Today, Condoleezza Rice offers her analysis of recent US diplomacy with Russia and increased support for Ukraine; Peter Berkowitz explains the importance of citizens recognizing the distinctive contributions of the American Declaration of Independence; and Michael Hartney considers whether the behavior of political leaders might account for declining support among Americans for using standardized tests to measure student achievement.
US Foreign Policy
Over the weekend, NBC News reported on former Secretary of State and current Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice’s remarks at the annual Aspen Security Forum. Responding to President Trump’s ultimatum to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin that he “accept a peace deal with Ukraine within 50 days or face new secondary sanctions,” Rice said, “I think the best news that we could possibly give to the Ukrainian people is that the United States and Europe have finally aligned around the idea that Vladimir Putin will not be stopped with words. He will only be stopped if he believes that he can go no further, he can win no further.” Rice suggested that American and European alignment on handling Russia marks a “turning point” in the Ukraine conflict, raising the prospect of additional weapons deliveries and support for the embattled nation. Rice also discussed the possible challenges of enforcing secondary sanctions on entities doing business with Russia, and shared her view on why it’s not a bad thing that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is jointly serving as National Security Advisor. Read more here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
In his weekly column at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz argues that a key challenge as America heads into the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence will be communicating the enduring values, principles, and meaning of the Declaration in a political and educational atmosphere where it is often disparaged by left- and right-wing critics. “Captive to the taste for the gaudy and the melodramatic nurtured by American higher education, both camps want to revalue traditional values, change the world rather than understand it, and replace history’s complexities with simplistic grand narratives of good and evil,” writes Berkowitz. He calls on civic educators and citizens to remember the “revolutionary achievements of 1776—grounding just government in citizens’ consent, focusing government on securing rights, and protecting religious liberty out of respect for faith”—and to consider how they can inform constitutional government amid today’s national challenges. Read more here.
Reforming K–12 Education
Writing in the Opinion section at The74, Hoover Fellow Michael Hartney examines the consequences of voters “following the leader” in national education policy. As he explains, political science literature supports the idea that voters often embrace or reject “policies championed—or opposed—by elites in their political tribe.” In education, Hartney says, shifts among the Democratic Party’s leadership on school accountability and standardized testing have driven down rank-and-file support for the use of standardized tests to measure student achievement. While support has dropped over the last 20 years among Republicans too, the swing is larger among Democrats. Hartney suggests that the concurrent embrace of teachers’ unions by the Democratic Party helps to explain the change. As he concludes, “Testing and accountability became less popular among Democratic voters after the party’s elected officials and their powerful labor partners firmly united publicly against these positions.” Read more here.
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
In a piece for Project Syndicate coauthored with Vera Songwe of the Brookings Institution, Senior Fellow Peter Blair Henry and Distinguished Visiting Fellow Jendayi Frazer argue that while the Basel III international regulatory framework for banks has “played a crucial role in preventing another systemic collapse” since its inception in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it has also created “regulatory barriers that hinder the efficient deployment of capital to emerging markets and developing economies.” Noting the urgent need to deploy more private capital to these economies to finance development, health, and education, the authors propose four core reforms to the Basel III framework designed to “align regulation with actual risk.” As they conclude, implementation of these reforms by G20 nations would “crowd in more private investment, reduce borrowing costs for developing countries, and accelerate progress toward transformative development that creates much-needed jobs.” Read more here.
In a post for his Substack, Senior Fellow John H. Cochrane takes a look at the federal 340B drug pricing program. As Cochrane notes, “It is one of thousands of chaotic federal interventions that make our health care system maddeningly costly and inefficient, and a good example of some basic economic mistakes.” He explains how the “program is essentially a sales tax on drugs, used to fund a subsidy” for participating hospitals that are entitled to purchase drugs from manufacturers at a deep discount—then resell them for substantial profit. Reminding readers that “nobody gives stuff away for free,” Cochrane notes parallels between the 340B program and banking regulation, where the “government allows banks unique access to low paying government insured deposits” under the belief that “banks will turn around and lend money at lower rates.” In reality, at both banks and hospitals, Cochrane says, poorly designed incentives encourage taking advantage of subsidy programs. Read more here.
Related Commentary