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The Eurasian Century, with Hal Brands
2.5k Plays1 month ago
We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. Eurasia is a strategic prize without equal—which is why the world has been roiled, reshaped and nearly destroyed by clashes over the supercontinent.
To discuss the fight for Eurasia in 2025 and beyond, and how to compete with China, Russia, and Iran, Will is joined by one of the world’s most respected foreign affairs experts, Hal Brands. Hal is the author of the new book, 'The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World.'
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Transcript
Welcome and Introduction
00:00:21
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. so
History Rhymes: Fact or Fiction?
00:00:30
Speaker
The quote is usually attributed to Mark Twain, despite no evidence he actually said it.
00:00:35
Speaker
Twain is just fortunate to be in that elite group alongside Churchill and Oscar Wilde, who get witticisms attached to them purely on the basis of a stellar rhetorical record. Regardless,
Parallels Between Past and Present Conflicts
00:00:46
Speaker
the quote rings true, and never more so than in the field of geopolitics.
00:00:52
Speaker
It would be easy to watch drones flying over Ukraine, or Twitter diplomacy coming out of the White House, or pages exploding in the Middle East, and assume that we are living through unprecedented times.
00:01:05
Speaker
In fact, the turmoil across Europe and Asia in 2025 are in many respects a new round to the conflicts that defined the 20th century.
Introducing Hal Brands and His Insights
00:01:15
Speaker
To discuss how we can apply that history to understand the threats from China, Iran and Russia today,
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm delighted to be joined by Hal Brands. Hal is one of the world's leading foreign affairs experts. He is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the wonderful new book, The Eurasian Century, Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World.
00:01:45
Speaker
Hal, welcome to Fire at Will. Thank you
Historical and Modern Geopolitical Struggles
00:01:48
Speaker
for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on We have stolen a rule on this podcast from our mutual friend, Jonah Goldberg, and that is when we have someone on who has written a book, the first question is, what's the book about?
00:02:03
Speaker
Well, you gave a pretty good summary of what's it about in the intro. So the the book is basically about the way that struggles for Eurasia and the waters around Eurasia have shaped and defined the modern world.
00:02:18
Speaker
And so it it really starts at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th. centuries as some smart people on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to make sense of the world that was emerging as ah technology and and particularly transportation technology was changing. It was knitting countries and continents closer together.
00:02:38
Speaker
And then it walks through the great struggles of the 20th century, World War I, World War II and the Cold War. which were all in various ways ah struggles to rule Eurasia or some of its vital regions, at least, and the oceans off their coasts.
Eurasian Conflicts: Continuity and Change
00:02:56
Speaker
And then it brings us forward to the 21st century and the contention of the book that may be of greatest interest to your audience, is that the challenges and the contests that the United States and its friends face against the likes of China and Russia and Iran and North Korea, um all of which are revisionist powers located in key regions of Eurasia, that's really just round four in this larger struggle for Eurasia that has shaped modern history.
00:03:25
Speaker
When we think about round four then of this struggle, how should we be thinking about the key similarities between this struggle now and those earlier rounds?
00:03:36
Speaker
And then perhaps what are some of the differences between how we look at the first Eurasian century being the 20th century and then what you now label as the second Eurasian century being the 21st century? you're never going to get a detailed playbook for a particular competition or conflict of your own era by looking at something that has
Ukraine's Strategic Significance
00:03:57
Speaker
come before. And in fact, one of the interesting things about the history that I just summarized is that the shape and the rhythms of Eurasian contests vary dramatically over time as technology changes, for instance.
00:04:12
Speaker
and And so if you were just to look at the difference between World War I and World War two World War I, at least on the Western Front, what was a struggle of attrition. was a struggle of positional warfare. There was not a huge amount of movement on the Western Front between the fall of 1914 and really the spring of 1918.
00:04:34
Speaker
World War II was dramatically different. It saw huge amounts of mobility on a global scale. in part because military technology had evolved and the doctrinal concepts that were used to harness that technology had evolved. And the same thing is is true today.
00:04:51
Speaker
you know we didn't There weren't hypersonic missiles during a World War one Artificial intelligence was not a thing. And so the the way that these struggles play out and the way that various technologies play into them is constantly shifting over time.
00:05:04
Speaker
That said, there are there are parts of what's happening today that would be totally familiar to people who had lived through these earlier eras.
Geopolitics: Geography vs. Technology
00:05:14
Speaker
And let me just give you one example, which is in the news right now.
