School of War - Ep 254: Frank Gavin on History and Statecraft

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Frank Gavin, Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University SAIS and author of Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, joins the show to discuss the promise and perils of using history to guide today’s statecraft. ▪️ Times 02:20 Political Science vs. History 05:37 The Importance of Historical Thinking 08:13 Historical Interpretation 11:22 Counterfactuals  14:26 The Misuse of History in Policy Making 17:19 Thinking in Time 22:27 Errors When Thinking Historically 31:57 Putin’s View of History 40:01 Philosophical Understanding 47:05 Does History Have a Direction? 53:34 A Checklist for Historical Thinking Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Today we have a conversation that goes right to the heart of what I'm trying to do here on School of War. Our approach, as you know, is to examine military history and the history of strategy, not just because it's kind of interesting, though it is, but because we believe that a proper understanding of such things will inform better understanding and action in the present. We look at the past to understand today, and when we talk about current events, we try to do it with history firmly in mind. But what are the pitfalls, the common mistakes that people make when they try to use history for present-day purposes, sometimes with catastrophic consequences? And how does history as a guide for action compare with other ways of understanding the world?

Political science, for example. My guest today, Frank Gavin, does a brilliant job of walking us through these questions and more. Let's get into it. For the experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face a great situation in Grand. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. Long-time listeners might remember me mentioning a summer fellowship I teach for on Grand Strategy and Statecraft, the Hertog Security Studies program. Applications are open again for the summer of 26. and I'd like to invite you or maybe somebody you know to apply. The Security Studies Program is a five-week residential fellowship in Washington, D.C., for advanced undergraduates, recent graduates, and young professionals. It's an intensive deep dive into geopolitics and national security,

with courses led by some of the best in the field, many of whom have been guests right here on School of War. I'll open the program with a seminar on geopolitics, followed by Vance Surchuk on U.S.-Russia relations. then Mike Durand of the Hudson Institute will take on the Middle East, and Dan Blumenthal of AEI will cover Chinese grand strategy. We'll close with West Point's Hugh Liebert to teach Thucydides. Our fellows also hear from a world-class roster of speakers.

Last summer we hosted Senator Tom Cotton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, retired General Frank McKenzie, Palantiers Mike Gallagher, and others. So if you're passionate about history, geopolitics, or statecraft, this is a really extraordinary opportunity to sharpen your understanding and meet leaders shaping American strategy today. Applications are now open on a rolling basis at hertogfoundation.org. That's h-e-r-tog-Foundation.org.

I hope you'll join me next summer for the Hurtag Security Studies program. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show, Frank Gavin, the Giovanni-N-Yelli, distinguished professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kessinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. I think I got the acronym right. Johns Hopkins Sice, most will know it as. He's been busy. He has a couple of new books out there for the history buff and maybe more aptly put the history obsessive in your life. One is a collection of essays called Wonder and Worry, Contemporary History in the Age of Uncertainty. The other

is called Thinking Historically, a Guide to Statecraft and Strategy. Professor Gavin, thank you so much for coming back to the show. Thank you, Aaron. It's really wonderful to be here. There's a lot in here in these two books, and it seems to be some of it sort of is an effort to get at subjects that have been on your mind for a very long time and seem to be ongoing themes of your work. And I want to think about thinking historically with you, but let me actually start in a place where you seem to be a bit adversarial. I want to ask, what's your complaint is about the political scientists?

What did they ever do to hurt you, Frank? I know, this is obviously slightly facetious coming from me, but I, you know, I have friends who are international relations, or I've been trained, I should say, by international relations theorists and who have served in government and they seem like nice people and they're no worse than the average sort. And they also don't seem to me to necessarily do any worse in their policy jobs than others. So what's the issue here? So it's a great question. I too have many friends that are political scientists and international

relations theorists. And you're absolutely right. Many of them are quite brilliant. I've been deeply influenced by many of them. I was someone who, Bob Jervis, who left this too soon, but was an extraordinary influence on me. And there's a variety of others. I think perhaps I straw man them a little more than I should in the book, but I do it in order to highlight what I believe are the differences between the way historians understand, explore and evaluate the world, and the way other, what I refer to in the book is more muscular social science epistemologies do. And I try to draw off those differences in order to highlight what I think are some of the really valuable insights, qualities, and characteristics of historical thinking, they're often lost.

So if I'm a little bit too critical, I would say it's, one, to draw the distinction. And two, because I think a lot of young people who start off their college careers or policy career saying, I want to understand the world, and I want to use a college education to do so, they end up taking international relations classes more often than history classes. And to be clear, that's on history because history is not offering the kind of classes they want. But I feel as if through that engagement and learning international relations, they might get a slightly distorted view of how the world works. That being said, the truth is the people who are going to read my book are going to be more likely

international Asian scholars and historians. And I have given talks at any number of institutions this fall, Yale and Harvard, Stanford, places like that. And it's always been in centers or departments closer to political science. I've never actually given a talk on this book. I've actually never given any talk in a history department. So for my complaints about political science, they're actually been more supportive and interested in this kind of work than my own discipline. I take your point that for the 18-year-old entering their undergraduate education and interested in the world and conceiving of themselves as somebody who might have a life in public affairs and international relations or something like that, there's something about

what the IR theory class, IR 101, offers that's ambitious. It's you want to understand, kid, you want to understand how the world works. You want to understand why there's war and peace. Well, here's how you do it. Let's talk. Let's talk about war and peace and all this other stuff. And I guess what you're suggesting is that whatever the, I guess there is no equivalent history 101 class, it doesn't seem to scratch the same edge. Yeah, no.

And I think for that 18-year-old coming to that class, there's a variety of values and key characteristics in international relations theory class would have. It's similar to taking an economics class. They'll say we've got these powerful theories to understand the world. Our way at looking at things is to generalize over space and time, to accumulate knowledge. We settle one question and we move on to the next. Most of our theories about the world should be replicable, kind of like a scientific experiment. And we want the theories and explanations of the world that are most parsimonious, simple,

that we want a simple theory that can explain the most. And again, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's mirroring a lot of what I think international relations takes from the economics field, which takes from what they believe to be the physics field. And you can imagine why a young person would say, this is great, the world looks complicated. I want to understand questions of workpiece. And here's a question, here's a set of theories that look at shifting military balances,

or the importance of institutions, or you name what the theory is, historians have problems with all of those characteristics and qualities. They don't believe, you know, while they accept knowledge as cumulative, they keep going over the same questions. What are the origins of the First World War? What were the causes of the Cold War? And they don't believe you can necessarily generalize over space and time as easily as IR would have it. They certainly don't believe most wars when they cause are caused. They're unique.

They come from particular circumstances, particular context. And parsimonious theories kind of rub historians wrong way. In the ideal world, Aaron, you would want a mixture of both. The great thing that IR theorists do is they're very clear about their assumptions about causality and agency in the world. They're very clear about how they define what they're researching and looking at. Historians tend to be a little more fuzzy about this. So I would say, and there are classes that do this, right?

And there are some of my best classes as a young person. Sometimes they were history classes like Wally McDougal's History of American Foreign Policy or Mark Tractonberg's European diplomatic history, which incorporated some elements of IR theory. And when I was a young person taking war in the nation state with John Mearsheimer, it was a very historical course, which also had IR theory in it. So I think ultimately the best is a blend for particular reasons because of the way these disciplines have developed. I think that's less the case than it was when people like Paul Kennedy were producing great works and John Lewis Gattis. But in an ideal world, you'd want both. I guess if I were a sort of malicious partisan of IR theory and I wanted to make the case for my department and against history,

in addition to the account or parts of the account that you just gave about sort of history's disciplinary struggles, I think I could say something like this about history properly conceived.

History, if we were pursuing it without all the sort of annoying details of the academy as it actually exists. And it would go something like this. Look, even at their best, the problem historians will all have the best historians looking at the most interesting questions is that there's just a lot of stuff

that happens to happen in history. Sometimes a guy walking across the street just gets hit by a truck, and it doesn't really mean anything. It can have consequences. It might not have consequences, but thousands of people, as it were, are getting hit by thousands of trucks every day,

and it's just a bit of a mess. You have a great anecdote or story, rather, in your book about the man with the black umbrella on the grassy knoll that seems to me to be related to this. Maybe we can go into that. But the problem with history is everything just kind of happens, all the time, and how you're going to draw any useful principles from that seems a bit mysterious. What you need is to reduce things down to their essentials, be a bit more philosophic, we might have

said centuries ago. And once we've reduced things down to their essentials and we're operating from a kind of a level that looks more like a level of principle, well, that's knowledge you'll then be able to use. History's just not very philosophic, and it's not very useful. So, you know, good, I mean, in addition to the fact that also, you know, all the classes seem to be about kind of uninteresting things, even if they were about interesting things, you would struggle. You would struggle with the fact that you have to constantly focus on all of these facts. Yeah, no, I think you're right, but I think historians, when they do their job, can incorporate that. So the greatest example of what you talked about in terms of an accident, of course, are the events of June 28, 1914, right,

Archduke Fritz Ferdinand makes this ill-advised trip to Sarajevo. His advisors had said, don't go. And he wanted to go anyway. There was very poor coordination between his security detail and the city's security detail. There's an assassination attempt that fails earlier in the day. His advisors and his wife say, you know, let's get the heck out of Dodge here. We've gotten lucky. He's like, no, I need to go to the hospital and see the people who have been harmed. His driver ends up making a left turn when he should have made a right turn. And his car engine dies right in front of the cafe where the person who had failed earlier in the day to assassinate him was sitting. He gets up, can't believe his luck, gets up and shoots the Archduke.

