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History and Statecraft: A Complicated Marriage
History and Statecraft: A Complicated Marriage Review by Evan D. McCormick Evan D. McCormick is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
IN REVIEW Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, editors, The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
“Those who consider the matter for a minute or two,” writes Philip Zelikow, a former official in the George W. Bush State Department and now professor of History at the University of Virginia, “realize that historical reasoning is as common in public affairs as oxygen is in water.” And yet, as the contributors to The Power of the Past agree, in institutional terms, the relationship between history and policy is “intimate but frequently dysfunctional.” The dysfunction is not for lack of awareness or trying. The craft of bringing historical knowledge to bear on contemporary policy problems has long been the aim of astute decision makers and has produced no shortage of corresponding academic volumes. Perhaps, the most notable of these— Ernest May and Richard Neustadt’s Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers (1986)—is an explicit influence on the editors and contributors here. The aim of The Power of the Past, then, is not to stake a novel claim to the past’s relevance for the present, but to renew the appeal for a connection between history and statecraft in a policy and professional environment that currently discourages meaningful collaboration. The editors, Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, are two historians uniquely suited to this endeavor: in addition to publishing numerous books and articles on the history of U.S. foreign policy, Brands recently completed a year-long Council on Foreign Relations fellowship in the Defense Department, while Suri has become a leading public historian on topics ranging from U.S. nationbuilding efforts abroad to the foreign policy in the 2016 election. In this volume, they bring together a dozen essays that highlight the complexity of history’s lessons for policymakers, the diverse pathways through which historical knowledge has found purchase with decision makers over time, and the shared responsibilities of professionals in both groups to continually deepen their mutual understanding. The breadth involved in exploring the nature of the history-policy relationship is a strength of this work. Notwithstanding the book’s rather functional structure—organized around how history can and should influence policy, and
© 2016 Published for the Foreign Policy Research Institute by Elsevier Ltd.
Winter 2017 | 1 doi: 10.1016/j.orbis.2016.12.012
MC CORMICK
policymakers’ insights on the “pathways” of history’s influence—the essays are most effective in provoking conceptual questions and demonstrating the type of historical thinking that the editors seek to encourage. For this task, Suri and Brands have assembled an impressive, methodologically diverse—not to mention bipartisan— group of scholars and policymakers. An impressive roster of historians, anchored by H.W. Brands and Mark Lawrence, is augmented by several younger historians and tenured academics with policy experience. The aforementioned Zelikow and Jim Steinberg, the latter a former deputy national security advisor under President Bill Clinton and deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama, do more than represent policymakers, with each providing an impressive conceptual chapter. If the “fit” of the essays is at times incongruous, policymakers and academics alike will nonetheless benefit from reading the volume holistically; the rigorous critical analysis of how history has influenced policymaking in various episodes will provoke thought about the way that history can and should influence future policy challenges as well. Several major themes permeate the essays, the most important being the power of analogic reasoning. One cannot help but appreciate the authors’ (often explicit) ambivalence for the appeal that analogies hold among policymaking audiences. As several well-reasoned chapters by Mark Lawrence, H.W. Brands, and Thomas Mahnken make clear, analogies tempt policymakers with the allure of harnessing past successes in imagery primed for public consumption, but they also obscure the baggage that accompanies such intellectual shorthand. Lawrence’s essay, showing how the Vietnam analogy has unfurled over time, demonstrates that policymakers have little control over the various meanings that a singular event can hold for different audiences. The persistence of wildly different interpretations about the lessons of Vietnam has not dampened policymakers’ affinity for using the war as a trope in arguing both for and against U.S. intervention abroad. Ironically, this overuse has sapped the analogy of much of its power to provoke critical thought about the limits of U.S. power. “Invocations of the earlier conflict often have a scripted, predictable quality to them,” Lawrence laments, “reflecting not so much a desire to uncover useful information as a determination to mobilize support among like-minded individuals within the bureaucracy or the public at-large.” Chapters by Brands and Mahnken are similarly cautionary