A New U.S. Grand Strategy: The Eurasia Challenge, With Hal Brands

LINDSAY:
Welcome to the President's Inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the Eurasia Challenge.
With me to discuss how the struggle to dominate the Eurasian landmass in the past and today has and will challenge the United States is Hal Brands. Hal is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He's also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is a prolific writer on foreign policy and international affairs with nine books to his name. His latest book, The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars in the Making of The Modern World hit bookstore shelves last week. This episode of the President's Inbox is the fifth in my series on U.S. grand strategy.
Hal, thank you for joining me on the President's Inbox and congratulations on the publication of The Eurasian Century, which Kirkus Reviews made a starred review and called 'thoughtful and disturbing.'

BRANDS:
Thanks, Jim. It's great to be here.

LINDSAY:
Hal, I want to begin with the point you make very early on in your book that, "We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we are living in a long, violent Eurasian century. Since the early 1900s, Eurasia has been the cockpit of global rivalry." Tell me what you mean.

BRANDS:
Eurasia has really been the strategic center of the world for a long time, mostly because that's where most of the people are, it's where most of the economic resources are, and thus it is where most of the military potential is. The reason the 20th century was so shockingly violent and contested across the Eurasian landmass, and in some cases beyond, had to do with the intersection of technology and ideology; technology in the sense that the proliferation of railroads across Europe and Asia was making it possible to project power and to move armies over longer distances in shorter periods of time than ever before. And so in a symbolic way, you can say that the Eurasian century began when the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in 1904 and basically links one end of the landmass to another.
At the same time, you're getting other technological and economic changes. The Industrial Revolution has borne fruits that are making collisions between the great powers more violent, they're making wars more protracted, and you're seeing the emergence, over a long period of time but really culminating in the 20th century, of autocratic regimes that fuse illiberalism with economic dynamism and with really messianic ambitions. And when you put all those things together, it creates a situation where aggressive powers within Eurasia try to conquer big swaths of that landmass and use it as a platform for global expansion. And then the offshore powers, like Britain and later the United States, try to prevent them from doing that. And that's really the story of the Eurasian century. It's what plays out in World War I, World War II and the Cold War as well.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Just a quick question, Hal, to make this concrete. Who are these powers over the last 120 odd years that have risen out of the Eurasian landmass that you have in mind? Just put names to suspects.

BRANDS:
Sure. So think of there being four rounds of this. So in the first round, which is basically World War I, you have the central powers, with Germany being the leader among them. And Germany's basically trying to carve out an empire reaching from the English Channel into the Caucasus and use that as the source of world power. In World War II it is the countries of the Tripartite Pact or the Axis. So that's Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Imperial Japan, which pursue separate but linked in some ways programs of expansion that ultimately go everywhere, from France's Atlantic coast and out into the Atlantic to the Central Pacific, in Japan's case. In the Cold War it is the Communist Bloc, which is led by the Soviet Union and at certain points stretches all the way from Berlin to Vladivostok and the Korean Peninsula. And then today it is the Autocratic Quartet, or the Axis of Revisionism, or whatever you want to call it, this group of four revisionist autocratic powers, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, which are pushing for primacy in their own regions and thereby upsetting the balance of power globally.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Just a quick definitional check. When you say Eurasia, what do you mean? I suspect for a lot of people, that's not a term they commonly carry around with them. So draw a line maybe around the globe and tell me what's part of Eurasia and what's outside of it.

BRANDS:
So Eurasia to a certain extent is what it sounds like. It's the combination of Europe and Asia. So running from the Iberian Peninsula in the West all the way to the Russian Far East. Also, it is generally thought to encompass what you might consider the nearby islands. And so United Kingdom, which is considered a part of Europe, even though it's physically separate from the continent, and then the countries make up the Asian Littoral, so Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, places like that. And so it's bounded then by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the East and the West, by the Indian Ocean in the South, and by the Arctic Ocean in the North. And then by some definitions it would also encompass the southern shore of the Mediterranean, because the thinking is that that part of North Africa is as closely linked to Europe by the sea as it is blocked from the rest of Africa by the desert. And so Halford Mackinder, for instance, who was one of the thinkers who put this idea of Eurasian century on the map, would've included North Africa and his definition as well.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'm glad you raised Mackinder's name because you've obviously been influenced by a number of thinkers in what we might call sort of the world of geopolitics, Mackinder being a leading one. Walk me through who these thinkers are and what their general approach was, because you draw on them a lot?

