The Useable Past:
Historical Analogy in International Affairs
Waltraud Q. Morales
University of Central Florida
We have to take from the past what is good….To cut our losses and build something new.[1]
Introduction
Whether in war-ravaged Bosnia, post-apartheid South Africa, or post-Dirty War Argentina—to name but a few graphic examples—historians as well as the man and woman on the street are confronted with pasts that must become known, understood, and ultimately reconciled. In part the struggle is a human and psychological one; and, in part, it represents an intellectual need to learn from history in order to avoid the mistakes of the past in the future. Within this context, historical analogy continues to hold a commanding position. In all three country cases war crimes commissions and truth commissions continue to scour the record of the past in order to reunify and normalize traumatized peoples and countries. Operating within ambivalent maxims that the truth shall set you free or that the truth leads to reconciliation, and influenced by persistent and powerful analogies with the Jewish Holocaust and the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals of World War II, the challenge of how to assimilate the past and construct logical reasoning and formulate conclusions about the past remains formidable. It seems that in no single disciplinary field (other than history itself) and in no single substantive area has the process of analyzing events to distill historical analogies been more prevalent than in international affairs and diplomatic history and in dealing with the chronic threats of disastrous global wars and regional conflicts.
Classic examples of remarkable historical analogies are discovered in the great history of The Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who was also one of the early proponents of realism as a theory of international relations. Clearly, one may argue that then and now, historical analogy has served as an indispensable mode of reasoning, theorizing and theory-building in many fields, but especially history and international politics. The historian, David Hackett Fischer, correctly argued that “without analogies, creative thought and communication” would be inconceivable.[2] As one contemporary historian succinctly observed, “’visions of any future have to proceed from the awareness of some kind of past; otherwise…there can be no language for expressing them.”[3] In large part, analogy and metaphor (an abridged form of analogy) are the more prevalent language structures employed to express this logically deduced relationship between the past, present and future. In this sense, analogous thinking and metaphorical images may be seen to represent the more diffuse and less precise type of theory generally found in the social sciences, wherein concepts and hypotheses are interrelated and supported by historical description and comparison as evidence; and ultimately even evaluated against normative standards.[4] In his discussion of false analogy, David Hacker Fischer reminds us that “analogical inference plays an important, and even an indispensable, part in the mysterious process of intellectual creativity,” and that “many great innovative minds,” including famous men of science like Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Huygens, relied on analogy for theoretical breakthroughs and discovery.[5]
This is not to conclude that analogies only serve the scientist, historian, or abstract theorist, because analogous thinking also serves to make the past usable for the policymaker who seeks to derive knowledge from direct personal and decision-making experience, and understandable and explainable to the general public. Analogies bridge the concerns of social theorists with generalization, or the identification of the “elements common to many situations,” with the demands of policymakers who must come to terms with unique situations, but in reference to similar past experiences.[6] Traditional international relations scholars have long held that history is the very blood and sinew of international relations theory. Over forth years ago, Kenneth Thompson argued: “’The substance of theory is history, composed of unique events and occurrences. An episode in history and politics is in one sense never repeated. It happens as it does only once. In this sense, history is beyond the reach of theory. Underlying all theory, however, is the assumption that these same unique events are also more concrete instances of more general propositions.’”[7] If history is integral to theory, so is analogy. Clearly, “traditionalist” international relations theorists have consciously employed metaphor and analogy to conceptualize and explain both the “reality” and alternate visions of political and international life. Even the “behavioralist” theories have relied on concepts in their “scientific” models which are derived from analogies or metaphors.[8]
With this introduction in mind, the initial purpose of this brief essay is to further consider and assess the role and function of several selected popular historical analogies. It seems that often the conscious awareness of the widespread use and of the full implications of analogous reasoning elude us.[9] Some of the most popular and persistent historical analogies are those that have formed and continue to form around the central problem of international and human affairs: war and conflict. As a beginning, this investigation will focus on old and new analogies influential in diplomatic history and international relations, in order to determine the benefits and detriments associated with this natural form of historical reasoning and theorizing.
