Hal Brands
a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.A black-and-white photo shows soldiers carrying guns and wearing helmets, seen from behind as they head toward something burning on the horizon. Plumes of smoke billow into the sky.Soviet infantry in combat during the Battle of Kursk in 1943. Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
America must “pay the price for peace,” said President Harry Truman in 1948, or it would “pay the price of war.” The ghastliest moments of the 20th century came when autocratic aggressors ruptured the Eurasian balance of power. Standards of morality went by the wayside in conquered regions. Autocratic spheres of influence became platforms for further predation. Countervailing coalitions, thrown together under dire circumstances, had to claw their way back into hostile continents at horrid cost. This is why Truman’s America, having paid the price of war twice in a quarter century, chose to continuously bolster the peace after 1945.
There was nothing simple about this. Preventing global war was arduous, morally troubling work. It required learning the apocalyptic absurdities of nuclear deterrence. It involved fighting bloody “limited” conflicts, going to the brink over Cuba and Berlin, and preparing incessantly for a confrontation the United States and its allies hoped never to fight. The long great-power peace of the postwar era didn’t just happen; it was the payoff of a decades-long effort to make the military balance favor the free world. An important lesson, then, is that a cold war is the reward for deterring a hot one.
Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author, most recently, of The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World. X
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