Today, Herb Lin and Maria Langan-Riekhof write about how governments can avoid the strategic surprises that come with rapid technological advances. Timothy Garton Ash offers eight ways free nations can hasten Vladimir Putin’s demise. And author Sebastian Junger discusses his own brush with death in a life spent observing the deaths and near misses of others engaged in conflict.
Hoover Institution Research Fellow Herb Lin and researcher Maria Langan-Riekhof argue in this new essay that rapid technological advancement creates strategic surprises that governments and institutions struggle to anticipate. They define strategic technological surprises as disruptions that overturn prevailing assumptions, shift power dynamics, and demand significant and rapid societal responses. China’s development of the DeepSeek AI R1 model exemplified this, shattering assumptions about China’s ability to produce competitive AI at scale. The authors warn that the convergence of technologies like artificial intelligence, bioengineering, quantum computing, and space capabilities accelerates change at unprecedented speed. These disruptions differ from historical innovations because of their pace and interconnected nature.
Writing in The Guardian, Senior Fellow Timothy Garton Ash lays out eight elements of a strategy he says democracies in Europe and their allies can use to ensure the defeat of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s “external ambitions.” First, Garton Ash implores the free nations of the world to stay the course with Ukraine, even beyond a future ceasefire, and let it into the EU. “Only when Ukraine is a reasonably prosperous, secure, stable, and democratic member state of the EU will we be able to say that Putin has been defeated there,” he writes. Next, Garton Ash suggests a continued re-armament of Europe, concerted efforts to defeat Russia-sympathetic parties in national elections, and diplomatic outreach to the “other Russian constituencies” likely open to an anti-authoritarian message.
In The Diplomat, Research Fellow Dinsha Mistree and Bill Drexel of the Hudson Institute argue US foreign policy risks a fundamental misunderstanding if it applies lessons learned about China, an authoritarian state seeking to upend global norms and trade to serve its own interests, to India, another rising power that very much wants to retain the global status quo. “The lesson of China is not to distrust every rising power. It is to distinguish between those that seek to overturn the international order and those likely to strengthen it,” Mistree and Drexel write. “And India, whatever its imperfections, has every reason to want the current system to endure.” They point out India is not and has never been an expansionist power and is a natural bulwark against a rising China.
At RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz writes that American universities are failing to educate students about the principles underlying the nation’s founding and its 250-year rise to global economic, political, and military superpower. He contends higher education has corrupted liberal education through three problematic ideals: political activism that treats progressive views as orthodoxy rather than teaching students to evaluate competing arguments; methodological obsession in social sciences that prioritizes scientific techniques over understanding human affairs; and professional focus on training future scholars rather than informed citizens. Berkowitz says this betrayal produces graduates who are fundamentally ignorant of the Declaration of Independence and the American experiment in ordered liberty. He advocates a new curriculum centered on the Declaration, constitutional system, Western civilization, and the comparative study of other cultures.
What does a lifelong atheist do when his dead father appears above him in the emergency room? Author and war reporter Sebastian Junger nearly bled to death in 2020 from a ruptured aneurysm, and what he saw in those moments sent him on a journey into physics, near-death experiences, and the nature of consciousness itself. In his third appearance on EconTalk, Junger discusses his remarkable book In My Time of Dying with Visiting Fellow Russ Roberts. He reflects on covering wars from Sarajevo to Afghanistan, the strange phenomenon of dying people seeing the dead, and why he’s still an atheist. Along the way, Junger offers a powerful meditation on terror and reverence, blessing and wounding, and why understanding life’s fragility might be the most sacred gift of all.
For more than two decades, the Hoover Institution has been producing Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, a series hosted by Hoover fellow Peter Robinson as an outlet for political leaders, scholars, journalists, and today’s big thinkers to share their views with the world.
