The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft

by Hal Brands author of Latin America's (Editor), Jeremi Suri (Editor)

Overview

Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present.

History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815727132
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	11/10/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	334
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Hal Brands teaches in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of three books on U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, most recently What Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (2014).Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He is the author or editor of six previous books on international affairs, including Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (coedited with Robert Hutchings) and Liberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction: Thinking about History and Foreign Policy Hal Brands Jeremi Suri 1

Part I How History Does Influence Policy

2 Henry Kissinger, the Study of History, and the Modern Statesman Jeremi Suri 27

3 Policymaking and the Uses of the Vietnam War Mark Atwood Lawrence 49

4 Neither Munich nor Vietnam: The Gulf War of 1991 H. W. Brands 73

5 Narrating Democracy: Historical Narratives, the Potsdam Declaration, and Japanese Rearmament, 1945-50 Jennifer M. Miller 99

Part II How History Can and Should Influence Policy

6 Containment: myth and Metaphor Thomas G. Mahnken 133

7 Grand Strategy and Petty Squabbles: The Paradox and Lessons of the Reagan NSC William Inboden 151

8 The Ambiguities of Humanitarian Intervention Michael Cotey Morgan 181

9 The Shadow of White Slavery: Race, Innocence, and History in Contemporary Anti-Human Trafficking Campaigns Gunther Peck 209

Part III Policymakers' Insights

10 History, Policymaking, and the Balkans: Lessons Imported and Lessons Learned James B. Steinberg 237

11 Looking Forward through the Past: The Role of History in Bush White House National Security Policymaking Peter Feaver William Inboden 253

12 The Nature of History's Lessons Philip Zelikow 281

About the Authors 311

Index 315

Editorial Reviews

Brands and Suri have assembled a fine collection of contributions that should attract historians and policy-makers alike, but it could also be of great interest to other professionals such as journalists and activists. Hopefully this book will inspire more of this kind of work and an increasingly fruitful dialogue between historians and practitioners.—International Affairs

From the Publisher