Search results for ""hoover institution press,u.s.""

What was life in the Soviet Union really like? Through a series of true stories, One Day We Will Live Without Fear describes what people's day-to-day life was like under the regime of the Soviet police state. Drawing on events from the 1930s through the 1970s, Mark Harrison shows how, by accident or design, people became entangled in the workings of Soviet rule. The author outlines the seven principles on which that police state operated during its history, from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and illustrates them throughout the book. Well-known people appear in the stories, but the central characters are those who will have been remembered only within their families: a budding artist, an engineer, a pensioner, a government office worker, a teacher, a group of tourists. Those tales, based on historical records, shine a light on the many tragic, funny, and bizarre aspects of Soviet life.

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A diverse group of contributors offer different perspectives on whether or not the different experiences of our military and the broader society amounts to a ""gap""—and if the American public is losing connection to its military. They analyze extensive polling information to identify those gaps between civilian and military attitudes on issues central to the military profession and the professionalism of our military, determine which if any of these gaps are problematic for sustaining the traditionally strong bonds between the American military and its broader public, analyze whether any problematic gaps are amenable to remediation by policy means, and assess potential solutions. The contributors also explore public disengagement and the effect of high levels of public support for the military combined with very low levels of trust in elected political leaders—both recurring themes in their research. And they reflect on whether American society is becoming so divorced from the requirements for success on the battlefield that not only will we fail to comprehend our military, but we also will be unwilling to endure a military so constituted to protect us.

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Paolo Mancosu continues an investigation he began in his 2013 book Inside the Zhivago Storm, which the New York Book Review of Books described as "a tour de force of literary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes". In this book Mancosu extends his detective work by reconstructing the network of contacts that helped Pasternak smuggle the typescripts of Doctor Zhivago outside the Soviet Union and following the vicissitudes of the typescripts when they arrived in the West. Mancosu draws on a wealth of firsthand sources to piece together the long-standing mysteries surrounding the many different typescripts that played a role in the publication of Doctor Zhivago, thereby solving the problem of which typescript served as the basis of the first Russian edition: a pirate publication covertly orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also offers a new perspective, aided by the recently declassified CIA documents, by narrowing the focus as to who might have passed the typescript to the CIA. In the process, Mancosu reveals details of events that were treated as top secret by all those involved, vividly recounting the history of the publication of Pasternak's epic work with all its human and political ramifications.

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In 2012, building off work first published in 2010, the Resolution Project proposed that a new Chapter 14 be added to the Bankruptcy Code, exclusively designed to deal with the reorganization or liquidation of the nation’s large financial institutions. In this book, the contributors expand on their proposal to improve the prospect that our largest financial institutions—particularly with prebankruptcy planning—could be successfully reorganized or liquidated pursuant to the rule of law and, in doing so, both make resolution planning pursuant to Title I of Dodd-Frank more fruitful and make reliance on administrative proceedings pursuant to Title II of Dodd-Frank largely unnecessary.

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Andrei Sakharov holds an honored place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest scientists, reformers, and champions of human rights. But his embrace of human rights did not come through a sudden conversion; he came to it in stages. Drawing from a 2014 Hoover Institution conference focused on Sakharov’s life and principles, this book tells the compelling story of his metamorphosis from a distinguished physical scientist into a courageous, outspoken dissident humanitarian voice. His extraordinary life saw him go from playing the leading role in designing and building the most powerful thermonuclear weapon (the so-called hydrogen bomb) ever exploded to demanding an end to the testing of such weapons and their eventual elimination. The essays detail his transformation, as he appealed first to his scientific colleagues abroad and then tomankind at large, for solidarity in resolving the growing threats to human survival—many of which stemmed from science and technology. Ultimately, the distinguished contributors show how the work and thinking of this eminent Russian nuclear physicist and courageous human rights campaigner can help find solutions to the nuclear threats of today.

