 Welcome everyone, my name is Andrew Earhart and I'm an earnest May fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School and a visiting fellow with the Center for Grant Strategy at King's. I'm delighted today to be chairing this event for Professor Hal Brands, who will be discussing his new book, The Twilight Shruggle, what the Cold War teaches us about great power rivalry today. Now I've had the opportunity to read portions of this book, and I can say that it's a wonderful example of what folks today refer to as applied history. That is the view that historical knowledge is not only useful, but essential for contemporary thinking. I think Professor Brands has delivered an excellent analysis of how the American and Western experience of the Cold War, both its successes and its shortcomings can inform future policy in Washington, London, Paris, and beyond. I'm hoping we can get into a discussion about its specific insights and how exactly this knowledge can be brought into modern policymaking and commentary. Now I think our guest speaker needs a little bit of an introduction, so I'll try to keep it short. But Professor Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and he writes a weekly column for Bloomberg opinion. I think many of you know that Professor Brands has long been a leading commentator on American foreign policy, but I would recommend to everyone on this call and beyond to read his opinions on the pages of Bloomberg. I'm sure we can all get quite a lot out of it. I know I do. Professor Brands has deep experience in the halls of government, having served as special assistant to the Secretary of Defense for strategic planning. And that was between 2015 and 2016. He's also served as a lead writer for the Commission on the National Defense Strategy for the United States. Among his many books and edited volumes are American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump, which was published in 2018. Making the Unipolar Moment, U.S. Foreign Policy in the Rise of Post Cold War Order, which was published in 2016. A personal favorite and a favorite of the Center for Grand Strategy is the book What Good is Grand Strategy, which he published almost a decade ago now. And then a few others are Latin America's Cold War, as well as the power of the past history and statecraft, which is a wonderful edited volume on applied history. I would also add that he has more recently published with Charles Eddle, the Lessons of Tragedy, Statecraft, and World Order. If we were closer to Christmas, I would say that's a pretty serious reading list or shopping list really, but maybe keep that in mind before December. So before we get started, just a few notes for the audience. Professor Brands will speak for around 10 minutes and then we'll get into a discussion. If you'd like to ask a question or to make a comment, please indicate this by using the raise hand function on Zoom. And if there's a problem with this, and I have a problem all the time with raising my hand on Zoom, please just post your intention to speak in the chat and I'll call on you. Just a note, I would prefer everybody asks their question or makes their comment over audio if possible. And that's as opposed to writing in the chat. And when you do so, please introduce yourself. So Professor Brands and myself have an idea of where you study or your affiliation and what you're interested in. And finally, please know that this session will be recorded. And now I think we can get started. So Professor Brands over to you. I appreciate that kind of reduction and I appreciate you having me here to do this discussion today. And I appreciate everybody who was able to spend a little bit of time, whether it's at the end of your day or in the middle of your day as it is over here to listen and talk. And I'll put the emphasis I guess on talk because I'm going to try to keep this relatively short. I'm going to talk maybe for 10 to 15 minutes, and I'm going to try to give you kind of the setup for the book. And then I'm happy to talk about specific issues that emerge in it or specific issues of relevance to US policy vis-a-vis China or Russia today because I think that's probably one of the areas of greatest interest. And so I think maybe what I'll do is just kind of start by talking about the metaphor that is on the books cover. And so this is obviously the idea of the Twilight struggle. And if you are of a certain age or you are unfortunate enough to spend your life reliving the Cold War as a historian, then you'll be familiar with the fact that this was a phrase that was really coined by John Kennedy in 1961. And he described the US-Soviet Cold War as a long Twilight struggle. And the metaphor was apt. Twilight, of course, is kind of this weird in-between state. It is not light or dark, it's not day or night, it's kind of in the murky middle. And that was a pretty good description of the Cold War from Americans' perspective. And so the Cold War was not a global hot war of the type that Kennedy had fought in and that Americans had experienced just a couple of decades earlier. There were certainly lots of hot wars that were part of the Cold War. Some of them like Korea and Vietnam had US involvement. Some of them did not. Some of them were essentially proxy wars. Because there was no shortage of violence during the Cold War, of course, but there was no cataclysmic global war of the sort that the world had become all too familiar with, sadly, during the first half of the 20th century. And so when Americans thought about the Cold War, it wasn't war in the sense that they had traditionally understood it, but it wasn't peace in the sense that they had traditionally understood it either. The Cold War was basically a never-ending coda to World War II, or that's how it seemed. It was a national security emergency that lasted for years, decades even. And so the United States never really got back to what it had previously thought of as a peacetime normal prior to World War II. And in fact, waging the Cold War required the United States to do a lot of things that were just without precedent in American history. The United States had never had a large standing military establishment in peacetime in its history. It had never had a network of global security commitments in peacetime before. It had never committed itself to the defense of frontiers half a world away in peacetime before. It had never built a centralized intelligence apparatus in peacetime before. And so there were all sorts of things that were just fundamentally new for Americans that were required or seem to be required to wage and win the Cold War. And so the Cold War wasn't really peace as Americans had traditionally understood it either. I think the metaphor is again useful in thinking about the