The Power of the Past ─ History and Statecraft

Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present.

History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that theUnited States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarelyengage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990–91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

Hal Brands teaches in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of three books on U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, most recentlyWhat Good Is Grand Strategy? Power and Purpose in American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush (2014).

Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He is the author or editor of six previous books on international affairs, including Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy (coedited with Robert Hutchings) andLiberty's Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama.