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The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today

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A leading historian’s guide to great-power competition, as told through America’s successes and failures in the Cold War

“There is an undeniable ease and fluidity to Mr. Brands’s narrative, and his use of Cold War archives is impressive.”—A. Wess Mitchell, Wall Street Journal

“If you want to know how America can win today's rivalries with Russia and China, read this book about how it triumphed in another twilight the Cold War.”—Stephen J. Hadley, national security adviser to President George W. Bush

America is entering an era of long-term great power competition with China and Russia. In this innovative and illuminating book, Hal Brands, a leading historian and former Pentagon adviser, argues that America should look to the history of the Cold War for lessons on how to succeed in great-power rivalry today. 

318 pages, Hardcover

Published January 25, 2022

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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
Profile Image for Cav.
897 reviews189 followers
February 16, 2023
"Great-power competition—prolonged, dangerous, even deadly geopolitical rivalry—is more normal than we think. From antiquity to the present, nations have vied for influence and advantage..."

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy The Twilight Struggle as much as I'd hoped. The book is my second from the author, after his 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, which was exceptional. So, I guess I went into this one with high expectations. Sadly, the writing here did not meet the high bar established for me in Danger Zone.

Author Hal Brands is an American scholar of U.S. foreign policy. He is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Hal Brands:
Brands-Hal-600x400-1

My main gripe with this book was the overall style and tone it was presented in. The writing is stereotypical academic prose; dry, long-winded, and tedious at times. IMHO, The book was just too long... The audio version I have clocked in at ~13 or 14 hours.

I also felt that the formatting of this one was subpar. The narrative flow jumps around too much, with not enough attention paid to overall cohesion. Sadly, this is in stark contrast to the other book I read from the author. My reviews are always heavily weighted toward how readable a book is, and unfortunately will see this one punished fairly harshly here...

Brands continues the quote from the start of this review:
"...Today, America is facing new twilight struggles—high-stakes, longterm competitions against China and Russia. So far, these competitions are occurring in the no-man’s-land between peace and war, although the danger of military conflict is growing. They represent fierce geopolitical struggles over power and influence, but also deeply ideological conflicts between authoritarianism and democracy. These competitions will determine whether the twenty-first century extends the relatively peaceful, prosperous world to which Americans have become accustomed or thrusts us back to a darker past. They will influence the fate of freedom in countries around the globe."

In this quote, Brand lays out the framework for the source material of the book:
"Many books have been written about how America should wage great power competition in the coming decades. This one is different. Here, I seek insight about the future by examining the past. Protracted rivalry against powerful authoritarian countries feels unfamiliar to Americans after the generation of great-power peace that followed the Cold War. But longterm competition seems new only because it is very old. Rediscovering the lost art of long-term competition requires only that we reacquaint ourselves with history."

***********************

I didn't like The Twilight Struggle. I would not recommend it; for the reasons above.
Too bad, as there is some interesting content covered here...
2.5 stars.
Profile Image for John Forbes.
7 reviews1 follower
February 26, 2022
“History…can sharpen the judgment of policymakers as they confront a new generation of challenges.”

In this book, Professor Brands dissects ten themes of the Cold War that are relevant to competition the U.S. encounters today with China and Russia. From “forging a strategy” - remember to focus on vital interests - to “managing the endgame” by use of the golden bridge, Brands shares these key Cold War lessons in crisp 20-30 page essay-like chapters. He ends the book with a dozen lessons on great power competition that, if properly considered and applied, will guide the U.S. through successful competition in today’s twilight struggle.
Profile Image for Liquidlasagna.
2,895 reviews95 followers
October 16, 2024

The problem with Brands is that he wants to solve all of today's world's problems by looking back at the Cold War, and his solution is just squeeze maximum pressure on everyone, and they'll say uncle and run away to lick their wounds.

Yeah great, I'm sure it'll work for Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Ukraine.

At least the realists like Huntington focuses on the Chinese and Islam as civilizational issues which are of prime importance.

But to just extract some unrealistic pollyannaish ways of fixing the problem by just exerting MAXIMUM pressure on all the other Superpowers that get in our way, just feels like a recipe for total disaster, without realizing how those measures, for the most essential of goal with the national interest.

It feels like a different path to come to same methods and conclusions as the Neoconservatives did, which is exceedingly dangerous and costly.

Except Brands says that the most we can get is "peaceful coexistence".
At times he talks tough, and then he gets all wishy-wishy.

.......

mini-review 1

The New Republic
The Disastrous Return of Cold War Strategy

Hal Brands urges the U.S. to make China and Russia “pay exorbitantly” for their policies. History shows that has never worked.

//////

mini-review 2

H-Diplo

That the United States 'won the Cold War'—and, indeed, that President Ronald Reagan brought the Soviet empire down—are accepted by many as conventional wisdom. Hal Brands doubles-down on that wisdom.....

Because Brands knows how this story ends, he arguably downplays considerable evidence that US strategy was neither as coherent nor successful as he depicts it.

end of mini-review

.......

And I think the biggest flaw is that the alignments of the Cold War are never going to be in our favour like that again, as well as the economic costs of ticking off all the rivals we need to break a few bones with to smarten then up.

I think at times, he's out of his depth. One moment invoking Kennan and then in the next breath being totally oblivious to his warnings, by suggesting policy that George Kennan would never dream of.

............

Exhibit A

The dean of America’s Russia experts, George F. Kennan, had called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” Kennan, the architect of America’s post-World War II strategy of containment of the Soviet Union, believed, as did most other Russia experts in the United States, that expanding NATO would damage beyond repair U.S. efforts to transform Russia from enemy to partner.

.........

Now pay attention to what Hal Brands says about NATO and Kennan in the review below.

And I don't agree with the reviewer or Brands

..........

Exhibit B

Policy Magazine

Is the world slipping into a new Cold War? And, if so, what can we learn from the last one? Hal Brands gives us much to consider in The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today.

A prolific essayist and author on US foreign policy and diplomacy, Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

While the Cold War of 1945 to 1990 was the first to feature nuclear weapons, it is, says Brands, only the most recent in great-power competitions dating back to those recorded by Thucydides, Tacitus and earlier historians.

The Cold War is still part of our collective memory. It provides relevant experience for the US and its allies when it comes to blending cooperation with competition, marshaling a diverse and often fractured coalition, and thinking about long-term strategy while dealing with short-term shocks.

The Cold War, writes Brands, "was never strictly a debate of hard power or 'geopolitical interests' " but "the larger principles—self-determination, democracy, human rights—that Americans had shed so much blood to defend."

Brands draws out key lessons, including the advantage of strategic patience, the focus on sustaining alliances, and the value of aligning grand strategy with national values.

If the Soviet Union was the principal antagonist for the West in the Cold War, this time it is a rising China. As led by Xi Jinping, China is determined to displace the USA in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia while simultaneously undermining the rules-based international institutions and subverting democracies everywhere including, as CSIS reveals, in Canada.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is also a threat, largely because of its arsenal of nuclear weapons and cyber capability. Putin wants to restore the sphere of influence once enjoyed by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, while sabotaging NATO and the European Union, and destabilizing world order generally.

Future historians will likely point to February 2022, and the signature of the Russo-Chinese "no limits" friendship on the eve of the Beijing winter Olympics and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the start of the new great power confrontation that, in this iteration, pits democracy against autocracy. Brands says we can expect a series of long and grinding contests most of which will be "twilight struggles" — hence the book’s title — because they happen "between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war."

In response, argues Brands, the US and its allies must build robust democracies at home and develop military deterrent capability.

Sustaining democracy at home is essential, says Brands, because this is an ideological struggle. A free, open and diverse society is a proven magnet to business, students and tourists, and refugees and migrants from every corner of the world.

Entrepreneurial by instinct, newcomers join the innovators and discoverers that give the West its edge. This was instilled in me by former Secretary of State George Shultz who decried the attempts after 9-11 by then-Vice President Dick Cheney to ban migration from Muslim nations.

But openness must also be accompanied by military strength, including cyber-deterrence, intelligence capacity, and informational capability, given the pervasive reach of social media and mis/disinformation.
While avoiding backing a "desperate, nuclear-armed regime" into a corner, there is "no path to success that doesn’t involve making China and Russia pay exorbitantly for aggressive policies."

Ukraine is an alarm bell for NATO allies to meet their commitments.

The Cold War framework — the hub and spoke alliances, the multilateral institutions — has endured although it now needs reform and reinvigoration. It means allies must meet the NATO commitment of spending 2 percent of GDP on defence by 2024.

Canada currently spends 1.3 percent. Only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt, declared John F. Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address, can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

The West, writes Brands, must be realistic in its expectations.

The most we can likely hope for is a return to "peaceful co-existence", in which we can all enjoy the benefits of trade-based reciprocity.

"Constructive inconsistency" is how Brands describes working with nations like India, Philippines and Vietnam because, as we are learning in the application of sanctions on Russia, the weight of the "consolidated" democracies – the EU, G7, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan – is insufficient.

Dealing with China or Russia, says Brands, will also inevitably involve "relying on expedients, from covert action to outright coercion, it would never sanction at home." But this is too often tricky and treacherous and, for democracies, a slippery slope as the US learned in the Iran-Contra scandal. Integrating morality into foreign policy is hard. It often involves compromises. But it should always be kept in mind not least because it is in our best interests.