problems that the United States faces vis-a-vis China and Russia today. And so I'm happy to talk in greater detail about what exactly China and Russia are trying to achieve in the world. But I think the sort of the shortest way of saying that is that both of them are pursuing their ambitions in a way that is likely to lead, is already leading to competition and could perhaps lead to conflict with the United States and many of its allies. If you look at what the way that China is trying to reorder East Asia and the Western Pacific, for instance, it's progressively running up against American interests in that region. If you look at the way that Russia is trying to reshape the post-Cold War settlement in Europe most recently through its war in Ukraine, there's clearly a degree of tension that is built in with the United States there as well. And so we are looking at the prospect of ongoing protracted security competitions with China and Russia in a way that may be similar to the Cold War. Now, what's also interesting is that so far both of these competitions have remained below the threshold of outright war. We've seen in Ukraine, of course, that competition can turn to conflict quite easily and the danger of a wider conflict between Russia and the West is of course not negligible at the moment. But if you look at what China has done in the Western Pacific, whether it's through sort of creeping coercion in the South China Sea or the amassing of a really impressive amount of naval power and military empowerment more broadly, there's clearly a sense that military power is relevant to these struggles and that it may actually be central. But so far the United States has not really found itself in open conflict with Russia or China. And of course we all hope it will stay that way. But there are a lot of books that have been written about the future of US relations with Russia and China. There are a lot of very good books that have been written about that subject that's the subject of my next book, but I decided to try to look forward by looking backward and this one I wanted to figure out what the past could tell us and particularly I wanted to look at the world's most recent long term great power competition, which was of course the Cold War. Now the obvious and correct objection that people often raise when I foreground or when I when I introduced studies ways to point out that the US Soviet Cold War was just different than the US China rivalry or the US Russia rivalry today and I think that's that's true in a lot of the geography of maritime Asia is very different than the geography of Central Europe. Xi Jinping is not Mao Zedong, he's not Joseph Stalin, even though he takes on, you know, more of those qualities seemingly every day that the economics of the competition are obviously vastly different. If you look particularly at the US China relationship, even the global setting is different. There's a lot now about a global order that is under strain the problem in the late 1940s is that there was no global order and that was one of the reasons why the Soviet Union seemed so so threatening and so I take as fact I will stipulate to the proposition that there are a lot of murier differences between the past and the present but of course that the idea that you can learn from history is premised on the idea that you can learn something useful from a past that is never exactly like the present and I would say that there are at least three big reasons why the United States and why democracies more broadly can learn from the Cold War. The first is that the Cold War itself was not totally unique there were unique aspects of it it was the first great power rivalry to really feature nuclear weapons. But it was part of this longer running trend of rivalry between the most powerful actors in the international system that goes all the way back to the beginning of recorded history we can see it in Athens and Sparta we can see it in the Napoleonic era we could see it. It was a great game or the Anglo-German rivalry and of course we can see it during the Cold War as well Cold War policymakers by the way were very conscious of this history in the spring of 1947. George Marshall of course gave his most famous speech at Harvard when he introduced the Marshall plan but about three months before that he gave a speech at Princeton on leadership and he told the young men they're all men at that point that the way you end up to make sense of the present was by studying the past he said no one can understand the Cold War who is not given serious thought to the clash between Athens and Sparta 2500 years before. Dean Atchison like to talk about Roman Carthage and trying to explain the way that power had become polarized after the Second World War. And so we can take a similar approach today if we look at this last instance of sort of epic great power rivalry can teach us something about that larger phenomenon and what is required to succeed in it. A second reason we should look at this is that it is the most relevant experience that the United States has in great power rivalry there just aren't a lot of cases in American history where we have geared up systematically for a decades long competition with an autocratic rival there's one case or maybe two if you count the US UK rivalry the late 19th century, but but anyways there's not an inexhaustible number of cases. And so if we want to know what the United States does well in this pulling great power rivalry we can do worse than to look at the Cold War and in fact, I guarantee you that American policymakers will look at the cold war the cold war is part of our national memory in the United States as it is in countries around the world. And so I guarantee you that Joe Biden has some understanding of the Cold War that shapes his thinking about issues ranging from Afghanistan to Ukraine. And so it is better for us to go back and study that history systematically rather than using it impressionistically because the alternative to using history well isn't not using history it's using history poorly. And so I prefer that we use it. Well, and then the last point I would make is that while the Cold War is not a perfect analogy for the US China or US Russia rivalry, it's not a terrible analogy, either. The Cold War was a high stakes contest of the contours of global order. It had ideological and geopolitical components. It required the United States to do things like marshalling diverse and often fractious coalitions, thinking about long term strategy while dealing with strategic shocks, figuring out how to blend competition and cooperation and all of these things are true if only at a broad level of the US Russia and US China rivalries today. And so certainly we can learn something from the past, in