Is History Useful? | Kissinger Learns the Hard Way

If you’re former Secretary of State and diplomatic heavyweight Henry Kissinger, you might be a wee bit concerned about who is writing the personal history of your professional life and how it is portrayed:

Kissinger has always been acutely sensitive to criticism, and he miscalculated by providing Walter Isaacson full access for a 1992 biography, which was supposed to counterbalance Seymour Hersh’s withering 1983 account, “The Price of Power.” It didn’t. Then came Christopher Hitchens’s “Trial of Henry Kissinger” 2001. Turning to two British historians with conservative pedigrees must have seemed the prudent way to restore order: Horne explains that in 2004 he met with Kissinger, whom he has known for almost three decades, and proposed confining himself to 1973, thereby allowing the equally prolific Niall Ferguson, who extolled Kissinger last year in The Times Literary Supplement, to work unmolested on a forthcoming official life. [from NYTBR of Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year by Alstair Horne]

In a similar vein, Margaret MacMillan addresses the larger theme–an important point for all who work in the realm of international relations where the past is always present.  What is the use of history, or as she wonders, the “abuses,” as well?  She concludes:

History’s ultimate utility does not lie in its predictive or even its explanatory value, but in its ability to teach humility, to nurture an appreciation of the limits on our capacity to see the past clearly or to know fully the historical determinants of our own brief passage in time. “If the study of history does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful,” she writes. A knowledge of history, as the great historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burckhardt once wrote, will not make us clever for the next time, but wise forever.

An even better book is the one by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May called Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, where leaders get a useful heuristic for analyzing past events for current concerns.

Vasily Aksyonov, Exiled Soviet Writer, Is Dead at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com

Chatter abounds on the merits of Obama’s Russia trip, an intriguing Russian writer, Vasily Aksyonov,  passes on–another reason I must be getting older as I enjoy these obits more and more.  Over at Volokh Consipiracy, the observation that “unlike such Russian nationalist dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov advocated liberal democracy, opposed anti-Semitism, and deplored the recent revival of authoritarian Russian nationalism under Vladimir Putin.”  Why he matters:

“Solzhenitsyn is all about the imprisonment and trying to get out, and Aksyonov is the young person whose mother got out and he actually can live his life now,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, who is a great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and a friend of the Aksyonov family and who teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. “It was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression.”

via Vasily Aksyonov, Exiled Soviet Writer, Is Dead at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

And what to read:

• “The Burn” is a surreal, jazz-inspired riff on the plight of intellectuals under Communism, and “Island of Crimea” imagines what life would have been like on the Black Sea peninsula if the White Army had staved off the Bolsheviks there during the Russian Civil War and their descendants had flourished.
• ”Island of Crimea,” an eerily prescient, tragicomic deconstruction of Russia’s split personality, was written two decades before Vladimir V. Putin started mixing the Bolshevik and pre-revolutionary strains in Russian culture in the search for a new Russian identity.

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality – The New York Review of Books

Thanks to Simon Schama for this important rethinking of the Holocaust in NYR of Books:

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’s Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

A much-reoccuring argument for multilateral orgs and the role diplomacy plays in stemming conflict derives at least some of its moral authority from the Holocaust and other holocausts/genocides.  It is important to keep remembering, especially as Americans reflect on the expansive freedoms we enjoy in this incredible country.

Traditional History Courses – Disappearing or Just Evolving? – NYTimes.com

Then decline of diplomatic history?  We’d be losing an important vantage point in the study of IR:

… critics like David A. Bell, the dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University, argue that traditional diplomatic and economic history are still the specialties that are best suited to deal with America’s problems today.

Simply giving everyone a place at the table is just not affordable in an era of shrinking resources. “I’d love to let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, a history professor at Ohio University in Athens, but “it’s hard for all but the largest departments or the richest.” In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement. (A handful of faculty members had the view that “military history is evil,” Mr. Hamby said.) The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in “U.S. and the world,” he said, “the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.”

Mr. Hitchcock of Temple University remains unconvinced that there is a zero-sum game however. “How will we write the history of the Iraq war?” he asked

via Traditional History Courses – Disappearing or Just Evolving? – NYTimes.com.

Booklist | History as a Key for Policymakers in Foreign Affairs

Too often the long view or the hard questions lose out–perhaps because of process but also likely due to lack of awareness.  Kudos to the late Harvard professor Ernest May.  The idea that those making the big decisions need to consider the past is praised by Stephen Walt on FP.com:

His book “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Abuse of History in American Foreign Policy in one of the first IR courses I ever took, and its central message — about the ways that historical interpretations shape (and more often, distort) policymaking — has resonated with me ever since.

…leading into his other important work on this idea…

Professor May developed a course on the systematic use of historical comparisons to determine current public policy choices. They also wrote a book on the subject, “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers” (Free Press, 1986), whose methodology has since been used by “a cadre of historians” and students.  [via Ernest May, International Relations Expert, Dies at 80 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com.]

