School of War - Ep. 12: Hal Brands on the Cold War

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, joins the show to discuss the Cold War's lessons for great-power rivalry today. Times 01:24 - Introduction 02:47 - Halford Mackinder and how Eurasian geopolitics framed the Cold War 05:37 - Mackinder's theory of the heartland 07:47 - China's Belt and Road Initiative as an application of Mackinder's theory 09:07 - Comparing the United States' approaches to the USSR and China 13:04 - Nuclear power during the Cold War 17:24 - How Cold War-era nuclear logic applies today 21:02 - No first use policy 26:56 - The Nixon administration's critique of containment strategy 29:58 - The collapse of the Soviet Union 32:15 - Theories of victory that led to the Vietnam War 35:08 - End of the Cold War 39:17 - Infrastructure needed to fight the Soviets in the United States, and what the U.S. needs to take on China today 44:02 - China's moves to decouple economically from the United States 46:47 - The United States' harrowing responsibility to take on adversarial powers

If you hear any reference to the Cold War and discussions of contemporary national security decision-making, the tone is often pejorative, as if the whole half-century-long struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States and their allies is best written off as a regrettable episode. The struggle ended well for America, the preservation of our way of life and of the prospect of a free world, and Soviet communism was consigned to the ash heap, all without direct conflict between the two powers, which, considering the existence of nuclear weapons, would very likely have been catastrophic for all involved. What can we learn from the Cold War that can inform our decisions in a new era of, quote, great power competition? What if something like a Cold War with China is as good as we can do? And what if we should all be praying that it ends as well as the first one did?

It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live. in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who knock these buildings down will hear all of us soon. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. delighted that we are joined today by Hal Brands. Hal is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's a senior

fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's a colonist for Bloomberg opinion. He served in the Department of Defense in the past. Most recently, he's the author of The Twilight Struggle, what the Cold War teaches us about great power rivalry today, which Hal, I want to talk to you about, But you've also been writing, you wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal about how containment can work against China. And you have a fascinating series of essays on the subject of Halford McKinder and Eurasian geopolitics. And it's all kind of connected subject matter. Having listed all of that, my first question to you is, do you sleep? I tried to.

Thanks for having me. I'm a fan of the podcast. So it's a lot of fun to be on the show and have a chance to talk to you about this. You know, there's so much interesting stuff going on international affairs these days. And one reason that I was drawn to write about the Cold War is that it sometimes feels like it's 1946, 1947 all over again. And so I think the thing that energizes me and gets me out of bed in the morning is that it's a pretty target-rich environment intellectually these days. You know, one of the themes you've been hitting regularly in your writing in recent months and beyond that, really,

that there are themes that emerge and reemerge in history. There are patterns that we can learn from those patterns in ways that are applicable today. And that's true of great power competition, as it would be of any other form of human competition. Why don't we start with the sort of question of Eurasia and Eurasian geopolitics as a way of framing the Cold War? Because I was just fascinated by this series of essays that you wrote, It's the Anglesburg ideas, organization and website, which I came to be aware of because you are writing for them and then going through their archives. It's obvious that I should have already been aware of it. But you've written a piece called the Eurasian century that starts with a

kind of profile and discussion of this. I think what to a lot of people will be an obscure British writer, Alfred McKinder. Why would anyone be interested in this guy? And what does he have to tell us that might be helpful in thinking about competition with China? So McKinder is interesting because he wrote one of those essays that kind of captures the contours of a century. And so back in 1904, when he was an academic, he gave a lecture titled the geographical pivot of history. And the basic argument of the essay was that we were coming to the close of what he called the Colombian epoch, basically 400 years in which the mobility of sea power had exceeded the mobility of land power, thanks to the revolutions and sail and then steam. And that had enabled essentially a long

period of expansion and exploration by the European great powers. Basically, they had directed a lot of their energy outward toward exploring and conquering large swaths of the globe. But he said, look, this period is coming to an end, in part because the globe has been explored and largely conquered. But also, and here he was pointing to the completion of the trans-Siberian, railroad in 1904 because there is a land power revolution that's going on. The technology is basically making it possible to project power to move armies across land and particularly across the core of Eurasia in a way that had never before been possible. And so his argument was that you were going to see big clashes for primacy within the Eurasian continent and on the

oceans, just off its coasts, as powerful countries within Eurasia sort of pushed out and looked to try to attain Eurasian and then global primacy and then sea powers like Britain and then the United States pushed back. And in a lot of ways, that's the right framework for thinking about World War I. It's the right framework for thinking about World War II. It matches the Cold War. And you can see some parallels in the U.S.-China rivalry as well. Now, there are critics, to include critics long ago of the notion of the heartland, right, which is one of McKinder's key idea is that he who controls the heartland essentially controls the world, to skip from the beginning to the end of the ditty, how it goes.

