Stephen M. Kellen Lecture

Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War

As tensions among China, Russia, and the United States escalate perilously toward a new Cold War, Michael Doyle discusses the difficult compromises over Ukraine and Taiwan needed to facilitate the international cooperation necessary to avert the global threats of our time. Combining history with analysis and theory, Doyle explores the roots of global conflict in both great power rivalry and the incompatible, clashing domestic orders of liberal capitalist democracy and nationalist corporatist autocracy. He notes the impacts of cyberwarfare, foreign election-meddling, and the unprecedented schism of contemporary U.S. politics on American foreign policy. There can be no success in addressing climate change without China’s cooperation, Doyle contends, nor any hope of averting nuclear catastrophe without Russia’s. This talk draws from Doyle’s forthcoming book Cold Peace: Avoiding the New Cold War (W.W. Norton, April 2023).

Michael W. Doyle is a University Professor of Columbia University, where he is affiliated with the School of International and Public Affairs, department of political science, and the law school. He previously taught at the University of Warwick, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton, and Yale.

Doyle’s career has joined scholarship and international public service. He has written numerous books on the history of empires, international monetary order, peacekeeping, preventive war, and international intervention; he is also well known for the theory of the liberal democratic peace (“democracies do not go to war with each other”). His current book project, Cold Peace (forthcoming in April 2023 from W.W. Norton), is a study of the origins (and how to mitigate) a new Cold War between the United States and its allies, and with Russia and China.

From 2006 to 2013, Doyle was an individual member and then chair of the UN Democracy Fund, established in 2005 by the UN General Assembly to promote grass-roots democratization around the world. He previously served as assistant secretary-general and special adviser for policy planning to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. His responsibilities in the Secretary-General’s Executive Office included strategic planning (including the “Millennium Development Goals”), outreach to the international corporate sector (the “Global Compact’) and relations with Washington.

Doyle has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and has received the Charles Merriam Award of the American Political Science Association. In 2011, he received APSA’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award; in 2012, he was inducted into the American Academy of Political and Social Science.