Depending on your perspective, Henry Kissinger is the best statesman of his generation, a power-hungry villain, or maybe even a war criminal. Regardless, for someone who last served in government in the ‘70s, Kissinger remains a man in demand.
Kissinger is the subject of a new book by another controversial public intellectual, Niall Ferguson. Ferguson’s new book was recently reviewed by Graham Allison, a well-respected political scientist at Harvard. In his review, Allison makes an important point about the source of Kissinger’s power — his deep knowledge of history and its contemporary value. It is describe this way (my emphasis):
For Ferguson, it was a humbling revelation. As he confesses in the introduction to Kissinger: “In researching the life and times of Henry Kissinger, I have come to realize that my approach was unsubtle. In particular, I had missed the crucial importance in American foreign policy of the history deficit: The fact that key decision-makers know almost nothing not just of other countries’ pasts but also of their own. Worse, they often do not see what is wrong with their ignorance.”
Graham goes on to describe what he calls Applied History:
The book plants a flag for a project in “Applied History,” which he and I have been gestating at Harvard for several years. By Applied History we mean the explicit attempt to illuminate current policy challenges by analyzing historical precedents and analogues. Following in the footsteps of the 1986 classic Thinking in Time by Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, our goal is to revitalize Applied History both as a discipline in the university and as an art in the practice of statecraft.
I love the term “Applied History.” It is simple and compelling. It makes a static concept — history — come to life.
Applied history is a counterpoint to the technology-first crowd; it turns out that soft skills, like reading history and absorbing its lessons, actually matter.
By reading and understanding history, we can all begin to better understand the nuance of life — what I call Headlines and Trend-lines and what Allison calls Applied History.
