The Paikin Podcast - World on Edge: Why We Need to “Think Historically” to Survive this Uncertain Era

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Francis J. Gavin joins Janice Stein to discuss his new book, Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, why we need to know history to understand the uncertain geopolitical order today, whether Trump and his advisors understand history, why it’s necessary to understand countries such as China, Russia, and Iran, and which President of the United States knew the most history. They then discuss how history is misused, how to use the often contested lessons from history, the lessons from the Vietnam and Iraq wars, why we need to complicate our story of the Cold War, and why history makes the "unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar. Support us: patreon.com/thepaikinpodcast Follow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/@ThePaikinPodcastSPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OhwznCIUEA11lZGcNIM4h?si=b5d73bc7c3a041b7X: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.social Email us at: [e-mail] 

Do you think it would be helpful to today's international affairs decision makers if they knew just a little bit something about history? I mean, it seems reasonable, right? The more you know about what went down in the past, the more you can ensure that you don't make the same mistakes in the present. Well, despite what seems pretty obvious, we'll focus this week on why that seems to actually happen so little. World on Edge. Coming right up on the Paken podcast. Always delighted to welcome back our partner in crime on this venture. Janice Stein, founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the

University of Toronto. And our special guest this week is Francis J. Gavin. He's with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and has a new book out called Thinking Historically, a guide to statecraft and strategy. And we congratulate you, Frank, off the top, for being the Lionel Gelber Prize winner for Best Foreign Affairs Book for the Year 2026. I will happily show the book to everybody, which I've read and very much enjoyed. you're joining us from Washington, D.C. How are you today? I'm doing great. Thank you so much. And it was such an amazing honor, very humbling to win such a prestigious award. And I'm just thrilled to be here.

Congrats again. I essentially want to start our conversation by saying this is, you know, this is a book about how to make, how to use the past better to make better choices in the present. And my first question is who on the world stage today is actually doing that? That's a really good question. I'm often asked, what are the kind of best examples of thinking historically. And in fact, this question came up last week in Toronto. And I mentioned Ben Bernanke during the financial crisis in 2008. It was an economic historian. It was incredible. Chair of the Fed at the time.

Yes. Very, very effective using his knowledge of the late 20s and early 30s to navigate a crisis. If you're asking me for contemporary examples, I think we're, It's not a deep bench. I don't, we're in a time where sophisticated historical knowledge or analysis is really prized or put forward. I think it's hard to look at world events and see really any leader using historic history effectively. You see a lot of them misusing it. You see some of Putin's arguments about history, whether it's from NATO expansion or

the supposed idea that there was never such a thing as a Ukrainian people. You see Xi and China being obsessed with crafting a kind of a unified historical standard that's not without problems. And, you know, indeed, in our own country, there was a great piece in New York Times this last weekend about the Trump administration's misuse of lucidities in the Pelopid Asian War. So, and it gets to one of the dilemmas. It's not that history is absent. It's just that it's being deployed very ineffectively or quite improperly. I'm going to ask your friend Janice Stein about whether or not she was impressed at the 10-minute video that the Prime Minister of Canada just dropped, something he says he's going to be doing

more of in the future. And one of the things he referenced in the video was Sir Isaac Brock, who is kind of the hero of the war of 1812 in what wasn't even yet, Canada. there's a world leader right now who's gone back into history to use an example that is sort of not really part of every day's typical conversation and he seemed to know what he was talking about. What did you think of that?

You know, it really was fascinating because Francis is unusual in Canada. The closest analogy would be FDR in radio days doing a fireside chat. So the prime minister did a recorded video, unusual times, unusual challenges. He's going to have these conversations with Canadians. But in the middle, he pulls up a little figurine that somebody had given him. It was on his desk and it was General Sir Isaac Brock and he said, this is here on my desk every day because it helps me remember how important history is.