00:05:18
Speaker
It is remarkably striking that Ukraine has found itself at the center of every one of the rounds of competition that I just talked about.
00:05:29
Speaker
In World War I and World War two Ukraine was central to Germany's plans for expansion and the creation of a resource-rich empire, whether of Kaiser Wilhelm II's variety or Adolf Hitler's variety in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
00:05:49
Speaker
During the Cold War, it was sort of the link between Russia and Eastern Europe. And it was Ukraine's decision to bolt for independence in 1991 that really sealed the fate of the Soviet Union.
00:06:03
Speaker
And of course, it's sort of the key battleground between Russia and its friends on the one hand and the United States and its friends on the other right now. And the reason for that is that even as technology changes,
00:06:17
Speaker
Geography doesn't change that much. And Eurasia, sorry, Ukraine is still part of the the hinge that connects Europe sort of Eurasia as Halford McKinder thought about it, and then sort of the dynamic, economically advanced parts of Europe.
00:06:34
Speaker
And so if you are a European empire that's striving for Eurasian greatness, you got to push through Ukraine or Poland, maybe. If you are sort of a Eurasian empire or Russia, for instance, that is looking to dominate Europe, you got to go through Ukraine or Poland as well. And so there's a reason why Ukraine keeps popping up.
00:06:53
Speaker
in these struggles And so I think sort of the the key argument of the book, in a sense, is that you can really get a good understanding of some of the enduring patterns of these struggles by learning the history of this previous era and and thinking about the way that people like Halford Mackinder envisioned Eurasia as a strategic entity, even as we understand that a lot changes from era to era.
Mackinder's Theory and Influence
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of the really interesting things in the book is that in an age of globalization and advanced technology, particularly advanced telecommunications technology, you can instinctively feel like geography no longer matters as much.
00:07:35
Speaker
But the brutal truth is it it very much does in the in the realm of geopolitics. You mentioned Mackinder there and you start the book with Mackinder. Who was he and why was his thinking important?
00:07:46
Speaker
Mackinder was one of the most interesting and important people that nobody's ever heard of, or nobody outside of academia anyways. So Mackinder was a British intellectual, also a British politician.
00:08:00
Speaker
He lived in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, brought broadly speaking. He is known as the father, or perhaps one of the fathers, of the field of geopolitics. So basically, the the study of how the physical features of the Earth interact with and shape the struggle for global power.
00:08:24
Speaker
And he got that reputation really on the strength of a single lecture that he delivered in early 1904. It was called The Geographical Pivot of History.
00:08:35
Speaker
And basically, Mackinder argued that one era in human history was coming to an end and another one was starting. The era that was coming to an end was sort of the Columbian era, as in Christopher Columbus. And it had been defined by European imperial expansion into late developing regions around the globe.
00:08:56
Speaker
The challenge, of course, was that by the early 20th century, there really wasn't much left to colonize. And so European powers were going to be turned inward against each other. you wanted to expand. You had to do it at the expense of a country nearby.
00:09:12
Speaker
At the same time that the proliferation of railroads happened, were knitting Eurasia into a single strategic space and making it possible to move armies, big armies, from one side of that supercontinent to the other more more quickly than it had been possible to do you know at any time since Genghis Khan.
00:09:32
Speaker
And so, Mackinder's insight was that the coming era was going to be dominated by clashes between ah aggressive countries that would try to conquer Eurasia or large swaths of it, and then the offshore powers he had in mind, originally Britain, and then of course the United States, that would work with threatened onshore powers to try to hold those as aggressors or coalitions of aggressors back.
Geopolitics' Negative Reputation: Why?
00:09:59
Speaker
and And that, in a nutshell, is what happened and in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. The particular lineups changed over time in some cases. you know The United States used the Soviet Union to beat Germany in the Cold War and then used Germany, or at least the Western part of it, to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
00:10:19
Speaker
But the basic patterns were longer the same. And those patterns from Mackinder, which he outlined in 1904, continue into the 21st century. But some people in the foreign affairs establishment, in politics, in the 80s and in the 90s, were arguing that that Mackinder...
00:10:37
Speaker
I wonder if I can say Macandarian. Probably doesn't roll off the tongue. But that view of history was coming to an end. And it was that sort of end of history view where globalization and increased interconductivity would mean that those sorts of old geopolitical frameworks would no longer apply, it particularly given that China was looking like it was liberalizing economically, which many people made a bet to say that that meant it would also lead to political liberalization.
