Wisdom without tears: Statecraft and the uses of history

ABSTRACT

The world is mired in history again, as historical modes of competition return and historical grievances fuel the policies of multiple revisionist actors. If the end of history has ended, then it follows that the time is ripe for an engagement with history’s wisdom. We argue that the making of American statecraft—the deliberate, coordinated use of national power to achieve important objectives—can be significantly enhanced by a better understanding of the past. This essay, which draws on the extensive literature on history and statecraft, U.S. foreign policy, and the author’s own research and experiences, offers a defense of the use of history to improve statecraft, as well as a typology of ten distinct ways in which an understanding of history can improve government policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Uses of history
• statecraft
• great power competition
• grand strategy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ With apologies to Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ National Interest 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18.

² On the current security environment, see Thomas Wright, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century and the Future of American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2017); and Hal Brands and Eric Edelman, Why is the World So Unsettled? The End of the Post-Cold War Era and the Crisis of Global Order (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments 2017).

³ Ernest May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford UP 1973); and Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library 2009).

⁴ For notable exceptions, see Francis Gavin, ‘Thinking historically: a guide for strategy and statecraft’, War on the Rocks, 17 Nov. 2016; Eliot Cohen, ‘The Historical Mind and Military Strategy’, Orbis 49/4 (2005), 575–88; and William Inboden, ‘Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience: A Taxonomy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37/2 (2014), 291–318.

⁵ The search for a ‘usable past,’ writes David Hackett Fischer, ‘ends merely in polemical pedantry, which is equally unreadable and inaccurate.’ Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row 1970), 314. For the idea that historians should conceive of their role as ‘speaking truth to power,’ see Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (New York: Cambridge UP 2014).

⁶ Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press 1986).

⁷ A complete list of the works whose insights we review and synthesize in this essay can be found in the notes that follow. Among those we find particularly useful, particularly in dealing explicitly with the history-policy relationship, are Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time; Gavin, ‘Thinking Historically’; Inboden, ‘Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience’; Cohen, ‘The Historical Mind and Military Strategy’; Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri (eds.), The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 2015); Gordon Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: Penguin 2008); Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton UP 1992); John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford UP 2004); John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (New York: Penguin 2018); May, “Lessons” of the Past; Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1992); MacMillan, Dangerous Games; Jeffrey Record, The Perils of Reasoning by Historical Analogy: Munich, Vietnam, and American Use of Force since 1945, Occasional Paper 4 (Maxwell, AL: Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College 1998); Howard French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (New York: Knopf 2017); Bruno Tertrais, ‘The Revenge of History’, Washington Quarterly 38/4 (Winter 2016), 7–18; Thomas Mahnken (ed.), Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History, and Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2012); Robert McNamara and Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage 1996); Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (New York: Random House 2001); Richard Danzig, Driving in the Dark: Ten Propositions about Prediction and National Security (Washington DC: Center for a New American Security 2011); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2017); Williamson Murray, War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness (New York: Cambridge UP 2011); Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (eds.), Successful Strategies: Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge UP 2013); Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford UP 2013); Bruce Jentleson and Ely Ratner, ‘Bridging the Beltway-Ivory Tower Gap’, International Studies Review 13/1 (2011), 6–11; Seth Center, Towards a Lessons Learned Paradigm: Aspirations, Obstacles, and Tradeoffs (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State 2014); Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1991); The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2012); Francis Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2012); Jeffrey Engel, ‘Bush, Germany, and the Power of Time: How History Makes History’, Diplomatic History 37/4 (2013), 639–63; Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 1992); and Melvyn Leffler, Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920–2015 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2017).

⁸ See Jill Lepore, ‘Tea and sympathy: who owns the American revolution?’ New Yorker, 3 May 2010.

⁹ Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2006), 159.

¹⁰ See, for instance, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York: Mariner 2002).

¹¹ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Classics 1972), 49; and Wood, The Purpose of the Past, 308. For a recent effort to draw lessons from this conflict, see Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2017).

¹² John Lukacs, At the End of An Age (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2002), 50.

¹³ For thoughtful explorations of this concept of the past as a ‘foreign country,’ see Gaddis, The Landscape of History; and Carl Trueman, Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History (Wheaton, IL: Crossway 2010).

