History Informing Foreign and Defense Policy
In a Foreign Affairs, Kotkin outlines five plausible courses that events in Russia could follow over the years ahead. Perhaps Russia will end up like France, with strong state institutions and a proud historical legacy but peaceful relations with its neighbors; or perhaps it will end up like North Korea, a true pariah on the world stage renowned for its repressive backwardness. Still other possible futures would see Russia become a vassal of an ascendent China, retrench due to internal weaknesses, or collapse into a level of chaos previously averted, even at the end of the Soviet Union. The sixth scenario that Kotkin rules out: Russia actualizing its own imagined position in the world system as “a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs.”
In this article at the Texas National Security Review Diplomat, historian, and Hoover senior fellow Philip Zelikow argues that the United States is in an exceptionally dangerous period because of the current configuration of American power relative to that of emergent adversaries China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Months before North Korean troops appeared in combat against Ukraine, Zelikow warned of the extensive nature of the collaboration among the regimes of what is sometimes called the “new Axis” (a framing that Zelikow does not himself endorse). Zelikow stresses that western leaders must take seriously their adversaries’ martial ambitions and work to rearm democracies quickly. If great-power war can be avoided in the short term—Zelikow identifies the next one to three years as the “period of maximum danger”—then the “task for this period of crisis is to weather it with America’s core strengths and advantages preserved, or even enhanced.”
In this essay for the Hoover History Lab, Hoover Fellow Joseph Ledford applies George Shultz’s advice that “foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood” to the present and argues that the United States must adopt an “Americas first” approach, prioritizing the Western Hemisphere in its strategic calculus. Ledford examines how the interconnected problems of transnational crime and smuggling in humans and drugs intersect with the geopolitical aims of illiberal states such as Iran, China, and Russia. Ledford then considers how American foreign policy can lean into Latin America and the Caribbean to promote greater trade, economic development, and people-to-people ties with the US while also mitigating corruption and other drivers of mass irregular migration northward. Although such efforts will require policymakers’ time and focus to succeed, Ledford stresses that the fundamentals are there to build up alliances and help make the region a long-term success.
In their 2023 book Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Andrew Roberts and General David Petraeus, former CIA director and senior military commander in both Iraq and Afghanistan, related lessons learned from their analysis of over 70 years of conflict. This past spring, Roberts joined Uncommon Knowledge to discuss the book in relation to Israel’s ongoing defensive war against Iranian proxies and other current events.
