Author: Hal Brands, Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Chair: Dr Andrew Ehrhardt, Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History & Policy, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University

Hal Brands will discuss his book The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches us about Great-Power Rivalry Today with Dr Andrew Ehrhardt. This book is a leading historian’s guide to great-power competition, as told through America’s successes and failures in the Cold War.

As the United States enters an era of great-power competition with China and Russia, global struggles happen in a geopolitical twilight, between the sunshine of peace and the darkness of war. 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 in how to succeed in great-power rivalry today.

Although the threat posed by authoritarian powers is growing, America’s muscle memory for dealing with dangerous foes has atrophied in the thirty years since the Cold War ended. In long-term competitions where the diplomatic jockeying is intense and the threat of violence is omnipresent, the United States will need all the historical insight it can get. Exploring how America won a previous twilight struggle is the starting point for determining how America can successfully prosecute another high-stakes rivalry today.

About the author

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

Hal served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defence for Strategic Planning from 2015 to 2016. He has also served as lead writer for the Commission on the National Defence Strategy for the United States, and consulted with a range of government offices and agencies in the intelligence and national security communities.

Hal is the author or editor of several other books, including American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (2018), Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (2016), What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (2014), Latin America’s Cold War (2010), From Berlin to Baghdad: America’s Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (2008), The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (co-edited with Jeremi Suri, 2015), and The Last Card: Inside George W. Bush’s Decision to Surge in Iraq (co-edited with Jeffrey Engel, Timothy Sayle, and William Inboden, 2019). His newest books are The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, co-authored with Charles Edel, and COVID-19 and World Order, co-edited with Francis Gavin.