and how much I need to pay attention. So then the whole series of conversations went on. Well, should the prime minister be doing firesaw chats or not? Maybe he should do a press conference for journalists might be able to ask him some tough questions. But the interesting thing is he told, he didn't tell the full story of Sir Isaac Brock. So all the nerds gone on his case, Steve,

and said, yeah, that was part of the story. the story, but he didn't talk about some of the stumbles that's for Isaac Brockney. And that speaks, you know, to Frank's point. It's not the book is not about the history. It's about the telling of the history and historical sensibility and awareness. That's a much harder hill to climb than just. Well, let me pick up on those two big words that you and Frank both used, historical sensibility. Obviously, a PhD in history, Frank, would get you closer to that if you're an average citizen, but I'm not sure that that's what the average citizen wants to do. But for people

who are watching or listening to this, who would like to, you know, just actually embrace that notion of historical sensibility a little bit more to help them understand world events. What do you recommend? So it's a great question. And the way I think about it is being familiar with the past, its unusualness, and also its connections to our own time. It was like foreign travel. We all remember that first trip we took to a country that was new. And it's as if the world opened up and we saw things completely differently. We understood the things that we took for granted. Maybe we're seen differently by other people that our normal daily practices might be seen as unusual. And history is like that. It gives you an opportunity to go to the past,

to see different worlds, different peoples, and you see where you share a sort of a solidarity with them, where the human experience is similar and the same over time, but also the great differences that different cultures, different societies, different peoples, understand the world, make sense of the world differently. And my belief is when you do that, that generates certain qualities, certain characteristics, a certain humility, a certain questioning of your own assignment, assumptions, a notion of the perspectives are different depending upon where they're given and when they're given, which I think generates a tolerance. And so all of these qualities come together, I think, which I think are obviously often in short supply in our contemporary political

and social culture that generate a certain understanding, a certain notion that things may be different than what we think. And I think most people want that. And I think familiarizing yourself with history, not to see confirmation for your previous beliefs, but to see the world differently and new, to see it how other people saw, which then allows you to reflect upon how you understand interact with the world. You know, Steve, let me give you a concrete example here, because I was really struck by it. And not to stereotype anybody here for one. moment, but when Donald Trump was thinking about going to war, and there was a discussion, General Kane brought up, you know, the straight, there's a straight of Hormuz. And Iran could seize the

straight. If you had a historical sensibility, your next question would be, well, tell me, tell me, when a country that was really close to a choke point actually seized when they did that and when they didn't do that. So you're not looking to confirm your beliefs or disconfirm your beliefs right out of the gate. You're actually looking for both confirming and disconfirming beliefs. And that helps you then sort it out. Donald Trump didn't look for either. He just said they won't do that.

And that was the end of the conversation. So there's Frank's point. It makes it richer, harder. It's harder. It's more complex. It's more gray. But it also slows you down when you're thinking. It slows you down.

You don't rush to a judgment that way. No, it's, Janice, it's certainly fair to say that this president does not seem to be burdened by curiosity or the notion that he might not be right on something and doesn't ask a lot of questions. But, but Frank, what about anybody else in his administration? I mean, he is, he is supposed to be surrounded by advisors. who may have a little more historical sensibility than he does. Do you see evidence up? So I'm going to take that question and say that the absence of it is not the exception we would like it to be. Janice and I have plenty of friends, former students, who were in the previous administration,

the Biden administration. And I wouldn't say that that was an administration that was brimming over with people that had a great historical sensibility. you look at sort of, let's say, their policy towards China. And I remember having conversations with some very high-level people there. And we talk about various things about the history of China. Like, do you know what the May 4th movement is? No idea. Right?

You can't understand China without understanding the May 4th movement. Or in 1937, when Chiang Kai Shek unleashed a giant dam to sort of flood the Japanese who were attacking and ended up killing anywhere between half a million and a million Chinese citizens. And people I knew who were dealing directly with the Chinese had no idea about this. And what I said was it wasn't the specifics that you had to know. It was the fact that what this story told you was two things about China. One, this is a country that has faced enormous amounts of chaos and disorder, and they will do whatever they can to avoid it, whether it's flood, famine, invasion, revolution.

So this notion of some kind of libertarian political ideas just not in their vocabulary and they're not interested. And the second, they'll go to great lengths to avoid foreign interference, right? So it was less knowing the specifics of the history. And again, this was an administration that I had a lot of sympathy for that I think Janice did, that we knew a lot of the people. And so Trump's people, they often, the ones that do know some history, they take sort of a very overly style. point of view, but I would say there have not been a lot of American administrations that are imbued with this. And just to make one another point about a sensibility, if you were to guess what president in modern times read more history than any other, probably far none, would you

know who it was? I'd guess George W. Bush. We're absolutely right. Does he strike you as someone out of great historical sensibility and whose decisions were? And so consuming what I often call Father's Day history or someone else told me, no, it's father-in-law history, the kind of big books that you get over the holidays when you don't know what else to get, your father-in-law, these big books that are important and interesting, but they're often biographies or military histories. That's not the same thing as developing both a certain sensibility and understanding and certain tools of analysis that help you confront complexity and uncertainty. And so that's always one of the difficult things. Because you alluded to this earlier,

