Michael Brenes is a senior lecturer in Global Affairs at Yale University. He is also a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brooks Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University.

He is the author of For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy, published by University of Massachusetts Press, and The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy (co-authored with Van Jackson), published by Yale University Press in 2025. He is also the co-editor (with Daniel Bessner) of Rethinking U.S. Power: Domestic Histories of U.S. Foreign Relations, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2024, and Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

In addition to his academic articles and book chapters, his work has been published in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico, The New Republic, Dissent, Boston Review, The Nation, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He is currently writing a history of the War and Terror from the 1990s to the present, to be published by Grove Atlantic.