00:11:03
Speaker
That obviously hasn't turned out the way that many of those thinkers thought it would. How did so many in the political and foreign affairs establishment get that bet wrong?
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah, there's there's a lot in that question. i think there there are a handful of things that are worth saying. The first is that geopolitics got a little bit of a bad name in the second half of the 20th century because of the way it had been weaponized by bad actors, name namely the Nazis during the 1930s and the 1940s. And so there were some prominent German geopolitical thinkers during this period.
00:11:44
Speaker
who basically used geopolitics as kind of ah a quasi-scientific way of explaining and justifying why Germany needed to expand so aggressively and you know essentially managed to tar the entire field of geopolitics as a result of that, even even though I think that was a bit unfair in the sense that the the founders of that field, Alfred Dermahan, McKender, and Nicholas Spiegelman, I think they they had a very different mindset when it came to thinking about the uses of geopolitics. But that that was one part of it. The second part of it is that, look, geopolitics is is a grim endeavor.
00:12:23
Speaker
it It basically holds that the struggle for power never really ends. It's a little bit fatalistic in the sense that it recognizes that a country's options are always constrained by it's physical features and its physical
China, Globalization, and Western Misjudgments
00:12:43
Speaker
surroundings. you know if you If you are Israel, you don't have an infinite number of strategies at your disposal because you're located where you are.
00:12:53
Speaker
And so there is always a hope that we can find a more hopeful path forward, right? That you can somehow find a way of transcending these old ugly patterns of geopolitical competition.
00:13:05
Speaker
And the end of the Cold War certainly gave rise to that type of of thinking. And then I think the the last piece was the one that ah you mentioned, which was that there it wasn't so much that Western policymakers were sort of rejecting the notion of geopolitics or geostrategy entirely. and In fact, the United States did a lot of things after the Cold War that had the effect of maintaining or even strengthening its its global positions. The United States didn't walk away from NATO. didn't walk away from its alliances in East Asia because I think there was a realization that even though the world had seemingly changed so much, that the need for that offshore balancer to be there was was was still there.
00:13:51
Speaker
But I do think there was bet that was made that the attraction of of being included in the international system would be so significant for a country like China that it would overcome whatever hesitations China had about that system.
00:14:11
Speaker
And it would eventually make China, to use the the phrase from the early 2000s, a responsible stakeholder in maintaining that system.
The Influence of Leaders: Xi and Putin
00:14:19
Speaker
And that was not a crazy bet to make in the 1990s.
00:14:24
Speaker
I think it came a proper for a number of reasons that I'm that i'm happy to get into. But there was very much this hope that you could find ways of bringing countries into the system through attraction, and that would at least mitigate the dangers of a return to the sort of vicious geopolitical competition that we see today.
00:14:44
Speaker
I've heard one explanation for reason China went in a direction many people in the world hoped it would not go is due to the specific personality and power of Xi himself.
00:14:57
Speaker
And it's a question that I was thinking about as I was reading your book. is the lens of those two theories of history, you know, the great man theory of history, which says that particular personalities shape outcomes and the more historical forces view that says they are bigger, more vague forces that ultimately define where the world goes.
00:15:16
Speaker
Now, obviously, there's always a bit of both in these sorts of these sorts of in in these sorts of analysis, but it feels like we're in an age where particular people Great men, and I use the term great in in the historical sense, like Xi, like Putin, like Trump, their personalities are shaping this geopolitical battlefield.
00:15:37
Speaker
To what extent do you think about the personality view as opposed to more of the historical forces view in this respect? I think it's both. And I think the examples that you raised are good examples of of why it's both and why it's always a mix of these two forces. And so it's it's it's hard to imagine China becoming as as confrontational, as willing to court risk in its international relationships, as abrasive in some of its overseas dealings, as it has become under xi Jinping. Xi Jinping has a very well-developed
00:16:13
Speaker
sense of where he wants China to go. He has a very well-developed sense of his own personal role in bringing about China's return to greatness. And he has ah desire to centralize power within that political system that has shaped a lot of what China has done at home and abroad in in recent years. And so if you somehow remove Xi Jinping from the equation, I'm sure Chinese conduct would be different in important respects.
00:16:41
Speaker
That said, I think there are two things to keep in mind. The first is that Xi Jinping isn't doing all of the explanatory work here because the the turn in Chinese conduct, the turn toward a more assertive, bellicose China predated Xi Jinping. It really starts and in 2008, 2009, during and after the global financial crisis, when I think there was ah fairly widespread view among Chinese strategists that a huge dent had been put in American power and that there was more running room for a country like China than there had been before.