BRANDS:
There are three people that are particularly worth focusing on. One is Halford Mackinder, who you mentioned. He was a British intellectual and politician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is really one of the founders of what we would now call geopolitics. So the study of how geography interacts with the struggle for power in an international environment. And his major contribution was to tease out the theory of why Eurasia mattered so much that I mentioned a few moments ago. And so he gave a famous lecture in January 1904 when the Trans-Siberian Railway was on the verge of being completed, and he basically said, "Look out, because now that it's possible to project power from one end of Eurasia to the other, the coming era is going to be defined by clashes between land powers that try to rule Eurasia and the sea powers that try to hem them in."
Mackinder did not get everything right. And so he was more worried about Russia, but of course it was Germany and Japan that posed the bigger challenges to the Eurasian balance in the first half the 20th century. And so he was in dialogue, in an argument with a couple of other thinkers. One of them was Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American navalist, who argued that sea power was still superior to land power. It was a more efficient way of moving people and goods. But he fundamentally agreed with Mackinder that Eurasia was where the action was going to be, because since he was a navalist, what he worried about was a country like Russia or later Japan or Germany establishing a dominant position within their region and then using that as a platform to try to control the seas around.
And so Mahan is important in the American strategic tradition because he is one of the first thinkers to say that America's forward line of defense needs to be across the ocean. It needs to be in East Asia or in Western Europe, because that's the way you prevent hostile powers from controlling the seas.

LINDSAY:
Better to fight over there than fighting here.

BRANDS:
That's right. Easier to defend away than to defend close to home.
And then the last one was Nicholas Spykman, who was a Dutch-American academic who worked at Yale University in the 1930s and 1940s, and he got into a bit of a scrape with Mackinder as well. So Mackinder had basically said, "Look, the danger is going to come out of the Eurasian heartland." He was thinking about Russia and Central Asia. Spykman says, "No, the parts of your Eurasia that are well industrialized, that are economically dynamic, they are the rimlands, the places around the margins of Eurasia, Europe and East Asia." And so he pointed out that the two world wars had been started in one way or another by amphibious powers, so Germany and Japan, countries that tried to exert power on land and at sea.
And so they went back and forth on all these things, but what united them all was a sense that Eurasia was where the action was going to be, and increasingly, in the case of Spykman, that the U.S. was going to have to play a dominant role in moderating the Eurasian balance of power if it didn't want to see the world fall apart again and again and again.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So as we think of this over the last 120 years, my sense is that you're not arguing that history repeats itself, but to use that perhaps tired metaphor, it rhymes. And that this dynamic which characterized the 20th century will continue to characterize the 21st century. Do I have it right?

BRANDS:
Yeah, that's right. So the lineups change over time, the technologies change over time, and so the contours of these conflicts change over time. World War II looks very different than World War I. The Cold War is defined by nuclear challenges in a way that neither of the world wars were until the very end of World War II. We're dealing with an entirely different set of technologies that are revolutionizing economic and military power today. And yet, if you look at where the trouble is globally, it's in familiar places and it's being caused, in my view, by familiar culprits, where what you have is another set of autocratic powers that are trying to become preeminent within their regions. In China's case, I think they're also trying to become preeminent globally. And in doing so, they're putting pressure on the balance of power in all of these vital parts of Eurasia. And what's even more worrying in my view is that they are increasingly working together in doing this. And so we've seen China and Iran and North Korea support Russia and Ukraine, we're seeing Russia trade away some of its top military technology in exchange for that support. And so we're increasingly finding ourselves in a situation that I think would've been quite familiar to Spykman and Mackinder.

