I owe you an answer to your very apt challenge last night. What would I, in retrospect, have done differently about the early post-war/Cold War period? This will be boring, but you did ask! 1/ https://twitter.com/kenaviba/status/1253780104603242496

2/Three major things: I would have tried harder, and earlier, to disaggregate and discriminate between adversaries. Specifically, Soviet v Asian communisms. Rather than regarding them as a global megalith. Trying to open up relations earlier with China, for balancing.

7/Thirdly, and perhaps controversial: not trying as hard to dismantle British international power and turn it into a financial supplicant. Why? So that US would maximise its power and reach less, but share more burden with other Soviet-containing states.

9/But that, in turn, points to a more fundamental alternative grand strategy: not aiming for extra-regional primacy, rather creating capacity to balance enough in the security competition, without it getting over-militarised, polarising or depleting.

8/ A complex area, of course, and much scholarship (eg @shifrinson) shows that the US was not simply trying to wreck British power, but turn UK into a counterweight, while underestimating damage of its policies (eg dollar convertibility).

10/These were and are hard choices: similarly, the question of balancing China's rise today - the how and the why - raises uncomfortable trade-offs. Panegyrics about seventy years of rules-based order and "global leadership" won't help in navigating, and may get in the way.

3/In other words, I would have followed the early realist/Morgenthau critique of the Cold War, that it was over-ideologised and globalised, leading to overstretch abroad (crossing the 38th parallel in Korea, the misadventure in Vietnam), and waste and demagoguery at home.

4/It might not have worked, but it was worth a shot. As opposed to what did happen: doing something that some hawks want to try again - conflating disparate enemies into a universal demon (now it is "authoritarianism"), which then drives over-reach.

6/Of course, as a classical realist/Machiavellian, some atrocity and evil will be necessary in statecraft. But being more wary of the point of excess, in particular self-harming excess. Giving Moscow too many opportunities to portray America as a predatory empire.

5/ Second: agreeing with baseline strategy of containing the Soviet Union as a "strongpoint" rather than limitless "perimeter" strategy, would have urged greater restraint on discrete choices: far less coups, election meddling, and errands on behalf of the likes of United Fruit.