And you can imagine any number of events that would have kept the archduke. archdued from being killed that day, not showing up, going home, his driver making a right set of a left, his car engine not failing, the assassin losing his nerve. But what reconstructing those events carefully does, if you do it correctly, is it forces you to wrestle with agents and causes in the world. If you're someone who believes that if the driver had made a different turn and that you would not have had the First World War, that tells you something very important about how you think about the world. If you say, well, look, the environment was set for all sorts of disaster. If not that event, then something else would have set it off. Then that affects your notions of agency

and causality in the world. You know, another example of this is, of course, in the summer of 1944, Franklin Roosevelt realized that he had a problem with his vice president, Henry Wallace. He was too far to the left. A lot of his people who were supporting his unprecedented fourth term wanted to get him off the ticket. FDR was notorious, as a lot of presidents are, for hating confrontation. So he sends Wallace on this around the world trip to get him off the ticket. The convention shows up. And both Henry Wallace and Harry Truman think they're going to be the vice president.

presidential candidate. And it's very easy to construct a world where FDR chickens out, keeps Wallace on the ticket. And of course, he's dead in less than a year. And so the question is, Henry Wallace, who had a much different attitude towards the Soviet Union than Harry Truman did, when you ask yourself, would the Cold War have happened, would it have looked different, would the events of international politics and American foreign policy have been different if Henry Wallace had been president. Wrestling with that question, which is a historical question and a counterfactual, and I talk in the book about doing those kind of counterfactuals, forces you to say what you think matters or not. Now, if you're a realist, a structural realist, you would, of course, say to both

those questions, they don't actually matter that much. Who was president doesn't matter, the sort of ideological and geopolitical struggle between these two superpowers, fighting over power, vacuums in Europe and East Asia was more or less inevitable. And Wallace might have said one thing or another, but the conflict was inevitable. If you're someone who believes in the importance of individual leadership, you might say, no, actually the outcome could have been much different. If FDR had lived longer, if Wallace had been president, if a third candidate had been president, they would have made different choices and there would have been different outcomes. And so these questions are historical and they actually give you an opportunity to wrestle with some of the

bigger causal arguments that I are theorists make. So I agree with you that you want to be careful with history not being one damn thing after another, but by reconstructing historical events and asking yourself, how inevitable was this, what would the world look like if different historicals had unfolded, for giving that room for contingency, chance, accidents, circumstance, context, it gives you an opportunity to sort of really explore and interrogate your own views about causality and agency. I mean, I do this a couple times in the book with textbook exercises, but one of my favorite ones is, and I always do this to my students, imagine, Aaron, you were asked, we're living a century or so a year ago. And, you know,

your editor says, Aaron, I want you to write a history of European politics in the century after the Congress of Vienna. And your deadline is June 1st, 1914. And you work on it and you say to yourself, this has been a pretty damn good century. We've had these two crises in the Balkans in the last three years and we've escaped it. We've had some wars here and there. But the century has witnessed an enormous amount of growth, relative peace and stability. and right now the Kaiser's partying with the British Navy things seem pretty good. I'd say keep on, keep it on.

And you send it off to your editor. Your editor's on vacation. He finally gets to the manuscript in August. He says, what the hell is this? Right? Like, you have to completely rewrite this. Because oftentimes our theories of the world have a certain amount of when we look back on the past, we say, well, this was inevitable.

This would happen. And I think playing around with these kind of. different ways of using history to interrogate events allows us to open up and examine our own theories about how the world works. You mention a book a few times called Thinking in Time by Richard Neustadt and Ernest May as being very influential to you. When did you first encounter this book and how did it come to influence you? Oh, when did I first see this?

I would say when I first started, I have a whole story about how I became interested in writing my own book and it involves ending up at the University of Texas in 2000 and trying to think about how I could use my educational background in history to help people who were going to enter the policy world make consequential decisions about the future and I thought well I don't really I know what it is to be a historian but I don't know what it means to apply that kind of history and I started looking for the books that did this. And the book that everyone recommended was this book by Richard Newstad. It was a political scientist and had been a presidential advisor to Truman, JFK, and LBJ, then Ernest May, who was a famous diplomatic historian and who when I was at Harvard at the

Olin Institute, I got to know one of his leading students, Drew Erdman, very well. And it was a book that was based on a course they taught at the Kennedy School, started. starting the early 70s called Reasoning from History. And the course was to use examples from the past to help highlight lessons decision makers could use. And they have this great line. Their argument was teaching history to policymakers was like teaching sex education to teenagers. You couldn't tell teenagers not to have sex. So they ought to do it more safely and perhaps enjoy it.

