u/HooverInstitution

Mahnaz Akbari tells of the encounters she had as a member of Afghanistan’s security forces tasked with interviewing girls and women. These meetings conveyed a harsh truth: Afghan girls grow up not knowing they can learn to read and write and pursue their own interests. Many also believe that their society does not have a place for them. “I know she was not just a girl in a remote village,” Akbari writes of one meeting. “She was the symbol of millions of girls whose futures were decided before they ever had the chance to choose.” After Afghanistan fell again to the Taliban, women protested in the streets to defend their rights to education and freedom, Akbari writes, but those rights are under attack daily.

In this Q&A, Research Fellow and AI expert Max Lamparth takes a look at the growing pains of artificial intelligence, including popular misunderstandings of what it is, why industries feel pressure to deploy it prematurely, and how one of the greatest challenges is employing AI when we demand “a good answer from human judgment.” Concentration of AI power in a few hands also risks hampering the broad benefits of the technology, he says, also pointing out the risks of reflexive automation and information gatekeeping. His work includes finding ways to evaluate AI systems without picking winners, as well as learning how AI can perform both reliably and democratically. 

At The Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh examine the implications of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding. The deal “sets the stage for an eventual nuclear revival” on the part of Iran, they argue, “since what’s been blown up can be rebuilt as long as enough oil flows, the regime’s illicit dual-use import network remains operational, and US and Israeli intelligence fails against Iranian vigilance.” After demonstrating a bold willingness to cross “lines that previous presidents dared not traverse,” the authors say, President Trump now appears as “another American politician hoping to induce the Iranian regime toward pragmatism by dangling financial rewards.” Gerecht and Takeyh caution that previous administrations have gone wrong trying to find and exploit fissures between supposed moderates and hard-liners within the repressive Iranian regime, and they encourage current policymakers not to fall for this “fool’s gold of American statesmen.”

Today, “in the fifth year of Putin’s barbaric invasion, the assumption that time is on Russia’s side seems to be increasingly inaccurate,” Senior Fellow Michael McFaul argues in this viral post at his Substack. “The longer this war drags on, the more likely it is that time may, instead, be on Ukraine’s side.” The distinguished scholar explains that Putin failed to achieve regime change in Ukraine and ended up galvanizing Ukrainian identity with his invasion. Ukrainian defense innovations slowed Russian advances and now increasingly enable counteroffensives against the invading force. Ukraine has also developed the capability to strike deep inside Russia, imposing significant costs. So, McFaul concludes, “Ukraine will survive this war as a pro-European independent democracy, with most of its territory governed from Kyiv rather than Moscow.” But the “final contours” of the end to the conflict “are still not yet defined.”

Senior Fellow Frank Dikötter, a renowned historian of modern China, joins Uncommon Knowledge to discuss his new book, Red Dawn over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity with host Peter M. Robinson. Drawing from tightly controlled Chinese Communist Party archives and Soviet Comintern documents, Dikötter systematically dismantles decades of romanticized Western myths—originally popularized by journalist Edgar Snow—surrounding the rise of Mao Zedong. He details how the Chinese Communist Party was a deeply unpopular, marginal movement that was heavily armed by Joseph Stalin rather than gaining organic peasant support, eventually taking the country through the devastation of civil war and the Red Army’s strategic handover of Manchuria. Shifting to modern-day geopolitics, the conversation explores how the “enforced amnesia” around this history shapes the systemic constraints of China's current single-party state. Dikötter analyzes the vulnerabilities behind the CCP’s economic facade, Xi Jinping's relentless military purges, the critical importance of arming Taiwan, and why the West must counter a regime built on deep-seated political paranoia.

Hoover Senior Fellows John H. Cochrane and Amit Seru argue in this op-ed at The Washington Post that reforming financial regulations should be high on the list of priorities for recently confirmed Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. “The US financial regulatory regime failed catastrophically in 2008,” the authors write. But in their view, the post-crisis reforms, including “the Dodd-Frank law and the Fed’s subsidiary regulation,” only extended the pre-crisis approach of “managing asset riskiness.” The authors also trace how the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank “was fueled by earlier Fed errors.” Today, Seru and Cochrane conclude, “Warsh need not reform the big banks. . . . He should focus on simple truths: A crisis is a run and only a run is a crisis. Somebody losing money on a risky investment is not a crisis.”