The known details of the so-called Steele dossier point to a peculiar ambiguity. To expert analysts, it always appeared to be low-quality political opposition research. Yet, it turned American against American, paralyzed our government — and may be the greatest Russian disinformation coup in history.
The former State Secretary Condoleezza Rice said that Georgia should build its own democracy and economy in order to cope with difficult international circumstances, while the international community can only assist in this process.
President Trump has changed his mind on many issues. Yet there is one theme of his presidency that remains strikingly constant: his peculiar deference to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
As the November 2020 presidential election approaches, it is worth imagining how a foreign adversary might attempt to intervene in the domestic political process. We have no evidence that any of the precise things we consider in this essay are actually happening—though some may well be. They are based on a review of what we know to be possible and plausible given what has occurred in the past and the vulnerabilities we can see clearly today.
This poster from World War II Britain is a reminder of another era in which public health took on broad importance, with implications that crossed borders and even touched on world politics and conflict. Here are two science students examining samples under a microscope. What may be remarkable to modern viewers of this poster from the Hoover Archives is that the young scientists are not researching a vaccine or a cure.
by Mary Schaeffer Conroy, Valentina Fedorovna Sosonkinavia Hoover Digest
Tuesday, August 4, 2020
A hundred years ago, American doctors came to the aid of Belarus, a struggling Soviet republic where displaced people were falling prey to disease. In an eerily familiar story, overwhelmed hospitals and shortages of medical supplies prolonged the suffering. So did revolution and war.
It gets more ludicrous with every passing day – and more sinister. Take the case of Professor Patricia Simon, from Marymount Manhattan College in New York, who made the mistake of failing to be sufficiently enthusiastic in the course of a Zoom meeting.
Central banks want to learn from history. They can do so by drawing on decades of work by economic historians, as well as their own archives which manifest layers of institutional memory. But the path from page to policy can be difficult to find.
