The Uses and Abuses of History

by Margaret MacMillan

  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, rumours started to circulate that the Soviets had recently positioned combat troops in Cuba. This not only came 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 The crisis had ended when Khrushchev, bowing to demands from Kennedy, had withdrawn the rockets and nuclear weapons.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 confirmed that there was a Soviet brigade in Cuba. Shortly thereafter, Senator Frank Church of Idaho and 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. Secondly, 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. Back 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 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 practise war, in exercises, but those cannot replicate the actuality of war itself, with its real violence and death, and in 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 the insurgents; and Islam and nationalism fuelling 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 defence 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 defence. 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 defence. Just when advances in airplanes, mobile artillery, tanks, and other motorized vehicles were making it possible to bypass or attack fortifications, the French sunk 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.

  By the end of the Vietnam War, the American military had learned a good deal about how to fight a counterinsurgency war against a nationalist movement that used both conventional and guerrilla forces. The only problem was that few people wanted to remember either Vietnam or its lessons. There was, said T.X. Hammes, a Marine colonel who maintained an interest in counter-insurgency, “a pretty visceral reaction that we would not do this again.” American military training focused on conventional war; counter-insurgency was not even mentioned in the army’s core strategic planning in the 1970s. Hammes nevertheless studied the small wars in places such as Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan, and wrote a book on how to combat guerrilla warfare. A publisher turned it down: “Interesting book, well written, but a subject nobody’s interested in because it’s not going to happen.” The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century finally came out in 2004 as the Americans were painfully learning in Iraq the lessons they had chosen to forget. In 2005, General Petraeus, one of the few American generals to devise successful tactics in Iraq, set up a counter-insurgency academy there. Back in the United States, he made the study of counter-insurgency compulsory at the army’s advanced training colleges. Two books, T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, about the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I, and Counterinsurgency Warfare by the French officer David Galula, became unexpec
ted bestsellers in bookstores near army bases.

  HISTORY CAN HELP US to be wise; it can also suggest to us what the likely outcome of our actions might be. There are no clear blueprints to be discovered in history that can help us shape the future as we wish. Each historical event is a unique congeries of factors, people, or chronology. Yet, by examining the past, we can get some useful lessons about how to proceed and some warning about what is or is not likely to happen. We do have to be careful to cast our gaze as widely as possible. If we look only for the lessons that reinforce decisions we have already made, we will run into trouble. In May 1941, as warnings poured in from all quarters that the Germans were getting ready to attack the Soviet Union, Stalin refused to listen to them. He did not want a war with Germany because he knew just how ill-prepared the Soviet Union was. And so he persuaded himself that Germany would not move until it had made peace with Great Britain. “Hitler and his generals are not so stupid as to fight at the same time on two fronts,” Stalin told his inner circle. “That broke the neck of the Germans in the First World War.” A month later, German troops overran the Soviet forces that had been told to take up defensive positions back from the borders. Stalin could have found other lessons from the past if he had wanted. Hitler had shown himself a gambler before when he had seized Austria and Czechoslovakia. His rapid and stunning victory over France in 1940 had served only to convince him that he was always right. Moreover, he had made no secret of his long-term goal of moving eastward to obtain territory for the German people.

  History, if it is used with care, can present us with alternatives, help us to form the questions we need to ask of the present, and warn us about what might go wrong. In the 1920s, T.E. Lawrence criticized the British government for its involvement in what had become the new country of Iraq: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities.”

  In 2002, as the American and British governments prepared their plans for the swift invasion and what they confidently assumed would be a short occupation of Iraq, they would have been wise to look at that earlier occupation. The British had assumed then that it would be easy, that the locals would welcome them or at least remain quiescent, and that they would find an obliging Arab ruler to act as their proxy. Moreover, Iraq would pay for itself by exporting wheat and, possibly, the oil that was yet to be exploited. Those illusions barely lasted a year. In the summer of 1920, British forces were stretched to the limit as they tried to contain widespread revolts across the country. Although the British thought they had found their ruler in Feisal, whom they made king the following year, he never proved to be the compliant ruler they wanted. Iraq remained an uneasy and troublesome part of the British sphere of influence right up to the 1950s.

  If we had wanted to know in 2002 how Iraqis would respond to a foreign invasion and occupation, then we might have found some instructive ideas and warnings in the British experience there or in other occupations, such as the ones of Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. When we are trying to make sense of a situation (and may well have more information than we can absorb) to come to a decision, we use analogies to try to discern a pattern and to sort out what is important from what is not. If we decide that a dictator, say Saddam Hussein, is rather like Hitler, then that suggests ways we might want to deal with him. If the economic crisis of 2008 is like the start of the Great Depression, then governments and central banks may decide to stimulate the economy. If it is more like the crash of the dot.com bubble in the 1990s, it may be wiser to treat it as a short-term correction in the markets. We may not always get the right analogy, but we are almost certainly bound to try to use one.