of course people think I should understand history. What the book tries to suggest is that that's not enough. You have to hone and develop those skills so that history is not seen as a comfort food, but it's actually something that sharpens your questions generates different insights and different perspectives. And so there's no doubting this administration. is not the periclean age. I think it's fair to say. But I think that some of the administrations of recent time where, like if you were to ask me, who was the American policymaker or the greatest historical sensibility? It was the namesake of my center, Henry Kissinger, right, who did have that deep understanding of history's rhythm, regardless of what you thought of his

policies or his worldview, actually was imbued with a historical sensitivity. Can I just, while you have the floor for another 30 seconds, let's improve the historical sensibility of anybody watching or listening to this by having you tell us, what was the May 4th movement in China all about? So the May 4th movement is after, during the Versailles Conference, where the Western powers and Woodrow Wilson were basically deciding the fate of the world after the First World War, their head of a decision about what to do with German provinces in China, which the Chinese felt should be returned to them. The French and the British should sign a secret deal with the Japanese in order to get support during the war, where they said when the war was over, we would return these to you.

And to be fair, Woodrow Wilson did not know about these. When he found out about him, he was very upset. And when it was announced that these German concessions that were in China were not returned to China, but given to Japan, it generated protests in China, Beijing and elsewhere, first among students and then among others. And it is often seen pretty much both in the nationalist Chinese party and also the Communist Party as the beginning of the sort of more herbalt. nationalism and this desire to sort of reclaim China's greatness and the interference of foreign powers. And every Chinese student, it gets this, knows this inside now. Well, May the Fourth means a different thing in popular culture today, as in May the Fourth be with you.

So it's a whole different thing. Janice, go ahead. Yeah, I just add, you know, to what Frank just said, it's interesting too because there's this deep anti-imperial sentiment. You know, it starts with the opium wars and it continues. And it's so alive in China today that it's really easy for Shishiping to tap into that narrative in China, that here we go yet again. There is a Western power that is trying to contain us and does not want China to thrive and be vibrant.

that goes back through all these stories. And if you don't know that about China, as a diplomat or a negotiator, when you go, Steve, you're just, you're not going to do very well. But, Janice, I assume you could make the same argument today in as much as, you know, I think the average American attention span in terms of history goes back maybe about 10 minutes. I'm trying not to be a smart alec here. But, you know, the Iranian people certainly have as part of their historic sense of. the memory of America having, you know, overthrown a legitimately elected person at the head of their country back in the 50s, only to impose the Shah.

And that's all part of the story today. We don't seem to get that, but they surely do, right? Beyond truly, first of all, I mean, I find it actually stunning in this last year and a half. How little people making big decisions about what to do about Iran? know about Iran it is an old proud civilization Persian civilization

with one of the richest historical tradition you know we've seen some of the museums unfortunately because they were destroyed but in say you know a very very rich and deep culture that if you don't know that it's like China China has this long

sense of history I remember Chinese diplomat once saying to me you Westerners, you've been around a very short time. We've been here forever and we will be here long after you're gone. That's very much the Iranian sensibility too. And so when you come to deal with Iran today and you think to make this very concrete, that Iran is going to capitulate in three days,

you know, what are you missing here? There was an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, and the Iranians persisted for five years after they understood, really, that they lost. So knowing nothing is a recipe for what we're seeing. Well, and it's further this point. I've been rereading Herodotus's, Herodotus is the histories, which is all about the greatness of Persian. and you see a Greek interlocutor talking about Cyrus and Persian civilization, how amazing it is, right? And so when you release a dumb tweet, a terrifying tweet about ending a civilization,

basically you get all those people within Iran who dislike the regime, who want a different way, who are, would love nothing better than to see change. You've suddenly pushed them all on behalf of the regime because you've essentially had a powerful leader identify and degrade something that is a core part of your identity, right? And so... Well, let me play devil's advocate on that for a second, Frank, because, you know, your center's name state, Henry Kissinger, if I remember my history properly, and you will correct me if I don't, would occasionally say to the Vietnamese when he was in negotiations with them,

look, Nixon's crazy. I don't know what he's going to do next. You better try and cut a deal what you know, the best deal you can quickly, because for all I know, he's going to use nuclear weapons. Is it, I mean, could you argue that's what Trump is trying to do with his insane tweets and bellicose language? So this is another subject that Janice and I know a lot about, about the kind of manipulation of risk, the theories of coercion, I've just written a piece on Thomas Schelling and how overrated he is. I would just step back and say, because I want to say something about Kissinger for a moment. There's a difference between the sort of tactical maneuvers you might make, in order to either win a negotiation or a way to confrontation.