And it was the same with using history. Everyone uses history. Everyone thinks they think historically. They just don't do it very well. And they tried to convey some lessons for it. And it's a very interesting book. It's a very influential book. The course, which is now taught by Fred Logovall, and I occasionally guest lecture in it,

still a very popular course. And the book had a big influence on me. There are things I like about it. There's things I like less about it. It was published in 1980. If you held a gun in my head, I would say that what it's most effective at is teaching someone how to navigate complex bureaucracies in American government. It's less about thinking about the deep lessons of history and applying them to decision making. And it's more because both Neustadt and May were very much products of the kind of bureaucratic politics school that Andy Marshall was.

first or the father of, but really got its start and it accelerated at the Institute of Politics with people like Graham Allison, Dick Neustadt, and Ernie May in the 70s and 80s. In your most recent book, which in some ways is an extension, a revision, a conversation with Newstat and May book, you identify a series of ways in which history does get misused, common errors, Over certainty is one of them. You have a list of others. Talk us through some of those. What are the common errors that you see people make policymakers, but maybe others as well, when they attempt to think historically? So there's a variety of specific things, but I think the overarching problem comes down to two big issues. The first issue is we are sort of neurobiologically wired

to think historically. We look as the past. unfolds into the present and into the future to construct causal narratives of how we got where we are. Our brains are wired this way. This is why we love movies and novels. It's why Shakespeare is such a genius, right? They understood that our brains are drawn to these causal narratives where the world looks chaotic and someone puts together a story that explains how we got to we are. The challenge is that since everybody believes they already do it, they don't see it as a craft. And there's this common experience a historian will have when they go to a cocktail party

or home for the holidays. And someone says, what do you do? And you say, I'm a historian. Studies international relations. They say, oh, I have some views on that. Let me tell you what I think about the war in Iraq. Or let me tell you what I think about the First World War. Let me tell you what I think about. And this is not something that neurophysicists or aircraft designers go through when they go on. No one goes to a heart surgeon and say, I've got some opinions for you on how you can improve heart surgery. Yet I believe that it's a craft that is as difficult to achieve excellence in as just as any other. But that leads to the second problem. How do you define excellence? if you're a bad brain surgeon, your patients die and people say you're a bad brain surgeon,

you should stop doing it. If you're a bad bridge builder and your bridges collapse, it's harder with historians because there's no way of really assessing when people are using history badly, especially since everyone thinks that they do it well. They're not particularly open to that critique and criticism. And the only metric that we have is the judgment of the historical profession, who for any number of reasons, have really surrendered the right to make these kind of judgments about who's using good history and bad history.

And as I talk a bit about in the book, a lot of that has to do with the nature of the epistemology itself. I tell the story about how when I was an undergraduate, you could make. major in history of the University of Chicago, either in the College of Humanities or the College of Social Sciences. It's the only major like that. And it gets to this identity crisis that historians have. You mentioned in the beginning political science. Political science is a social science. It takes great pride in accepting the scientific revolution and the methods of the physical and natural sciences, just like economics does. History at times feels it's in that tradition,

and at other times feels it's more humanities, it's more interpretive, it's more about looking at questions of culture, of meaning, of purpose that are harder to quantify and analyze and apply the scientific method to. So that absence of a shared sense of what it is makes it, has it, makes it seem confusing to outsiders. I talk in the book about how that's actually an advantage of properly deployed, but what happens then is that because no one has any notion of what it means to do good history, other than I know it when I see it, people engage in a lot of uses of history for what I see as problematic purposes.

You mentioned over certainty. In terms of policy, the leaders who use history, history more than any are probably Xi and Putin. And we know the way they're weaponizing it is for their own particular purposes. There's also, you know, so there's history used to justify. There's also history used to declare victim status. I basically make the case that historians should not go to the past and their first instinct should be to see it as a crime scene, right? So part of what history should do is to take historical actors and agents seriously. And this gets another thing that historians wrestle with, which is the question of judgment, right?

You want to use history to judge the past, but you also want to recognize that the views and values and interests of people, cultures, and societies change over time. And you want to be aware of that. So it's this balancing act that's really, really difficult. And the final thing, and it gets to something you, you know, quite insightful that you said earlier, which is that history looks like it could be any number of things. And I talk in the book about historical vertigo where you can be overwhelmed by different perspectives, different judgments, different angles being flooded with information so that history can paralyze you from making choices.

