Introducing Michael Brenes

Please welcome our newest Foreign Exchanges contributor!

Hello everybody, it’s Derek. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to introduce a new contributor and so I’m very pleased to announce that Michael Brenes is joining the Foreign Exchanges team! Michael comes to us from Yale University, and those of you who are American Prestige listeners may recognize him from his two (so far) appearances on the show. He’s also starting his own Substack newsletter, which he’ll tell you about below. Here at Foreign Exchanges he’ll be writing about big topics in US foreign policy, including restraint and the ever-popular military-industrial complex.

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Hi Foreign Exchanges readers! As a longtime fan of FX and the work Derek does to generate conversations about the state of international affairs, I’m very pleased to be joining as a contributor.

A bit about me: I am the Interim Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at Yale University. I teach regularly on international history, US political history, political economy, and political theory. I have written for many publications, including The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Dissent, Jacobin, and The New Republic.

My first book, entitled For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy, examined the relationship between the military-industrial complex and US politics and political economy from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Editor’s note: buy it today!

I remain interested in the amount of federal dollars spent on the US military and what it tells us about America’s domestic and international priorities, the bi-partisan support for a militarized foreign policy, and the possibilities for reforming the role played by the US government both at home and abroad. I have also just launched a Substack newsletter called Warfare and Welfare, where I will be writing regularly on these themes: military spending, US politics, liberalism and conservatism, and the future of US foreign policy, all with a historical perspective.

For my first column for Foreign Exchanges, I will be writing about what the war in Ukraine may mean for the future of restraint in US foreign policy. Additional columns will cover the growth of the US military-industrial complex since the end of the Cold War, the history of efforts to restore American democracy through “great-power competition,” and the idea of liberal internationalism. I look forward to engaging with you all and feel free contact me if you wish. Thanks for welcoming me to FX!