President Reagan knew a detent with the Soviet Union wouldn’t win the Cold War. If we take off the gloves and force Soviet communism to compete with American democracy, he thought, the U.S. will prevail. In a phrase: “We win, they lose.” He was right. The U.S. won. The Soviet Union collapsed. 

But in the decades since as America’s role in the world diminished and the rules-based order decayed, Russia relapsed. And as he puts back the pieces of a shattered Soviet Union one illegal land-grab at a time, Putin is hardly the only despot hellbent on resurrecting an imperial renaissance in the shadows of American retrenchment.

Also jonesing for a rise from the ash heap of history are the Islamist regime in Tehran and Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. Together with Moscow, they’ve formed a neo-imperialist axis to take on the West in a New Cold War. 

With the U.S. facing multiple nuclear-powered adversaries in a conflict for the first time ever, the second Cold War is shaping up to be far more dangerous than the first. With such high stakes, CWII’s outcome will no doubt be a decisive chapter in modern history. 

The task of navigating the free world through this crisis falls on one desk (you know the one). And while he who will sit behind it remains uncertain, the possibilities can be narrowed down to two. Both have sat there before. 

So far, only one has a tailored roadmap for winning Cold War II, and it’s based entirely on Reagan’s playbook. The experts behind the strategy (AKA their new book: We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War) are Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea. They join host Cliff May who has some questions for them.