Oh

Ladies and gentlemen

Can I please have your attention?

Greetings your listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg host of the remnant podcast brought to you by the dispatch and dispatch media as our streak of A.I.

Scholars continues. I'm very excited to have a new colleague of mine who I'm not in fact met in person yet.

He is the I want to get this correct you correct me if I'm wrong but you are the Henry A Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, also known as SICE, also my beloved wife's alma mater.

And you are a senior fellow at A.E.I. and you have a new book on the Cold War which I'm going to ask you to give me the title because I for some reason don't have it in front of me and welcome to the remnant.

Thanks for having me in the title of the book is the Twilight struggle with the Cold War teaches us about great power rivalry today.

All right so that's so I have a standing rule on this podcast as an author myself. I think if you spent the time to work on a book you at least deserve to be asked a softball question at the beginning of any conversation.

And so what's your book about?

Yeah so that's a good one and I'm happy to start there and I'm delighted to get a softball and so the book is basically think of it as kind of like 80% history of the Cold War with 20% applying the lessons of the Cold War to US China and US Russia rivalry today.

And sort of the conceit of the book I guess is that the sort of rivalries that we're experiencing with Moscow and Beijing right now they're not unprecedented they're part of a much longer run of geopolitical and ideological competition really dating back as far as recorded history goes and that the United States has really one one case of prolonged experience with this sort of thing which is the Cold War.

And so if we look back at the history of the Cold War we should get some greater familiarity with the challenges of geopolitical and ideological rivalry and maybe some better conception of how we can succeed today.

So you use the phrase twilight struggle which is a homage to JFK's term for you know why don't you just sort of explain why you picked that as the title.

Yeah so this is from you know JFK's famous speech in 1961 where he calls the Cold War the long twilight struggle and the metaphor is apt so you know twilight is neither day nor night right it's sort of the hazy in between between these two things that we know and the Cold War was kind of the same so the Cold War wasn't hot war of the sort that the United States had experienced during World War 1 or World War 2 I mean there were plenty of wars that were part of the Cold War but not wars involved.

Not wars involving the United States and the Soviet Union meeting head on in the way that the Allies in the Axis had met head on during World War 2 so it wasn't hot war but it wasn't peace in the way that Americans had traditionally understood it either and so the the Cold War really required the United States to do things that were fundamentally new in its experience.

Never built in peacetime a big standing military or a big intelligence establishment a national security state before we never had a global network of alliance commitments and partners that we pledged to defend from aggression and so this wasn't anything like Americans had understood as peace before and so it was neither you know worn or peace it was a twilight struggle and I think we're looking at the same thing today when we look at the trials we're facing vis-à-vis China and Russia neither one of them has touched off.

A U.S. Russia or U.S. China hot war yet but the danger of war is certainly growing and even short of that we're looking at sharper and sharper competition for influence in the space short of war.

Yeah so I mean I read somewhere I think it was in foreign affairs a piece that you wrote a pro wrote where you make an important distinction that this to call to say that there were entering into a cold war like period.

There's a problem in the sense that it's it's you're not arguing it's capital C capital W right that is a label that we use for a specific period 4748 to 8991 but it's a lowercase C lowercase W and this sort of raises one of my great.

P's Charles Kraut error my late friend he one of his greatest essays was this time magazine essay from 1993 where he he raked Bill Clinton and others over the coals for.

This very common thing back then which was this claim that you heard from a lot of people usually from people who are on the wrong side of a lot of arguments that there was remarkable unanimity during the cold war and that everybody basically agreed with cold war strategy anti communism and all that when in fact.

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