about the power of two other canonical metaphors: appeasement at Munich and containment during the Cold War. In 1990, urged on by Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush embraced an analogy that likened Saddam Hussein’s territorial grab in Kuwait to Hitler’s expansion into Poland in 1939. Simultaneously, as Brands shows, Bush wielded the Vietnam analogy to demonstrate his commitment to a sensible war waged with decisive force. Seemingly validated in the short term by the rapid liberation of Kuwait and massive popular support for the war, the Munich analogy turned into a problem for the Bush Administration when U.S. interests cautioned against a comprehensive effort to topple Saddam. Similarly, Mahnken shows that containment has retained remarkable appeal as a strategic analogy in spite of baggage that most diplomatic historians understand: that containment was not as consistent a strategy as the shorthand suggests and that it was always a difficult and controversial strategy to pursue. As applied by recent administrations in the cases of Iran and China, the containment analogy has become a “surrogate for policy and strategy,”
2 | Orbis
In Review
Mahnken notes, preventing policymakers from engaging in the more important work of “thinking through U.S. aims, performing a careful net assessment, and developing a strategy.” The contributors are not dismissive of analogies, with each acknowledging the natural appeal that policymakers will find in returning to pivotal historical episodes. Indeed, each author deserves credit for not dwelling on the more facile limitations of analogic thinking: the gulf of difference between past and present circumstance. Instead, they argue that more carefully thinking through the complexities of past experience can promote smarter use of analogies in the present. The power of an analogy is to “compress experience and emotion,” Brands reflects with regard to Bush, “but that is also its weakness, for extraneous elements get dragged along with the pertinent.” Historians, as Lawrence argues most explicitly, can help policymakers extricate themselves from this analogic quagmire by reinforcing the nuances and complexities of their analyses and by making that work more available to public policymakers. This broader idea of historical sensibility that allows policymakers to effectively marshal historical knowledge comprises the second major theme of the book. The editors are emphatic about the inherent imprecision involved in such awareness. Mining the past for “useful” knowledge is not a science but an art—one that Hal Brands likens to the coup d’oeil, or flash of insight, described by Clausewitz in the context of battle. These cautions notwithstanding, readers of the book will find several remarkably persuasive meditations on the art, particularly in the chapters by Steinberg and Zelikow. Steinberg’s essay outlines three modes of historical thinking that influenced policymaking during his time in the Clinton and Obama administrations: “deep history,” or decision makers’ understanding of how an issue developed; analogic history; and personal history. Steinberg illustrates this schema by examining the efforts of the George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administrations to address the Bosnian crisis of the 1990s, and then the Obama Administration’s use of the Bosnian crisis as a reference point in dealing with Libya. It is Steinberg’s illustration of how these modes of thinking overlap and interact—particularly deep and personal histories—that is especially valuable. Because few policymakers come to government with deep historical knowledge of the areas and topics they are forced to confront, personal historical experience is a powerful guide in shaping how one makes sense of various issues and policy options. Complementing Steinberg, Zelikow’s essay presents something of a policymaker’s epistemology, tracing the interrelation of judgments that inform what policymakers care about and what they might seek to do. Zelikow’s is an argument for critical analysis that can help students of history more precisely to break down the factors that have produced major policy decisions. But Steinberg’s essay suggests that such deliberate historical thinking within government—an awareness of “underlying assumptions and causal logic”—can facilitate “constructive historical learning” that ensures the mistakes of the past are not repeated. Given this attention to historical sensibility, a theme that could have received more explicit attention is that of ahistorical thinking, or the way that policymakers’
Winter 2017 | 3
MC CORMICK
