When U.S. policymakers and commentators need guidance, they habitually turn to the Cold War. They mine its events for lessons, consult its characters for advice, and compare its features to the present. Cold War history sets the terms of debate over the United States’ approach to the world. U.S. President Joe Biden’s recent assertion that there “need not be a new Cold War” with China is only the highest-profile example of an analytic reflex that grips the entire foreign policy community.
This Cold War compulsion hinders more than it helps. The incongruence between today’s realities and the history of the Cold War has stunted the search for a new American strategy. For roughly 80 years, U.S. policy has been predicated on the country’s preponderance of economic, military, technological, and political strength. This dominance allowed the United States to seek the unconditional surrender of the overstretched Axis powers in World War II, the containment of a rising but war-ruined Soviet Union, and regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, most analysts agree that the United States’ declining share of global GDP, narrowing military advantages, decreasing technological supremacy, and waning diplomatic influence mean that Washington will soon face a multipolar world for the first time since World War II. Yet Americans remain captured by ideas from a vanishing era when their power reigned supreme.
Cold War history has become a straitjacket constraining how Americans perceive the world. Dominating their knowledge of the past, it warps how they understand conflict, how they approach negotiations, how they think about their capabilities, and even how they analyze problems. It does so by limiting the scope of debate to the possibilities of an unusual and bygone time. This narrow frame of reference misleads those who seek to learn from the Cold War and obscures centuries of historical inspiration for those who seek to move beyond it. To manage the coming multipolar order, the U.S. foreign policy community must study earlier eras when states struggled to survive without the advantages of overwhelming power. By familiarizing themselves with different styles of statecraft, Americans will gain the tools to better handle the multipolar future.
Whether they accept or reject the analogy, virtually everyone in U.S. foreign policy circles takes the Cold War as their reference point for world affairs. The result is a shallow historical debate. The Biden administration treats the Cold War as the archetypical rivalry—whose gravity it is desperate to escape. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has argued that the United States must reject “neo-containment,” that “the old Cold War construct of blocs is not coherent,” and that the United States should “heed the lessons of the Cold War while rejecting the idea that its logic still applies.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken has insisted, “I don’t think [the Cold War] reflects the current reality in a few ways,” and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has noted, “We do not seek a new Cold War, an Asian NATO, or a region split into hostile blocs.” The 2022 National Security Strategy emphasized that U.S. policymakers “do not seek conflict or a new Cold War.” Conversely, Blinken has argued with respect to the Long Telegram (the 1946 document written by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan that enshrined “containment” as a policy doctrine) that “you could literally insert Russia and Putin for what he [Kennan] says about the then Soviet Union.”
Across the aisle, former Trump administration officials also use Cold War history as their touchstone. In 2020, Mike Pompeo, then the secretary of state, said that “what’s happening now isn’t Cold War 2.0. The challenge of resisting the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] threat is in some ways worse.” The 2017 National Security Strategy stated that “today’s challenges to free societies are just as serious, but more diverse” than those of the Cold War. And in April, the former national security adviser John Bolton argued that the U.S. should write a new NSC-68 (the 1950 State Department document requesting massive rearmament) to confront China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
Historians such as Hal Brands, Niall Ferguson, and M. E. Sarotte have argued that the United States is in a new Cold War with China and Russia. Analysts including Fareed Zakaria, David Ignatius, Edward Luce, and Walter Russell Mead routinely parse Cold War analogies for wisdom. Roughly two-thirds of the books on history, politics, and international relations named “best of 2022” by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy focus on the period during or after World War II, when a preeminent United States was challenged only by ambitious but weaker powers.
It is no coincidence that these policymakers and thinkers have been struggling to chart a new course for the United States in the world. A hyperfixation on “the American era” limits strategic imagination. By framing reality with outdated ideas and practices, it normalizes a style of statecraft that should be notable not for its timelessness but for its strangeness. And by crowding out alternative historical examples, it deprives analysts of a broader base of knowledge that could help them think creatively. Even when analysts disavow the analogy, they contribute to a conversation that treats the Cold War as the ultimate precedent for international rivalries. This leaves them with the vexing task of designing new approaches from scratch.
Cold War history grossly constrains how Americans perceive the world.
A frame of reference based on Cold War history misleads policymakers in numerous ways. For one, Cold War history makes conflict appear to resemble an on-off switch. Stories of the United States containing the Evil Empire and leading the Free World to victory narrow the spectrum of international relationships to a binary between friendship and total rivalry. This perception makes intermediate degrees of tension difficult to understand. Thus, the many variations of what Sullivan has termed “managed coexistence” for U.S.-Chinese relations have been needlessly difficult for the policy community to imagine and accept. Butting up against Cold War absolutes, Americans struggle to understand gray areas between friend and foe.
Cold War history also warps assumptions about how to deal with distasteful partners. The most-studied negotiations of the Cold War era portray dealmaking with rivals as either shameful or boldly revolutionary. The resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 hinged on a top-secret quid pro quo designed by the Kennedy administration to be fully deniable. The détente with the Soviet Union engineered by U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which compensated for declining American power, involved compromises on human rights and anticommunism that tarnished the administration’s reputation. By contrast, the Chinese-American rapprochement under Nixon is regarded by many observers as a groundbreaking transformation. These stories make negotiations with rivals appear to carry impossibly high stakes, even though such diplomacy is a standard practice between countries seeking to advance mutual aims.
