As Barack Obama begins his second term as president of the United States, the nation faces a range of formidable challenges at the intersection of which are national security and law.

The Hoover Institution hosted its annual Spring Retreat beginning on Sunday, April 21, 2013, with before-dinner remarks by Kevin Warsh, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His speech, titled “The Economy over the Horizon: Unknown Knowns,” emphasized the importance of the state of the economy, which currently has a 2 percent growth rate, and understanding the concept of “unknown knowns,” a reference to former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The ten-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks recently passed. Shortly after September 11, 2001, Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson interviewed George P. Shultz on the war on terrorism in “Enemy at the Gates: The War on Terrorism.” “We should change the inflection in our voices when we say, that's history.

Acknowledging the long history of cooperation between the United State and Canada during times of armed conflict, the Honorable Peter MacKay, Canada’s minister of national defense, cited that cooperation in a roundtable meeting with Hoover fellows on Thursday, February 23, 2012, the culmination of the minister’s daylong meetings in Silicon Valley and at Stanford University.

The roundtable, hosted by Condoleezza Rice, the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow at Hoover, included discussions of the future of NATO, the conflict in Afghanistan and its implication for future conflicts, and the use of technology in intelligence gathering, all of which relate to the importance of international security and defense cooperation, Canada’s contributions to global security, and the strength of Canada’s long-standing defense and security relationship with the United States.