Applied History Project

China is developing 500 smart cities — almost half the worldwide total, and more than 10 times North America's figure.

Why it matters: China's smart cities signal the country's strengths not only in technology and infrastructure, but in implementation.

The strategic rationale for the relationship between the United States and China has collapsed. After a quarter century in which American presidents sought to integrate a rapidly developing China into the American-led international order, the United States has concluded that what it thought was a “strategic partner” is in fact a “strategic adversary.” After decades of keeping its head down following Deng Xiaoping’s injunction to “hide and bide,” Xi Jinping’s China has discarded that cloak and become increasingly assertive.

In early May, 70 scholars and practitioners gathered for the Applied History Network Meeting at Harvard Kennedy School, hosted by the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

On the anniversary of  the Allied Forces invasion of Normandy, Calder Walton recounts an extraordinary story about intelligence, war, and D-Day. The British and Americans devised an entire false army in southern England, made of inflatable tanks and balsa-wood, to convince the German high command that the real Allied invasion was coming to Calais, not Normandy. The deception plan worked perfectly—and saved Allied lives on the beaches of Normandy.

Calder Walton  analyzes Brexit's cascading series of repercussions for British intelligence.  He recommends that the UK invest in cyber/digital intelligence as a way out of the strategic intelligence quagmire that Brexit has placed it in.

You were hired a month ago as a special assistant to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. When selecting you, he said he wanted someone from outside the system, with fresh eyes, and a capacity for strategic imagination. As he put it in giving you what he called a “modest assignment,” your first project is to help him design a US grand strategy for meeting the China challenge.