Focusing on the history of the Cold War limits how Americans view their capabilities and makes it hard for them to imagine a less-militarized foreign policy. Looking back only as far as World War II allowed William Burns, a former deputy secretary of state and now the CIA director, to hail the Cold War as a golden age of American diplomacy in a 2019 Foreign Affairs article. But a longer view reveals that the postwar era was characterized by a U.S. defense apparatus built to project military power around the globe and force Moscow to concede to Washington’s demands. This system allowed the military, the CIA, and the secretary of defense to strengthen their positions in the policy process at the expense of the State Department and even the president.
Finally, the inflated memory of the Cold War obscures other eras of history that could be more helpful to contemporary policymakers and analysts. By limiting the menu of available historical knowledge, Americans’ reflexive study of the Cold War deprives them of the benefits of what some scholars call “applied history”: using history to clarify the present, illuminate an issue’s origins, and gain vicarious experience. These are the main analytic methods policymakers use in their daily work, and they are stunted when Americans neglect centuries of history before the Cold War. Together, these effects of Cold War myopia prime Americans to perceive the world through the eyes of a dominant, uncompromising United States after Pearl Harbor. But the United States is not about to reprise that era, and Americans steeped in the Cold War are unequipped for the emerging multipolar world.
In their seminal work, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, the political scientist Richard Neustadt and the historian Ernest May warn readers about historical analogies that dominate decision-makers’ analysis despite being unhelpful or misleading. The Cold War has become one such analogy. To take just one key metric, Harvard’s Avoiding Great Power War Project has shown that the U.S. share of global GDP—a foundation of national power—declined from 50 percent after World War II, to around 20 percent in 1991, to less than 17 percent today. As Burns argued in Foreign Affairs in 2019, “the United States is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block.” In this situation, there is only one way to escape the unhelpful Cold War framework: study more history.
For Americans to think clearly about their approach to a multipolar world, they must learn about states that have navigated multipolar orders in the past. They could start by examining the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, when the Habsburg Empire faced a spasm of violence caused by a series of overlapping disputes—a power conflict between Europe’s monarchies, a decades-old Dutch revolt against imperial control, and the century-old religious frictions of the Protestant Reformation—and resolved each in different agreements: one recognizing Dutch independence, one resolving the central European religious and power conflict, and one settling the dispute between France and the Spanish Habsburgs. Or analysts could consider the Congress of Vienna in the nineteenth century, which restructured Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s wars to better manage two conflicts: one over power, addressed with a new territorial arrangement guaranteed by a security alliance and by institutions for conflict resolution, and one over governance, addressed with agreements on governing principles and an alliance of conservative states. Or policymakers could consider the Anglo-German antagonism beginning in the late nineteenth century, during which the United Kingdom and Germany enjoyed a mutually beneficial trading relationship while waging a geopolitical competition. These cases make it easier to imagine, for example, how the United States and China might untangle and manage disputes in arenas such as trade, ideology, and geopolitics rather than surrender to an all-encompassing cold war.
History might also change how analysts perceive dealmaking with adversaries. The Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 occurred when Austria joined its age-old rival, France, in a war against an alliance between two former antagonists, Great Britain and Prussia. A similar process occurred when in the early twentieth century the United Kingdom reconciled with old adversaries—France, Japan, Russia, and the United States—to lighten the burden of protecting its colonies while focusing on a rising Germany. In that confrontation, London and Berlin attempted repeatedly from the late 1890s to the early 1910s to ease their rivalry in talks concerning their navies and colonies. Chinese history is rife with examples of dynasties making deals with enemies. The Han and Song dynasties each developed elaborate treaty, trade, and diplomatic systems to coexist with powerful neighbors whom they could not defeat in war, while working to increase their relative power. They also developed ways of thinking and talking about these relationships that—along with a self-aggrandizing tradition of court history—helped shield their claims of superiority from the distasteful realities of compromise and coexistence with rivals. As U.S. dominance wanes, these histories illuminate how states have compensated for weakness by prioritizing objectives, making tradeoffs, and shifting partnerships—a way of thinking and acting far removed from the rigidity of the Cold War’s binaries.
Americans must remember how states made foreign policy without the benefit of overwhelming power.
History can also help analysts learn how to manage capabilities in a world of limited resources. Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides ample instances of states mismatching commitments, diplomacy, military power, economic power, and administrative bandwidth. The overextended Dutch slipped from the ranks of the great powers between the early 1600s and late 1700s by failing to balance their rivalries with their resources. France’s ambitious diplomacy through the 1700s created a slew of foes on both land and sea that demanded too much of its capabilities and capacity for management. With the important exception of the Vietnam War, Cold War history does not accustom Americans to the problems states have faced when failing to align ends, ways, and means.
These and other such histories can help sensitize Americans to a different way of seeing the world: one based on tolerable tradeoffs, not intransigence; on the difficult prioritization of goals, not total victory; on practical policy, not zealotry; on the integration of military and economic power with diplomacy, not brute force; and on coexistence with people whom Americans can neither change nor ignore. Of course, Americans cannot find easy answers by copying some old strategic playbook. They must always start with the unique aspects of their place and time, such as cultural values, domestic politics, technological advances, and the unprecedented demands of today’s transnational issues. They should also not overcorrect by forgetting the Cold War, which birthed the institutions and ideas that helped shape the United States of today. And they should not idealize the statecraft of these earlier, violent times, when war was considered a commonplace tool of policy and not the tragic failure of diplomacy that it is. Despite all this, ignoring how people made foreign policy without the benefit of overwhelming power will lead Americans into a dangerous world—one in which their inability to grapple with change may cause self-destructive bloodshed.
The United States must break out of the Cold War straitjacket if it is to succeed in the dawning multipolar era. Today, the U.S. foreign policy community is struggling within historical confines that cripple its imagination, that need not exist, and that are easily escaped if analysts only broaden their perspective by reaching deeper into the past.