LINDSAY:
This line of argument, Hal, it strikes me is running against the zeitgeist of the moment, at least here in the United States. We've heard a lot of talk about the rise of what's sometimes called neo-isolationism, might be called non-interventionism, which seems to stem from the argument that we should have learned our lesson from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the United States and its national security interest is better served by, in some sense, coming home, doing less abroad. You seem to be arguing against that.

BRANDS:
Yeah, absolutely. For me, the lesson of the 20th century is that the United States is indispensable to the global balance of power, it's indispensable to stability within Eurasia, and if you don't get stability within Eurasia, eventually that will reach out and touch the United States in uncomfortable ways as well.
And so what we learned from the two world wars was that once the bad guys got up a head of steam, there was no group of purely Eurasian countries that could contain them or stop them. And so Britain and France were on their way to losing World War I before the United States came in. France had been defeated and Britain was on the ropes before the United States came in in World War II. And United States had lots of help in both of these contests, but it provided the indispensable margin of victory. And what those conflicts also showed was that you could try to stay out of these Eurasian conflicts, but they would find you, because the combatants in these conflicts would try to control the oceanic approaches to Eurasia. So Germany would try to knock Britain out of the war through submarine warfare, for instance. And so unless the United States truly was willing to isolate itself, not simply strategically, but economically, it would eventually get pulled into these struggles.
And so during the Cold War, U.S. policymakers said, "Well, look, we've seen that movie a couple of times. We don't particularly want to see it again." And so the U.S. took Mahan's advice and decided to defend Ford. And so it creates these alliances, it leads the non-communist world in ways that are meant to deter aggression by the Soviet Union against the flanks of Eurasia, while also suppressing historical tensions within those regions. And to make a long story short, the result is the emergence of the relatively prosperous, relatively peaceful world order we know today.
And so I understand why Americans may feel that they are tired of foreign interventions. I have a certain sympathy with the critique that you can be too aggressive in using U.S. power. But what I think people have to keep in mind is that if the U.S. isn't there holding the balance within Eurasia, things have a tendency to fall apart, and that can make even the United States insecure over time.

LINDSAY:
So it sounds to me, Hal, as if you are skeptical of the arguments for retrenchment, at least as they are conveyed, let's say in the popular press, but you also note that there is an issue of timing and level of effort. And as I think about these issues, one of the things I will note is that historically as hegemons have aspired to dominate the European landmass, they have triggered their own undoing. Other countries have come around, not just the United States, but have sought to basically prevent the hegemon from holding sway because it's in their interest to prevent that from happening. So that's really a timing question to some extent. Or maybe it's a question of perhaps the United States should wait a little bit longer and wait and see if the aspiring hegemon, in this case China, leading this axis of autocracies, might just collapse in and of itself. What's wrong with the argument for just sitting back and waiting to see what happens?

BRANDS:
It's an interesting argument, and it's reasonable in some respects. The challenge is that the lesson of the 20th century is that balancing does not get cheaper the longer you wait. And so World War II is the classic example of this, where the United States waits to enter that war until continental Europe has been more or less overrun by Germany, and Japan is on its way to overrunning a huge chunk of East Asia and the Pacific. And the U.S. and its friends are ultimately successful in restoring the balance, and so some academics code this as a checkmark, as a success for a strategy of offshore balancing, of staying offshore until things fall apart. Now, what that leaves out is doing that cost several hundred thousand American lives, it cost sixty or sixty-five million lives globally, and that's not a price that anybody wanted to pay again.
And so the strategy that the U.S. pursued during the Cold War was not inexpensive, right? The United States left hundreds of thousands of troops deployed in Europe and Asia primarily, spent more on defense than it had ever spent in a peacetime period before, it fought a number of small wars that weren't small at all in places like Korea and Vietnam. But the bet was that doing so would be cheaper in the long run because it would reduce the odds of having to fight your way back into Eurasia once it had been conquered in another global conflict. I think on balance, that was a good bet.
But I do want to acknowledge one piece of this, which is that in pursuing this project, the United States has from time to time become engaged in conflicts and interventions that did not pay off and that were not perceived to have paid off by the American people, Vietnam and Iraq being the most important of them. And the reason that those interventions are so damaging is not just the direct cost they impose on lives and treasure, it's that they leave Americans disillusioned with the larger project of global engagement that the United States has been involved in. And so I think it is totally fair to suggest that if you are in favor of a globally engaged foreign policy, you have to be attentive to limits and you've got to be prudent in how you use U.S. power or you may spoil the whole thing.

