Applied History Project

Disoriented in a historical re-play, as headlines would have it, that seems to have crammed the timeline from the Machtergreifung to the Truman Doctrine into a mere nine months, The New Republic called up prizewinning Cold War historian Arne Westad at Harvard Kennedy School to get his thoughts. Over the course of a short phone call, he offered his take on proxy conflicts, Putin’s motivations, and why Russia is in a weaker position than it may seem.

For about four years now, since Russia’s occupation of Crimeaand China’s launch of the Belt and Road Initiative, there has been much speculation about whether another Cold War between East and West is coming. In the last month alone, headlines have proclaimed that “The New Cold War Is Here,” heralded “Putin’s New Cold War,” and warned that “Trump Is Preparing for a New Cold War.” But are we really returning to the past? Contemporary politics is full of false analogies, and the return of the Cold War seems to be one of them.

"Johnson did what modern American presidents are never supposed to do: refrain from seeking re-election. (Since World War II, only Harry Truman in 1952 has done likewise.) He feared that his health could not withstand four more years, but what really worried him was the Vietnam War and the divisions it had created. The war was not just a threat to his personal legacy; it was a threat to the very foundations of the liberal political order that he cherished so deeply and that had built so many middle-class American dreams."

Cold War histories tend to discuss KGB covert action — including assassinations — in passing, if at all. My research on intelligence and Cold War superpowers, drawing on previously classified KGB material, reveals the importance that successive Soviet leaders attached to 'liquidating' traitors.

The authors recount Alexander Haig's tenure and departure as U.S. Secretary of State and analyze the implications for Rex Tillerson's departure from that position. 

Kori Schake’s essay (and the book from which it is adapted) provides a serious, penetrating, and provocative invitation to debate the overriding geostrategic challenge of our time: what to do about the rise of China. Safe Passage is an outstanding example of the sort of work we champion at the Harvard Belfer Center’s Applied History Project. It illuminates current challenges by careful analysis of the historical record. And the case she examines in which the United States rose to rival and eventually surpass the British global hegemony is among the most instructive of the 16 cases in the Harvard Thucydides’ Trap case file for policymakers seeking to cope with the current U.S.-China competition.

As an international historian, Odd Arne Westad may be best known for bringing a fresh interpretation to the Cold War in which he argues that the era began much earlier and extended much farther than popularly thought.

Those and other themes are explored in detail in a comprehensive new history of the Cold War written by Westad, the S.T. Lee Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations at Harvard, where he teaches at the Kennedy School.

Even taken on its own terms, the Nunes memo does nothing that Trump claims. But it does show us something—with deep ramifications for the intelligence community, the Russia investigation and maybe even the presidency