we are.
The genetic changes in the just-approved potatoes and apples are wellcircumscribed, well-understood, and minimal, so the reviews should have
been neither difficult nor time-consuming. In the 1980s, when I was the FDA
medical reviewer for the first genetically engineered drugshuman insulins
obtained from bacteriawe approved them for marketing in five months.
The shilly-shallying by the USDA and FDA on the Innate potatoes and Arctic
apples was a disgraceful abuse of power and an affront to innovators.
University of California, Berkeley, agricultural economist David Zilberman
has observed that excessive regulation comes at a costit prevents the
introduction of beneficial innovation, and eventually lack of innovation is a
source of heightened risk to human health and the environment.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is To

Americas Health: A Proposal to Reform the Food and
Drug Administration, by Henry I. Miller. To order, call
82
L AW
Law Schools Are

Flunking
Enrollment is sagging and student debt climbing.
Law schools are a businessand in desperate
need of a new business model.
By James Huffman
egal education is at a crossroads, but

you would hardly know it from law
schools response to a six-year decline in
applications.
Legal educators should be talking about an entirely
new business model. Clearly the existing model has

failed, but because most law faculty view themselves
as public servants and legal education as a public
good, they reject the very idea that legal education
can even be thought of in business terms. Regardless
of how much public good they are doing, law schools,
like the universities to which most of them are
attached, have a bottom line.
Demand for legal education has declined every
Key points
Law school
tuition has risen far
faster than inflation even as the
applicant pool has
shrunk.
Many students
enter the field
deeply in debt
and inadequately
trained for a changing market.
Law schools must
shake up a model
that mainly benefits
themselves.
year since 2010not just a little, but by nearly 40

percent. The same number of law schools have
James Huffman is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the Erskine
Wood Sr. Professor of Law (Emeritus) at Lewis & Clark Law School.
83
thirty-three thousand fewer prospective customers than they had five years
ago. Because the vast majority of law schools are heavily dependent on
tuition revenue to meet expenses, achieving enrollment targets is critical
to the bottom line. At a minimum, this means law schools must be far less
selective.
But even achieving enrollment targets does not guarantee a balanced
budget. For the past two decades, law schools have relied on discounted
tuition to recruit the best students. Such students, with high test scores and
undergraduate grade-point averages, boost rankings, which helps recruitment. However, tuition discounts, sometimes approaching 100 percent, cause
problems. When aggregate discounts become too large, more students actually result in less net revenue. Without enough endowment income (which
very few schools have) to cover tuition revenue lost to discounting, the
least-qualified students, with the worst prospects for
gainful employment after graduation, end
up paying for the most-qualified
students to attend law school.
Law school tuition has risen
in excess of inflation for the past
four decades. When I entered the
University of Chicago Law School
in 1969, tuition was equivalent
to $16,000 in 2014 dollars.
Chicagos
84
85
2014 tuition was over $54,000. No one can claim that todays students are
getting three and a half times the value I did forty-six years ago, but students
are still willing and able to pay that much because they can get governmentguaranteed loans to cover it.
Top graduates from the University of Chicago will have no difficulty repaying $150,000 to $200,000 in law school debt, but most law school graduates
will spend most of their careers paying off their legal education. Many will
never be able to do so. The economics of legal education are inextricably
linked to the demand for new lawyers, which is linked to the market for legal
services. That market has changed dramatically and permanently over the
past decade, resulting in six consecutive years of decline in the demand for
new lawyers.
In the face of these economic challenges, most legal educators appear to
assume that their options are three: cut expenses, somehow maintain enrollments, or get their universities to bridge the growing financial gap.
Cutting expenses within the current business model is difficult. Short of
moving into smaller space, there is little to be done about facilities costs
in the short term. Program cuts compromise highly competitive student
recruitment. Indeed, many
schools are considering
Regardless of how much public good adding programs, including graduate degrees that
they do, law schools, like the uniwill add to total costs for
versities theyre attached to, have a
students willing to enroll,
bottom line.
in hopes of enticing more
applicants. Faculty members, the largest expense for most schools, are almost all tenured, making
cuts impossible without scaring off prospective students with signs of financial distress.
The current practice of year-to-year, incremental expense cuts, combined
with heavily discounted tuition to maintain enrollments, is not going to fix
the problem. The longer legal educators deny the true magnitude of the
financial crisis they face, the more devastating will be the crash.
ELABORATE AND VERY EXPENSIVE
Through the first half of the twentieth century, law schools relied on small
faculties to teach large classes in facilities consisting of a few lecture halls,
offices, and a library. Today, large faculties teach small classes in elaborate
facilities housing high-tech classrooms, courtrooms, cafs, lounges, faculty
86
suites, administrative and student organization offices, computer labs, libraries, and perhaps even exercise rooms. Faculty teach not only smaller but
fewer classes, with frequent sabbaticals and research leaves. Little wonder
tuition has risen in excess of
inflation for four decades.
The least-qualified students, with
As someone who promotthe worst prospects for gainful
ed all of the above as a law
employment, end up paying for the
school dean and benefitted
from it all as a law profesmost-qualified students to attend
sor, it pains me to acknowllaw school.
edge that during my nearly
four-decade career of legal education, I abandoned frugality for profligacy.
Some of the rising costs resulted from program expansions in response to a
plethora of new legal specialties and from steady pressure from the American Bar Association (ABA) for more training in lawyering skills that requires
a much lower student-faculty ratio.
But the core of the escalating cost of legal education is that the guild of law
school professors long ago captured the combined regulatory apparatus of
the ABA and the Association of American Law Schools. We law professors
have constructed a legal education model that first and foremost serves faculty interests: higher salaries, more faculty protected by tenure, smaller and
fewer classes, shorter semesters, generous sabbatical and leave policies, and
supplemental grants for research and writing.
We could not have done better for ourselves, except that the system is now
collapsing.
BETTER EDUCATION FOR THE BUCK
A high-quality legal education could be provided for half of todays average
tuition. Here are a few suggestions for how to do it:
Cut faculty numbers in half by requiring faculty to devote most of
their time to teaching. In the existing model, law faculty are expected to
teach, produce scholarship, engage in public service, and perform service
to their institution. Because achieving tenure at most institutions depends
almost entirely on the production of scholarship, that function has come
to dominate faculty time. Prospective professors are asked not about their
interest in and preparation for teaching but whether or not they have a
research agenda. High-level scholarship is important to the development of
the law and can be a positive influence on teaching, but it is not in the interest of the public or of students (who pay the bills) for the thousands of faculty
87
members at some two hundred law schools to devote most of their time to
writing articles that usually duplicate the efforts of others. Reducing the
administrative responsibilities of faculty will also free up time for teaching.
A role for faculty in institutional governance is important, but in most law
schools endless committee meetings and mundane administrative tasks can
become overwhelming despite the rapid increase in administrative staff.
Eliminate tenure and take advantage of a highly competitive market
for law professors. Tenure once served as a bulwark of academic freedom,
but todays speech codes and mandatory trigger warnings make a mockery of
that once-grand idea. Tenure has become little more than a form of job security in a world where most people manage without a guarantee of lifetime
employment. Todays law professors earn a comfortable living. Some even
become wealthy by double-dipping through lucrative consulting assignments
that also take away from time for teaching. While there are thousands of
practicing lawyers and judicial clerks standing in line for law teaching jobs,
tenure ensures that available teaching positions at any given time are relatively few. A more competitive market for law teachers would reduce costs
while improving teaching quality.
Reduce law school from three to two years. Although the law has
become ever more complex over the past many decades, the basic intellectual skills required of practicing lawyers have changed little. Two years in a
well-conceived curriculum are ample to provide those skills. It would be a
fools errand to try to teach law students the broad substance of our burgeoning and always-changing laws no matter how long they stay in law school.
Law schools also have taken on many tasks, like instruction in basic writing
skills, that should be and can be more effectively acquired before law school.
It is long past time to acknowledge that the biggest obstacle to making law
school significantly less costly by reducing it to two years is that law schools
are addicted to the tuition revenue generated by the mandatory third year or
its equivalent. In fact most third-year students are biding their time, at great
expense, until they are allowed to take the bar exam and get on with their
careers.
Stop the facilities arms race. New programs and larger faculties have
required law schools to expand office space, and the past two decades have
witnessed a surge in the construction of ever more palatial law school buildings. Many have been financed by debt, placing an added burden, along with
new maintenance costs, on operating budgets. With declining enrollments
and smaller faculties, law schools will require smaller, not grander, facilities
in the coming years.
88
Take greater advantage of online instruction. There is little doubt that

some of what lawyers need to know is best taught by professors in a classroom. But there is much that can be learned, as well or better, through online
instruction. Why should we have hundreds of professors, ranging from excellent to terrible, teaching the rules of evidence or the internal revenue code
or administrative procedures to fifty or a hundred students when a handful
of truly outstanding teachers could be available to every law student in the
country? Most law professors will object that they are teaching students far
more than the substance of the lawthey are teaching them to solve problems and think like lawyers. But those skills do not need to be taught in every
course, and in reality most law students top concern is learning the substance so they can pass a bar exam. The Socratic method can be stimulating
and mind-opening, but few professors do it well. And even if every professor
were a master of Socratic dialogue, repeating it in every course leads to
steeply diminishing returns.
WHATS STANDING IN THE WAY?
Those are just a few obvious changes that might contribute to a new business
model for legal education. Once legal educators accept the need for drastic
change, other and probably better ideas will surface. But law schools still
need to be freed from the
heavy-handed, one-sizeMost law school graduates will
fits-all ABA accreditation
spend most of their careers paying
standards. Although the
off their legal education. Many will
ABA has just completed a
never do so.
comprehensive review of
the standards and made
some changes intended to give law schools greater flexibility in meeting
them, there remains little room for true innovation.
For example, the most substantive change is to mandate that all law
schools require students to take at least six credits in experiential courses,
which will increase the costs of compliance, given the low student-faculty
ratio such courses normally require. The new standards also allow for more
distance education, but with tight restrictions that protect the central role
of in-house faculty. The ABA would better serve the public and the profession
if it turned its attention to ensuring that law schools are transparent about
what they offer and how their graduates fare in the market for lawyers.
Law schools should be allowed to innovate, specialize, experiment, and
appeal to prospective students on the basis of the unique education they
89
offer, not on their rank among a sea of law schools doing basically the same
thing. Only then will new business models emerge and be tested against the
twenty-first-century market for legal services.
Because the ABA accreditation
process serves the vested interLaw schools should be allowed
ests of law professors and of law
to innovate, specialize, and
schools in relation to their parent
institutions, reform is unlikely
experiment.
without pressure from others with
an interest in the future of legal education. Fortunately those others exist,
and they can force change. Each state, usually acting through its high court,
determines who is qualified to practice law within its borders. To the extent
that states require candidates for the bar to hold a degree from an ABAaccredited law school, they have been complicit in sustaining the cartel that
is American legal education.
The key to finding new business models for legal education may ultimately
rest with the high courts of the fifty states. If their bar-admission standards
focus more on the qualifications in individual applicants and less on where
applicants acquired those qualifications, legal educators would be freed to succeed or fail on the quality of the education they offer. The legal profession and
the public would be better for it. Legal education would become sustainable
and better adapted to twenty-first-century needs, and law students could begin
their careers with little or no debt.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is

Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, SelfGovernment, and Political Moderation, by Peter
Berkowitz. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
90
CA LI F OR N I A
A (Dry) Winters
Tale
In parched California, the well of political foresight
ran dry years ago.
By Victor Davis Hanson
ast December, the first large storms in three years drenched California, offering hope that plentiful rain and snow would bring the
states record drought, both natural and man-made, to an end. But
that hope was in vain. Now, amid a fourth year of drought, canal
water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park still keeps
Silicon Valley and the rest of the Bay Area a verdant oasis. This parched
coastal mountain range would have been depopulated long ago without the
infrastructure that an earlier, wiser generation built and that latter-day regulators and environmentalists so casually deprecated. For now, gardens and
lawns remain green in Palo Alto, San Mateo, Cupertino, and San Francisco,
where residents reap the benefits of past investments in huge water transfers from inland mountains to the coast. They will be the last to go dry.
In the 1970s, coastal elites squelched Californias near-century-long commitment to building dams, reservoirs, and canals, even as the Golden States
population ballooned. Court-ordered drainage of man-made lakes, meant to
restore fish to the 1,100-square-mile SacramentoSan Joaquin River Delta,
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and the chair of Hoovers Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict.
91
92
partly caused central Californias reservoir water to dry up. Not content
with preventing construction of new water infrastructure, environmentalists reverse-engineered existing projects to divert precious water away from
agriculture, privileging the needs of fish over the needs of people. Then they
alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies, had caused the
current crisis.
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley during the 1950s. In those days, some
old-timers remembered with fondness when the undammed Kings Rivers
wild, white water would gush down into the sparsely populated valley. But
most Californians never had such nostalgia. Past generations accepted that
California was a growing state (with some twenty million people by 1970),
that agriculture was its premier industry, and that the state fed not just its
own people but millions across America and overseas. All of that required
redistribution of waterand thus dams, reservoirs, and irrigation
canals.
For fifty years, the state transferred surface
water from Northern California to the Central Valley through the California State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Given these
vast and ambitious initiatives,

H O O V E R D IG E S T S U M M ER 2015
93
Californians didnt worry much about the occasional one- or two-year

drought or the steady growth in population. The postwar, can-do mentality
resulted in a brilliantly engineered water system, far ahead of its time, that
brought canal water daily from the 30 percent of the state where rain and
snow were plentifulmostly north of Sacramento as well as from the Sierra
Nevadato the lower, western, and warmer 70 percent of the state, where
people preferred to work, farm, and live.
Everyone seemed to benefit. Floods in Northern California became a thing
of the past. The more than forty major mountain reservoirs generated clean
hydroelectric power. New lakes offered recreation for millions living in a
once-arid state. Gravity-fed snowmelt was channeled into irrigation canals,
opening millions of new acres to farming and ending reliance on pumping the aquifer. To most Californians, the irrigated, fertile Central Valley
seemed a natural occurrence, not an environmental anomaly made possible
only through the foresight of a now-forgotten generation of engineers and
hydrologists.
Just as Californias freeways were designed to grow to meet increased
traffic, the states vast water projects were engineered to expand with the
population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to
the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and
early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental movement would one day go to
court to stop most new dam
Environmentalists reverse-engiconstruction, including the
14,000-acre Sites Reserneered projects to divert precious
voir on the Sacramento
water away from farms, privileging
River near Maxwell; the Los
fish over people.
Banos Grandes facility, along
a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic
Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the
resulting Ah Pah reservoir would have been the states largest man-made
reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored fifteen
million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for thirty years.
Californias water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today
had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water
from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently
moved to freeze Californias water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.
94
All the while, the green activists remained blissfully unconcerned about
the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico that
would help double the states population in just four decades, to forty million.
Had population growth remained static, perhaps California could have lived
with partially finished water projects. The state might also have been able to
restore the flow of scenic rivers from the mountains to the sea, maintained a
robust agribusiness sector, and even survived a
One never-built reservoir might have
four- or five-year drought.
stored fifteen million acre-feet of
But if California continues
to block new construction
water, enough to supply San Franof the State Water Project
cisco for thirty years.
as well as additions to local
and federal water-storage infrastructure, officials must halve Californias
population, or shut down the five million acres of irrigated crops on the
Central Valleys west side, or cut back municipal water usage in a way never
before done in the United States.
WATER WISE? NOT US
When the drought began in autumn 2011, the average Californian barely
noticed. Mountain reservoirs remained full throughout 2011 and much of
2012, thanks to ample rainfall in previous years. Though rain and snowfall
plunged to as much as 40 percent below average in most inland counties,
shortages affected only large agribusiness conglomerates on the west side of
the San Joaquin Valleya small group of corporate grandees with plenty of
land and little public sympathy.
During that first year of drought, quarrels over water were mostly
confined to farmers and environmentalists. Confident that stored surface
water in mountain reservoirs would remain plentiful, the greens insisted
that the state continue to divert reservoir water away from agricultural
usageat roughly the same rate as during pre-drought yearsin order
to replenish rivers. In practical terms, however, the diversions meant that
substantial amounts of stored snowmelt were released from mountain
dams and allowed to flow freely to the Pacific Ocean. Farmers called that
wasted water; environmentalists called it a return to a natural, preindustrial California. The green dream was not simply river restoration
and beautification, however. Bay Area environmentalists also believed
that vastly increased freshwater inflows would help oxygenate the Delta,
thereby enabling the survival of the Delta smelt, a three-inch baitfish, while
95
ensuring that salmon could be reintroduced into the San Joaquin River
watershed.
Farmers mostly lost these early diversion battles. After all, the states
reservoirs stood at or near capacity, previous wet years had recharged valley
aquifers, and conventional wisdom held that the drought would probably
end soon, anyway. Nevertheless, hand-painted protest signs began sprouting
along Interstate 5, amid a few abandoned almond orchards, proclaiming a
new dust bowl and condemning liberal Bay Area officials, such as Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Barbara Boxer, for supporting the river
diversions. In Fresno County, the Consolidated Irrigation District and others
stopped almost all surface deliveries to their
agricultural water users from the Pine
Flat Dam on the Kings River reservoir. The water masters of the
Kings River had enough stored
water at Pine Flat to keep the
reservoir at mostly normal
96
levels. By cutting off deliveries to farmers, authorities had the luxury of

releasing water to refurbish the lower Kings River for habitat restoration.
I experienced the effects of these policies firsthand. My property contains a 130-year-old abandoned well that my great-great-grandparents dug
by hand and lined with tin pipe. Throughout 2012, the water table in my
front yard remained about forty feet below the surface, and all through the
drought, the well proved a reliable barometer of changing groundwater levels. No one likes paying irrigation taxes for surface water not delivered, but
local farmers shrugged, turned on their standby pumps, and drew from the
shallow aquifer. We got by during the droughts first year with only moderately elevated electricity bills.
Fifty miles to the west, however, farmers and agribusinesses on the Central
Valleys west side resorted to drilling deeper, sometimes in excess of fifteen
hundred feet. Pumping brackish water from great depths is an unsustainable
way to irrigate millions of acres of valuable croplands. The entire five-million-acre westside agricultural project that arose from desert scrub didnt
exist before the early 1960sprecisely because the region had neither an
aquifer nor a water project to deliver surface irrigation water from northern
and eastern California.
As the drought continued, the political debate heated up. Farmers reminded Bay Area greens that they had no proof that the Delta smelt was suffering
from a lack of fresh river water. Equally likely culprits for the fishs plight
were the more than thirty Bay Area and Stockton-area municipalities that
dump oxygen-depleted wastewater into the baitfishs habitat. The farmers
noted the irony of using artificial reservoirs to ensure supposedly natural
year-round river flows for salmon and smelt. Before the construction of Californias modern dams, Sierra snowmelts didnt necessarily ensure continually rushing rivers. Nineteenth-century spring floods into the valley usually
were followed by a depleted late-summer Sierra snowpack and dry August
river trickles. How odd, farmers thought, that environmentalists opposed
new dams and reservoirs as unnatural, and yet counted on existing reservoir
water to maintain a dependable habitat for newly introduced salmon. Before
the dams, nature simply didnt operate that way.
In the winter of 2012, the drought entered its second year, but record-high
agricultural commodity prices tempered the farmers acrimony. Newly affluent customers in China and Indiain addition to wealthy Japanese, Taiwanese, and South Korean consumersfueled demand for premium California
dairy products, wine, nuts and dried fruits, fresh fruits and vegetables, beef,
and cotton. Raisin prices jumped from $900 per ton to more than $1,900
97
per ton. Some almond growers became millionaires overnight. When the
per-pound price of nuts tripled, and new varieties of trees and new farming
practices bolstered production to well over three thousand pounds per acre,
a once-inefficient family farmer with forty acres could suddenly net $5,000
an acre. Given that harvesting almonds is mostly mechanized and requires
little if any manual labor, growers embarked on planting sprees up and down
the drought-stricken valley. If forty acres could net $200,000, large conglomerates of five thousand acres or more might see profits of $25 million annually. Pistachios and walnuts proved even more lucrative. For the first time in
a quarter-century, Central Valley farmers saw the kind of prosperity associated with Silicon Valley and Napa Valley.
By 2013, however, with snowfall scant, some Northern California reservoirs
had fallen far below normal levels. Farms on the Central Valleys eastern
sidethe ones with prior privileged access to local irrigation districts and
shallow water tablesfaced a second year without surface-water deliveries.
After twelve months of steady pumping, their water tables werent so shallow
any more. My old well dipped from around forty to sixty feet as the water
table began dropping more than a foot per month. In past years, I could
count on access to canal water to replenish the water table. Now, for the
first time in the 140-year history of our farm, nature and man had cut off the
water. The well went dry.
Meanwhile, on the west side, state and local officials warned farmers that
they might receive far less than even the 10 percent of contracted surfacewater delivery they had been promised. Nevertheless, environmentalists prevailed upon the courts to extend orders diverting freshwater reserves from
irrigation canals to rivers and the ocean. The public remained indifferent: the
state had survived two years of drought before, and cities still got their water
allotments from shrinking northern and mountain reservoirs. In 2012 and
2013, man-made reservoirs in San Francisco and Los Angeles brimmed while
the northern and mountain lakes that supplied them were just two-thirds
full. Facing no threat of rationing, coastal Californians didnt worry if a few
hundred thousand acres of lucrative orchards simply shriveled up.
THE ONCE AN D FUTURE DROUGHT
As 2013 wore on, climatologists, trying to project how long the drought
might persist, warned state officials that their records only ran as far back
as the late 1860s. Scientists can say little with certainty about the eons of
natural history preceding the arrival of Spanish, Mexican, and American
explorers. Tree-ring evidence suggests that past droughts had lasted fifty
98
or even a hundred years. Historically, drought may be the norm rather