that respect. And so what I'm trying to do in the book is to look at 10 competitive challenges basically problems that based in competing through like what makes for a good long term strategy right why are allies so important and also so infuriating right how should we think about the role of bureaucracy and the organization of government as a tool of rivalry what does it take to really understand and know your enemy. I will say though that I think the biggest takeaway from the book is really just about the value of history. Long term rivalry is one of those things that it feels new for us today, but only because it's so old. It only feels unfamiliar because we lived through this anomalous 25 to 30 years of post Cold War peace where the danger of great power war seemed to recede almost entirely for a while, where great power rivalry was more muted than it had been at any time, and at least a century if not more. And so I think the value of studying this period is that it provides us with a certain degree of vicarious experience that allows us to learn about the hard truth of great power rivalry without necessarily having to experience them ourselves and so it makes the learning curve a bit less steep for the United States and other countries as we go into another area of high stakes geopolitical competition today. So the purpose of the books to try to rebuild some of the intellectual expertise that democracies had in long term competition during the Cold War, and then hopefully faring better today as a result of it so why don't I stop there and we could take the conversation and whatever direction people think might be useful. That's excellent. Thank you so much how it's a lot to chew on there even in those brief remarks. So the center for grand strategy that has, unless they've added some since I've left full time, three kind of key themes that they look at the first grand strategy, which is in the name, the second world order broadly defined. And the third is applied history. Right so this book, this talk, this subject to discussion is just perfect for, I think a lot of folks in this call. You mentioned the value of history, you mentioned it several times in your remarks but especially at the end. And I, I hope well this is recorded system was not to go in and get that great line that you had about the need to study it systematically and in depth as opposed to kind of popular narratives that might grow up in really kind of popular myths, we might use that word. But just to get us started I know we have one question in the chat so I'm going to ask a question but hopefully it'll give people time to raise hands and and even posting this in the chat. I'm not sure if, if you can ask over audio but I think we would prefer that just something to keep in mind. So that question. How is, you have a wonderful line in the first substantive chapter, which is about forging a strategy. And you talk about it needs a clear direction, but it also needs to be flexible enough to adapt and use this wonderful phrase, which is conceptual guard rails. And it reminded me of a phrase that I think in the integrated review. And I think someone we, we know well at the Center for Grand Strategy and you very well has used a similar phrase in that integrated review which is handrails of foreign policy. My question to you is conceptual guard rails. As you describe it. What might those be, in your opinion, going forward. I know it's a massive question but you definitely give a lot of thought to this and you've written on it before I think but for the audience I mean what are some key things you think maybe in the next 510 even 20 years that can give a conceptual handrail or guard rail. I wrote that phrase I think and kind of trying to explain why we still look back on containment as sort of an interesting strategy that's worth studying even though when you look at the history of the Cold War, it becomes clear that the myth of containment is a lot more impressive than the reality. And so, you know, containment started as kind of this amorphous body of ideas really closely associated with George Kennan. What it meant in practice really evolved a lot over time. And then basically became a dissenter from the consensus on containment by about the middle of 1948, which gives you a sense of how rapidly things were changing the Truman administration, and had, you know, at least two different approaches to containment during its in office, you know Dwight Eisenhower came to power saying he was going to throw containment out that it was it was sort of feudal and immoral and reactive. And, and so what containment meant in policy terms right what it meant for us policy toward Iran or Western Europe or whatever the area was varied a lot over the course of the Cold War. But nonetheless, containment really created the intellectual and strategic context within which specific policy decisions were made and it did so in a few ways I guess and so one was giving the United States, a sense of what it was trying to avoid or what it was dealing with I guess would be a better way of putting it. And so if you go back and you read the X article in the long telegram, they're not the sort of, you know, like five step policy prescriptions you might expect to find in foreign affairs today that they're about 95 98% diagnosis more than prescription and it's basically a long description of, you know, what the Soviet Union is why it behaves in the way it does why that makes near term compromise a reconciliation impossible, and why the United States should nonetheless not think of Stalin the same way that it was in the context of Hitler as somebody who was sort of determined to just knock over the table come, come what may, which opened the door to containment, and the idea of containment I think was itself kind of a second conceptual guardrail and containment basically was the argument that if you would hold the line against Soviet expansion it would buy time for the weaknesses of the Soviet system to come in the open will actually exacerbate those weaknesses and the reason that containment ultimately was, I won't say attractive because it was continually attacked by people on both left and right but the reason it was resilient was that containment really offered a middle path between two unacceptable alternatives and so one alternative would have been the sort of diplomatic that had figured in the run up to World War two with with fairly disastrous results and the second alternative would have been escalation or bringing about a showdown in a way that could have triggered a really catastrophic World War three and so the the thesis of containment was that you could defeat the Soviet challenge over long term without having to resort to war and that was I think the fundamental