The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World

By Hal Brands

Penguin Random House/January 2025

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

March 10, 2025

The contest over the Eurasian landmass and its four surrounding oceans is the “defining feature of global politics in the modern era.” So argues Hal Brands in his brilliant new book The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World.

An accomplished scholar of geopolitics, diplomacy and US foreign policy, Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

The struggle for the strategic heartland and rimlands of Eurasia, argues Brands, has pitted authoritarian Eurasian land powers against offshore sea powers. First, the United Kingdom and —especially since the Second World War — the United States, strived to make the world safe for democracy by constraining Germany, then the Soviet Union, and now China to keep Eurasia in balance.

Against this broad canvas, Brands guides his readers in a comprehensive romp through history as empires including the Mongols, Ottomans and Russians vied for dominance. He examines, for example, the significance of the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War as well as the ‘Great Game’ competition between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, over Afghanistan, Persia (now Iran) and Tibet.

Brand’s focus in Eurasian Century is on the 20th century’s three great conflicts – the first and second world wars, then the Cold War and its aftermath.

The collapse of empires, argues Brands, created power vacuums and instability that we are still dealing with a century later in the former territories of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and, a half century on, in the case of the British and French in post-colonial Africa and the Middle East.

Brands also describes how technology and innovation have transformed warfare and expansion in the quest for dominance. Examples range from the application of gunpowder to the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway that expedited Russian expansion into Siberia and increased its strategic reach into Asia, to the invention of nuclear weapons.

Innovation was not always for the worst. The concept of ‘mutually assured destruction’ through nuclear arms effectively deterred direct military confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a ‘near-run thing’ but peace endured. Nuclear deterrence and peace through strength, including Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the Strategic Defense Initiative and ‘Star Wars’, helped in the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A consistent point of reference for Brands is Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) — who combined careers as a British member of parliament, imperial civil servant, and intellectual — and his continuing influence on strategy and strategists.

Mackinder, who fathered the concepts of geopolitics and geostrategy, believed that geostrategy was about control of Eurasia and the contest between the land-based autocracies and their partners – first Germany, then the Soviet Union and now China – and the maritime democracies and their allies; first Britain, then the United States.

Brands guides his readers in a comprehensive romp through history as empires including the Mongols, Ottomans and Russians vied for dominance.

Mackinder defined Eurasia as the ‘world island’ running from littoral Asia in the east to the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles in the west, from the Arctic and Atlantic oceans in the north and east to the Indian and Pacific oceans in the south and west.

Cradle to many of the civilizations, Eurasia accounts for more than one-third of global landmass. It contains 70 percent of the world’s population, and much of its industrial and military might. It is the birthplace of all five of humanity’s major religions.

Mackinder presciently worried that a rising United States might mean Britain’s fall. The critical thing, wrote Mackinder in 1908, was to keep the United States from swallowing Canada for “if all North America were a single power, Britain would, indeed, be dwarfed” and the Great Republic “take from us the command of the ocean”. Who would have thought that Donald Trump has read Mackinder?

For Mackinder, writing at the start of the 20th century, the maritime hot spots were the North Sea, Mediterranean and North Atlantic. Then, the lead revisionist powers were first Germany and then the Soviet Union.

Now, says Brands, it is the Taiwan Strait, and the South and North China Sea where Chinese and American power meet. As China expands its Belt and Road Initiative across Eurasia, Brand observes, it is constructing new economic and strategic relationships already altering the balance of power in the region, including via the replacement of democracies with “illiberal” democracies and autocracies.

A cursory read of history would suggest that when it comes to conflict, the democracies and their control of the seas is determinant.

Not so, says Brands, and he points out that while the entry of the United States tilted the balance in both world wars, it was no sure thing. Technology and innovation are critical but so are things like supply chain logistics, troop numbers and combat readiness. These are factors where autocracies enjoy an early advantage in their ability to mobilize. They also don’t require the same degree of public approval.

This is relevant to Ukraine’s situation today. Brands writes scathingly that “Russian units raped Ukraine’s women, stole its children, murdered its citizens, and otherwise sought to erase its national identity.” What differentiated Ukraine in 2022 and Czechoslovakia in 1938 was the US and the collective security system it brought to bear in supplying arms and money to Ukraine. With that system seemingly collapsing under Trump, it is now up to the Europeans, Canada and Japan to try to sustain Ukraine. But there is no guarantee of a happy ending, especially if the US and Russia cut a deal in the fashion of great powers in an earlier age.

The Eurasian Century is a rigorous work of scholarship with meticulous references drawing on original sources from state archives as well as the memoirs of the players and fellow scholars.

As the second Eurasian century begins, what we thought would be a contest between the authoritarian axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea and the alliance of democracies led by the United States is being upended by Donald Trump and the interests who’ve returned him to office.

In a recent Foreign Affairs essay, a coda to The Eurasian Century, Brands writes that having transformed the American political order, Trump now threatens to reshape the global order. Brands writes that “a fourth battle for Eurasia is raging, and the system is being menaced on every front.”

But despite Trump, the fundamentals of geopolitics and grand strategy remain. For those seeking a deeper perspective on how the struggle for Eurasia continues to evolve, the Eurasian Century is a good starting point.

Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow and host of the Global Exchange podcast with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa.