Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, joins the show to discuss the Cold War's lessons for great-power rivalry today.Times
01:24 - Introduction
02:47 - Halford Mackinder and how Eurasian geopolitics framed the Cold War
05:37 - Mackinder's theory of the heartland
07:47 - China's Belt and Road Initiative as an application of Mackinder's theory
09:07 - Comparing the United States' approaches to the USSR and China
13:04 - Nuclear power during the Cold War
17:24 - How Cold War-era nuclear logic applies today
21:02 - No first use policy
26:56 - The Nixon administration's critique of containment strategy
29:58 - The collapse of the Soviet Union
32:15 - Theories of victory that led to the Vietnam War
35:08 - End of the Cold War
39:17 - Infrastructure needed to fight the Soviets in the United States, and what the U.S. needs to take on China today
44:02 - China's moves to decouple economically from the United States
46:47 - The United States' harrowing responsibility to take on adversarial powers
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This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, o...