Brands says we can learn much from the strategy and tactics employed during the Cold War. The best starting point is still George F. Kennan’s containment strategy. Spelled out in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Foreign Affairs, July 1947), Kennan argued that the Soviet Union could “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”

At the time, few thought containment was the best strategy.

Isolationists like Herbert Hoover and Joseph Kennedy called for Washington to abandon its allies and withdraw to the Western Hemisphere. Kennedy, writes Brands, argued the US must "conserve American lives for American ends, not waste them in the freezing hills of Korea or on the battle-scarred plains of Western Germany." Walter Lippmann, the leading American columnist of the day labeled containment a "strategic monstrosity" that would force unending interventions on behalf of "satellites, puppets, clients, agents about who we know very little."

Kennan’s view of the Soviet Union was that Stalin was incapable of good relations with the West because the combination of traditional Russian insecurity and expansionism, Communist ideology and Stalinist paranoia meant that it could never trust the capitalist world. But Stalin was not Hitler and he was in no particular hurry, so when he ran up against resistance he would recoil. Thus, the policy of containment.

That Kennan lost faith in his own prescriptions because he put the emphasis on statecraft rather than military buildup is another story.

While strategy needs clear direction with conceptual guardrails, the vagueness of containment on specific tactics, says Brands, was also its strength because it allowed continuous adaptation to circumstances. Thus, the creation of institutions at home, like the National Security Council. Abroad, it resulted in NATO and the alliance system.

The “fusing of geopolitics and ideology”, Brands argues, “was necessary to create a Cold War consensus.” It furnished an overarching strategic theme: support for democracy. While anticipating the internal collapse of the Soviet system, it encouraged strategic patience.

Brands is ambivalent about détente. While engagement and statecraft are essential, the danger for the West is to ascribe our hopes to our adversaries when in fact our enemies are our enemies and they will exploit our piety. Ronald Reagan was right to employ the old Russian maxim “trust but verify”, with the emphasis on verification.

For now, the competitions with China and Russia have remained below the threshold of direct and open conflict, although daily cyber-intrusion is a gray zone and the necessary provision of Western arms to Ukraine is making it a proxy war. While history does not repeat itself there are similar rhythms of Cold War history that we need to study and learn from. That means preventing competition from turning into conflict.

Brands says much of Cold War strategy was distinguishing between what was central and what was peripheral. American commitments tended to proliferate and got them into trouble in places like Vietnam. While Ukraine does not qualify under NATO’s Article V, what happens there could well have implications elsewhere. With Taiwan his target, Xi Jinping is watching how the West responds in Ukraine.

There is also the danger of fatalism and ascribing strengths to the adversary that they don’t have. Despite Sputnik, Russia was never technologically or strategically superior to the United States. So, too, with China, which may have certain asymmetric advantages, but faces major demographic, environmental and internal strains at home.

We need to avoid acting precipitously. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the justification for invasion. Wishful thinking should never pervert intelligence subjected to critical scrutiny. Action against Afghanistan was necessary because it gave Osama bin Laden his base for 9-11. But as with Iraq, staying on and trying to install democracy turned liberation into the trap of occupation.

The Cold War, writes Brands, fundamentally changed the United States. It was both a national and international security emergency that lasted for decades. It required the US to do things that were without precedent. This included creating a large standing military establishment, a network of global security alliances, commitments to the defence of frontiers half a world away, and a centralized intelligence apparatus. The new challenge is creating cyber capability that was never previously imagined.

It was not the peace envisaged by Churchill and Roosevelt when they met off Newfoundland’s Grand Banks in August 1941 to sign the Atlantic Charter. But it was necessary.

Diplomatic history and grand strategy have gone out of fashion in our universities because they were perceived as too linked with traditionalists and old-school agendas.

But understanding history and geography, study abroad and learning languages, is critical to better prepare for the future.

As Brands says: “we need to see competition as a way of life” and prepare accordingly.

The Cold War is still part of our memory. We should study it systematically. Hal Brand’s Twilight Struggle is a good starting point.

..........

blech

............

H-Diplo

Cold War-era scholars endlessly debated whether the United States or the Soviet Union bore primary responsibility for US-Soviet hostility. They made their case arguing that the conflict stemmed mainly from the ideology, political system, or leadership on one side of the conflict; capitalist economic imperatives; great power rivalry and security concerns; or misperception and misjudgment.

