After seemingly drifting into irrelevance following the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, the ongoing war in Ukraine has given NATO a new lease on life. The thirty-nation alliance has not only returned to its traditional modus vivendi of facing off against Russia — including a tripwire defense strengthened by new deployments, bigger budgets, and renewed cohesion — but has also focused its attention on the supposed security threats posed by China.

Within this context, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry by Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at John Hopkins University and recent appointee to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, is a timely intervention. At this perilous moment, Brands argues, Americans must revive the “muscle memory” that originally crafted the “carefully measured and coldly unsentimental strategy” that defeated the Soviet Union. That policy, he says, was “containment” that, bluntly put, entailed mobilizing some 5 to 10 percent of GDP to halt and erode the threat from Moscow and, from 1950 into the 1970s, from China.

Whether or not US voters — let alone European allies — are up for recommitting to a cold war will be influenced by what is remembered of the last one, as well as by memories of their failed hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To this end, Brands recaps decades of global conflict, focusing on the original East-West antagonism of 1947–1991. From this, he distills twelve “lessons” from an era of neither war nor peace. Americans, and thereby their allies, he concludes, must accept “the need to see competition as a way of life.”