The Power of the Past: History and Statecraft

Hal Brands; Jeremi Suri

doi:10.5771/9780815727132

Summary

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 199091; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

Search publication

Bibliographic data

Edition: 1/2015
Copyright year: 2015
ISBN-Print: 978-0-8157-2714-9
ISBN-Online: 978-0-8157-2713-2
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 1
Product type: Edited Book

1. Table of Contents No access
Introduction: Thinking about History and Foreign Policy No access Pages 1 - 24
1. Henry Kissinger, the Study of History, and the Modern Statesman No access
2. Policymaking and the Uses of the Vietnam War No access
3. Neither Munich nor Vietnam: The Gulf War of 1991 No access
4. Narrating Democracy: Historical Narratives, the Potsdam Declaration, and Japanese Rearament, 1945-50 No access
1. Containment: Myth and Metaphor No access
2. Grand Strategy and Petty Squabbles No access
3. The Ambiguities of Humanitarian Intervention No access
4. The Shadow of White Slavery: Race, Innocence, and History in Contemporary Anti-Human Trafficking Campaigns No access
1. History, Policymaking, and the Balkans: Lessons Imported and Lessons Learned No access
2. Looking Forward through the Past: The Role of History in Bush White House National Security Policymaking No access
3. The Nature of History's Lessons No access
About the Authors No access Pages 311 - 314
Index No access Pages 315 - 1