Appropriate Analogies
The success of physical science depends on the selection of the crucial experiment; that of political science in the field of international affairs, on the selection of the crucial period. I have chosen for my topic the period between 1812 and 1822, partly, I am frank to say, because its problems seem to me analogous to those of our day. But I do not insist on this analogy.[10]
The search for the appropriate analogy presupposes that historical analogies do indeed influence the process of both theorizing and decision-making in a meaningful way, and that the public analogies often employed by statesmen are directly or indirectly correlated to their rational choices and policy actions. Certainly the analogies employed by elites have been used to fashion and influence public opinion. Moreover, scholars have assessed the role of analogies and of the lessons that may be learned from history. Historians such as Ernest May and Arthur Schlesinger have debated whether statesmen are drawn to analogies in order to solve foreign policy dilemmas or in order to publicly justify predetermined decisions.[11] In one work professor May concludes that the answer is both; analogies serve analytical as well as advocacy functions.[12] In the analytical function analogies may assist in the process of disassembling any given situation by “separating the Known from the Unclear and both from the Presumed (presumed, that is, by those who think they have a problem).”[13]
International relations theorists have also engaged in this debate, emphasizing the role of cognitive processes, psychology, and perception, on the one hand, and the environmental and systemic constraints of inter-state politics on the other.[14] A brief review of the pros and cons of this debate has been discussed in Yuen Foong Khong’s persuasive investigation of the uses of analogies in the Vietnam War.[15] Characterizing the two seemingly conflicting perspectives on the role of historical analogies in policymaking as the analytical view and the skeptical view, the former understands analogies as cognitive devices used by decision makers to determine policy, while the skeptical view perceives analogies as primarily ex post facto public justifications. Khong rejects the view of this last group which she terms “skeptics,” and insists on the integral role of the “AE (Analogical Explanation) framework” which serves to “perform six diagnostic tasks central to political decision-making.” These tasks include defining the situation, assessing the stakes, prescribing solutions, evaluating alternatives, predicting success; evaluating moral correctness; and warning of potential dangers.[16] In a sense these operations are similar to the tasks expected of a theory, paradigm, or research design; and, therefore, to my mind, reasoning by analogy and precedent can also be conceived as pre-theoretical activities. In addition these are analytical tasks that have also been identified as integral to the policymaking and decision-making processes. She ultimately argues that the application and testing of historical analogies in the Vietnam case can be perceived as useful for theory building and as ideal for theory-confirming and invalidation.[17] Specifically, her historical research reveals that the Munich analogy and especially the Korean analogy influenced the decision to intervene in Vietnam in 1965 and determined the form of how that military intervention would occur. Further, she concludes that none of the other rival explanations—the dominant ones being containment, hawks versus doves, bureaucratic politics, and domestic imperatives—as effectively served as persuasive alternatives.[18]
However, having demonstrated the important role of key historical analogies, her work also confirms that analogies were generally misused and the wrong lessons drawn from history. Instead of asserting, as many have done, that policymakers have been hampered by their imperfect historical knowledge, she convincingly suggests that the flaw lies in the analogical reasoning process itself. Her argument is supported by the fact that in the Vietnam decision of 1965 the major policymakers had been either former professors of history or “certainly more historically conscious than the average career official.” [19]
Relying on the classic analysis of historical methodology by David Hackett Fischer and studies of logical reasoning and cognitive psychology, she defines historical analogy as “an inference that if two or more events separated in time agree in one respect, then they may also agree in another.”[20] One can interpret from this logical parallelism that analogies not only help to order and interpret voluminous flows of information, but that they also assist in the coping process, and do so inherently by simplification. Therefore, this rational and logical process is potentially structurally limited; it can err not only in terms of the very selection of the relevant analogy, but also in the selection and rejection of confirming information from reality. She explains these problems as “systematic biases” associated with the “top-down” processing of incoming information, and the holder’s blind persistence to maintain the analogy.[21] Thus, analogies may function in ways similar to cognitive belief-systems which reinterpret and filter incoming stimuli in order to maintain congruence with initial premises and values and preclude cognitive dissonance. Given these conclusions, how does one find the appropriate analogy, and are any analogies ever appropriate?