00:17:17
Speaker
And so you start to see a much more forward-leaning China in the South China Sea, just to give one example. Now, and I think that judgment that the Chinese made at the time about the shifting interest in the international system was actually wrong. I think that they underrated American staying power.
00:17:32
Speaker
But nonetheless, you you see this move start to happen under Hu Jintao, The second point I would make is that it's always it's always tough to tell whether somebody like she is the cause or the effect, right? The independent variable or the dependent variable.
00:17:48
Speaker
And so... yeah maybe you were destined to get a leader like Xi Jinping at some point in in sort of this stage of China's evolution, regardless of whether Xi Jinping exists or not. That is, as China's power grew, as China confronted fundamental choices about whether to continue liberalizing the economy or to sort of crack down and prioritize political control and stability, that there was a decent chance you would get somebody with the same general set of priorities as she, even if she had not come along.
00:18:24
Speaker
And I think, candidly, you can make some of the same points about Russia on under Putin. And so, you know, the war on Ukraine has surely been shaped by the particular characteristics of of Putin and by the particular characteristics of his regime. The invasion would not have been such a half-baked catastrophe had Putin, if if you didn't have Putin in charge, pursuing this hyper-personalized style of governance in which there are very few avenues for outside information to get to the highest levels of the Kremlin and in which dissent clearly is not exactly welcome.
00:19:02
Speaker
clearly, Putin sees himself as the leader who is going to return Russia to the glory and the influence that it lost after the Cold War. And and so in all those ways, this is ah this is a story about Putin. And I can point to examples of cases where I can imagine different Russian leaders, even different Russian ultranationalists, making different decisions than than Putin did. I don't think that every Russian ultranationalist, for instance,
00:19:28
Speaker
is as happy about the depth Russian dependence on China as Putin seems to be. But at the same time, you know, over the longer historical suite, what Russia is doing in Ukraine, it's not that much different from what Russia has done to countries along its periphery going back hundreds of years, right? that This is a country that lacks secure, well-defined land borders.
00:19:55
Speaker
It's a country that has often been governed in illiberal ways. And so it is often sought security as as Russia defines that security, by expanding and subjugating nations along
NATO's Role and Russian Strategies
00:20:07
Speaker
its periphery. And and so in that respect, know Putin is nothing original at all.
00:20:11
Speaker
Some people, so let's let's drill down on Russia. They are one of the three members of the axis of upheaval along with China and Iran. Some people have argued that it was the, one of the key differences, perhaps, you know, from say a couple hundred years ago, was the expansion of NATO and the push closer towards Russian borders, perhaps indirectly, if not directly forced Russia's hand.
00:20:37
Speaker
There are some on even the fringe elements of the right now that put the blame very firmly on NATO and America for Putin's actions. How much credence do you give to that argument?
00:20:48
Speaker
Well, in in a sense, there's a kernel of truth there because it's it's true that Russia never liked NATO expansion. it's It's clear that Putin himself never liked NATO expansion.
00:21:00
Speaker
and And it's clear that He thinks that Ukraine joining NATO would be a disaster for Russia. And, you know, as we speak and we're thinking about the shape of negotiations over and into the war in Ukraine, I imagine that, you know, membership in NATO for Ukraine would be a red line for for Putin. And so so clearly there was Russian dissatisfaction.
00:21:24
Speaker
But, you know, it's it's worth examining, like, what was what was the source of that dissatisfaction? and And I don't believe it's true to suggest that the source of that dissatisfaction was a fear that ukraine sorry, that NATO was going to invade Russia.
00:21:40
Speaker
That if you know if NATO had moved into Poland and the Baltic states, then the next thing you know, NATO would be marching on St. Petersburg and Moscow. There's just no evidence that the Russians ever particularly thought that was a realistic possibility. and And why would they? Because NATO military capabilities in Eastern Europe after the Cold War were skeletal at best. They only started increasing after Russia kept invading its neighbors in 2008 2014 and then in 2022. And I think the root cause of Russian frustration with NATO enlargement was that they understood, quite candidly, that NATO expansion was going to prevent them from doing the sort of thing that they're doing to Ukraine right now. it was going to prevent Russia from using coercion and perhaps force to reestablish a sphere of influence that
00:22:33
Speaker
in Eastern Europe. And so, you know, to that, to the extent that NATO expansion prejudiced that project, then then yeah, the Russians didn't like it. But that's nothing for the United States and its allies to feel bad about, right? that That's a good thing that they managed to keep Poland and the Baltic states and and Hungary and Romania from being pressured and coerced by Russia and the way that those countries have been pressured and coerced by the Soviet Union.