So there's any number of pathologies that too much history and misuse of history can lead you to that is important to guard against. And I'll say quite honestly, I used to think to myself that if you gave me the choice between that 12-year-old boy in Serbia who's obsessing about 1369 and that 12-year-old American who's living in California and doesn't know anything about the past, I'd prefer somebody who really understood history and used it well, but that American who didn't know anything, that might be a little bit better.

I think over time I've come to the conclusion that since everybody believes they think historically, we have an obligation to help them do it better. Let's linger on some of these pathologies and because you raise the case of Putin, let's linger on him for a bit. Because I've been thinking about this case for a little while. And I agree with your characterization that Putin weaponizes

history. That's obvious. He has a conception of what Ukraine is or perhaps more accurately what Ukraine isn't in that narrative that he promotes back in the, he starts in this essay back, probably before that, but I noticed it in 2021. I want to say a long essay about how long story short, there is no such thing as Ukraine. But what's striking is in addition, if you put a gun to my head and ask me to speculate about Putin's actual beliefs and his sort of psychology on this issue. I expect that there's something sort of sincere to it. That is to say, it's not purely or only, or maybe even at all, a cynical exploitation of falsehood to advance policy goals. There's something about this that is woven into the guy, this narrative about Russian history.

And my evidence, or a piece of evidence for this is, I think Putin, I almost hesitate to say this aloud in case that someone's listening and he corrects his ways, but I think he really screwed up. Alaska this past summer where, you know, President Trump clearly wants to be the person responsible for ending the fighting in Ukraine. He wants a deal. He has a particular vision of the world and of international affairs that is not, it can be hard day-to-day to track, but it's not that hard, I think, to think about in principle. It involves the primacy of economic motivations, a desire to do business, a desire for American business to do well, for there to be good deals for America. There's sort of a list of things you could enunciate.

that help you understand where he's coming from. And Putin shows up, walks into a room with the president where there's a deal to be made, clearly. And apparently, according to the reporting, launches into a tedious lecture about how, you know, Duke's so-and-so in the 7th century, you know, signed an agreement regarding, you know, blah, blah, I don't actually, I couldn't recite it.

But you know what I mean. And this seems to have alienated the president. It was not what the president was there to talk about. The president doesn't give damn about that stuff one way or the other, somewhat reasonably, I would add. And this opportunity for settling something clearly slipped away. Now, it wasn't probably the only reason it slipped away. But there's something about this historical vision that to me seems sincere for Putin. And by the way, poses a problem for the Trump administration's approach to Putin because the Trump administration's approach is very American in a way, is premised on this notion that we'll all just figure out how to live our lives peacefully and make a lot of money.

And actually, it doesn't seem to me to be Putin's primary motivation. So I agree with you that he does believe this and this is sincere. He had another article that he wrote a year or two before about the origins of the Second World War where he really blames the West overlooking the Molotov-the-Ribbentrop pact where he clearly spent an enormous amount of time crafting this narrative. And friend Phil Zellico actually wrote a response to it, took it seriously. And I think what you say actually highlights the importance of it, because it's interesting when you think how he uses history to justify these things. He thinks history matters for the justification.

And it's similar, you know, Xi is spending an enormous amount of time recrafting history standards and talking about how the Second World War actually really worked. I mean, you would think that if someone just said, well, I want Ukraine because I want Ukraine. Who really cares about the history of it? Or I want to be an authoritarian state or whatever the particular thing is. The fact that history is used to justify it in and of itself is very, very important. And I would suggest is not always necessarily understood, let's say, in the international relations approach. There's a lot of debate in international relations where you say, well, what are the interests here? and how do we define these interests?

And a lot of times, states and actors are motivated by things that don't fit very well in an econometric interest curve. If you honestly believe it is your historical mission to do this, then you're actually going to bear a lot more cost and you're going to have a different view of interest than a standard social science model. And it might be good if you're trying to assess. what Putin is here doing to be aware of that. So if you say to you, if you come to the conclusion that Putin has this notion of a historical mission and it's based on a particular understanding of history. And by the way, he's offering it to a nation and it would be good to understand whether

they also accept or embrace it. It's going to shape your calculations both about why he did it, why the Russian people, people might continue to accept it or not. And it'll also affect your views of deterrence, right? And cutting a deal. I think about this often in terms of cross-straight relations, right? If you have, if you're Xi and you, you know, we have a lot of people, a lot of friends who talk about what the requirements of deterrence are in keeping China from attacking Taiwan.

And a lot of those calculations are based on a stand. standardize notion of what interest is, right? If you raise the cost to make it very, very painful for an adversary to do something, they'll make this rational calculation and not do it. But if you are someone who believes no, this is my historical mission, it's actually far more important to me that I achieve this end than increased GDP by 6% a year. That's an important thing to know. So understanding how your adversary or your allies understand the world. And this, by the way, this circles nicely, Aaron, back to your question about my problem with international relations theory.

