Uzi Arad visited the Hoover Institution on Friday, April 26, 2013, to discuss Israel’s national security challenges and US-Israel relations. Richard Sousa, senior associate director, and Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, also attended the event.

An episode of political violence in London a hundred years ago, featuring a cast of characters including revolutionaries from the Russian Empire, Winston Churchill, and the czarist secret police (the Okhrana) is in the news again, at least in Latvia, where the revolutionaries came from. The episode, known as the Siege of Sidney Street, has never completely disappeared from popular folklore in London, even figuring as part of the inspiration for an Alfred Hitchcock film (The Man Who Knew Too Much). Despite its notoriety, the incident has faded from history, eclipsed first by the outbreak of World War I and by much larger events such as the 1917 Russian revolution.

The 2016 Fall Retreat, which took place during October 16–18,  the talks were for the first time organized around a single theme: American exceptionalism. 

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 Hoover Institution is pleased to announce the fourth issue of Strategika. This issue asks a significant, but often ignored question: What do the jihadists want? Max Boot analyzes the history of jihadism in Chechnya beginning in the 19th century, and elucidates the lessons we can learn from this historical example. In the featured commentary essays, Josef Joffe examines the contradictions in the stated aims of jihadi terrorism, while Peter R. Mansoor explores the activities of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

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.

Chairman Hebert Dwight convened the meeting of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers at the Willard InterContinental hotel in Washington, DC, on Sunday, February 24, 2013. In addition to conducting its usual business in its semiannual two-day meeting in Washington, the board had the opportunity to hear from leading legislative and judicial officials from the federal government and to learn of the research of selected Hoover fellows.