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The Nuclear Dilemma in a Changing World.The War That Must Never Be Fought explores how nuclear deterrence should be understood seventy years after the first nuclear tests. These essays, edited by George P. Shultz and James E. Goodby, challenge outdated deterrence theories and show a clear need to re-examine notions from the Cold War that no longer fit present circumstances. They argue that a world without nuclear weapons is a desirable objective that is in the national security interests of the United States.The contributors examine nuclear deterrence from the vantage points of nations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, all of which have some form of security relationship with the United States, either cooperative or competitive. They explain, for instance, why agreement by Poland and Germany on nuclear deterrence and nuclear arms control is necessary if Europeans are to be proactive in reducing nuclear weapons in Europe and. They explore the strategic views, and resulting nuclear policies, of India and Pakistan to determine the possibilities for decoupling nuclear weapons from deterrence. They also tell why successfully reducing and ultimately eliminating the nuclear threat must be based on a combination of regional and global joint enterprises. The authors conclude with suggestions that might lead to a successful joint enterprise on security among the world's nuclear powers.

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In her memoirs, Helena Paderewska, wife of the celebrated pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, tells how she partnered with her husband to influence the course of history for their native Poland after World War I. Through his fame as a musician, Paderewski gained access to top political leadership and became an eloquent spokesman for the country of his birth, then divided among the empires of Germany, Russia, and Austro-Hungary. With Helena's support and collaboration, Paderewski succeeded in uniting the Polish American community and gaining the support of the Allied governments toward Polish independence.Helena's story represents a rare example of a woman's documenting the world of international politics during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. As Paderewski's companion, she facilitated and accompanied virtually his every move and was one of only several women present for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Her accounts are essential sources on the key historical events in which she and her husband participated.

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Ronald Reagan's Cold War strategy was well established in his first year in office and did not change throughout his presidency. It was to make absolutely sure in the minds of the Soviets that they too would be destroyed in a nuclear war - even as Reagan sought an alternative through strategic defense to make nuclear missiles obsolete and thus eliminate the possibility of an all-out nuclear war. This book offers new perspectives on Ronald Reagan's primary accomplishment as president - persuading the Soviets to reduce their nuclear arsenals and end the Cold War. It details how he achieved this success and in the process explains why Americans consider Reagan one of our greatest presidents. The authors examine the decisions Reagan made during his presidency that made his success possible and review Reagan's critical negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev ending with the 1988 Moscow Summit that effectively ended the Cold War. They present Gorbachev's thoughts on Reagan as a great man and a great president 20 years after he left office. But ultimately, they reveal the depth of Reagan's vision of a world safe from nuclear weapons, painting a clear portrait of a Cold Warrior who saw the possibility of moving beyond that war.

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By democracy we usually mean a government comprising popular rule, individual human rights and freedom, and a free-market economy. Yet the flaws in traditional Athenian democracy can instruct us on the weaknesses of that first element of modern democracies shared with Athens: rule by all citizens equally. In Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents, Bruce Thornton discusses those criticisms first aired by ancient critics of Athenian democracy, then traces the historical process by which the Republic of the founders has evolved into something similar to ancient democracy, and finally argues for the relevance of those critiques to contemporary US policy.He asserts that many of the problems we face today are the consequences of the increasing democratization of our government and that the flaws of democracy, being ultimately an expression of the flaws in human nature, are unlikely to be corrected. Yet, he says, the continuing vigour of the US Constitution and the American character give us hope that democracy’s dangers and discontents do not have to end in soft despotism and that we can restore the limited government of the founders and recover American democracy’s “aptitude and strength.”

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Author Angelo Codevilla asks, What is to be America’s peace? How is it to be won and preserved in our time? He notes that our government’s increasingly unlimited powers flow in part from our statesmen’s inability to stay out of wars or to win them and that our statesmen and academics have eased to think about such things. The purpose of this book is to rekindle such thoughts.The author re-establishes early American statecraft’s understanding of peace—what it takes to make it and what it takes to keep it. He reminds Americans why our founding generation placed the pursuit of peace ahead of all other objectives; he shows how they tried to keep the peace by drawing sharp lines between America’s business and that of others, as well as between peace and war.He shows how our 20th-century statesmen confused peace and war as well as America’s affairs with that of mankind’s. The result, he shows, has been endless war abroad and spiralling strife among Americans. Codevilla provides intellectual guidelines for recovering the pursuit of peace as the guiding principle by which the American people and statesmen may navigate domestic as well as international affairs.

