A Masterclass in Strategic Thinking: The Work of Harald Malmgren
We are publishing a series of articles highlighting the books we published in 2025. This is the second of sixteen posts highlighting each book published in 2025.
Harald Malmgren’s long career, as captured in Assessing Global Change: Strategic Perspectives of Dr. Harald Malmgren, is essentially a guided tour through six decades of global transformation seen through the eyes of a systems-level strategist. The book, edited and framed by Robbin Laird, presents Malmgren’s interviews and essays as a coherent masterclass in how to connect economics, politics, and security into a single, usable picture for decision-makers.
The book and its architecture
Assessing Global Change is organized around Malmgren’s own intellectual journey and then around the major strategic “dynamics” that have shaped the contemporary order: the United States, China, Russia, Europe, and wider global trends. Laird introduces the volume with three vantage points, American (Michael Wynne), European (Lt Gen Pasquale Preziosa), and Australian (AVM John Blackburn). underscoring that Malmgren’s work has practical relevance across alliances rather than being a purely American account.
The core of the book combines new 2024 interviews with Malmgren and his daughter Philippa “Pippa” Malmgren with previously published essays drawn from Second Line of Defense and Defense.info, giving the reader both retrospective reflection and contemporaneous analysis of key turning points since the Cold War. An appendix reprints Malmgren’s 1964 Orbis article, “A Forward-Pause Defense for Europe,” allowing readers to see how his early strategic logic foreshadows later assessments of NATO, deterrence, and escalation management.
A systems thinker in practice
From his academic beginnings through his advisory roles to multiple U.S. presidents, Malmgren is consistently portrayed as a systems thinker who refuses to “stay in his lane.” Trained in mathematical economics at Yale and Oxford under figures like Thomas Schelling and Sir John Hicks, he was pushed early to translate complex models into plain English so that they could shape real policy, a discipline that defines the style of his later essays.
The early interviews trace five phases of his career: Cold War defense analysis and crisis management in the Kennedy Pentagon, senior trade roles under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, Congressional advisory work on landmark trade legislation, and then global consulting with CEOs, financial institutions, and international bodies. Across each phase, the book highlights how he moves between levels, linking nuclear strategy to alliance management, trade rules to domestic politics, and corporate decisions (such as persuading Toyota to “insource” manufacturing into the United States) to long-term shifts in globalization.
Strategic method: questions, not formulas
One of the most revealing threads in the book is Malmgren’s method: he treats strategic analysis as the art of asking the right questions at the right time, rather than delivering pre-packaged doctrinal answers. In his recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, he describes slowing down senior commanders pushing for nuclear strikes by reframing the decision: What target? If Moscow, who will be left to negotiate with? Is this specific Soviet move worth unlimited nuclear war?
This emphasis on framing choices also appears in his trade and economic work, where he repeatedly focuses on the “cost of the competition” or how defensive innovations (for example, missile defense concepts that later informed the Strategic Defense Initiative) alter the offense–defense cost ratio and thereby change adversary incentives. The same logic surfaces again in his 1964 “Forward-Pause Defense” concept, which examines how NATO can trade space for time, combine fixed and mobile defenses, and use pauses in operations as opportunities for negotiation rather than seeking a purely military solution.
Reading global change through interacting “dynamics”
Laird’s organization of the essays by “dynamics” underscores how Malmgren reads the world as shifting, overlapping systems rather than as a static balance-of-power tableau.
The United States dynamic section traces the evolution from Cold War leadership through post-Cold War overreach to today’s problems of fiscal risk, political polarization, and what Malmgren calls the “governability challenge,” including his early reading of Trump as a political “icebreaker” rather than an anomaly.
The Chinese dynamic follows China’s move from export-led growth and deep integration with Western markets toward a more controlled, politically driven model under Xi, with Malmgren warning that a slowing, more authoritarian China will pursue leverage through economic nationalism, informal empire, and selective exploitation of global tensions rather than rescuing the global economy as in 2008–09.
The Russian dynamic pieces such as “What the West Gets Wrong about Putin” draw on Malmgren’s personal interactions with Russian elites to argue that Western misreading of Putin’s mindset, status anxieties, and willingness to exploit peripheral crises (from Crimea to the Middle East) has undercut effective deterrence.
European dynamics essays track the Eurozone’s recurring crises, Brexit, and the erosion of political authority, treating Europe as both an economic laboratory and a strategic fault line whose internal imbalances create openings for Russian and Chinese influence.
General trends chapters examine phenomena such as leaderless revolutions, broken supply chains, the return of economic nationalism, and the emergence of a multipolar, authoritarian-inflected order in which “rules-based” systems diverge rather than converge.
Throughout, Malmgren’s method is to connect discrete events. the Tunisian revolution, Fukushima’s supply-chain shocks, the Eurozone’s Greek episodes, the “white paper” protests in China, into an integrated account of how shocks propagate across political, economic, and security systems.
Why this work matters now
The concluding sections, including Laird’s 2024 interview on “NATO and the Defense of Europe: 1964 versus 2024,” frame Malmgren’s oeuvre as an antidote to today’s siloed strategic discourse. The juxtaposition of his 1960s thinking about forward defense, pauses, and negotiation with current debates over Ukraine, nuclear signaling, and alliance fragmentation highlights both continuity (the enduring problem of how to defend Europe without tumbling into uncontrolled escalation) and change (the loss of the Warsaw Pact buffer, the rise of informal authoritarian networks, and the weakening of overarching Western strategy).
Contributors such as Wynne, Preziosa, and Blackburn explicitly present the book as a strategic toolkit: a way for policymakers, military officers, and analysts in the United States, Europe, and Australia to regain the habit of integrating economics, technology, and geopolitics rather than treating them as separate domains. The final editorial reflections emphasize that Malmgren’s “no fences in his mind” approach carried forward by Pippa Malmgren and institutionalized in their Geopolitics Institute offers a model for thinking in a world of overlapping crises, contested globalizations, and multi-layered competition short of war.
In that sense, Assessing Global Change does reads less like a commemorative volume and more like a living seminar on strategic thinking, using one remarkable career to teach how to see, connect, and act in a world in flux.
Assessing Global Change: Strategic Perspectives of Dr. Harald Malmgren
Assessing Global Change: A Podcast Highlighting the Strategic Thinking of Dr. Harald Malmgren