geopolitical guardrail that the United States was able to put in place and its allies were able to put in place that guided them over the course of the conflict at a very broad level I think that remains a useful guardrail today I think the United States has an abiding interest in preventing the destabilization of a world order that it and its allies have worked very hard over the past 75 years or so to create but I don't think there is any you know I see you know Putin or Mint to wage global war whatever may come and so I think that the basic proposition that if the free world or the democratic community or whatever you want to call it maintains sufficient strength and wields it with the right degree of prudence it can maintain its interests while also avoiding war and I think that is a good lesson to keep in mind I will say one other thing though we have not quite managed to specify in the same way that can ended in the late 1940s what our theory of success is in these competitions. It's a little bit more understandable with respect to Russia because I think events are sort of shifting our perspective every day. Even with China we've had two separate US presidential administrations that have said that competition is our policy of course competition is really just more a description of geopolitical reality that it is a strategy and we haven't quite gotten an answer to the question of how do we think this ends and how will a more competitive strategy. Do we think that it leads to some sort of grand bargain whereby the United States and China will resolve the issues between them do we think it just leads to sort of holding the line and definitely do we think it leads to you know the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party different people I think would give you different answers to those questions but I haven't seen it clearly articulated in public by the US government that that may change as we get some of the forthcoming documents here in the United States but I think it's important to do that because it gives you a metric against which to measure your efforts and it's also just sort of important when you set off on a geopolitical journey as important as competition with Russia or China where it is you're actually trying to go and how you think it is that you'll get there and I think that's that's been a bit lacking today. I think those are great points out. Yeah, thank you for addressing that was a massive question and in such detail, but also easy to take notes on. So I have a copy to bunch. Let's go to the chat now, and we have a question from Julia Hoffman who asked how applicable do you think the Thucydides trap is to the current us sign a rivalry US China rivalry. So I think that the, I mean the idea of the Thucydides trap, people are probably aware of it but for those who are not, you know, when you have a rising power that challenges a raining power it creates tensions and unless the two countries find really creative ways of resolving their differences that it leads to war in in one sense, it is undeniably true right and so shifting power dynamics are one of the key sources of tension in the international system as countries become more powerful they typically try to shift the international system and their favor they decide that things that were tolerable when they were weak are no longer tolerable than they're strong and that often does create a degree of tension with whatever the previously dominant power was and so US China relations would not be merely as tense as they are now if China was still a relatively weak country that accounted for 2% of global GDP and you know had very little military power projection capability that the fact that China has become so much stronger has given the Chinese government, the ability to pursue its interest much more assertively the ability to expand its interest, and that has brought it into increased competition with the United States and so I think that the basic dynamic right that that rising powers tend to be disruptive the international system is is correct. But I think it is, we need to be really careful with it for a few reasons and so the first is that it's not clear actually that the idea of the Thucydides trap even explains the Athens sparta war, or the great Peloponnesian war and so the greatest sort of modern you know Thucydides had the the line it was you know the growth of the power of Athens and the fear this provoked in sparta that was the truest cause of war however it's rendered in whatever translation. Interestingly, the greatest modern historian of that conflict, Donald Kagan who passed away a little bit less than a year ago, basically says this this is wrong, right that Athenian power was no longer growing in the run up to the great Peloponnesian war that its influence was no longer expanding and the problem actually was that it's its influence in some ways had peaked, and it was looking at a negative change in the balance of power, which caused it to move more rashly and take greater risks than it had before. And this is the problem that a colleague, Mike Beckley and I have referred to as the peaking power trap. And so argument is that revisionist powers countries that want to change the international system actually become most aggressive. When they realize that they are about to peak or that they're already peaking that the future 15 years from now won't be better than the future today because they may actually start to decline. And I think there's actually a fair amount of history that backs us up and so if you look at World War one. Germany was a country that had been rising rapidly for decades, but then in the period just before World War one basically saw its military power peak it had lost the naval race to Britain. It was looking at unfavorable shifts in the balance of power vis a vis France and Russia and so the develops very much sort of a now we're never mentality and Berlin if we don't grab the gains we've been talking about things we've been promising our population, a middle Europa or whatever the case maybe we're not going to have the ability to do that in the future and it provokes really rash risk taking during the July crisis. You can make similar arguments about Japan in 1941. And so I think the facilities trap is okay as far as it goes, but we need to understand that the dynamics that actually tempt revisionist powers to use force may be a little bit different they may be a little bit more complex and I think, you know, I don't know if you can hear it because I've got a little bit, but you can see similar dynamics in the US China relationship today. One of the reasons that Becley and I argue that the next decade of the US China competition is going to be the most dangerous part of the competition