But then there's this recognition of saying, you know, we're a big country, there's another big country, they have a different way of viewing things. And I'll tell you a story. You know, we actually reread this document recently when, because Henry's beloved in China, right, you see one American diplomat who was loved. You say, well, why is this? People in D.C. will cynically say, well, he was so sympathetic to them. And that's not the answer at all.

his first meeting with Joe and Lie, which goes on for like seven hours. Basically, Henry says, tell me how you see the world. Tell me how you understand your place in the world, how you understand us, and then just listen. And by the end, he doesn't agree with it. In fact, beginning the conversation is quite grating. Joe and Lie is telling him everything the U.S. has done wrong, how they're not involved in supporting Vietnam, which wasn't true at all. This is in the midst of the cultural revolution is just over.

still kind of winding down. And you could imagine the temptation of an American diplomat to say, who are you to tell me these kind of things? But Kissinger listens, takes it all in and says, well, you know, I understand you're a civilization that's been around a very, very long time. He makes a joke that we can all agree that John Foster Dulles was terrible, right? And they all laugh. He breaks the moment. And it's not that he agreed with them. He realized to Janice's point that if you want to be an effective negotiator, you have to understand the perspective of your interoper. And if you're, and when you understand them, all of a sudden, you build trust.

And all of a sudden, they're willing to talk about things that wouldn't otherwise. If you're lecturing to them first about international law or whatever the particular issue is, they're going to tune you out. If you say, I want to learn about how you see the world. And I think, you know, in Henry's perspective, there was also an idea that great powers mattered and lesser powers mattered less. And so when he went to China, we talked to them with a certain respect that he might not have talked to to his North Vietnamese airwaffe. So I think that might explain the difference. And we'll be back right after this. Janice, I wonder if I could get you to

weigh in on this aspect of the theory in Frank's book, which is to say there are many administrations which don't, as we've established here, have a deep understanding of history or agree on what history's lessons ought to be. And therefore, I wonder how helpful history, a knowledge of history truly is for American policymakers if folks don't actually agree on what lesson we ought to be taking from it anyway. Yeah. And, you know, that's the question that organizes Frank's book, frankly, the one you just put. And, you know, the most fun and easy part of this book, and I love it.

And I say to any listeners, start here in a way. Because Frank tells the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. What did that mean? All right. It happened in 1963. And he writes the first version of 10 years later. Here's what the lessons of history are. Then it writes the second version, 1983.

They're different at 1993. And he walks us through five decades, is it, Frank, I can't remember, or six. And each time, Steve, the lessons are different. So this book is really about, what lessons did you learn from that, Steve? Oh, and what lessons might I have learned? And maybe they're not the same. And it's that sobering for somebody who has to make a decision is absolutely convinced. They're right.

And all of a sudden there's more than one way to understand history. It makes you ask hard questions. Well, why do you think that? And what do I think, what I think? And what conditions were there then? And what conditions weren't there? And it starts you on a conversation. And the goal of a historical sensibility is to make the world more complicated.

Whereas policymakers just want to make it more simple so they can make the call and get on. Well, there's a story in Frank's book that I want to have him tell right now, which is really a great example of how absurd sometimes the lessons we think we understand from history can be. And I want to take everybody back to the 22nd of November, 1963, at Daly Plaza in Dallas. And amidst all of the people who were there to see President John F. Kennedy's motorcade come through was a man standing with an umbrella on a perfectly sunshiny day. And, of course, the conspiracy theorist had a feel. day with this because of course, why would you have an umbrella there? There must be, he must have been part of the conspiracy somehow to kill the president on that day. Okay, Frank, pick up the story. So it was the mystery of the umbrella man. And the, he was seen in various photographs. He was

seen in his Pruder film. And John Updike does a little talk on the town a few years later where they talk about him. And everyone wonders who is the umbrella man, who is this guy on a perfectly sunny day, holding an open black umbrella, and into the gap of not having that knowledge, all sorts of conspiracies fell in. And so people assumed he was part of the assassination. He was sifting. Maybe it was a gun device, all sorts of things that came out. And the House Select Investigation Committee on the assassination basically made a call for this guy,

will you please show up? And as they were Steve DeWitt. And he showed up and they interviewed him. They said, well, what were you doing there? And he said, well, you know, I was just protesting. I'd gotten the idea because I'd read that there was a protest against the Kennedy family. And the umbrellas symbolized the appeasement policy that his father, Joseph Chamberlain, had followed when he was the American ambassador of Britain. And that that irred-

