Revitalizing History

Applying History to Today’s Challenges

In his recently published book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, Victor Davis Hanson examines a series of sieges and sackings that span centuries, from the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World, to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration, particularly when they fail to take seriously their security challenges. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. In May, Hanson joined Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge to elaborate on the book’s thesis and to highlight its relevance to current conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

In a presentation to the Applied History Working Group, Hoover Fellow Anthony Gregory discussed his recent book, New Deal Law and Order: How the War on Crime Built the Modern Liberal State. In it, Gregory explains how the 1930s redefined law and order, transforming liberalism and reshaping American government itself. He advances his thesis that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal allies emphasized issues of law and order to increase federal investigative powers—notably within the Federal Bureau of Investigation—under the banner of liberalism, ushering in a new era of increased law enforcement and incarceration.

By looking at historical US approaches to immigration from the early years of the republic, Research Fellow Cody Nager finds lessons America can apply today as it confronts the policy challenges of immigration. In a policy brief for the Hoover History Lab, Nager suggests that historical debates around immigration policy have focused on “designing or reforming migration systems to select immigrants who align with prevailing national goals.” He also finds that immigration reforms of the past worked best when state and local governments received adequate support to help immigrants integrate.

Revitalizing the Discipline of History

At a conference on March 22, 2024, Hoover fellows and scholars affiliated with the Institution’s Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group explored the history and use of proxy forces in warfare and what they mean for modern great-power competition. The group talked about proxy wars dating back to ancient Greece, how they led to larger major global conflicts in history, the US experience with proxy wars, and the status of conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and with Iran’s proxies across the Middle East.

In this special episode of Uncommon Knowledge, Distinguished Policy Fellow Peter Robinson speaks with three Hoover Institution historians, Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Andrew Roberts appearing together for the first time in a public forum. The distinguished scholars discuss the current state of historical writing; the trouble with correcting far-reaching factual errors in revisionist historical narratives promulgated by podcasters and new media pundits; the relationship between technology and human nature; and the geopolitical dangers of the present historical moment. Says Ferguson, “Best case, it's a Cold War, worst case, we're on a path to World War III, that's how I think about it.” Returning to the past, the panelists conclude by considering how exceptional leadership can help chart the way out of periods of profound national difficulty.

The Counterfactual Show: Reimagining History, with Stephen Kotkin

Historians differ over the need to explore “counterfactuals”—the study of scenarios that never happened—and what they can tell us about historical causation. Stephen Kotkin, the Hoover Institution’s Kleinheinz Senior Fellow and noted historian of Russia, joins Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson and John Cochrane on GoodFellows to discuss alternative historical outcomes: Stalin not surviving a two-front invasion in World War II and Churchill dying well beforehand; the American Revolution failing; the Beatles never spearheading pop music’s British Invasion; a Trump victory in 2020 and its potential effect on the current state of affairs in Ukraine and the Middle East; plus a world in which COVID never happened (spoiler alert: it might have impacted John and Niall’s book sales).

History Informing Foreign and Defense Policy

In a Foreign Affairs, Kotkin outlines five plausible courses that events in Russia could follow over the years ahead. Perhaps Russia will end up like France, with strong state institutions and a proud historical legacy but peaceful relations with its neighbors; or perhaps it will end up like North Korea, a true pariah on the world stage renowned for its repressive backwardness. Still other possible futures would see Russia become a vassal of an ascendent China, retrench due to internal weaknesses, or collapse into a level of chaos previously averted, even at the end of the Soviet Union. The sixth scenario that Kotkin rules out: Russia actualizing its own imagined position in the world system as “a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs.”

In this article at the Texas National Security Review Diplomat, historian, and Hoover senior fellow Philip Zelikow argues that the United States is in an exceptionally dangerous period because of the current configuration of American power relative to that of emergent adversaries China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Months before North Korean troops appeared in combat against Ukraine, Zelikow warned of the extensive nature of the collaboration among the regimes of what is sometimes called the “new Axis” (a framing that Zelikow does not himself endorse). Zelikow stresses that western leaders must take seriously their adversaries’ martial ambitions and work to rearm democracies quickly. If great-power war can be avoided in the short term—Zelikow identifies the next one to three years as the “period of maximum danger”—then the “task for this period of crisis is to weather it with America’s core strengths and advantages preserved, or even enhanced.”

In this essay for the Hoover History Lab, Hoover Fellow Joseph Ledford applies George Shultz’s advice that “foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood” to the present and argues that the United States must adopt an “Americas first” approach, prioritizing the Western Hemisphere in its strategic calculus. Ledford examines how the interconnected problems of transnational crime and smuggling in humans and drugs intersect with the geopolitical aims of illiberal states such as Iran, China, and Russia. Ledford then considers how American foreign policy can lean into Latin America and the Caribbean to promote greater trade, economic development, and people-to-people ties with the US while also mitigating corruption and other drivers of mass irregular migration northward. Although such efforts will require policymakers’ time and focus to succeed, Ledford stresses that the fundamentals are there to build up alliances and help make the region a long-term success.

In their 2023 book Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Andrew Roberts and General David Petraeus, former CIA director and senior military commander in both Iraq and Afghanistan, related lessons learned from their analysis of over 70 years of conflict. This past spring, Roberts joined Uncommon Knowledge to discuss the book in relation to Israel’s ongoing defensive war against Iranian proxies and other current events.