is that we would argue that China's economic power is probably peaking, but its military power is still expanding. China is going to become less and less confident about future and more and more willing to take risks to cash in on the coercive power is developed through that through that military might. Thank you how and Julie it's a great question. Katya has asked a question which follows perfectly from this and I think you've answered at least half of it. But she also brings up the time factor rushes often said to feel it needs to act it's running out of time is a great power, and China's instead able to be more patient. But how do you think the US seems the time factor currently you've addressed China and some other historical examples but if you have anything on the US and how they're perceiving it. I think it's an interesting question and I don't think that there is a lot of consensus and in the United States on the time factor and in general I mean, and to be fair there's not perfect consensus on the Chinese side or at least it's not perfect uniformity and so you can you look at certain Chinese thinkers who basically say you know look this is China's moment because the democratic world is in disarray you know the East is rising and the West is declining and so China's got a long runway in front of it and then you can find others who say the opposite and in the US case, I think the big debate is not so much is time on China's side over a 50 year period I think most American policymakers believe and I think the right on this that over the very long run. The American system is likely to prove significantly stronger than the Chinese system in part because the Chinese system I mean faces some challenges that I think make ours look quite minor by comparison whether that's you know the worst peacetime demographic crunch in history that China is about to be suffering may already be suffering. You know the the slowing growth and massive debt bubble that's becoming a bigger and bigger problem since 2008 or whatever the case maybe or just the fact that the United States you know we calculate our own strengths. The good news is that we don't have to calculate only our own strengths we get to add in all of these great allies that we have in Europe and Asia as well that that allow us to punch significantly above our own weight. So I don't think that's the critical question I think the critical question is at what point does the China challenge become most pronounced and most dangerous and this is where there's not a lot of consensus I would say until. You know three or four years ago most people would have told you that this was kind of a 2035 problem that it was still a decade or two in the future. And so we needed to begin preparing more seriously for it but it was not a tomorrow sort of problem. Recently you've seen a number of American officials in the Pentagon and elsewhere warned that this may be a 2024 2025 problem that the Chinese military modernization has reached the point where Xi Jinping might calculate that he would be successful in a war to subdue Taiwan for instance, sometime in the middle of this decade. Perhaps he would be tempted to do so because the trends in Taiwanese politics are so unfavorable from a Chinese perspective, but even today there's not consensus on that and so if you go talk to some people they will say that they worry that if we basically think that we're going to end in 2025 we're going to exhaust ourselves before we get to the long term and you have other people who say that we simply don't have time to be thinking about this as a 20 to 20 to 30 or 2035 problem. And so it has to deal with a lot of assessments of the military balance assessments of economic strength, I put myself more and kind of it's a 2025 problem rather than 2035 problem and that's the argument that that Beckley and I'll make in the book we have coming out a few months from now. But but nonetheless, you know lots of reasonable people who would tell you that we are way off. Looking forward to that book that's for sure. My goodness we have some very long questions coming in on the chat, but I want to go to a son, who I'm glad has raised his hand again, because I think he had put it down. Again if anybody's having trouble with the raise hand function just indicate in the chat and then we'll we'll go to you. Hassan, do you are you able to unmute and ask the question. Hello, can you hear me. Yep. So hello my name is Hassan I'm a second year board study student at King's College London and I wanted to ask, is the world order that is now. Well that we live in now. Is it predisposed to great power rivalry, because if you look at it from from a general point of view. We do see that it is sort of an extension of the the Wolfowitz doctrine and sort of the initial version of the defense planning guidance for the 1994 and 1999 fiscal years. Yeah, that's the question is the current world order. We are in basically predisposed to to to sort of great power rivalry. So it's an interesting question and I guess my answer would be a sort of compared to what right and so is this world order. Does it have within it certain seeds of conflict in the sense that you know America's desire over the postcode were to maintain a unipolar system and to basically say that we would be happy to have China and Russia as members of that system so long as it's sort of on a on a second class basis does that create tensions with Moscow and Beijing sure right does the fact that the United States have it has a tendency to proselytize on behalf of its own values and to try to craft an international system. The democratic values does that create insecurity on the part of autocratic regimes in Russia China and elsewhere. I think the answer to that is yes, right, and you could you could take the argument further, and you could say that the current world order has a great competition, great power competition another way by helping to give countries like China, the means to challenge the existing order and so the thesis of American policy. After the Cold War wasn't that we were going to hold China down forever that we're going to help it rise economically in hopes that that would reconcile it to the existing international system and of course what happened instead was that we helped China gain the means to challenge that system and so there are various arguments you can make where it is true that aspects of the current international system have not been conducive to you know perfect piece between the great powers but but again and this is where I'd bring in the kind of the comparative issue, you know, compared to what right is this international system, more predisposed to great power rivalry than the international system of the early 20th century right well