And the fact is, if you look at the actual Eurasian heartland, whether it's 100 years ago or today, it's still, you know, a lot of empty space, a lot of step. There's not actually the great railroad network connecting it that McKinder sort of theorized, was on its way. So he got things wrong as well, didn't he? So McKinder is one of these guys who gets the big, big picture right, and gets everything else wrong. And so McKinder was looking at this from the perspective of a citizen of the United Kingdom, who had sort of been watching the great game between Russia and England over the course of the 19th century. And so when he looks at things in 1904, and he talks about what he will later call the heartland,

he's really thinking about the danger of an aggressive modernizing Russia pushing out towards the coasts of Eurasia. Russia tries that in 1904. It goes really poorly and they get thrashed by Japan and the Russo-Japanese War. And so then as some of McKinders critics point out, during the first half of the 20th century, it's not so much the heartland that's conquering the rim land, so the periphery of Eurasia. It's the Rimmed. It's the Rimms. lands that are trying to conquer the heartland. So it's, it's Germany in World War I, and then it's Germany in Japan and World War II. And so McKinder, he's basically famous for about three things. He wrote over the course of almost half a century. So there was the initial essay. And then every time

there was a World War, he would go back and revise his thesis a little bit. And so by the time he writes his last major piece in 1943 during World War II, he basically says, yeah, the critics were right. It's really Germany that we have to be worried about. And of course, this is happening just as the onset of the Cold War is around the corner, which would have proved him right after all. And just to flash forward for a second, though, I want to take us back to the Cold War. You know, what do you think about the, well, at one point we were described as the one belt, one road initiative, or the Belt and Road initiative, however exactly you want to phrase it, it's almost as though the Chinese are kind of working according to the basic logic of McKinder or reverse engineering.

I'm not sure exactly how you want to describe it, but with the belt being the, you know, the rimland and the road being an effort to dominate the heartland. Yeah, the Chinese have certainly read their classic geopolitics. And in a way, you can think of Xi Jinping's agenda as combining a little bit of Mahan and a little bit of McKinder. And so there's certainly the push for maritime dominance in the Western Pacific and potentially beyond. And I think that probably borrows a lot from the ideas of people like Alfred There, Mahan. In fact, Mahan is very widely read within the PLA Navy and in Chinese strategic circles. But as you mentioned, if you look at BRI, which is basically an effort to use economic and technological connectivity

to ensure that all roads in Eurasia and beyond lead toward Beijing, it sort of looks like a soft version of the type of imperial expansion that McKinder was talking about a century ago. And, of course, railroads actually play a pretty important role in it in places like Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Let's talk about the Cold War then since it's the subject of your new book and also the most recent period of great power competition in which the United States is engaged. The Soviet Union of the 40s through its end, it's a very different cat than the People's Republic of China in the 2020s in terms of wealth, in terms of the integration of its economy into the rest of the world. You know, we're far more integrated with China today than the United States

ever was with the Soviet Union. And so to speak of containment, it seems almost like kind of madness. I take it from your recent writing. You don't agree. And I'm curious to know why. So this is actually one of the things I take on in the introduction to the book, because it is the obvious objection to writing a book about the Cold War that's meant to inform our approach to great power of rivalry today. And everything you say is true, of course. And it's easy to point out lots of ways in which China is not the Soviet Union, in which the international order of the early 2020s is not the international order of the late 1940s and so on and so forth. But I think there are a handful of reasons to believe that studying the Cold War is still useful, even if you don't

think, as I don't think, that the China-America competition is an exact analog for that rivalry. So the first is that I think it's pretty clear that the cold war, the, the Cold War, war was unique in some ways, but it was also just sort of one example of this larger phenomenon of long-term great power rivalry, rivalry that plays out in uneasy peace under the shadow of war with violent conflict sometimes intruding upon it, that really dates back as far as recorded history goes. And so the idea in studying the Cold War, which is one of the most epic and one of the most prominent long-term competitions in history is simply that it can teach us something about that phenomenon and the challenges of doing it well. And so that's that's one thing. And that's

actually sort of a familiar move, you know. And so, you know, Thucydides argued that the history of the Peloponnesian War could teach us fundamental things about what we would now call geopolitics writ large. Klausovitz was really writing a lot of what he was writing was about the Napoleonic Wars when he was trying to pin him. his treatise on the nature of war. And so it's not crazy to suggest that we can learn something fundamental about long-term competition by looking at the Cold War. The second reason is that it's a really good way of thinking about how America does long-term competition. And so there is not an inexhaustible list of examples of long-term competitions in which the United States has geared up

