Today, H.R. McMaster argues that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a Venezuelan opposition leader gives the United States an opportunity to push back against autocrats across Latin America; Jay Bhattacharya joins Jon Hartley to discuss his philosophy for running the National Institutes of Health; and Peter Berkowitz highlights the role of the liberal spirit in preserving a healthy political culture.
US Foreign Policy
Writing for his Substack History We Don’t Know, Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster examines the Trump administration’s diplomatic approach to President Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela. “Early in his new Presidency it seemed that Trump might alleviate pressure on the regime and allow the oil company Chevron to operate in Venezuela,” McMaster writes. “But after formally ending diplomatic outreach to Maduro earlier this month, Trump ordered combat-ready U.S. military forces to the Caribbean, authorized strikes against vessels linked to Venezuelan narcotics trafficking, and designated narco-criminal organizations . . . as foreign terrorist organizations.” Now, McMaster says, there’s “an opportunity to use the momentum from the Trump administration’s tough actions against Maduro and the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to [María Corina] Machado to galvanize diplomatic, law enforcement, and economic actions in support of those living under repressive far left dictatorships not only in Venezuela but also in Cuba and Nicaragua.” Read more here.
Health Care and Economics
For the latest episode of Capitalism and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, Policy Fellow Jon Hartley speaks with Jay Bhattacharya, former Hoover senior fellow and current director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Hartley and Dr. Bhattacharya discuss Bhattacharya’s vision for the NIH, running the NIH as an innovation accelerator, and how to address the much-discussed issue of replication in the sciences. The conversation also touches on how best to measure scientists’ productivity, as well as the new NIH policy reducing animal testing. Watch or listen here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
Writing at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz considers the fate of the “liberal spirit” in American political culture and institutional life. “Once a fighting creed,” Berkowitz writes, “the liberal spirit in America now fights for its life while drawing heavy fire from both” the political left and right. The column advances the view that “neither camp comes close to appreciating the liberal spirit’s role in sustaining the American experiment in ordered liberty.” Berkowitz situates thinkers ranging from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson to Alexis de Tocqueville and Friedrich Hayek within the liberal tradition and finds among them a common thread of commitment to constitutional governance and protecting pluralism. Looking with caution at the decline of liberal commitments in American politics and public life, Berkowitz concludes that revitalized civic education would preserve the liberal spirit and “foster a healthy civic culture.” Read more here.
Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy
A new fact sheet from Hoover’s Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy lays out popular myths concerning free speech in the United States, and the facts that these myths are missing. One common misconception is that the US has laws against “hate speech.” As the fact sheet explains, “There is no First Amendment exception for ‘hate speech’ (and thus not even a legal definition of ‘hate speech’ under American law).” The sheet also tackles the topic of where the protections afforded under the First Amendment apply and where they don’t. In fact, “the First Amendment restricts the government but not private individuals or businesses,” who are generally free to control what types of speech and expression they allow in their own home, on their property, or within their place of business. Check out the fact sheet to learn more about the foundational protections for free expression in the United States. Read more here.
Confronting and Competing with China
In his weekly China Articles newsletter, Visiting Fellow Matthew Turpin unpacks a recent and significant move by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to restrict the export of rare earth elements and magnets used in many American commercial and defense applications. “These export restrictions apply to products that contain just trace amounts of PRC-sourced minerals or made with PRC equipment,” Turpin writes. He further expresses his hope that the clear-cut move by the PRC to cut off global supplies of critical minerals “will finally settle the debate over whether the PRC will seek to weaponize industries that it dominates (think EVs, telecom equipment, green energy technology, etc.).” Examining the statist-mercantilist policies that have enabled China to undercut other suppliers of the minerals at issue, Turpin stresses that American and allied policymakers must get more serious about reducing dependencies on China that the ruling Communist Party could use for coercion. Read more here.
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