clearly the answer is no because we saw much more destructive, you know, much more violent rivalry during, you know, 25 30 year period then and we've seen in kind of the 75 years since World War two was it was it, you know, predisposed to rivalry. Compared to the concert of Europe, well you know maybe that that's the more interesting comparison. And I guess that what I'm saying here is that the current system. It is, it lends itself to certain types of rivalry, but it also stifles other types of rivalry. And so we worried a lot in the early 1990s I mean no one remembers this now because why would we about a revanche is Germany, or a revanche is a revan right that once the Cold War was over these countries were going to go back to the battle ways of trying to reassert supremacy over their regions and ways that it led to conflict before and of course they didn't and one of the reasons they didn't is that they were pretty securely in sconce in an international system that provided for their prosperity it provided for their security in the form of security guarantees from the United States and NATO in Germany's case, in particular the system in that case had a really stifling impact on great power competition and essentially removed the sources of the two world wars. And so I think that sort of the short way of putting this is that no international system is perfect I would say that this one has been fairly good historically in terms of tamping down international rivalry or we haven't seen the type of all out global crack up that was all too common before 1945 since 1945 right we've seen a lot of cooperative relationships take root in the economic realm it's all relative of course and no system is perfect, but I think we have to keep kind of the pluses and minuses in mind. Okay on to our next question. This is from an anonymous attendee, which unfortunately they're not going to get credit for a great question. And that is one of the main things the US can learn from the Cold War to improve its strategy in the third world for great power rivalry now. And I know that, and this is for the anonymous attendee. I definitely recommend getting a copy of this book because there's an entire chapter dedicated to it. But how over to you. Yeah, it is a good question, in part because I think the, the Cold War, or the third world really is the place for the United States encountered the greatest difficulty. The world as well as strategic during the Cold War. And it was the place where, you know, there were the largest number of decisions that we would like to have back today, or even you know, 10 years after the fact and so it's particularly rich with with lessons for that reason I think what maybe I'll do is kind of talk through some of the difficulties that the United States had as an indirect way of getting at the lessons. And so, you know, one is that the United States really struggled to reconcile short term problems with long term aspirations and so we understood from late 1940s onward, that the best American policy in the third world would be to support forces of political independence and to try to get sort of a vibrant assertive third world that could protect itself vis a vis the Soviet Union that the problem was that and that we shouldn't try to get on that we shouldn't get on the wrong side of third world nationalism. The problem was that in the short term there were all these vulnerabilities that emerged and so maybe the most powerful political force in a newly independent country was uncomfortably close to the communists or maybe there were concerns about political instability in important countries and so then we often found ourselves drawn in to doing things that we that we understood might be counterproductive over the long term to protect our short term interest so so interventions and you know Ron or Guatemala and the early 1950s there's this great Eisenhower quote where he says, you know I wish we could get some of the people in these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us. It was like two months before he approved the coup in Iran and so it goes to that particular dilemma. A second dilemma I think was that where our second problem was that we sometimes failed to realize that solutions that have worked really well in one setting might not work well in another. And so one of the effects of the Marshall plan. It is so successful but it convinces a generation of American officials that the United States may also be successful in changing the trajectory of countries in the third world. And so the Marshall plan is in some ways the intellectual antecedent to programs like the Alliance for progress and Latin America during the 1960s which was this really ambitious effort to kind of overhaul the economies and societies of a number of underdeveloped countries in the Western hemisphere. Now the problem of course is that the conditions just weren't the same and there was sort of a critical mass of empowered moderate Democratic leaders in Western Europe after World War two that sometimes didn't exist in third world countries, particularly in Latin America during 1960s. And so we found that pursuing you know sort of Europe centric solutions in non European regions could be a recipe for grief. And I think the last thing we learned is that you have to keep problems in perspective. And so the United States got in the most trouble in the third world during the Cold War, when we allowed our involvement in peripheral places to become so vast that it started jeopardizing our interest at the core of the international system that the situation of the war in Korea in late 1950 would be one example of this and then of course the Vietnam War would be the even more compelling example of this now this lesson is kind of like easy to easy to say and hard to do. The problem of course was that it wasn't always easy to tell in real time how peripheral and interest was right Southeast Asia seemed important as a source of raw materials and markets for Japan. But it is just a reminder that when you are working in places sort of outside of the geopolitical core you need to be constantly metering your involvement there because can distract you from more important things. And I think the lesson for today just to kind of bring this around to where the question started is that we shouldn't just because we are in a competition with Russia and China doesn't mean that we have to compete with them with equal intensity everywhere. Right there are going to be geographic areas where the United States just won't be as influential as Russia and China or they just don't matter as much geopolitically parts of Central Asia might fit that description parts of Africa might fit that description. I don't mean to suggest these countries are unimportant