This Friday, Russell Berman explains what’s at stake for the United States if a far-right party comes into power in upcoming German state elections; Hsiao-ting Lin introduces a new Hoover Institution exhibit chronicling the brutal “reeducation” that millions of Chinese young people experienced during the Cultural Revolution; and Stephen Haber joins Bill Whalen to discuss what the fifty-year success of Apple reveals about the American innovation ecosystem.
European Politics
At 1945, Senior Fellow Russell Berman argues that the “firewall” maintained by Germany’s major political parties against the far-right AfD party is not working. As the AfD continues to gain ground, Berman says, “Germany is now confronting difficult questions about where legitimate democratic defense ends and political exclusion begins.” Berman sees two reasons this challenge concerns Americans. First, prominent figures including Vice President Vance and Elon Musk “have publicly expressed sympathy for the AfD or criticized efforts to exclude it from German political life,” so the future of the AfD will carry ramifications for their political brands. “The second and more consequential issue concerns Russia,” Berman writes. The AfD calls for a return to importing Russian energy as well as ceasing German aid to Ukraine. Both policies, if adopted, would undermine American strategy. Berman warns that an AfD victory in upcoming state elections would “present Moscow with an opportunity to exploit political divisions inside one of NATO’s most important European members.” Read more here.
Freedom Frequency
During Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, millions of young people were torn from their homes and sent to farm and labor camps for “reeducation.” A new exhibition at the Hoover Institution brings to light these stories from a brutal decade of Chinese history. The story of the “sent-down youth” is one of deprivation and abuse in the name of enforcing revolutionary ideals, argues Research Fellow and curator Hsiao-ting Lin. Many of those young people were determined both to survive and to escape, he writes, and the fragile artifacts they used—handmade compasses, hidden maps, letters, and cherished objects—are now on display to help viewers understand this dark epoch. Read more here.
China’s appropriation of intellectual property, familiar to many companies as the “price of doing business,” represents a rupture in the world trading system, argue Hoover Fellow Eyck Freymann and coauthor Hugo Bromley. Intellectual property has always conferred great advantages in trade, and there have always been tensions between hoarding it and encouraging further innovation. In the 1990s, they explain, a new legal architecture set up to manage this tension included binding commitments to protect IP. But China subverted this arrangement through programs of coercion, espionage, lax legal protections, and outright theft, Bromley and Freymann say. And now, artificial intelligence is shaping cyber technology that will make IP even harder to protect. The authors conclude that the world needs a new structure that can preserve the inestimable value of trade, satisfy global partners, and protect against piracy, spying, and the forced taking of intellectual property. Read more here.
“Chokepoints” in trade and finance are signs of geoeconomic power, or the ability of governments to leverage their strengths to achieve goals in the world, Senior Fellow Matteo Maggiori, Christopher Clayton, and Jesse Schreger argue in this essay. True chokepoints are not always easy to identify: A buyer must be reliant on a supplier for most of its purchases, alternatives must be inferior, and the buyer’s economy must be largely dependent on the input. Where true chokepoints exist, the authors note, it’s important for suppliers to exert themselves predictably, credibly, and according to established rules. The main reason for this discipline is that acting coercively undercuts a hegemon’s power—buyers will find or develop alternatives or other suppliers. A longer-term risk associated with abusing geoeconomic power, the authors find, is that countries will “fragment,” or pull away from the trading system that continues to bring benefits to the world. Read more here.
Technology and Innovation
Fifty years ago, three young men working out of a modest ranch house in Los Altos, California, changed the world by creating Apple Inc. But what is the broader meaning of Apple’s success?
The Big Idea: In conversation with Distinguished Policy Fellow Bill Whalen, Senior Fellow Stephen Haber contends that the tech giant is but one more example of America’s uniquely innovative technological and commercial ecosystem, more than two and a half centuries in the making. Watch or listen here.
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