00:23:02
Speaker
And so, you know, it's a sort of a question of like, which set of objectives do you find strategically or morally preferable? And so I would sort of concede the premise that the Russians didn't like NATO expansion and also just said that's a little bit beside the point in terms of the debates that we're having.
00:23:19
Speaker
Well, one of the big debates that we are having today is how likely future Russian aggression would be and whether that is changed by you know a deal in the coming weeks or alternatively whether that is is made more or less likely by continuing on this war in an attritional defensive capacity for a long time to come.
00:23:37
Speaker
How likely do you think it is that Russian will continue with an expansionist strategy
00:23:45
Speaker
strategy after potentially a ceasefire or a peace deal in Ukraine? i think it really depends a lot on the character of that deal and then on the geopolitical maneuvering that's happening behind it.
00:23:57
Speaker
And so if if you get a strong peace deal in Ukraine, strong from the perspective of Ukraine and its Western supporters, then I think that makes it harder for Russia to engage in future aggression.
Peace Prospects in Ukraine
00:24:12
Speaker
if you have If you have a Ukraine, for instance, that you know retains strong military capabilities, has strong ties to the West, potentially has European troops with some sort of American backstop on their soil. You have a very robust demilitarized zone separating Russian and Ukrainian troops are ah along what's now the line of contact. right if you If you imagine that sort of
00:24:36
Speaker
ceasefire, then I can imagine ah successful Ukraine developing behind the the front lines and emerging as ah real security problem for Russia, frankly, and a stumbling block to future Russian expansion in the former Soviet Union or or elsewhere.
00:24:55
Speaker
I'm also positing in this scenario that NATO remains intact and it remains relatively vibrant. And both allies and potential challengers believe that the Article V commitment is a real thing. yeah If that's the case, then I think um the Russians will find it hard to turn the outcome that they have achieved at extremely high cost in Ukraine into an opportunity for future expansion.
00:25:24
Speaker
But i I can imagine other scenarios as well. And so you can imagine a much weaker ceasefire where basically, you know, we say, OK, the shooting is going to stop, but there will be strict limits on Ukraine's future relationship with the West. The United States won't be there lending support, in which case I think it's unlikely that the the Brits or the French or others will deploy troops in Ukraine.
00:25:49
Speaker
And at the same time, NATO is going to be in this terrible crisis. because there will be a perception that the U.S. sort of abandoned Ukraine at its moment of need, while at the same time brawling in a pretty intense fashion with a number of its European allies. And so no nobody is quite sure what will actually happen if Russia attacks Latvia or Estonia or something like that. If if that's the case, then I think it opens the door to First, to an eventual resumption of Russia's war in Ukraine at a time when Putin feels that that is advantageous.
00:26:28
Speaker
And second, perhaps more aggressive behavior toward NATO countries themselves. you know whether Whether that is sort of below the threshold but aggressive action like the sabotage and subversion we've been seeing recently or something bigger than that, is ah it's a little bit of a speculative question at this
Trump's Foreign Policy Impact
00:26:47
Speaker
point. But if you get that second scenario, I worry more about European stability in the years ahead.
00:26:52
Speaker
So much of this does come down to to Trump and you the way you phrased his more aggressive confrontational approach to to European allies. I know I'm actually aware that he reads next to nothing, so her I doubt he very much he would read your book, but let's say he was too. Why counting on it?
00:27:10
Speaker
What would he make of it? i You know, I think there are there are parts of this book that might resonate with Trump to it to a degree. I mean, I think he does view the international landscape as a fairly zero-sum competitive landscape.
00:27:28
Speaker
And so he would recognize that part of his worldview in the book or in some of the thinkers that are in the book. In other ways, though, i just I just don't think he sees the world in the same way. And so so i so i spend a lot of time talking about the development of the international system that emerged after World War two which I would argue has been pretty successful in bringing them about peaceful, prosperous, increasingly democratic world.
00:27:58
Speaker
I don't think Trump thinks about the international system at all. I think he thinks about sort of bilateral relationships between the United States and other countries. And in fact, he really dislikes the idea that the United States should bear special responsibilities for international peace and security, which which of course is the founding concept of the international order that that we know today. So in that sense, I don't think it would resonate.