Analogies for War, Revolution and Intervention
He did not accept the “shameful” peace as final. He, too, held that revolutionary war was inescapable; and more than once he recalled the peace of Tilsit which Napoleon had dictated to Prussia in 1807 and which the progressive Prussian statesmen, von Stein and Gneisenau, had used to modernize their country and army and to prepare revenge. He was following their example; and he also hoped that during the respite revolution might mature in Germany and renounce and annul the Kaiser’s conquests.[22]
Great men and great minds (as well as small ones) have been captivated by historical analogies in times of war and revolution. Trotsky, the brilliant Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, not only compared the brutal German-Russian separate peace at Brest Litovsk to the Prussian defeat by Napoleon at Tilsit, but he, as well as Lenin, often drew analogies between the Russian Revolution and the Great French Revolution. In the words of Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer, “the Bolsheviks had been accustomed to look back to the great French precedent and to think in historical analogies.”[23] Thus, to paraphrase a current graduate student, the French Revolution served as a model, both positive and negative for the Bolsheviks. President Harry Truman in the 1950 Korean War decision invoked the events of the 1930s and a pre-Munich analogy of appeasement, explaining to Congress that he committed American troops because he remembered the “’fateful events of the nineteen-thirties, when aggression unopposed bred more aggression and eventually war.’”[24]
The extant and declassified historical record reveals that John F. Kennedy and his advisers resorted to critical historical analogies as a way to assimilate and assess the potential ramifications of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.[25] For example, Secretary of State Dean Rusk compared the crisis to the 1956 “Suez-Hungary combination” wherein the Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising while the West was preoccupied with the British and French bombing of the Suez Canal.[26] This analogous thinking, therefore, explains both the perception of the missile crisis as a Soviet ruse, and the fears that American responses might cause Khrushchev to retaliate in Berlin. A more pervasive and persuasive analogy that surfaced during the crisis was Pearl Harbor. Thus the note that Robert Kennedy passed his brother with the message, “’I know now how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor,’” has become legendary. Through this analogy Robert Kennedy and the various references to Pearl Harbor by Theodore Sorensen and George Ball, probably dissuaded President Kennedy from the surprise bombing option. The analogy had a powerful effect on other members of the ExCom decision-making group as well, despite the fact that Eisenhower’s former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had been invited to the meeting, argued forcefully against the applicability of the analogy, calling it “silly.”[27] Neustadt and May argue that although Kennedy referred to the lessons of the 1930s in his public address that this was only rhetoric; and that his reference to World War I was not really analogous. Nevertheless, both seemed to be analogues that taught powerful negative lessons of the dangers to avoid. May’s recent scholarship on the Kennedy tapes affirms the importance of both the Pearl Harbor (no secret surprise attacks) and Munich-type (no appeasement of dictators) analogies in the crisis outcome.[28]
In a similar vein, the Bosnian crisis which erupted in the early 1990s, and has at times dominated and continued in the news for nearly a decade, evoked the fearful analogy of Sarajevo in 1914, as well as that of Munich and Vietnam. And now that violence has recently escalated in Kosovo, Bosnia itself is being seen as a model and analogue for the what is ahead. Bitterly one Albanian official in the self-styled Kosovo government referred to the Dayton Accord of 1995 that brought an uneasy peace to Bosnia: “’It was a terrible, terrible lesson’….We learned that violence works. It is the only way in this part of the world to achieve what you want and get the attention of the international community.’”[29] And news commentators and policy experts feared that Kosovo would be even worse than Bosnia, not only an extension of more ethnic cleansing, but a crisis case, much closer to the 1914 Sarajevo assassination of the Austrian Archduke, that may not be contained. Or, in the view of the journalist, “Kosovo isn’t another Bosnia. It came first, and could be worse.”[30] Perhaps for this reason, in the current Kosovo crisis the “falling dominoes” analogy—used during the 1947 Greek Civil War and in the 1950s and 1960s with American involvement in Vietnam—has directly been invoked. The Kosovo ethnic conflict has the potential to engulf Macedonia, and therefore Greece, and Albania, as well as the United States and other NATO members.
Why are such analogies so popular in times of war and revolution? In part, because analogies draw, as Yuen Foong Khong suggests, unforgettable lessons of history which are very useful to define, and to assess stakes, alternatives, success, possible dangers, and moral rightness. Analogy is also a way that both theorists and decision makers can effectively, and persuasively, “communicate their vision to audiences who lacked theoretical sophistication.”[31] And as Neustadt and May emphasize, analogues serve to highlight similarities and differences, that are central to the critical process of comparison. How is “now” like “then.”[32] In the cases of Bosnia and Kosovo aggression analogies are important in the search for a rationale for intervention, as they were in the 1950 Korea crisis or 1963 escalation in Vietnam. And are such analogies dangerous? Despite the potential persuasiveness of analogies of war, Michael Clough criticizes this misuse of analogy in his recent review of David Callahan’s Unwinnable Wars. Callahan indirectly employs a domino or spillover metaphor to rationalize American involvement and intervention in ethnic conflicts in far away countries. To espouse a form of aggressive internationalism in the world’s periphery, the reviewer asserts, Callahan inappropriately reworks a “’version of the cumulative-threat argument of the cold war. If zones of instability expand or multiply, the well-being of the international system as a whole suffers.’”[33] Moreover, the reviewer is critical of a central metaphor that the book draws between America’s urban ghettos and the “global ghettos” of the Third World periphery. The reviewer essentially concludes with the warning that a revival of an ethnic violence-based domino theory which might provoke and justify interventions would be counterproductive to the American national interest. Challenging the logic of the implied analogy, he argues for careful case by case evaluation of each crisis.[34]
Analogies for Enemies
That was the approach George Bush and Jim Baker tried on Hussein before they started calling him Hitler Jr.[35]
Analogies have also been useful to stereotype and demonize enemies and enemy leaders and to contain them. For example Muammar el-Khaddafi has been compared to Hitler, and Panama’s ex-dictator, Antonio Noriega, before and after the December 1989 intervention was likened to both. Similarly, to characterize Saddam Hussein’s perceived behavior, both in the 1991 Gulf War and in the recent U.S.-Iraq crisis over continued United Nations weapons inspections, a popular metaphor has been that of Adolf Hitler and the analogy of his appeasement at Munich and subsequent aggression.[36] The Munich and Hitler comparisons have not only seemed to coincide with reality for most Americans and Westerners, but they have served to explain, popularize and propagandize war and coercive diplomacy. And although no direct, public references to Kofi Annan as Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s Foreign Secretary who negotiated the Munich agreement, have apparently emerged, if the newly brokered agreement with Saddam Hussein and the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annaan is violated (as many predict it will be), the World War II analogy will be further reinforced and the world’s populations potentially more receptive to the direct use of force to contain or rollback another dictatorship. Indeed if one compares and probes the lessons behind the 1930s analogies the message is “that something had not been done which, if done, might have staved off World War II.”[37] On the other hand, the consequences of the very decision to use force in the U.N.-sponsored 1950's police action in Korea, a crisis decision which had also heavily relied on the analogues of the 1930s to contain aggressors and dictators, may currently present a powerful counter-analogue, with the warning message not to pursue forceful military action too far. Thus the failed attempt to reunify Korea provides a historical lesson in the limited use of force and limited war objectives. Neustadt and May debate the probable consequences in 1950 if Truman had announced at the outset limited U.S.-U.N. war aims to restore existing borders rather than Korean unification, and conclude that this action would have been political difficult.