From their conclusions, we learned whether conflict was avoidable or inevitable—even understandable or shameful. Unsurprisingly, then, why the Cold War ended remains an issue, though admittedly a less contentious one. That the United States ‘won the Cold War’—and, indeed, that President Ronald Reagan brought the Soviet empire down—are accepted by many as conventional wisdom.

Hal Brands doubles-down on that wisdom in his ambitious, provocative, yet sturdy, new volume. Brands’s main contribution is chronicling the evolution, establishing the basic coherence, and crediting the champions of the ‘winning’ strategy.

Toward that end, his book contains revealing chapters on the origins of US containment strategy, the creation of the post-war institutional order, the superpower nuclear arms competition, US competitive challenges in the developing world, US policy toward Eastern Europe, the Cold War’s effects on the US political system, and final chapters on the Cold War’s end.

For me, the chapters on the growth of the US intelligence establishment (Knowing the Enemy) and the organization of the US national-security establishment (Organizing for Victory” are especially illuminating.

Through these diverse chapters, Brands hammers the main point: Despite challenges, detours, and painful setbacks, US policymakers generally ‘got it right.’

The Soviet Union could not hope to compete successfully with the United States over the long term. Soviet resource deficiencies, ideological failings, corruption, and repression made that impossible.

Key US policymakers knew this; some US presidents knew it better than others. Together, over successive decades, they crafted policies that played to US strengths and exploited Soviet weaknesses.

For Brands, the lessons learned from Cold War experience apply to current US efforts to engage China: “long-term competition is an ongoing, open-ended contest for influence between great powers” In competition, the challenge is great: “It involves mastering a dynamic interaction while synchronizing initiatives across time, space, and the various dimensions of national power. It requires creating asymmetric advantages and imposing disproportionate costs, rather than simply overwhelming an adversary everywhere”

Thus, the book also makes much of the obstacles that confronted US officials in crafting and implementing policy in the new era

“Containment looks so pristine, so impressive, only in hindsight” when, in fact, “it was pieced together, incrementally and often chaotically”

The “drawbacks” were plentiful: “its plodding pace, its dangers and costs, its moral compromises.”

Although Brands highlights US efforts to strengthen Europe, to deter and fight Soviet aggression, and promote international institutions to foster cooperation and suppress destructive rivalries, US problems and failures remain central, then, to his assessment: US allies who fretted their location on the frontlines of a US-Soviet military confrontation, US grumblings about “free riding” allies, US strongarm tactics meant to even the slate, and inevitable US acceptance of the limited US capability to resolve tensions that were baked into US policies.

Brands’s assessment also spotlights serious US misjudgments and missteps.

These include the US belief that the Soviets accepted the principles of Mutual Assured Destruction and shared the view that nuclear weapons serve no useful purpose beyond deterring their own use. They also include US efforts to wedge Eastern Europe countries away from Soviet domination. He writes, “the U.S. record wasn’t bad, all things considered. But it was freighted with failures, frustrations, and unresolved dilemmas”

Even then, Brands recognizes the battle for the ‘periphery’ as an exceptional source of US defeat, distress, and disillusionment. In the Third World, the United States competed at a serious disadvantage—no less, on enemy turf—in its broad-based effort to win support and defeat leftist regimes.

Most onerously, having confused nationalist with Communist goals, the United States wasted blood, treasure, and global political capital in a futile war in Southeast Asia. In consequence, “overreach in the 1960s produced underreach in the 1970s”

But here, as elsewhere, Brands offers a positive denouement. Even seeming defeats amount to at least minor triumphs, then, with a ‘net assessment’ or long-term view.

Take, for instance, the limited US success in battling Soviet control of Eastern Europe. He concludes that “at relatively modest cost, then, U.S. policy [of the Truman administration] weaponized the failings of bloc regimes, intensified strains between Moscow and the satellites, and encouraged the latent dissidence that would periodically flare into something greater”

Overall, he concludes: “If we measure U.S. policy not by its near-term failure to roll back the Iron Curtain but by its success in exploiting scarce opportunities and exacerbating long-term frictions, the record looks more credible”.

Even “eliciting harsher repression could, paradoxically, be a form of success”

Reagan must be given his due, and Brands is not alone among respected historians in thinking so.

.........

blech

500 reviews13 followers
September 25, 2024
The subtitle of Hal Brands’ “The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today” does a disservice to what is in fact a great synthesis of the Cold War, whereas the lessons for today are slotted in the conclusion. The author clearly prefers to elaborate on what he knows than speculate on what he doesn’t. Only an author with several Cold War books under his belt could view the whole nearly 50 year struggle from such heights that the great trends become obvious.

The US was rather slow to understand that the great WWII alliance had unraveled the moment the Soviets took Berlin. It is a fact the Roosevelt team had plenty of Soviet moles, and they may have swayed the president’s delusion that he could trust Stalin after fixing him drinks. Brilliant as he might have been in many was, FDR was one of the least visionary in international affairs, beyond that alliance.