00:28:25
Speaker
And there's a second sense in which I think it would not resonate either. ah you know The world that I describe, ah the contemporary world, is one that, from my perspective, is basically shaped by ah clash between the advanced democracies on the one hand and the Eurasian autocracies on the other with a bunch of multi-aligned and non-aligned states trying to play politics.
00:28:51
Speaker
both sides. But basically, sort of the advanced democracies are one big strategic community. the Eurasian autocracies are another. And again, I i just don't think Trump sees the world that way. I don't think he believes that the United States has sort of special strategic or values-based bonds with its allies. He thinks those relationships should be more transactional. And he doesn't think that at least some of the Eurasian autocracies are ah implacably opposed to the sort of world that he wants to bring about. He clearly thinks that there is and more cooperative relationship to be had with Russia.
00:29:28
Speaker
ah He clearly thinks that there are ways of sort of tempting Vladimir Putin to lean away from Xi Jinping and and creating some distance in that relationship.
00:29:39
Speaker
and And so I think Trump would have a fairly different view of the world. Now, that doesn't necessarily... mean that Trump has to be a disaster for sort of the international system that I have described. And something else that I wrote recently, i I argued that while Trump doesn't care about international order, he does care about power relationships.
00:29:59
Speaker
And that's important because any international system is is underpinned by power relationships. And so you you could imagine one set of Trumpian policies that he doesn't pursue because he thinks they're strengthening the international order, but they have that effect nonetheless, right? And so let's imagine a scenario where Trump is successful in getting the Europeans to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense without breaking NATO in the process. you know Let's imagine a scenario where he and his advisors layer on more economic and technological restrictions on Beijing while forming firming up the US military posture in the Western Pacific. you know Let's imagine a scenario where they really turn the screws on Iran in hopes of getting a better nuclear deal.
00:30:41
Speaker
none None of those policies are beyond the realm of possibility. and ah in a Trump MAGA presidency. And I think all of them could be sort of objectively good for the position of the U.S. and its friends. i think I think the challenge right now is it's not actually clear whether Trump is going to pursue those policies or a different set of policies that will be a lot more accommodating of U.S. adversaries particularly.
00:31:08
Speaker
Regardless of which way he chooses to go, Trump's only around for another four years. But the fact remains that the Republican Party is now, it would appear to be, much less invested in that US-led, rules-based international order and the active engagement of the US in protecting that than they were definitely under Reagan and and and under George W. Bush and and those leaders.
00:31:33
Speaker
and And as well, the US public, I think as well, is jaded and tired of that sort of mindset, or many of them are, in a way that they weren't 30 years ago. How confident are you of the maintenance or protection of that US-led, rules-based international order in the long term, even after Trump leaves the stage?
00:31:58
Speaker
Well, if I was super confident in it, I wouldn't have spent two years of my life working on a book, making the case for why this is an important thing to to preserve. So so the fact the fact that the book exists is is testament to exactly the uncertainty that you're you're talking about.
00:32:15
Speaker
Look, i more more seriously, I will say, i think there is a raging debate about the future of U.S. international leadership and engagement.
Republican Party's Foreign Policy Future
00:32:27
Speaker
And I don't think the outcome of that debate has been decided one way or another. and And so just to look at the Republican Party, know it's true that the party has gone ah much farther in kind of the America first MAGA direction than many observers, including myself, might have predicted ah decade ago.
00:32:46
Speaker
But i I don't know that the battle for the Republican Party is over. And I would just sort of offer two reasons to think what that it's it's not. The first is that, yeah, Trump won the Republican nomination in 2024, obviously.
00:33:02
Speaker
But the person who came in second with 30 to 40 percent of the vote, number of primaries, was Nikki Haley, who who favors sort of a much more traditional Reagan, George W. w Bush approach to the world.
00:33:15
Speaker
a number of key figures ah in sort of the Republican conference on the Hill, particularly in the Senate, I think still align themselves with that set of preferences, even even though they understand you've got to be a little bit MAGA these days to stay in step with Trump.
00:33:31
Speaker
And then the second thing I would mention is that I i think that, you know, Trump is is in some ways unique. So he has a particular set of impulses and instincts about world affairs.
00:33:47
Speaker
And he has managed to imprint those on the Republican Party because he dominates the party at the moment. But so much of Trump's political appeal is about personality, right? It's it's about sort of like the emotional and psychological connections that he has with his voters. He's an and he's an immensely successful president in that respect.
