History is in vogue, not that it ever went out of style. Whether referring to the high tariffs during the Presidency of William McKinley or dropping regular (and at times inappropriate) references to World War II, current US President Donald Trump frequently draws on historical analogies to justify his foreign policy actions. Vladimir Putin’s understanding of Ukraine’s deep historical ties to Russia, combined with a desire to recreate Peter the Great’s efforts to forge a Russian Empire, motivated his 2022 decision to launch a full invasion of Ukraine. Even Xi Jinping of China frequently refers to the lessons of history, both for situating his vision of China’s greatness and as a warning to others whom he sees as seeking hegemony.
The invoking of history by these world leaders illustrates why history matters. In international politics, how one understands the past can and does directly inform how one acts in the present. This is not to say that a leader’s understanding of the past is accurate, that leaders will avoid having selective memory, or that decision makers will avoid “this time will be different” thinking. How leaders use history is as much a product of motivated reasoning as it is a faithful reconstruction of events that took place.
But leaders and policy makers nevertheless draw on history, mobilizing the past to push policies in the present. For that reason, it is appropriate that Steve Chan’s essential new book is titled Mobilizing the Past. The book’s subtitle, “The Lessons of History and the Danger of War Between China and the United States,” makes clear that the book is primarily focused on the use of history to understand if the two largest powers in the world today, the United States as the established hegemon and China as the rising great power, are on a path to war. Though the prospects of a US–China war are the central object of the book’s study, the book’s lessons can and should be applied more broadly.
Chan’s decision to center the book on debates about the possibility of war between the United States and China makes sense given the role of historical analogy in discussions about that possibility. Most notable in that regard is the 2017 book by Graham Allison, Destined for War, which, as the title suggests, argues that the United States and China are destined to go to war by falling into what he calls the “Thucydides Trap.” The popularity of Allison’s book makes it an appropriate foil for Chan. Personally, I eventually lost count of the times a student or attendee during a public talk asked, “what do you think of Allison’s book?” My short answer has been, “you should read Organski or Gilpin instead.” But the appeal of the book remains, and it’s folly on my part to expect everyone to go read decades-old scholarly monographs written on the intricacies of power transition theory or how hegemonic wars induce system change. But they might and should read Chan’s book.
Chan’s core motivation for writing the book is what he describes as “serious distortions of history and flawed reasoning in popular narratives on Sino-American relations.” In criticizing these narratives, he “does not pull [his] punches” (p. 7). Readers are better served by Chan’s no-holds-barred approach.
Given the prominence of Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” argument, Chan makes it the focus of the book’s first core chapter. He unpacks how policy makers and scholars often misunderstand the history offered in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, especially when it comes to how that history explains the origins of the war between Athens and Sparta over two millennia ago. Chan spends time addressing various critiques of Allison’s depiction of Thucydides argument, the essence of which is that the power aggregation of Athens caused anxiety in Sparta, which sparked war.
The primary critique of Allison’s work is that Thucydides’ actual account is not so much about power aggregation, but about power aggregation leading to revisionist policies and aggressive actions. Athens did not just grow internally; it expanded externally. It was Athens’ imperialistic policies, perhaps enabled by its growth, that played the key role in sparking war between it and Sparta. Chan writes how “Thucydides’ discussion can just as easily be interpreted to say that rather than Athens’ increasing power, it was its aggression that caused the Peloponnesian War.” Hence, there is no “trap” per se: war comes about, not mechanistically through one country rising and another falling, but by the rising country becoming aggressively revisionist.
Revisionism is more contingent than Allison portrays, not limited to major powers nor to rising powers. Indeed, declining powers can also seek to revise the order, perhaps out of a need to restore glory. Chan makes clear that “Thucydides’ own account suggests that war between Sparta and Athens was far from preordained or inevitable.” The same can be said for war with China and the United States. It could still happen, but it will not be due to a trap.
If rebutting Allison was the sole focus of the book, then Chan could have limited himself to an article. Fortunately, his ambitions are greater than simply countering Allison. That ambition is driven by necessity, as the application of faulty historical interpretations to the US–China relationship is not limited to Allison or to the Peloponnesian War.
Chapter 2 tackles the origins of World War I and World War II, arguing that, once again, power transition theory fails as an explanation. These were not wars of an “upstart Germany” seeking to topple the established hegemon, Britain. That’s a nice story, but it’s gravely historically flawed. Instead, the true power transition that took place was that between the United States and Great Britain, a peaceful transition that is the subject of Chapter 4.
Chapter 3 focuses on common analogies used to justify preventive wars, especially the so-called “Munich analogy.” This analogy holds that Britain and France erred in appeasing Hitler by agreeing to allow him to take the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938 in exchange for promises of general peace in Europe. That promise was, as is well known, broken. Hence, the purported lesson from the Munich episode is that one must take a hard line, not appease, in order to avoid war.
Chan describes how US President Harry Truman’s decision to intervene in the Korean War was informed by his understanding of Munich. Truman might have been right in that case, but, as Chan argues, one must consider an episode that holds the opposite lesson: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor precisely because the United States took a hard line against Japanese aggression in China and against European colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. In other words, it serves as a counterfactual rarely considered by historians who draw on the “Munich Analogy”: that Hitler would still have attacked, only now out of desperation, not emboldenment. If this means that there are no clear lessons to be drawn from these cases, then that might well be the point.
The remainder of the book explores the use of the Cuban Missile Crisis to understand a potential crisis over Taiwan, as well as exploring historical lessons drawn from the Falkland War, the Suez Crisis, and other cases. Overall, the book provides a useful critique of “selective history.” As Chan writes in the book’s penultimate chapter, “the above examples are reminders about the threats posed by ‘idiosyncrasy’ and ‘irrelevance’ to valid analysis,” especially when that analysis seeks to make a causal social scientific claim.
Chan is fortunately not the only scholar who has recently written on the use (and abuse) of historical thinking for informing policy. Other recent contributions include Francis Gavin’s Thinking Historically and Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm. Of the three, Chan’s book can be viewed as the most critical of historical analogy. That caution needs to be heeded generally, but especially when it comes to a case as consequential for the future of international politics as the relationship between the United States and China.