than the exception in California. This might explain why such a naturally
rich state could support only a small population of indigenous people. Is
coastal and central California, in its natural state, a mostly unsustainable
desert for large, settled agrarian populations? Maybe modern Californians
dont fully appreciate the genius of their forefathers, who were prescient
enough to see that, if huge quantities of water werent transferred from the
wet northlands, the Sierra, and the Colorado River, then the cities of San
Francisco and Los Angeles would be little more than arid coastal villages,
analogous to lightly populated and perennially water-short Cayucos or
Cambria, along Highway 1.
Californians heaved a sigh of relief after a few days of heavy rain in November 2013, and some early snowfalls seemed to suggest that the drought would
end in 2014. But the relief was premature; the dry spells returned. What
rain and snow followed was too little and far too late. Even the snowpack in
the American River watersheda northern river
As the drought deepened, some
system usually drawing on
farmers tried to find just enough
the greatest snowmelts
water to allow a final harvest at
reached just 12 percent of
its average. Soon, the huge
record prices, before the exhausted
man-made reservoirs in
trees were pulled out.
both the ordinarily wet
north and the arid center of the stateFolsom, Millerton, New Melones,
Oroville, Pine Flat, San Luis, Shasta, Trinitydipped below half-full levels
and, in some cases, plunged below 10 percent of capacity. By July 2014, the
average storage level of reservoirs statewide was 13 percent. Across the state,
surface-irrigation deliveries to farms and orchards fell to near zero.
Farmers engaged in another vigorous round of groundwater pumping in
summer 2014. Water tables predictably plunged even further. Disaster struck
the west side, as large agribusiness concerns drilled new wells to unheard-of
depths of 2,000 feet and more, installing massive three-hundred-horsepower
electric pumps to bring up just enough brackish water to trickle over their
thirsty crops. Panic ensued even on the east side, with its famous and onceshallow aquifer. Farmers complained about six-month-long waiting lists to
deepen their wells. Instead of the usual 150- or 200-foot wells, farmers drilled
to depths of 300 or 400 feet. Pump installations were similarly backlogged,
and pump sizes increased from the standard fifteen-horsepower models to
twenty- and fifty-horsepower machinesall this to ensure that a farmers
99
particular straw had the best chance of siphoning every last drop from an
emptying common glass.
Such every-man-for-himself drilling came with its own attendant human
foibles: bribing drillers to cut in front of the waiting list; violating decade-old
pump-sharing easements; stealthily tapping into neighbors pipeline systems;
or charging exorbitant rates to give dry farmers access to working wells.
Well-rig manufacturers had trouble keeping up with demand. Some entrepreneurs, eager to gouge desperate farmers, sought drilling machinery on the
East Coast and overseas. Meanwhile, farmers understood that, with the commodities boom, an investment in permanent trees and vines might represent
$15,000$20,000 per acre and annual profits of over $5,000 per year. By 2014,
keeping the orchard or vineyard alive, not just the current crop, became the
aim. On the west side, some orchard owners began bulldozing older or less
productive nut groves. Others tried to find just enough water to allow a final
August or September harvest at record prices, before the exhausted trees
were removed in the winter.
Californias huge urban reservoirs, however, remained full. Municipalities demanded that they receive all the final deliveries of state and federal
surface water from the mountainous north and east. The Hetch Hetchy
Reservoir in Yosemite still supplies almost 90 percent of the San Francisco
Bay Areas daily water supplies. In a strange paradox, that water bypasses
the San Joaquin River, into which environmentalists had diverted millions
of acre-feet of irrigation water for fish. Even in 2014, as the state baked
dry, environmentalists insisted on diverting what little mountain reservoir
water remained to river-restoration efforts. Yet no environmentalist group
has suggested that California tap Hetch Hetchy for habitat restoration in
the same manner in which it has expropriated the water of farmers.
By late 2014, Pyramid and Castaic Lakes in Southern Californiapart of
the vast reserves controlled by the Southern California Metropolitan Water
Districtremained well above 90 percent of their capacities. But their
sources in the distant north had almost no surface water left to give. The
cities had drained and banked virtually all the states existing reservoirs.
Indeed, so well banked are Southern Californias project reservoirs that they
have enough water to keep millions of customers well supplied through 2015,
even as Northern and Central California communities dry up.
In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought,
the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond
on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go
to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the
100
RIVERS IN THE DESERT: The Los Angeles Aqueduct runs through Jawbone
Canyon in the western Mojave Desert. The aqueduct, finished in 1913, was
part of the earlier generation of Californias water-engineering programs
planned to accommodate the needs of a growing population. [National Park Service / Jet Lowe]
bonds provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access
to groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more
than a century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers
ability to pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators
who helped draft the bill failed to grasp that farmers drilling and pumping
is driven not by greed or insensitivity to the environment but by a doubling
in the states population and a water infrastructure that has not kept pace.
A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to
increase vastly the reservoir surface water for agriculture so farmers would
101
have no need to turn on their pumps. But legislators and policy makers let
utopianism get in the way.
In the summer of 2014, my two agricultural pumps worked from June to
late August to keep forty acres of grapevines alive during hundred-degree
days. Electricity and pump maintenance are costly. So are the annual irrigation district taxes Ive paid the past three years for contractedthough
undeliveredsurface water from the system that my great-grandfather and
other pioneers built themselves with horse-drawn scrapers at the turn of
the twentieth century. Last winter I added my name to the waiting list to
lower the pump bowlsthe impellers deep in the well that force the water up
through the casing to the surfacein anticipation of another year of drought.
A DUST BOWL OF OUR OWN MAKING
Governor Brown had little choice but to issue in April his belated, statewide mandate to reduce water usage by 25 percent. How such restrictions
will affect Californians remains to be seen, given the Golden States wide
diversity in geography, climate, water supply, and demography. But we do
know that Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that
their opposition in the 1970s to the completion of state and federal water
projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now
home to forty million people.
Continuing drought means vast tracts of westside farmlands will turn to
dust. Californias nearly $30 billion agricultural export industryled by dairy,
almond, and grape productionis in grave peril. Its collapse would crush
the economic livelihood of the Central Valley, especially its Hispanic community. When the five-million-acre west side goes dry, hundreds of thousands
of people will lose their jobs in a part of the state where the average unemployment rate still hovers above 10 percent. Farmers will spend hundreds
of millions of dollars to further deepen their wells and save what water they
can. Everything they and their predecessors have known for a century will be
threatened with extinction.
Water use in California is being curtailed by those least affected, if
affected at all, by the consequences of their advocacy. But environmentalists, who for forty years worked to undermine the prudent expansion of the
states water infrastructure, have a rendezvous with those consequences
soon. No reservoir water is left for them to divertnone for the reintroduction of their salmon, none for the Delta smelt. Their one hope is to claim
possession of the water in the ground once theyve exhausted what was
102
above it. Redistribution, not expansion of supplies, is the liberal creed for
water, just as it is for wealth.
Now that no more reservoir water remains to divert, the exasperated left
is damning corporate agriculture (Big Ag) for wasting water on things
like hundreds of thousands of acres of almonds and non-wine grapes. But
corporate giants like Big Apple, Big Google, and Big Facebook assume
that their multimillion-person landscapes sit atop an aquifer. They dontat
least, not one large enough to service their growing populations. I have never
met a Bay Area environmentalist or Silicon Valley grandee who didnt drink
or shower with water imported from a far distant water project.
And as the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir drains, Bay Area man-made storage lakes will necessarily follow. Another year of drought will deplete even
Southern Californias municipal reserves sooner rather than later. When
Silicon Valley tech lords and academics cant take a shower and find themselves paving over their lawns and gardens or letting their pools stand empty,
perhaps they, too, will see the value of reservoir water for people rather than
for fish. The new dust bowl may see a different generation of Joads abandoning California for a wetterand more prosperousMidwest.
Could California still save itself? New reservoirs to store millions of acrefeet of snowmelt could be built relatively quickly for the price of the states
high-speed rail boondoggle. Latino votersthe states largest minority
might come around to the view that the liberal coastal elites obsession with
environmental regulations leads to higher electricity rates, gasoline prices,
and food costs, along with fewer jobs and economic opportunities. Barring
that, there may be only two things left for California farmers to do: pray for
wet weather to return, and, if it does, pray further that environmentalists do
not send the precious manna from heaven out to sea.
Reprinted by permission of City Journal (www.city-journal.com). 2015
The Manhattan Institute. All rights reserved.
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103
ED U CATI ON
Human Capital 101

Why does college enrollment boom when the
economy goes bust? Hoover fellow Caroline M.
Hoxby explains.
By Clifton B. Parker
hen the Great Recession struck in 2008, it made young

people think differently about American higher education,
says Hoover senior fellow and Stanford economist Caroline
M. Hoxby.
While job opportunities dipped during the recession, student interest in
college increased, according to Hoxby, the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics as well as a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for
Economic Policy Research. She recently co-edited a book, How the Financial
Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education, with Jeffrey R. Brown.
The Stanford News Service interviewed Hoxby about this issue.
Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: How did the Great Recession
affect student access to higher education and their families who pay for it?
Any good news?
Caroline M. Hoxby: The evidence shows that students were more likely
to enroll in college and were more likely to stay in college during the
Great Recession. This may seem surprising, but actually college-going has
increased in every recession since the 1960s. What happens is that the
Caroline M. Hoxby is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is the Scott
and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University and directs the
Economics of Education Program for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Clifton B. Parker covers the social sciences for the Stanford Report.
104
opportunity cost of going to collegethe job opportunities a person forgoes

while in collegedrops very dramatically during recessions. It is harder to
find a job, to keep a job, or to get a promotion. Thus, some people who would
not enroll do enroll. People who would drop out stay enrolled. And people
who would have taken some time off between undergraduate and graduate
school decide to go straight to graduate school.
In short, even though families may find it more painful to pay for college
during a recession because their incomes and home values are stagnant or
falling, they do pay for college. This is the sense in which higher education is
a countercyclical industry.
Just how painful was the cost of college attendance? The answer depends
both on the familys income and where the student enrolled. The federal Pell
Grants program rose by 32 percent between 2006 and 2009. As a result, lowincome students who qualify for the grant often paid less for college during
the recession. However, some public and for-profit colleges raised tuition by
about the same amount as the increase in the Pell Grant so that students
were no better off. Private nonprofit colleges tended not to do this.
Public universities offer little explicit financial aid to middle- and upperincome families. Instead their tuition is kept artificially low by state appropriations. Economists call this implicit form of financial aid the tuition subsidy.
During the recession, these tuition subsidies fell as states decided to spend
their money elsewhere. As a result, middle- and upper-income students faced
higher tuition at many state schools.
The schools were not spending any more money; they were just subsidizing tuition less. This was undoubtedly painful but, as already mentioned,
students were still more likely to go to college. Even in California, where
tuition subsidies fell a lot, provoking campus protests, the evidence suggests
that only a tiny share of students even downgraded their enrollment by, for
instance, choosing a cheaper CSU rather than a more expensive UC.
There is a good-news side to all of this. Our population ends up more educated as the result of a recession. If you think that people ought to be getting
more education anyway, this is an unexpected benefit. Also, since demand
for higher education goes up, not down, during recessions, institutions are
somewhat insulated from economic downturns. Because demand for education goes up, they can expand enrollment or raise tuition to make up for
losses elsewhere.
Parker: In what ways did universities respond differently to the financial
crisis?
105
Hoxby: Both public and private universities responded to the financial crisis
and recession by cutting back on the hiring of young, tenure-line faculty. Staff
payrolls, however, continued to grow. Also, despite claims to the contrary,
there is no evidence that universities significantly reduced the number of
faculty close to or over age sixty-five.
The top public research universities drove new bargains with their state
legislatures, obtaining more autonomy in return for accepting lower state
funding. They used this autonomy to raise tuition and enroll more out-ofstate studentswho pay more than in-state studentsin their most indemand programs.
Top private research universities obtained research funding windfalls from
the federal governments generous stimulus budgets. This allowed them to
reallocate some of the money they would otherwise have spent on research
to other purposes such as financial aid.
Parker: What lessons or takeaways are there for universities from the financial crisis?
Hoxby: During the crisis, university leaders talked a lot about creative
destruction: cutting ineffective programs, rationalizing the staff, rejuvenating the faculty by retiring expensive professors over age sixty-five, and
hiring inexpensive assistant professors. However, they did not actually do
any amount of this creative destruction. It is hard to do such things at any
time, but doing it during a crisis is easier than doing it when the economy is
buoyant.
Reprinted by permission of the Stanford Report. 2015 by the Board of
Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
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106
E DUCAT I ON
A Degree of
Difficulty
Not every job requires a college degree. Employers
are shrinking the labor pool unfairlyand
unwisely.
By Michael J. Petrilli
he pundit class is raising questions about whether Wisconsin

Governor Scott Walkers lack of a college degree would disqualify him from being Americas forty-fifth president. This is
what educators call a teachable moment, because the issue
goes much deeper than Walkers biography. Of course a college credential

shouldnt be a prerequisite for the presidency, but thats true for many other
jobs today that demand a degree even when its not really necessary. Thats a
big problem.
Many American leaders are obsessed with college as the path to economic
opportunity. President Obama, for instance, wants America to lead the world
in college graduates by 2020. Hes hardly alone. Philanthropists, scholars,
business leaders, and other members of the meritocratic elite have been
banging the college for all drumor at least college for almost allfor
the better part of a decade.
Yet despite their own blue-ribbon educations, these leaders are making a classic rookie blunder: they mistake correlation for causation. They
Michael J. Petrilli is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, executive editor
of Education Next, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
107
point to study after study showing that Americans with college degrees do
significantly better on a wide range of indicators: income, marriage, health,
happiness, you name it. But they assume that its something about college
itself that makes the difference, some alchemy at their alma mater that turns
gangly eighteen-year-olds into twentysomething masters of the universe.
College can be a great experience, and many individuals gain important
knowledge, skills, insights, and contacts there. Its also a prerequisite for
most graduate and professional schools. All of that can help to build the
human capital that enables people to get good-paying jobs and then excel at
them.
But much of the college advantage can be explained by selection bias: the
differences between those who tend to complete college and those who dont.
The dirty little secret of college is that it tends to bestow a credential on
those already most likely to succeed. To use another term from Statistics 101,
its confounding variables that explain why college grads do better: their
reading and math abilities,
their social skills, their
Millions of Americans dont have
wealth. If people with these
the opportunity to make their case
underlying advantages did
something with their time
to prospective employers, because
other than go to college
their lack of a degree locks them out.
like start a business or serve
in the militarythey would still outperform their peers over the long term.
Furthermore, research tells us how college students do on average against
their peers without degrees. But those averages can mask a lot of variation. As Andrew Kelly succinctly put it in a recent paper for the Thomas B.
Fordham Institute, on average always. He cites a study by the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York that found that the lowest-paid quartile of college
graduates earn little more than average high-school graduates do; thats
been so since the 1970s. Which helps to explain all of those college-educated
Starbucks baristas.
Back to Governor Walker. Our challenge as his prospective employer
isnt to determine whether presidents on average do better with a college
degree than without one. Its to consider Walkers particular case. Does he
have the knowledge and skills to do the job? Whats his track record in similar positions? We might conclude that his executive experience and legislative skills are quite solid but that his foreign-policy knowledge is a bit of a
question mark. Thats the case with various of the successful GOP governors
who are running for president. What matters isnt whether they finished
109
college thirty or forty years ago, but how theyve been performing in recent
years, what kinds of advisers they are associating with, and what that implies
for their potential success as president.
Unfortunately, millions of Americans dont have this same opportunity
to make their case to prospective employers, because their lack of a degree
locks them out of the recruitment process altogether. While there are indeed
some jobs that require the knowledge
and skills gained in college, surely
College tends to bestow a
receptionists and photographers
credential on those already
are not among them. Employers use
college degrees as a proxy for smarts,
most likely to succeed.
perseverance, and other valuable
skills. But this shortcut unwittingly excludes many talented people from their
prospective hiring pool. This is especially unfair since its people who come
from modest means (such as Walker) who are most likely to be disadvantaged by this type of credentialism. As Charles Murray has argued persuasively, a much better system would be one in which employers rely more
on direct evidence about what the job candidate knows, less on where it was
learned or how long it took.
Walker may or may not be the best candidate for president. But theres
little doubt that he should be in the candidate pool. The same goes for millions of his non-college-educated peers who want a shot at a good job. We
should give them a chance.
Reprinted by permission of National Review. 2015 National Review, Inc.
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110
DE M OC RACY
Trust Me, You Fool

That gibe about the stupidity of the American
voter is as old as Athens and as modern as a
federal technocrat.
By Bruce S. Thornton
ast year Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable

Care Act, had to explain to Congress several remarks he had made
about the stupidity of the American voter, as he put it in one
speech. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh frequently uses the
more diplomatic phrase low-information voter to explain why bad policies or

incompetent politicians succeed. And numerous polls of respondents knowledge of history and current events repeatedly imply the same conclusion: that
the American people are not informed or smart enough for democracy.
This bipartisan disdain for the masses has been a constant theme of political
philosophy for more than 2,500 years. From the beginnings of popular rule in
ancient Athens, critics of democracy have called into question the competence
of the average person to manage the state. Lacking the innate intelligence or
the acquired learning to dispassionately judge policy, the critics say, the masses
instead are driven by their passions or private short-term interests.
The earliest critic of democracy, an Athenian known as the Old Oligarch,
wrote that among the common people are the greatest ignorance, ill-discipline,
and depravity. Aristotle argued that the need to make a living prevents most
people from acquiring the education and developing the virtues necessary to run
the state. He said the best form of state will not admit them to citizenship. And
Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of
Hoovers Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict,
and a professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno.
111
Socrates famously sneered at the notion that any tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and poor, high and low could be consulted on an affair of state.
PROTECTING THE WORTHY
By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, this distrust of the
masses had long been a staple of political philosophy. Roger Sherman, a lawyer and future senator from Massachusetts, who opposed letting the people
directly elect members of the House of Representatives, typified the antidemocratic sentiment of many delegates. He argued that the people should
have as little to do as may be about the government, for they want information and are constantly liable to be misled.
Most of the delegates in Philadelphia were not quite as wary as Sherman of
giving the people too much direct power, but in the end they allowed them to
elect directly only the House of Representatives. Such sentiments were also
frequently heard in
the state convenJames Madison was among those opposed
tions that ratified
to elites that have debauched themselves
the Constitution,
into a persuasion that mankind are incawhere the antifedpable of governing themselves.
eralists charges
of a democracy
deficit in the Constitution were met with protestations that the document
was designed to protect, as John Dickinson of Delaware put it, the worthy
against the licentious, the men of position, education, and property against
the volatile, ignorant masses.
Unlike earlier antidemocrats, however, the framers of the Constitution did not
believe that a Platonic elite superior by birth, wealth, or learning could be trusted
with unlimited political power, since human frailty and depravity were universal,
and power was of an encroaching nature, as George Washington said, prone to
expansion and corruption. Hence the Constitution dispersed power among the
three branches of government, so that each could check and balance the other.
For as Alexander Hamilton said, Give all power to the many, they will oppress
the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many. Both therefore
ought to have power, that each may defend itself against the other.
A century later, for all its talk of expanding democracy, the Progressive
movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted a
form of rule by elites, dismissing the fear of concentrated power that motivated the founders. The Progressives argued that government by experts
was made necessary by industrial capitalism and new transportation and
112
communication technologies, and that the new sciences of psychology and

sociology were providing knowledge that could guide these technocrats in
creating social and economic progress.
Future Progressive president Woodrow Wilson in 1887 argued for this
expansion and centralization of federal power in order to form a cadre
of administrative elites who, armed with new scientific knowledge about
human behavior, could address the novel cares and responsibilities which
will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience, as he wrote in
his essay The Study of Administration. This administrative power, Wilson
went on, should be insulated from politics, just as other technical knowledge
like engineering or medicine was not accountable to the approval of voters.
Thus Wilson envisioned federal bureaucracies of skilled, economical administration comprising the hundred who are wise empowered to guide the
thousands who are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.
Like the antidemocrats going back to ancient Athens, Wilsons ideas
reflected contempt for the people who lack this specialized knowledge and
so cannot be trusted with the power to run their own lives. Todays progressives, as Jonathan Grubers remarks show, share the same distrust of the
masses and the preference for what French political philosopher Chantal
Delsol calls techno-politics, rule by technocrats.
Thus, on entering office in 2009, President Obama said that on issues
like stem-cell research or climate change, he aimed to develop a strategy
for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making and to
protect them from politics. We hear the same technocratic ideal in one of
Hillary Clintons favorite talking points, that public policy should be guided
by evidence-based decision making rather than by principle, fidelity to the
Constitution, or virtue.
The important question, however, is whether or not political decision
making requires technical knowledge more than the wisdom gleaned from
experience, mores, and morals.
RISE OF THE TECHNOCRACY
Today, this old problem of citizen ignorance and its political role has been
worsened by the expansion of the scale and scope of the federal government
and its agencies over the past seventy-five years. Indeed, the complexity of
the policies that federal agencies enforce and manage has made Wilsons
ideas about the necessity for government by technocratic elites a selffulfilling prophecy. In 1960, economist F. A. Hayek made this point about the
Social Security program, noting that the ordinary economist or sociologist
113
or lawyer is today nearly as ignorant [as the layman] of the details of that
complex and ever-changing system.
This makes the champions and managers of such programs the experts
whom citizens and Congress members must trust, and these unelected,
unaccountable experts
are almost by definition,
The modern problem of citizen ignopersons who are in favor of
rance argues for an important reform: the principles underlying
a return to the limited central govern- the policy, Hayek wrote in
ment enshrined in the Constitution.
The Constitution of Liberty.
This problem has obviously
been magnified by the exponential growth of federal agencies and programs
since 1960, the workings of which few people, including most members of
Congress, understand.
If we accept, as many do today, that governing is a matter of technical
knowledge, then the lack of knowledge among the masses is a problem, given
that politicians are accountable to the voters on Election Day. If, however,
politics is a question of principle and common sense, the wisdom of daily
life necessary for humans to get along and cooperate with one another, then
technical knowledge is not as important as those other qualities.
This is the argument made by an early champion of democracy, the philosopher Protagoras, a contemporary of Socrates. Protagoras defended democracy
by pointing out that Zeus gave all humans reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation. Political
communities could not even exist if virtues and justice and wisdom were not
the birthright of all people. As such, as James Madison wrote in 1792, mankind
are capable of governing themselves and of understanding the general interest
of the community, and so should not be subjected to elites, whether defined by
birth, wealth, or superior knowledge, which have debauched themselves into a
persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves.
A big government comprising numerous programs whose workings and
structure are obscure to most people has indeed made citizen ignorance a
problem. In his detailed analysis of polls taken during the 2012 presidential
election, political philosopher Ilya Somin writes in his book Democracy and
Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, Voters are ignorant
not just about specific policy issues but about the structure of government
and how it operates, as well as such basic aspects of the US political system
as who has the power to declare war, the respective functions of the three
branches of government, and who controls monetary policy.
114
Though many critics from both political parties complain about this ignorance among the citizenry, solutions generally involve wholesale, and unlikely,
transformations of social institutions, like reforming school curricula or correcting the ideological biases of the media.
As Somin points out, however, the modern problem of citizen ignorance
is in fact an argument for a much more important reform: a return to the
limited central government enshrined in the Constitution. State governments
should be the highest level of governmental policy except for those responsibilities constitutionally entrusted to the federal government such as foreign
policy, securing the national borders, and overseeing interstate commerce.
On all else, the principle of subsidiarity should applydecision making
should devolve to the lowest practical level, as close as possible to those who
will be affected by it. The closer to the daily lives and specific social and
economic conditions of the voters, the more likely they are to have the knowledge necessary for political deliberation and choice. In this way the cultural,
economic, and regional diversity of the country will be respected. And it will
be much easier for citizens to acquire the information necessary for deliberating and deciding on issues that impact their lives.
Shrinking the federal government may sound as utopian as transforming
our schools or restoring journalistic integrity. The difference, however, is that
the federal government and its entitlement programs need money, and our
$18 trillion debt, trillion-dollar deficits, and $130 trillion in unfunded liabilities are unsustainable. Sooner or later the time will come when a smaller
federal government will be imposed on us by necessity. Perhaps then we will
rediscover the wisdom that the smaller the government, the easier it is for us
to have enough knowledge to manage it.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Democracys

Dangers and Discontents: The Tyranny of the Majority
from the Greeks to Obama, by Bruce S. Thornton. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
115
D EMOCRACY
Still Springing
Forward
Despite terrorism in Tunisia, the birthplace of the
Arab Spring, the democracy movement in the Arab
world lives on. But its successes are fragile.
By Larry Diamond
he savage terrorist attack in Tunis in

March targeted the one country that
has delivered on the promise of the
Arab Spring by producing a realand
surprisingly liberaldemocracy. In every other

Arab country swept by mass pro-democracy
protests in 2011 and 2012, hopes have been cruelly
dashed. Egypt struggles under a military-dominated dictatorship. Syria is mired in a civil war, and
now Libya and more recently Yemen are sliding in
the same direction. Democratic protests in Bahrain
were brutally crushed by troops from Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf neighbors, and nowhere else did
Key points
Tunisia has held
free, fair elections
and achieved a
remarkable level of
political compromise.
Tunisia desperately needs economic growth to consolidate its gains and
quell radicalism.
The US and Europe can lend critical support.
protests reach a scale that seriously challenged

autocracy.
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a coordinator of
Hoovers Project on Democracy in Iran. He also is a senior fellow at the Freeman
Spogli Institute for International Studies and is the Peter E. Haas Faculty CoDirector of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University.
116
Did the Tunis attack signal that Tunisia will be the next (and final) Arab
Spring state to be swallowed by violence and repression?
No. The attack was shocking and will further damage the countrys ailing
tourism industry, which accounted for 7 percent of the entire economy before
the past few years of political turbulence. But Tunisia remains full of promise. Alone among the Arab Spring states, it has achieved a remarkable level
of political compromise among secular parties and the principal Islamist
party, Ennahda. This has been due in no small measure to the leadership of
Ennahda founder Rachid Ghannouchi, who has, at every crucial turn on the
sometimes troubled path from dictatorship, embraced flexibility and moderation and promoted the vision, as he put it in a March 20 statement celebrating the countrys fifty-ninth anniversary of independence, of a republic of
freedom, democracy, and social justice.
In marked contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Ennahda
agreed early last year to a remarkably secular constitution that firmly
embraces religious freedom and equality of women while rejecting language (common in many Arab constitutions) identifying Islam as a principal source of law. And when the country fell into political crisis and
deadlock in 2013 after the assassinations of two liberal leaders, Ennahda
agreed to surrender power to a politically neutral caretaker government
that steered the country through the successful 2014 elections. The result
has been the freest and fairest elections in the modern history of the Arab
world, and levels of freedom, openness, and pluralism that are unknown in
the rest of the Arab world.
DANGERS WITHIN
AND WITHOUT
The United States and the European
Tunisians I have spoken
Union made lavish promises after
to, from widely varying
Tunisias peaceful revolution. Most
political persuasions and
of the pledged aid never materialized.
religious orientations, overwhelmingly reject not just the terrorism of the March 18 attacks but all forms
of violence and intolerance. They are proud of their democratic achievements and determined not to let a small band of violent religious zealots
undermine them. From the most militant secularists to the devoted followers
of Ennahda, there is genuine revulsion with the violent jihadist ideology that
apparently propelled the attackers and broad concern that such terrorism
could endanger the unprecedented scope of freedom Tunisians have fought
so hard to achieve.
117
Unfortunately, however, Tunisia is in a dangerous neighborhood. Libyas

violence has radiated destabilizing effects throughout North Africa,
contributing to insurgency and a military coup in Mali, the flow of arms
to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and a general radicalization of alienated youth
in the region. Tunisian officials warn that they can never achieve true
security until the deepening chaos in neighboring Libya is addressed. Two
perpetrators of the March 18 shootings, who were killed by security forces
during the attack, reportedly trained in Libya. They came from a rough,
impoverished part of Tunisia, in the Atlas Mountains region near the
border with Algeria, which experienced Islamist radicalization and severe
polarization and repression during the 1990s. There is growing recognition
that Tunisiawhich has sent more foreign fighters to Syria than any other
Arab countrymust urgently address the economic and social marginalization of some of its youth and a section of its territory. This requires not
118
only more effective generation of meaningful education and jobs, but also
a counter-radicalization strategy that combats the allure of violent jihadist
groups and gives these alienated young Tunisians a feeling of hope, dignity,
and inclusion.
With its relatively high levels of education, its secular traditions, and its
constitutional progress since the fall of Zine el-Abidine Ben Alis dictatorship
in 2011, Tunisia has a real chance to consolidate democracy and become an
inspiration and point of diffusion for people throughout the Arab world looking for a better model of governance. But to do so, the country must revive
economic growth and address high levels of unemployment, now estimated
at 15 percent overall and a distressing 35 percent among youth. The challenge has become more formidable since the March terrorist assault, which
targeted the economically vital tourism sector.
Tunisia also has a lot of work to do to improve its public security, but
Tunisians I have spoken with are concerned that the needed enhancements
of policing and intelligence not come at the expense of civil liberties and due
process. International-assistance efforts must bear this in mind. The United
States and Europe can be particularly helpful now in helping to improve the
technology and training of Tunisian law enforcement while emphasizing
democratic norms of policing and community engagement.
WE STAND WITH YOU
In its quest to become a vibrant and durable democracy, Tunisia needs
and deserves help from the West. The United States and the European
Union made lavish promises after Tunisias peaceful revolution in 2011,
but most of the pledged aid never materialized. Recently, the Obama
administration has proposed a significant increase in both economic
and security assistance. But as Nazanin Ash and Allison Grossman have
recently pointed out,
about half the proposed
total of $130 million is
Sometimes small countries assume
military assistance. The
a strategic significance out of all proaid package needs to be
portion to their size.
tied to the adoption of
stalled economic and administrative reforms to improve flexibility in
the labor market, rein in corruption, and enhance government transparency. Such reforms could help unlock the real key to Tunisias economic
recovery: substantially increased foreign and domestic investment. The
United States should use this critical moment to appeal to the European
119
Union to increase its assistance to Tunisia as well. Tunisia also needs

and deserves closer economic integration with the United States and the
European Union through a free-trade agreement in exchange for farreaching reform.
The best way for the United States and its European allies to respond to
this latest atrocity is to say to the people and government of Tunisia, We
stand with you in this time
of tragedy, and we are ready
Alone among the Arab Spring states,
to demonstrate that in mateTunisia has achieved a remarkable
rial ways. In the wake of the
level of political compromise among terrorist attack, the country
needs nownot six months
secularists and Islamists.
or a year from nowan
immediate response to specific Tunisian security needs for equipment, intelligence, and special-forces training to combat the threat.
Sometimes in history, small countries assume a strategic significance out
of all proportion to their size. As the lone Arab country to move forward
from popular upheaval to democracy, Tunisia is now vital to the future of the
entire Arab world. The United States should bet very heavily, but smartly, on
its future.
Reprinted by permission of the Atlantic. 2015 Atlantic Monthly Group.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is In This Arab

Time: The Pursuit of Deliverance, by Fouad Ajami. To
120
WA R FA R E
The Drone Age

The drone revolution will pose new threatsbut
also better ways to counter them.
By Amy B. Zegart
magine an aircraft carrierin the sky, not on sea. From its bay, it
deploys swarms of armed drones that can fly, spy, and kill, all guided by
the touch of a computer keyboard thousands of miles away. This isnt a
scene from a science-fiction movie. Its part of a recent proposal from
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon skunk works
that brought us the Internet, videoconferencing, and GPS. Now DARPA is
soliciting ideas from companies on how to bring this technology to life.
Equally important are the questions about how drones will be used strategically. Drones do not only offer new ways to kill. They can prevent war.
The cumulative US and Soviet nuclear stockpile peaked at seventy thousand
weapons in 1986. None of them was fired, but all kept the peace by threatening mutually assured destruction.
Pentagon planners and defense intellectuals have spent decades analyzing
the functions of nuclear weapons, but they have never considered seriously
how drones could change the face of combat and coercion, whether by threat
or with deterrence. Meanwhile, more than twenty nations, including China,
are developing lethal drone technologies. In December, Iran said it was
deploying an aerial drone replicated from Boeings ScanEagle surveillance
Amy B. Zegart is a Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-chair
of Hoovers Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and a member of
the Hoover task forces focusing on national security and law, Arctic security, military history, and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the co-director of
the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
121
drone. But Irans version is fashioned to crash into designated targets, earning it the nickname suicide drone.
Drones are going to revolutionize how nations and nonstate actors
threaten the use of violence. First, they will make low-cost, high-credibility
threats possible. Military planners have long assumed that high-cost
actions risking blood, treasure, and national reputation make the most
credible threats. The classic example is US Cold War tripwire forces in
Germany. Risking two hundred thousand American lives signaled to the
Soviets and to NATO allies that any Soviet invasion would kill many Americans, inevitably drawing the United States and its nuclear forces into war.
Putting lives on the line proved that US leaders meant it when they said
the nuclear umbrella covered Europe.
Lethal drones, by comparison, are low-cost weapons. They are remotely
piloted (US drones in Afghanistan have been piloted from Nevada), so they
122
pose no risk of a pilot being shot down over enemy airspace. Each MQ-9
Reaper, one of the mainstays of the US arsenal, costs about $14 million.
By contrast, the Air Forces newest manned aircraft, the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter, is expected to cost between $148 million and $337 million per jet.
Boots on the ground arent cheap, either: according to the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the estimated all-in cost of a single
deployed service member in Afghanistan in 2014 was $2.1 million.
The political costs of using drones are much lower, too. President Obamas
lethal drone strikes in counterterrorism operations have been controversial. But
a December Rasmussen poll found that 71 percent of the public still favors using
them. Such low political risks could change the game. Effective threat messaging
used to mean taking actions that conveyed: You know I mean business because
Ive put so much on the line. A future effective threat could
be: You know I mean business because I can send
swarms of cheap, lethal, stealthy drones at you all
day long with no risk to me.
Convincing the enemy that you have the
domestic political support to do what you
threaten is more important than ever because
Americas wars since the twentieth century have
generally grown longer and more inconclusive.
US involvement in World War II lasted almost
four years, and in Korea a full three years. Yet
US combat in Vietnam and the second Iraq
war lasted nearly nine years, and the war in
Afghanistan has lasted thirteen. When warfare
123
was nasty, brutish, and short, credible threats entailed convincing the enemy
to do this, or Ill start shooting. Today, the true test of political resolve is not
initiating combat but sustaining it. Adversaries used to be sure that over time,
pressure would mount in the United States to bring troops home. The drones
of future combat wont have families or come back in coffins.
The current generation of drones also has capabilities we could not have
imagined twenty years ago. Artificial intelligence and autonomous aerial
refueling could remove human limitations even more, enabling drones to keep
other drones flying and keep the pressure on for as long as victory takes.
Finally, lethal drones may make possible a new form of high-tech coercion: targeted hurting. Targeted terrorist-killing operations are designed
to take an enemy off the battlefield. Targeted hurting could be designed to
change any enemys behaviorby destroying selectively the family members,
friends, associates, villages, or capabilities that the enemy holds most dear.
Targeted hurting once was nearly impossible, because intelligence
demands of precision targeting were too great, the lapse between identifying and hitting a target was too long, and the penetration of enemy territory
required to succeed was too risky and difficult. It took 269 days to find Saddam Hussein in his spider hole even after US forces invaded Iraq, and even
though many of his countrymen wanted him caught. Now needle-in-haystack
precision operations are growing far more feasible by the day. Drones already
have the ability to hover over a target for up to fourteen hours without being
refueled, and to combine real-time imagery with real-time strike capabilities.
As robotic warfare technologies proliferate and evolve, the United States
is in a strategy race with other countries engaged in drone programs. If we
do not develop innovative ideas about how these weapons can be used for
coercion as well as combat, others will.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is A Memoir

of the Missile Age: One Mans Journey, by Vitaly
Leonidovich Katayev. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
124
E UR OPE
Five steps toward restoring economic sanity in the

eurozone.
By Michael J. Boskin
hough the Greek crisis has been placed on pause, the economic
situation in Europe remains bleak. Eurozone growth is up
slightly from its near-recession levels, but projections by the
International Monetary Fund for 2015 and 2016 barely exceed
1 percent. Unemployment remains above 11 percenttwice that among the

young (and doubled again in countries like Greece and Spain).
Greeces exit from the eurozone would likely be less disruptive now than it
would have been a few years ago. The countries most at risk of contagion
Portugal, Spain, and Italyare less vulnerable now in the eyes of the markets; the European Union has established a bailout fund; and the European
Central Bank has launched a large bond-buying program.
The real challenge in Europe is continued stagnation and rising public-sector fiscal pressures in bloated welfare states with rapidly aging populations.
Restoring growth, opportunity, prosperity, and financial stability will require
bold solutions to five interrelated problems:
The fiscal problem. The math is simple. The tax rate necessary to
fund social spending must equal the ratio of the number of people receiving
Michael J. Boskin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of Hoovers
Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy and Working Group on Economic
Policy, and the T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
125
benefits to the number of taxpayers (the dependency ratio), multiplied by the

average benefit relative to the income being taxed (the replacement rate). It was
this math that led Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank,
to declare, The European social model has already gone. Too many Europeans
are collecting too many benefits, but so far governments have mostly ducked the
issue, taking on massive debt to postpone the reckoning. Reform that targets
social spending at true need is long overdue.
The economic problem. Growth in Europe has fallen far short of that in the
United States, decade after decade. Though economic theory predicts convergence
in standards of living, Europe lags behind the United States by 30 percent or more.
High taxes and burdensome regulations stifle the labor market and potential new
businesses. Overgenerous social-welfare payments create disincentives to work,
hire, invest, and grow. Chronic sluggish growth is insufficient to create opportunities for the continents masses of unemployed and underemployed young people.
The banking crisis. In Europe, banks supply roughly 70 percent of the
credit to European economies, compared to 30 percent in the United States.
But many European banks are overleveraged zombies, kept alive by emergency
public infusions of liquidity.
The currency crisis. The euros many benefitscross-border pricing
transparency, lower transaction costs, and inflation credibilityrequired surrendering independent monetary policies and flexible exchange rates. But given
limited interregional transfers and labor mobility, this means that the continent
has far less ability to absorb disparate shocks through the operation of socalled automatic stabilizers. In the United States, by contrast, people in highunemployment Michigan move to, say, Texas, where jobs are plentiful, even as
the federal tax and transfer system automatically shifts money in the opposite
direction, cushioning the local downturn.
A severe governance deficit. Citizens are becoming increasingly disenchanted with European elites and supranational institutions such as the European Commission, which impose rules and regulations that conflict with their
countries economic interests and sovereignty. Voters are restless, as the Greek
election result demonstrated. Nationalist sentiment is rising, and demagogic
parties of the far right and left are gaining in every poll.
Addressing these problems will be difficult, but not impossible. The core
challenge is fiscal; Europe cannot escape the need to scale back its sclerotic
welfare states. By recognizing that, and implementing the following series
of mutually reinforcing policies, the continent can move beyond its current
torpor.
126
Gradual fiscal consolidationreducing the projected future size of government spending, and hence future tax rateswill have to be at the center of the
effort. This should be combined with the mutualization of some portion of the
liabilities of highly indebted countriesdefined as a debt-to-GDP ratio above,
say, 60 or 70 percentand modest write-downs in exchange for long-term
zero-coupon bonds. The Brady bonds that the United States used to help
resolve the Latin American debt crisis in the 1990s could serve as a model.
Meanwhile, Europes zombie banks will have to be rapidly resolved by acquisition or temporary takeover, cleanup, and asset sale, as was done by the Resolution Trust Corporation during the US savings and loan crisis in the 1980s.
Structural reforms that increase labor-market flexibility and reduce red tape
and related obstacles to new business formation must also be implemented.
Finally, the eurozone should adopt a two-track euro with a fluctuating
exchange ratean idea championed by the American economist Allan
Meltzer. Systematic rules would have to be developed to determine when
members of the eurozone are demoted to euro B or promoted to euro A.
Such a halfway housecall it depreciation without departurewould avoid
some (but not all) of the problems of a countrys complete withdrawal from
the eurozone. It would create its own set of incentives, which, on balance,
would pressure individual countries to avoid demotion, just as top-tier soccer
teams seek to avoid relegation to the minor leagues.
Together, these policies would reduce sovereign debt, lower interest rates,
ameliorate tax pressures, enable countries to increase competitiveness with
fewer sacrifices to living standards, and provide Europe with a road map to
prosperity. Until now, the European Unions leaders have followed the easiest
but least productive path, patching temporary, partial fixes on problems as
they erupt. The possibility of a brighter economic future should be a prize
large enough to evoke the same type of leadership through which Europe
rose from the ashes of World War II.
Reprinted by permission of Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.
org). 2015 Project Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is Ronald
Reagan: Decisions of Greatness, by Martin and
Annelise Anderson. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
127
R U SS I A
Autocrat for Life

Vladimir Putin, with his genius for tapping the
countrys pathologies, has come to embody Russia
itself.
By Stephen Kotkin
ow did twenty-first-century Russia end up, yet again, in personal rule? An advanced industrial country of 142 million people,
it has no enduring political parties that organize and respond
to voter preferences. The military is sprawling yet tame; the
immense secret police are effectively in one mans pocket. The hydrocarbon
sector is a personal bank, and indeed much of the economy is increasingly
treated as an individual fiefdom. Mass media move more or less in lockstep
with the commands of the presidential administration. Competing interest
groups abound, but there is no rival center of power.
Last October, a top aide to Russias president told the annual forum of the
Valdai Discussion Club, which brings together Russian and foreign experts,
that Russians understand if there is no Putin, there is no Russia. The pundit
Stanislav Belkovsky then observed that the search for Russias national idea,
which began after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is finally over. Now, it is
evident that Russias national idea is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Russia is classified as a high-income economy by the World Bank (having a per capita GDP exceeding $14,000). Its unemployment remains low
Stephen Kotkin is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the John P.
Birkelund 52 Professor in History and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and History Department of Princeton University. He is the author of
Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 18781928 (Penguin Press, 2015), which
was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in biography or autobiography.
128
(around 5 percent); until recently, consumer spending had been expanding

at more than 5 percent annually; life expectancy has been rising; and Internet penetration exceeds that of some countries in the European Union. But
Russia is now beset by economic stagnation alongside high inflation, its labor
productivity remains dismally low, and its once-vaunted school system has
deteriorated alarmingly. And it is astonishingly corrupt. Not only the bullying central authorities in Moscow but regional state bodies, too, have been
systematically criminalizing revenue streams, while giant swaths of territory
lack basic public services and local vigilante groups proliferate. Across the
country, officials who have purchased their positions for hefty sums team up
with organized-crime syndicates and use friendly prosecutors and judges to
extort and expropriate rivals. President Vladimir Putins vaunted stability,
in short, has turned into spoliation.
But Putin has been in power for fifteen years, and there is no end in sight.
Stalin ruled for some three decades; Brezhnev for almost two. Putin, still
relatively young and healthy, looks set to top the latter and might even outdo
the former.
In some ways, observers are still trying to fathom how the revolt against
tsarist autocracy in 1917the widest mass revolution in history up to that
pointculminated in a regime unaccountable to itself, let alone to the masses. Now, after the mass mobilizations for democracy that accompanied and
followed the 1991 Soviet collapse, a new authoritarianism has taken shape. Of
course, Putins dictatorship differs substantially from the Soviet communist
version. Todays Russia has no single ideology and no disciplined ruling party,
and although it lacks the rule of law, it does allow private property and free
movement across borders. Still, the country is back in a familiar place: a oneman regime.
The methods Putin used to fix the corrupt, dysfunctional post-Soviet state
have produced yet another corrupt, dysfunctional state. Putin himself complains publicly that only about 20 percent of his decisions get implemented,
with the rest being ignored or circumvented unless he intervenes forcefully
with the interest groups and functionaries concerned. But he cannot intervene directly with every boss, governor, and official in the country on every
issue. Many underlings invoke Putins name and do what they want. Personal systems of rule convey immense power on the ruler in select strategic
areasthe secret police, control of cash flowbut they are ultimately ineffective and self-defeating.
Russia just might be able to get out of this trap, in part because of the
severity of the various crises currently besetting Putins regime. But
129
perversely, even that hopeful scenario would require yet another act of personal rule.
WELCOME TO THE FAMILY
Putin was born in Soviet Leningrad in 1952, the only surviving child of
parents who had lived through the Nazi siege of the city a decade earlier. He
grew up in a rough section of Peter the Greats showcase, took up martial
arts, graduated with a degree in law from Leningrad State University, and
begged his way into the KGB, eventually being posted to Dresden, East Germany, in 1985.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the KGB recalled him to Leningrad and assigned him to his alma mater, where his former law professor Anatoly Sobchak still taught
part time. Sobchak eventually
It is evident that Russias
became chair of the city council
and then mayor, and Putin served
national idea is Vladimir
as his top deputy, responsible
Vladimirovich Putin.
for difficult assignments, including feeding the citys large population during the years of post-Soviet
economic depression. He discovered that Leningrads self-styled democrats could get almost nothing done and that he could embezzle money
both to help address the citys challenges and to enrich himself and his
cronies. When Sobchak lost a bid for re-election in 1996, Putin found
himself unemployed at forty-three. But a year later, through connections
(notably Alexei Kudrin, another official in the Sobchak mayoralty who
had become deputy chief of staff to Russian President Boris Yeltsin),
Putin moved to Moscow and obtained a series of positions in the presidential administration, the successor to the old Soviet central-party
apparatus.
There are indications that Putin might have coveted the lucrative, powerful CEO job at Gazprom, Russias monopoly gas behemoth, but if so, it
eluded him. Then, in July 1998, lightning struck: Yeltsin appointed the former
lieutenant colonel above hundreds of higher-ranking secret police officers to
head the FSB, the successor to the KGBand the following year appointed
him first acting prime minister of the Russian Federation and then acting
president. So the simplest answer to the question of how Putin came to
power is that he was selected.
Yeltsins inner circle, known as the Familyin particular, Valentin Yumashev (the ghostwriter of Yeltsins autobiographies) and Yumashevs future
130
wife, Yeltsins daughter Tatyanapicked Putin over others who failed their
auditions. He had shown a basic competence in administration and had demonstrated loyalty (having arranged in 1997 for Sobchak, then under threat of
arrest, to escape to France without submitting to Russian passport control).
It was hoped that he would protect the Familys interests, and maybe those of
Russia as well. Putin secured victory in the March 2000 presidential election through control of the countrys main television station, Channel One
(thanks to Boris Berezovsky, a secondary member of the Family); ruthless
manipulation of the Chechen terrorist threat; and access to all the perks of
incumbency. Some fraud, too, cannot be excluded. In the reported results,
Putin received nearly forty million votes, 53 percent of those cast, a majority that enabled him to avoid a runoff. Second place (29 percent) went to the
Communist Party candidate-bogeyman. Nine other candidates split the rest
of the votes.
Interestingly, when Putin took office, he had little effective power. His chief
of staff, Alexander Voloshin, was a core member of the Family and would
remain in his commanding position for
The methods Putin used to fix the cortwo more years. Berrupt, dysfunctional post-Soviet state
ezovsky continued to
control Channel One,
have produced yet another corrupt, dysand the second-mostfunctional state.
important station,
privately owned NTV, belonged to the independent actor Vladimir Gusinsky.
The mammoth cash flow generated by the state gas monopoly had been
largely privatized into the hands of a cabal led by Rem Vyakhirev (a protg
of the former Soviet gas minister, later the Russian prime minister, Viktor
Chernomyrdin), and much of the oil industry had been formally privatized,
a lot of it into a huge new company, Yukos, controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russias then eighty-nine regions were in the hands of governors who
answered to no one. Chechnya had de facto independence. The Russian state
was floundering.
Bit by bit, however, using stealth and dirty tricks, Putin reasserted central
control over the levers of power within the countrythe TV stations, the gas
industry, the oil industry, the regions. It was a cunning feat of state rebuilding, aided by Putins healthy contrast to the infirm Yeltsin, hyped fears of a
Russian state dissolution, well-crafted appeals to patriotism, and the humbling of some oligarchs. Some fear of authority was necessary to tame the
utter lawlessness into which the country had sunk. Putin instilled that fear,
131
thanks to his own history and persona and some high-handed political theater, such as the arrest of Khodorkovsky, who was taken right off his private
jet. But Putins transformation into a dominant political figure required more
than a widely shared appreciation that he was saving the Russian state. It
also took a surprise economic boom.
BOOM TIMESAND NOT JUST FOR OIL
From 1999 through 2008, Russias economy grew at a brisk 7 percent
annually, thereby doubling its GDP in ruble terms. Real individual income
growth was even brisker, increasing by two and a half times. In dollar
terms, because of the rubles appreciation over time, the increase in
GDP was exceptionally vivid: from a nadir of around $196 billion in 1999
to around $2.1 trillion in 2013. A new, grateful Russian middle class was
born, some thirty million strong, able to travel and shop abroad easily.
More broadly, Russian society was transformed: cell-phone penetration
went from zero to 100 percent, unemployment dropped from 12.9 percent
to 6.3 percent, and the poverty rate fell from 29 percent to 13 percent.
Wages rose, pensions were doled out, and the immense national debt that
had been accumulated by previous leaders was paid off early. Foreign
investors reaped rich rewards, too, as Russias stock market skyrocketed,
increasing twentyfold.
Many analysts have attributed the Russian boom to luck, in the form
of plentiful fossil fuels. Yet although oil and gas have generally brought
in approximately 50 percent of the Russian states revenues, they have
accounted for no more than 30 percent of the economy at largea high
number, but significantly lower than Middle East petrostate proportions.
Even adding in all the knock-on effects around hydrocarbons, the most
sophisticated analyses of Russian economic growth credit oil and gas with
at most 40 to 50 percent of GDP during the boom. An immense amount of
other value was created during these years as well, and Putin was partly
responsible.
Tax cuts increased incentives to work and reduced incentives to hide
income. Simplification of business licensing and reduced inspections led
to a burst of entrepreneurialism. Financial reforms and sensible macroeconomic policy facilitated investment. And land became a marketable
commodity.
The impact of these pro-market reforms, which Putin supported
and signed, was magnified by favorable trade winds. Russia had undergone a searing debt default and currency devaluation in 1998, and most
132
MAN OF HISTORY: A portrait of the Russian leader adorns a wall decorated

with Russian Orthodox pictures. Vladimir Putins Russia has no single ideology and no disciplined ruling party, but it finds itself in a familiar place: a oneman regime. [Rex / Newscom]
commentators thought the country would be devastated. But in fact, the

devaluation unintentionally made Russian exports cheaper and thus more
competitive. At the same time, Chinas ongoing rise lifted global prices for
Russian products, from fertilizer and chemicals to metals and cement.
Insatiable Chinese demand brought Soviet legacy industries back from the
dead. Brand-new sectors surged as well, such as retail, food processing,
biotechnology, and software, driven by increased domestic demand and
global outsourcing. Many of the Soviet legacy industries, such as coal and
steel, underwent significant rationalization, as unprofitable mines or plants
were phased out. (Agriculture, however, was never really revived, let alone
rationalized, and Russia became dependent on food imports.)
Skeptics take note: oil prices during Putins first presidential term,
when growth was robust, averaged only around $35 a barrel; during
Putins second term, the average grew to around $65 a barrel. In recent
years, with oil prices consistently at or above $100 a barrel, Russias
economy has stagnated.
133
PRINCE OF THIEVES
Chinas rise, the rubles devaluation, and a pent-up wave of structural reforms
were critical to the Russian boom, but as the man in charge, Putin took the
lions share of the credit. His critics refuse to acknowledge his contribution, and some have improbably made him out to be a nonentity. In her 2012
biography, The Man Without a Face, for example, the Russian-American
journalist Masha Gessen offers the ultimate portrait of Putin as an accident.
A well-written, impassioned compendium of facts, hearsay, and psychologizing about Putins life and career, Gessens book makes Putin out to be a mere
thug and self-dealer, a murderer but ultimately a small man. Yet accidents
and nonentities do not stay in power this long.
Mr. Putin, by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, two Russia hands at the Brookings Institution, offers less drama but more balance. It characterizes Putin as
moving back and forth among six different personas: the Statist, the History
Man (celebrating tsarist Russian statesmen), the Survivalist, the Outsider
(not a Muscovite, not an apparatchik, not even a typical KGB officer), the
Free Marketeer (actually, crony capitalist), and the Case Officer (who wins
peoples confidence through manipulation, bribery, and blackmail). It is a
nicely rounded portrait. It is not, however, an intimate one.
In their best chapters, Hill and Gaddy delineate the self-defeating crosspurposes among the six Putin personas, along with Putins limitations when
it comes to public politics. They rebut the prevalent American narrative
about a tragic Putin betrayal of
a Yeltsin-era trajectory toward
democracy, bending over backThe simplest answer to the
ward to make understandable the
question of how Putin came to
alternative Russian narrative of a
power is that he was selected.
Putin-led rescue from a 1990s time
of troubles. But they do not advance their own explicit, systematic explanation for how it was possible, in such a vast country, to establish what they dub
a one-boy network political system.
Western sanctions levied against Russia over its actions in Ukraine have
targeted not economic sectors but individuals. Putins Kleptocracy, by Karen
Dawisha, shows why such an approach makes sense. It offers a comprehensive catalog of Putins cronies, most of whom got to know Putin early, during
his St. Petersburg years. Dawisha details how they all got filthy rich thanks
to the noncompetitive privatization of state assets, no-bid government
contracts, dubious loans, fake bankruptcies, phantom middleman firms, tax
refunds, patriotic megaprojects (such as the Olympics), and other favors.
134
She maintains that Putin, too, is a thief, and, calling attention to the $700,000
worth of watches publicly spotted on his wrist, she repeats guesstimates that
put his personal wealth at $40 billion.
Particularly striking is the fact that most of the book is devoted to the period before Putin first became president. Dawisha reminds us that the KGBs
role in private business began even before the Soviet collapse, and she argues
that these are the roots of Putins kleptocracychallenging the conventional
wisdom in which the 2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky and the confiscation of his
private oil giant, Yukos, marked a key turning point.
Like other scholars of Russia, I have spent a significant portion of my
career thinking and writing about how the post-communist states might
make a transition toward
democracy, she confesses,
but says that eventually she
Some fear of authority was necesgot wise, concluding that
sary to tame the utter lawlessness
Russia was not an inchoate
into which the country had sunk.
democratic system being
Putin instilled that fear.
pulled down by history,
accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor
Western advice. Rather, from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to
create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal with embedded
interests, plans, and capabilities, who used democracy for decoration rather
than direction. Putins nasty tendencies, in other words, cannot be blamed
on external factors, such as NATO expansion.
Dawisha never really clarifies, however, the extent to which sincerely
held beliefs bind the Putin kleptocrats (as they did, say, the old Brezhnev
clique, who also were said to be a bunch of cynics). She quotes Nikolay
Leonov, the former head of analysis for the KGB, as saying of Putin and
his KGB associates back in 2001, They are patriots and proponents of a
strong state grounded in centuries-old tradition. History recruited them
to carry out a special operation for the resurrection of our great power,
because there has to be balance in the world, and without a strong Russia
the geopolitical turbulence will begin. So is the enrichment an end in itself
or a means to an end?
PRINCE OF DISORDER
In Fragile Empire, the journalist Ben Judah sees Putins return to the
presidency for a third term as a severe blow to the regime. He delves into
what he calls Putins telepopulism, discussing the Kremlins spin doctors
135
and puppeteers, such as Vladislav Surkov, and how the George W. Bush
administrations aggressions and transgressions proved to be a gift to their
manipulations.
But the concept of the Putin regime as a videocracy dead ends: as
Judah himself demonstrates, the propaganda is not always so effective and
Putinism is more than mere show. It is a society. Judah details how Russian
state spending on security, law, and order went from $2.8 billion in 2000 to
$36.5 billion by 2010. More than 40 percent of the new middle class work for
the state, and therefore they are not independent people. The regimes social
base, in other words, is itself.
Judah also offers a vivid portrait of Moscow as an oppressive colonial
power in its own lands. He travels out to remote locales and finds the little
Putins, the feudal lords presiding over near-statelessness and
profound despair. Judah offers one
Insatiable Chinese demand
of the best accounts of how Putin
brought Soviet legacy indusbuilt his personal regime out of the
tries back from the dead.
mundane process of addressing the
pathologies of the Russian state he inherited. To clean things up, an undertaking for which Putin had wide support, he had to acquire ever more power.
All the while, a bogeyman served him wellnot a return to communism,
Yeltsins scarecrow, but the chaos of Yeltsinism. The power to control the
Russian nightmare of total collapse brought [Putin] to power and has kept
him in power, Judah summarizes.
But none of this unfolded automatically; the construction of such a regime
required certain skills and real work. Putin seized an opportunity provided
by historical contingencies, and he proved up to the task. He made himself
indispensable to all factions and interests, their guarantoror notin a
system in which uncertainty besets even the richest and most powerful. He
shamelessly monetized his political position, but he also turned out to be
dedicated to the cause of Russian statehood, in his own KGB way.
Certain kinds of leaders do seem to fit certain moments in a countrys history. Putin only looks like an accident. And it is precisely because he is not a
nonentity that he has been a calamity.
A LONELY AND INSECURE POWER
Remarkably, this pattern keeps repeating itself in Russia. About a decade
ago, Stefan Hedlund, an expert on Russia at Uppsala University, in Sweden,
wrote an impressive overview of twelve centuries of Eastern Slavic history
136
in an attempt to explain Putins authoritarianism. He pointed out that Russia

