The story of how America outcompeted the Soviet Union can help U.S. strategists do the same to China and Russia now.
The story of how America outcompeted the Soviet Union can help U.S. strategists do the same to China and Russia now.
The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today, by Hal Brands (Yale University Press. 328 pages, $32.50)
T oday’s sundry commentaries on great-power competition usually skirt comparisons to the Cold War or dismiss them outright. During a talk I attended at the University of Texas at Austin, one speaker slammed national-security practitioners who would replay our last superpower struggle in calling for cooperation with Beijing. “China isn’t the Soviet Union,” diplomatic historian Melvyn P. Leffler has written. Many see our contemporary great-power rivalry as unique unto itself.
With aplomb, Hal Brands disproves that thinking. A professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, he is well known to foreign-policy wonks. The Twilight Struggle, his just-published book, is an attempt to tease out lessons from the Cold War. “I seek insight about the future by examining the past,” he states unapologetically.
Doing so puts him at odds with a historical profession averse to that pursuit. The term may not appear in the book, but this is applied history, through and through. Brands’ is the latest work in a field that, however laudable, has been confined to far corners of the Ivory Tower. For swimming against the academic tide, he should be commended.
Brands should also be commended for taking on such a timely subject. Our present “twilight struggles,” which he defines as “high-stakes, long-term competitions,” compel him to study our past ones. The story of how America outcompeted the Soviet Union can help U.S. strategists do the same to China and Russia today. Brands’ focus on historical precedent complements the many excellent studies that have recently come out, such as Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial.
To that end, most of The Twilight Struggle reads like a typical history. Thematically oriented chapters cover nuclear strategy, intelligence operations, and the Third World, among other subjects. Primary sources by key national-security officials under every president from Truman to Bush 41 create a gripping narrative. Readers looking for just an overview of U.S. Cold War strategy could do far worse than this book.
Brands rightly does not take applied history too far. He doesn’t liken each historical episode to a contemporary one. Except in the introduction and conclusion, references to Xi’s China or Putin’s Russia are scarce if not absent altogether. What appear instead are judgments about U.S. Cold War policy that bear implicitly on the current moment.
Take the chapter on the origins of containment. Edifying insights accompany Brands’ dexterous reconstruction of how U.S. policymakers made the strategy work. They “differentiated between greater and lesser threats: they accepted peripheral setbacks to achieve victory in places that mattered more,” he notes. “Containment was not a brilliant strategy, but it was the best of bad alternatives.”
A takeaway might be that the Biden administration and its successors should contain China in much the same way Truman and his successors contained the Soviet Union. Or that Sino–American economic interdependence means that containment needs to be adapted to our times. But Brands says nothing of the sort explicitly, leaving the readers to decide for themselves.
Only in the conclusion does Brands directly spell out lessons to be heeded today. In line with his penchant for enumeration in earlier chapters, he lists twelve for us to digest. Some of them are bound to meet with opposition. For instance, many would disagree that the Cold War showed that values are an “essential weapon in a great-power struggle.” Others are less objectionable, such as “excelling in extended rivalry requites setting a steady pace” and “long-term competition rewards a strategic understanding of time.” Those who are already familiar with Cold War history or short on time might focus on these last few pages. The practical applications found in the conclusion and elsewhere complement Brands’ rich rendition of a story that’s been told often but yet not enough.
Brands may be America’s best young diplomatic historian, and it’s easy to see why. His prose is crisp and his analysis sharp. What he’s done in this book is write engagingly about a topic that interests many lay readers, not the sociocultural trivialities that have become academics’ sole province.
The Twilight Struggle makes two lasting contributions. The first is deftly recounting how the United States beat its Soviet foe. The second is drawing lessons from Cold War strategy that can inform today’s contests against China and Russia. Doing both well is no small feat.
“Study history, study history,” Winston Churchill once said to a young American. “In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” Brands has followed his sage advice while putting the lie to the idea that the Cold War has nothing to teach us.
To understand the great-power rivalry of bygone times and times to come, look no further than this book.