Published on September 17, 2025 (Episode 424)
Introduction
We reach for the Cold War as if it were a really good pocket tool: compact, familiar, ready to deal with any problem in today’s world. U.S.–China rivalry? “Cold War 2.0.” Russia and the West? “Cold War redux.” The appeal is obvious: the Cold War offers a story we already know how to tell—great-power tension, nuclear standoff, ideological blocs, and finally, a tidy ending.
But as Francis J. Gavin argues, analogies always smuggle in assumptions. To label something a “new Cold War” is to commit to a whole strategic script: decades of rivalry, fixed blocs, and an expectation of how the story ends. But what if the conditions that defined the 20th-century Cold War—its nuclear stability, its institutions, even its duration—don’t apply now? And what if these words “Cold War”that you use do not mean what I mean by the words “Cold War”?
In our conversation, Gavin makes the case for thinking historically rather than leaning on a word or two. Analogies can discipline our imagination, but they can also blind us to what’s new, strange, or contingent. If policy is going to be wise, it needs more than analogies; it needs context, proportion, and humility.
About the Guest
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age and Thinking Historically: A Guide for Policymakers.
For Further Investigation
Francis J. Gavin, Thinking Historically: A Guide for Policymakers (Oxford University Press, 2023)
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (Columbia University Press, 2000)
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th anniversary ed. (W.W. Norton, 2009)
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford University Press, 1993)
Listen and Discuss
What analogies have you leaned on? Why? When you think about it, should you have? Share with someone who has called today’s geopolitics a “new Cold War.”