Joseph Kennedy. Yeah, Joseph Kennedy. And so because the black umbrellas are associated with Neville Chamberlain leaving, you know, leaving Munich after negotiating with Hitler. And they said, well, this has anything to do with this cold war policies? They have anything to do with it? He said, no, I just didn't like liberals in general. So I went out. This is how I protested it.

And you kind of come to the conclusion. There's this great little Errol Morris op-doc that goes through and shows this crazy, sinister-looking fact actually with which there is, you know, the most basic explanation for it turns out to be true. And there's a, there's a, there's a, There's more background story about this that I didn't include it in the book. Because you ask yourself this question, because here's the Warren Commission. They do great contemporary history uncovering what actually happened.

Why does no one believe them? And there's sort of two stories that I found out. One, if you listen to the LBJ tapes, John Connolly was in the car and he was also shot. And Connolly was shot with the same bullet that went through Kennedy. The Connolly family, I knew this from living in Texas, was deeply resentful the fact that they were ignored while Kennedy was rushed to the hospital. And so they basically wanted their own bullet. And I knew people from this time, I knew Connolly's chief aide. And he was convinced he needed his own bullet.

So if you listen to the LVJ tapes, you hear Dick Russell, who is LBJ's man on the Warren Commission saying he wants his own bullet. and nobody is like, all right, give him his own bullet. He's a Southern gentleman, right? And so they muffle it in the report. So conspiracy people are like, here's this missing bullet. The second thing that historical work can show is that who is terrified, most terrified after the assassination is the Soviets because they're afraid they're going to be blamed. So they create a disinformation report where they basically plant a story in an Italian

Marxist newspaper that says the CIA did it. This in the 1960s has the equivalent of going. viral, it gets picked up by this crazy Attorney General in New Orleans and becomes the basis of the idiotic Oliver Stone movie about JFK, which is all based in a conspiracy. All of this is a way to say that people use history, they just use it badly. And these are the kind of things that happen when you don't interrogate the history. And this is why the umbrella man story is so interesting. Here's something that looks very sinister. And it turns out to be type quite innocent. Sometimes you can have something that's very innocent that turns out to be quite sinister. And to Janice's point,

the historical sensibility causes you to constantly investigate and look and ask questions about this. And let me give you a Canadian example. Okay, that just came to mind. Steve, wow, Frank was speaking, you know, we, we're having a debate right now in this country. We have, we always have a debate about our foreign policy. But we have a prime minister who self-identifies as a principal pragmatist, right? So what does that really turn into? All the people who are really invested in the principles, the values, considering him far too pragmatic.

And I'm on his case all the time. You know, what about our values? Well, you take that one, Stephen, we come back and you go to a country of the 5,000-year-old history. They don't think they're without values. they just think you're Johnny newcomer to the game and enjoy your values

if you want to. That's your privilege. But don't come to my country and lecture me about your universal values. You wouldn't do that if you have historical sensibility. You would do that if you have

a very abbreviated sense and think the whole world looks like you. But Frank, let me put the last well, let me put a handful of American foreign policy misadventures to you. Let's say Vietnam, let's say Afghanistan, let's say the Gulf War in Iraq, current war in Iran. Is there any reason, any concrete reason to believe that if the administrations that were involved in all of those misadventures had a better sense of historical sensibility that the outcomes necessarily would have

been any better? So it's a very important question. And Janice knows this story because I told it during the KELPA Prize lecture. But one of the things that inspired me to write this book was when I started teaching in a policy school in the fall 2000 in Austin, Texas, at the same time the governor Bush at the time was campaigning for president. I taught a policy development class. And what we did was since we were next to the LBJ presidential library, we did a deep dive on the mistakes that were made on Vietnam. And we read some secondary literature. but the most fun part was the students went for the library next door, read the documents, took on the roles of Dean Ross, George Ball, Max Taylor, and then we tried to see if we could

