U.S. Foreign Policy and the Lessons of History

Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the history of U.S. foreign policy. First, I oversaw the Council on Foreign Relations’ survey on the Best and Worst Decisions in U.S. foreign policy history and wrote the content for the accompanying website. Since then, I have been resurfacing essays I have written over the years and writing new ones as part of the Council’s America at 250 initiative.

So, I was delighted to attend the Council’s annual Hauser Symposium on Monday. Titled “America at 250,” it examined the evolution of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. The first session looked at the onset of the Cold War:

The second session examined the post-Cold War era:

And the third panel tackled where we are headed today:

I had two takeaways from the symposium’s rich and detailed discussions. The first was that events consistently surprise policymakers and their plans. We like to think we can peer into the future. But arrangements and trends that look to be lasting frequently prove fleeting. Rana Mitter, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, noted that in 1946, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin assumed “Nationalist China would be around for a long time to come,” so he cut deals with Chiang Kai-Shek. Three years later, Mao Zedong took power in Beijing and Chiang fled to Taiwan. Benn Steil, my colleague here at the Council, observed that the French in 1946 were “almost as ruthless occupiers of Germany as the Soviets.” Given the bitter residue of World War II, it “was impossible for the French to imagine in ’46-’47 that they would be in a military alliance with Germany in just a few short years.” And the post-Cold War era itself attests to dashed expectations. Americans in the 1990s believed that the unipolar moment, the end of history, and globalization would all work to transform the world in America’s image. Rather than entrench U.S. primacy, however, events of the past three decades have undermined it.

My second takeaway was that successive U.S. presidents since the end of the Cold War have consistently exaggerated what U.S. military power can accomplish. The lessons of Vietnam were forgotten in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and in the interventions in Libya and Somalia as presidents of both parties persuaded themselves that their military operations would be different. Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, put it this way:

It is really striking, and I still don’t have a completely satisfactory explanation in my own head, but why we seem to be repeating this under very different presidents. I mean, you couldn’t ask for a different set of people than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump.

And yet, all of them in that period found that there were political problems that were best solved by sending a cruise missile, sending a plane, sending something, blowing something up, and then hoping you could talk your way through the problem afterwards.

Military superiority repeatedly enabled the United States to inflict unimaginable punishment on others. The outcomes of these conflicts, however, were decided not by who inflicted the most pain but by who could absorb the most pain. And in case after case, the United States came up short. This dynamic may be repeating itself today in the war on Iran. Perhaps the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was right when he wrote: “What experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

My two takeaways from the Hauser Symposium argue for humility in what we know and what we seek to do. That is not a message of defeatism but of pragmatism. The more we acknowledge uncertainty, the more likely we will be able to recognize changing events and perhaps even master them.

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this article.