William Inboden

Statecraft, Decision-Making, and the Varieties of Historical Experience: A Taxonomy

Abstract This article constructs a taxonomy of the various ways that national security policy-makers attempt to use history. It identifies four types of history: experience, memory, tradition, and study. It then defines and describes three categories of how history is used in national security policy: predictive, prescriptive, and existential. Each category is distilled further into specific manifestations. The article agrees with existing scholarship that policy-makers often misuse history, but argues that nevertheless policy-makers engage with history in more diverse and complex ways than are commonly understood. Thus before scholars attempt to critique and improve the manner in which policy-makers use history, we should first employ a more sophisticated understanding of the multiple ways that policy-makers approach history in the first place.

Wisdom without tears: Statecraft and the uses of history

ABSTRACT The world is mired in history again, as historical modes of competition return and historical grievances fuel the policies of multiple revisionist actors. If the end of history has ended, then it follows that the time is ripe for an engagement with history’s wisdom. We argue that the making of American statecraft—the deliberate, coordinated use of national power to achieve important objectives—can be significantly enhanced by a better understanding of the past. This essay, which draws on the extensive literature on history and statecraft, U.S. foreign policy, and the author’s own research and experiences, offers a defense of the use of history to improve statecraft, as well as a typology of ten distinct ways in which an understanding of history can improve government policy.

The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics, by Marc Trachtenberg

There are historians, there are political scientists, there are international relations theorists, and then there is Marc Trachtenberg. Having been trained as a historian and taught in history departments for almost three decades, but for the last 14 years holding his faculty appointment in a political science department, Trachtenberg is almost sui generis among scholars. He has carved out a unique intellectual niche that is at once a testimony to his versatility and also an indictment of the scholarly impoverishment and parochialism that today afflicts too much academic history and political science. One of the few other historians who work at the intersection of history and theory is John Lewis Gaddis. Reflecting on the aversion his fellow historians have towards theory, Gaddis once wrote that ‘historians tend to respond to theory as small children do to spinach: we don’t much like it, but we rarely explain why’. To extend Gaddis’s metaphor, Trachtenberg is that rare historian who loves his spinach and can explain why in persuasive detail. Books based on a collection of previously published articles face a higher burden of proof, I think, in justifying their existence to the reader. After all, why bother buying or reading a book when almost all of its content has appeared previously in articles that can be readily accessed? Trachtenberg acknowledges as much and in his prefatory essay says ‘if I had to sum up in a single sentence what I have learned over the years about how historical work on international politics should be done, it would be this: the key to doing meaningful work in this area is to find some way to get conceptual and empirical issues to link up with each other’ (p. vii). He then turns to the third theme of the book, policy, and describes how he has eschewed his erstwhile worries that ‘a concern with policy tainted the scholarly enterprise’. Now he believes that ‘history, policy, and theory can be made to relate to each

PRESIDENTIAL PROMOTION OF INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Abstract The Clinton and Bush Administrations both included religious freedom measures in their foreign policy. For example, President Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act into law and approved Secretary Albrights decision to designate China and a Country of Particular Concern. The Bush Administration elevated religious freedom as a priority in its National Security Strategy and engaged in personal diplomacy with the Dalai Lama and Chinese house church leaders. The next President shouldintegrate religious freedom and foreign aid by encouraging faith-based humanitarian efforts and promoting greater religious liberty protections as part of overall democracy programming.