Richard Fontaine is president of the Center for a New American Security. Vance Serchuk is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

This year has been filled with multiple, competing foreign policy crises, but 2014 has also been a year of dueling historical analogies.

The trend began in January, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe invoked the specter of 1914 in remarks at Davos. In comparing his country’s current tensions with China to those between Britain and Germany before World War I, Abe noted that deep economic interdependence did not prevent war between the two powers. Two months later, with Vladimir Putin in the process of seizing Crimea in the name of Russian speakers, Hillary Clinton suggested that the time was more like 1938. “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” she said, noting that Hitler cited the need to protect ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland and beyond. Then, in June, as ISIS overran northern Iraq, its fighters announced that they were rerunning 1916, this time erasing the century-old Sykes-Picot borders—a strategic setback that, in Washington, set off comparisons to 1975 and the fall of Saigon. It seems that those who remember history are condemned to invoke it.


With all of this historical-mindedness, it is worth reflecting on some of the dates today’s leaders are inclined to invoke, as they debate the dilemmas of the present. In their choice of historical analogy, politicians and policymakers often reveal more about their foreign policy worldview than do conventional partisan or ideological labels. Just how this takes shape can be seen in three sets of competing historical prisms and how each is applied to events in today’s world.

1914 versus 1938. As Prime Minister Abe articulated—and a raft of articles commemorating a century since the outbreak of World War I have emphasized—small, seemingly trivial events can have tremendous, catastrophic consequences. No one in 1914 expected that the assassination of an archduke in a remote corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire would unleash a global conflict that would result, within four years, in 16 million dead and Europe’s empires shattered. Had Austria-Hungary not responded to the incident by provoking war with Serbia, had the European powers not invoked their cascading treaty obligations and mobilized their armies, and had small events not been permitted to spiral out of control, history might have turned out very differently.

The lesson of 1914 seems clear—don’t let minor incidents escalate, maintain cordial great power relations, emphasize diplomacy in resolving solutions, be careful about extending treaty commitments to client states, don’t overreact, be cautious. And so as 1914 partisans watch Beijing establish an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea and drag an oil rig into Vietnamese waters, or see Moscow and its proxies annex Crimea and fell a civilian airliner over eastern Ukraine, their instinct is to keep eyes on the prize—preserving the great power peace. Are Americans willing to send their sons and daughters to die for the Senkakus or Sevastapol? If the answer is no, then the United States must be prudent to avoid becoming too entangled in the tensions over these obscure places that could drag us into a cataclysmic conflict. We won’t be fully happy with the outcome, but that’s not the point; the goal is to manage global events in a way that keeps silent the guns of August. Rashly extending security guarantees to countries on Russia and China’s respective peripheries, blindly selling them weapons, ramping up the U.S. military presence in eastern Europe and the western Pacific—these things are a recipe for repeating the disaster whose centenary we mark this year.

On the other hand, Secretary Clinton’s invocation of Hitler’s moves eastward in the 1930s provides precisely the opposite lesson. In appeasing the Fuhrer and acquiescing in his seizure of portions of Czechoslovakia, Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart made a bad situation infinitely worse. By demonstrating that Britain and France would impose no meaningful cost on Hitler’s appetites they merely fed them, ensuring that the war to come was even more bloody and costly, and waged against a stronger Germany that controlled significant new land to its east.

Thus, as politicians right and left have repeated ever since, there must be “no more Munichs.” Permitting assertiveness to become aggression, and failing to respond forcefully to even seemingly minor provocations by authoritarians enhances rather than reduces the prospect of war. The 1938 devotees see in Beijing and Moscow’s recent moves precisely the kinds of bullying that must be confronted quickly and firmly, lest they become the bleeding edge of much greater conflicts in the future. Counter their actions now, they argue, even if there is an economic cost to the United States and heightened geopolitical tensions; by remaining firm and showing strength we will deter far worse future conflict. A show of firmness and resolve is order, not flexibility and accommodation to those who would change the global status quo.

