The Hoover History Lab invites you to a special keynote conversation “Lessons” of the Past? A Conversation on the Uses and Misuses of History on Monday, May 19, 2025 from 12:30-2:00 pm PT in the Shultz Auditorium, George P. Shultz Building.
Beliefs about history influence the practice of foreign policy. Policymakers often use history—and they often use history badly. Can policymakers use history more discriminatingly? How have scholars and practitioners alike strived to improve the application of historical knowledge? Munich. Watergate. Vietnam. Iraq. Such powerful historical analogies inspire axiomatic thinking about past events and suggest lessons for the present. Yet can the complexity of the past offer ironclad lessons for contemporary decision-makers?
Speakers
Philip Zelikow is the Botha-Chan Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. For 25 years he held a chaired professorship in history at the University of Virginia. For seven years before that, he was an associate professor at Harvard University. In his scholarship, Zelikow focuses on critical episodes in world history and the challenges of policy design and statecraft. His most recent book is The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Turning Point of the Great War, 1916-17 (2021).
An attorney and former career diplomat, Zelikow's federal service includes work across the government in the five administrations from Reagan through Obama, including serving as a strategic consultant for the recent Biden administration. On the NSC Staff (1989-91) he took part in the diplomacy to unify Germany and end the Cold War. As Counselor of the Department of State (2005-07) he had deputy-level policy responsibilities on issues around the world. He is one of few Americans to have served on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board for presidents from both political parties.
Zelikow has also directed three successful and bipartisan national commissions: the Carter-Ford commission on federal election reform (2001), the 9/11 Commission (2004), and the Covid Crisis Group. That group's acclaimed report, Lessons from the Covid War, was published in April 2023.
Andrew (“Drew”) Erdmann has more than 25 years of experience as a public servant and consultant. He has counseled senior executives on their strategic and performance transformations in large government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and leading nonprofits.
Drew is currently a partner, for the second time, of the global consultancy McKinsey & Company. Drew helps lead McKinsey’s support for state and local governments across the United States. His focuses upon organizational and operational transformations as well as economic development strategies. He also leads McKinsey’s Public Sector Practice’s analysis of the potential economic impacts on U.S. states and cities of recent federal policy changes.
Drew served as the Chief Operating Officer of the State of Missouri between 2017 and 2021. In that role, he convened the 16 executive cabinet departments for two governors and led a multi-year management transformation across the state government’s 45,000 employee enterprise. He also helped design and lead the state’s COVID-19 Response Fusion Cell. From 2005 to 2017 at McKinsey, Drew advised senior executives on their strategies and organizational transformations mainly in the Aerospace & Defense sector and with U.S. federal government national security institutions in the United States and overseas.
Before joining McKinsey, Drew served in a variety of national security roles in the US government. Between 2001 and 2005, he served in the U.S. Government as a member of Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research in Iraq, and, lastly, Director for Iran, Iraq, and Strategic Planning on the National Security Council staff at the White House. He received Meritorious and Distinguished Service Awards from the US Department of State for his service in Washington, DC, and overseas.
Drew has taught international affairs at Harvard University and George Washington University as well as lectured and published on U.S. national security policy and management topics. After receiving his first B.A. from Williams College and then a second B.A. from Oxford University as a Carroll Wilson Fellow, Drew received an A.M. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Ernest R. May was his dissertation advisor.
Drew is a Research Fellow of the Applied History Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Moderator
Daniel J. Sargent is associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds appointments in the Department of History and the Goldman School of Public Policy and co-directs UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies. Sargent has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and at International Security Studies at Yale University. In 2018-19, he was the William C. Bark National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
A historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy and the history of international relations, he is the co-editor of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective and the author of A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s and the forthcoming Pax Americana: A History of the American World Order.