over a period of decades to do a geopolitical and ideological battle with an authoritarian foe. There's actually exactly one example of that in our history. And so the Cold War, for that reason, and also because it's within the living memory of some policymakers, is going to be the mental example that we default to. And so it's worth studying it systematically so that we at least take away the right insights, rather than having sort of a superficial understanding of the contest. And then the third reason I would offer is that while the Cold War certainly isn't a perfect analog for the U.S.-China competition, it's not a terrible analog either. And so the United States had to do a lot of things during the Cold War that it will have to do in the U.S.-China competition, things like managing coalitions, defining a strategy for victory, thinking about how to combine competition and diplomacy, competition and negotiation, and so on and so forth.

And so we can presumably learn something about these aspects of competition by studying the Cold War. And hopefully this should provide some broad insights for thinking about the present. It's another parallel as well. And I'm curious to know your thoughts about this, which is that, of course, the Cold War takes place with the threat of nuclear weapons. And this distinguishes it from every great power competition that precedes it. And of course, we are in the same situation. Indeed, a situation of growing seriousness with the expansion of China's arsenal. How did the nuclear dimension differentiate the great power competition of the Cold War from everything that had preceded it?

And to what extent is that relevant for us now? Well, it's a good issue to mention, and it's noteworthy in the sense that I think if it raised that point when I first conceived of the book three years ago, people would have kind of dismissed the parallel and said that, you know, look, China just doesn't have anything like a Cold War nuclear arsenal. It's a red herring. It looks a lot different now in light of what we know about China's current and likely to be future nuclear capabilities.

So by the end of this decade, we could very much find ourselves in a situation that looks a lot like the Cold War in terms of having to deal with a nuclear peer in China in addition to a nuclear peer in Russia. So the nuclear dimension is the most obvious area in which the Cold War differs from everything that came before it. And, you know, the nuclear shadow really influenced nearly everything that happened in the Cold War. There had been long-term military competitions before. You had seen that between the United Kingdom and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and in a variety of other cases. But there had never really been a case, obviously, in which the shadow of nuclear apocalypse hung over everything. And so, you know, American policymakers, I think, were always of two basic minds in terms of how to deal with this. The first was that nuclear weapons were a tool of competition and they were potentially a tool of asymmetric.

advantage for the United States. And so at the beginning of the Cold War, it was only the United States that had nuclear weapons through the early 1960s. The United States has such a dominant advantage in nuclear weapons, and particularly in intercontinental capabilities, that it probably could have conducted something close to a disarming first strike of the Soviet Union, basically hitting all of the Soviet nuclear capabilities in a way that left Moscow unable to respond on, kind of, you know, fighting a nuclear war and coming out clean. It wouldn't have been clean for the Europeans. It wouldn't have been clean for a lot of other people. But the United States had a pretty significant advantage. And so nuclear weapons are always at the forefront of American strategy,

in part because the United States isn't just trying to defend its own territory. It's trying to defend far-flung allies that are located in the shadow of Soviet conventional power and can't be defended until the 1980s by conventional means. And so the United States understands, that nuclear weapons are an essential tool of deterrence and competition, and that if the United States doesn't appear willing to use nuclear weapons and to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict, then its entire global defense strategy will be rendered non-credible. So that's way one in which they matter. But there was always sort of the second way that American policymakers thought about nuclear

weapons, which was that they were so revolutionary that they were basically unusable. And so I think if you could have administered truth serum, to any American president, really from Harry Truman onward, they would have said that they were uncertain at best whether nuclear weapons could ever be used in conflict, especially after you get the thermonuclear revolution in the early 1950s, which is really a quantum leap in destructiveness from early nuclear weapons. And there's all sorts of examples of Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy

and Nixon and everyone else, basically saying that if we were ever to fight a nuclear war, it would simply be a matter of sort of digging ourselves out of the ashes and going back to bows and arrows after that. The level of destruction would be so great. And so there are these two competing imperatives of sort of stabilizing the nuclear competition, negotiating arms control agreements with the Soviets, finding ways of reducing the likelihood of nuclear war, but then also trying to exploit nuclear advantage for competitive purposes. And these two things are irreconcilable at a certain level. And so there's this ongoing tension in the way that Americans think about nuclear weapons during the Cold War. In what ways do, does the sort of nuclear logic and the sort of awful, awful paradox