come up with different outcomes. And we did it in the fall 2000, and then we did it in the spring of 2001. It was really, really successful. And at the end of the spring of 2001, I said, well, at least we never have to worry about this again. We never have to worry about the United States thinking it's a good idea to try to shape the domestic and sociocultural circumstances in a country that knows a little about thousands of miles away. And, of course, this is several months before the horrific attacks of 9-11. Now, I don't necessarily think that a deep understanding of that history would have, I can't prove, it would have made for better policies. What I'm pretty sure about is two things. One, it would have generated different questions and better questions. You would

have opened up the aperture of what was possible. Because when 9-11 happened, what scared me the most was people acted as if history had ended. We were in a new era, that American power was unbound, that we were fueled by the kind of things that are historically quite common, rage and fear and the desire for revenge. Most of the times in history when you learn about those motivations, they don't work out too well. A historical sensibility might have given not just policymakers, but the general cultural at large, a chance to pause and say, what are we doing here? What is the best step forward?

And that's a lot to ask for. The second thing I think it would have done is history makes you more aware when your mistakes are happening in the reverse course. I think you have a knowledge that mistakes are possible. And so perhaps after sometime when a policy is not worked out, instead of doubling or tripling down, you're more likely to adapt. So I am, again, this is a very personal experience. One of the reasons I wrote the book was at the time when the 9-11 attacks happened. I remember thinking, my country is going to make some really unfortunate choices because of the state it's in and because it's going to pretend history doesn't matter.

And, you know, 25 years later, I think we're seeing some of the results of it. Now, this isn't to say those same policymakers who made those disastrous decisions in Vietnam also constructed the nuclear nonproliferation policy that led to the nuclear nonproperation treaty. Same people, same time. They didn't go from one meeting to the next to those 20 IQ points. These policies are really hard. George W. Bush, when he gave his speech to Congress announcing the war, leave you the reasons for the war against the wreck, also announced the president's emergency

relief program, again, for AIDS, PEPFAR, which I saw my estimate that saved over 20 million lives in his book. I don't know. Yeah. So making policies hard. These decisions are difficult. And so part of the message is not just for policymakers. It's for my historian colleagues in the general culture to say, when you're making difficult,

consequential choices in the face of deep uncertainty, it's really, really hard, and you need any tool you can. And you will make mistakes. Kistinger called all of these problems, 5149 problems. You can do everything right and still get it wrong. But at the very least, you'll ask better questions, you'll interrogate your own assumptions, and hopefully that will generate better outcomes. And if not always better outcomes, you'll at least be able to recognize when you've made mistakes. Incorrect. Well, to that end, you have an idea that you kick around in your book, and let me get

Janice's take on this, the notion of creating a White House counsel of historical advisors, which is essentially a group of scholars who could analyze, you know, events as they're taking place and suggest potential consequences and interventions. Should that be institutionalized? What do you think of that idea? Look, I'm a big believer. Because I'm a big believer, only because of, the goal is to open up decisions rather than close them down, right?

And every single story that Frank tells that ends up in a really, really bad outcome is where people rush to judgment, frankly. That's the common thread through all of them, Frank. You know, it brings to mind Joe Biden's trip to Israel on October 8th or 9th, whatever day it was. And in many ways, leave aside now, all the other. all the other threats of this story. But here's a president going very rare under those circumstances to deliver the following message. We made mistakes.

We were attacked. We were consumed by revenge and anger. And we made decisions which turned out very badly. Don't do the same thing. I understand the anger. I understand they're take a step back. So in a way, he was giving voice to historical sensibility. But the Netanyahu and the people around him

constructed from themselves a simple decision rule. And that rule is if we see somebody over the border organizing and they could be organizing to attack us, we are not taking any chances. because we did that on October 5th, and look what happened. And that decision rule is what's led to war after war, after war, and virtually without end, Steve. Whereas if you thought about it differently,

it's not that it wasn't a wicked decision, as Frank just said. People attacked across the border in a really brutal way determined to provoke. When you rape like that, you're determined to provoke. but you have to ask yourself, what's the risk of every single time you see something that might lead to attack? There's real risk there if you do that, and each time you do it, you increase the risk. They didn't ask that question. Joe Biden said to them, hey, buddies, we've been there. We didn't ask that question.