desire to break with the past can serve as an equally powerful influence on their readings of precedent. In light of the volume’s rich treatment of the pathways by which historical knowledge permeates the White House, this seems to be an omission. This is most obvious in William Inboden’s otherwise compelling chapter on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC), typically seen as a paragon of bureaucratic incoherence and counterproductive policy. Inboden cogently contends that under the leadership of William Clark from 1982-1983, the NSC actually succeeded in crafting strategy that reflected Reagan’s complicated ideological schema. There is much convincing evidence here that the process that culminated in NSDD75, a strategic document promoting internal change in the Soviet Union, was coherent and deliberative. Nonetheless, Reagan’s ideology entailed a very specific reading of history that rejected the recent legacies of détente and the containment policies of Cold War realists. More explicit attention to the way that Reagan officials—especially academics like Richard Pipes—selected historical evidence to justify their views of Soviet behavior would have made this an even more striking study. A subsequent drawback of the book is only apparent because of the contributors’ eloquence in appealing to the virtue of original thinking in historical analysis. For all of the concern over abused metaphors, readers will find most authors focused on a familiar set of historical episodes. As mentioned above, the treatments of those episodes are illuminating and critical, and thus are sure to elicit new and productive conversations. Nonetheless, if historians remain locked in battle over the meanings of Munich, Vietnam, and containment, it only would undermine this volume’s call for a renewed commitment to the relevance of historical analysis. Acknowledging this limitation, the editors of the book feature three standout chapters that mine underutilized historical episodes to address present problems. In a chapter on postwar reconstruction of Japan, Jennifer Miller shows how U.S. policymakers’ use of the “Potsdam” narrative, which suggested that the war in the Pacific had been the result of an aggressive and irresponsible campaign waged by the Japanese military. Initially employing this narrative to argue for the need to democratize postwar Japan, policymakers were forced to abandon it when the Korean crisis gave them a reason to promote Japanese rearmament. The strength of Miller’s contribution lies in showing how the use of historical narratives about “democracy” was neither unitary nor confined to policymaking circles. Instead, as both U.S. and Japanese officials, together with their respective publics, sought to glean lessons of the war, “Americans and Japanese constantly borrowed from, influenced, and contested” each other’s readings of history. Appreciating the contested historical terrain that underlies U.S. understandings of the relationship between democracy and military strength is a timely lesson for policymakers now engaged in similar nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq. A pair of well-argued essays by Michael Cotey Morgan and Gunther Peck examines the historical record for insight into humanitarian intervention and attempts to stop human trafficking, respectively. Morgan gleans a series of lessons from the experiences of British attempts to end the slave trade in the nineteenth century and U.S. intervention on behalf of Cuban revolutionaries in 1898: that diplomacy has its limits; that intervention requires public support; that the line
4 | Orbis
In Review
between humanitarianism and brute force is “inherently blurry;” and that power politics are an inescapable—perhaps integral—component of humanitarian intervention. If the lessons sound familiar, Morgan’s analysis of the historical events underlying them can broaden the frame of U.S. policymakers considering the costs and benefits of intervention. The abolition of the slave trade was not the triumph of an “absolute moral good ahead of the concerns of great power diplomacy,” he argues, but rather required careful statecraft to balance humanitarian commitments against Britain’s competing interests in international peace and national power. Nor did U.S. President William McKinley intervene in Cuba without calculated confidence in popular support at home and U.S. power in the region. Even in the age of responsibility to protect, policymakers still must make judgments that weigh competing interests of security and humanitarian ideals, and Morgan suggests that history can be a guide for living within this tension and navigating “messy solutions.” If Morgan’s essay is instructive for highlighting the historical lessons in two less obvious episodes, Gunther Peck’s essay shows the care with which policymakers ought to select and engage with historical antecedents. Peck questions how slavery has been used as a historical analogy by policymakers dealing with contemporary human trafficking, arguing that a more appropriate analogy lies in campaigns to end “white slavery” during the industrial revolution and the progressive era. This analogy is, as Peck argues, contentious territory—white slavery remains a popular canard on the far right as corrective to “politically correct” histories that have emphasized chattel slavery. But, as he deftly argues, white slavery shared with modern trafficking the fact that it could not be abolished by an emancipatory law and instead required reformers to make arguments that would shape how others viewed forms of labor as unfree. Rather than gleaning specific lessons, Peck suggests that policymakers would do well to study the cultural and gendered tropes that have accompanied the “shadow of white slavery,” often glorifying “raid and rescue” as a policy alternative without giving adequate attention to the voices and motivations of the victims. Such critical historical