Then, not unlike now, broader military aims were initially very popular. Compare current editorials and the criticism by Republicans and Democrats alike of the self-imposed limitation of planned bombing in Iraq. In Republican circles, for example, President Clinton has been characterized as “soft on Iraq,” and Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator Arlen Specter confirmed: “’There’s more than a consensus, there’s virtual unanimity that Saddam Hussein has to be deposed.’”[38] On the democratic side, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry proposed an “’endgame strategy with respect to Saddam,’” and the insertion of ground troops and special operations commando units.[39] And as one commentator wrote of the operation: “On what might be the eve of the largest U.S. military campaign since the Persian Gulf War, U.S. military planners are struggling to reconcile an overwhelming military advantage with a set of imposed limits.”[40] Those limits include propaganda defeats as a result of civilian casualties and destruction of “dual-use” locations, the risks to U.S. pilots and civilians from an inadvertent release of toxins into the atmosphere, as well as the broader issues of future credibility of U.S. force, continued leverage over Saddam Hussein, and anti-Americanism in the Arab World.[41]
The focus on limited force in the current U.N.-Iraqi crisis suggests that perhaps Korea, rather than Munich, may be the more persuasive and appropriate analogy influencing decision makers privately. If the fundamental goal of U.S. policy is to prevent World War III, which many have generally assumed would be most likely in the volatile Middle East, the negative lesson of Korea suggests that the maintenance of the status quo or “restoring conditions as before,” is the best formula for peace.[42] Further reinforcing the limited force lesson, is another unforgettable foreign policy analogy: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, wherein a “covert” CIA plan to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro failed, in part because of overestimation of the internal opposition to the dictator on the island. Recently, international relations analyst, Richard Haass, cited the Bay of Pigs analogue, which historians have described as “the classic case of presumptions unexamined.”[43] Haass specifically warned against “strategies designed to capitalize” on a weak and divided Iraqi opposition.[44] As Castro did to a lesser degree in Cuba after his 1959 Revolution, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein has systematically executed, imprisoned, or exterminated internal opposition elements. However, upon closer inspection, Haass really seemed to be recalling the powerful and persistent Vietnam analogy and its central historical lesson implied in a recent press statement: “’We would be investing U.S. prestige and risking U.S. lives in situations in which it could be impossible to distinguish between friend and foe.’”[45] Not surprisingly, perhaps more than Munich and the 1930s aggression analogies, the American war in Vietnam continues to represent the most pervasive historical analogy for foreign policymakers in the second half of the twentieth century.
