Chip War: Book Talk with Chris Miller

Join us for an engaging conversation with Chris Miller (Tufts University) and Stephen Kotkin on

Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything—from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market—runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the most advanced chips and used its control over computing power to maintain its lead as the world's leading superpower. The Soviet Union--which designed and manufactured many of its most advanced semiconductors in the Baltic States--could never keep up. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Today, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US, and using this to build a military that threatens Taiwan, the beating heart of the digital world. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity.

SPEAKER: Chris Miller is the author of "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology," a geopolitical history of the computer chip. He previously wrote three other books on Russia, including "Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia;" "We Shall Be Masters: Russia's Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin;" and "The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR." He also serves as Associate Professor of International History at Tufts University, where his research focuses on technology, geopolitics, economics, international affairs, and Russia. He has previously served as the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, a lecturer at the New Economic School in Moscow, a visiting researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research associate at the Brookings Institution, and as a fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Academy. He received his PhD and MA from Yale University and his BA in history from Harvard University. For more information, see www.christophermiller.net

DISCUSSANT: Stephen Kotkin is Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (Stanford University). He is also the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School), where he taught for 33 years. He earned his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley and has been conducting research in the Hoover Library & Archives for more than three decades. Kotkin’s research encompasses geopolitics and authoritarian regimes in history and in the present. His publications include Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (Penguin, 2017) and Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (Penguin, 2014), two parts of a planned three-volume history of Russian power in the world and of Stalin’s power in Russia. He has also written a history of the Stalin system’s rise from a street-level perspective, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California 1995); and a trilogy analyzing Communism’s demise, of which two volumes have appeared thus far: Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001; rev. ed. 2008) and Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, with a contribution by Jan T. Gross (Modern Library, 2009). The third volume will be on the Soviet Union in the third world and Afghanistan. Kotkin’s publications and public lectures also often focus on Communist China.

This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is requested.

This event is part of Global Conversations, a series of talks, lectures, and seminars hosted by Stanford University Libraries and Vabamu with the goal of educating scholars, students, leaders, and the public on the benefits of but also challenges related to sustaining freedom.