2003 versus 1995. A second clash of historical analogies draws from comparatively more recent events—a set of U.S. military interventions that occurred within the personal memory and in many cases direct experience of current policymakers. It is also the historical prism that most fuels the ongoing debate over to what extent, and indeed whether, the United States should involve itself in the multiple interlocking crises now burning across the Middle East.

For many policymakers and pundits, the most salient guidepost for U.S. strategy today is the Bush Administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003, which was intended to rid the world of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and midwife a model Arab democracy that could then transform the region. In this view, the subsequent descent of Iraq into chaos, terrorism, and eventually sectarian civil war, coupled with a bloody, costly, decade-long U.S. military entanglement in this morass, imparts a number of blindingly obvious set of lessons, including awareness of the limits of American power, especially military power, to engineer political outcomes in foreign societies; the risk of getting sucked into the quagmire of someone else’s never-ending civil war; and the potentially draconian and unforeseen costs associated with the use of force.

In his West Point speech earlier this year, President Obama encapsulated the 2003ist credo in saying, “Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.” Or, as he has reportedly stressed in private to his team: “Don’t do stupid [stuff].”

Many 2003ists also evince a special skepticism about the Middle East, viewing the region as a geopolitical vortex with a bottomless capacity to absorb American blood and treasure, while distracting us from more important national security priorities elsewhere in the world. Faced with civil war in Syria, chaos in Libya, or the latest crisis in Iraq, the conclusions are coldly straightforward: don’t delude yourself into thinking you can solve these terrible problems; stay out if at all possible; and for God’s sake, if you absolutely need to wade into it, keep involvement to an absolute minimum. And don’t think about anything involving boots on the ground.

For those on the other side of the debate over these challenges, however, another experience weighs heavily. Interestingly, it is neither the Gulf War of 1991 nor the 2007-2008 surge, two examples of relatively successful American military intervention in the Middle East. Rather, the military mission that those who reject President Obama’s current approach are most likely to invoke is President Clinton’s decision, in 1995, to launch airstrikes in Bosnia.

Like the Middle East today, the Balkans were seen during the early 1990s as a “problem from hell,” a sinkhole of ancient hatreds and humanitarian horrors that Americans found impossible to ignore, but that simultaneously set off intense anxieties about another Vietnam and struck many as marginal to core U.S. national security interests. The latter calculus prevailed to restrain the outgoing Bush 41 administration and then the Clinton team during its first two years in office. In Congress, meanwhile, debate cut across partisan lines, with internationalist Republicans like Bob Dole and John McCain partnering with hawkish Democrats like Joe Biden and Joe Lieberman to advocate stronger U.S. action—including arming ethnic Bosniaks under siege from Serbian forces—while realist Republicans and dovish Democrats stood together in opposition.

The tide finally turned in 1995, when President Clinton—under growing pressure from the Hill—authorized air strikes against Serb militias in Bosnia. Rather than ensnarling the U.S. in Balkan quicksand, the limited military effort swiftly tipped the military balance on the ground away from the Serbs, which in turn empowered U.S. diplomacy and led to a breakthrough at the Dayton peace talks, ending the war—at no cost in American life.

Bosnia thus stands as the poster child for how a modest exertion of military power by the United States can sometimes unlock what previously appeared to be an insolvable crisis. It was a formula roughly repeated four years later in Kosovo, which also left many wondering, in hindsight, whether the Clinton Administration’s failure to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which killed upwards of 800,000 people, was a horrific blunder.

As during Bosnia itself, the division today between 2003ists and 1995ers is less a partisan split between Democrats and Republicans than a schism within each party—and indeed, within the Obama Administration itself, whose ranks are populated both by officials for whom the Iraq war was their formative foreign policy experience, and those for whom the Balkans served that role. The tensions between these two camps played out in policy toward Libya in 2011 and are critical to understanding the internal debate over Syria and Iraq today.