Ask the question. I think there would be better outcome, Steve, if you could, if you, over. open up the discussion and say, give me some historical examples where we're attacking at the first sign of suspicious activity doesn't work out very well. Well, and the other point Frank makes in the book is that superpowers seem to be able to cooperate on some very big international projects. You think of eradicating smallpox. You think from time to time about how international cooperation on COVID, on the response

to COVID, actually. Climate. Not perfect. Climate. Yes. Climate change sometimes. There are all sorts of examples where superpowers and the world comes together, but then it seems to stop there. And Frank, I wonder, like, why does it stop there?

Why can't they take that foundation and build on it and to the betterment of mankind? So Janice and I've been talking about this a lot in terms of emerging technology and artificial intelligence. because another motivation for this book and some of the other things I've worked on is you're in Washington, say, over the last three ten years and you keep hearing about the return of Cold War II or the return of great power political rivalry. And this is the dilemma, right? People are using historical models, but they're using these off-the-shelf models. They're very simplistic that are used to actually fit with what their prejudices and initial assumptions are instead of challenging them. And when they looked at U.S. relations with China, they said, well, what was the Cold War all about, if not a military competition that the U.S. prevailed in, the Soviet Union collapsed? And so I turn around and I say, A, that's an oversimplistic view of this model that as badly as China and the United States may get along today, it's nothing compared to the entity, the ideological and geopolitical entity that existed between the Soviet Union. Union in the United States during the middle of the 1960s.

Yet somehow, several years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost ended in World War III, these two superpowers found a reason to come together to cooperate. One, as you pointed out at a high level, on the Nuclear Amplioration Treaty, which I will say was deeply controversial. Many of the sort of older advisors, the Dean Ross, Dean Atchison, John McCoy said, this is crazy, right? But it was this bold step. And then on a sort of lower bureaucratic level to work together to eliminate smallpox,

which was killing two million people a year in 1965 and 10 years later killed zero. And so this was a reminder to say that Cold War that you trot out as a historical analogy is different than you think. It's not your father's Cold War, right? As they used to say about the Buick's, right? It's different than you think. And in the same way, we face challenges today. of course we have a rivalry to China, whether it's economic, geopolitical, great dispute over the future, military political status of Taiwan.

But given the nature of the international environment, there's a number of shared problems. You've mentioned COVID and the failure to cooperate more between the two great powers. I think probably if they had cooperated in a way similar to the mid-1960s, there'd be millions more people alive to know. Right. And we're going to see these crises again, whether it's climate, whether it's emerging technology, whether it's international finance, whether it's migration, the nature of these kind of challenges don't fit into this kind of stereotyped, you know, lucidity's trap, great power of politics, cold war models, that the Cold War itself was far more interesting and provides some counterintuitive lessons through the kind of cooperation today that I think we did. desperately need because the kind of challenges we're going to face are going to be ones that if the great powers don't cooperate, then the outcomes for citizens around the world are going to be

much, much worse. And so that was why I tried to take the Cold War story and complicate it and make people realize when they use it in policy arguments, which they do all the time. If I hear Cold War II all the time, I'm just going to lose my mind. It's not the Cold War. It's totally different. But the Cold War, we think you're referring to is not the Cold War that happen. It's much, much different, right? That's why I love that chapter. And read that chapter because that is the best, because it isn't your father's Cold War. And our understanding that changes all the time and a story gets more complicated.

And as soon as you have a complicated story, to be blunt, you get fewer stupid decisions. let me put one last question to both of you here and that is this is a book that obviously says the more you know about history the better you will be complicated you make history well that's what the book says okay but uh i'm just going to make a different point which is to say that that you know if you have a better historical sensibility your chances of making better decisions today will be there right and and frank let me just put this to you directly what if that's that not true. What if a better knowledge of history actually doesn't make a damn bit of difference to our ability to get things right or wrong today? So, again, it's somewhat unanswerable question,

right? Because we only know the great dilemma of using history in the present moment is we don't know how the story turns out, right? I always like to tell this story, and I tell it in the book, that wrestling with history forces you to think about what matters in the world, right? So on June 28th, 1914, the Archduke had a terrible driver, an incompetent driver who made left when he should have made a right. If it made the right turn, what kind of world would we live in? Now, wrestling with that question, you can't answer it. But what it forces you to do is to say, well, what matters in the world? And if you want to make policy, policy is about changing things in the world that you think are suboptimal to make them better. You can't do it unless you think about causality and agency