Truman, who was thought to be a very provincial and mediocre man, had much clearer vision about Stalin and the Soviets than patrician Roosevelt. He did not allow the US to retreat into isolationism, like it did after WWI. This saved Western Europe, its colonies and Asia from Soviet domination. So he launched ambitious initiatives like the Marshall Plan, the Japanese rehabilitation, the CIA and the whole intelligence apparatus, the hydrogen bomb and, eventually the Korea War. He supported Yugoslavia’s Tito against Stalin not out of any sympathy for the former, but because he was the only Eastern European communist leader to have liberated his country from the Nazis at the head of his own men, rather than in the rearguard of a Soviet armored division. He also took no orders from Stalin and actually threatened to kill him. A big advantage for the US was the ready availability of Russian and speakers and the use of the GI bill to create strong Russian departments in the top universities. The ability to think like them was a strong asset for the US when confronting ruthless enemies whose covert supporters could move much easier in the US, than American moles in the USSR.

Eisenhower, who knew war deeply, maintained the aggressive strategy perhaps beyond its convenience, since he took no account of Stalin’s death and it was two years before he met Khrushchev. The US, through the Voice of America network and other ways of political warfare, induced the Hungarians to arise in 1956, only to let them be crushed by Soviet tanks and shot in the tens of thousands. However, he and Kennedy kept up the nuke buildup, even though they knew there was no missile gap, the US had many more bombs than the Soviets, but either of them had enough to wipe humanity out. Kennedy’s youth and his poor handling of the Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion led Khrushchev to overplay his cards in the 1962 missile crisis, the moment where Armageddon was at the gates.

Kennedy’s murder let a weak president in, Lyndon B Johnson, who committed the US to war in Vietnam. There was no way to disentangle the country from that quagmire without losing face. This blew up the Johnson presidency and a much wilier customer took over. Nixon and Kissinger could not pull out of Vietnam without weakening the standing of the US. So they played realpolitik and approached chairman Mao, which only Nixon, as a former red baiter, could have done without being dubbed a pinko. The US strategy in the 1950s was to force China to bleed Russia (by demanding military and economic support), generating resentment and envy, and then to pull them apart. Of course the Soviets supported Chinese regional rivals and enemies of the US, the Vietnamese. When the Nixon presidency blew up over the Watergate scandal and the US had to let the ROC fall at the hands of the communists, the country reached its nadir, victim of imperial overstretch and internal political paralysis.

This was the period of the great nuclear weapon limitation treaties, by which the US attempted to give itself a breather and let the Soviets follow the same self-destructive path, but from a weaker position due to its smaller, clunkier economy. It helped that the Soviets were able to penetrate the pacifist movement in the Western world and used to weaken popular will to resist. It was also the Soviet heyday as it expanded its footprint in East Asia, Africa and Latin America. Each of these political triumphs was an economic disaster, since the Soviets had to bail out red dictators either directly or through their Cuban clients, at great expense. As the US rebuilt its political consensus and its intelligence structure, the Soviets took one step too far when they invaded Afghanistan. There, the US gave them back what it had received in Vietnam. Here time was against the Soviets. Technological change (computers) did not favor the Soviet ways. Ronald Reagan, a remarkably astute and consistent leader, was able to destabilize the Soviets by increasing military spend well beyond what they match, and by a combination of militaristic rhetoric (it nearly ignited a hot war, when Soviet detection devices during NATO joint military exercises Able Archer in 1983) that kept them on their toes. By befriending Premier Gorbachev, Reagan was able to sugarcoat what was in fact a ruthless push to dismantle the Soviet state and its alliances in Europe. By the GHW Bush presidency, the Soviets were bankrupt and they had lost appetite for mass repression, which, in the competent hands of the president and Secretary of State Baker led to the collapse of the communist states of central and Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union itself.

The US won by having no doubt the Communists were mortal enemies of democracy, capitalism and the rules-based international system. By being aware that it was an existential struggle that could end in confrontation or with one of the systems falling prey to its internal contradictions. By realizing it was a multigenerational confrontation that would shape the country for decades. By confronting the Soviets were the US was strong (political warfare, technological innovation, industrial and financial might) and negotiating the issues were the Soviets were stronger (number of ICBMs, social order, militarization of society), while descaling tensions by irrelevant concessions that would allow the Soviet leaders to look good without gaining any significance advantage. By seeking matters in which the US could work together with the Soviets, to generate “feel good” moments. By never forgetting that it was a long term struggle and never giving up on beating an inferior, loathsome system that could never compete with democracy and free markets unless at the point of a gun.

