We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War

In 1977, then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was discussing foreign affairs when he said, "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win, and they lose." Three years later, Reagan was elected president; by the time he left office, the United States had won the First Cold War.

Today, a New Cold War has started, this time with the People's Republic of China (PRC). While Beijing challenged the United States for many years, Washington only awoke to this reality in 2017 when President Donald J. Trump declared "great power competition" with China and Russia as the greatest threat facing the nation. We are in the early days of the New Cold War, and Washington is still struggling to define a clear China strategy.

Inspired by Trump and Reagan, this book proposes a straightforward goal for the struggle with China: we win, and they lose. Brilliant and engagingly written, this book provides a conservative foreign policy strategy—A Trump-Reagan fusion—for winning the New Cold War with China. We Win, They Lose explains why a conservative worldview is best suited for the coming confrontation with China and provides a comprehensive strategy for tackling every major foreign policy issue facing the United States, including: defense, trade, and values; Russia, Iran, and North Korea; allies and institutions; border security and immigration; energy and the environment, and more.

With this strategy in hand, the GOP and the United States can spring to action. It is time to win the New Cold War.

Dr. Matthew Kroenig is the vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. In 2022, he was appointed by the US Congress as a Republican commissioner on the bipartisan Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States. He previously served in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Kroenig is also a tenured professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. He received the Pentagon's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Heritage Foundation's Freedom and Opportunity's Academic Prize. A 2019 study ranked him one of the top twenty-five most cited political scientists of his generation. He is the author or editor of seven books, including The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China. His commentary has appeared in every major media outlet. He has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard University, and Stanford University. He holds an MA and PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Dan Negrea is the senior director of the Atlantic Council's Freedom and Prosperity Center. He was the State Department's special representative for commercial and business affairs between 2019 and 2021. He was a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning office between 2018 and 2019, where he was responsible for the economic portfolio. For three decades before that, he held leadership positions in Wall Street firms. He defected from Communist Romania where he had been an official in the Ministry of Finance and was involved in negotiating government loans with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He holds an MBA from Cornell University and an MA from the School of International Economic Relations in Bucharest, Romania.