or paradoxes at its heart apply today and should condition our thinking about China and its strategic weapons and our strategic weapons? So it may apply in a certain very uncomfortable sense and that the basic purpose of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, at least from an American perspective, was to help defend or help deter attacks upon exposed positions that could not easily to be defended with conventional forces. And so when you put it like that, it pretty quickly becomes clear that we might have to think about the role of nuclear weapons in, say, the defense of Taiwan. If that's a conflict that's not going well from a conventional perspective, the question might be raised. It would we use low-yield nuclear weapons to blunt a Chinese

invasion or something like that? But I think it's actually a little bit more complicated in this case. You know, the threat of nuclear escalation during the Cold War was always problematic, but what made it relatively credible, I think, was a couple of factors. And so one was that the alternative to using nuclear weapons, if the Soviets mounted a massive invasion of Europe, would have been seeing the global balance of power shift in just unacceptable ways. And so the fundamental lesson that American policymakers drew from World War I, and especially, from World War II, and this goes back to McKinder, is that it is intolerable to have an aggressive authoritarian power exert control over the Eurasian landmass, because that would allow them either to coerce the United States on a global scale or to develop the military and economic potential to actually attack the United States. And so I think that as awful, as unbelievably awful as

nuclear war would have been, you know, in the 1950s with the memory of World War II, not that long in the past, it wasn't entirely incredible for Eisenhower to say we would start a massive nuclear war rather than lose a conventional war over Europe. The other thing that worked in favor of nuclear deterrence was that what IR theorists or security studies scholar might, scholars might call the balance of resolve seem relatively equal when we were talking about crises over places like West Berlin, right? And so West Berlin mattered a lot to us. It mattered a lot to the Soviets. But neither side really considered it its territory. And in the final analysis, neither side wanted to die over Berlin. And this is what we learned from the crises in the late

1950s and the early 1960s. So the question is, do those conditions apply in a case like Taiwan? And I think the answer is they don't apply nearly as well. The loss of Taiwan would be really bad from the perspective of the balance of power in the Western Pacific. It would not be as bad for the United States as losing Europe to the Soviets in the 1950s. And so that may make the threat of nuclear escalation a little bit less credible. I think the balance of resolve is also different because Taiwan is something different to China and the CCP than Berlin was to the USSR. And so the prospect of sort of waging apocalyptic nuclear war over Taiwan, I don't think is credible, which starts pushing you in the direction of, well, are there limited nuclear options you might use to defend Taiwan? And of course,

there are big debates about whether limited nuclear options are credible as well. Yeah. And you know, you don't have to change too many details or travel too many thousands of miles in the region to get new scenarios that raise sort of of complicated questions of deterrence. You know, take Japan, you know, a treaty ally, which has, you know, these little islands, as you are well aware, that are contested by the Chinese. I was in Japan in 2016, and a senior Japanese officer told us, told our group, you know, you know, we have, you know, as it were, the conventional fight.

We see it as our duty to defend our sovereign territory and we are prepared to do it. What we need from you is the strategic deterrent. that is what we need from the United States. It's very explicit, very blunt. And it's sort of harrowing to think about what the destabilizing effects would be of imposing some sort of no first use policy that essentially told the Japanese, sorry, guys, you're out of luck. I think that's right. And I think a no first use policy would cut against the logic of American global strategy for the past 75 years. And it would raise some pretty severe questions about American credibility. and staying power at a time when the conventional balance is a lot less favorable than it was 10, let alone 20 years ago.

It's interesting, though, that you mentioned that because American allies were always also of two minds when it came to nuclear weapons. On the one hand, they wanted constant reassurance that the United States would be willing to commit national suicide on their behalf, to be willing to wage a nuclear war that from the mid-1960s onward might well result. in the utter devastation of the United States in order to protect them. On the other hand, they were terrified of exactly that prospect. And they were terrified of the fact that the United States might use nuclear weapons in cases that they didn't think made sense in terms of the stakes. And so there's this great moment in one of the Berlin crises when Conrad Adonauer, the Chancellor of West Germany, is basically briefed on the American war plan for Europe.

And it becomes clear to him that the United States is, in fact, planning to use nuclear weapons if there is a war that starts in Germany. And he says, my God, not for Berlin. I mean, so this was even, you know, the West German chancellor saying he could hardly imagine that sort of conflict. And so it goes back to sort of this complicated dynamics surrounding nuclear weapons that you've mentioned, where you've got to be in sort of the way the logic runs during the Cold War and today, you have to be willing to use them, but you also can't be seen

to be cavalier about their use. Let's talk about American strategy in the Cold War and talk about containment. Maybe you could let us, so what was containment? Who kind of comes up with the idea, what are its main elements? So containment was really less a strategy than a theory of victory. And so the guy who gets credit for coining the term containment is George Kenan. He was a long time Foreign Service officer who came back from Moscow to the United States in 1946, and then the next year took up a post running the policy planning staff at the State Department after it was created under Secretary George Marshall. And he was deeply involved in a lot of sort of the first-order debates about American policy in the post-war era.

