American strategists also assumed that the Kremlin was prepared to risk all-out war in pursuit of its goals. In fact, given the Soviet Union’s huge losses in both world wars and the enormous job of reconstruction that lay before it after 1945, it was equally likely that the Soviet leadership would do a great deal to avoid war. We now know that was, in fact, often the case. When Nikita Khrushchev put nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba in 1962, part of his motive was to let the United States feel what it was like to fear direct attack and the devastation of its land, something the Soviets knew so well. And when he pulled them out, it was because he did not want to live through another, even more deadly war than the two he had already survived.
In 1949, when the Communists won in China, the Americans knew far more about China than they did about the Soviet Union, but they still got it wrong The pessimists who believed that the Chinese Communists really were placing themselves under Stalin’s orders drowned out those few experts on China who suggested that with such different histories and cultures, it was probably only a matter of time before the two Communist powers fell out. Mao, they predicted, would be the Asian Tito. (The Yugoslav Communist leader had just fallen out very dramatically with Stalin.) And indeed, that is exactly what happened a decade later. When the Sino-Soviet split occurred, some hardliners in the West could not bring themselves to believe it, arguing that the public recriminations between Beijing and Moscow were evidence of the extraordinary duplicity and deviousness of Communists.
The Communists usually misread the West just as badly, even though they had a much easier time in getting information. The Soviets expected Western powers to try to destroy them because, after all, wasn’t that what they had done when they sent troops to intervene in the Russian civil war? In fact, Western intervention, even though it was supported noisily by people like Winston Churchill, was halfhearted; at the end of World War I, there was little stomach for further military adventures in countries such as Britain and France. The Marxist blinkers were powerful ones, and what they learned about the West and its history only reinforced their preconceptions. Even young Soviet diplomats in training were only allowed to read the Communist newspapers from Western countries. Capitalism would continue to grind the workers down, as it always had, and there would eventually be revolutions in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Talk of democracy, public opinion, or the rule of law in such places was just that—talk. When American presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton among them, raised issues of human rights, Communist leaders saw it as merely a way of interfering in their internal affairs.
If you do not know the history of another people, you will not understand their values, their fears, and their hopes or how they are likely to react to something you do. There is another way of getting things wrong and that is to assume that other peoples are just like you. Robert McNamara has spent much of his life trying to come to terms with what went wrong with the American war in Vietnam. In his memoir, In Retrospect, he came up with lessons he hoped future leaders might heed. “We viewed,” he says in one, “the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for—and a determination to fight for—freedom and democracy.” The United States failed equally to understand the determination of the North Vietnamese. Time and again, it assumed that it could raise the pain it was inflicting on the North to the point where its leaders would do a cost-benefit analysis and decide that the time had come to throw in the towel. Yet these were the people who had fought for seven years to defeat the French. “Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike,” McNamara concluded sadly, “reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area and the personalities and habits of their leaders.”
It was not a lesson the Bush White House of recent years appears to have learned. You believe in studying reality, a senior adviser said contemptuously to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2002. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” If the White House had studied reality a bit more, the president might not have used the word “crusade” two days after September 11 to refer to how he intended to deal with terrorists. Muslims, even moderate ones, tend to react viscerally to being reminded of much earlier attacks from the West. If some attention had been paid to reality, the United States and the United Kingdom might not have been quite so surprised that Iraqis failed to welcome them or appreciate foreign control of their oil.
In November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had his only meeting with independent British experts. “We all pretty much said the same thing,” said George Joffe, a Middle East specialist from Cambridge University. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” Blair did not appear interested in this analysis and focused instead on Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” The experts tried to explain that thirty years of Hussein’s dictatorship had ground down Iraq’s civil society to the point that there were virtually no independent organized forces to serve as allies for the coalition. Blair remained uninterested. The Foreign Office showed no more interest in taking advantage of their considerable knowledge and expertise.
A little more than five years later, in January 2008, the U.K. Ministry of Defence issued a report that was severely critical of the way in which British soldiers were prepared to serve in Iraq. There had been, the report said, a lack of information about the context the soldiers would be operating in and uncertainty about how the Iraqis might react to an invasion. The military, the report went on, failed to anticipate differences between Iraq and the Balkans and Northern Ireland, where British forces had gained a great deal of their recent experience. In other words, they had not looked at the history of Iraq.
Knowing history can help avoid lazy generalizations as well. It would be folly to take on the Serbs, said the pessimists as Yugoslavia was falling to pieces; look how they fought off the Nazis in World War II. In fact, if you look more closely at what happened, as an American army researcher did a few years ago, you find that the German divisions were not the cream of the German army and most were seriously understrength. And if you look even further back, at World War I, you see that the Serbian army was defeated and forced into exile, and Serbia itself was occupied until the end of the war by German and Austrian troops. Afghanistan comes in for much the same rhetoric of despair; it has never, the pundits say, been conquered by an outside power. That would come as a surprise to Alexander the Great as much as to Genghis Khan. Today, we hear that the Western powers cannot interfere in the increasing chaos and misery of Zimbabwe because it would only rouse memories of colonialism among the population. It is a pity that such considerations were not taken into account when the United States went into Vietnam or, more recently, into Iraq.