There is much to be learned here in the rivalries with Russia and China. The US did take advantage of Russian weakness in the latter 1980s, as it should have, as the Soviets did against the US in the latter 1970s. The only reason Khrushchev did not bury the Americans as he threatened to do, was that he didn’t have the wherewithal. The US misread the Russian leadership in this century, by projecting into them their own preferences rather than engaging seriously with them. Russia is particularly dangerous because it is not really a super power except for its great size and its nukes. And all trends (demographic, economic, technological) are against it. A powerful enemy that sees itself as condemned eventually to lose could strike out in terrible ways, as Russia has done in Ukraine and could do in other places. Here, the US needs to rebuild the intellectual capabilities it had from the time of George Kennan and Richard Pipes and to realize that, although the Russian leadership does not propose an alternative political, social and economic system, it is a danger and will remain so for decades. Similarly with China. The US in the Clinton and GW Bush years chose to value China as a market and a cheap supplier of foods above the obvious long term threat it represented. China, instead, had a clear road map: to build itself up by using Western technology and foreign funds from a perpetual trade surplus and then translate economic and technical power into military might and eventually drive the US from East Asia. Here the rivalry with a powerful business partner is particularly difficult to sustain, as there are always corporate interests that would prefer business as usual to continue. But the US must find a way to confront China where it must while working with them where it is convenient to do so, never forgetting that demographic tends are against China and that at some point this should translate into advantage for the US, if it manages to maintain focus while avoiding a blow up. That’s a tall order, particularly with the ongoing degradation of the US political system and the low caliber of US presidents for decades, none of whom are even in the same weight class as Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon or Reagan. It’s a safe bet this new Cold War could not end as conclusively and as peacefully as the first one. We should all keep our fingers crossed that all will end well.
Profile Image for Frank Kelly.
443 reviews25 followers
March 19, 2022
The Cold War is a distant memory for many of us of a certain age and nothing more than a textbook history lesson for the rest of us under the age of 40. But now, in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s brutal and bloody onslaught against Ukraine amid our collective prolonged worry and apprehension about an increasingly aggressive China, many seem to be struggling to understand what it will take to keep the peace. History can and will guide us, so we go back to the history books. The first place we should start is with Hal Brand’s latest book. Brands, a noted Cold War historian, and former Pentagon advisor, presents an illuminating and richly researched lesson of how the US dealt with the challenge of the Cold War – that “Twilight Struggle” the West fought from the end of World War II until 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved itself. Brands gives us a crisp examination of the many successes and more than a few missteps US leaders experienced during these anxious years. Ultimately, the power of ideas and free markets brought the West victory against a hollowed-out Communist empire – but it took extraordinary work, innumerable policies and programs, and a willingness to stand strong that won the peace.
Brands ventures deep into those many challenges, strategies, and tactics the Cold War American Presidents, beginning with Truman to ending with Reagan and Bush, took up to win that “Twilight Struggle.” To be fair to potential readers, this is not light reading. But it is an excellent read for those fascinated by Cold War history. For everyone else who picks up this book, it is something of an incredibly well-timed primer for what it will likely require from all of us to strenuously defend freedom and democracy as we know it once again.
517 reviews33 followers
August 1, 2023
An impressive and timely read by the noted national security scholar Hal Brands. In "The Twilight Struggle," a phrase lifted from JFK's inaugural address, Brands presents a succinct record of how the United States built its national security organization from the days of World War II. His emphasis is on the years of the Cold War that followed, and upon how the nation dealt with the international climate that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. He explores how the lessons learned in that long Cold War and its aftermath may provide insights for dealing with what is increasingly being called Cold War II, our current competition with Russia and China.

The heart of American strategy in the Cold War was the policy of containment developed by diplomat George Kennan. Containment envisioned an effort to forestall the spread of communism by the Soviets through military or political means anywhere in the world. Brands writes of containment's fame, "It persisted for two generations. It delivered the greatest peaceful victory in the history of great power rivalry." However, he also notes, "The strategy triggered fierce political fights almost from the outset; it faced withering critiques from left and right, hawks and doves, for decades thereafter. And not surprisingly, because containment had plenty of drawbacks--its plodding pace, its dangers and costs, its moral compromises--and often looked to be failing until it triumphed." The confrontational element of containment did not do the job alone. The development of government organizations such as the CIA and the State Department's Policy Planning Staff (headed by Kennan) proved to be key elements in the overall strategy. Building the support of other nations through creating the Marshall Plan, NATO, and Radio Free Europe not only forestalled Soviet ambitions but added voices and arms in support of the American efforts.