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When Barack Obama came into office, the strategic landscape facing the United States in its overseas counterterrorism operations was undergoing a shift. Even before the rise of drones necessitated the articulation of legal doctrine, the Obama administration had to explain itself. In Speaking the Law, the authors offer a detailed examination of the speeches of the Obama administration on national security legal issues. Viewed together here for the first time, the authors lay out a broad array of legal and policy positions regarding a large number of principles currently contested at both the domestic and international levels. The book describes what the Obama administration has said about the legal framework in which it is operating with respect to such questions as the nature of the war on terrorism, the use of drones and targeted killings, detention, trial by military commission and in federal courts, and interrogation. The authors analyze this framework, examining the stresses on it and asking where the administration got matters right and where they were wrong. They conclude with suggestions for certain reforms to the framework for the administration and Congress to consider.

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The coming decade holds immense potential for dramatic improvement in U.S. education and in the achievement of American children and in this volume, members of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education examine both the potential gains and the pitfalls that lie ahead, informed by where U.S. education has been, what changes have been made in recent years, and what’s still required for the comprehensive overhaul that this vital enterprise so urgently needs.Looking backward is infinitely easier than predicting the future, but planning for the future is necessary if anything is to change and by analysing the recent past and present condition of American primary and secondary school education across a host of key topics, task force members in this volume chart a bold course for the years ahead.Optimistic about the opportunities at hand, they identify essential—and feasible—reforms as well as the barriers that must be overcome if those changes are to occur. They offer high-quality scholarship and thoughtful prescriptions for productive policy alternatives.

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During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labour camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimised by the Gulag, Paul Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply in the literature. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of these five women—from different social strata and regions—in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. ¬ These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state.Gregory begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the twentieth century.

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Public schools face the challenge of educating large numbers of students for whom learning does not come easily. They are institutions with long-established practices, often protected by politics and therefore highly resistant to change. The Best Teachers in the World explains why changing our traditional approach to improving our schools is critical and tells how to achieve such change. John Chubb shows how we can raise student achievement to levels comparable to those of the best nations in the world through a new strategy for raising teacher quality that is very different from the approach our country has historically followed. He asserts that we must attract and retain high-calibre individuals to teaching, train teachers in institutions and programs that can demonstrate their efficacy in producing teachers who raise student achievement, and improve the quality of school leadership.Chubb suggests moving beyond licensing and other regulatory approaches to teacher quality to focus on providing quality by measuring performance directly-including direct measurement of both teacher effectiveness and training effectiveness-with the success of each gauged by the ability of participants subsequently to raise student achievement. Given strong incentives to perform and the information to do so, he shows, the American educational system can improve teacher training and raise teacher quality to the highest levels in the world.

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Public schools face the challenge of educating large numbers of students for whom learning does not come easily. They are institutions with long-established practices, often protected by politics and therefore highly resistant to change. The Best Teachers in the World explains why changing our traditional approach to improving our schools is critical and tells how to achieve such change. John Chubb shows how we can raise student achievement to levels comparable to those of the best nations in the world through a new strategy for raising teacher quality that is very different from the approach our country has historically followed. He asserts that we must attract and retain high-calibre individuals to teaching, train teachers in institutions and programs that can demonstrate their efficacy in producing teachers who raise student achievement, and improve the quality of school leadership.Chubb suggests moving beyond licensing and other regulatory approaches to teacher quality to focus on providing quality by measuring performance directly—including direct measurement of both teacher effectiveness and training effectiveness—with the success of each gauged by the ability of participants subsequently to raise student achievement. Given strong incentives to perform and the information to do so, he shows, the American educational system can improve teacher training and raise teacher quality to the highest levels in the world.