History can also help in self-knowledge. The favorable light we so often see ourselves in can cast shadows as well. Canadians, for example, see themselves as a benevolent force in the world; they tend to overlook the fact that among rich countries, ours has provided a surprisingly small amount of foreign aid in past decades. Although Canadians pride themselves on being peacekeepers, they often do not know that Canada fought in four major wars in the twentieth century, from the South African one to the Korean. Americans tend to think of themselves as a peace-loving people who have never willingly picked a fight. “Our country has never started a war,” President Ronald Reagan said in 1983. “Our sole objective is deterrence, the strength and capability it takes to prevent war.” That is not how it might seem to the Mexicans or the Nicaraguans or the Cubans or, today, the Iraqis.
Geo
rge Santayana’s famous “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is one of those overused dicta politicians and others offer up when they want to sound profound. It is true, however, that history reminds us usefully about the sorts of situations that have caused trouble in the past. Allied leaders in World War II were determined that this time, Germany and the other Axis powers would not be able to claim that they had never been defeated on the battlefield. Allied policy was one of unconditional surrender, and Germany, Japan, and Italy were all occupied at the end of the war, and serious attempts, not all of them successful, were made to remodel their societies so that they would no longer be undemocratic and militaristic. When someone complained that such treatment was like the savage peace the Romans imposed on Carthage, the American general Mark Clark noted that no one heard much of the Carthaginians these days.
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other Western leaders were starting to plan for the postwar world, they had the recent past very much in their minds in other ways. They wanted to build a robust world order which would prevent the world from sliding, yet again, into a deadly conflict. The interwar years had been unstable ones, partly because the League of Nations had not been strong enough. Key powers, the United States in particular, had not joined or, like Germany and Japan, had dropped out. This time, Roosevelt was determined, the United States should be a member of the new United Nations. He was also prepared to do a good deal to keep the Soviet Union in and the world stable and prosperous. What had been a precariously balanced international order of the 1920s had been put under further strain in the 1930s by the Great Depression, which encouraged countries to turn inward, throwing up tariff walls to protect their own workers and their own industries. What may have made sense for individual nations was disastrous for the world as a whole. Trade and investment dropped off sharply, and national rivalries were exacerbated. The world lurched toward World War II. As one American diplomat said at the end of World War II, “That bit of history was as well known in Cordell Hull’s State Department as the Bible’s account of the Fall of the Garden of Eden. History must not be repeated!”
To avoid that, the Allies, with the Soviet Union’s grudging acquiescence, created the economic institutions known collectively as the Bretton Woods system. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Trade Organization (this last did not materialize as the World Trade Organization until much later) were designed to provide stability to the world’s economy and to encourage free trade among nations. How much difference these all made to the international order after 1945 will always be a matter of debate, but the world did not get a repeat of the 1930s.
Memories of the Great Depression and the lessons to be learned from it came to the forefront again in the second half of 2008 as the world’s financial system and then its economy lurched from one crisis to the next. Professional economists who had largely relegated John Maynard Keynes to the archives dusted off his works again, especially those parts where he talked of the need for government regulation of risk-taking and the obligations of governments to use the tools at their disposal to stimulate the economy. It was perhaps fortunate too that Benjamin S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, one of the key figures in formulating American policy in those tense months, is an expert on the Depression. He has written and lectured extensively on what he sees as its lessons. In an article published in Foreign Policy in 2000, he argued that “the economic repercussions of a stock market crash depend less on the severity of the crash itself than on the response of economic policymakers, particularly central bankers.” The Federal Reserve, he said, had been wrong in trying to protect the value of the dollar by, for example, raising interest rates, instead of trying to stabilize the domestic economy. In his reaction to the 2008 crisis, he was prepared to go further than many other officials in stimulating the economy.
In their book Thinking in Time, Richard Neustadt and Ernest May show how knowing the background to an issue can also help us avoid unnecessary and potentially costly mistakes. In the summer of 1979, to take their most telling example, rumors started to circulate that the Soviets had recently positioned combat troops in Cuba. Not only did this come at a time when relations between the Soviet Union and the United States were entering one of their tenser phases, but it brought back vivid memories of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the Soviets had poured forces, including nuclear weapons, into Cuba. The crisis had ended when Khrushchev, bowing to demands from Kennedy, had withdrawn the rockets and nuclear weapons. Kennedy had given a quiet promise that, in turn, the United States would not invade Cuba. Was this Soviet brigade the start of a similar crisis, and what did the Soviets mean by apparently violating their agreement of 1962 to withdraw their troops?
