Bloomberg Opinion
Multinationals Aren’t Ready for the US-China Clash
November 13th, 2025
“A disordered world tests multinational corporations as well as diplomats. Amid trade wars and real wars, great-power struggles and vicious crises, geopolitical and geoeconomic disruptions are mounting. The global risk map has become more crowded, more complex…”
Foreign Affairs
America’s Superintelligence Dilemma: How to Avoid and AI Catastrophe
August 5th, 2026
“For years, experts have predicted that artificial intelligence would revolutionize world politics. History may record 2026 as the moment the revolution arrived. From the start of this year, continuous developments have underscored the possibilities and perils of the AI era, from the use of AI in U.S. military interventions to the emergence of AI cyberweapons that can significantly outperform human operators. “Loss of control” episodes—cases in which AI models escape human control and supervision—have become more common. U.S. officials, including President Donald Trump, tout the American lead at the frontier of AI development, even as they worry about what dangers lurk over the horizon…”
Heartland vs. Rimland: The Battle Lines in the War for the Next Global Order
June 23rd, 2026
“At first glance, today’s strategic map seems familiar. A bloc of land-based powers, clustered around the center of Eurasia, is challenging a liberal, maritime order headed by an offshore superpower. China and Russia, reinforced by Iran and North Korea and ringed by autocracies from Belarus to Myanmar, now occupy the role that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and the Soviet Union each once held—continental empires seeking to dominate Eurasia and project power globally. The United States, like the United Kingdom before it, remains the only actor capable of anchoring a great arc of coastal and maritime countries…”
The Renegade Order: How Trump Wields American Power
February 25th, 2025
“Donald Trump has already transformed the American political order. Not since Ronald Reagan has a president so dominated the national landscape or shifted its ideological terrain. In his second term, Trump could reshape global order in ways no less profound…”
The Age of Amorality: Can America Save the Liberal Order Through Illiberal Means?
February 20th, 2024
“‘How much evil we must do in order to do good,’ the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them…”
The Next Global War: How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II
January 26th, 2024
“The post-Cold War era began, in the early 1990s, with soaring visions of global peace. It is ending, three decades later, with surging risks of global war. Today, Europe is experiencing its most devastating military conflict in generations. A brutal fight between Israel and Hamas is sowing violence and instability across the Middle East. East Asia, fortunately, is not at war. But it isn’t exactly peaceful, either, as China coerces its neighbors and amasses military power at a historic rate…”
The New Cold War: America, China, and the Echoes of History
October 19th, 2021
Co-authored with John Lewis Gaddis
“Is the world entering a new cold war? Our answer is yes and no. Yes if we mean a protracted international rivalry, for cold wars in this sense are as old as history itself. Some became hot, some didn’t: no law guarantees either outcome. No if we mean the Cold War, which we capitalize because it originated and popularized the term. That struggle took place at a particular time (from 1945–47 to 1989–91), among particular adversaries (the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies), and over particular issues (post–World War II power balances, ideological clashes, arms races)…”
Foreign Policy
June 9th, 2026
“‘The war in the Persian Gulf has created global shock waves—by roiling the world economy, unsettling U.S. alliances, creating epic disruptions to freedom of navigation, and bringing the nuclear nonproliferation order to a tipping point. But one of the most important and potentially destabilizing implications of this conflict has been to throw U.S. strategic insolvency into harsh relief…”
Three Scenarios for a Post-Trump World
March 23rd, 2026
“‘The old world is dying,’ Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1930, “and the new world struggles to be born.” His Marxist convictions notwithstanding, Gramsci would feel at home in the Trumpian age. The old world, in this case, is the international order that the United States built in the West after World War II and then sought to globalize after its victory in the Cold War. That project brought world-changing peace, prosperity, and freedom. Yet today, the old order has run its course…”
Trump’s Return Would Transform Europe
June 26th, 2024
“Which is the real Europe? The mostly peaceful, democratic, and united continent of the past few decades? Or the fragmented, volatile, and conflict-ridden Europe that existed for centuries before that? If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, we may soon find out … Even among those who don’t explicitly subscribe to the America First ethos, the pull of competing priorities—particularly in Asia—is growing stronger. A post-American Europe is becoming ever more thinkable. It’s worth asking what kind of place that might be…”
The Field of Geopolitics Offers Both Promise and Peril
December 28th, 2023
“Alexander Dugin is a bit of a madman. The Russian intellectual made headlines in the West in 2022, when his daughter was killed, apparently by Ukrainian operatives, in a Moscow car bombing likely meant for Dugin himself. Dugin would have been targeted because of his unapologetic, yearslong advocacy for a genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” he screeched after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of that country in 2014, adding: “This is my opinion as a professor.” Even at his daughter’s funeral, Dugin stayed on message. Among her first words as an infant, he claimed, were “our empire.” True or not, the comment was a window into the rabid nationalism that shapes Putin’s foreign policy. It was also a window into a much-misunderstood tradition: geopolitics…”
Deterrence in Taiwan Is Failing
September 8th, 2023
“‘My gut tells me we will fight in 2025,’ U.S. Air Force Gen. Mike Minihan wrote in a January memo to officers in the Air Mobility Command. The memo, which promptly leaked to reporters, warned that the United States and China were barreling toward a conflict over Taiwan. The U.S. Defense Department quickly distanced itself from Minihan’s blunt assessment. Yet the general wasn’t saying anything in private that military and civilian officials weren’t already saying in public…”
June 4th, 2023
“The war in Ukraine may have many positive outcomes: a Russia bled white by its own aggression, a United States that has rediscovered the centrality of its power and leadership, a democratic community that has been unified and energized for the dangerous years ahead. There will also be one very ominous outcome: the rise of a coalition of Eurasian autocracies linked by geographic proximity to one another and geopolitical hostility to the West. As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s folly rallies the advanced democracies, it hastens the construction of a Fortress Eurasia, manned by the free world’s enemies…”
Wall Street Journal
August 4th, 2022
Co-authored with Michael Beckley
“The U.S. is running out of time to prevent a cataclysmic war in the Western Pacific. While the world has been focused on Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, Xi Jinping appears to be preparing for an even more consequential onslaught against Taiwan. Mr. Xi’s China is fueled by a dangerous mix of strength and weakness: Faced with profound economic, demographic and strategic problems, it will be tempted to use its burgeoning military power to transform the existing order while it still has the opportunity…”
Washington Post
January 9th, 2025
“The most dangerous geopolitical phenomenon of our era isn’t any single crisis, conflict or competitor. It is the growing web of ties that bind America’s Eurasian foes. Eurasia — the supercontinent encompassing Europe, Asia and their outlying islands — is the world’s strategic center, where most of its people and economic potential reside. An empire that ruled Eurasia could project its influence across the adjoining oceans and around the world…”
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Hal Brands 