LINDSAY:
I will note, Hal, that's a lot easier to say than to do. Just to take out the issue of Vietnam, there were people inside the U.S. government, outside the U.S. government who decided early on that the war was not winnable, or not winnable on terms acceptable to the United States, but American policymakers doubled down. They did not take Senator George Aiken's advice to declare victory and get the heck out, which I think is one of the concerns that many critics of American interventionism have, that we make mistakes and then we compound them.

BRANDS:
Yeah, I think that's right, and I think it's further fair to point out that it's easy to pick out which interventions are good and which interventions are bad in hindsight. But in 1964 and 1965, most Americans and most American national security elites were in favor of intervention in Vietnam, just as most Americans and most national security elites were in favor of invading Iraq in early 2003. And so it may be that there is a certain amount of overreach and tragedy that is inevitably built into a project of this scope, and I think that's a relatively fair critique, but it doesn't absolve policymakers of the need to try to exercise good judgment in difficult situations as best they can.

LINDSAY:
I take that point, Hal, but I guess it raises another question, which is if the United States can get something like Vietnam so wrong for so long, how can we be sure that we're getting China right today? Why are you convinced that China is going down a road that is going to, if not checked, lead to a confrontation with the United States, or in the absence of a confrontation, an outcome in which American interests are harmed and American influence, prosperity and security are undermined?

BRANDS:
Let me make a couple of points here. The first is that the logic is much more straightforward in the case of China than it was in, say, Vietnam. And so even the biggest proponents of intervention in Southeast Asia in the 1960s did not contend that South Vietnam was crucial in its own right or that North Vietnam was going to take over the world. It was more of a credibility argument, that if you didn't stand up to communist aggression in place A, then why would anybody believe that you would stand up to it in place B? And there was a big argument and there is a big scholarly argument over whether those sorts of credibility based claims make sense, but it was always a bank shot argument.
The case with China is much clearer because China is the most powerful country in the world besides the United States. And so it's not so much a question of if China takes Taiwan and becomes the primary power in the Indo-Pacific, what third or fourth order consequence does that unleash? That's the consequence that you are worried about.
And so let me make one point about China's ambitions and then one point about the consequences if China were to achieve those ambitions. I think Chinese ambitions are much less debatable than they might have been ten or fifteen years ago. You have had a growing number of Chinese analysts, including periodically Xi Jinping himself, say in one form or another that China wants to be the dominant power in the Asia-Pacific, and it would like the U.S. to get out of that region, as the U.S. not so kindly asked the European powers to get out of Latin America and the Caribbean when the United States became a great power.
I think Chinese strategists, Chinese commentators are also increasingly clear that the goal is to make China the most powerful country in the world by some time in the middle of this century. This is really what the idea of China's great rejuvenation means. And they don't spell out exactly what will happen at that point, but I think it's safe to assume that a world in which China is the dominant power will look pretty dramatically different than a world that has been structured by American power.
Now, the interesting question is why does any of that matter to the United States? And I think this is a reasonable objection to raise in one sense in that the fear of people like Nicholas Spykman in the 1940s was that if Germany and Japan dominated their regions and harnessed the economic and military potential of those regions, they could ultimately coerce, blockade, and then perhaps invade the United States and force America to fight on its own soil. I think that is less likely to happen in a world with nuclear weapons. As long as the United States has a few hundred bombs on ICBMs, that's a very high risk strategy for even a globally dominant aggressor to pursue. But I think what could happen is that the United States would find itself locked out of key regions of the world, strategically and economically, which would make the United States weaker and less prosperous, and that a country like China would not hesitate to use its power and its leverage to coerce the United States and perhaps even to meddle in its politics.
And this is not a hypothetical situation. If you recall a few years ago, the Australian government said, "We would like to have an international inquiry into how COVID got started and how it spread." And the Chinese government leveled a bunch of economic sanctions against Australia and gave them a bunch of demands, and one of the demands was you have to shut down these newspapers and think tanks that have been spreading what the Chinese government referred to as anti-China propaganda. And so that was an effort to use Chinese economic leverage to stifle free speech within a democratic society, and I worry we would only see more of that as China becomes more powerful.