had essentially collapsed three timesin 161013, 191718, and 1991and that
each time, the country was revived fundamentally unchanged. Despite the
depth of the crises and the stated intentions of would-be transformative leaders, Russia re-emerged with an unaccountable government, repression, and
resistance to the imposition of the rule of law.
Hedlunds impressive tome was titled Russian Path Dependence, but rather
than complete determinism, he perceived choicesalbeit choices heavily
conditioned by culture. He noted that efforts at institutional change in Russia had always failed because they had not altered the countrys underlying
system of norms, which rested on a deeply ingrained preference for informal
rules. But Hedlund overemphasized the institutional continuities supposedly
at work from ancient Muscovy onward and underplayed the power of Russias relations with the outside world. Not just a preference for informal rules
but also Russias quest for great-power status, and especially its perennial
difficulties competing with stronger powers, has produced both the collapses
and the trying aftermaths, during which an imperative to revive national
greatness comes to the fore. Russia was and will remain a great power,
announced Putins original presidential manifesto, posted online in late 1999.
Putin resembles a villain out of central casting. He has repeatedly revealed
himself as cocksure, patronizing, aggrieved, vindictive, and quick with a
retort for Western critics. But he is hardly the first Russian leader to make
demonization of the West a
foundation of Russias core
In Russias remote locales one finds
identity and its governthe little Putins, the feudal lords prements claim to legitimacy.
siding over near-statelessness and
He has perfected the art
of moistening the eyes of
profound despair.
Russian elites assembled in
opulent czarist settings, plucking the strings of mystical pride in all things
Russian and of ressentiment at all things Western. They see reason where
critics see madness.
From the Kremlins perspective, as Washington engages in stupid, hypocritical, and destabilizing global behavior, Moscow shoulders the burden of
serving as a counterweight, thereby bringing sanity and balance to the international system. Russian lying, cheating, and hypocrisy thus serve a higher
purpose. Cybercrime is patriotism; rigging elections and demobilizing opposition are sacred duties. Putins macho posturing, additionally, is undergirded
by a view of Russia as a country of real men opposing a pampered, gutless,
137
and decadent West. Resentment toward US power resonates far beyond

Russia, and with his ramped-up social conservatism, Putin has expanded a
perennial sense of Russian exceptionalism to include an alternative social
model as well.
Paradoxically, however, all of this has only helped render Russia what
the analyst Lilia Shevtsova has aptly called a lonely power. Putins predatory politics at home and abroad, his cozying up to right-wing extremists in
Europe, and his attempted engagement of a powerful China hardly
Certain kinds of leaders seem
add up to an effective Russian grand
strategy. Russia has no actual allies
to fit certain moments in a
and has damaged its most important
countrys history. Putin only
relationship, that with Germany.
looks like an accident.
Winning domestic plaudits at Western powers expense is politically useful, but those countries, as always, continue to possess the advanced technology Russia needs, especially in energy
exploration and drilling.
Over the long term, realizing the ambitions Putin and his supporters have
articulated would require new and deeper structural reforms, a dramatic
cutback in bureaucracy and state procurement shenanigans, and the creation of an environment supportive of entrepreneurialism and investment.
Putin is choosing the path of least resistance in the short term, thus risking
possible long-term stagnation or worse. A revival of Russias latent Soviet-era
industrial capacity was a trick that could happen only once.
BREAKING THE UKRAINE STANDOFF
Given the Wests imposition of sanctions and dropping world oil prices, it
might be tempting to write Putin off. Authoritarian regimes often prove to
be at once all-powerful and strikingly brittle, and Judah, for one, sees Putins
rule as almost on its last legs. And yet, despite the Russian populations
seething anger over its predatory state and educated urbanites despondency
over the absence of a modernizing vision for the future, much of the elite
retains a strong sense of mission and resolve. Dawisha concludes that Putin
will not go gentle into the night, and she is probably correct.
Putins Russia possesses powerful resources as a potential international
spoiler, including the ability to apply economic pressure, buy off or co-opt
powerful foreign interests, engage in covert operations, wage cyberattacks,
and deploy a modernizing military force that is by far the strongest in the
region. Ironically, Russias greatest source of leverage might be the fact that
138
the West, especially Europe, needs its neighbors integration into the international order. Managing such integration would be a lot less difficult if Putin
were just a thief, la Dawisha, or a cynic, la Judah. But he is actually a composite, la Hill and Gaddya thief and a cynic with deeply held convictions
about the special qualities and mission of the Russian state, views that enjoy
wide resonance among the population.
So what happens now, especially given that the Russian leader has managed to trap himself in the latest and largest of his so-called frozen conflicts,
enraging the West and setting himself on a path toward isolation and creeping autarky?
Neither Putin nor his Western counterparts planned to get embroiled in
a prolonged standoff over Ukraine. Ukraine is a debilitated state, created
under Soviet auspices, hampered by a difficult Soviet inheritance, and hollowed out by its own predatory elites during two decades of misrule. But it is
also a nation that is too big and independent for Russia to swallow up. Russia,
meanwhile, is a damaged yet still formidable great power whose rulers cannot be intimidated into allowing Ukraine to enter the Western orbit. Hence
the standoff.
No external power or aid package can solve Ukraines problems or compensate for its inherent vulnerabilities vis--vis Russia. Nor would sending
lethal weaponry to Ukraines
brave but ragtag volunteer
Distasteful as it might sound,
fighters and corrupt state
structures improve the situWashington faces the prospect of
ation; in fact, weapons would
trying to work out some negotiated
worsen the situation by failing
territorial settlement over Ukraine.
to balance Russian predominance while giving Moscow a pretext to escalate the conflict even more.
The European Union cannot resolve this latest standoff, nor can the United
Nations. The United States will not go to war over Ukraine or start bombing
Russia, and the wherewithal and will for indefinite sanctions against Russia
are lacking. Distasteful as it might sound, Washington faces the prospect of
trying to work out some negotiated larger territorial settlement.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, Western opponents of a negotiated
settlement are really opting for another long-term, open-ended attempt to
contain Russia and hope for regime changea policy likely to last until the
end of Putins life and possibly well beyond. The costs of such an approach
are likely to be quite high, and other global issues will continue to demand
attention and resources. And all the while, Ukraine would effectively remain
139
crippled, Europes economy would suffer, and Russia would grow ever more
embittered and difficult to handle. All of that might occur no matter what.
But if negotiations hold out a chance of somehow averting such an outcome,
they are worth a try.
It is ultimately up to Russias leaders to take meaningful steps to integrate
their country into the existing world order, one they can vex but not fully
overturn. To the extent that the Ukraine debacle has brought this reality into
sharper focus, it might actually have been useful in helping Putin to see some
light, and the same goes for the collapse of oil prices and the accompanying devaluation of the ruble. After the nadir of 1998, smart policy choices in
Moscow, together with some lucky outside breaks, helped Russia transform
a crisis into a breakthrough, with real and impressive steps forward. That
history could replay itselfbut whether it will remains the prerogative of one
person alone.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs (www.foreignaffairs.com),
where a longer version of this essay first appeared. 2015 by the Council
on Foreign Relations Inc. All rights reserved.
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140
R USSI A
Putins Recipe for

Power
Large parts aggression and calculation, a helping
of insecurity, and many dollops of resentment.
By Victor Davis Hanson
ussian President Vladimir Putin said something in 2005

that is now commonly footnoted to explain his latest
aggressions:
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet

Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the
Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of
our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian
territory.
Putin was not necessarily lamenting the collapse of Soviet communism.

Even the former KGB officer realized that the system was largely selfimmolating. Rather, Putin was mourning the collapse of the vast Russian
empire. Specifically he missed the wealth, influence, and power that
accrued from the incorporation of the so-called former Soviet republics. In his mind, the implosion of all that had led to a geopolitical
catastrophe.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and the chair of Hoovers Working Group on the Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict.
141
More important, however, were Putins often-ignored following sentences,

especially his regret that tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots
found themselves outside Russian territory. Nearly a decade ago, this speech
tipped off the West of Putins upcoming agenda to make sure co-citizens
and co-patriots would not have to remain outside Russian territory.
Two impulsesa desire for past geopolitical power and status, and a wish
to refashion borders to include tens of millions of Russian-speakers in
Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, and the Baltic statesdrive Putin. He apparently
believes that twenty-first-century Russia could become an updated nineteenth-century czarist empire characSome in the West actually admire Putin for terized by oligarchy,
Orthodoxy, and the
a political incorrectness unapologetically
glories of Russian
felt and expressed.
language and culture. The Russian Union could become as powerful on the world stage as was
the Soviet Union, but without its internal weaknesses and unsustainability.
In that vein, Putin has so far been successful in adding territory to Russia
without prompting a war, in much the same eerie manner that Adolf Hitler
had cobbled together a new Third Reich by the late 1930s without warat
least before overstepping in 1939.
PUTIN HOLDS A STRONG HAND
Why has Putin gotten away with such blatant aggression?
One, the West feels exhausted by the 2008 financial meltdown, the crisis
in the European Union, the wars and their dismal follow-ups in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Libya, and the rise of the premodern Islamic State. In reaction to all
these past interventions and present challenges and with Western finances
still shaky, many Westerners would rather not become involved anywhere.
The fighting in Ukraine is our generations Czechoslovakia (a quarrel in
a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing, as Neville
Chamberlain said in 1938). And no one knows whether the Baltic states may
become our Polandtottering allies whom we do not wish to defend but in
theory must, if only halfheartedly through a Sitzkrieg, thanks to past treaty
obligations.
Second, Putin sits atop Russias nuclear arsenal. He understands that his
apparent instability and unpredictability prove valuable cards in nuclear
pokeras we have seen from occasional lunatic pronouncements from
both North Korea and Iran. Each time Russian jets buzz the coastlines of
142
Scandinavia or Britain or an obscure general smarts off about Western military weakness and Russian nuclear strength, Westerners are not quite sure
what Putin might do if challenged or checkedand therefore hope he will
just take only one or two more countries, and then satiated go away and leave
them alone.
Third, Europe for now still needs Russian gas and oil, or at least finds such
energy more easily accessible than imports from elsewhere. Europe enjoys a
huge and profitable export market in Russia. Less important, Germany, the
font of European power, either appears to show penance for its past aggression that led to twenty million Russian dead or is now so weak militarily that
it has no ability to deter Putin if it wanted to. In the case of Orthodox states
like Serbia, Greece, and Cyprus, Putins Russia is far more popular than is
the United States.
Fourth, some Westerners shrug that many of the recently annexed territories were Russian at various times, well before Josef Stalins aggressions. They point out that Putin has understandable emotional claims to
these lands that are linked with past bloody Russian sacrifice. Think of the
failed Russian defenses of Sevastopol in 185455 during the Crimean War or
General Erich von Mansteins bloody capture of the city in July 1942, when
Russia suffered over a hundred thousand casualties. We in the West think
of an autonomous, post-Soviet Ukraine; Putin instead recalls the 1941 first
battle of Kiev, when Russians suffered over seven hundred thousand casualties in failed efforts to save a Ukraine cut off by the sweeping pincers of the
Wehrmacht.
Almost all the foci of Putins recent annexations have long histories
of strife, in which Russia battled to defend these lands against foreign
attackers or itself sought to conquer
them. For Putin, these borderlands
are his irredentist updated verPutin apparently believes
sions of the Rhineland, Saarland,
that Russia could become an
Austria, Sudetenland, and Danzig
updated czarist empire.
where millions of German-speakers
were supposedly orphaned outside the Third Reich. For many Westerners, to the degree that they care about Putins aggrandizement, they have
conceded that Russia has a longer history and interest in all these regions
than they do.
Fifth, others in the West do not just locate Putins aggression in historical
contexts but rather are sympathetic to his grand talk about contemporary
Christianity, traditional Russian values, a decadent West rife with abortion,
143
homosexuality, multiculturalism, and opposition to radical Islam. He has

become a sort of paleocon: his reactionary views may be eccentric but are
admired for a political incorrectness unapologetically felt and expressed.
Finally, Putin thinks President Obama not only is weakafter the backing down on missile defense in Eastern Europe, the pink lines in Syria, the
serial deadlines with Iran, and the deer-in-the-headlights confusion about
the Islamic Statebut also pompous in his impotence. For Putin, Obama
combines speaking loudly while carrying a small stick. Obama has psychoanalyzed Putin as the proverbial adolescent cut-up in the back of the room
or the wannabe strutting about with his macho shtick. In reaction, Putin
seems to go out of his way to try to make Obama look weak and deliberately
embarrass him in the Middle East.
REAL DETERR ENCE
Can Putin be deterred, if, as is expected, he begins to bully the Baltic
states with his now-accustomed modus operandipersecuted Russian
minorities, unfair and gratuitous smears and slanders about a past noble
Russian contribution to those countries, and the need for plebiscites, federalism, and semiautonomy? For Putin, the fact that the Baltic states are
NATO members is an enticement, not a deterrent. He wagers that it is
more likely that NATO would fold than fight should he cross into Estonia.
And with such a backing down would come the dissolution of the alliance itself. Some Eastern European states are already concluding that a
proximate and aggressive Putin is a better bet than a distant and retiring
America.
The United States and its NATO allies should beef up collective air and
ground defenses in the Baltic states. They should keep sanctions against
Russia and reopen missile
defense talks with Poland
To Putin, the fact that the Baltic
and the Czech Republic, despite the apparent
states are NATO members is an
realpolitik tilt of much of
enticement, not a deterrent.
Eastern Europe toward
Russia. Instead of outsourcing traditional US leadership responsibilities
to Germany, the United States should craft precise NATO contingenciesdeciding which NATO ally will do whatthe moment Putin masses
forces on his borders.
Most of all, the president should stop psychoanalyzing Putin. We forget
the historical role of personal pique in geopolitics. Chamberlain was so fond
144
of explaining Hitler to othersand Hitler to Hitler himselfthat the fhrer

finally went out of his way to find a method of provoking Chamberlain and
the Western democracies with him. Of the solicitous, verbose, but apparently appeasing Chamberlain who gave Germany what it wanted at Munich,
Hitler scoffed, If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with
his umbrella, Ill kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach in front of the
photographers.
If an American president were seen by Putin as reticent, unpredictable,
and quite dangerous rather than garrulous, predictable, and acquiescent, the
Russian leader might pause, worryand back off.
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2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
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145
R U SS I A
Sanctions Arent
Working
Economic pressure is a slow, unpredictable weapon
at best. Sanctions not only have failed to deter Putin
but might prompt him to behave even worse.
By Mark Harrison
he Russian economy is subject to Western sanctions. There are

two kinds: smart sanctions that aim to limit the international
travel and transactions of named persons and corporations, and
broader sanctions that aim to limit the international trade and
borrowing of Russias financial, energy, and defense sectors.

In history, advocates of economic sanctions against an adversary have
usually claimed two advantages for them. One is speed of action: it has often
been predicted that economic sanctions will quickly starve out an adversary
(metaphorically or literally). The other claimed advantage is cost: by attacking
the adversarys economy we can achieve our goals without the heavy casualties
to our own side that would result from a military confrontation.
Are these claims justified by experience? Based on the experience of
modern warfare and economic sanctions from the Napoleonic Wars through
the US Civil War and the two world wars of the twentieth century to the Cold
War, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Cuba, the answer has typically been no.
Mark Harrison is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick, and a research fellow at Warwicks Centre
for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy and the University of Birminghams Centre for Russian and East European Studies.
146
The effects of sanctions on national power have generally been slower and
smaller than expected. First, they attack national power indirectly, through
the economy, and the economy provides a very complicated and uncertain
transmission mechanism. If a country is refused access to something for
which it appears to have a vital need, such as oil or food, it generally turns
out that there are plenty of alternatives and ways around; nothing is as
essential as it seems at first. Second, external measures will be met by countermeasures. In a country that is blockaded or sanctioned, soldiers will look
for ways to use military strength to break out and so offset economic weakness. Suffering hardship and feeling unfairly victimized, civilians will become
more willing to tighten their belts and fight on.
It would be wrong to go to the other extreme and conclude that sanctions
achieve nothing. What have sanctions actually achieved in historical experience? Sanctions do raise the cost of producing national power. They do so
gradually, so that immediate effects may not be perceptible. Nonetheless they
impose costs on the adversary, and eventually these costs will tell. It is hard
to show, however, that sanctions have ever had a decisive effect on their own;
at best, they have been shown to have their effect in combination with other
factors, such as military force. In those cases, sanctions were a complement
to military power, not a substitute or alternative.
The purpose of Western sanctions against Russia is clear: to change President Putins behavior, making him more cautious and more accommodating
to the demands of Western powers.
What is the mechanism that is supposed to bring this about? Western
observers generally see that Putins political base is built on the use of energy
profits to buy political support. Russias energy sector, much of it state-owned,
has provided major revenues to the Russian government budget. The Russian
government uses these revenues to buy support, partly by paying off key persons, partly by subsidizing employment in Russias inefficient, uncompetitive
domestic industries. As a result many people feel obligated to Putins regime
because without it they would lose their privilege or position in society.
In that context, sanctions have been designed to target those industries
and persons that supply resources to the government and those that depend
on the government for financial support. By doing so, they aim to deprive
Putin of the resources he needs to retain loyalty.
How have sanctions actually worked? In Russia, real output is falling and
inflation is rising. It is important to bear in mind, however, that in recent
months sanctions have been only one of three external sources of pressure
on the Russian economy.
147
THREE FORMS OF PRESSURE

