Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (18 page)

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.

George 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 the 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.

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 counterinsurgency “a pretty visceral reaction that we would not do this again.” American military training focused on conventional war; counterinsurgency 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 David Petraeus, one of the few American generals to devise successful tactics in Iraq, set up a counterinsurgency academy there. Back in the United States, he made the study of counterinsurgency 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 War-fare
by the French officer David Galula, became unexpected 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 east to obtain territory for the German people.