Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host to James Rogers and I am in the US this week

I'm conducting research for my new book on the history of American warfare but while I'm here I'm meeting up with some old friends and colleagues to bring you new histories of war and conflict

Now I'm in New Haven Connecticut, which is the home of Yale University, so while I'm here I'm meeting with my old colleague Mike Brennes who is the associate director of the Brady Johnson program in Grand Strategy.

He has written an amazing new book called For Might and Right, Cold War defense spending and the remaking of American

Democracy. He takes us through that delicate period 1945 when the US had to reassess all its threats in an emerging Cold War period.

It transformed from relying on ships and tanks and guns towards high-powered sophisticated

rocketry, intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear technologies.

And with this came a shift in the politics of the United States.

So here he is, Mike Brennes, on the United States. So here he is Mike Brennes on the Cold War, defense spending and the remaking of American democracy. Hi Mike, great to see you again. Nice to see you. How have you been? I'm good. Thanks, how are you? All things considered. All things considered, I'm very well. I'm happy to be able to travel just a little bit for the first time in 18 months and

You know I couldn't think of a better place to be here on the East Coast on a beautiful day

Sitting in the old Yale office on the and politics all around us the great names in there as well and what's it LBJ Kissinger some controversial so mixing okay so all the controversial and there's

there's on the wall there's Ford and Nixon and Carter and Reagan.

This seems like a pretty good environment to discuss what we're going to discuss

them, right? Okay, so let's get into it. We know, Mike, that in times of supreme emergency and crisis,

that these are periods that allow us to galvanize massive change in society

and the way we think about what should be economically prioritized.

We can look back at the establishment of the NHS, the National Health Service in the UK after

the Second World War, or the massive

reorientation of industry and the breaking down of gender norms to set women to

work in factories in the UK after the First World War. But in your work, you focus on how the

global Cold War period influenced American politics and American society back home. So tell us, give us a little

glimpse into this. How did the Cold War effect American society? Well, there are several ways, of course.

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