thinking might “inform a set of questions” that would facilitate a human trafficking policy that is more responsive to victims’ own conceptions of “coercion, opportunity, and rescue.” The questions of framing and empiricism that Peck urges in thinking about policy alternatives illustrate the historical sensibility urged by policymakers elsewhere in the volume. Together, the rigorous and illuminating essays in The Power of the Past represent a powerful argument against perceptions that have made policy-relevant scholarship increasingly out of bounds in academic history departments. To their credit, the editors do not dwell on this reality, which owes in part to the turn towards social and cultural history over the past three decades, as well as to skepticism of centers of power that still linger after the Vietnam War. It is a division that has grown increasingly artificial in light of the glut of Ph.D.s and the availability of terminal advanced degrees, both of which have populated Washington with policymakers eager to consume academic discourse. So, too, has the public conversation on many policy issues become academic in a way that calls out for more engaged historical scholarship by those immersed in newly available sources. Some historians might
Winter 2017 | 5
MC CORMICK
bristle at Hal Brands’ assertion that promoting an effective policy-history relationship flows from historians’ obligation to “serve their broader society.” Yet, there should be no disagreement that encouraging historians to balance the “proper and necessary desire to be critical in assessing policy. . . with empathy and willingness to engage with policymakers” can facilitate valuable policy insights without compromising scholarly standards. Most encouragingly, Suri and Brands undertake this effort with the view that establishing a more successful long-term symbiosis between academic historians and policymakers requires a relationship in which each side accommodates the particular modes of the other. Just as academics must understand the limits of time and attention that often curb the depth of policymakers’ knowledge, so too policymakers must recognize that historians’ methodologies and professional incentives do not favor easily digestible material calibrated to the present. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but rather foundations for shaping the “structures of dialogue and the networks of association that drive professionalism” in ways that seek to improve policymaking through engaged scholarship. The greatest strength of The Power of the Past is that it presents a model for doing just this: bringing historians and policymakers together in an open and productive exchange of ideas. This type of relationship between history and policy is not just a goal to be sought, but a methodological and disciplinary reality that should be encouraged and expanded in years to come.
6 | Orbis
IN REVIEW Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, editors, The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
“Those who consider the matter for a minute or two,” writes Philip Zelikow, a former official in the George W. Bush State Department and now professor of History at the University of Virginia, “realize that historical reasoning is as common in public affairs as oxygen is in water.” And yet, as the contributors to The Power of the Past agree, in institutional terms, the relationship between history and policy is “intimate but frequently dysfunctional.” The dysfunction is not for lack of awareness or trying. The craft of bringing historical knowledge to bear on contemporary policy problems has long been the aim of astute decision makers and has produced no shortage of corresponding academic volumes. Perhaps, the most notable of these— Ernest May and Richard Neustadt’s Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers (1986)—is an explicit influence on the editors and contributors here. The aim of The Power of the Past, then, is not to stake a novel claim to the past’s relevance for the present, but to renew the appeal for a connection between history and statecraft in a policy and professional environment that currently discourages meaningful collaboration. The editors, Hal Brands and Jeremi Suri, are two historians uniquely suited to this endeavor: in addition to publishing numerous books and articles on the history of U.S. foreign policy, Brands recently completed a year-long Council on Foreign Relations fellowship in the Defense Department, while Suri has become a leading public historian on topics ranging from U.S. nationbuilding efforts abroad to the foreign policy in the 2016 election. In this volume, they bring together a dozen essays that highlight the complexity of history’s lessons for policymakers, the diverse pathways through which historical knowledge has found purchase with decision makers over time, and the shared responsibilities of professionals in both groups to continually deepen their mutual understanding. The breadth involved in exploring the nature of the history-policy relationship is a strength of this work. Notwithstanding the book’s rather functional structure—organized around how history can and should influence policy, and
© 2016 Published for the Foreign Policy Research Institute by Elsevier Ltd.