Three factors have been at work: sanctions, confidence in the ruble, and energy
prices. These factors should be thought of as semi-independent: there are obvious connections among them, but in each case the agency is different.
Sanctions. Before the crisis over Crimea, Russian corporations had
approximately $650 billion of short-term, low-interest debt denominated in
foreign currency. International lenders have been reluctant to lend to Russia
long term because Russias lack of protection of property rights leaves them
uncertain about the security of their loans. Because this debt is short term,
it requires regular refinancing. Russian firms, including organizations and
sectors that have not been directly targeted by sanctions, are now unable to
borrow abroad. Struggling to cover their credit needs, they have turned to
the Russian government to make emergency loans or bail them out.
Confidence in the ruble. As lenders have lost confidence in Russia,
capital flight has increased. The ruble has lost half its external value in the
past year, and this has doubled the real burden of private foreign-currency
debts of Russian corporations and also wealthy families with housing debts in
euros or dollars. This has intensified private sector pressure on the government for bailouts.
Oil prices. The dollar price of oil has fallen, slashing Russias energy
revenues and plunging the state budget into deficit.
These three pressures point in the same direction and complement each
other. Their cumulative effect is to be seen in the deteriorating outlook for
the economy as a whole and for public finance. The government has lost
important revenues while spending pressures have multiplied. Arguably,
therefore, sanctions have worked, because they have squeezed the capacity
of the Russian administration to satisfy the expectations of its supporters.
A LEARNING OPPORTUNITY
From a social-science perspective, we should think of this moment as a learning opportunity: how the Russian administration responds in these circumstances should reveal its type.
To benchmark the Russian response today, consider how two Soviet leaders responded to closely similar situations in the past.
One benchmark is offered by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. By the mid-1980s
the global energy market had reached a situation not far removed from that
of today. A decade of high oil prices was being brought to an end by new,
non-OPEC suppliers. This put the Soviet economy under a severe squeeze.
149
Faced with this squeeze, Gorbachev chose policies of demilitarization and

relaxation abroad and at home.
Another benchmark is offered by Josef Stalin in 1930. If anything, the
predicament of the Soviet economy in 1930 was even closer to its situation
today. Soviet exports were faced with collapsing prices as the world economy
entered the Great Depression. The Soviet economy also had considerable
short-term debts that suddenly could not be rolled over because international lending dried up. In response, Stalin demanded the first five-year plan.
It involved accelerated mobilization and sacrifice, and ended in the famine
deaths of millions of his own citizens, many of them in Ukraine.
These two examples illustrate the alternative responses of a ruler under
external pressure. When it becomes harder to buy loyalty the ruler can
respond like Gorbachev, by moderating demands on supporters; or like Stalin, by cracking the whip over them. In 2015, faced with economic sanctions,
falling oil prices, and a falling ruble, which choice has Putin made? His words
and deeds both deserve attention.
Before sanctions, Putins words were of a Russia encircled by enemies and
penetrated by foreign agents. His policies involved accelerated rearmament
and frozen conflicts with Moldova and Georgia, capped by the annexation of
Crimea. How did things change after Western sanctions were imposed? Putins
rhetoric shifted up a notch with talk of national traitors and a fifth column of
enemies within. His economists began to discuss ways to shift from a market
economy to a mobilization economy. His foreign-policy spokesmen incited
tensions in the Baltic region and made nuclear threats against the West. The
Russian military embarked on continuous large-scale exercises and increased
the frequency of testing NATO defenses in the Baltic and the North Sea. Russian forces and heavy weapons were infiltrated into Eastern Ukraine.
The lesson for social science is that under external economic pressure
Putin has revealed his type: he is a power-building authoritarian ruler.
WHY ARENT THEY WORKING?
From a policy perspective, the effect of sanctions on the Russian economy is
only the tactical outcome of sanctions. Their strategic purpose is to change
Russias behavior for the better, and that is the only true test of whether they
have worked. The lesson for policy is that despite sanctions, Putin remains
prepared to take risks with peace and to commit aggression. Sanctions are
not changing his behavior.
Now that we know this, what should we conclude? A clear implication is
that things could get worse. Some worry (or threaten) that if the pressure
150
on him grows, Putin might became more confrontational and take additional
risks rather than back down and look for compromise. It has also been suggested that, if unseated, Putin might be replaced by someone worsea role
for which there are several candidates.
This leads me to a somber conclusion. Its not a conclusion I much like;
I have thought about it a lot and I wish I could see another way out of the
situation. To sum it up, Ill quote in full a letter I wrote to the Financial Times
recently in response to an article by Gideon Rachman (Russian hearts,
minds, and refrigerators):
Gideon Rachman. . . . writes: Rather than engage the Putin government where it is relatively strong, on the battlefield, it makes
more sense to hit Russia at its weak point: the economy. But this
neglects the incentives that arise from the time factor.
If the West plays to its strength, which is economic, President
Putin will play to Russias strength, which is military. But the
action of Western financial and trade measures is slow and cannot be accelerated. Meanwhile, Russia can accelerate its military
action at will.
In playing the sanctions card while neglecting defense, the West is
encouraging President Putin to raise the tempo on the battlefield
and change realities quickly and irrevocably through warfare,
before the Russian economy can be weakened further.
For the West, therefore, economic sanctions are not an alternative to a military confrontation that is already under way. To avoid
disaster, the West must support financial and trade measures with
a credible defense.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Adapted from Mark Harrisons blog
(https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison).
New from the Hoover Institution Press is To Make and

Keep Peace among Ourselves and with All Nations, by
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151
R U SS I A
A New Economic
Web
Russias new Eurasian Economic Union is also an
instrument of Putins political power.
By Sam Rebo and Norman M. Naimark
urope was shocked when former Ukrainian president Viktor

Yanukovich rejected an association agreement with the European Union in 2013, as were most Ukrainians. Instead, Yanukovich
moved Ukraine towards Russia, agreeing to join the Eurasian
Economic Union (EEU), a Moscow-led customs union. Russian commentators praised the Ukrainian leader for making a choice that reflected
Ukraines economic realities; Western-leaning protesters quickly assembled
in Kievs Maidan Square and cried foul, condemning Yanukovichs favoring of
Russian crony capitalism over European democracy and rule of law. Yanukovich, like many other post-Soviet leaders, had been lured into Moscows
force field.
Later that year Serge Sargasyan, Armenias president, was faced with the
same choice: sign an association agreement with the European Union or
draw closer to Russia and join the Russian-dominated customs union. After
originally declaring his intention to enter into an EU association agreement,
Sam Rebo is majoring in international relations at Stanford University. Norman

M. Naimark is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli
Institute for International Studies. He is also the Robert and Florence McDonnell
Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University, where he is the Fisher
Family Director of the Global Studies Division.
152
Sargasyan performed an about-face. In September 2013 he signaled his

desire to join the Russian customs union instead. Armenian opposition leaders claim that Sargasyan changed his mind under intense pressure from
Moscow, but little is known about the behind-the-scenes bargaining.
Moscow has been criticized for ostensibly compelling such choices. Hillary
Clinton, for example, believes that promoting the EEU is part of Russian
leader Vladimir Putins attempts to re-create the Soviet Union. Yet on paper
the EEU, as designed by Moscow, is simply a customs union. Although Russia
originally hoped for greater ties, no unified parliament, common currency, or
political union exists. The EEU is not at all the Soviet Union reincarnate; it is
not even the equivalent of the European Union.
Western analysts are uncertain what Russias goals are in creating the
EEU. Given the fact that Russia already has close economic ties with the
proposed membersBelarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan (not
to mention with pre-conflict Ukraine)it is difficult to know whether Putin
envisions a greater, more powerful role for the organization. The Maidan
protesters were correct in criticizing the EEU as having marginal economic
utility for the states involved but they were wrong to conclude that the EEU
brings significant material gains to Russia. The EEU does not move Russia
perceptibly closer to its goal of regional domination; instead it gives Moscow
the largely symbolic benefit of representing Moscows interests in the postSoviet space. It has the potential to morph into something more substantial,
but for the time being offers Russia little tangible political gain.
The Putin government regards the post-Soviet space as a loose collection of Russian-speakers moving ever so slowly away from Moscow under
the influence of the West and China. To regain great-power status, Moscow
believes, Russia must maintain a sphere of influence. This view supports
both Putins domestic politics and his international standing. Critically, such
a sphere of influence does not mean that Moscow must dominate the other
states but rather that the states remain closer to Moscow than to Washington, Brussels, or Beijing. The EEU is Russias attempt to create a secure
division between its post-Soviet space and the rest of the world.
REMAINING A GREAT POWER
Moscows policies are not driven solely by Putin; they stem from traditional
Russian imperial thinking that possession of the vast Eurasian land mass is
essential to being a great power. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Moscow
quickly addressed its loss of territory by creating a loose Confederation of
Independent States (CIS). The prevailing sentiment in Moscow was that
153
the states of the former Soviet Union were the near abroad rather than
sovereign entities. But the CIS was weakened by many factors, not the
least of which was its lack of institutional capacity. Moreover, the Russians
themselves preferred to conduct their affairs with the new states on bilateral
rather than multilateral terms. The states of the former Soviet Union, as a
result, went their own ways.
By the mid-1990s Russia was at a low point in its ability to project a
great-power image. President Boris Yeltsin had lost much of the impetus
from his democratic reform movement; the economy was dominated by
oligarchs and mafia-style
illegal organizations; and,
In traditional Russian imperial think- most important from the
perspective of geopolitics,
ing, its essential to possess the vast
Moscow ruled the least
Eurasian land mass.
amount of territory since
the seventeenth century. From the time Putin first came to power in
2000 it was clear that he was determined to try to reverse what he called
the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century, the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
Most Russian commentators view the newly constituted Eurasian Economic Union through this historical lens. The EEU serves the political
rather than economic interests of Russia, they note, since including states
like Armenia and Kyrgyzstan brings almost nothing to the union in terms
of resources or trade. Even some politicians openly wonder why Russia
needs to attract poor, developing countries like Kyrgyzstan into its orbit.
But as Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center points out, this desire
is directly related to the traditional Russian idea that more land means
increased power. Since the time of medieval Muscovy, Russian self-understanding has depended on the extension of its geographical reach.
WHAT IS THERE TO GAIN?
The Russian government cites imprecise figures and selective statistics
to evaluate the EEUs potential impact on trade and production. Even a
straightforward question, such as whether the EEUs precursor, the customs
union, experienced significant growth, elicits different answers, depending
on the source. The US Embassy cites internal trade growth in the customs
union at a paltry 1.5 percent per year from 2011 to 2014. The Eurasian Economic Commission, the organization charged with leading the integration,
cites a figure above 30 percent per year.
154
In public statements, the Russian government has lauded the strength

of the EEU economies and their readiness to come together. Uniting them,
Russia says, will bring significant economic benefits to all. Together the
countries in the union make up the largest producers in the world of oil, gas,
sunflowers, and sugar beets. However, US government officials say hardly
anything has changed with the advent of the EEU; the only new economic
benefits derive from reduced customs bureaucracy in each of the three current member nations. Moreover, whatever trade benefits have come from
the union were already in place before any formal agreements were signed,
independent policy experts note.
Critics like Konstantin Sonin, vice-rector of the Higher School of Economics, maintain that the Kremlin will pronounce the EEU a success no matter
the real economic results. The drafting of the agreement, its signing, and
every small success along the way will be hailed as a major victory. Even
EEU officials admit that the union will have minimal impact. Minister of
Trade for the Eurasian Economic Commission Andrey Slepnev was asked
whether he believes that the EEU could reinvigorate the Russian economy
from its current stagnant
state. His answer was that
The new economic union serves the
it could not. Slepnev argues
that the EEU should be
political rather than the economic
evaluated as a long-term
interests of Russia.
project and not be expected
to bring results any time soon. The EEUs proponents compare the infant
organization to early iterations of the European Union and insist that it cannot be expected to boost the economies of its member nations any sooner
than did its European counterpart.
Judging from the anemic success of the EEUs predecessor, the customs
union, there are few if any indicators that the EEU will become anything like
the EU. Similar models do not always yield the same results, and without any
hard evidence to suggest future success, there is little reason to believe that
in twenty or more years the role of the EEU will be any different.
Moscow does not seem to have much to gain economically. Russia offers
oil and gas at reduced prices to its trading partners, and in doing so, deals
with each country separately. If a state were to provoke the governments ire,
Russia would be free to annul tariff deals as it sees fit. Thus Russia dangles
energy carrots to entice other states to join the union but maintains its
ability to back out of energy agreements when convenient. As Sonin points
out, oil and gas incentives are what bring states like Belarus closer to Russia.
155
Without them, the likelihood is that these states would move towards Europe
even faster than Ukraine.
THROUGH A POLITICAL LENS
Most commentators believe that if Russia does not derive economic benefits
from the EEU then it must see the union as a boon to its political objectives.
Especially in the West, the argument goes that the union allows Russia to
dominate its smaller neighbors and exert influence over tens of millions of
people.
Russian leaders have tried to dispel this idea. Moscow argues that it no
more dominates the EEU than the Germans dominate the EU. The Russians
also underline the fact that every EEU member state has three votes on
the commission. But because the Russians pay the bulk of the duties (some
estimate up to 80 percent), Moscow dominates the backroom political and
economic decision making of the EEU despite formal voting procedures.
A former foreign minister of Armenia, Alexander Arzoumanian, worries in
this connection that Armenia is in danger of losing its sovereignty by moving closer to Russia and joining the EEU. He thinks that while Armenia has
much to gain economically by such a move, the political costs are dangerous.
A cursory glance at the Armenian economy seems to confirm his fears: Gazprom just purchased 100 percent of the Armenian energy sector and Russian
businesses dominate the streets of Yerevan, the Armenian capital. How could
Armenia make its own political decisions in such a context?
Arzoumanian, however, may not be entirely correct. Russian involvement in the Armenian economy has already advanced to the point where
Moscows political involvement in Armenian affairs
is not just a given; some
Russias partner states are few, but
critics ask whether Armecrucial to Russian foreign policy.
nia has already become
another Russian oblast. Now that Armenia has formally joined the EEU, it
is unlikely that the perquisites of membershipfree movement of people,
capital, and goodswill affect Moscows already profound political influence in the country.
Moscows original idea for Eurasian integration was to build a strong union
complete with a common passport, currency, and parliament. Kazakh leaders, worried about the political control this would ultimately give to Moscow,
opposed the plan and indicated that they would accept only an exclusively
economic union. Russian authorities turned to the Eurasian Economic Union
156
as their only alternative. Both Kazakhstan and Belarus offer examples of the
limits of Russian say over EEU allies. In June 2014, for instance, both countries refused to limit imports from Ukraine, defying strong Russian pressure.
Even if Russia is not always able to assert its policy preferences, it needs
to appear to be a hegemonic power in the former Soviet space for domestic
political purposes. Its
partner states are few
Gazprom just purchased 100 percent
but crucial to Russian
of the Armenian energy sector. Some
foreign policy. Since
Moscow cannot annex
critics ask whether Armenia has already
them (even if that were
become just another Russian oblast.
Putins intention), Russia wants to ensure that such states do not drift towards the EU, Washington,
or Beijing. Therefore, Moscow cannot risk alienating the Kazakh, Belarussian, Armenian, or even the Kyrgyz leaders. (The latter have expressed an
intention to join the EEU.)
The union is a modest political asset to Moscow in the region by serving
to rescue some of Russias pride and bolster its self-image as a great power.
Contrary to reports announcing the collapse of US influencethey appear
almost every day in the Russian pressRussia more than the United States
suffers from diminished power and influence. Russia failed to stop NATO
expansion, was unable to keep states that were once part of the Soviet Union
from turning away, and has witnessed expanded Chinese influence in Central
Asia and Russias far east. In the short term, the EEU cannot be much help.
Longer term, it could develop some political punch. In that case, Russias
efforts, even economic sacrifices, might just pay off.
Special to the Hoover Digest. This article is based in part on interviews
Sam Rebo conducted with Russian and Armenian policy experts during
June-July 2014.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is War,

Revolution, and Peace in Russia: The Passages of
Frank Golder, 19141927, edited by Terence Emmons
and Bertrand M. Patenaude. To order, call (800) 8884741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
157
I N TERVI EW
Find Your Fit

Born creators, people are everywhere in creative
chains: David Kelley, founder of the Stanford
design school, wants to free your inner innovator.
By Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: Surveys show that no more than

25 percent of people consider themselves creative. Today, one of the most
important designers of the past half century is here to insist that the correct
proportion is 100 percent.
David Kelley received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon and his masters in design from Stanford. In 1980,
Kelley worked with a young, unknown entrepreneur to design a new device
for controlling computers. That entrepreneur was Steve Jobs, and the device
was the mouse. In 1991, Kelley founded the design firm IDEO, which now
has offices in a dozen cities. And in 2005, he led the creation of the Hasso
Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, known universally simply as the
d.school. Kelley holds one other distinction: in the long history of Stanford
University, he is the only person to have been made a tenured professor
without a doctorate. With his brother and longtime collaborator, Tom, David
Kelley published Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within
Us All. David Kelley, welcome.
David Kelley: Thank you.
David Kelley heads the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, where he is also the Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering. Peter Robinson is the editor of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon
Knowledge, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
158
Robinson: Let me quote you to yourself. In our experience, everybody is the

creative type. Come on, really?
Kelley: My proof is to go to a kindergarten class and ask how many of them
are creative. Everybody will enthusiastically raise their hand and show you
what theyre working on. When we started the d.school, I thought we were
going to teach creativity, but it turns out you dont have to. All we really have
to do is remove the blocks that are in the way of that creativity.
Robinson: I thought when I began reading this book that it is a how-to book.
In fact, you have much grander designs, which I would like to get at by beginning with the circumstances that led to writing it. In April 2007 your cell
phone rang, and your doctors number came up. What happened?
Kelley: He said I had throat cancer and I had a 40 percent chance of survival. He told me they would treat me and that my life would change. And it
did. I had a full-time job at IDEO and was a full-time professor, and all those
meetings that were on my calendar and all those things I thought were really
important to do just stopped. And for the next year, I fought the cancer.
Robinson: In this book, you and your brother wrote, We vowed that if David
survived, we would work together side by side on a project that would allow
us to share ideas with each other and the world. So that is the project in this
book. It is not a how-to book, although it is about how you and your organization can solve problems better, and unleash a certain creativity. But you are
really at the most basic
level writing a book about
how to live. Isnt that right?
Kelley: Yes, we think that
if you talk to the psychologists, what I call creative
confidence they would call
self-efficacy. And its really one of the essential ways to have a vital life. Selfefficacy is you have a sense of the way the world is put together and that you
can accomplish what you set out to do in life. Once I understood that I was
going to survive, the thing that I really wanted to make my lifes work was to
have as many people as possible gain this new kind of living with confidence,
and confidence that they are a creative person.
Robinson: You write that not only can everyone be creative but that everyone should be creative. If youre in a rut, if youre in a slump, if youre just
159
following rules, sit up and do something about it. The world needs more
creative policy makers, office managers, and real estate agents.
Kelley: Everybody can be wildly creative, in my opinion. As I said, I believe
everybody in kindergarten is creative, but by about age nine people opt out of
thinking of themselves as creative. Something happens. A teacher says thats
not a very good drawing, or
you cannot play the piano
very well, or youre not a
If you talk to the psychologists,
dancer. Whatever it is, they
what I call creative confidence they
have confused talent with
would call self-efficacy. And its
creativity, but for some
really one of the essential ways to
reason that kind of negative
have a vital life.
critique really sticks with us,
and people opt out of thinking of themselves as creative. And they go about their lives saying that. By the
time they get to adulthood, it is pretty ingrained, but the good news is that we
find that if you help somebody and you give them a series of small successes in
a creative area, then it comes backthey actually build that confidence. But
you really have to have a kind of immersive experience.
EMBRACE: A CASE STUDY IN DESIG N
Robinson: So lets talk about the immersive experience. The d.school is a unit
of Stanford University. Kids go through ten-week courses. I want to plunge in
to try to convey some of what the d.school does. So why dont you tell us one
story: the Embrace infant warmer.
Kelley: We have lots of classes at the d.school. One nice thing about the
d.school is everybody kind of opts in. We dont pay the professors, we dont
give degreesyou are there because you want to be there.
Robinson: So a student is taking time out from attending the business school,
the school of education, the medical school, the engineering school, and so on.
They take time out from that curriculum to do a project at the d.school.
Kelley: Correct, and then you go back there and get your degree. So Embrace
comes from a class called Extreme Affordability, and the students go to
places like India, Myanmar, and Africa, and they look for needs. They look
for things that could really solve problems that are meaningful to people.
So the Embrace people were looking in hospitals and looking at incubators,
160
because so many young children are dying because they cant maintain their
body weight. But they go into the hospitals and the incubators are not full. So
whats the story? They were going to design a better incubator at first blush,
but what they found was that they had to completely reframe the problem. A
lot of innovation comes not from problem solving but from deciding what is
worth working on in the first placereframing the problem and then solving
it. Thats what happened here. They found that the babies were dying out in
the villages before they could get to a hospital.
Robinson: They couldnt keep them alive long enough to get them into a
Western incubator.
Kelley: Exactly. So what
they decided to dowhich You go out into the world and you
build empathy for the people you are
was brilliantwas to
make this thing that had
trying to help, whether they are Wall
paraffin wax in it that they Street executives or people in the bush
could heat up, and it would in Africa. We call it need finding.
keep the right 98.6 degree
temperature going long enough for the baby to start eating and start gaining
body weight. It has been a huge success; hundreds of thousands of lives will be
saved. It is this process we call design thinking, where you go out into the world
and you build empathy for the people you are trying to help, whether they are
Wall Street executives or people in the bush in Africa. We call it need finding.
By understanding that, then you can find a problem thats worth working on,
and thats what happened with Embrace.
Robinson: So what does one of these backpacks with heatable paraffin wax cost?
Kelley: Its a $200 sleeping bag. Embrace is a self-sustaining company. Weve
had lots of them in that class and other classes. Were in Silicon Valley, and
students are able and excited about starting their own companies, but our
role at the d.school is not the entrepreneurship part. Were just trying to find
really interesting problems that will get the students excited so theyll work
on building their confidence. So we have lots of projects. If you come to the
d.school, even in a ten-week class youll do lots of projects.
DESIGN TH INKING
Robinson: In Creative Confidence you write that one of the breakthroughs for
youone of the light bulb momentswas that IDEO was not selling designs.
161
What you really had done was develop a methodology that you now call
design thinking. Briefly, I am going to name each of the five steps in design
thinking, and you tell me what they mean.
Kelley: OK.
Robinson: First, empathize.
Kelley: Empathize means what we were talking about with Embrace. Instead
of sitting in your office and using your big brain to try to come up with ideas
for your next invention or for your next involvement, whatever it is, go out
into the world and be with people. We call this bias toward action. I gave
my present students a project to improve the experience of taking the train
from Palo Alto to San Francisco. So the empathize phase would be to ride the
train, talk to the conductor, watch people buy tickets, go into peoples homes
and see how they decide which train to take, look at the signs, and watch how
people get out of the train in San Francisco. Just be in the middle of it and
be open-minded to watching people and see what they do, where they have
troubles, and what they care about.
Robinson: Get out of yourself.
Kelley: Yes, we have way too many meetings with people sitting around a
table talking about things rather than being immersed in the situation so that
they can figure out what is going on.
Robinson: Step two, define.
Kelley: One of the unique things about design thinking is that the process
of defining what the problem is, that is inside of our process. With most
processes that I know about for innovation, the problem statement comes
first, and then you try to innovate to make something exciting given that
problem statement. We try to put the definition stage in the middle of the
process. So every time youre going around, youre iterating it in the process.
You ask yourself, is there a more interesting project I could be working on
here, meaning redefine. So we redefine the problem as a natural part of the
process, rather than accepting it.
Robinson: So that when the kids get to Bhutan thinking that they dont have
enough incubators, they get to the hospital and discover incubators are not
even being used, so they redefine the problem as keeping the babies alive
between the village and the hospital.
162
CREATIVE TYPES: David Kelley heads Stanford Universitys d.school, the

Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, and is also the Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering. When we started the d.school, he says, I
thought we were going to teach creativity, but it turns out you dont have to.
[Hoover Institution]
Kelley: Exactly. In that same class, Extreme Affordability, we sent them out
to look at the problems of water in India, and some of the students found out
that the kerosene they burn at night was a bigger problem in their minds.
The project ended up being a solar lantern called d.light. So they were given
water and they came up with a solar lantern that solved the kerosene problem. Or we have another class called Liberation Technology, where students
go to Africa and they were looking at fire prevention. And when they go into
the villages and talk to people, they find that people are worried about the
fires because theyre worried about their documents. Their documents are
really important and theyre vulnerable in their minds, so the students start
a company that takes computers around to scan everybodys documents and
put them up in the cloud. Another group might have said, you told me to look
at fire prevention, so Im just going to look at fire prevention, even though I
discovered that document protection is actually a more interesting problem.
163
Our process allows you to redefine the problem so that youre working on
something more meaningful for the people that youve discovered in the
empathy phase.
Robinson: OK. Step three, ideate.
Kelley: So you have defined the problem and you have a point of view
about what you want to do. Point of view is you have a user group and
you have some inspiration. Now what you need to do is in a cyclical way
to come up with ideas. Somebody once said, if you want a good idea, have
lots of ideas.
Robinson: You are presuming a team here.
Kelley: This whole thing is a team sport. I am not talking about individuals
at all. So the team is now going to talk with what we call extreme users and
people down the middle
and all the experts they can
find and look at the state
We have way too many meetings
of the art in what else is
with people sitting around a table
out there in this new thing
talking about things rather than
that you just found out, and
being immersed in the situation.
theyll try to come up with
as many ideas as they can.
It is the brainstorming phase. The idea is to have what we call fluency and
flexibility: lots of ideas just for the sake of lots of ideas, and ideas that are
different one from the next. Come up with as many as you can; in the next
phase, were going to select.
Robinson: OK. The next phase you call prototype.
Kelley: So you know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? We
think a prototype is worth a million words. If I tell you about my idea for this
new coffee cup, you might not be that interested, right? But if I actually build
a coffee cup and I have you try it out, now youre going to help meyoure
going to tell me whats wrong with it. Humans are really good at telling you
whats wrong with other peoples ideas. I define a prototype as painting a picture of the future with your idea in itso this is a physical thing. If I wanted
to prototype the experience of checking into the Stanford Hospital, I can
prototype that. I can build a space with cardboard, or I can find a place at
Stanford, and I can hire actors, and I can pretend, and I can bring in a bunch
of the public, and I can prototype that and see what happens.
164
My students used to design just objects mostly. And they would bring a
prototype in under a black cloth and we would pull it up. But now, if youre
trying to prototype what the experience of your idea is, we find video is
the way to go. So every team of students has to make a three-minute video.
On presentation day, instead of a bunch of hardware and a bunch of black
cloths being pulled up, now we pop popcorn and load the videos, and we all
sit there and play them. And then we can critique them one at a time, the
whole class.
So prototyping is really this iterative way of painting a picture of the
future.
Robinson: Which leads to the final step, testing.
Kelley: So its not enough to build this prototype and think that you did OK.
What you really have to do is bring in the people who are going to matter. If
were building a new nurses station, we have to bring real nurses in to test it,
and theyll have all kinds of good ideas about how to improve it. And then we
go back and we cycle through.
Robinson: Also, its fast. At the d.school, you require all the teams to go
through all five stepsincluding prototyping and testingwithin ten weeks,
within the space of the course.
Kelley: Several times within ten weeks. The fastest story is a really interesting one. We have a class at the d.school called LaunchPad, in which you have
to get your product in the world in the fifth week. It has to be real in the fifth
week! So there is a company now in the world called Pulse, which started in
LaunchPad.
Robinson: Its a news aggregator, isnt it?
Kelley: Yes. This team of two guys spent their five weeks in a coffee shop
in Palo Alto. They were in there all the time just prototyping their news
aggregator and showing it to people on the iPad and changing it and moving
it around. Week five they launched, and they got sued by the New York Times
and got offers from the San Jose Mercury News as employees the same week.
It was a big week for them, and then they got it out in the world. It became
the best-selling iPad app in the world, and they sold it to LinkedIn for $90
million.
Robinson: Wow.
Kelley: But the point of that is the speed. So five weeks there.
165
Robinson: You mean if I sign up, five weeks from now Ill be worth $90
million?
Kelley: Well, we cant guarantee that. Thats not the goal. Our goal is to make
innovators. Whether theyre successful in that way or not is up to them. But
were really trying to make people able to routinely come up with big ideas. It
sounds a little lofty, but we really believe it happens.
COMMERCE AND INNOVATION
Robinson: David, the role of money. Before founding the d.school at this
not-for-profit institution known as Stanford University, you built IDEO into
a big, successful firm. In the world of business, Steve Jobs may have been an
artist. It has always struck me that of all the entrepreneurs produced in the
80s and 90s, he was the one to whom beauty mattered. Profits mattered to
Steve, too.
Kelley: Sure.
Robinson: The typical academic view of commerce might be something
along the lines of its coarsening for society; it dulls our finer instincts. Yet
here you are, you live your life in commerce and you develop the importance
of creativity in commerce. At the d.school, you just mentioned that in many
of these classes like Extreme Affordability there is a strong social component, but a lot of these kids want to build companies that are profitable.
Kelley: They do.
Robinson: So are you three cheers for capitalism? Is commerce the place
that elicits the greatest creativity?
Kelley: I think commerce is the place where a cutting-edge interest in a lot of
things comes from, so that makes me interested. IDEO is at the cutting edge
of things because money is
changing hands, and it is a
Somebody once said, if you want a
driver. What I really care
good idea, have lots of ideas.
about are new ideas, innovation, and driving economies. And I think there are three components of that:
technology, business, and human values. And I am equally interested in all of
them. But I think the thing we contribute is looking at things from a human
point of view, to try to figure out what people really value, and then well
take the risks to come up with a technology that solves their problem. So Im
166
really interested in commerce because you cannot be successful without all

three of those things happening.
Robinson: But if one of your kids at the d.school sits down and begins with
the following question: How do I make a lot of money? You would immediately say, wrong question.
Kelley: Absolutely. Its not the wrong question because I care about his value
systems; its the wrong question because you do not get there from there. You
have to have concern for peopleempathy comes first.
Robinson: Youve been talking about the d.school and the methodology of
design thinking, and it is wildly popular. Does this say anything about the
future of Silicon Valley or even about the future of the American economy? Is
design thinking going to change the shape of the economy?
Kelley: Im not presumptuous enough to think that our little thing, design,
will do that. But I do think that the United States is particularly well suited
for being innovative. When we grew up, everyone knew who invented the
cotton gin and the telephonethey were our heroes. Innovation is something
were good at, and that will continue to drive the economy.
Robinson: Last question. IDEO, the d.school, a stream of products from the
mouse on, and the methodology of design thinking itselfwhat is your proudest accomplishment?
Kelley: My proudest accomplishment in business is building a stage and
letting my students and employees and everyone perform on it. When youre
a performerwhen youre the designer and everybody is looking at you like
youre the designerits very hard for you to say, Im not going to design anymore because Im going to build the stage and let others perform on it. And
so I am really proud of the fact that so many people are empowered by these
organizations and they find their fit, and so they basically enjoy their life.
Robinson: David Kelley, author of Creative Confidence, thank you.
167
VA LUES
The Honesty Gap

The clamor over male-female pay disparities
persists not because the clamor accomplishes
anything but because its politically useful.
By Thomas Sowell
here may be some poetic justice in the recent revelation that

Hillary Clinton, who has made big noises about a pay gap
between women and men, paid the women on her Senate staff
just 72 percent of what she paid the men. The Obama White
House staff likewise has a pay gap between women and men, as of course
does the economy as a whole.
Does this mean that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both discriminate against women, that they are themselves part of the nefarious war on
women that so many on the left loudly denounce? The poetic justice in the
recent pay-gap revelations is that the fundamental fraud in the statistics that
are thrown around comes back to bite those who are promoting that fraud
for political purposes.
What makes such statistics fraudulent is that they are comparing apples
and oranges.
Innumerable studies, going back for decades, have shown that women do
not average as many hours of work per year as men, do not have as many
consecutive years of full-time employment as men, do not work in the same
mix of occupations as men, and do not specialize in the same mix of subjects
in college as men.
Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy
at the Hoover Institution.
168
Back in 1996, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine

showed that young male physicians earned 41 percent higher incomes than
young female physicians. But the same study showed that young male
physicians worked over five hundred hours a year more than young female
physicians.
When the study took into account differences in hours of work, in the fields
in which male and female doctors specialized, and other differences in their
job characteristics, no earnings difference was evident. In other words,
when you compare apples to apples, you dont get the gender gap in pay
that you get when you compare apples to oranges.
This is not peculiar to the medical profession. Nor was this a new revelation, even back in 1996. Many studies done by many scholars over the
yearsincluding female scholarsshow the same thing, again and again.
A breakdown of statistics in an old monograph of mineAffirmative
Action in Academiashowed the pay differential between women and men
evaporating, or even reversing, as you compared individuals with truly comparable characteristics.
This was back in 1975, forty years ago!
There might have been some excuse for believing that income differences between women and men were proof of discrimination back in
the 1960s. But there is no
excuse for continuing to
The proportion of women among the
use misleading statistics
high achievers listed in Whos Who
in the twenty-first century,
when their flaws have been in America in 1902 was more than
exposed repeatedly and
double the proportion listed in 1958.
long ago.
Many kinds of high-level and high-pressure careers require working fifty or
sixty hours a week regularly, and women with childrenor expecting to have
childrenseldom choose those kinds of careers.
Nor is there any reason why they should, if they dont want to. Raising a
child is not an incidental activity that you can do in your spare time, like collecting stamps or bowling.
If you trace the actual history of women in high-level careers, you will find
that it bears no resemblance to the radical feminist fable, in which advances
began with the womens liberation movement in the 1960s and new antidiscrimination laws.
In reality, women were far better represented in professional occupations
in the first three decades of the twentieth century than in the middle of that
169
century. Women received a larger share of the postgraduate degrees necessary for such careers in the earlier era than in the 1950s and 1960s.
The proportion of women among the high achievers listed in Whos Who
in America in 1902 was more than double the proportion listed in 1958. The
decline of women in highlevel careers occurred when
Many high-level, high-pressure
womens age of marriage
careers require working fifty or sixty
and childbearing declined
hours a week, and women with childuring the midcentury baby
drenor expecting to have them
boom years.
seldom choose those.
The later rise of women
began when the age of marriage and childbearing rose again. In 1972 women again received as high a
proportion of doctoral degrees as they had back in 1932.
The truth is not nearly as politically useful as scare statistics. The gender
gap is not nearly as big as the honesty gap.
Reprinted by permission of Creators Syndicate (www.creators.com).
2015 Creators Syndicate Inc. All rights reserved.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is Is Reality

Optional? And Other Essays, by Thomas Sowell. To
170
HISTORY A N D C ULT UR E
One of the Very

Few
A review of Shame, the new book by Hoover fellow
Shelby Steele, which presents a portrait of Steele
himself.
By Joseph Epstein
ou, a character in Ossie Daviss 1961 play Purlie Victorious says to another, are a disgrace to the Negro profession. The line recurs to me whenever I see Al Sharpton
or Jesse Jackson making perfunctory rabble-rousing
remarks in Ferguson, Missouri; Madison, Wisconsin; current-day Selma, Alabama; or any other protest scene where their appearance, like Toni Morrison
on a list of honorary-degree recipients, has become de rigueur. I wonder if
Shelby Steele has also been called a disgrace to the Negro profession, and
this for diametrically opposite reasons. Had he been it could only have been
by people who, despite their endless cries for social justice, in one way or
another have a deep emotional if not financial investment in keeping black
Americans in the sad conditions in which so many of them continue to find
themselves.
Shelby Steele is one of the very few writers able to tell home truths
about the plight of black Americans. Telling truth to power used to be a
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of Hoovers Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group
on Islamism and the International Order. Joseph Epstein, an essayist and editor,
wrote this review for the Wall Street Journal.
171
Liberalism, writes Hoover senior fellow Shelby Steele, expresses its inborn
racism in the way it overlooks the full human complexity of blacksthe fact
that they are more than mere victimsin order to distill and harden the idea of
their victimization into a currency of liberal power. [Hoover Institution]
sign of intellectual courage, but today, when the Internet has made this no
great feat, what takes courage is telling truth to listeners who have grown
accustomed to thinking themselves victims, have accepted the ultimately
inadequate benefits of victimhood and, touchier than a fresh burn, take
offense at the least criticism. Steele has taken on this thankless job with, as
I suspect he would agree, less than happy results. Still, he shows no sign of
letting up. In his new book Shame: How Americas Past Sins Have Polarized
Our Country, an essay on the political polarization of our country and on
the want of progress among black Americans, he has produced his most
complex and challenging work.
His authority for writing derives in part from his intellectual cogency, in
part from his birth. His white mother married his black father in 1944, a time
172
when a more radical act than miscegenation is not easily imagined. A mixed
marriage in those days meant that a couple lived in black neighborhoods.
Shelby Steele, born in 1946, grew up in Harvey, Illinois, a predominantly
working-class town just south of Chicago. He has described his biracial birth
as an absolute gift, the greatest source of insight and understanding. . . .
[because] race was demystified for me. I could never see white people as just
some unified group who hated blacks. Although he doesnt say so, being
biracial has also allowed him insight into the hypocrisy of both blacks and
whites on the subject of race.
The author has a fierce racial pride, and his writing about blacks in America is without condescension and imbued with deep sympathy. He is a brother,
make no mistake, but a brother quite unlike any other. What distinguishes
him is his openly stated belief that blacks in America have been sold out by
the very liberals who ardently claim to wish them most good. He regrets that
affirmative action, multiculturalism, and most welfare programs purportedly
put in place to show racial preference, far from liberating black Americans,
have failed to advance their fortunes. Judging from high crime, divorce, and
unemployment rates, as well as relatively low rates of high school and college
completion, a case can be made that liberal policies have harmed them. To
cite a single statistic: in 1965, the year after passage of the Civil Rights Act,
23.6 percent of black births in America were to single women; today that
number is 72 percent.
Shame does not portray the United States as the promised land in which all
promises have been made good. Even our liberal royal family, the Kennedys,
were, when in power, wobbly on civil rights. Steeles father was a truck driver
who, owing to racism, was kept out of the Teamsters union, and hence out of
making a good living, until late in his working life. Steele recounts a heartbreaking story of his own high school days in the early 1960s when he learned
that the school swimming team, of which he was a key member, was invited
to the coachs mothers summer house and that he was excluded because the
woman disliked blacks. Pockets of racism of course still exist in the country, and doubtless always will. But legal freedom has long been established,
owing in part to the physical courage of civil rights activists in the South, and
opportunities for blacks to rise are now in place. Shame takes up the question
of why for the most part they havent.
TURBULENT TIMES
Steele graduated from college in that annus horribilis 1968, at the height of
protest tumult and before affirmative action kicked in. An Afro-wearing,
173
James Baldwinreading young man, he worked in an antipoverty program in