in the world. And the only laboratory we have for causality and agency is the past in its history. Now, we're not going to agree. There are some people who would say, it doesn't matter what the driver did. World War I was baked in. And there's other people who would say, huh, well, we would have had something else that gas was in the air. We just needed a match to go off and it would have been something different. And someone else would have said, I could imagine a world where if you don't have a war that day, and in fact, there's evidence that the British and Germans were approaching day tide. There's all sorts of evidence that after two other wars in the Balkan and one in North Africa, that people have managed that's theulation. You live in a different world where you

don't have the Russian revolution. You don't have, you know, all sorts of different outcomes. And it's not to give a definitive answer as to what those outcomes would have been because they're counterfactuals. You can't know what didn't happen. But it forces you to ask better questions in the process, which, as Janice says, can't help but sharpen your analytical ability and make better decisions. Janice, you about the last word on this? Yeah, so I'm going to give an answer that I'm not sure Frank is going to like, okay, because because my understanding of history is a very complicated process. And we only, even the best of us, we get a glimpse, right,

of all these complex interconnections. So let me take that and say, what kind of decision makers have I met? And roughly, the ones who think about a problem is really complicated. I'd see all the interconnections. They're slower. They're less inclined to make really awful decisions. They manage risk better because they see it.

And the process unfolds over time and they're no big, bold decisions. Because they see all the complexities, right? And that's a constraint. There's a subgroup of people who brush aside the complexity because they don't want to know about it. and they take big, bold, rash decisions. For 90% of those people, it works out really terribly. But for 10%, they're great, right? They're really great.

And so those are the inequities. So what Frank is arguing for is a way of thinking about risk in a serious way by going back and peeling the layers of history so that you really see the risk. And the few really great decision makers dismiss the risk because if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to make those bold, bold decisions. And life's not perfect. Do you agree, Frank? I agree.

You agree. Oh, so not as controversial as you thought, Jess. Not so bad at all. Because there's no magic bullet for any, you know, there's no magic bullet that will get everything right, Frank. And neither of the two of us would promise that to our students or to anybody else we talked to. Having said that, Janice, I want you to know, Frank, I not only read the book, but I read the acknowledgments as well. And I want to read one sentence in the acknowledgments, which goes like this. Janice Stein is the first and last person I go to for intellectual feedback

and the suggestions she provided for this manuscript were the best, most useful comments I've ever received from another scholar. Okay, I need to know the story behind that. Does it get any better than that? Steve, it doesn't get that. It's amazing. And it's absolutely true. I will tell you, I was wrestling. As you know, having read the book, there's a distinction between the concept of a historical sensibility, which is a temperament and the idea of thinking historically, which is a kind of analytical toolkit. In an earlier version of the draft, they were mixed together. And Janice said, you're talking about two different things here.

And it was just that a light bulb went off. And if I could use a sort of a visual comparison, thinking historically is like a, or historical sensibility is like a powerful magnet that pulls all sorts of things from under a surface you would never see otherwise, right? All these hidden worlds, they kind of come to you through that historical sensibility. Thinking historically, and I only got to say after talking about Janus, it's like a chemical die in the infinite amount of data and information, what actually matters. Because Janice's point, you know, things are complicated.

If you're a decision maker, you have to make choices. How do you boil down the things that you need to know that are most important? And that's thinking historically, and that's what Janice, because I had them combined together, and she said, you're talking about totally different things. And it was, I said, one of those moments, it was like out of a movie, a light bulb goes off, and it was far in a way, it completely made the book what it is. And so I'm eternally grateful to Janice for any number of things, but that intervention was extraordinary. Not bad, Stein. Nope. Not bad at all. Okay, before we sign off here,

let me do a couple of things. I want to thank the people who help keep the lights on on this podcast. As you know, we insist that it be free, but there are costs associated with it. And so we always like to thank the people who go to our Patreon page. That's patreon.com forward slash the Paken podcast and shell out whatever they want to help keep us going here. And to that end, a couple of people I want to shout out are Chris and Julianne Leggett and another guy named James Gallagher, who's actually neighbors on the mountain in Hamilton with my buddies Kenny and Gary Rosenthal when we were all growing up, I've known them all for 60 years. And apparently James, you took cello lessons with my brother probably 55 years ago. I hope you turned out to be a better cello player than he did,

James, because my brother was horrible, and we're very glad that he decided to give it up. All of our shows are archived at Steve Paken.com. Francis J. Gavin has been our special guest, Thinking Historically, a Guide to Statecraft and Strategy is his Gelber Prize-winning book. Frank, thanks for joining us today. Janice, as always, great to be in your company. Peace and love, everybody. See you next time.

Thank you. Thank you, Steve.