but just that we will have to make hard choices again about where to deploy our resources and so that lesson from the Cold War will become relevant. That's great thank you Hal. We have a question from Vincent need I'm so glad is on this call. He had his hand raised and I don't know if he wants to ask that over audio or we can go to this question. Yeah, Vincent if you can introduce yourself as well. Hi, hi. Thanks Andrew. Good to see you again. And I'm a journalist for the Guardian and I cover China. I have a long standing interest in US China relations. I just wanted to sort of add a bit of sort of commentary on what you said, you know China changing the international system. I think, you know, it's a fair to say that, you know, China wants to do that other cards instead of like, you know, wholesale subvert the entire entire existing world order because surely China has benefited from the existing world order and it will continue to benefit from it. So I think, you know, in the discussion of what China's intention vis-à-vis the existing global order, would it be useful to discern what exactly China wants to do. This is my first question. The second is, you know, could you say a bit more about democracy versus autocracy framing because, yes, China might be on the other side of democracy. What Biden administration, you know, really believes is that, you know, the biggest challenge for America is the rise of authoritarianism. How does that explain Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as Lloyd Austin, you know, going to Vietnam. The UK is, you know, warming up its relationship with Vietnam as well. Vietnam is far from being a liberal democracy, right. So, so what is really going on here, you know, are we giving the kind of more idealistic framing in public and then doing things, you know, you know, differently in reality or, you know, is there a different way to understand this democracy versus autocracy framing. Sure. So I would argue in terms of kind of like what concretely does China want. I often think it's useful to have sort of four-part framework for this. And so the first thing that, and when we talk about China, by the way, we're talking about the Chinese Communist Party and particularly the top leadership of that party. And that's important to keep in mind because it bears on thing one, which is the CCP and Xi Jinping want to stay in power. That is the eternal aspiration of every tyrant because they know that it won't end well if they are toppled from power. That doesn't mean that China has limited ambitions. It simply means that everything that the CCP does is retracted through this lens of how does it help the CCP stay in power. The second thing, and the Chinese again have been very explicit about this, is essentially, you know, making China whole again, reclaiming the parts of China that in the CCP's telling were ripped away from the country when it was weak and divided and now must come back as part of this great rejuvenation. Hong Kong, obviously, Taiwan, parts of the South China Sea, most of the South China Sea, most of the East China Sea, border disputes with India and other countries. Xi Jinping's map of China looks a lot different than my map of China. The third thing I think would be sort of the regional sphere of influence. And again, Chinese commentators have been pretty explicit about this. Xi Jinping has called it Asia for Asians back in 2014. And the idea is basically, you know, China wants what most great powers have historically wanted, which is that they want to get other great powers out of their neighborhood, so that they can be the dominant influence there. And I think that China is going to go on a military rampage across Asia, but I think it does mean that China would like to have a degree of deference from countries on its maritime and territorial peripheries. And then the fourth thing, and I think this is one where there's still a lot of debate but it's become increasingly clear to me in recent years at least is that it kind of aspires to be the most powerful country in the international system. And does, you know, do they think this is going to happen by 2035 or 2049 or 2050, you know, answers differ to that. But there's been some really good work by a number of scholars. There's a great piece in the Texas National Security Review by Liza Tobin a few years ago basically outlining Xi Jinping's vision of global order and it's often an international system that looks considerably different than this one. This one looks today it's it's one where international organizations protect autocratic right rather than the democratic rule it is is one where US alliances are far less potent or perhaps have been dissolved in China has kind of a flexible network of security packs linking it security packs maybe the wrong word security relationships linking it to countries around the world it's it's one where China increasingly pursues a global power projection footprint and we can see the or we can see you know early in that today and Chinese efforts to gain bases in the Persian Gulf and East Africa and a variety of other variety of other places. So, does China want to change the international system. Absolutely. Right the international system that China likes would want to see is as far different than the one that exists today now that doesn't mean that every element of it would be changed. China would like the United States to continue pursuing free trade policies, even as China continues to pursue more of a mercantilist approach. China would presumably like to see the United Nations, which is an important part of the international system, continue so long as the United Nations and you and bodies become more protective of the interests and prerogatives of the CCP. And so it's not to say that the new international order will look nothing like the existing international order but I think it will be dramatically different. On the democracy versus autocracy question, you know, look during the Cold War, the United States talked about defending the free world, and American policymakers were not being insincere about that they genuinely believe that the fundamental question at issue in the Cold War was whether the world would be made safe for democracy and capitalism or the world would be made safe for communism and they believe that that ideological cleavage was really the thing that was fundamental the fundamental difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the same time, they understood that you had to make lots of concessions to expediency. And so, defending the free world might involve, you know, partnering with the junta in Argentina, or it might involve working with the Shah of Iran, because that was the only way to preserve a balance of power in which democratic