¹⁴ See Khong, Analogies at War; David Hoagland Noon, ‘Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror, and the Uses of Historical Memory’, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 7/3 (2004), 339–64; and MacMillan, Dangerous Games.

¹⁵ See Barbara Keys, ‘Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy’, Diplomatic History 34/5 (2010), 823–51.

¹⁶ John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford UP 1987).

¹⁷ Howard, The Lessons of History, 12, quoted at 18–19.

¹⁸ MacMillan, Dangerous Games; Khong, Analogies at War; and Jeffrey Record, The Perils of Reasoning by Historical Analogy, 23.

¹⁹ Niall Ferguson, ‘The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered’, Foreign Affairs 94/5 (2015), 137–8. For more on the intellectual and policy deficiencies of academic structural realism, see Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, ‘Saving realism from the so-called realists’, Commentary, Sep 2017, 15–22; and John Owen and William Inboden, ‘Putin, Ukraine, and the Question of Realism’, The Hedgehog Review 17/1 (Spring 2015).

²⁰ French, Everything Under the Heavens; and Tertrais, ‘The Revenge of History’.

²¹ Alexander George, Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace 1993), 126–7.

²² John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin 2011).

²³ Andrew Marshall, Long-Term Competition with the Soviets: A Framework for Strategic Analysis (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1972); Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books 2015), esp. 130–2; and Mahnken, Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century.

²⁴ Evan Osnos, ‘On the Brink’, The New Yorker 93/28 (18 Sep 2017), 34.

²⁵ McNamara and VanDeMark, In Retrospect, 322.

²⁶ See George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2005).

²⁷ Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 1999).

²⁸ As outstanding examples, see Mead, Special Providence; and Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (New York: Knopf 2014).

²⁹ See Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 2005).

³⁰ Richard Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’ International Security 25/2 (Fall 2000), 16.

³¹ Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, 251.

³² See, as a classic example, Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1979).

³³ Charley Keyes, ‘U.S. Military needs flexibility due to poor predictions, gates says’, CNN.com, 24 May 2011, <http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/05/24/gates.speech/index.html>; and Danzig, Driving in the Dark.

³⁴ For one such effort, see National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, Dec. 2012, <https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf>.

³⁵ Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (New York: Random House 2008), 69.

³⁶ Publius (John Jay), Federalist No. 5: The Same Subject Continued, 10 Nov. 1787, <http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/federalist-no-5/>.

³⁷ Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by Harvey Mansfield (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1998), 3–4.

³⁸ Quoted in Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 239.

³⁹ Greg Behrman, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe (New York: Simon & Schuster 2007), quoted at 48.

⁴⁰ Peter Feaver and William Inboden, ‘Looking Forward Through the Past: The Role of History in Bush White House National Security Policymaking’, in Brands and Suri, The Power of the Past, 261.

⁴¹ David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP 2013).

⁴² Murray, War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness, 34.

⁴³ Freedman, Strategy, 3.

⁴⁴ Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1984).

⁴⁵ For one recent, insightful analysis, see Mark Gilchrist, ‘Why thucydides still matters’, Real Clear Defense, 30 Nov. 2016.

⁴⁶ Jentleson and Ratner, ‘Bridging the Beltway-Ivory Tower Gap’, 9.

⁴⁷ Jervis, Perception and Misperception.

⁴⁸ Center, ‘Towards a Lessons Learned Paradigm’; and Richard Neustadt, Report to JFK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1999).

⁴⁹ Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1991); and Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1984).

⁵⁰ Alexander George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia UP 1974); and Alexander George, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boston, MA: Little Brown & Company 1971).

⁵¹ Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft, 157–70.

⁵² Trachtenberg, The Cold War and After, x.

⁵³ Fredrik Logevall, ‘Presidential Address: Structure, Contingency, and the War in Vietnam’, Diplomatic History 39/1 (Jan. 2015), 1–15.

⁵⁴ Memorandum of Conversation between Nixon and Zhou Enlai, 23 Feb. 1972, National Security Archive, Washington DC.

⁵⁵ Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon & Schuster 2001).