He coined the term in an article that was published under a pseudonym in foreign affairs in the summer of 1947. And it's interesting, when you read the article, you realize that it's actually not a policy paper in the sense that we typically think of things appearing in foreign affairs today. There are remarkably few specific policy prescriptions. The paper is mostly about diagnosing Soviet behavior rather than anything else. And so the question that Kenan was trying to answer was, you know, why won't the Soviet Union play nice with its wartime allies once the war is over? And the answer he came back with was that it was just impossible. for the Soviet Union to do so because of the nature of its system. The combination really of

traditional Russian expansionism, communist ideology, and then Stalinist paranoia left the Soviets unappeasably hostile to the capitalist world and convinced that there was going to be at some point a climactic struggle between these two worlds. And so that was the bad news. But Kenan said the good news is that the Soviets are not like Hitler. They're not operating on a fixed timetable. They're they're patient. They believe that communism will win in the long term. And so that makes them cautious about provoking war in the short term. And so he says, look, here's the opportunity. The opportunity is that if we can contain Soviet power, and he doesn't really give a good sense of what containment means in that article, then over time, the weaknesses of the Soviet system will become manifest

and ultimately will get the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. So basically, if you can prevent the Soviet Union from expanding, from overturning the balance of power in the near term, its internal vulnerabilities will do it in over the long term. And so that was the basic theory. And while that theory was challenged a bunch of times during the Cold War, it was really the intellectual core of American foreign policy. And then the task was turning that into actual policy. And that's where you get huge debates, huge changes over every administration, sometimes within administrations who would debate, you know, what did containment mean in terms of nuclear weapons? What did it mean in terms of military strategy? Did it mean that our defense perimeter included

South Korea or did not include South Korea? Sort of the specifics of containment were always up for debate, even as the basic theory of victory remained intact. The moment of critique I'm most familiar with is, you know, Nixon. The first generation's approach to taking on the Russians had largely been shown to be a failure. It had been shown to be exhausting to the United States. It had been based on, well, actually not based on it. It had failed to take advantage, right, of a situation between the two countries of the United States, has been much more powerful than Russia at the start of the Cold War. That was over. They were achieving parity. The opportunity had been there and it had been lost. It was time to seek some new,

you know, balance of power relationship with the Russians. Was that a rejection of containment or just a rethinking of its logic? How would you assess the Nixonian sort of era here? think it depends a little bit on which day of the week you were talking to Nixon and Kissinger on. And so I think the most sort of faithful interpretation of detente or of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy is that it was basically containment by other means. And that Nixon and Kissinger, I think, were pretty hardheaded about what the Soviet Union was. They understood that Soviet hegemony would be disastrous for the United States, but they really felt handicapped in terms of the means that they had at their disposal to pursue containment. They take power after it's become clear the United States is not going to prevail in the Vietnam War, but Vietnam is still an incredibly divisive issue domestically. There are over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam.

You know, parts of this country are literally on fire as a result of domestic unrest. There's an amazing statistic where there were something like 600 domestic bombings in 1969. And there were serious tensions within NATO and other U.S. alliances. And so what Nixon and Kistinger thought was that sort of the strategy of confrontation wasn't going to work anymore. And so we had to bound Soviet power through a subtler mix of incentives. incentives and disincentives. So disincentives in the sense that we would still oppose Soviet expansion, but incentives in that we would use negotiation, we would use economic inducements, we would use a variety of other things to try to give the Soviets reason for restraint. And now the reason I said that it depended on the day of the week at the outset of this comment was that in selling that strategy, and they may have ultimately come to believe it a little bit.

Nixon and Kinsinger sometimes went further and essentially made the argument that the Soviet Union, would eventually be transformed into what a later generation might call a responsible stakeholder, that it would become so reconciled of the post-war system that it would have no reason to challenge it. That was never going to work, frankly. And I think that was more about either sort of the rhetoric of Daytonaun running away with itself or simply the domestic politics of Dayton. I think the sort of the more realistic version of the strategy was essentially a new version of containment for a more challenging era. In that line of the rhetoric or the self-understanding,

there was this belief fundamentally that all this revolutionary talk that, you know, undergirded the Soviet regime was, you know, it was domestic politics. And all countries have domestic politics. And statesmanship is something it has to do with, you know, the adults in the room sitting down and seeing past all that. If you could just find the Soviets who could have those conversations and some of them were probably already there if you, you know, administered truth serum to it, you know, then you could have a relationship that would be enduring. And it sort of follows from that in some respects, you know, the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union is a bit of a disaster. Yeah, I think it's entirely fair to say that detaunt was an effort