Brands describes all of these efforts, and more. He highlights the roles of each Cold War era American President in responding to the long-term competition between democracy and authoritarianism. Of particular interest is his discussion of the shaping of the conclusion of the struggle through diplomacy and economic pressure by President Ronald Reagan and the deft personal relationship between President H. W. Bush and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to finalize the end of the Soviet Union.

In his concluding chapter, Brands lays out twelve lessons from American conduct of the Cold War. He offers these, not as a blueprint, but for consideration by policy makers and by citizens as a way to "sharpen the judgment" in "confronting a new generation of challenges."




184 reviews5 followers
September 21, 2022
This was a thoughtful audiobook to listen to as Professor Brands describes the current global security environment as an "ongoing, open-ended contest for influence between great powers." While today's challenges do differ from those of the Cold War and it would be foolish to seek answers to the specific issues that demand responses today, it is an experience that can and should inform the approach to protracted competition. With the book first published in January 2022 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine starting the next month, the discussion on working within limits was quite topical as providing material support to Ukraine unfolded while Beijing ratcheted up pressure on Taiwan by launching joint military exercises with ballistic missile launches over the island while dramatically increasing the volume of its attacks in cyberspace in response to the Speaker Pelosi visit. There have certainly been those who argue for a greater resource allocation to the current hostilities in Europe just as there are those who feel the substantial U.S. commitment of security assistance to Ukraine comes with too high an opportunity cost with those resources needing to be committed to contending with the "pacing threat" from Beijing. It was very important to hear his descriptions of avoiding policies, both at home and abroad, that negatively impact national vitality. The increasing fragility of key institutions and the sharply divided U.S. politics today reinforce that Moscow and Beijing will seek to capitalize on U.S. domestic weaknesses that they find. The challenge from both authoritarian powers will continue to test U.S. statecraft and the risk of expanded conflict looks to remain heightened across this decade.
5 reviews
November 29, 2022
Dr. Brands has written a well-researched and thorough analysis of the less entertaining parts of the Cold War, the greatest ideological struggle of the 20th century. In rich detail, he describes the various ways and keys through which the United States was able to equip itself, compete, and win a great-power competition in the ever-dangerous nuclear age. By carefully breaking down the component parts of power competition, and analyzing the ways in which the United States was able to excel, and the ways the United States failed, he paints a picture of a true twilight struggle. Out of the sunshine of peace and between the shadow of war does this competition come, in what he terms the geopolitical twilight.

By using examples such as the contest of systems, intelligence community, and building the bureaucracy, Dr. Brands is able to argumentatively make the case that the United States needs to take lessons from this Cold War if it is to get into another massive ideological conflict, and compete in this twilight struggle (more fun than gray zone, I think.) If, as I believe, we are to get into this massive contest with the PRC, this book would provide valuable lessons for policymakers to take from when engaging in the contest of systems.

Stylistically, this is clearly an IR book, and as such is very technical. However, it is well written, has enough breaks in text to allow you to digest what's being written. It's not a long slog either, sitting nicely at 250 pages. It is chock full of good advice and historical lessons to educate aspiring policymakers and seasoned hands to take on the burdens of ensuring the American system will prevail, should we get into these sorts of spots again.
22 reviews
July 1, 2022
Audiobook. Brands does a great job exploring the contours and through lines of the cold-war, showing what worked and what didn’t and explaining exactly why. Importantly, he provides context for each set of policies which helps the reader understand why a certain U.S. posture and set of policies which worked at one time, probably would not have worked at another moment of the Cold War. For example, Reagan needed the detente failure in order to pursue his maximalist position against the Soviets. Had Reagan’s policies been tried in the 1960s they likely would have failed as the Soviet system was still economically and ideologically viable at that point. Reagan and H.W. Bush come off particularly well in Brand’s telling, but the real winner is the US’s open society and market place of ideas.