00:34:09
Speaker
And ah what that means, I think, is that it's it's not at all assured that the America First politicians who come after Trump will be as successful in dominating the party as he has been. And in fact, what you saw, you know, when when Ron DeSantis tried this in the twenty twenty three twenty twenty four election cycle, it went nowhere, right? Because he just doesn't have the same level of appeal and connection with the voters that that Trump does. So for all of those reasons, I think once we get to 2028, there's going to be a huge fight over the future of the Republican Party, pitting people like J.D. Vance, who who who has tried to turn sort of Trump's gut instincts into a coherent governing ideology, and then people who represent what you or I might think of as sort of a more traditional Republican perspective on foreign policy on the other.
China's Geopolitical Risks and Demographic Challenges
00:35:00
Speaker
I want to dig a bit deeper on on China. Some geopolitical pundits, people like Peter Zion, for example, have argued that China's effectively already done largely for crippling demographics reasons and that they don't represent a long-term threat throughout the 21st century to u global power.
00:35:22
Speaker
how How do you think of the the threat from from China? with that as a context yeah it it is true but also not that relevant to point out that you know chinese power in the year 2100 will be significantly less than it is today it's it's true because china has huge demographic problems it's got a huge problem with economic stagnation that xi jinping seems either unable or unwilling to fix it's true because china's running out of resources and and and all of these other problems
00:35:56
Speaker
But you know there's a long road between then and now. And what we know is that looking at history, revisionist powers, so countries that want to change the way the system works, they often become most aggressive, not when their trajectory is sort of steadily, comfortably upward, but when they they fear that they are peaking relative to their rivals and starting to decline. That was really the story with Imperial Germany before World War I, for instance, and it was one of the reasons that Germany ran such tremendous risks in the July crisis of that year.
00:36:31
Speaker
And so you could have a China that is declining or peaking over the long term that still becomes more risk tolerant, more averse in the short term because it wants to lock in the gains that it can while it can.
00:36:44
Speaker
And unfortunately, the real problem is that even if China is peaking or declining economically, it is not yet peaking or declining militarily. And so the military balance in the Western Pacific ah is going nowhere to from U.S. perspective. It's been shifting in adverse ways for a quarter century now.
00:37:02
Speaker
And by the time you get to sort of the the last couple of years of this decade, you could well be in a position where Xi Jinping thinks that he might be able to win ah fight with the United States over Taiwan or elsewhere within the first island chain. And in fact, a friend of mine, Mike Beckley, and I wrote wrote a book about this a couple of years ago, arguing that Sort of China's problems are worse than you think. And for that reason, China is actually more dangerous than than you think. And so I think it can be true that China has serious long term problems while also being true that they ah present a really serious challenge, the stability of the Western Pacific and the wider world in the next five to 10 years or even beyond that.
00:37:41
Speaker
Well, you mentioned the next five to five to ten years. I'm aware that Xi Jinping has said, and this is almost a cliche now, that he wants his military to be ready by 2027. He wants a modern military by 2027.
00:37:54
Speaker
As he has watched what has happened in the Middle East and in Russia and Ukraine in recent times, What lessons do you think he has drawn from those conflicts? And do you think those conflicts have made him more or less likely to either economically blockade Taiwan or to to physically intervene in Taiwan?
00:38:13
Speaker
Well, I don't think he's done drawing lessons yet. And so you you can sketch out one set of lessons that Xi might have drawn from the war in Ukraine in particular that would make you or I feel better about the prospects for peace in the Western Pacific. Because you know presumably he's seen how Russia has you know, fallen on its face, particularly in the early phases of the war. He saw how corruption could hollow out a military. He saw how if you're facing ah ah committed, well-armed defender, you know, controlling enemy territory is actually quite difficult and and and so on and so forth.
00:38:48
Speaker
And all of those lessons would lead him to think twice about whether it's a good idea to attack Taiwan. Now, on the other hand, there there was a different set of lessons that he might also plausibly have drawn, perhaps the most important of which is that the U.S. just isn't going to fight a war against a nuclear army great power, because that that is precisely what the Biden administration said from the outset in Ukraine.
00:39:12
Speaker
They had good reasons for for doing that. But if you are Xi Jinping and you're thinking, well, they're probably not going to want to fight a war against me either because I have nuclear weapons, then maybe that makes you a little bit more inclined to think that if you go after Taiwan in a way that's sort of less than full on invasion, maybe we can you can get
Navigating Major Power Struggles
00:39:31
Speaker
away with it.
00:39:31
Speaker
And then finally, I think the reason I'd say that I don't know that Xi's lessons are set in stone yet is that we don't know how the war in Ukraine is going to end yet. and And so... You know, kind of comes back to these scenarios that I mentioned earlier.
00:39:43
Speaker
if If the U.S. decides three years after Ukraine was invaded by Russia that we're just we're done with. Right. And we're we're done providing military aid to Ukraine. We're done providing intelligence aid to Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky either needs to cut a deal with Putin or he's going to be on his I can't imagine that that will impress Xi Jinping as to the staying power of the Western world.
00:40:07
Speaker
He will see a U.S. that is willing to sort of indirectly support and endanger democracy for a little while, but not that long. He'll see a Western world that is facing pretty severe internal ruptures.
00:40:20
Speaker
And he may wonder about the solidity of U.S. commitments in the Western Pacific as well. And so one of the reasons I think it's so important to get the end of the war in Ukraine right is that it it will have him. Two final questions in the time we've got left, Hal, and they both go towards lessons for other actors in this broader story.
00:40:37
Speaker
And the first set of actors is, i guess, middle powers that are watching these great power struggle between you know the the US on one side and and Europe collectively, and then the autocracy on the other. And I'll use Australia as an example, as as as an Australian myself.
00:40:52
Speaker
How should those types of powers be thinking about this conflict and where they should slot into the piece? Well, they're going to need as many friends as they can get.
00:41:03
Speaker
And I would say, look, the the lesson of the last hundred years or more is that, unfortunately, there is no credible balancing coalition that can sort of hold the line in Eurasia without the United States. Right. And so when these autocratic bad guys get up ahead of steam,
00:41:21
Speaker
There's no purely local coalition that has been able to check them. So the Brits and the French were going to lose World War I if the U.S. s hadn't come in clearly Clearly, the Allies would not have won World War II if the United States had not gotten involved. Same thing goes for the the Cold War.
00:41:36
Speaker
And unfortunately, particularly in Asia, I think that's that's still true today. So then the question becomes, well, you know if preference A is working closely with the United States and trying to keep it engaged,
00:41:50
Speaker
what's preference B if that's no longer possible? And I guess I would say that the best that you can do is is simply forge as many overlapping relationships with you know other like-minded states in the region as as possible.
00:42:03
Speaker
And so I think a lot of this is already happening. Japan and Australia have really built out their relationship in recent years, India and Australia, India and Japan, and and and so on and so forth. And so there's a lot of good stuff happening here and all those relationships will become all the more valuable if Asian countries or Indo-Pacific countries find themselves trying to balance China without so much active support from the US.
00:42:27
Speaker
There is a lot of good stuff happening. At the same time, a lot of the trends that you've identified throughout the 20th century are perpetuating in the 21st century. And so to tee up my final question, on a personal level, how how optimistic are you about the second Eurasian century?
00:42:43
Speaker
Well, I'm a little bit worried about where we are at the moment because I see increasing degrees of unity between the Eurasian autocracies.
Optimism in Democratic Resilience
00:42:54
Speaker
If you just look at the relationships that have emerged or flourished over the past few years, and I see increasing tensions within the democratic world, and I see some of the the signs of disengagement that you pointed to on the part of the United States. So that that makes me pessimistic. What makes me optimistic is that the democratic world has been in worse spots before.
00:43:17
Speaker
and In the early 1940s, there were a total of like 12 democracies in the world, right? You had ah bad guys who had overrun virtually all of Europe, you know big swaths of the Pacific and and mainland Asia and and so on and so forth. And so, you know, we're not in that position yet.
00:43:34
Speaker
And I think we still have time to present prevent ourselves from getting back in a similarly desperate position. And so one of the good things that came out of the first Eurasian century was this very favorable balance of power that the U.S. and its friends enjoy today.
00:43:50
Speaker
And so I hope very much that we will do what's necessary to to shore up that balance of power so we don't find ourselves back in 1917 1941 1947 type situation forty one or nineteen forty seven type situation again Well, it is one of the great things about using history as a lens to look at the present and the future is not just that you can learn from it, but it can give you that sense of perspective that you just alluded to as well.
Conclusion and Book Recommendation
00:44:12
Speaker
And this book does that better than than almost any other that I've read. Hal, it is wonderful. Strongly recommend that everyone goes out and gets a copy. Thank you for writing it and thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. i enjoyed the conversation.