It would be nice to think that there were universal laws of international politics that we could understand and we could assess and calculate, we could generate the right formula for deterrence and assurance and figure out when to cut a deal and when to go to war. But I'm always reminded of Thucydides who says, of course, war can come by interest, fear, or honor. And international relations theory in economics is very, very good at figuring out interest. We can understand how states and people calculate interest. How do you measure fear and honor? And if you look at the actions of someone like Putin or a G, or frankly, some of the politics in our own country,

We're in a world where, you know, if I were to talk to Putin about interest, I'd say, why do you want to control the Donbaths? In 1905, the sources of power were wheat, coal, and a supplicant population, having the Donbass made sense. Nobody in 2025 thinks wheat or coal is a source of power in the world. It's not a supplicant population. This is not your interest. Even if you won, you lose, right? This doesn't make you any more powerful. But that's if that's not what the calculation is, if it's that fear and honor and

humiliation and resentment, it's not to agree with it, but it should help you when you're developing your own strategy, your own way to advance your own interest and your own way to defeat your adversaries. And so I think there's both an element in our own historical thinking to say we should do it better. We should avoid the sort of certainty. We should avoid some of the pathologies that exist among some of our adversaries. But when we're constructing our own strategies, being aware that they see history differently and that their motivations for their grand strategies may not actually fit in an indifference curve, may not be, you know, there may not be a Pareto-optimal spot when honor and fear are involved. It's an important thing to understand.

And cutting some deal that's going to make Russia rich may not matter if that historical narrative really is what's driving things. Yeah, I, for what it's worth, agree completely. The way I've always put it to myself, or at least for the last few years, have put it to myself, is that the IRA theorists, whether they're different varieties of liberals or different varieties of realists, that neither super school has a sufficiently rich anthropology. And that goes back, by the way, to the original texts of political philosophy that they're all downstream of. Back to the early modern liberals or the early modern realists and the lines are kind of hard to draw between those two. But Hobbs or Locke or whoever we want to talk about, as you know, all these guys are writing to kind of found a new world. And the premises that they lay down for human nature in this new world are materialistic premises that assume that we can found a politics on the lowest, common denominators of survival, gain, security, all this kind of stuff.

And that is not, they are rejecting, consciously rejecting, a much more complicated and, in my view, richer anthropology that ancient authors tended to have. And it's very hard for me, it was very hard to account for a Putin-esque vision of national destiny in this new anthropology, or a Hitlerian racial vision, or the totalitarianism of the left in various forms of, you know, Leninism or whatever, Maoism. None of that really fits. And so we nice Westerners, whether we are liberals or whether we are sort of disgusted with liberalism, so we become realists, we're kind of, we're all caught in this loop

where we're actually all operating from the same premises of the same philosophical revolution that decided to ignore all these elements of human nature. And so we're constantly at a disadvantage when we're sitting across the table from people who just we can't account for. No, that's a very good point. One of the puzzles I wrestle with, and there's some essays in wonder and worry about this, is that we live in this age of extraordinary material miracles, right?

We live in an age of technological wonder. We live in an age where, if you look at most of humanity, they were plagued by these terrible scarcities in terms of material wealth, in terms of security in terms of information. They had very little knowledge about the world, very little knowledge about their neighbors. And we now live in a world where on these handheld devices,

all the information in the world is available to anyone in the world for free, basically. And if you told people that from an interest perspective, 50 years ago, they would have said, well, you must live in utopia. And the fact that we don't, the fact that despite the fact in the last century, we've doubled life expectancy, that we've generated this extraordinary material abundance, that we have this amazing amount of information, all of which from an interest perspective would indicate, well, geez, this must be the end of history. This must be.

What is there to be angry and fight about? But of course, as you very nicely highlighted, human motivations aren't all about utility maximization. They have any number of issues. And, you know, by the way, even though we always make fun of poor Frank Fukuyama, this is all in his book, right? He talks about, you know, the sort of desire for recognition. He talks about the challenges of the last man.

He talks about how human beings are about more than simple material acquisition. And again, this gets back to IR because IR and economics is very good. I mean, you see this, I mean, all my trade economist friends, who, like, what is one thing we know? Tariffs are bad, right? Like, it's like smoking. This isn't really disputable. And they just all look depressed with no explanation.

But for historians, there's more than simple wealth accumulation to explain and understand. And I think that perhaps more than other epistemologies, and again, I love your connection with political theory and with the classics because they also wrestled with this too, right? You know, you sort of, yeah, it's one of the, we, John Bue and I were involved in a project to help publish Henry Kissinger's undergraduate thesis, the meaning of history. And one of the interesting things about Kissinger is, A, he took, he wrestled with history incredibly seriously. And how do you think about the opportunity, the little slice of free will that exists in a world that creates Treblinka and Stalinism, right? And so he's writing this in a time where there's all these very over-determined theories, and he's trying to capture some of that agency.