The final chapter that applies the lessons of the Cold War to the current geopolitical struggle between the US and Russia and China, is excellent. Brands neatly and persuasively creates a role for values and human rights within America’s grand strategy that is too often defined only by liberal interventionists who disdain the logic or balance of power politics and on the other end, realists who see nothing but balance of power politics. I think brands’ reading fits better with the latter than it does the former view of the international system, but it does effectively point out one of the blind spots in the realist model. All in all, really good stuff. I’m planning to buy the book to read and re-read that final chapter.
Profile Image for Chad Manske.
1,271 reviews38 followers
March 23, 2022
If the Cold War taught us anything, it was to never underestimate our adversary. Sometimes that meant building up a deterrent military capability such that the risk of miscalculation by the other side was too great to take. At other times it may have meant making diplomatic entreaties, either directly—to the extent possible—or through proxies, as the struggle to gain influence rapidly expanded. Brands, a noted Cold War historian, has delved deep in this new offering looking back at last century’s Cold War to communicate in 10 chapters/lessons how what we did and said to triumph during the 40+year struggle contains the DNA strands for confronting today’s great power rivalry. From efforts and concepts such as containment, escalation, satellite proxies, a physical wall, Reykjavik, Sputnik, SALT, Open Skies, perestroika, CFE, glasnost—and many others, the West ultimately ‘won.’ Yet, how do we take these lessons appropriately away for application today without improperly muddling the contextual analogy? Brands walks us through that. See this recent interview with Brands to go a bit deeper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzPSk....
Profile Image for Beth.
30 reviews10 followers
September 18, 2024
I read this for three reasons: 1) support (we’re in DC for the next year while the other half goes to school), 2) curiosity in their assigned reading materials and 3) filling the history gap, albeit with a military-slanted lens.

It took me a few chapters to get oriented to the writer’s style and purpose. Each chapter focuses on a topic and the writer takes us through multiple administrations during the Cold War. The chapters are relatively brief and highlighted each leader’s perspective and how each managed it.

As a civilian, who does not know much military history and strategy, reading this provided insight on the relationships among national priorities, international partners, and our partners’ priorities and realities. For me, I think I have an inkling of understanding on just how much the United States took on and was relied on during the post-WWII and subsequent Cold War era to lead and manage the fragile geopolitical situation to its conclusion.
9 reviews
May 18, 2022
Strategy (The Cold War History - Strategy Perspective)

Using the history of the Cold War as a foundation to revisit the successful framework of strategies that endured from that time, the author adeptly orients readers to the salient aspects of applying strategy and analysis into today’s great power competition. Retrospectively reviewing both the good and the bad from the Cold War, one can take away very useful elements in crafting strategy and conducting analysis. Though no panacea exists in strategy, this book is an outstanding read in growing one’s own intellectual prowess to think and plan strategically.
Profile Image for John Crippen.
532 reviews2 followers
January 11, 2023
I wish I had read this before Brands' Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, but I'm very glad to have the information and inspiration now. The book's ten chapters describe different Cold War-era strategic challenges relevant to today's global power competition, explain how America was successful (if we were), and offer some insight into the role those strategic challenges play today. The conclusion includes 12 lessons the Cold War can teach us.
537 reviews3 followers
February 8, 2022
Professor Brands makes a compelling argument for a more involved Foreign Policy to counteract the Global Rise of Chinese influence. Not the large destabilizing impact of invasion but rather a combination of smart foreign policy, military advisors as well as intelligent use of American Money. All of these things must be carried out not in the ad hoc manner that has been happening since the end of the "Cold War" but by taking lessons from the past and applying the principles of those lessons to the present.
Profile Image for Luke.
33 reviews2 followers
May 2, 2022
This is a splendid book that considers the Cold War as a strategic classroom. It is not a president-by-president history or decade-by-decade history of the 40-something-year struggle between the US and the Soviet Union. Instead, Hal Brands invites to look at it as a place to learn how to think about competitive statecraft. This book is best read in tandem with other books on grand strategy or the Cold War, but whether as first introduction to the topic or summary of the field, readers will be rewarded by Brands's latest contribution.
Profile Image for Felix Sun.
117 reviews
February 6, 2025
There are something to learn from the book, although if it is a general level, Odd Arne Westad's book is much better than this. Thia book is leaning on US side, and lacking the perspective on USSR side.

Also, the book's promise of "what can be learned from the Cold War" is delivered in the final chapter 'Conclusion', and even then it was under delivered. I don't hate it, but a bit disappointing.
Profile Image for Turgut.
349 reviews
April 3, 2022
Great book! Hal Brands didn't disappoint. One of the best books I've read in a while.
Profile Image for Dale.
1,050 reviews
May 12, 2022
Great snap shot of the Cold War and lessons for today.
Profile Image for Benjamin Phillips.
234 reviews14 followers
October 20, 2022
A good “usable history” analysis of US policy in the Cold War and it’s evolution.
55 reviews
January 30, 2023
Terrific overview of Cold War history and US strategy.
68 reviews1 follower
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April 14, 2023
" A geopolitics masterpiece of Great powers from contemporary American Power competition strategies backgrounds lessons " For any willing policy makers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Jeffrey Cavanaugh.
399 reviews6 followers
July 29, 2023
A discussion of how the US fought the Cold War that covers old ground with an to today’s rivalry with Beijing.
Profile Image for Nick.
69 reviews
August 26, 2023
Provides frames of reference and mental models to understand competition today. Some models seem obvious, others are more analytically creative.
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