systems could could thrive. And so you can you can think of it as constructive inconsistency you can think of it as hypocrisy right you can think of it as whatever word you you like to it. But it was not insincerity during the Cold War and I don't think it's insincerity today I think Joe Biden genuinely believes that what is fundamentally at issue between the United States and China is whether the 21st century is dominated by democratic powers or autocratic powers and I think that the reason he worries so much about Chinese power is that he worries that that power will be used to weaken democratic societies and strengthen the forces of autocracy in regions around the globe. At the same time, I Joe Biden clearly recognizes as I think every American policymaker does that if you only work with consolidated liberal democracies, you're not going to have the coalition you need to check Chinese power in particular regions. I think that you know American policymaker is going to be comfortable again or they're going to have to beat they're going to have to be comfortable again, talking about values framing what is that issue in the US China competition, while also working with non democratic powers and Vietnam is it's a great example when you mentioned there are others as well. There are aspects of the Indian political system that American policy makers are increasingly uncomfortable with and yet India is just far too important a partner to put that at the center of the relationship right now we've seen that in other cases as well. And so I think we're going to see, you know what what I would call constructive inconsistency and what others might call hypocrisy in the same way in this competition that we did during the Cold War. Great thanks Hal and thank you Vincent for the question and for attending it's great to see you. How do you have time for one more question I know I promise that you have a hard stop. Yep. Okay, so I'll ask a question from Francesca Gretti, who is a PhD student with the Center for grand strategy. She also works full time as an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China studies, she's a wonderful scholar of EU and China relations. She has three questions but I'm just gonna ask the first, because I think it's a big one and it's also addressed in your book, but she says obviously she agrees that we need a better long term strategic framework. But how do we do that while managing high political instability at home. Yeah, so great, great question. And I want to start with the caveat that my answer is not meant to minimize the political instability that the United States faces that other democratic societies face it's significant and in some ways it's, it's alarming. But let me make a couple of points. And so one is that we should not overestimate the degree of political stability there was in previous eras of great power rivalry and you know in the United States. You know we had a pretty ugly episode with McCarthyism in the early 1950s. By the time you get to the late 1960s, there were hundreds of bombings in the United States each year. There was widespread political violence basically as a result of a variety of factors we had, you know, significant economic instability in the United States and throughout the capitalist world during the 1970s. And so, there have been severe challenges to democratic political systems before even during times of great power rivalry where we've done fairly well. The second point is that we don't really have an alternative to tackling both of these things at the same time. Right. And so if the United States the United Kingdom or other countries decide they are going to drop out of international affairs to sort of focus on their own affairs what you're going to see is a dramatic deterioration of the international environment the empowerment of autocratic rivals and the way that American and UK policymakers have traditionally thought about this at least. They have believed that there is a connection between the quality of the of democracy in their societies and the quality of democracy in the world and Franklin Roosevelt put this most starkly 1940 where he said that no democracy can survive as an island in a sea of tyranny or something like that. And so I think you would see similar things they in a less dramatic form but if you know China and Russia really were able to gain the ascendancy, they would become more assertive and using economic coercion informational means and other other things to distort democratic systems and divide them and weaken them. Final point. Great power rivalry has often been a spur for democratic societies, particularly the United States to get its act together. The United States. One of the reasons it has such a wonderful higher education system is because we invested a lot in it during the Cold War as a tool of competition. One of the reasons why the federal government got serious about breaking down segregation in the south in the late 50s and early 60s is that it had become just too ideologically costly in the context of the Cold War, and you can go down down the list. I mean, there were a variety of major initiatives that really didn't make the United States a more vibrant and in some ways more inclusive society that were undertaken at least in part because of the Cold War. And so that's really the spirit that we need to heart today I see some signs of that by the way I think there's some legislation in Congress on competitiveness and things like that. That's promising but that's the that's the part of the Cold War example I'd like us to emulate. Thanks Hal and thanks Francesca for that great question. Sorry, we're going to have to close there but sorry to everyone who did not. We didn't get to your question, and that includes our co director may Brian, you asked one to two great questions. I hope I still have my visiting fellowship next year as a result. A quick announcement the next event will be on Tuesday. Next Tuesday, the Center for Grand Strategy will be hosting Professor Zara call for her book launch. She's at Cambridge but for her book launch of before the West, the rise and fall of Eastern World Orders. This will be held in person in the war studies meeting room at 5pm. You will need to sign up. Please visit the Center for Grand Strategies website to do that. Finally, thank you to everyone for joining and for all the great questions. And most importantly, thank you Hal for a wonderful talk. I highly highly recommend for everybody on this call to go out and get the book. It's a great read. And yes, it will really help you I think going forward in terms how to think about this stuff. But yes, Hal, we can't thank you enough. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good one everyone and we'll see you soon.