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The federal government is today facing the largest fiscal challenge since World War II. The fundamental question before the nation is whether the fiscal course the government is on can continue. In Entitlement Spending: Our Coming Fiscal Tsunami, David Koitz argues that it is not a Democratic or Republican problem; it is an American problem. As it comes ever closer, he contends, the need for political convergence becomes ever more pressing. Written so as to make the issues understandable to nonexperts, the book is designed to raise public awareness of the urgency to act by clarifying misconceptions and presenting the facts on the impending economic crisis driven by the federal government's enormous spending on entitlement programs. Although Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are idolised as pillars of the nation's safety net, he shows why those programs are in fact the largest drivers of our looming fiscal problem. He explains how, if an effective remedy is to emerge, those programs must contribute heavily to the changes lawmakers consider and offers various policy directions for reining in their spending. Koitz suggests, for instance, that increasing out-of-pocket spending by health care consumers may be the only effective way to sensitise both medical providers and patients to the costs of care, contending that, regardless of how this may affect utilisation or medical practices, major limits are needed in Medicare and Medicaid expenditures because they have become unaffordable. Whether by raising the Medicare eligibility age above sixty-five, imposing higher deductibles and co-payments, or converting Medicare to a program supporting the purchase of health insurance in the private market, the program's expenditures must be reined in and the expectations of future Medicare recipients balanced against the risks of a governmental debt calamity. For Social Security, he says, the public must understand that much of the system's financial problems are due to the large gains in longevity since the system's inception in the 1930s and the much larger lifetime benefits now being paid to current retirees and projected to be paid to future generations. Social Security too, he contends, needs major constraints, many of which have long lingered and are well understood on Capitol Hill; what is lacking is political courage. He emphasises that the nation's long-term economic outlook is now predicated on issuing an unsustainable amount of debt and that for policy makers to ignore that condition and the things creating it, or to pass the buck to future generations to make the hard choices, is simply irresponsible. He concludes "it's not courage to make clear what for decades was opaque. It's not courage to act responsibly and do what's seemingly hard. It's statesmanship. It's about the real job of legislating.

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This detailed account of Herbert Hoover's presidency reveals him as a staunch defender of constitutional government and one of our least understood presidents. Battling political partisanship while trying to place the needs of the nation as a whole over those of state and localities, Hoover found his program for America's entry into the new scientific era overwhelmed by profound changes in the social and economic structure of a nation entering a new age.

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Vitaly Leonidovich Katayev was an eyewitness to history as he saw the arms race accelerating at an absurd and inexplicable pace, and he understood why. His perspective was from inside the Soviet system, in an office that was devoted to analysis of arms control and defense matters in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and later in an interdepartmental working group. Vitaly Katayev was a skilled designer and an acute observer. His recollections in this book, along with documents he deposited at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, offer an extraordinary window into Soviet decisions and calculations. This monograph shows how Soviet leaders were often hobbled by a poor understanding of what was happening in the United States, but it also demonstrates that Americans, too, had a weak grasp of what was happening in Moscow, before and after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. The misunderstandings on both sides were a symptom of the deepest chasm of the Cold War and A Memoir of the Missile Age provides a valuable key with which to open the Soviet black box.

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Originating in Hoover Institution discussions held under the auspices of the Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society, Conserving Liberty defends the principles of American conservatism, clarifying many of the narrow or mistaken views that have arisen from both its friends and its foes. Author Mark Blitz asserts that individual liberty is the most powerful, reliable, and true standpoint from which to clarify and secure conservatism—but that individual freedom alone cannot produce happiness. He shows that, to fully grasp conservatism’s merits, we must we also understand the substance of responsibility, toleration and other virtues, traditional institutions, individual excellence, and self-government.Blitz first sketches the elements of conservatism that appeal to individuals, reminding us that to consider ourselves first of all as free individuals and not in group, class, racial, or gender terms is the heart of American conservatism’s strength. He then shows that we need certain virtues to secure our rights and use them successfully—responsibility being the chief among these virtues. The author also explains how institutional authority works, why it is necessary, and where it supports the intellectually and morally excellent. He clarifies how natural rights and their associated virtues can be a base from which to secure and preserve necessary institutions.

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What exactly is the United Nations? For that matter, why is there still a United Nations at all? In Living with the UN, international legal scholar Kenneth Anderson analyzes US-UN relations in each major aspect of the United Nations’ work—security, human rights and universal values, and development—and addresses the crucial question of whether, when, and how the United States should engage or not engage with the United Nations in its many different organs and activities. He looks at each UN organ and function and suggests the form of engagement that the United States should take toward it, giving workable, pragmatic meaning to “multilateral engagement” across the full range of the United Nations’ work.Cutting through the “alphabet soup” of UN agencies, as well as the utopian idealism that, however noble, often clouds analyses of the United Nations, the book offers principles for a permanent relationship based on ideals and interests between the United States and the United Nations—and provides guidance for long-term US policy that runs far beyond the Obama administration’s tenure. Ultimately, Living with the UN offers a vision of a better, but also more modest, United Nations—a vision unlikely to be realized but well worth presenting.