Vietnam’s Never Again[46]
American wars have to be politically understandable by the American public. There has to be a cogent, convincing case if we are to enjoy sustained public support.[47]
North Vietnam’s revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, once warned the colonialist French that in the struggle for Vietnamese independence for every one Frenchman killed, ten Vietnamese would die, but that in the end they would tire first. Arguably, the French experience in the First Indochinese War of 1945–1954, would have been an appropriate analogy for the Americans in Vietnam from 1965 to 1975. Neustadt and May refer to a memorandum attributed to McGeorge Bundy, a national security adviser, and written to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that was entitled, “France in Vietnam, 1954, and the U.S. in Vietnam, 1965—A Useful Analogy?” The memo forcefully concluded that the differences in the two cases were great and the similarities virtually nonexistent.[48] Nevertheless, the most important similarity appears to have been overlooked or underestimated—the domestic political and overall international consequences of an unpopular, unwinnable, protracted war. Like the French, the U.S. could not bear the costs or outlast the Vietcong in this lengthy anticolonial struggle, termed “peoples’ war” and a “war of national liberation” by the North Vietnamese opponents. As a result, the very stakes and national interests that most decision-makers had agreed necessitated engagement—international credibility and firm alliance commitments—and that Vietnam had been intended to affirm, were cast into doubt. Moreover, the domestic political and electoral consequences of appearing “soft on communism,” were realized in the presidential defeats as a result of growing popular opinion against the war.[49]
Ironically, if learning important lessons from historical analogies is at the heart their analytical, theoretical and operational contribution to policymaking, it is also at the heart of the difficult decision-making process: rarely does every participant or observer learn similar lessons from the same historical events. Perhaps the Vietnam War analogy has been so pervasive and persuasive is because a degree of consensus has emerged as to its lessons. However, Earl Ravenal specifically decried the contemporary situation wherein the overwhelming central Vietnam lesson of noninterventionism was never learned and never accepted. Two potentially conflicting policy lessons that were drawn have implications for the current U.S.-U.N.-Iraqi confrontation. First of these he views as tactical, that future intervention should not be gradual, but overwhelming and rapid; and the second, which he characterizes as “the most important strategic lesson”, is that “there are constraints that limit the production and projection of American military power.”[50]
How can one resolve this apparent conundrum that often inappropriate analogies are drawn by policymakers to deal with international crises? As Yuen Foong Khong suggests, perhaps the answer lies more in the structure of analogy, and in the expressed or implied psychological and perceptual relationships. Therefore, can the persistence of the Vietnam War analogy be the consequence of its perceived and desired overall congruence with the many other critical historical analogies of this century? Theoretically and analytically dissonance and contradictions among competing historical analogies are potentially resolvable by a careful study of history and delineation of known, unclear, and presumed facts, and a thorough evaluation of similarities and differences.[51] On the other hand, behavioral research on cognitive dynamics and images in international affairs has indicated that the contradictory or discrepant information “does not create an equal pressure to reduce dissonance,” because “attitudes about central values will be more resistant to change,” than attitudes at the periphery of the belief system.[52] Further, this work argues that attitudes and perceptions that support central values, such as aggressors must be punished or they will aggress further, will remain unchanged if challenged by contradictory information.
More precisely, what is being asserted here is not only that discrepant or dissonant historical information will be suppressed or discarded, but that the analogies of the 1930s, the 1938 Munich analogy, the 1951 Korean War analogy, and most especially the 1965 Vietnam War analogy, are readily interpreted so that they reinforce elements of a central and fundamental lesson enshrined in twentieth century international affairs: “that success only feeds the appetite of aggression,” and if not stopped that “the battle would be renewed in one country after another.”[53] This domino metaphor, implying that security is indivisible, and “that weakness in one place would only invite aggression in others,” was not only widely shared by the majority of key decision makers in all of the post-World War II crises and their derived analogies above.[54] In short, despite the arguments of the Vietnam War scholars, or the fascinating research of Yuen Foong Khong, historical analogies have not been at war, because an overall analogical consensus, just like a dominant theoretical paradigm, continues to hold court. The major analogues since World War II have all been fundamentally subservient to that lesson of oppose aggression and the domino metaphor of Hitler and Munich. If the above thesis can be supported, then the current references to Hitler, Munich, and appeasement in relation to the dispute with Saddam Hussein reflect more than historical analogy at the service of public propaganda, but also reveal a persistently persuasive model structuring the choices of decision makers. In this sense the 1991 Gulf War may be said to have done more than erase the legacy of the “Vietnam syndrome,” it has defeated a revolutionary challenge to the dominant analogical paradigm of post-World War II American foreign policy, and its continued goals to militarily exercise power, selectively intervene where national interests are perceived to be threatened, and actively pursue international leadership.
