Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.

What the fuck are you even talking about? The whole point of that reference, if you were to read the linked academic article, was to point out how government officials were over reliant on frameworks and how they judged two monumental events using those historical frameworks in real time. As the author pointed out, “The point of this article is not to judge, with the great benefit of hindsight, the decisions that were made in September 2001 and September 2008. Rather, it is to assess the decision-making discussions as they happened and on the basis of the knowledge that the participants had at their disposal.”

Maybe, you know, if you actually READ the thing, you would realize what the fuck the author was talking about.

My conclusions are modest ones. Those who determined U.S. policy in the wake of the great disasters of 9/11 and 9/15 were over-reliant on conceptual frameworks that did not give a formal role to history. In both cases, analogies were thrown around in a somewhat casual way. 9/11 was Pearl Harbor. Al Qaeda were “Islamo-fascists.” Saddam Hussein was Hitler. Baghdad in 2003 would be Paris in 1944. When President Bush lost patience with the difficulties of establishing democracy in Iraq, his questions epitomized the problem: “Where’s the leader? Where’s George Washington? Where’s Thomas Jefferson? Where’s John Adams, for crying out loud?”57 There was a similar, scatter-gun quality to the historical analogies discussed by the FOMC in 2008. A more systematic assessment of relevant analogies, in the spirit of Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, would have been beneficial.58 The case for applied history is an unpretentious one. If history is, as former Defense Secretary Ash Carter once remarked, “the language that is spoken” in the corridors of power—not economics, not political science—then it is surely desirable for those who inhabit those corridors to speak it fluently: in other words, to be aware of the pitfalls as well as the power of arguing on the basis of historical analogies.59

Secondly, what Henry Kissinger long ago called “the problem of conjecture”—the impossibility of having certainty about the consequences of either action or inaction—was insufficiently appreciated in 2001. The argument for treating the 9/11 attacks as an “opportunity” for a large-scale geopolitical reordering was not subjected to sufficient scrutiny and too quickly became the basis for a policy that misunderstood the problem of conjecture. Preemption, as Kissinger understood, is a hazardous thing. Even if the Bush administration had been correct, and Saddam Hussein had assisted al Qaeda materially and had possessed weapons of mass destruction, would voters in the future be grateful that they did not have to experience whatever scenario was averted by his deposition? The adverse consequences of the U.S. invasion (extending beyond the costs to the United States in lives and treasure, to include the disproportionate benefits to Iran of chaos next door) were always bound to loom larger than those of a hypothetical future in which Saddam acquired WMD. By contrast, the decision makers at the Federal Reserve came to appreciate relatively swiftly that not to do everything in their power to avert a second Depression would have been more hazardous than to do everything. This was partly because Geithner—not coincidentally a Kissinger protégé—so ably made the case for action. Whatever risks Ben Bernanke and his colleagues ran after the failure of Lehman—whatever unforeseen costs their innovations may turn out to have incurred—most economists would now agree now that they were probably worth it. However, this is mainly because we can better imagine a hypothetical future in which the monetary policy mistakes of the 1930s were repeated.

“Risk management” is in many ways a misleading term, for the most difficult challenge for policy makers in both finance and foreign policy is to cope not with risk but with uncertainty—with dangers to which probabilities cannot be attached. To my mind, it will not be enough in the future merely to break down the walls that currently separate the people in the securities analysis silo from those in the national security silo. We need to introduce in both fields a more rigorous notion of applied history, and a recognition that the value of history lies precisely in teaching risk managers of all kinds to interrogate explicitly their unspoken assumptions.

https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/aop/article-10.1163-25895893-bja10021/article-10.1163-25895893-bja10021.xml