to drain the ideological passion from the Cold War and basically take, you know, kind of a realist Metternichian approach to geopolitics, that, you know, regardless of ideology, And I think you're right, that when Kissinger looked at Soviet leaders, he saw basically thuggish bureaucrats rather than committed revolutionaries. But you could get them in the room and you could make hardheaded deals on the basis of common interests. I actually think that was part of the undoing of de Tant. It was its undoing domestically in the sense that Americans increasingly revolted as they tend to do against a strategy that seemed to put issues like human rights and democracy and values. to the side, it's very hard to sustain a strategy like that domestically in the United States. It was unsustainable because it didn't allow for the fact that the Soviets were themselves

still motivated by ideology. And this becomes very clear when there's sort of an upsurge of ideological fervor in the Soviet foreign policy establishment after the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, which leads to a lot of the Soviet interventions in places like Angola and Ethiopia in the late 1970s. And I think it was. was also just sort of a misreading of the fact that, you know, the U.S. Soviet competition wasn't just geopolitical. It was ideological. It was about conflicting visions of where the world was going and what made for a just society. And so you could minimize that aspect of it from time to time, but you could never really put it to the side for long. Let's talk about Vietnam for a second. Any strategy

or any theory of victory that endorses or leads to the start of and leads to the, escalation of the Vietnam War, a war that tears the heart out of America that, as you yourself concede, leads to tremendous domestic unrest. And in some ways, a kind of psychic damage that lasts to today. In the way that, you know, say, World War I has psychic damage for Europe that lasts to this day, how on earth could we judge any such, you know, strategic concept to be a success? Well, to be fair to the critics of containment, in some ways, the earliest critic of containment is Walter Lippmann, the famous journalist who actually helps coin the term Cold War. He writes a series of newspaper columns in response to Kenan's X article in Foreign Affairs. And then those columns get packaged as a short book, which was called the Cold War, study in U.S. foreign policy, released in 1947. And a lot of Lippman's argument had to do with the fact that something like Vietnam was going to happen eventually. And so he looked at containment and he said, well, look, if our policy is really to contain Soviet power everywhere it encroaches on the

interests of the free world, that's going to lead us into supporting dubious clients in what would later be called the third world. It will lead to overextension. And of course, Vietnam is almost sort of the paradigmatic example of what he's talking about. And so there's no talking away the Vietnam War and any assessment of Cold War foreign policy. That said, I think you have to look at the Cold War holistically and not just that any one bad example or anyone good example. And so I think the overall scorecard on the Cold War has to start with this. The United States and its allies, achieved a geopolitical and ideological victory over the Soviet Union as decisive as anything that had been won in war without having to wage a great power of war. And that actually was something

new. That was something that was doubted at the time that containment was first promulgated in the late 1940s. It was something that was doubted well into the 1980s. And so, yes, there were costs, there were tragedies, there were terrible sacrifices along the way. But the world that we inhabit today, a world in which democracy is quite widespread, prosperity is very strong globally and in the United States, a world in which the democracies have been geopolitically dominant for the past 75 years. In a lot of ways, that's a product of America's Cold War strategy. And so in any evaluation, you've got to take into account the bad, but you've got to frame it against a pretty good overall performance. Let's talk about the end of the Cold War. Let's talk about Reagan where, you know, the

ideological dimension of the struggle comes back into the foreground. Look, I mean, it's hard for anyone, I think, to deny that there is, you know, ultimately a mellowing and then a pretty dramatic collapse of Soviet power. But to what extent do the policies pursued by the United States in the final, you know, decade of the conflict or so contribute to that? And to what extent, you know, did we just kind of stand by and get lucky as the social? Soviet Union fell apart. So I would say that American policy is a contributing, not a decisive factor, and it is a necessary, not sufficient condition for the end of the Cold War. And so when Reagan came to power, and in fairness to Jimmy Carter, I think it's really Jimmy Carter, who ought to get

some credit for reintroducing the ideological dimension of the Cold War, although he did it in ways that were sometimes confused and counterproductive. But Reagan really had two objectives vis-a-vis the Soviet The first is that he wanted to turn the tide of the Cold War, basically by applying pressure on the Soviet Union on nearly every front. And so I think Reagan's fundamental insight was that while the Soviet Union was militarily quite strong in the early 1980s, it was economically, ideologically, and politically weak because all of the internal debilities that Kenan had talked about were, in fact, working their way to the surface at this point. And so Reagan's policies are, actually quite influential in, say, helping to turn the tide of the arms race, of the military