President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, asked the intelligence agencies to investigate. By the middle of August, reports had confirmed that there was a Soviet brigade in Cuba. Shortly thereafter, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went public. “The president,” he told reporters, “must make it clear, we draw the line on Russian penetration of this hemisphere.” The crisis persisted through much of September. Gradually, two things emerged as the administration began to go back into the files. First, Kennedy had asked for the removal of Soviet ground troops but in the end had not insisted on it. Second, and this was particularly embarrassing, it appeared as though Soviet troops had been stationed in Cuba continuously since 1962. “Appallingly,” wrote Cyrus Vance, Carter’s secretary of state, “awareness of the Soviet ground force units had faded from the institutional memories of the intelligence agencies.” Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador who had been in Washington since Kennedy’s time, was in Moscow at his mother’s deathbed. He rushed back to the United States to help sort out what was by now an increasingly dangerous crisis. In Moscow, his superiors had trouble believing that the whole fuss had been an honest mistake and speculated that the Americans must have very dark motives indeed. In Dobrynin’s view, the whole farce led to the further deterioration of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Two groups in particular in our society have always taken history seriously as a guide. People in business and in the military want to know what their chances of success are if they take a particular course of action. Will they lose their investment or, in the case of the military, the war? One way of narrowing the odds is to study similar situations in the past. That, after all, is what the case study is. Why was the Edsel a failure and the Volkswagen a success? In 2008, as the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis rippled through the world’s economies, market analysts turned to history to try to determine how long the downturn in the stock markets would last. (In the past fifty years, apparently, we have had nine bear markets, and they have lasted on average just over a year.)
Investors may experience several bad patches; the military often never see a war, and it is the rare senior officer who fights in more than one. It is possible to practice war, in exercises, but those cannot replicate the actuality of war itself, with its real violence and death and all its confusion and unpredictability. So history becomes all the more important a tool for learning about possible reasons for victory and, equally important, for defeat. The weapons and uniforms are very different, yet military academies and staff colleges still find some utility in setting their students to studying the Peloponnesian Wars or Nelson’s battles. After exercises and actual campaigns, the military study what happened and try to draw lessons from it. The official histories of World War II were meant to help governments and their military learn from successes and mistakes.
Today, some in the United States are trying to learn lessons to apply in Iraq from the war that France fought against Algerian nationalists from 1954 to 1962. There are indeed parallels: large, technologically advanced powers fighting an elusive yet ubiquitous enemy; a sullen civilian population, some of which gives active support to t
he insurgents; and Islam and nationalism fueling the struggle. At the Marine Corps University in Virginia, young officers can now take a course on the French-Algerian War. The classic movie The Battle of Algiers, which shows the brutality on both sides, is being used in training by the Pentagon. “A little strange,” said its left-wing Italian director, Gillo Pontecorvo, shortly before he died in 2006. “I think that the most that The Battle of Algiers can do is teach how to make cinema, not war.” President Bush has been reading A Savage War of Peace, the classic account of the Algerian war. (On the Internet, copies were going for over $200 until the publisher rushed out a paperback.) In May 2007, Bush extended a rare invitation to stay in the White House to its British author, Alistair Horne. The president does not seem concerned that the French eventually lost their war. According to an aide, Bush found the book interesting but came to the conclusion that the French failed because their bureaucracy was not up to the job.
Paying attention to the past cannot always save the military from getting it wrong. Before World War I, there was plenty of evidence that the power of the defense was getting stronger. From the American Civil War to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the combination of trenches and greater and faster firepower was raising the cost of attack dramatically. Only a handful of observers took the trend seriously. Most European military thinkers discounted such wars on the grounds that they were being fought by less capable (in other words, non-European) forces. The French, predisposed by their own military history to think in terms of the offensive, found further consolation in the work of a young officer who had died in the first month of France’s war with Prussia. Ardant du Picq argued that in the end victory came down to superior morale. French military planners also stressed superior firepower, better training, and sheer weight of numbers, including cavalry, to carry the day. They paid very little attention in the years before 1914 to the techniques of defense. After 1918, they paid too much. The enormous losses of World War I, the long years of stalemate on the western front, and, above all, the desperate struggle around Verdun, where the French army held off the Germans, persuaded the French military and politicians that the future of war lay in the defense. Just when advances in airplanes, mobile artillery, tanks, and other motorized vehicles were making it possible to bypass or attack fortifications, the French sank their hopes and a good deal of their military budget into the Maginot Line. While much of the French army was waiting for the great German attack that never came, Hitler’s forces were sweeping past the west end of the line.
Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Page 13