A Single Historical Lesson can be More Dangerous than None

Iran is not 2003 Iraq, or 1938 Germany.

This is not a current events blog, and I will not turn it into one. However, Israel and Iran are obviously all over the news, and discussion of nuclear weapons and US intervention is bringing out all the usual historical analogies. These analogies are directly relevant to the focus of this blog, and I even mentioned some of them in my initial launch article three years ago.

This won’t be a long historical deep-dive, and I won’t attempt to wade into the actual merits and discussion of anything going on right now in the Middle East or America. Historical attention is fundamentally shaped by the concerns of the present, but I don’t consider it my place to offer punditry or factional talking points. Ideally, studying history well should serve all parties and interests.

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We use history to understand the origins of the present, and as an aide and guide in decision-making about the future. However, while “those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it” is a popular aphorism, it’s also the case that many of the greatest mistakes in history were carried out by actors who thought they were learning from the laws and lessons of history. Sometimes, little or no historical knowledge is actually worse than none at all.

Three years ago, I wrote about how, in the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, proponents of the war constantly referenced Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938, while opponents of the war cited the experience of Vietnam and the prospect of the U.S. getting drawn into another quagmire.

Arguably, both positions were wrong, though not to the same degree. The invasion of Iraq today is widely seen as a strategic blunder, and one wishes that the Bush administration had spent much more time examining the tribal history of Iraq and its Sunni/Shia sectarian divide, and drawing historical lessons from counter-insurgencies (America in the Philippines, the French in Algeria, The Romans in Spain and Judea, Charlemagne in Germany, Napoleon in Spain, etc). Advocates of the war drew on the wrong historical lesson, and missed many others that would have been more helpful.

However, the critics of the war weren’t entirely correct either. For while the U.S. invasion of Iraq began to look like a failure by 2005, Bush’s famous Surge (in the face of fierce domestic opposition) and pivot to robust counter-insurgency in 2006 actually worked. It has already been somewhat forgotten that by 2008, Iraq was actually much more stable and peaceful than critics predicted in 2005. That doesn’t justify the initial invasion, but it also means that only focusing on Vietnam wasn’t the most helpful analogy.

In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible that there was actually another much more important lesson from Vietnam that was ignored; that mistakes abroad could lead to the collapse of public trust and confidence of America’s role and power in the world. Much of the last half-decade or so has, at times, felt a bit like the malaise of the 1970’s, with a loss of public trust in major institutions, and doubt about whether America is a force for good. In both Vietnam and Iraq, the moral and psychological cost was arguably greater than the financial and military cost. That historical lesson from Vietnam feels much more salient at the moment, though it was not widely predicted at the time, as far as I can remember.

America does not have much of a tradition of grand strategic thinking. Historically, Americans can be somewhat manic about foreign policy, dramatically swinging from one pendulum extreme to the other. Starting just before 1900, the American public experienced in just four decades:

• Jingoistic imperialism during the Spanish-American War

• Studious non-interventionism during the initial years of WW I

• Messianic Wilsonian “make the world safe for Democracy” expeditionary warfare

• Explicit isolationism and an “America First” withdrawal from the world

• Naïve outlaw-all-war peace-treaties and arms-limitations during the 1920’s and 1930s

• Becoming the Arsenal of Democracy, world hegemon, and the greatest superpower in history by 1945.

Viewed in this light, the fervent outpouring of patriotism and desire to nation-build in the Middle East following 9/11, and subsequent backlash of American popular opinion against that project over the last decade or so, has plenty of precedent.

In the last few years, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s conflict with Iran and its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies, have obviously brought up comparisons to the 2000’s War on Terror, and the history of America idealistically spreading Western values and democracy. This is understandable, as the events of the early 2000’s are still fresh in our minds.

We shouldn’t ignore recent history. However, we shouldn’t only draw on recent history, and only on America’s role either. Historical paradigms change, and often surprisingly quickly.

Nails, hammers, and being doomed to repeat history

About as common as “those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it,” is the lesson, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It is very easy for the first aphorism to become a clear demonstration of the second.