The other thing is people always assumed Kissinger was going back to Hobbes and Machiavelli when it was Kant was the one he wrestled with most, right? And the critique of pure reason. So I think you bring up a great point of recapturing some of those elements that the classics wrestled with which we have forgotten some of the sort of rational expectation, social science theory, where we just thought, look, this method generated such great benefits and insights in taming the natural and physical world. Surely we can apply these to the political, social, and cultural world. It turns out human beings and societies are a little more complicated.

And I think history, while it may not be able to provide quick and fast answers, is aware of that and sensitive to that, which is another reason why I think in supplement to other kinds of epistemologies that can really help us understand this moment. You spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about the Cold War and use it as a kind of case study for what can go wrong or what can go right in terms of thinking historically. I feel like I've lived as an eyewitness, at least participant at some tactical level, in one policy evolution that was downstream of a misunderstanding of something about the Cold War, really about its end. It strikes me that a lot of the Bush administration's errors in the post-9-11 era and Iraq and Afghanistan in particular its embrace of this democratization strategy was downstream of a kind of misunderstanding of what happens in the aftermath

of the Cold War, a kind of Fukuyamaism. Though, by the way, I share your desire to defend Fukuyama and his book, which is a brilliant book. And the last few chapters, as you know, are Fukuyama saying, and by the way, if I'm wrong, here are the reasons why I'll be wrong, and here's what's going to happen. They actually provide a pretty good guide in the next, you know, 20, 20, 30 years. But that all said, it seemed to me, I mean, by the way, I was caught up in this as a young man and sort of realize the errors of my ways, I mean, literally, and I have.

Afghanistan when it did not suddenly seem to me as though democracy was about to spring forth anytime soon. But there had been this historical moment beginning in the end of the 80s, picking up real steam through the early 90s of democratization, democratization in Eastern Europe in particular, where you had all of these former Soviet satrappies suddenly emerges independent nations with democratic politics that were more or less healthy, certainly healthier than whatever had preceded them. And you could add to that the story of, you know, the East Asian success stories in the second half of the 20th century, South Korea, Taiwan, et cetera. And so you just have this powerful impression that there is this direction to history. There is history with a capital age. And so all we need to do is excise the tumor of the Taliban or excise the tumor of Saddam Hussein. And this is sort of the natural destiny of man. All we've got to do is kind of steer it and tap it along. But the animal spirits of the Iraqi people and the Afghanistan people will naturally drive in this direction. to mix a few metaphors.

And so it'll be, if not easy, exactly, feasible. It'll be feasible. And it did not work out. It did not work out at all. And that strikes me, I'm not even sure if it happened, I'm not aware of any memos to this effect. Maybe Fukuyama's work right at the end of the Cold War is the best, the closest thing to it.

But memos to the effect of, this is the direction of history so we know democratization is going to work. It seemed to me to be much more impressionistic and just a general sense that everyone agreed in. Everyone sort of thought this was something about human nature that they understood. And it turned out not to be quite as simple. Yeah, it's a great point. And it's tricky because in this book, I try very hard not to lay out my own views.

There's some of that in wonder and worry. Part of it is to say, look, all of these problems, if you're, I have great sympathy for my friends who were in the Bush administration, dealing with this. These are really hard decisions, right? And it's, as Kissinger said, any of these are 5149, meaning that you could do everything absolutely right and understand the larger forishes and things could still turn out wrong. And of course, there are all sorts of contingencies. I, you know, one, I remember strangely enough running into Senator Cornyn at a UT football game. And I asked him what he was reading. And he was reading, and he was reading Tony Jutzer.

post-war, which is a tremendous book. And, you know, to be fair, if you were in the summer of 1945, you were to say, we're going to democratize Japan, people would have said you were nuts, right? There was nothing. You know, democracy had failed miserably. This was a very militaristic, Riven society. How could you say nothing about Germany? How could you imagine this happening? And so I I don't, I try in the book not, nor do I want history necessarily to be part of that Monday morning quarterbacking critiquing people. Because, you know, President Bush had a theory. You, I can run the experiment in my head a thousand times and imagine different things working out differently. You know far more about Afghanistan.