LINDSAY:
I would actually have a slightly different worry, Hal, and I think it's one that's more pervasive and we're already witnessing, which is that the Chinese don't have to threaten anyone. People realize how important China is as a market, and they begin to trim their sails so as to avoid becoming the subject of Beijing's ire. I think you clearly see that in Hollywood films, and I know people may dismiss films as mere puffery, but it is a very big business worldwide.

BRANDS:
Yeah, that's right. Whether it's censorship or self-censorship, the effect is the same, and it degrades the quality of your democracy in the same way.

LINDSAY:
So let me ask you then, Hal, what do you think the United States should do going forward? I mean, there's obviously this timing issue. I don't take from what you're saying that the United States should go to war with China anytime soon or to look for that opportunity, but you're also saying that we can't simply wait for history to come to our side; that whatever that arc is, it needs help in staying in that position. So how does this translate into practical policy?

BRANDS:
The great U.S. accomplishment of the last eighty years has not been in winning great power wars, but in preventing great power wars from happening and deterring them from breaking out in the first place. And I think that should be the goal of the United States today, whether we are looking at Eastern Europe or East Asia, because among other things, if a great power war were to break out today, it would be a war between two nuclear-armed powers. And we don't have much experience with that, thankfully, and nobody really knows how it would play out and how intense the dangers of escalation would be. And so when I'm asked sometimes whether I think the U.S. should be willing to fight China in a war over Taiwan, my answer is always I think we should try really hard to make sure that doesn't happen, because once it starts, there are no good choices.
Now, unfortunately, deterring wars is hard business, and I don't think that the U.S. is necessarily on the path to doing it today. The military balance has been eroding in the Western Pacific for a couple of decades now, thanks to the Chinese buildup, and it's possible that later in this decade we could reach a point where the window of opportunity starts to open from Xi Jinping's perspective with respect to Taiwan.
There is a bigger problem though, which is that the U.S. has basically been pursuing a one-war defense strategy for the past decade, but now finds itself in a world where it's plausible that you could have wars in two or even three really important regions at the same time. And so this is all a long way of saying that the U.S. and its allies are collectively under-capitalized in the military realm, and if they want to preserve the world that they have created, they're really going to have to step up. And I think that's going to involve significant military expenditures from U.S. allies, but also from the United States. There's a bunch of other pieces of it, but I think that's the hard power backbone.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me try you out on the ally part of it, Hal, because it strikes me that with the Trump administration now in office, you have a President who is skeptical of what it is that allies bring to the table. He's made no secret of that. How important, in your view, are allies to the success of the United States in preventing the rise of another hegemon on the Eurasian landmass?