If one remembers how the lessons of the 1930s and Munich were described and perceived by Truman and later presidents, the sense was that resolute timely action would prevent a worse situation in the future. For example, in the Korean decision Truman explained, “’Firmness now would be the only way to deter new actions in other portions of the world…confidence of peoples in countries adjacent to the Soviet Union would be very adversely affected’” if the U.S. failed to take action.[55] And successful action would further serve to deter other aggressive moves elsewhere. “’I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted….’”[56] For Truman the events of the 1930s were seminal, landmark experiences which May asserts had a “conversion effect” on him and evoked his “shame and guilt” because he had supported neutrality legislation. He became convinced that the United States should have led to forcibly oppose aggression.[57] It is from Truman that we see the admitted conscious awareness that history was to be used to discover foreign policy precedents which would serve as lessons and guides to “‘right principles’ of action.”[58] However other presidents, both Johnson and Kennedy, for their own personal reasons, ascribed to similar perceptions of the “domino theory” or indivisibility of aggression, of “punish the aggressor,” and of the need to demonstrate American resolve and protect credibility. The words of Henry Kissinger in the 1975 Mayaguez incident, as reported by President Gerald Ford, are exemplary: “It is not our choice. But we must act upon it now, and act firmly,” otherwise American resolve and prestige could be at stake.[59] All of these examples and many more underline a central, almost universal, lesson to be found in the Munich analogy: Inaction breeds war. A recent analysis of American motivations in the Gulf War basically updated this lesson:
The breakdown in the post-war global balance of power between the ‘east’ and ‘west’ entails the relaxation of the superpower restraints on Third World client states and a potential for more violence and coercive behaviour by a number of regimes in this category. American inaction in response to Iraq’s invasion would have risked the message being received…by many of these regimes that similar action by them in the future would not bring forth an American reaction.[60]
Perhaps historians like David Hackett Fischer would respond to the problem of the conundrum over competing analogies with his explanation of the “fallacy of the insidious analogy,” whereby unintended and dysfunctional conclusions are drawn, or some other error in analogous reasoning. Others have argued that landmark historical events and experiences (such as the last war) influence the selection and persistence of certain analogies, and that the personal experiences of decision makers (what happened to them than why it happened) are often critical in this selection process.[61] Thus Kennedy when asked about the domino theory responded: “’I believe it. I believe it.’”[62]
To conclude this preliminary exploration, I think that the answers to the conundrum and the most fertile field for further investigation lie in uncovering the repeated application of certain landmark analogies. Yuen Foong Khong in her provocative work, Analogies at War, has done precisely that for the 1965 Vietnam decision. She discovered that the most frequently used Vietnam analogies in public between 1950 and 1966 were Korea and the 1930s; and those most frequently used in private for this time were Korea and the French experience.[63] Not only need this type of careful analysis be undertaken for decision making after 1965, but more deconstruction of the main lesson of the most frequently used analogies is needed. For example, other research has also indicated that states cared less about specific issues intrinsically than about the expectations other states might derive from how the issues were dealt with. In short, over time consistency in behavior and adherence to precedent were extremely important.[64] The consistent context and import of all historical analogies since World War II have underlined strong and consistent action to repel a threat.
Perhaps such a project might lend support to my earlier argument that the congruence of one central lesson within historical analogies and the salience of this central lesson for deeply held values and landmark experiences and perceptions of decision-makers is significant. Historian call it, “finding the history that fits.”[65] But the critical question remains: History that fits what? Postmodern International relations theorist refer to “intertextual relations,” and remind the reader that we have “beliefs because there exist institutionalized interests with respect to how we process information about remote experiences.”[66] This poststructuralist perspective argues that “the orthodoxies of our social and political worlds are recreated” in our writing and our texts “through which our dominant understandings of the world have been constructed.”[67] What impact might this approach have on further understanding of the roles of metaphor and analogy in history and diplomacy?
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[1] Suzanne Daley, “Dark Past, Black Future for Africa’s ‘White Tribe,’” The New York Times, 22 February 1998, p. 1. Words of an 11th-generation Afrikaner, Christoff Heyns, on post-apartheid life in South Africa.
[2] David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 244.
[3] James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories of International Relations: A Comprehensive Survey, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1997), p. 6, quoting Gaddis from “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,” International Security, 17 (Winter 1992/1993: 6.
[4] See Elliot Zashin, and Phillip C. Chapman, “The Uses of Metaphor and Analogy: Toward a Renewal of Political Language,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 36 (1974): 290–326. Although unnecessary in this essay, these authors draw generally useful distinctions between the devices of metaphor, simile, and analogy. A metaphor is variously defined as “a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, different thing by being spoken of as if it were that other”; an “anomalous assertion of identity, or also an elliptical simile with the term “like” understood, where the comparison of similarities and differences is tacit, or an unconscious, involuntary association of ideas. A simile is a direct comparison using the term “like.” And an analogy “is a technique of explanation relying upon direct comparison,” whereby comparison is explicit and conscious, and “is typically used in the more abstract and deliberate phases of thought.” The comparisons invoked in analogy are too complex to be spontaneous and demand the “conscious cooperation” of an audience to work out the expressed parallelism. However, the authors stress that “metaphor and analogy are not mutually exclusive.” Indeed, the use of analogies in international affairs, politics and perhaps history, may meld the two. Thus powerful analogies, I would argue, may take on the function often attributed to metaphors of doing more than simply substituting for formal comparison, and of actually adding meaning and broader context to a statement, experience or event, pp. 295–296, 300, 302, and 310–11.
