What Winston Churchill’s Relations with Russia Can Teach Us for Today

10/30/20 • 15 min

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Thursday, October 29, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

“If only I could dine with Stalin once a week,” Winston Churchill said with unusual naïveté during the Second World War, “then there would be no trouble at all.” When it came to dealing with Russia, Churchill went through five distinct phases of engagement, of which the most dangerous was thinking that Stalin was a normal statesman for whom personal relations mattered, rather than a hardened Russian ideologue and nationalist for whom only Realpolitik mattered. Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts will explore how Churchill’s experience can help the West in its dealings with Vladimir Putin.

Andrew Roberts is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and Visiting Professor at the War Studies Department at King’s College. He has written over a dozen books including Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Napoleon the Great, and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which was a New York Times Bestseller and won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust and the National Army Museum, and received his PhD from Cambridge University.

ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUP

https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group

This interview is part of the History Working Group Seminar Series. A central piece of the History Working Group is the seminar series, which is hosted in partnership with the Hoover Library & Archives. The seminar series was launched in the fall of 2019, and thus far has included six talks from Hoover research fellows, visiting scholars, and Stanford faculty. The seminars provide outside experts with an opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work. While the lunch seminars have grown in reputation, they have been purposefully kept small in order to ensure that the discussion retains a good seminar atmosphere.

What Winston Churchill’s Relations with Russia Can Teach Us for Today

Thursday, October 29, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

ABOUT THE HOOVER HISTORY WORKING GROUP

https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/history-working-group

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undefined - China’s Rise And Prospects For Security And Stability In The Indo-Pacific Region | 2020 Conference on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region | Panel 6

China’s Rise And Prospects For Security And Stability In The Indo-Pacific Region | 2020 Conference on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region | Panel 6

Thursday, October 29, 2020 Hoover Institution

Panel 6: Thursday, October 29, 4-5:30pm PDT and focuses on China’s Rise And Prospects For Security And Stability In The Indo-Pacific Region.

CHAIR: H.R. McMaster (Hoover Institution)

DISCUSSANT: Larry Diamond (Hoover Institution)

Michael Auslin, Hoover Institution

Elizabeth Economy, Hoover Institution

James Ellis, Hoover Institution

Thomas Fingar, Stanford University

Orville Schell, Asia Society

MEET THE PANELISTS

Dr. Michael Auslin is Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution. A historian of U.S. policy in Asia, he is the author of Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific.

Dr. Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He chairs Hoover’s projects on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and China’s Global Sharp Power. A renowned expert on democracy, he is the author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.

Dr. Elizabeth Economy is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an expert on Chinese domestic and foreign policy and author of The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State.

ADM James Ellis (Ret.) is an Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He led United States Strategic Command and commanded the USS Independence carrier battle group during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1996. He is also the former president and CEO of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO).

Dr. Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Formerly, he was first deputy director of national intelligence and chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Most recently, he co-edited Fateful Decisions: Choices that Will Shape China’s Future.

LTG H.R. McMaster (Ret.) is Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was the 26th U.S. national security advisor. McMaster is the author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World.

Orville Schell is Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. A long-time China observer, Schell is former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Next Episode

Covert, Coercive, and Corrupt: Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence in Free Societies

Friday, October 30, 2020 Hoover Institution, Stanford University

The Hoover Institution and the Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society held a Zoom webinar Covert, Coercive, and Corrupt: Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence in Free Societies: A Conversation with Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell on Friday, October 30, 2020 from 12:00 pm - 1:15 pm PDT | 3:00 pm - 4:15 pm EDT.

Following introductory remarks from Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell will give a policy address on the PRC's malign influence activities and how the US government is countering them. He will focus in particular on how the US government is using legal, diplomatic, and consular tools to identify PRC propaganda outlets, and on how it is seeking to help ensure the fair and reciprocal treatment of foreign journalists in China. After the speech, Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond will lead Assistant Secretary Stilwell in conversation with the Asia Society’s Orville Schell and Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

FEATURING

David R. Stilwell is the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He served in the Air Force for 35 years, retiring in 2015 in the rank of Brigadier General as the Asia advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. From 2017-2019, Mr. Stilwell served as the Director of the China Strategic Focus Group at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii. He was awarded the Department of Defense Superior Service Award in 2015.

Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a founding partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm. Rice served as the sixty-sixth secretary of state of the United States (2005-2009) and as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser (2001-2005).

Larry Diamond is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He chairs Hoover’s project on China’s Global Sharp Power. His most recent book is Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency (2019).

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society and former dean and professor at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of ten books about China, including most recently Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century (2013).

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Dr. Mastro is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she works as a strategic planner at INDOPACOM.