BRANDS:
Allies are indispensable because they give the United States access to the key regions of Europe and Asia. The United States doesn't have much sovereign territory in Western Europe or in East Asia; it relies on military bases and access points that are located on the soil of its allies. Then there's also the fact that the allies powerfully augment America's economic and military capabilities. It's one thing if China has to fight a war against Taiwan and the United States, it's another thing if China has to fight a war against Taiwan and the United States and Australia and Japan and a couple of European powers and so on and so forth. And so these alliances are extremely potent tools in the American arsenal.
Now, that said, it is fair, because you mentioned Trump, to point out that the United States has not been getting as much out of some of these alliances as is likely to be necessary in the years ahead, and this is why Trump is such a double-edged sword when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Donald Trump may be more successful than Joe Biden in getting the Europeans to go to, say, three percent of GDP in terms of defense spending, because they might actually believe that Trump is willing to cut them loose and send America troops home if they don't do it. So that could conceivably be a good thing. The problem is that I'm not sure whether Trump actually wants to stay in these alliances and so he's doing this as a form of bargaining, or whether he might like to be out of them in the end. And so that's the catch-twenty-two of the sort of nationalism that Trump espouses.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, my sense is, Hal, that the willingness of the Europeans in particular to spend more in defense is much more a function of what Russia has done than anything either Donald Trump or Joe Biden has done. And the question is going to be whether it can be sustained. And here's where we get the challenge that for allies, if they come to believe the United States will not be there for them, that creates incentives to head for the exits, to hedge, to cut their own deals with the powers-to-be.

BRANDS:
I think that's right. I think there are quite a number of leaders in Europe who believe that European defense spending needs to be higher and in that sense see Trump, as offensive as he can be, as a useful goad to moving their own political systems. The challenge though is that nobody's really sure if Trump can make what political scientists would call a credible commitment to stick with NATO and back it if European countries meet his demands on defense spending or trade or anything else. And that feeds into the hedging tendency that you just rightly identified.

LINDSAY:
I want to close, Hal, by drawing you out on a point that you make in the course of your book, which is the relationship between America's engagement abroad and the state of democracy at home. You are a trained historian, you know this very well. For a very long time the argument against America going abroad was that if America went abroad, it would endanger democracy at home. I get the sense you argue that in practice, the reverse was true, that going abroad actually helped improve the state of American democracy. And you've written, and I quote you here, "Global contests created virtuous pressures for the United States to become a truer version of itself." I want to ask you to reflect on that question, given that many Americans today are very concerned about the state of our democracy, and I suspect a fair number of our fellow citizens believe that if we did less abroad, we could do better at home. How do you think about that issue?

BRANDS:
That was one of the fundamental debates in the United States during the 20th century between people who worried that developing big armies and an active foreign policy and doing all the things you needed to do to intervene in Eurasian conflicts would be detrimental to American democracy and those who argued that allowing Eurasia to be conquered by fascist or communist powers would ultimately create a world that was unsafe for democracy in the United States itself. And the reality is that it all involves a bit of a counterfactual, because we never had to live in a world that was consistently dominated by hostile Eurasian powers, and so it's a little bit of conjecture as to what would ultimately happen to the United States if that were to come about.
I will say, one of the things we did learn during the 20th century is that persistent U.S. global engagement does not have to be detrimental to American democracy, because the U.S. was engaged in Eurasia on a consistent basis after World War II. It's still there today. And while I am concerned about the state of American democracy at times today, the reality is the U.S. has a much healthier democracy now than it did in 1945, and in many ways, the Cold War was actually a spur to democratic reform. Yes, it involved McCarthyism and violations of civil liberties, but it also helped move the federal government to get serious about supporting the Civil Rights Movement and breaking down segregation in the South, and that was directly related to the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.
The final point I'll make here is that whenever the United States has domestic troubles, there is a response that goes like this. "How can we possibly try to make the world safe for democracy when democracy is imperiled within the United States?" But I would say that, look, other countries are not going to call a timeout in terms of global competition if the U.S. withdraws to focus on its own internal imperfections. And so if we are geopolitically paralyzed by the weaknesses in our democracy, then the world will be shaped by powers that are less inclined to introspection, and that ultimately will not be a good thing for democracy in the United States or in a lot of places around the world.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up the President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Hal Brands, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins, SAIS, and the author of the terrific new book, The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars in the Making of the Modern World. Hal, as always, it was a delight to chat.

BRANDS:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to the President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for the President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on the President's Inbox are solely those of the host, our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster with director of podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Marcus Zakaria was our recording engineer. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.