competition. And so you see a lot of the things that begin in the 1970s start to come to fruition in the 1980s. And by the mid-1980s, the Soviet general staff is starting to realize that they're about to fall very, very far behind in the military competition, in part because their economy is overtaxed, in part because they just can't compete in high-tech. capabilities like precision guided munitions and other things that are really revolutionizing the battlefield. So that's one area. I think the Reagan strategy is also very effective in the third world. And so the Soviet Union had gotten itself very overextended in places like Afghanistan during the 1980s. And the United States under Reagan, again, building on a Carter era initiative, is really in a

position to punish that through covert action and support for either anti-communist regimes or anti-communist guerrillas. And so you can go down the list and you can identify a variety of ways where Reagan's policies are effective and sort of shifting the psychological climate of the Cold War. The second part of Reagan's strategy had been to try to use the resulting leverage to negotiate a reduction of tensions on American terms. It was sort of like detente but more thorough and we win this time. And he is able to do that in a variety of areas, most notably arms control by the end of his presidency. Now, this is where the question of causality becomes very complex. And so it's undeniable that it's the general decline of Soviet power in the Soviet

system during the 1980s that changes the dynamics between the United States and the Soviet Union, makes it easier for American policymakers to get what they want. It's undeniable that the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 presents U.S. leaders with just a fundamentally new type of Soviet leader who's actually willing to engage in a way that the Soviets had not been willing to engage before. But what Reagan does is he basically manages to set the conditions for success in these negotiations. And so he keeps the pressure on in a lot of ways. And so the Reagan doctrine aid continues during the late 1980s. But he also sends a lot of signals indicating that the United States will work constructively with a Soviet leadership that wants to improve

of its relations with the world. I think it's that combination of carrots and sticks that really goes a long way in terms of promoting the positive turn in U.S. Soviet relations by the end of the 1980s. I'm curious to know your view on the institutional infrastructure that supported these various initiatives to include beyond the defense establishment throughout the Cold War, you know, the legions of Russian speakers and analysts that the United States had to some extent its command, you know, our capacity for waging war in the space of ideas or information warfare. Do we have, first of all, am I correct in my suggestion that things like that played a significant

role? Maybe you disagree. And second of all, do we have anything comparable in our institutions today as we think about the China challenge? So I think it's an important question. And this is kind of what I call in the book, the hidden dimensions of competition. And so, Things like getting government organization right or training up a cadre of Russian speakers or a sovietologist during the Cold War. It wasn't particularly sexy. It didn't make a lot of headlines, but it was absolutely fundamental toward allowing the U.S. government to operate effectively.

It's, you know, the old cliche about knowing the enemy is absolutely true. And it's difficult to compete effectively against someone else if you don't really understand what makes them tick and what their strengths and weaknesses are. And the investments that the United States made in these areas during the Cold War were not just big. They were ongoing. And so, you know, the United States creates the national security state in the late 1940, primarily through the National Security Act and some follow-on legislation. But it's continually tweaked through the remainder of the Cold War.

And so we add agencies and sometimes subtract them to deal with particular aspects of the competition, places like the U.S. Information Agency, for instance. And of course, sort of the effort to understand the Soviet Union is ongoing as well. These are going to be pretty important in the ongoing competition with China. And I think there's kind of good news and bad news. And so the good news is that we're not starting from the same place we were starting from in 1947. We don't have to create a national security bureaucracy for peacetime. That was something we'd never had before in 1947. We have it today. And so it's really more of a matter of modifying it and optimizing it so that it's giving us what we need in the competition with China. Now, that's not easy. If you look at

areas like information warfare, if you look at intelligence, if you look at a variety of other things, there are clearly areas where the U.S. government's bureaucratic capabilities are not what they need. to be. And there are big debates about how to fix those things. I think it's similar if you look at sort of the intellectual aspects of it. And so we as a country have much more expertise on China in 2021 than we did vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in 1946. I'm not sure we have as much expertise on China in 2021 as we did on the Soviet Union in the 1960s or the 1980s because we haven't made the same type of generational investments in producing that. And so that's an area where I think it's not simply the U.S. government that has a role to play. It's universities, its think tanks,

it's philanthropic organizations. It's the entire constellation of institutions that really made Sovietology go during the Cold War and is going to have to do something similar today. The level of entanglement is just far greater now than it ever was during the Cold War, as you've mentioned. And what that means from a bureaucratic perspective is that, you know, agencies and departments that deal with a range of issues that were really never before considered matters of geopolitical competition or national security are now having to deal with precisely those issues. And it's often outside the traditional bureaucratic muscle memory of those institutions. And so, you know, commerce is a good example of that.

