In the spring of 2011, I was in the middle of writing a chapter about the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, which began when the Kingdom of Italy attacked and invaded the Ottoman territory known today as Libya. This war, now almost totally forgotten, was the first in which aircraft went up in reconnaissance to signal enemy positions to artillery batteries; it was also the first to see aerial bombardments, using bombs thrown from Italian aeroplanes and airships. Scarcely had I begun writing, but there was news once again of air strikes on Libya. Exactly 100 years later, bombs were falling on Libyan towns and the headlines were full of the same names – Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte, Derna, Tobruk, Zawiya, Misrata – as the newspapers of 1911.

The correspondences were uncanny, but what did they mean? The answer is anything but clear. The conflict of 2011 was fundamentally different from its predecessor. The Italo-Turkish war of 1911 triggered the chain of opportunist assaults on Ottoman south-eastern Europe known as the first Balkan war, sweeping away the geopolitical balances that had enabled local conflicts to be contained. It was a milestone (one of many) on the road to a war that would consume first Europe and then much of the world.

There was and is little reason to suppose that the air strikes of 2011 will bring such terrible consequences in their wake. History does not repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain remarked, it does occasionally rhyme. What do these rhymes mean? They may merely be symptomatic of a culture obsessed with anniversaries and remembrance. But we should not exclude the possibility that such moments of historical deja vu reveal authentic affinities between two moments in time.

In recent years, the affinities have piled up. It is becoming a truism that the world increasingly resembles the world of 1914. Having left behind the bipolar stability of the cold war, we are struggling to make sense of a system that is increasingly multipolar, opaque and unpredictable. As in 1914, a rising power confronts a weary (though not necessarily declining) hegemon. Crises rage unchecked in strategically sensitive regions of the world – in some of these, like the current standoff over the Senkaku islands in the western Pacific, great power interests are engaged. No one who – from the standpoint of the early 21st century – follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 can fail to be struck by the contemporary resonances. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade of automobiles. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organisation was scattered in cells across political borders; it was unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique, hidden.

Even the furore over WikiLeaks, espionage and Chinese cyber-attacks has its early 20th-century counterparts: French foreign policy was compromised in the previous pre-war years by targeted high-level intelligence leaks; the British worried about Russian espionage in central Asia and in early summer 1914 a spy at the Russian embassy in London kept Berlin apprised of the latest naval talks between Britain and Russia. The most scandalous case of all was that of Colonel Alfred Redl, who rose to head Austrian counter-intelligence but was himself an agent for the Russians and gave them high-quality military intelligence until he was arrested and allowed to kill himself in May 1913.

Is history trying to tell us something, and if so, what?

In summer 2008, after a brief war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, the Russian ambassador to Nato, Dmitri Rogozin, claimed to discern in the drama unfolding in the Caucasus a replay of the July crisis of 1914. He even expressed the hope that Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president (whom he regarded as the aggressor in the quarrel), would not go down in history as "the new Gavrilo Princip" – a reference to the young Bosnian Serb who assassinated the Austrian heir to the throne and his wife on 28 June 1914. In the aftermath of those killings, Serbia's conflict with Austria-Hungary had drawn in Russia, transforming a local conflict into a world war. If Georgia succeeded in securing the support of Nato, could the same happen?

These dark omens were never realised. Nato thought better of hitching its wagon to the star of the hot-headed Georgian president. After a limited US naval demonstration in the Black Sea, the crisis died away. Georgia was not early 20th-century Serbia, Nato was not tsarist Russia, and Saakashvili was not Gavrilo Princip. Rogozin's attempt to bolt the present on to a lop-sided analogy with the past was not an honest attempt at historically grounded prognosis, but a warning to the west to stay out of the conflict. It was both historically imprecise and hermeneutically empty.

Even in better informed and less manipulative hands, historical analogies resist unequivocal interpretation.

Stretcher bearers carry a wounded man to safety near Boesinghe on 1 August 1917 during the third battle of Ypres. Photograph: IWM/Getty Images

The problem is only partly that the fit between the past and the present is never perfect or even close. More fundamental is the problem that the meaning of past events is just as elusive – and just as susceptible to debate – as their meaning in the present. Take the case of China, for example. Is the China of today an analogue of the imperial Germany of 1914, as is often claimed?

Even if we decide that it is, what lessons should we draw from the parallel? If we take the view that German aggression above all else started the first world war, we may conclude the US should take a hard line against contemporary Chinese importuning. But if we see in the war of 1914-1918, as I do, the consequence of interactions between a plurality of powers, each of which was willing to resort to violence in support of its interests, then we might also infer we need to devise better ways of integrating new great powers into the international system. At the very least, 1914 remains (as it was for President John F Kennedy during the Cuba missile crisis of 1963) a cautionary tale about how very wrong international politics can go, and how fast, and with what terrible consequences.

It remains important that we challenge manipulative or reductive readings of the past when these are mobilised in support of present-day political objectives. The recourse to history is most enlightening when we understand our conversations about the past are as open-ended as our reflections on the present should be. History is still "the great instructor of public life", as Cicero said. Being blind to the future, we have no other. But it is an eccentric educator.

History's wisdom comes to us not in the form of pre-packaged lessons but of oracles, whose relevance to our current predicaments has to be puzzled over.

Christopher Clark is professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914

• This article was amended on 16 January 2014. The earlier version used the word "appraised" where "apprised" was meant.