- Security & Defense
- International Affairs
- Military
- History
- US Defense
- Science & Technology
- Determining America's Role in the World
- Revitalizing History
Stephen Kotkin returns to Uncommon Knowledge for another round of five questions, this time on Iran, China, Ukraine, and the future of the American republic. Kotkin argues that America still possesses unmatched strengths — economic, technological, military, and cultural — but warns that self-inflicted political dysfunction could squander them. Kotkin dissects Trump’s Iran strategy, explains why China wants Taiwan “for free,” argues that Ukraine has already won the sovereignty war against Russia, and delivers a powerful defense of America’s founding ideals at a moment when both authoritarian regimes abroad and political extremism at home are testing them. Sharp, provocative, and deeply informed, this is classic Kotkin: history as a guide to the geopolitical storms of the present.
Recorded on May 26, 2026.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Stephen Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Family Senior Fellow and director of the Hoover History Lab at the Hoover Institution, as well as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School), where he taught for 33 years. He earned his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley and has been conducting research at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives for more than three decades.
Peter M. Robinson is the Murdoch Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics and hosts Hoover's video series program Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. Robinson spent six years in the White House, serving from 1982 to 1983 as chief speechwriter to Vice President George H. W. Bush and from 1983 to 1988 as special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan. He wrote the historic Berlin Wall address in which President Reagan called on General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”