Treasury has more experience with it because it manages so much of the sanctions portfolio. But even there, I mean, we're having to consider ways in which American outbound investment may be strengthening firms linked to the PLA in China. The Department of Education is going to have a role to play in this when we think about Chinese efforts to compromise American universities. And so the definition of national security is expanding today. because of the Chinese strategy that you've talked about, and that poses challenges for our existing bureaucratic framework. You know, then again, you know, if you'd asked me two years ago or 18 months ago about this sort of set of issues,

I would have told you that the Chinese view the entanglement as a strength for themselves because of the way in which it compromises our politics and the players in our democracy. So many of them are kind of caught up in their interests essentially similar to those of the Chinese economically. But of course, we've witnessed in the last year or so a lot of energy towards decoupling, strikingly, much of it coming from the Chinese. And so I'm curious to know your view as to what is on Xi Jinping's mind as we think about

the moves he's made here. I mean, there's potentially quite dark interpretation of why the Chinese would look at what seems to me like an obvious advantage of being entangled with the United States economically. as they strive for global hegemony, presumably without nuclear war, to suddenly start pulling away in a lot of important respects. I think the dark interpretation is actually quite plausible, and I think there's a variety of things going on. I mean, part of it is that the Chinese have realized that they have serious vulnerabilities as a result of interdependence. And so, you know, we put a shot across the Bao with some of the sanctions on Huawei, for instance, and the abortive effort to go after ZTE,

for that, which really underscored how critically dependent the entire Chinese tech sector is on high-end semiconductors that are often designed in the United States and manufactured in other democratic countries, namely Taiwan. And so if you see the Chinese putting huge amounts of money into semiconductor research and development, I think it's because they assess probably correctly that they're not going to have access to that input forever. I think there are also concerns about ideological contamination. And so there have been calls in the United States to restrict the flow of Chinese citizens into American higher education. I think it may actually be the Chinese that do that.

I think they worry a lot about brain drain with sort of talented rising elites coming to the United States, and many of them choose to stay here. I think as Xi Jinping puts more and more emphasis on political control, he probably worries about the insidious Western ideas that people may pick up while they're over here. And so, you know, if you're an American college university that's used to having a steady flow of Chinese students, that may be a very good thing. I actually think it is a very good thing, but I think it's foolish to expect that that will continue forever. One last question that takes us back to where we started with McKinder. If the United States is occupying the role that Great Britain occupied

into major rounds of competition with First Imperial and the Nazi Germany, that story does not end real well for the British Empire. Luckily for the Brits, who still enjoy their freedom today, the United States was behind them ready to occupy the same sort of offshore role on a larger scale. there's no one behind us, and I don't think we want to end up suffering the same sort of consequences that the Brits did in the 1940s and beyond. How do you think about this? I mean, it's in certain respects, it's not just a grave responsibility that's dictated by America's geopolitical position, but an extraordinarily harrowing one. One of the themes that really emerges from what I call the Eurasian century, and it comes out clearly in World War I, and there are hints of it,

in McKinder's own writing is that there is no balancing coalition without the United States, that when you're dealing with really advanced aggressive industrial societies like Nazi Germany, like Japan, like the Soviet Union, there's no local balancing coalition that can work. You need nearby countries to be buttressed by the faraway superpower. And Churchill, of course, understands this. he talks in 1940 and 1941 about sort of waiting patiently for the new world to come to the salvation of the old. And it works in the British case. But as you point out, you know, there is no country that is to America as America was to Britain in 1917 or 1941 or in a variety of other places.

And you get the same sense when you talk to policymakers in, say, the Western Pacific. or in the Indian Ocean. And so if you talk to, you know, folks in government in India or in Australia or in Japan, they typically tell you two things. One is that China's behavior is galvanizing an ever larger counterbalancing coalition of countries that just don't want to live in a world dominated by Chinese power. But two, there's no equation that adds up to successful balancing that doesn't include the United States. And so I think it really, it's a dilemma that there's no way out for us. It's a reminder that if we want to continue to have the sort of global environment that you can

have, if you prevent an aggressive authoritarian power from dominating Eurasia, the United States is going to have to play a very large responsibility in doing that. And I think it's also a reminder that sort of the patterns of geopolitics that we observed in the 20th century didn't go away with the end of the Cold War. They're still very much in operation and the United States is going to have to play the same role today if it wants to avoid a pretty dark outcome. Hal, it is always a pleasure to speak with you and to learn from you. And I, as always, just appreciate the focus that you show in all of your writing on using the past as a meaningful guide to the present, which in its own modest way, this little podcast project is

also devoted to. Thank you so much for joining. Well, thank you for having me, Aaron. I really appreciate it. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.