East St. Louis, Illinois, and was sufficiently swept up in what in those days
was called the movement to have spent time with members of the Black
Panthers exiled in Algiers. He did not attend any of the name-brand, or what
today might be called designer, colleges. He went to Coe College in Iowa,
Southern Illinois for a masters degree, and the University of Utah for a doctorate in English literature. This relieves him of doubt about his having been
given a free pass on his education by affirmative action.
In a few dispiriting pages, Steele takes up the dubiety that Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas has always felt about his own entry, via affirmative
action, into Yale Law School.
After law school, Thomas
Shelby Steele is one of the very few
applied for jobs with several
writers able to tell home truths about firms, but to no avail. His
the plight of black Americans.
interrogators did not believe
that he was as good as his
own grades indicated, Steele writes. They assumed his presence before
them was explained by racial preferences, not by talent. It was as if they were
saying the pretense was over: Yale could afford tokenism, but they could not.
Every black student in the affirmative-action era must feel similar doubt.
One wonders if the Obamas, who between them were admitted to Columbia,
Princeton, and Harvard Law School, ever do.
Liberalism in the twenty-first century, Steele writes, is, for the most
part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in
American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs. This liberalism, which is not your Aunt Bessies liberalism but
the liberalism that came into play at the 1972 Democratic convention that
nominated George McGovern, is invested in an overstatement of Americas present sinfulness based on the nations past sins. Steele argues that
liberalisms efforts to alleviate the past injustices done to blacks in America
have amounted to another botched project of that famously failed political construction firm, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Liberalism,
Steele writes, expresses its inborn racism in the way it overlooks the
full human complexity of blacksthe fact that they are more than mere
victimsin order to distill and harden the idea of their victimization into a
currency of liberal power.
Liberals, Steele holds, deal in what he calls poetic truth. This is a kind of
truth conceived in reaction to the great shames of Americas pastracism,
sexism, territorial conquest (manifest destiny), corporate greed, militarism,
174
and so on. In poetic truth, the world is reduced to victims and victimizers,
with liberals alone innocent of evil and thus excluded, by self-dissociation,
from the role of victimizers. Under the realm of poetic truth, Steele explains,
the race riots of the late 1960s could find justification and the feminist slogan
woman as nigger could be taken seriously, while fifty years of real moral
evolution in America can be entirely ignored.
After the 1960s, in Steeles reading, authority was undermined and
authenticity put in its place. Authenticity, he writes, meant the embrace of
new idealisms and new identities that explicitly untethered you from Americas notorious hypocrisies. Through rebellion, antiwar activity, dissent, civil
and uncivil disobedience, and dropping out before selling out, authenticity
rendered one innocent of all the old evils associated with American power,
domestic and international; authenticity also gave one the right to view traditional America as a fundamentally hypocritical society.
Steele does not use the word, but authenticity also conferred virtue on
those who chose it. Self-virtue is the ultimate consolation to be found in the
poetic truth of the new politics that came into being in the 1960s, and millions
of Americans, rich white
liberals prominent among
Shame does not portray the United
themrecall Leonard
Bernsteins famous party for States as the promised land in which
the Black Panthersgloried all promises have been made good.
in it. These politics changed
the nature of liberalism from a reform-minded, character-forming set of
political ideas into a broad, guilt-driven, moralistic liberalism in which at
least a vague anti-Americanism was decency itself. America, in this interpretation, is essentially evil, and those who oppose it from within are thereby
good. Hence the claim to moral superiority of the protest groupsblacks,
women, gays et al.of our day. For black Americans, the claim to moral
superiority took the form of grievance, boisterous, unrelenting, and willfully
blind to any evidence of progress.
The new liberalism, eager to bring about The Good (Steeles capital letters), went in for social engineering to accomplish its missionary work. For
Steele not The Good but true good would include an incentive to minorities
to in fact become equal with all others by talent and merit. . . . [and] would
ask minorities to assimilate into modernity even if that felt like self-betrayal.
. . . And it would discourage them from building a group identity singularly
focused on protest. . . . Instead, all would be focused on their becoming
competitive. Blacks, Steele argues, ran into serious discrimination in sports
175
and music, and yet in these competitive fields their excellence and merit
ultimately prevailed over all else.
As things now stand in American political life, the desire for equality has
trumped freedom; self-virtue, honesty; and preferential programs, the development of character. The effect of these liberal victories has been to lessen
the quality of American life. Consider the contemporary university, where
the goal of diversity, enforced by the whip hand of political correctness, has
brought in various minority studies, womens and gay studies, and other
intellectual vulgarities in the name of redressing old injustices and mollifying
grievances. The humanities and the social sciences have become hopelessly
tendentious, the ideal of truth besmirched and higher education itself turned
sadly comic.
STRONG ENOUGH TO CHANGE
Through the pages of Shame, Steele fills in a few of the details behind his
own conversion from angry young black man to chronicler of the dead end
that anger and moral indignation, supported by white guilt, have brought to
American blacks. Strongly implicated in this conversion was his father, who
had seen much darker days than his son ever would and who, as long ago as
the late 1960s, assured him
that you shouldnt underSteeles conclusion is that black
estimate America. . . . Its
America sold itself out, entered a
strong enough to change.
After visiting the Black
Faustian pact, as he puts it, by placPanthers in North Africa
ing its destiny in the hands of conand witnessing their selftrite white people.
destructive hatred for their
own country, which left them placeless and bereft, Shelby Steele began to
recognize that the American mainstream would be my fate.
The authors conclusion is that black America sold itself out, entered a
Faustian pact, as he puts it, by placing its destiny in the hands of contrite
white people. Doing so, he writes, left us pleading with government, not
for freedom, which we had already won, but for programs and preferences
that would be a ladder to full equality. The chilling result is that now, fifty
years later, we remainby most important measuresin the position of inferiors and dependents. The liberalism that has come into prominence since
the 1960s, Steele believes, has done little more than toy with blacks.
Steele has himself become a conservative. He is a conservative who
believes less in the mysticism of the invisible hand of the market than in the
176
force of strong character as the main element propelling social change. He

is certain that there will never be a government program that builds such
character. Speaking
out about the false
America, in the new politics of the 1960s,
bargain that blacks
is essentially evil, and those who oppose
have made with the
new liberalism will
it from within are thereby good.
doubtless earn him,
if it hasnt already done so, the old opprobrious title of Uncle Tom. The irony
here is that Shelby Steele might just be a Tom of a different kinda black
Tom Paine, whose twenty-first-century common sense could go a long way to
bringing his people out of their by now historical doldrums.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is American

Contempt for Liberty, by Walter E. Williams. To order,
177
H O OVER ARCHIVE S
Chiangs Secret
Advisers
Driven from the Chinese mainland, Chiang
Kai-shek turned to Japanese and German military
officers, once his bitter foes, to help him defend
Taiwan.
By Hsiao-ting Lin
he year 1949 was a dark one for the Chinese Nationalist government. Having gained little military advantage against the
Chinese communist forces led by Mao Zedong and struggling
politically as well, Chiang Kai-shek stepped down that January.
But even in this semiretirement Chiang kept the reins of power largely intact
as the head of the Kuomintang (KMT). In fall 1949, for example, he instructed
a trusted military subordinate in Tokyo to organize a New Army, consisting
of former Japanese imperial soldiers, as a completely trustworthy and loyal
new force to serve his anticommunist cause.
No New Army was formed in the subsequent months, in light of the
worsening situation on the Chinese mainland. By February 1950, however,
two months after the Nationalist regime had retreated to the island refuge of
Taiwan, eighteen Japanese ex-officers had arrived surreptitiously in Taipei from Yokohama via Hong Kong. Those officers, under the leadership of
Tomita Naosuke, former chief of staff for the Japanese Imperial Twenty-third
Hsiao-ting Lin is curator of the East Asia Collection and a research fellow at the
Hoover Institution.
178
Army who had taken a Chinese name, Bai Hongliang, formed a group dubbed
Baituan (Bais group) that began military education and training among
Chiangs residual forces. A Military Officers Training Corps was established
at an obscure spot near Yuanshan, Taipei, where the Japanese military advisers undertook their unofficial, secret program.
AN ENEMYS INSIGHT
Chiang Kai-shek was convinced that no nation in the world understood China
and the communist problems it faced better than the Japanese, who after
all had fought a bitter war with the Chinese for eight years. That rationale
may have been behind Chiangs decision to employ former Japanese imperial
officers to train his demoralized force in Taiwan. But Baituan may also have
made it possible for the Generalissimo to use Japanese influence to neutralize General Sun Liren, his able but often recalcitrant commander in chief of
the Nationalist ground forces, who was the all-time US favorite. In the late
1940s and early 1950s, rumors began flying that with support from Uncle
Sam, Sun would eventually kick out the Generalissimo in a coup and lead
Free China (a synonym for Taiwan).
The Americans learned about Baituan soon enough. They found the presence of Japanese military officials incredible, given that Japan had been
Chiangs archrival and deadly enemy only a few years before. In the spring of
1951, shortly after the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) was
officially instituted in Taipei, the existence of Baituan, whose members had
grown from eighteen to seventy-six, became one of the most pressing issues
the Americans aimed to settle with Chiang. As the Americans became aware
that a main goal of the Baituan training program was to demonstrate that
US methods, both political and military, were unsuited to China and that the
Nationalists could learn more from Japan than from the United States in the
military field, Washington saw Baituans ousting as imperative.
Faced with strong US pressure, in July 1952 Chiang ordered Baituan to go
even deeper underground. The training corps at Yuanshan was shut down
and its staff reduced to about thirty. But the Japanese-led training program
soon resumed in another place under the pretext of researching military
theories and implementation.
Recent additions to the Hoover Institution Archives Japanese Modern History Manuscript Collection reveal that Chiang continued to allow
Baituan a crucial role. After 1953, the Japanese advisory group was paid
to draft and prepare a series of mainland recovery proposals, ranging
from launching surprise attacks against Fujian in order to sabotage its
179
OLD ACQUAINTANCE: Chiang Wei-kuo (left), adopted son of Chiang Kaishek, was trained in Hitlers Wehrmacht in the 1930s, at one point even commanding a Panzer unit during the 1938 Austrian Anschluss. Here he confers
in Taiwan in 1968 with German military adviser Oskar Munzel, a decorated
Wehrmacht officer and later a general in the West German army. Chiang Weikuo took advantage of his familiarity with German equipment, organization,
and tactics during his career in the Republic of Chinas army, where he rose to
major general. [Hoover Institution ArchivesWang Yue-che Papers]
local infrastructure, to amphibious operations aimed at retaking some

of the strategic islands along the south and southeast China coast. They
were frequently invited to participate in planning the KMTs mainland
counteroffensive and other secret military operations. Drawing on their
experience after the Russo-Japanese War in the early twentieth century,
the Japanese were especially good at advising and planning for Taiwans
social and military mobilization systems. They also provided Chiangs
guerrilla forces with ammunition and equipment. Even more stunning:
Chiang went so far as to share top-secret military intelligence with core
180
members of Baituan, notably information from the MAAG and the CIA
regarding Taiwans national defense, guerrilla warfare, and raids along
Chinas coastal areas.
In the end, Baituans plans were seldom put into practice, and whether
Chiang ever seriously considered their practicability remains questionable.
Perhaps the real significance of Baituan and its various proposals was not
so much the implementation of Chiangs military counteroffensive but as a
useful counterbalance to Chiangs American patrons and a checkmate to his
potential competitors from within.
The relocated Japanese military corps operated quietly for seventeen more
years. Not until early 1969 were the last four Japanese advisers asked to close
their training program and return to Japan. Estimates are that in the almost
two decades of Baituans existence in Taiwan, more than ten thousand of
Chiangs high-ranking military officers attended its training program.
In the fall of 1972, when Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka moved
to normalize relations with Beijing and sever diplomatic ties with Taipei (as
described in the personal
papers of Deng Zumou
Chiang Kai-shek was convinced that
in the Hoover Archives),
former members of Baituan no nation in the world understood
were a crucial factor in
China and its communist problem
bridging the collapsing
better than his former enemy, Japan.
political, military, and intelligence ties between Taipei and Tokyo. In a joint letter to Deng, Taiwans
last military attach in Tokyo, Baituan members pledged to serve as a useful channel of communications based on their shared anticommunist ideology, as well as to be a pressure group to check Tanakas new China policy.
Until the early 1980s, in the absence of diplomatic relations, the surviving
Baituan members continued to play a useful role in fostering friendship
between Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, and senior statesmen
in Japans political circle.
SOLDIERS IN THE GERMAN MOLD
The covert use of Japanese ex-officers was by no means the only cause of
fissures in the US-Taiwan alliance during the Cold War. Chiang Kai-shek,
of course, relied heavily on the United States to defend and consolidate his
island redoubt against a communist invasion. A major turning point was
the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, which prompted overnight
re-evaluations of Chiangs government by the Truman administration and
181
an about-face on issues surrounding Taiwan. Washington interposed the

Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, creating a foundation on which Chiang
and his hitherto-abandoned Nationalist cohorts could build their hopes.
Still, despite this ostensibly formidable US-Taiwan Cold War alliance, Chiang would from time to time turn to his erstwhile World War II enemies for
military advice. His reliance on Baituan, the Japanese advisory group, from
1950 to 1969 enhanced Chiangs innate distrust of the US government and
his instinct to undermine US influence as much as possible.
Beginning in the early 1960s (as the Hoover Archives Wang Yue-che
Papers disclose), without consent from Washington or joint consultation with
the MAAG, Chiang hired former German officers as his personal advisers
to train, lecture, and assess the US-equipped Taiwanese military forces. His
reasons were both philosophical and practical: Chiang fretted that the thinking of US warfare, based as it was on superior war materials and weaponry,
would be unsuitable for his tiny island state. As Chiang saw it, German forces
were noted for prevailing against overwhelming odds with limited supplies.
Chiang had worked with German military advisers in the past. Johannes
Friedrich Hans von Seeckt had been a key consultant in 193335 while
Nationalist forces fought the Chinese communists. Seeckt played a major role
in training and organizing Chiangs military. Chiang approached Germany
again in the spring of 1961, expressing his concerns to Reinhard Gehlen, chief
of West Germanys Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst),
and seeking Gehlens help in finding a candidate to be his personal military
adviser. Walther Wenck, a retired German general who had served as an aide
to Seeckt when he was young, recommended Oskar Munzel.
Munzel stepped on Taiwanese soil for the first time in November 1963 and
stayed for six months as Chiangs special adviser. Munzel, a highly decorated
Wehrmacht officer during World War II and recently retired as a general in
the West German army, the Bundeswehr, impressed his Nationalist hosts
from the beginning. The Generalissimo especially enjoyed conversations with
the German general concerning the military issues facing Taiwan.
BIG IDEAS: Chiang Kai-sheks Japanese advisory group helped draft plans
for a future mainland counteroffensive and other secret military operations.
This map analyzes Chinas coastal defenses. Whether Chiang ever seriously
considered the proposals is unclear, but they may have helped him counterbalance his US patrons and deter potential political rivals. [Hoover Institution
ArchivesWang Yue-che Papers]
H O O V E R D IG E S T S U M M E R 2015
183
QUIET PARTNERS: Chiang Ching-kuo, thenminister of defense, receives a

West German military intelligence delegation in Taipei in 1965. The relationship between German and Taiwanese military leaders would last ten more
years, even after West Germany normalized relations with Maos China. [Hoover
Institution ArchivesJapanese Modern History Manuscript Collection]
To work with the new German advisers under Munzel, a shadow office was
discreetly created within Taiwans military establishment and under the radar
of the MAAG. Between 1965 and 1975, Munzel and his two successors, Paul
Jordan and Kurt Kauffmann, led an unofficial German military advisory group
of about twenty-four members to reform Taiwans armored forces, inspect Taiwans military training, bridge military and intelligence cooperation between
Taipei and Bonn, and transform the mindset of Chiangs military echelons. The
group also created a program under which Chiang began sending his military
officers to study and intern in German military academies. Between 1964 and
1973, twenty-five officers enrolled in this program. Among them, seventeen
would be promoted to the rank of general and serve in Taiwans key military
and national security positions in the decades that followed.
Toward the end of 1966, as US President Lyndon Johnson began talking
about a possible shift in Americas China policy, a worried Chiang Kai-shek
deepened his reliance on his group of German advisers. The personal papers
184
of Wang Yue-che, a colonel in Chiangs army and an aide-de-camp to Munzel, indicate that an experimental infantry force at the battalion level was
covertly forged under the supervision of Munzel sometime in late 1966.
Trained, equipped, and exercised in German fashion, the experimental battalion quickly gained
Chiangs favor. With
extra military and finan- As Chiang saw it, German forces were
cial resources pouring in noted for prevailing against overand in a state of combat- whelming odds with limited supplies.
readiness, the Germanled infantry force caught the Americans attention. For several weeks in
the spring of 1969, MAAG officials frequented the battalion for inspections,
suspectingwrongly, as it turned outthat Chiang was secretly preparing
for a mainland counterattack.
While its Japanese counterpart ended its secret advisory role in Taiwan in
1969, the German group was still at work into the mid-1970s, four years after
Taipei was expelled from the United Nations and Bonn had normalized its
relations with the Peoples Republic of China. The group was disbanded in
December 1975, eight months after Chiang Kai-sheks death. Perhaps Chiang
Ching-kuo, now the de facto leader of Taiwan, no longer deemed it vital to
retain the Germans. For a number of years, however, the advisory group had
functioned as a critical, albeit unofficial, channel of communications between
Taiwan and West Germany at a time when Taiwan was suffering disastrous
blows to its international status and increasing isolation.
Whether Chinese Nationalist leaders resorted to their connections with
the West German military establishment to procure urgently needed ammunition and sensitive devices for developing nuclear weaponswhen the
Nixon White House was preparing to open to communist Chinadeserves
future investigation.
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is The

Struggle across the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China
Problem, by Ramon H. Myers and Jialin Zhang. To order,
185
On the Cover
The tree answered that we should live carefully and in our hearts beseech the Lord:
we do not want wars, but peace forever...
Gernikako Arbola, Jos Mara Iparraguirre
any peoples and nations are known by their symbols. This

oak tree and the colors red, green, and white symbolize
the Basques, a people without an independent nation of
their own. The Basques do, however, have a treenot just
a symbolic one but an oak actually growing in the town of Guernica (or
Gernika, its Basque name). The oak and its forebears have seen centuries of
war, revolution, and peace as the Basques struggled with Spain and France
for autonomy, and only time will tell if the tree will witness lasting peace in
todays Basque Country.
The oak depicted on the heraldic arms of Biscay, the Spanish province
where Guernica is located, represents the Basque peoples continuity and traditional freedoms. In Basque the tree is called Gernikako Arbola. Wordsworth
once wrote a sonnet to it. The nineteenth-century anthem quoted above is
considered the Basques Marseillaise.
Under the branches of the original tree, which dated from the fourteenth
century and lasted some 450 years, people would gather for constituent
assemblies and important speeches. The lehendakari, or president of the
Basque Autonomous Community, takes his oath at the site even now. When
the first tree died, another took its place. The second oak lived to the age of
150, and the remnants of its trunk, surrounded by a columned shrine, can
still be seen in Guernica. A third oak also lasted a century and a half, enduring the 1937 German and Italian bombing of Guernica depicted in Picassos
celebrated mural. It was felled not by fascists but by fungus, in 2004. The
fourth oak presided for only ten years, from 2005 to January 2015. A fifth was
planted last March. The modern trees sprouted from carefully saved acorns.
Basques, like those acorns, are widely scattered but put down roots where
they find themselves. They have a lively presence in the American West, for
186
instance. This poster from

1948 advertises a Congress of Basque Studies,
a gathering of scholars,
historians, scientists, artists, and others in Biarritz,
a city in the French part
of Basque Country. The
Society of Basque Studies had been established
in 1918 in San Sebastin,
home of todays University
of the Basque Country, to
bring together all lovers of
Basque Country who crave
its restoration. Asmoz Ta
Jakitez, the slogan beneath
the tree, means for talent
and knowledge.
The Basque people
emerged from World War II
still chafing under Franco,
the Spanish dictator who had joined hands with Hitler and Mussolini but who
stayed in power despite the Axis defeat. Picassos mural, displayed to great
acclaim in the 1937 Worlds Fair in Paris, had stirred new hopes of Basque
nationalism even as it became a symbol of innocent suffering. But Francos
government continued to suppress Basque language and culture and those of
other minorities. In 1959 some students formed Basque Country and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA), a nationalist group that grew into one
of Europes most notorious terrorist organizations. It took for its emblem
not a tree but a snake wrapped around an axe, symbolizing both diplomacy
and blunt force. Franco died in 1975, but the bloodshed continued; in the end,
ETA claimed more than eight hundred victims. Today, with a five-year-old
cease-fire still holding, ETA claims to be ready to negotiate and disband.
Given the passions aroused by Basque autonomy, the sacred trees botanical identity is ironic. It is a specimen of Quercus robur, a species that blankets
Western Europe and often lives to a ripe old age. It is called the English oak,
the pedunculate oak, or the French oak. But never the Basque oak.
Charles Lindsey
187
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188
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Dody Waugh
189
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