[5] Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, pp. 243–44; and Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962). Kuhn describes the role of paradigms (or models, frameworks, structures) and paradigm shift in the process of insight and discovery. The process that precedes paradigm shifts he compares to a flash of insight. Interestingly, Max Black, philosopher and linguist, describes the cognitive function of metaphor “as an instrument for drawing implications grounded in perceived analogies of structure between two subjects belonging to different domains”; and notes that “a good metaphor sometimes impresses, strikes, or seizes its producer: We want to say we had a “flash of insight,” not merely that we were comparing A with B, or even that we were thinking of A as if it were B.” Max Black, Perplexities: Rational Choice, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Metaphor, Poetic Ambiguity, and Other Puzzles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 64. In this work and his earlier Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), Black does not differentiate between the function of metaphors and analogies.
[6] Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories, p. 22; David Hackett Fischer states that multifunctional analogies “suggest and persuade, inform and illustrate, communicate and clarify,” and serve as vehicles “for the transference of thought from one mind to another,” Historical Fallacies, p. 244. Max Black’s study of metaphors discusses frames and images in language, which can, of course, be related to the concepts of image and “definition of the situation,” central to political psychology and decision-making; Black, Perplexities, pp. 47–65. For example see: Irving L. Janis, and Leon Mann, Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict Choice, and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976).
[7] Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories, p. 53, quoting Thompson, “Toward a Theory of International Politics,” American Political Science Review, 49 (September 1955): 734. And in assessing the role of metaphor in language Max Black argues that “every implication-complex supported by a metaphor’s secondary subject, I now think, is a model of the ascriptions imputed to the primary subject: Every metaphor is the tip of a submerged model.” In this sense metaphors and analogues create relational and interactive models used to understand and explain international events. Black, Perplexities, p. 62.
[8] Zashin and Chapman, “Uses of Metaphor and Analogy,” p. 293. These authors offer the concepts of “equilibrium, feedback, input, transactional, game, and structural-functional models,” and critically charge that “these are at best analogies or metaphors” with tenuous empirical and experiential referents.
[9] Fischer notes that “the fallacy of the insidious analogy is an unintended analogical inference which is embedded in an author’s language, and implanted in a reader’s mind, by a subliminal process which is more powerfully experienced than perceived,” p. 244.
[10] Dougherty and Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories, p. 78, quoting from Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored—Europe After Napoleon: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964)., p. 55.
[11] Ernest May, “Lessons” of the Past: THe Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Arthur Schlesinger’s review of “Lessons” of the Past” by Ernest May in The Journal of American History 61 (September 1974): 443–444.
[12] Richard E. Neustadt, and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 32. Here, in referring to the Cuban Missile crisis of October 1962, Neustadt and May conclude: “As we have already noted, advocacy stands with or ahead of sheer analysis as an objective for the uses we have studies. When summarized by JFK for public consumption, the history of the issue of ‘offensive’ Soviet weapons overseas was meant to move his auditors and rally their support—to smother questions, not to raise them. It was slanted accordingly.”
[13] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 37. They note that analysis literally means to “dissolve things,” from the Greek words, anas, or things, and lysein, meaning to dissolve.
[14] Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), and Glenn Snyder and Paul Diesing, Conflict Among Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
[15] Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 7–9.
[16] Khong, Analogies at War, p. 10.
[17] Khong, Analogies at War, p. 11; citing here Harry Eckstein’s work on crucial case studies, as those that are the “most likely” for invalidation, and the “least likely” for validation. Thus her selection of the Vietnam case, which was the most likely case for analogies to be used as public justification, but the least likely case to support the analytical view if indeed analogies “played a major diagnostic role in policymaking.”
[18] Khong, Analogies at War, pp. 11 and 17.
[19] Khong, Analogies at War, p. 13; here she notes that some of these officials in the first group included Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, and James Thomson, as well as George Ball and William Bundy, in the second category.
[20] Khong, Analogies at War, pp. 6–7; from Davis Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 243–59; and in symbolic terms as in Fischer, AX:BX::AY:BY, or “event A resembles event B in having characteristic X; A also has characteristic Y; therefore it is inferred that B also has characteristic Y.
[21] Khong, Analogies at War, p. 14.
[22] Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky, The Prophet Unarmed, Vol II., p. 94, describing Trotsky’s view of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk.
[23] Deutscher, p. 94.
[24] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 36 and 41. On the 1930s analogies, these authors quote at length from Truman’s memoirs: “I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors. If this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.’” Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955–56), pp. 332–33. Also refer to Ernest R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 52–86. Neustadt and May indicate that Truman did not, but could have equally recalled Hitler’s militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, or the Czech crisis of 1938 and Munich. Truman, instead refers to Japan’s seizure of Manchuris in 1931–32; Italy’s 1938 aggression in Ethiopia; and Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria in 1938.
[25] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 31, argues that in the Cuban Missile Crisis we have an instance of the “better” use of history than the “usual practice,” and that “analogies were little used.” Rather “the history of the issue was understood; presumptions were questioned; the histories of persons most concerned as well as organizations most affected were brought into play.”
