The War Lover and the War Intellectualizer

There’s a very thin line separating the two. Does it even matter which side of it the new Cold War liberals think they’re on?

In my forthcoming book with Mike Brenes, The Rivalry Peril, we do battle with a number of people you might describe as the new Cold War liberals, a number of whom serve as foils for our argument.

Of these folks, the one who has the best balance of sterling public standing and violence-perpetuating advice is Hal Brands.

I know Hal’s work well, for reasons I explain below, and was reviewing some of his recent musings about foreign policy for our book. Amid some deeply dismaying content, I came across a recent piece in which Hal expressed a view about the relationship between “hot wars” and “cold wars” that is just not correct but is nevertheless instructive in its wrongness.

The piece tried to tie together Israel’s onslaught against Palestinians (which he narrowly casts as a war against Hamas…), Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a vaguely portrayed Iranian “axis of resistance.” He sees these all as a common “series of hot wars at the center of the new cold war playing out around the world.”

All roads, he seems to believe, lead to great-power rivalry. A new variant of domino theory. Hot wars that erupt for virtually any reason ought to be seen as part of a grand Cold War.

It’s the maximalist view about how states accrue reputations in international relations…and it flouts what the literature has to actually say about how states accrue reputations. It’s the logic that finds the CNN/MSNBC pundits mistakenly believing that fighting for Ukraine is fighting for Taiwan, and that killing civilians in Gaza affords some kind of benefit in Israel’s fight against Hamas.

Explaining why this perspective is so problematic (and dangerous) requires situating Hal in the right-liberal policy world that has made his star big enough that Kissinger’s name adorns his title at Johns Hopkins University.