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The Nuclear Security Project, launched in 2007, helped reframe the global debate on nuclear issues and garnered significant global and domestic attention, increasing the political space for addressing global nuclear dangers and advancing understanding of the steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers. This volume, one of several under the project, presents a blueprint for actions government leaders can take to guide the policy making and technical development necessary to move toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Ten expert contributors identify the key technical, political, and diplomatic challenges associated with verifying, monitoring, and enforcing a world free of nuclear weapons and provide potential solutions to those challenges. Unifying themes include principal challenges or stumbling blocks; current technical limits that should inform decisions about investment in further research and technical analysis; technical constraints to developing the kind of system necessary to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons; and developing the architecture for a verification system.Contributors: Steven P. Andreasen, Everet H. Beckner, James Fuller, Steinar Høibråten, Edward Ifft, Halvor Kippe, Harold Müller, Annette Schaper, Thomas E. Shea, Ralf Wirtz

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Since its inception in 1947, the idea of Pakistan has been a contested one. Today, Pakistan faces a militant Islamist threat that its elected government is trying to combat in fractious collaboration with the army. As the country finds itself on the defensive against an array of groups claiming to wave the banner of Islam, it must counter their ideology decisively. This assessment of the struggle for Pakistan’s identity, from its birth to the present day, provides a political and cultural understanding of the role and use of Islam in Pakistan’s evolution.Author Ziad Haider, a Pakistani scholar, shows clearly how Pakistan’s viability as a state depends in large part on its ability to develop a new and progressive Islamic narrative. He identifies the key questions: How can religion in Pakistan be channeled as a force for progressive change, and what form should an enabling narrative of Islam in Pakistan assume? As the United States becomes more involved in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we shall need deeper understanding of both countries. This portrait of Pakistan is a valuable contribution to that endeavor.

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Mark V. Pauly offers a detailed look at the individual insurance market in the United States. He explains how it works, suggests approaches to improvement that build on what currently works well, and provides a realistic assessment of how much improvement we can demand and expect. He concludes that, although there are some serious deficiencies in today's individual insurance market, there are also some important advantages in this market that should be preserved.

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Christianity may have “won the world,” in the sense of being the most widespread religion in history with the largest number of adherents, but it is steadily losing ground in and around its birthplace. Although Christians of the East are leaving their homelands in record numbers, the powers of the West have shown little interest in their fate. In this essay by the noted Lebanese scholar Habib Malik—himself a child of Christian Lebanon—Malik offers a sobering account of the ordeal of Christian Arabs of the Middle East in this era of Islamist radicalism.Malik explains why the number of native Christians in the Middle East—now between ten and twelve million—continues to dwindle, one of the most prominent reasons being the rise of Islamic extremism, or Islamism, in both its Sunni and its Shiite varieties. Despite weaving a bleak tapestry, he offers hopeful suggestions on how to achieve a healthy pluralism between Muslims and Christians in the region.

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The growing threat of biological and chemical weapons (BCW) has created the frightening prospect of terrorist attacks by states, state-sanctioned terrorist organizations, and destructive individuals loose in our midst. What can we do to prepare for this threat? This illuminating and often disturbing book brings together the views of leading thinkers—in science, medicine, international and constitutional law, law enforcement, intelligence, and crisis management—on all diverse aspects of this challenge based on their statements at the November 1998 Hoover Institution Conference on Biological and Chemical Weapons. The New Terror takes a hard look at the most pressing BCW issues facing the international community and realistic options for preventing, deterring against, and mitigating the consequences of the use of BCW.

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Although almost a half-century has passed since the jury at Alger Hiss's second trial pronounced him guilty of perjury, the case remains controversial and the verdict leaves questions unanswered. The case has continued to make headlines and attract considerable media attention in the years since Perjury was first published in 1978, and this new edition of the book incorporates evidence available only in the past two decades, bringing the essential public story of the episode up to the present. The author has sought and gained access to many previously undiscovered, unavailable, or ignored sources of documentary and oral evidence, both in this country and abroad. His visits to over two dozen public archives uncovered important new material and verified numerous details about the case from the papers or recollections of Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, Felix Frankfurter, Richard Nixon, Harry S. Truman, and many others.The Hiss-Chambers case caused widespread political damage and much human suffering. Although nothing written at a distance of almost five decades can undo its effects, this analysis can perhaps explain the passion that the case still arouses.

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