I think that was always going to be a stretch given its own history, its own culture, its own. But I can imagine scenarios with Iraq and the greater Middle East where the theory, there were historical antecedents for it, right? And so I don't, I want to be careful not to use history to just do that Monday morning quarterbacking to sort of critique people. I mean, I do think they should have spent a little more time thinking about, say, the lessons of engagement in people. Vietnam and what that meant for military purposes and sort of rebuilding a society. But I do think for every example of something that you should have said, Ah, history told you not to do it. I do talk in the book about not letting history overly constrain you to know when there

are times, there are opportunities to say, and this was clear in Japan, right? You know, in the summer of 45, Herbert Hoover is distributing a memo that's getting a lot of popularity among the Republicans who are really rising up in power to say, look, this idea of fighting a war with Japan to unconditional surrender is just madness. This idea that you need to occupy Japan and transform it is madness. Just cut a deal because you don't want to create that power vacuum. You don't want the Soviets taking it over. Japan has no tradition to do a liberal democracy and you're going to risk extraordinary bloodshed in order to try to achieve an unattainable aim. Well, you know what?

Turned out Hoover was wrong. America gets very lucky that the emperor after the second bomb, you know, accepts a modified version of unconditional surrender. And after some fits and starts, the story in Japan is just one of the most extraordinary stories ever. Or to get to the Tony Judd story about post-war, you. Europe, which, you know, it's very easy to beat up on our European friends right now. And some of it, most of it is just, much of it is justified. But the miracle of Franco-German reconciliation and the

kind of rebirth of parliamentary democracy under American protection, which I think people, after the experience after World War I would have said, I don't know, that's a low probability event. It succeeds. So when I think about what history can do. I do think one of the benefits it could have provided for, say, some of the early wars in the Middle East is that history forces you to constantly reevaluate your assumptions and to maybe avoid the sunk cost fallacy to say, you know what, after a year, after two, after three years, we're looking at the evidence and we don't see support for our our original hypothesis here. Let's update and let's change. And of course, human beings and

policymakers are human beings and policy institutions. They're as apt to do the sunk cost fallacy, to sort of do prospect theory, to not do the Bayesian updating that we like. And I think history will say, all right, well, we came into this thinking that there would be a Fukuyama-esque move in Afghanistan towards this. We're not seeing this. In fact, we're seeing evidence of the opposite. should we shift our policies accordingly? And I do think history, unlike other epistemologies, allows you to update and change quicker, which is kind of a hidden little, and it might not seem like much. I don't think being historically informed means you're necessarily going to get the front end a whole lot more right. I think on the margins you will. But I think one of its great benefits is to say,

okay, this isn't going well. Our underlying assumptions need to be re-evaluated. Should we update? should we change our policies accordingly? Frank, Gavin, there's so much more we could discuss. We've just scratched the surface of what you say about the Cold War in the book, all of which is really interesting. Well, maybe if you wouldn't mind, take 60 seconds or so. I do want to be respectful of your time, but you should say a word about your checklist,

which I found to be a really interesting idea, sort of derived from the checklist manifesto and really the medical field of the ways in which checklists keep people from making stupid mistakes when they're in operating rooms and things like that. What is the history checklist, as you conceive of it, and promoted in the book? Sure. It's the, I try to come up with a way because people say policymakers aren't going to get PhDs in history.

How can they access some of this thinking historically without necessarily, you know, doing what would be wonderful, getting the deep dive and a deep understanding of the past? And so I construct a series of 12 questions, all associated with a historical concept that should, that a policymaker and a historian, ask about any particular question. You know, I've got some favorites in there. One of them is unspoken assumptions. James Joel does this great essay in 1968 about, look, if you want to understand the summer, if you want to understand the origins of the First World War, you have to understand the mindset of the summer of 1914. What are things that everyone so believed that they didn't even say it out loud? And I think by definition, you don't know what your unspoken assumptions are. But if you're aware that there might be things that you believe that are shaping how you understand the world

and act in the world and that they might, 50 or 100 years later, look foolish. You might want to ask yourself, what are the things we are all going into this and believe to be the case, not unlike what the Bush administration, there were certain assumptions about what had happened at 9-11 and what was going to happen in terms of the rise of democracy that didn't even need to be spoken. If you could say, well, what are some of these things? Can we surface some of those things? Another is the horizontal part of it where we say, you know, we have a tendency to focus on one particular issue. But in fact, if you're the president of the United States, all sorts of issues relate to each other. What you do towards Iran might affect what you

do towards Russia. It might affect what you do towards China. Might affect what you do towards the economy and to think more horizontally than we often do as analysts. So it's just a series of of quick questions, it's different than the medical one and that there's usually not a binary answer, but just to sort of surface some of the kind of ways that history can help you avoid obvious mistakes and ask yourself questions and interrogate some of your assumptions going into a consequential crucial decision. The books are called Thinking Historically, A Guide to State, Craft, and Strategy, and Wonder and Worry, Contemporary History,

In an Age of Uncertainty by Francis J. Gavin. Sir, thank you so much for coming on School of War. Thank you, Aaron. This was a real pleasure.