1979 versus 1993. A final prism for looking at America’s role in the world turns on the role of the presidency. 1979 was a very low moment for that office, as a Democratic commander-in-chief, battling high unemployment and national malaise, seemed overmatched as global events spun out of control. Americans watched as the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah and took U.S. hostages, Vietnam occupied Cambodia, Sandinistas overran Nicaragua, the American embassy in Islamabad was burned, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

For many who hearken back to that year, Obama is the new Carter. Emphasizing diplomacy, international standing and an updated version of détente with America’s adversaries, Obama came into office hoping to build productive relations on a foundation of sand, into which his foreign policy subsequently sunk. Like Carter, the President and his team shows signs, belatedly, of waking up to reality—with ISIL’s seizure of northern Iraq and Russia’s moves on Ukraine substituting for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—yet seem equally incapable of righting the ship of state. Perhaps, the 1979 crowd thinks, the answer is waiting in the wings, a la Ronald Reagan. Hillary Clinton? Jeb Bush? Choose your partisan preference.

For defenders of the Obama administration, however, the current moment resembles not 1979 but 1993. Then, too, a Democratic president faced the aftermath of long, costly war—the Cold War—and a rapidly changing international environment. For all of today’s troubles, challenges in the early 1990s were significant too—recall Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans, and Iraq. And while the early Clinton Administration fumbled some of these crises, it ultimately didn’t matter. After all, it’s the economy, stupid, that is the pillar of our national power—and that is where Bill Clinton really got it right, laying the foundation for what would become a resurgent American superpower by the end of the decade.

In this reading, Obama will be remembered less as the heir of Carter than of Bill Clinton. As the rare president who is faced with a truly new global environment, the President has skillfully limited American action to where it can make a significant difference, while prioritizing “nation building at home.” Unemployment is down, health care costs are coming under control, the economy has begun to claw back from the worst recession since the 1930s, and a North American energy revolution is under way that will transform America’s global standing. Vladimir Putin and the fanatics of ISIS may seem ascendant right now, but the future belongs to America—thanks to the new foundation laid by Obama.

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All analogies are imperfect, and each of these is flawed in its own way. They denote absolutes where few would apply the historical lessons dogmatically. Yet these prisms do shape the way leaders think about contemporary events, and as a result bear attention. Moreover, their relative weightings offer a useful typology in classifying the instincts and anticipating the preferences of policymakers—far more accurately than terms like “liberal,” “realist,” or “neoconservative.” Obama, for instance, is quite likely a 1914er, a 2003ist and a 1993 advocate; many of his opponents—Democrats as well as Republicans—gravitate toward 1938, 1995, and 1979. The same exercise, incidentally, could also be usefully applied (albeit with different dates and events) in assessing the leaders of foreign countries.

It’s also important to recognize that, while the crises of 2014 have inspired a great deal of history-invoking, the use—and misuse—of these kinds of analogies are as old as foreign policy itself. Isolationists in the 1930s invoked the specter of World War I to argue against confrontation with Hitler while a few years later, in the early 1940s, FDR’s plans for the postwar period were shaped by what he and his advisors viewed as Woodrow Wilson’s blunders in the wake of the last global conflict. JFK’s response to the Cuban Missile Crisis was reportedly influenced by his understanding of 1914—having read Barbara Tuchman’s history of those events the summer before—while the Bush 41 administration invoked both Hitler’s 1938 aggression and North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950 as it formulated its response to Saddam’s attack on Kuwait. A decade later, Bush’s son and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice invoked symmetries between the early days of the global war on terrorism and the Truman administration’s efforts during the early Cold War. And on it goes…

Is the endless articulation of historical analogies good practice? Sometimes, the answer is yes—but all too often, we think no. Parallels from the past too often are put forward less to focus debate and discussion than to shut them down. That’s exactly why the invocation of dates like 1938 or 2003 are such political catnip; suggesting that one’s intellectual opponents would have stood with Chamberlain in appeasing Hitler, or are eager for a replay of the Iraq war, suggest their arguments are not simply mistaken, but dangerous and morally bankrupt.

In their classic text on this matter, Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt counseled a very different approach. Rather than fixating narrowly on a single seductive and familiar date that validates a preconceived instinct, policymakers should catch their breath, burrow deep into the history of the particular issue under debate, and think broadly about parallels across the stream of time—noting not only similarities but dissonances and differences with other moments.

Can policymakers rediscover this lost art? Both for the sake of better foreign policy and better domestic politics, we must try. Indeed, for all the draw of dueling historical analogies, there’s no time like the present.