Winter 2017 | 1 doi: 10.1016/j.orbis.2016.12.012
MC CORMICK
policymakers’ insights on the “pathways” of history’s influence—the essays are most effective in provoking conceptual questions and demonstrating the type of historical thinking that the editors seek to encourage. For this task, Suri and Brands have assembled an impressive, methodologically diverse—not to mention bipartisan— group of scholars and policymakers. An impressive roster of historians, anchored by H.W. Brands and Mark Lawrence, is augmented by several younger historians and tenured academics with policy experience. The aforementioned Zelikow and Jim Steinberg, the latter a former deputy national security advisor under President Bill Clinton and deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama, do more than represent policymakers, with each providing an impressive conceptual chapter. If the “fit” of the essays is at times incongruous, policymakers and academics alike will nonetheless benefit from reading the volume holistically; the rigorous critical analysis of how history has influenced policymaking in various episodes will provoke thought about the way that history can and should influence future policy challenges as well. Several major themes permeate the essays, the most important being the power of analogic reasoning. One cannot help but appreciate the authors’ (often explicit) ambivalence for the appeal that analogies hold among policymaking audiences. As several well-reasoned chapters by Mark Lawrence, H.W. Brands, and Thomas Mahnken make clear, analogies tempt policymakers with the allure of harnessing past successes in imagery primed for public consumption, but they also obscure the baggage that accompanies such intellectual shorthand. Lawrence’s essay, showing how the Vietnam analogy has unfurled over time, demonstrates that policymakers have little control over the various meanings that a singular event can hold for different audiences. The persistence of wildly different interpretations about the lessons of Vietnam has not dampened policymakers’ affinity for using the war as a trope in arguing both for and against U.S. intervention abroad. Ironically, this overuse has sapped the analogy of much of its power to provoke critical thought about the limits of U.S. power. “Invocations of the earlier conflict often have a scripted, predictable quality to them,” Lawrence laments, “reflecting not so much a desire to uncover useful information as a determination to mobilize support among like-minded individuals within the bureaucracy or the public at-large.” Chapters by Brands and Mahnken are similarly cautionary about the power of two other canonical metaphors: appeasement at Munich and containment during the Cold War. In 1990, urged on by Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush embraced an analogy that likened Saddam Hussein’s territorial grab in Kuwait to Hitler’s expansion into Poland in 1939. Simultaneously, as Brands shows, Bush wielded the Vietnam analogy to demonstrate his commitment to a sensible war waged with decisive force. Seemingly validated in the short term by the rapid liberation of Kuwait and massive popular support for the war, the Munich analogy turned into a problem for the Bush Administration when U.S. interests cautioned against a comprehensive effort to topple Saddam. Similarly, Mahnken shows that containment has retained remarkable appeal as a strategic analogy in spite of baggage that most diplomatic historians understand: that containment was not as consistent a strategy as the shorthand suggests and that it was always a difficult and controversial strategy to pursue. As applied by recent administrations in the cases of Iran and China, the containment analogy has become a “surrogate for policy and strategy,”
2 | Orbis
In Review
Mahnken notes, preventing policymakers from engaging in the more important work of “thinking through U.S. aims, performing a careful net assessment, and developing a strategy.” The contributors are not dismissive of analogies, with each acknowledging the natural appeal that policymakers will find in returning to pivotal historical episodes. Indeed, each author deserves credit for not dwelling on the more facile limitations of analogic thinking: the gulf of difference between past and present circumstance. Instead, they argue that more carefully thinking through the complexities of past experience can promote smarter use of analogies in the present. The power of an analogy is to “compress experience and emotion,” Brands reflects with regard to Bush, “but that is also its weakness, for extraneous elements get dragged along with the pertinent.” Historians, as Lawrence argues most explicitly, can help policymakers extricate themselves from this analogic quagmire by reinforcing the nuances and complexities of their analyses and by making that work more available to public policymakers. This broader idea of historical sensibility that allows policymakers to effectively marshal historical knowledge comprises the second major theme of the book. The editors are emphatic about the inherent imprecision involved in such awareness. Mining the past for “useful” knowledge is not a science but an art—one that Hal Brands likens to the coup d’oeil, or flash of insight, described by Clausewitz in the context of battle. These cautions notwithstanding, readers of the book