[26] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 5; and Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Dambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 17.
[27] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, pp. 6–7.
[28] Ernest R. May, and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kenneday Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 1–7. The editors commented that “in the debates recorded on Kennedy’s tapes, Pearl Harbor has a presence as pervasive as Munich. Recollections of Pearl Harbor had helped to make worst-case worry about surprise attack a guiding theme for postwar U.S. military planning and procurement. Absent Pearl Harbor, the whole debate about the Soviet missiles in Cuba might have been different, for supposed lessons from the Pearl Harbor attack shaped the intelligence collection apparatus that informed Kennedy of the missiles and kep him and his advisers abreast of day-to-day developments.” p. 4
[29] Chris Hedges, “Another Victory for Death in Serbia,” The New York Times, March 8, 1998, Section 4, p. 5.
[30] Hedges, “Another Victory for Death in Serbia,” The New York Times.
[31] Zashin and Chapman, “Uses of Metaphor and Analogy,” p. 292.
[32] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, pp. 41–42.
[33] Michael Clough, “Uncle Sam, Policeman,” a review of David Callahan, Unwinnable Wars: American Power and Ethnic Conflict, in The New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1998, p. 22.
[34] Clough, “Uncle Same, Policeman,” p. 22.
[35] Jim Hoagland, “Smoke-and-Mirrors Diplomacy,” The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, March 2, 1998, p. 5.
[36] For example, Steven Erlanger, “America, the Lone Wolf With a Following,” The New York Times, March 1, 1998, Sec. 4, p. 4. Erlanger states: “The United States sees Mr. Hussein as uniquely evil, a ‘Hitler’ who threatens world peace and oil routes through his pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.”
[37] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 43, referring to the 1950 Korea decision.
[38] “Nothing too covert about the U.S. desire to remove Hussein,” Orlando Sentinel, February 27, 1996, p. A–14.
[39] “Nothing too Covert,” p. A–14.
[40] John Mintz, “Winning the Battle Without Losing the War,” The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, February 23, 1998, p. 14.
[41] Mintz, “Winning the Battle,” p. 14.
[42] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, pp. 47–48.
[43] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 140, and for discussion of this analogy, pp. 140–56.
[44] “Nothing too covert,” p. A–14.
[45] “Nothing too covert,” p. A–14.
[46] This is of course a popular refrain and the title of Earl C. Ravenal’s study, Never Again: Learning from America’s Foreign Policy Failures (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
[47] Vice President Hubert Humphrey in a letter to LBJ in 1965, quoted in Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 87.
[48] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, pp. 75–76 and 82–83.
[49] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 86. The authors quote Lyndon Johnson’s remarks to a friend: “I know that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Jose McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happened if we lost Vietnam.” Taken from Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 252–53. Ostensibly, one lesson that LBJ did not seem to learn from the Korean analogy was to avoid protracted limited wars. In a footnote Neustadt and May draw from an NSC meeting on July 21, 1965 the statement that Johnson wanted the mission in Vietnam to be limited as much as possible, p. 305.
[50] Ravenel, Never Again, pp. 70–71; quote, p. 104.
[51] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 53; and see May’s, “Lessons” of the Past, for this model.
[52] Ole R. Holsti, “Cognitive Dynamics and Images of the Enemy,” in John C. Farrell and Asa P. Smith, Image and Reality in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 21.
[53] Ravenal, Never Again, p. 34.
[54] Ravenal, Never Again, quote, p. 43.
[55] May, “Lessons” of the Past, pp. 76–77.
[56] May, “Lessons” of the Past, pp. 81–82.
[57] May, “Lessons” of History, p. 81.
[58] May, “Lessons” of History, p. 82.
[59] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, p. 60.
[60] Ken Matthews, The Gulf Conflict and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1993.
[61] Robert Jervis, “How Decision-Makers Learn from History,” in John A. Vasquez, Classics of International Relations, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996), pp. 166–171.
[62] May, “Lessons” of the Past, p. 93.
[63] Khong, Analogies at War, pp. 60–61.
[64] Paul A. Anderson, “Justifications and Precedents as Constraints in Foreign Policy Decision-Making,” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 25, No. 4 (November 1981): 741, and 742–43. Anderson quotes Henry Kissinger who explained that in the world, “’stability depends upon confidence in American promises.’” And concludes that “governments have a stake in maintaining certain expectations and in preventing others from being established.” Therefore, actions incompatible with “desired precedents and expectations” are generally unacceptable. Notice the adjective “desired.”
[65] Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time.
[66] Michael J. Shapiro, “Textualizing Global Politics,” in James Der Derian, and Michael J. Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989), p. 19.
[67] Shapiro, “Textualizing,” in International/Intertextual, p. 18.