CWP alum Eyck Freymann on the Hoover Institution Podcast 'Taiwan’s Slow Squeeze, Ukraine’s Long War'
America’s complicated relationship with China doesn’t lack for subplots – tariffs, territorial designs, human rights and espionage. But does the superpowers’ Cold War-like competition over artificial intelligence supersede all other U.S.-Sino concerns? On the eve of the year’s second Trump-Xi summit, Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann discusses the state of the superpowers’ rivalry and the possibility of a Chinese move on Taiwan in the near future (Freymann being the author of 2026’s Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, envisions an “all-domain pressure campaign” that slowly strangles the island nation). After that: Sir Niall recounts his recent visit to Kyiv (his fifth time in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion) and the odds of Vladimir Putin finding an “off-ramp” after a 55-month war of attrition (or, with his back to the wall, will Russia’s leader opt instead for a modern-day “Ludendorff Offensive”?). Finally, the fellows weigh in on the Fed’s recent rate increase, President Trump stepping up America’s strategic footprints in Greenland and Poland, plus what the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hanna-Jones’ mea culpa for purposely placing her daughter in a low-performing public school – the daughter now struggling with high-school academics – says about the state of education in America (and showcasing one’s offspring in the pages of The New York Times).
RELATED SOURCES
- Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann
- Is Peace at Hand in Ukraine? by Sir Niall Ferguson via The Free Press
- Cultivating Agency, Character, and Citizenship with H.R. McMaster and Ian Rowe on Today’s Battlegrounds
- TGIF by Nellie Bowles via The Free Press
https://www.hoover.org/plus/research/taiwans-slow-squeeze-ukraines-long-war
Taiwan’s Slow Squeeze, Ukraine’s Long War
GoodFellows • September 23, 2026 • 63 min • 58.8K views
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he directs the Allied Coordination Working Group. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, the Institute of Geoeconomics in Tokyo, and the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.
Dr. Freymann works on strategies to preserve peace and protect U.S. interests and values in an era of systemic competition with China. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford, 2026), The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices (Hoover, 2025), and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard, 2021). His scholarly work has appeared in The China Quarterly and is forthcoming in International Security.
Dr. Freymann comments on bipartisan national security issues in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, The Wire China, and The Atlantic, among other venues.
Before Hoover, Dr. Freymann held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Columbia. He holds a doctorate from Oxford, masters degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and a bachelors from Harvard, all in history and China studies.
Photo Credit: https://www.hoover.org/plus/research/taiwans-slow-squeeze-ukraines-long-war
