Books by Hal Brands

The United States is likely to face crucial grand strategic decisions in the coming years. This being the case, it is essential to have a rigorous, well-informed debate not simply about the nation's current grand strategy and policies, but about the most salient grand strategic options and alternatives open to the United States as well. In this monograph, Professor Hal Brands contributes to that debate through a probing analysis of one particular grand strategic alternative that has become increasingly prominent in recent years-the concept of "offshore balancing." Offshore balancing entails a large-scale strategic retrenchment of America's current presence overseas, and it has often been touted by its supporters as a sort of grand strategic panacea-an option that will allow the United States to improve its overall geopolitical position while simultaneously slashing the costs of its global posture.

Survival, the bi-monthly publication from The International Institute for Strategic Studies, is a leading forum for analysis and debate of international and strategic affairs. With a diverse range of authors, thoughtful reviews and review essays, Survival is scholarly in depth while vivid, well-written and policy-relevant in approach. Shaped by its editors to be both timely and forward-thinking, the publication encourages writers to challenge conventional wisdom and bring fresh, often controversial, perspectives to bear on the strategic issues of the moment.

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post-World War II international leadership appeared to be draining steadily away. Yet just over a decade later, by the early 1990s, America's global primacy had been reasserted in dramatic fashion. The Cold War...

From Berlin to Baghdad charts the often onerous course of recent American foreign policy, from the triumph of the fall of the Berlin Wall to the tragedies of 9/11 and beyond, analyzing the nation's search for purpose in the face of the daunting complexities of the post-Cold War world

Hal Brands explains why grand strategy is a concept that is so alluring and so elusive to those who make American statecraft, exploring what grand strategy is, why it is so essential, and why it is so hard to get right.

For Latin America, the Cold War was anything but cold. Nor was it the so-called "long peace" afforded the world's superpowers by their nuclear standoff. Taking an international perspective on the postwar decades in the region, this book explains what exactly happened in Latin America during the Cold War, and why it was so traumatic.