will find several remarkably persuasive meditations on the art, particularly in the chapters by Steinberg and Zelikow. Steinberg’s essay outlines three modes of historical thinking that influenced policymaking during his time in the Clinton and Obama administrations: “deep history,” or decision makers’ understanding of how an issue developed; analogic history; and personal history. Steinberg illustrates this schema by examining the efforts of the George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administrations to address the Bosnian crisis of the 1990s, and then the Obama Administration’s use of the Bosnian crisis as a reference point in dealing with Libya. It is Steinberg’s illustration of how these modes of thinking overlap and interact—particularly deep and personal histories—that is especially valuable. Because few policymakers come to government with deep historical knowledge of the areas and topics they are forced to confront, personal historical experience is a powerful guide in shaping how one makes sense of various issues and policy options. Complementing Steinberg, Zelikow’s essay presents something of a policymaker’s epistemology, tracing the interrelation of judgments that inform what policymakers care about and what they might seek to do. Zelikow’s is an argument for critical analysis that can help students of history more precisely to break down the factors that have produced major policy decisions. But Steinberg’s essay suggests that such deliberate historical thinking within government—an awareness of “underlying assumptions and causal logic”—can facilitate “constructive historical learning” that ensures the mistakes of the past are not repeated. Given this attention to historical sensibility, a theme that could have received more explicit attention is that of ahistorical thinking, or the way that policymakers’
Winter 2017 | 3
MC CORMICK
desire to break with the past can serve as an equally powerful influence on their readings of precedent. In light of the volume’s rich treatment of the pathways by which historical knowledge permeates the White House, this seems to be an omission. This is most obvious in William Inboden’s otherwise compelling chapter on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC), typically seen as a paragon of bureaucratic incoherence and counterproductive policy. Inboden cogently contends that under the leadership of William Clark from 1982-1983, the NSC actually succeeded in crafting strategy that reflected Reagan’s complicated ideological schema. There is much convincing evidence here that the process that culminated in NSDD75, a strategic document promoting internal change in the Soviet Union, was coherent and deliberative. Nonetheless, Reagan’s ideology entailed a very specific reading of history that rejected the recent legacies of détente and the containment policies of Cold War realists. More explicit attention to the way that Reagan officials—especially academics like Richard Pipes—selected historical evidence to justify their views of Soviet behavior would have made this an even more striking study. A subsequent drawback of the book is only apparent because of the contributors’ eloquence in appealing to the virtue of original thinking in historical analysis. For all of the concern over abused metaphors, readers will find most authors focused on a familiar set of historical episodes. As mentioned above, the treatments of those episodes are illuminating and critical, and thus are sure to elicit new and productive conversations. Nonetheless, if historians remain locked in battle over the meanings of Munich, Vietnam, and containment, it only would undermine this volume’s call for a renewed commitment to the relevance of historical analysis. Acknowledging this limitation, the editors of the book feature three standout chapters that mine underutilized historical episodes to address present problems. In a chapter on postwar reconstruction of Japan, Jennifer Miller shows how U.S. policymakers’ use of the “Potsdam” narrative, which suggested that the war in the Pacific had been the result of an aggressive and irresponsible campaign waged by the Japanese military. Initially employing this narrative to argue for the need to democratize postwar Japan, policymakers were forced to abandon it when the Korean crisis gave them a reason to promote Japanese rearmament. The strength of Miller’s contribution lies in showing how the use of historical narratives about “democracy” was neither unitary nor confined to policymaking circles. Instead, as both U.S. and Japanese officials, together with their respective publics, sought to glean lessons of the war, “Americans and Japanese constantly borrowed from, influenced, and contested” each other’s readings of history. Appreciating the contested historical terrain that underlies U.S. understandings of the relationship between democracy and military strength is a timely lesson for policymakers now engaged in similar nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq. A pair of well-argued essays by Michael Cotey Morgan and Gunther Peck examines the historical record for insight into humanitarian intervention and attempts to stop human trafficking, respectively. Morgan gleans a series of lessons from the experiences of British attempts to end the slave trade in the nineteenth century and U.S. intervention on behalf of Cuban revolutionaries in 1898: that diplomacy has its limits; that intervention requires public support; that the line
