It
is sometimes said
that most Americans live in “the United States of Amnesia.” Less widely
recognized is how many American policy makers live there too.
Speaking about his book Doomed
to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama, the American
diplomat Dennis Ross recently noted that “almost no administration’s leading
figures know the history of what we have done in the Middle East.” Neither do
they know the history of the region itself. In 2003, to take one example, when
President George W. Bush chose to topple Saddam Hussein, he did not appear to
fully appreciate either the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims or the
significance of the fact that Saddam’s regime was led by a Sunni minority that
had suppressed the Shiite majority. He failed to heed warnings that the
predictable consequence of his actions would be a Shiite-dominated Baghdad
beholden to the Shiite champion in the Middle East—Iran.
The problem is
by no means limited to the Middle East or to Bush. President Obama’s
inattention to the deep historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine led
him to underestimate the risks of closer ties between Ukraine and Europe. “I
don’t really even need George Kennan right now,” President Obama told The
New Yorker for a January 2014 article, referring to the great Cold War–era
diplomat and historian. By March, Russia had annexed Crimea.
To address this deficit,
it is not enough for a president to invite friendly historians to dinner, as
Obama has been known to do. Nor is it enough to appoint a court historian, as
John F. Kennedy did with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. We urge the next president
to establish a White House Council of Historical Advisers. Historians made
similar recommendations to Presidents Carter and Reagan during their
administrations, but nothing ever came of these proposals. Operationally, the
Council of Historical Advisers would mirror the Council of Economic Advisers,
established after World War II. A chair and two additional members would be
appointed by the president to full-time positions, and respond to assignments
from him or her. They would be supported by a small professional staff and
would be part of the Executive Office of the President.
For too long, history
has been disparaged as a “soft” subject by social scientists offering spurious
certainty. We believe it is time for a new and rigorous “applied history”—an
attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing precedents
and historical analogues. We not only want to see applied history incorporated
into the Executive Office of the President, alongside economic expertise; we
also want to see it developed as a discipline in its own right at American
universities, beginning at our own. When people refer to “applied history”
today, they are typically referring to training for archivists, museum
curators, and the like. We have in mind a different sort of applied history,
one that follows in the tradition of the modern historian Ernest May and the
political scientist Richard Neustadt. Their 1986 book, Thinking in Time,
provides the foundation on which we intend to build.
Mainstream historians take an event,
phenomenon, or era and attempt to explain what happened. They sometimes say
that they study the past “for its own sake.” Applied historians would take a
current predicament and try to identify analogues in the past. Their ultimate
goal would be to find clues about what is likely to happen, then suggest
possible policy interventions and assess probable consequences. You might say
that applied history is to mainstream history as medical practice is to
biochemistry, or engineering is to physics. But those analogies are not quite
right. In the realm of science, there is mutual respect between practitioners
and theorists. In the realm of policy, by contrast, there is far too often
mutual contempt between practitioners and academic historians. Applied history
can try to remedy that.
Imagine
that President obama had a Council of Historical Advisers today. What
assignments could he give it?
Start with the issue
that the president and his national-security team have been struggling with
most: isis. Recent statements indicate that the
administration tends to see isis as essentially a
new version of al-Qaeda, and that a top goal of U.S. national-security policy
is to decapitate it as al-Qaeda was decapitated with Osama bin Laden’s
assassination. But history suggests that isis is
quite different in structure from al-Qaeda and may even be a classic acephalous
network. When we searched for historical analogues to isis,
we came up with some 50 groups that were similarly brutal, fanatical, and
purpose-driven, including the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution. By
considering which characteristics of isis are most
salient, a Council of Historical Advisers might narrow this list to the most
relevant analogues. Study of these cases might dissuade the president from
equating isis with its recent forerunner.
The U.S. government’s
response to the 2008 financial crisis illustrates the value of this approach.
That September saw the biggest shock to the world economy since the Great
Depression. In a stroke of luck, the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the
time, Ben Bernanke, was a student of earlier financial crises, particularly the
Depression. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, “The context of history proved
invaluable.” Bernanke’s Fed acted decisively, using unprecedented tools that
stretched—if not exceeded—the Fed’s legal powers, such as buying up
mortgage-backed and Treasury securities in what was called quantitative easing.
Bernanke’s knowledge of the Depression also informed the Fed’s efforts to
backstop other central banks.
To be sure, historical analogies are easy to
get wrong. “History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes,”
observed Henry Kissinger, the most influential modern practitioner of applied
history. “It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable
situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in
fact comparable.” Amateur analogies were commonplace in the wake of September
11, ranging from President Bush’s invocation in his diary of Pearl Harbor to
the parallels drawn by his administration between Saddam and the Axis leaders
in World War II. To guard against such faulty parallels, May advised students
and policy makers to follow a simple procedure: Put the comparison you are
considering—for example, isis and the
Bolsheviks—on a sheet of paper, draw a line down the page, and label one column
“similar” and the other “different.” If you are unable to list three
points of similarity and three of difference, you should consult a historian.
Were a Council of
Historical Advisers in place today, it could consider precedents for numerous
strategic problems. For example: As tensions increase between the U.S. and
China in the South and East China Seas, are U.S. commitments to Japan, the
Philippines, and other countries as dangerous to peace as the 1839 treaty
governing Belgian neutrality, which became the casus belli between Britain and
Germany in 1914?
The council might study
whether a former president’s handling of another crisis could be applied to a
current challenge (what would X have done?). Consider Obama’s decision
to strike an imperfect deal to halt or at least delay Iran’s nuclear program,
rather than bombing its uranium-enrichment plants, as Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu hoped he might. Obama’s deliberations have significant
parallels with Kennedy’s decision during the Cuban missile crisis to strike a
deal with Nikita Khrushchev, rather than invading Cuba or learning to live with
Soviet missiles off Florida’s coast.
A president might also ask the council “what if?” questions. What if
some action had not been taken, or a different action had been taken? (These
questions are too seldom asked after a policy failure.) In this spirit, the
next president could ask the council to replay 2013. What if Obama had enforced
his “red line” against the Assad regime, rather than working with Russia to
remove Syrian chemical weapons? Was this decision, as critics maintain, the
biggest error of his presidency? Or was it, as he insists, one of his best
calls?
Finally, the council might consider grand strategic questions, including
perhaps the biggest one of all: Is the U.S. in decline? Can it surmount the
challenges facing it, or will American power steadily erode in the decades
ahead?
Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer answers to these questions.
Indeed, Trump proposes to “make America great again,” implying that decline has
already occurred, and to put “America first,” reviving a slogan with, to put it
mildly, a problematic history. The presidential campaign thus far gives us
little confidence that America’s history deficit is about to be closed.
We suggest that the charter for the future Council of Historical
Advisers begin with Thucydides’s observation that “the events of future history
… will be of the same nature—or nearly so—as the history of the past, so long
as men are men.” Although applied historians will never be clairvoyants with
unclouded crystal balls, we agree with Winston Churchill: “The longer you can
look back, the farther you can look forward.”
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