The entire history of Marxism and Communism is the clearest and most flagrant example of this problem. At the core of Marxism was an ironclad belief in Laws of History, which Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all believed were scientifically true, and inevitable. Motivated by unshakeable belief in this paramount lesson of Capital-H History, the leaders of Communism caused more death, destruction, and misery than any other ideology in history. The same goes for Fascism, which was literally named after a symbol of authority from Republican Rome. German racial superiority was based on an elaborate imagined concoction of ethnic history, and Hitler’s mistaken belief in the “stab in the back” myth about the end of the First World War drove his policy thinking well into the Second.

19th and 20th century social Progressivism echoed more faintly some of the same errors as Marxism, and many of the early leading lights of Proggressivism hailed from historical fields of study. Even setting aside the most egregious examples, the historical record is full of people acting on “history always shows us that…” lessons, and then very confidently stepping on rakes, smacking themselves in the face, and doing far more damage than if they’d cautiously proceeded forward on the assumption that they were in uncharted territory, and didn’t know what was in front of them.

Study the history of failed companies such as Kodak, BlockBuster, or Yahoo, and you’ll probably find well-heeled CEO’s being told that their decisions were based on all the best data and experience. Part of the reason the 2008 financial crisis was so bad was precisely because many hedge funds and investment groups convinced themselves that housing markets simply never crashed, while their finely-tuned quantitative models all confirmed what they wanted to hear. Lots of investors in the early 2000’s missed out on Amazon because the Dot-com bubble had taught them to avoid profitless companies.

I can still vividly remember the Obama years, and constant fears about debt-financing causing imminent inflation, which didn’t come to pass. When inflation finally hit in recent years after Covid, the critics who had incautiously predicted inflation a decade earlier were all treated as the boy who cried wolf, ignored until it was too late.

Sometimes immediate historical precedent is useful and correct. Sometimes, as our annoying-but-wise professors responded to our enthusiastic and naïve big ideas which we thought explained everything…it’s complicated. The study of history requires scientific rigor and empiricism, but its application is fundamentally that of an art, and requires cultivating the virtue of prudence.

Confident one-variable predictions about the future often remind me of how young children learn tasks and skills. It’s often right when a child thinks they know how to do a grown-up task that they are most likely to break something. A teenager learning to drive is possibly in more danger of crashing when they’ve been behind the wheel a few months, and beginning to relax too much. You may recall an employee or coworker making a mistake not on the first day of the job, when they’re most skittish and nervous, but several days in, when they’ve learned just enough to become dangerous. Much of the confident and strident claims I’ve heard about Iran and Israel the last few days strike a similar vein. I can think of some journalists and pundits currently decrying nation-building and American adventurism in the Middle East, who once participated in the very same cheerleading of the U.S. going into Iraq two decades ago. A one-hundred and eighty-degree reversal is still movement upon the same axis. If the pendulum keeps swinging to either extreme, it may be best to get off closer to the center.

Cultivating Prudence

An obvious implication from all of these examples I’ve given is to conclude that we should be cautious, avoid doing anything hasty, and sit carefully and watch. But that would be it's own pendulum swing from one extreme to another, since leaders and decisions makers cannot sit on their hands paralyzed like McClellan against Lee during the Civil War. Too much data can become its own problem, and most people do not have the luxury of studying every historical case study. Of course, when it comes to breaking news and geopolitical events…most of us aren’t leaders and decision makers, are spared from the burden of actually having to know exactly what’s going on, and what should be done. We are free to nudge our judgements and guesses towards the middle of the distribution curve of possible outcomes, and attach fairly large error-bars to whatever cautious predictions we might make.

That all said, there are some heuristics we can use to become more prudent and better-informed, and for which history can become an extremely powerful tool when used correctly. A few heuristics:

• The past creates the present. When looking to apply history, begin close to the event in question, and simply try to understand its immediate origins from the ground up, first stripping away as many prior assumptions as you can. These conclusions will often be more important than jumping to what may seem like one-to-one comparisons, which can easily be taken out of context. Don’t start looking for other comparisons until you’ve tried to create a ground-up view of things.

