“American Power and Influence: Assessments and Directions,” the third annual conference of the Hoover History Lab (HHL) on power, took place January 16-18, 2025, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, on the eve of the presidential inauguration. This annual gathering under the direction of Stephen Kotkin offers an extraordinary opportunity for analysts in the intelligence community and scholars, scientists, and national security professionals outside government to exchange ideas and gain deeper insights. This year, HHL partnered with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (since disestablished, after half a century), in addition to our longstanding main partner, the National Intelligence Council, and a group of distinguished analysts representing allies and friends, as well as Stanford students. There were some four dozen participants in all. Panels explored the full panoply of comprehensive national power: hard power, economic power, science and innovation power, soft power, alliance power, and willpower. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology featured prominently, as increasingly general-purpose technologies, and the keys to unlock innovation attracted the spotlight.
As its point of departure, the conference used a RAND report from a quarter century ago, Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age, a project led by Ashley J. Tellis, who was on hand to reflect on that work and how anything written today might look in 25 years. Presciently, that coauthored report focused on national (not natural) resources and national performance, that is, how some countries do better than others in mastering the cycles of innovation. Endowments can be measured (and therefore are readily studied), while it remains difficult, yet decisive, to assess operational competence, and to do so not as an outcome but as an attribute. Many discussants, including Hoover Institution Director and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, appreciated the framework’s enduring qualities while pondering the changing context from 25 years ago, whether today’s sharply declining fertility rates or pervasive digital networks, extreme interconnectivity, the ubiquity of dual-use technologies, or the stunning shift of manufacturing prowess to China. The group proceeded to examine analysis itself as a form of power.
Key debates revolved around questions of confidence, unifying narratives, and a sense of national purpose, as well as signs of deteriorating institutional performance. In 2024, debt payments exceeded the defense budget as a percentage of GDP, a trajectory set to worsen, highlighting the fiscal constraints on American power—and how solutions must come from political will (entitlement reforms). Abiding differences between American and European traditions of populism generated lively discussion. One presenter underscored how the American system is uniquely capable of generating but also digesting populist uprisings, channeling the energy while struggling to sideline the fringe elements, whereas elsewhere, especially in Europe, political systems pull out all the stops to keep populists out. Another presenter highlighted how U.S. economic performance has been astonishingly steady, roughly 2 percent average growth per annum through booms and busts, accounting for 25 percent of global GDP, since 1880—under a wide variety of policy regimes, but with underlying fundamentals: vigorous competition in the economy and in politics.
James Baker, at the time the director of the Office of Net Assessment, briefed another incisive, sobering presentation comparing U.S.-China capabilities in the military domain, weaving together into a cohesive whole a very wide array of publicly available writings by analysts outside ONA, thereby excluding classified information and protecting ONA’s own viewpoint. On hard power in the future, one attendee detailed how all the authorizations are already in place for a sweeping transformation of how the U.S. designs, builds, and buys new kinds of military hardware and software, if only imagination and initiative took hold.
America is a superpower, one foreign analyst reminded us, adding that he and his colleagues find themselves constantly compelled to remind the U.S. of its power. In fact, global demand for U.S. commitments seems unlimited but the supply is not, necessitating a fundamental rebalancing—which has commenced. Still, if the U.S. and its allies manage to deter hot war, the prize could well be so-called grey zone conflict as far as the eye can see. Private sector representatives in tech and infrastructure driving investment and innovation afforded cause for optimism, given deep and abiding strengths. As the conference wound down, how to specify the ways power’s various dimensions might interact going forward, and whether new dimensions were emerging and old dimensions diminishing, remained among the profound challenges to probe the next time. One attendee concluded that for analysts coming from the intelligence community, the conference constituted a mindset shift, because they study the adversary and global dynamics, marshaling their regional area expertise, but more and more they must have expertise in American history and institutions, to better understand Team Blue, something that can best be done with external partnerships, such as the one with the Hoover History Lab.
