Hal Brands

A leading historian's guide to great-power competition, as told through America's successes and failures in the Cold War The United States is entering an era of great-power competition with China and Russia. Such global struggles happen in a geopolitical twilight, between the sunshine of peace...

An eloquent call to draw on the lessons of the past to address current threats to international order The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought...

We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we're living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-rich landmass possesses the bulk of the global population, industrial might, and potential military power. Eurasia is a strategic prize without...

It has become conventional wisdom that America and China are running a "superpower marathon." Yet Hal Brands and Michael Beckley pose a counterintuitive question: What if the sharpest phase of that competition is more like a decade-long sprint? The Sino-American contest is driven by clashing...