• More and broader knowledge is better. Forming the art of judgment based on historical knowledge requires a wide and broad amount of knowledge. Similar to the way we learn any individual art or skill, the more general knowledge we have, the more creative we can be with that knowledge, and the more surprising and insightful connections and insights we can make. A beginner cook can only follow a recipe, but an expert chef could make a good meal out of new ingredients they’d never seen before, based only on general principles. Reading only one period or subject within history or human affairs will have diminishing returns next to broad areas of study. At a certain point, a niche domain expert will derive more benefit from reading Shakespeare than the next technical paper in their field.

• One-to-one comparisons are often confirmation bias. It’s not an accident that many of the most loud appeals to one-to-one historical examples, are also the most partisan or agenda-driven. Given what we know about polarization, factionalism, and the degree to which people are not actually open-minded and factual, it’s quite likely that many people using one-to-one historical comparisons have actually predetermined their conclusions, and are then searching for the nearest weaponized-historical analogy at hand. How many people who warned against appeasement of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and citing Chamberlain at Munich in 1938, were really surveying a broad range of historical examples and then finding the one that best fit? Think through how often we choose our examples and analogies in our day-to-day lives. We usually have a conclusion in mind, and are looking for evidence to make sense of it or confirm it. Often that’s not a bad thing when it comes to daily decisions, but it’s always worth remembering that the easiest person to fool is ourselves.

• Two-examples are a line, but three can triangulate the shape of a thing. Two data points just go in a straight line, but a third example, especially drawn from further away, can give depth and perspective. In geometry, triangulation of one point using two different ones, can give depth and distance. Perspective enhances clarity. For history, a wider array of examples, drawn from different historical contexts and paradigms, are more helpful.

• Recent history is Schrodinger’s cat. When everyone is loudly pointing to recent historical examples, that raises the odds that leaders and decision makers are themselves aware of the precedent, and are likely acting in that knowledge. The current U.S. administration is full of people who are very aware of what they think are the lessons from the War on Terror, starting with a sitting President who took over the Republican Party in no small part by criticizing Iraq and Afghanistan. They are probably more likely to act avoid what they think are those previous lessons, as they are to simply repeat them. One reason U.S. leaders thought regime change in Iraq was necessary in 2003, was precisely because regime change had not been pursued in 1991, leaving Saddam Hussein in power.

• Secondary and tertiary supporting pieces of knowledge are useful in the particular. The big headline story of “U.S. intervention in the Middle East,” and “Rouge state pursuing Nuclear Weapons,” may seem familiar, but in this case outcomes will probably turn on particular and event-specific pieces of knowledge. In sports, you can probably predict some of the broad trend that might define a game or season, but very often, particular events surpise and change outcomes. The nature of each military, the geography and distance of the conflict, and the personalities of the leaders, are all shaping events in real-time.

• The more you study the past for its own sake, the more useful it is. This one is a bit of a paradox, but the more history you study simply for its own enjoyment and fascination, the more benefit you’ll get from it. This is because doing so helps avoid the pitfalls of cherry-picking examples for your own confirmation bias, and it expands your mental horizons and context-window. Many of our best insights more useful discoveries come from these small little serendipities.

Conclusions

At this moment (Tuesday, June 17th), it appears that the U.S. is about to actively join the conflict between Israel and Iran. While I think it’s very clear that Iran cannot defeat the U.S. in any conventional sense of the term, I think anyone with a strong sense of certainty about the outcome or its prudential wisdom, is probably being foolish. The one piece of analysis I will throw out with some confidence, is that I think any loud prediction about the U.S. being about to invade Iran on the ground or conduct another massive nation-building program, should not be taken very seriously. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps are much much smaller in size than they were two decades ago, Iran is vastly larger and more populous than Iraq, and it possesses some of the best defensive geography on earth. I don’t think the West could do a massive invasion and nation-building program even if it wanted to.

Sometimes, the best decision turns out wrong, and sometimes, the best decision is also riskier than an overly cautious one. The very clarity of historical hindsight can also make it harder to appreciate how murky decisions are in the moment.