In the aftermath of the Cold War, several prominent thinkers focused their minds on the shape of the world to come. Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” (1989), Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?” (1993), Ken Jowitt’s “After Leninism: The New World Disorder” (1991), and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Civil Wars (1994) were all prognostications about a new world order. In the three decades since, irrespective of the accuracy of their predictions, many of their contentions have become embedded in the general policy discourse.
In our current geopolitical reality, visions of the future have been substituted with analogies from the past. Thinking via historical analogy has become the preferred way to confront the anxieties of the present. A day hardly goes by when we aren’t transported back to Europe’s tragic interwar period or the turbulent (but far less tragic) 1970s or even ancient history. Elon Musk confesses that he can’t stop thinking about the fall of Rome. “Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans,” Musk enjoys repeating. For him, Rome’s birth rate decline in the first century B.C. tells you everything you need to know about the global conjuncture today—namely, that demography is destiny.
Some commentators envisage U.S. President Donald Trump as the 21st-century version of Andrew Jackson, his 19th-century populist counterpart. Across Eastern Europe, the radical upending in the United States is contrasted with the bittersweet experience of Soviet convulsion that led to the Cold War’s demise—and thus many extrapolate that today’s disorder represents a crisis of U.S. power. Sinologists are haunted, naturally, by Chinese analogies. Esteemed China specialist Orville Schell wrote in February that while Mao Zedong, “who launched China’s violent Cultural Revolution, and Trump share little in the way of geography, ideology, or hairstyle, they can both be described as agents of insurrection.”
Yet are historical analogies truly useful in making sense of the current moment? And are we able to make the correct analogies in the first place?
Long ago, political scientist Robert Jervis observed that policymakers selectively choose analogies that fit their existing beliefs or predispositions, leading at times to flawed decision-making. He had a point. The slipshod nature of some historical analogies can have deleterious consequences. The overused 1930s Weimar analogy signifying the rise of fascism and its historical partner in crime, the 1938 Munich Agreement, to connote appeasement played an important role in Washington’s tragic decisions in Vietnam and Iraq.
But analogies are seductive not simply because they show similarities but also because they help us underline differences. The revolutionary spirit of Trump’s program is demonstrably different from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika policy, even as the Russian elite continues to view Trump as a Gorbachev-like figure who will shock America’s domestic system and precipitate its descent. And similarly shoddy reasoning marks Trump-drawn comparisons with the Cultural Revolution. All analogies are simply not born equal.
The popular deployment of historical analogies can also be driven by circumstance and are not simply a function of our conception of the past. The West’s reaction to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was likely influenced by Europe concurrently commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. And the flood of cultural products produced to mark that anniversary animated an intellectual debate in which some argued that what we should protect against isn’t inaction but overreaction.
It is arguable that had the shattering of the Berlin Wall in 1989 not coincided with the bicentennial of the French Revolution, our reading of the attendant changes in Central and Eastern Europe might have been different. What we countenance as a revolution today might have been classified as something else had it occurred in, say, 1979: maybe state collapse, imperial exhaustion, or even anti-authoritarian social mobilization. But not necessarily revolution.
Although historical analogies are risky and can be accidental, they are valuable intellectual devices to map the choices policymakers face. Unlike other analytical tools, analogies help us understand how policymakers feel about a concrete crisis. They measure its intensity. Comparing the current situation to the 1930s or 1970s betrays a particular degree of anxiety and alarm.
And while dubious analogies have been responsible for countless bad decisions, they are crucial to overcoming a crisis of orientation. Historical analogies provide a cognitive framework for organizing information and making sense of the world. They help policymakers connect the present to the past, offering a way to simplify complex situations and make them more understandable. Historical analogies allow policymakers to see the unfamiliar as familiar.
They also have several distinct advantages when it comes to the current moment. Unlike post-Cold War prophecies, historical analogies tend to be less Eurocentric and more rooted in a diverse set of national histories. In the aftermath of the Cold War, Western liberal democracies were considered the model of the world to come; how people outside Europe or the United States were trying to make sense of the radical political rupture they themselves were experiencing was of regrettably modest interest. Now, there is a growing recognition that we cannot make sense of world in flux if we are unaware of the historical analogies used in different corners of the world. We can’t ignore the fact that while for many in the West the crisis of the international order is viewed as a return to fascism, in China it is conceived differently—as the welcome and definitive end to the country’s extended “century of humiliation.”
Historical analogies are also less susceptible to groupthink than ideologies or theories. Political scientist Yuen Foong Khong insightfully describes U.S. decision-making during the Vietnam War as a war of analogies. Policymakers and strategists advocated for their positions by mobilizing different historical analogies. Thinking through historical analogies conditions democratic decision-making because it strengthens political communication. Unlike abstract analytical concepts, historical analogies populate the world of decision-making with historical figures and details and thereby make their contentions intelligible to the public.
The challenge of the current moment in this sense is not to land on the “right” analogy. The problem is to understand how contrasting analogies hold sway and influence and affect decision-making. It is to put analogies “on the couch” and through them to make sense of our prospective political possibilities.
If Chinese President Xi Jinping believes that “right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years,” he is likely making sense of Trump-world through the prism of the anarchic, warlord period leading up to the Communist Revolution. If Putin compares the current tumult in the West to that which transpired in the communist bloc 35 years ago, he will be drawn to conclusions that underscore collapse. And if Eastern Europeans adopt this latter reading based on their own experience, we will understand more easily how they conceive the future of the European Union. It is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s insistent comparison of the EU to the Soviet Union that at least partially explains his contention that the bloc’s disintegration is inevitable and that Hungary should be prepared for its implosion.
In a world in which universal political ideologies no longer shape the political personalities of the major geopolitical actors, historical analogies offer opportunities to move beyond pedestrian foreign-policy realism, in which political decisions are analyzed according to singular political factors or categories. Analogies, after all, are as pluralistic as history itself.
The explosion of reasoning by historical analogy may also be proof positive that what we see in the United States is in fact a revolution. In Trump’s imagination, only the destruction of the U.S.-led liberal order can preserve the country’s global supremacy; only a billionaire-led anti-capitalist revolution can save capitalism. The fact that Trump’s revolution is best explained not by reference to utopian visions but by historical analogies justifies our sense that we are experiencing a revolution in the style of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, guided by the revelation that “for things to remain the same, everything must change.”
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