  The Chinese have understood this for centuries. Traditional Chinese civilization invariably drew on the past for moral tales and examples of how to behave wisely. Even Chinese Communists, who represented a forward-looking ideology, could not escape the habits of centuries. Their leaders, from Mao down, repeatedly referred to events in the past, even the long-distant past. It would be as though an American president or a Canadian prime minister casually slipped references to Julius Caesar or Charlemagne into their conversations and expected their audiences to understand at once. When, at the end of the 1960s, Mao was contemplating opening up relations with the United States in part as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union, he had in mind the example of the statesman in the third century A.D. who had recommended allying with one of his country’s two enemies to defeat the third—and who had urged his ruler to choose the power further away as his ally on the grounds that it was dangerous to become too close to an enemy on one’s borders. Seeing the results of Mao’s decision—the expanding relationship between China and the United States and the increased respect with which the Soviet Union and then Russia treated China—it is hard to disagree with his reasoning.

  When the United States led a coalition against Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991, its leaders had in mind two analogies. They did not want American forces to get bogged down inside the country as they had in Vietnam, and they wanted to deter Hussein’s regime from further adventures as they had done with containment of the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China in the Cold War. Although President George H.W. Bush and his chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Colin Powell, were much criticized, especially by the right, for not invading Iraq and deposing Hussein, in fact they acted wisely. American and coalition forces did not get bogged down in a land war, and although Hussein’s regime survived, its capacity to threaten its neighbours was minimal. (It still, sadly, had the means to kill and repress Iraqi citizens.)

  Analogies from history must, of course, be treated with care. Using the wrong one not only can present an oversimplified picture of a complex situation in the present but can lead to wrong decisions. After September 11, 2001, it became fashionable, especially among neo-Conservatives, to talk about how the West finds itself engaged in World War IV. Norman Podhoretz, a leading neo-con thinker, argued that the Cold War was really World War III and that now, after a too-brief period of peace in the 1990s, we are engaged in an equally massive and deadly struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Like the other world wars, the United States and its allies are the innocent party; others have thrust war upon them. The West is only defending itself, even in wars like the Iraq one where it launched the attack. In such a view, the war is a moral one, of good against bad. A convenient shorthand, the authorship of which is proudly claimed by the Canadian David Frum, is the “Axis of Evil.” No matter that the Axis in World War II was a working set of alliances between Germany, Italy, and Japan and that this one is said to include Iraq and Iran, countries that waged a long war against each other in the 1980s, and North Korea, whose leaders probably have trouble finding their two reputed partners on the map. No matter, too, that the Cold War was not like the great military struggles of the two world wars and did not end with an armistice on the battlefields but with the collapse of one of the protagonists. Those who criticize the open-ended and ill-defined nature of the “war on terror” or the occupation of Iraq are dismissed as isolationists, cowards, or worse. Reviewing Podhoretz’s recent work, World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism, Ian Buruma wrote: “The book expresses a weird longing for the state of war, for the clarity it brings, and for the chance to divide one’s fellow citizens, or in
deed the whole world, neatly into friends and foes, comrades and traitors, warriors and appeasers, those who are with us and those who are against.”

  Another analogy that has had a good airing over the years is Munich, shorthand for the appeasement policies the democracies used in the 1930s with the dictators in a vain effort to prevent another war. Named after the Munich conference of 1938 when Britain and France agreed that Hitler’s Germany should have the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, Munich has become the symbol of weakness in the face of aggression. If the democracies had stood up to Hitler, better still even earlier in the 1930s before Germany had rearmed, and to Italy and Japan, they could have prevented, so the critics of appeasement say, World War II. That is a matter for historians and others to argue over.

  What is undeniable is that the Munich analogy has had a strong hold over statesmen and -women ever since and has been applied liberally to justify a whole range of policies. Anthony Eden, the British prime minister who succeeded Churchill, employed the analogy to disastrous effect when he tried to deal with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator in 1956. Like many leaders in what was then called the Third World, Nasser was prepared to take assistance from both sides in the Cold War. He bought arms from Communist Czechoslovakia but also tried to get a loan from the United States to build the Aswan Dam on the Nile. John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, was unable to get the loan through Congress. In retaliation and to raise the funds he needed, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which up to that point had been owned and managed by the British. Eden’s reaction was unequivocal. As British foreign secretary in the 1930s, he had dealt with the dictators. Now he and the world were facing the same thing again. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Success in a number of adventures involving the breaking of agreements in Abyssinia, in the Rhineland, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Albania had persuaded Hitler and Mussolini that the democracies had not the will to resist, that they could march with the certitude of success from signpost to signpost along the road which led to world dominion.… As my colleagues and I surveyed the scene in those autumn months of 1956, we were determined that the like should not come again.” But Nasser was no Hitler intent on conquering his neighbours. Rather, he was a nationalist who badly needed resources to develop his own country and stake out a position of leadership in the Middle East. The British action in collusion with the French and the Israelis to seize the Canal Zone was not only badly conceived; it rallied the Egyptians and the wider Arab world to Nasser’s side. Furthermore, it infuriated the Americans who, far from seeing a repeat of the 1930s, worried about the moral impact on other Third World countries.