4 | Orbis
In Review
between humanitarianism and brute force is “inherently blurry;” and that power politics are an inescapable—perhaps integral—component of humanitarian intervention. If the lessons sound familiar, Morgan’s analysis of the historical events underlying them can broaden the frame of U.S. policymakers considering the costs and benefits of intervention. The abolition of the slave trade was not the triumph of an “absolute moral good ahead of the concerns of great power diplomacy,” he argues, but rather required careful statecraft to balance humanitarian commitments against Britain’s competing interests in international peace and national power. Nor did U.S. President William McKinley intervene in Cuba without calculated confidence in popular support at home and U.S. power in the region. Even in the age of responsibility to protect, policymakers still must make judgments that weigh competing interests of security and humanitarian ideals, and Morgan suggests that history can be a guide for living within this tension and navigating “messy solutions.” If Morgan’s essay is instructive for highlighting the historical lessons in two less obvious episodes, Gunther Peck’s essay shows the care with which policymakers ought to select and engage with historical antecedents. Peck questions how slavery has been used as a historical analogy by policymakers dealing with contemporary human trafficking, arguing that a more appropriate analogy lies in campaigns to end “white slavery” during the industrial revolution and the progressive era. This analogy is, as Peck argues, contentious territory—white slavery remains a popular canard on the far right as corrective to “politically correct” histories that have emphasized chattel slavery. But, as he deftly argues, white slavery shared with modern trafficking the fact that it could not be abolished by an emancipatory law and instead required reformers to make arguments that would shape how others viewed forms of labor as unfree. Rather than gleaning specific lessons, Peck suggests that policymakers would do well to study the cultural and gendered tropes that have accompanied the “shadow of white slavery,” often glorifying “raid and rescue” as a policy alternative without giving adequate attention to the voices and motivations of the victims. Such critical historical thinking might “inform a set of questions” that would facilitate a human trafficking policy that is more responsive to victims’ own conceptions of “coercion, opportunity, and rescue.” The questions of framing and empiricism that Peck urges in thinking about policy alternatives illustrate the historical sensibility urged by policymakers elsewhere in the volume. Together, the rigorous and illuminating essays in The Power of the Past represent a powerful argument against perceptions that have made policy-relevant scholarship increasingly out of bounds in academic history departments. To their credit, the editors do not dwell on this reality, which owes in part to the turn towards social and cultural history over the past three decades, as well as to skepticism of centers of power that still linger after the Vietnam War. It is a division that has grown increasingly artificial in light of the glut of Ph.D.s and the availability of terminal advanced degrees, both of which have populated Washington with policymakers eager to consume academic discourse. So, too, has the public conversation on many policy issues become academic in a way that calls out for more engaged historical scholarship by those immersed in newly available sources. Some historians might
Winter 2017 | 5
MC CORMICK
bristle at Hal Brands’ assertion that promoting an effective policy-history relationship flows from historians’ obligation to “serve their broader society.” Yet, there should be no disagreement that encouraging historians to balance the “proper and necessary desire to be critical in assessing policy. . . with empathy and willingness to engage with policymakers” can facilitate valuable policy insights without compromising scholarly standards. Most encouragingly, Suri and Brands undertake this effort with the view that establishing a more successful long-term symbiosis between academic historians and policymakers requires a relationship in which each side accommodates the particular modes of the other. Just as academics must understand the limits of time and attention that often curb the depth of policymakers’ knowledge, so too policymakers must recognize that historians’ methodologies and professional incentives do not favor easily digestible material calibrated to the present. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but rather foundations for shaping the “structures of dialogue and the networks of association that drive professionalism” in ways that seek to improve policymaking through engaged scholarship. The greatest strength of The Power of the Past is that it presents a model for doing just this: bringing historians and policymakers together in an open and productive exchange of ideas. This type of relationship between history and policy is not just a goal to be sought, but a methodological and disciplinary reality that should be encouraged and expanded in years to come.
6 | Orbis