One brief synopsis in Foreign Affairs 1986, notes:

Professional historians, enjoying the luxury of unhurried reflection, might say that the book’s “method” is no more than a systematic and common-sense statement of the obvious-but the authors demonstrate that the “obvious” has too often been ignored, with unfortunate results.

Its also wonderful to find the public/private qualities of May’s greatness in sync, with some of his former students praising his name as a gentleman and a scholar.

History Repeating.

Common view:

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” That dismissal has been echoed by some social historians, who have insisted that because the study of foreign relations is too state centered, elite oriented, and tradition bound, it and its practitioners neglect important work on race, gender, and popular culture.

Why we need diplomatic history:

“It is one of the supreme ironies of recent history that leaders bent on perpetuating U.S. primacy squandered it through reckless use of the nation’s power,” Herring concludes. For the United States to find its way out of Iraq and back to political and financial stability, the American public will need to pay much closer attention to how the world works. Looking at Russia from a back porch in Alaska or attending grammar school in Indonesia may be a good start, but it’s not nearly enough. For as George Herring has pointed out, America’s transformation from colony to superpower required not only wise and realistic leaders willing to take calculated risks but also attentive and intelligent citizens willing to accept the consequences.

To understand and lead the US, those at the top and its so-called ‘informed citizenry’ must understand the world–past and future–an argument from Douglas Little in reviewing From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 by George C. Herring.

The Perils of Power from Former Wise Man

As Richard Holbrook eerily writes, reviewing Gordon M. Goldstein’s new book, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam in NYT Book Review:

Bundy would scribble notes: “the doves were right”; “a war we should not have fought”; “I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution.” “What are my worst mistakes?” For those of us who had known the self-confident, arrogant Brahmin from Harvard, these astonishing, even touching, efforts to understand his own mistakes are far more persuasive than the shallow analysis McNamara offers in his own memoir, “In Retrospect.”

Aside from the obvious old war/new war analogies is a careful study of the perils of trusting too much in experience and intellect (luck and timing have as much or more to do with success, as presidential historian Michael Beschloss wisely observes)

For today’s readers, what’s most important about “Lessons in Disaster” is not the details of how the United States stumbled into a war without knowing where it was going; that story has been told in hundreds of other books. Goldstein’s achievement is quite different: it offers insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly. On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it. The unfinished quality of Bundy’s self-inquest only enhances its power, authenticity and, yes, poignancy.

Gates urges middle way on Russia; other views

Sounds like diplomacy to me:

…Mr. Gates warned that matters of war and peace had too often been debated at polar extremes, “between a too eager embrace of the use of military force and an extreme aversion to it.”

He said policy was still overly influenced by the long shadows of two historic events: that of August 1914, where “miscalculation, hubris, bellicosity, fear of looking weak” led to World War I; and the journey 70 years ago this month by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain to Munich, where he appeased Hitler by acknowledging the Nazi leader’s rights to a portion of Czechoslovakia inhabited by ethnic Germans.

The proper course for world leaders today, Mr. Gates argued, was “to balance restraint in international affairs with the resolve and will to back up our commitments and defend our interests when called upon.” (NYT)

UPDATE

A few Russia Hands give a half-page each on where things are heading.  Highlights:

KOTKIN | In the future, Russia may find itself compelled to overhaul its autocracy to maintain or enhance its global clout, but already America finds itself forced to accommodate to authoritarian market-economy powers. In that regard, the nasty war between Russia and Georgia, ostensibly over the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia, has changed little but demonstrated a lot.

KHRUSHCHEVA | In such a state of affairs, Putin could remain a prime minister for many years to come, aided by a string of presidents — like Medvedev — who are nominally elected but hold little or no power.

LUCAS | The best way that the outside world can help Russia now is by example. The West has squandered the moral authority it had at the end of the cold war. Dick Cheney’s America and Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy don’t look much different from Putin’s Russia, at least when viewed from Moscow. We have to practice what we preach before we can expect anyone else to believe it.

IL efforts to limit war as an instrument of policy

With our attention on the Caucasus, we might recall efforts 80 years ago today to take war as an instrument of foreign policy off the table. Great idea, but how feasible?

Diplomacy is premised on an efforts to avoid more serious conflict.  But, also–sadly–it can quickly morph into empty, albeit hopeful, words.  As George Kennan wrote in 1985/86:

Finally, let us note that there are no internationally accepted standards of morality to which the U.S. government could appeal if it wished to act in the name of moral principles. It is true that there are certain words and phrases sufficiently high-sounding the world over so that most governments, when asked to declare themselves for or against, will cheerfully subscribe to them, considering that such is their vagueness that the mere act of subscribing to them carries with it no danger of having one’s freedom of action significantly impaired. To this category of pronouncements belong such documents as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Atlantic Charter, the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe, and the prologues of innumerable other international agreements.

(Its still considered an important contribution to international law (IL) but that’s another matter.)  See the full text of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, related correspondence, and other documents at the Avalon Project, Yale Law School.