⁵⁶ On these issues, see Gaddis, The Landscape of History; and E.H. Carr, What is History? (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1961).

⁵⁷ Lawrence Freedman, Strategy, ix; and Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2014).

⁵⁸ On this issue and the importance of history in Nixon-Kissinger statecraft, see Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company 1979), quoted at 54; and John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Rescuing Choice from Circumstance: The Statecraft of Henry Kissinger’, in Gordon Craig and Francis Loewenheim (eds.), The Diplomats, 1939–1979 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1994).

⁵⁹ Engel, ‘Bush, Germany, and the Power of Time’; and Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1995).

⁶⁰ Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post-Cold War Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2016), esp. chapter 6, esp. 281.

⁶¹ Arthur Schlesinger, ‘Folly’s antidote’, New York Times, 1 Jan. 2007.

⁶² See, for instance, Henry Kissinger, ‘Reflections on American Diplomacy’, Foreign Affairs 35/1 (1956), 53–4.

⁶³ Robert Kaplan, ‘Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism’, Atlantic Monthly, Jun. 1999, pp. 73–82. See, as examples of the burgeoning literature on this issue, Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House 2005); and Thomas Mahnken, ‘The Reagan Administration’s Strategy toward the Soviet Union’, in Murray and Sinnreich, Successful Strategies, 403–31.

⁶⁴ Gaddis, George F. Kennan.

⁶⁵ Joseph Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (February 21–5 June 1947) (New York: Viking 1955); and Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster 2013).

⁶⁶ See Dean Acheson’s classic description in Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton 1987), 214.

⁶⁷ These issues are all discussed in Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment; see also Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 (New York: Penguin 2004); and Bruce Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982–1990 (New York: Norton 1994).

⁶⁸ On red-teaming, see Murray, War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness, 139–67.

⁶⁹ Carl Becker, ‘Everyman His Own Historian’, The American Historical Review 37/2 (1932), 232.

⁷⁰ On this point, see Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, xv.

⁷¹ On the proper uses of analogies, see Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time.

⁷² On Iraq’s nuclear advances and the 1991 Gulf War, see Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer, The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons 2004); and Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House 2002). On the WMD intelligence failures in the 2003 war, see the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD (a.k.a. the ‘Duelfer Report’) available at https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd_2004/. On Iran, see David Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Random House 2012); Jay Solomon, The Iran Wars: Spy Wars, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East (New York: Random House 2016); and David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran (New York: Penguin Books 2012).

⁷³ See, on this debate, Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2014); and Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford UP 2016).

⁷⁴ Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies (New York: Norton 2013).

⁷⁵ Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin 1948), 324–8.

⁷⁶ The literature on Truman’s early Cold War policy initiatives and their political opponents is vast. See, for example, Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry Truman (New York: Oxford UP 1995); Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (New York: Cambridge UP 1998); and Leffler, A Preponderance of Power.

⁷⁷ William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (New York: Cambridge UP 2008), 105–6.

⁷⁸ For some speculations on the possible trajectory this might take, see Hal Brands and Peter Feaver, ‘The Case for Bush Revisionism: Re-Evaluating the Legacy of America’s 43rd President’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 28 Jul. 2017, <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2017.1348944>.

⁷⁹ Quoted in Feaver and Inboden, ‘Looking Forward Through the Past’, 253.

⁸⁰ See Frances Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From PreHuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2012); and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2015).

⁸¹ On North Korea, see Victor Cha, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (New York: HarperCollins 2012), 13.

⁸² Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge: Harvard UP 2017); and Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster 1994), 29–55.

⁸³ As Pieter Geyl noted, ‘History is indeed an argument without end.’ Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (New York: Mariner Books 1999), 164.

⁸⁴ Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. 4 (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company 1901), 468, quoted in Philip Zelikow, ‘The Nature of History’s Lessons’, in Brands and Suri, The Power of the Past, 281–2.

⁸⁵ Burke quoted in Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1965), 306.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hal Brands

Hal Brands is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His most recent book is American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (2018).

William Inboden

William Inboden is Executive Director and William Powers, Jr., Chair at the Clements Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft at the University of Texas.