The National Interest - Dejà Vu All Over Again: The Risks of Historical Amnesia - December 5, 2025 - By: Mathew Burrows, and Robert A. Manning

 The National Interest 

Dejà Vu All Over Again: The Risks of Historical Amnesia

December 5, 2025

By: Mathew Burrows, and Robert A. Manning

US policymakers are forgetting the lessons of history at just the moment their recollection is most needed.

The Stimson Center publishes the Red Cell series. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges. For more information about the Stimson Center’s Red Cell Project, see https://www.stimson.org/project/red-cell/. 

Red Cell

It is a sign of our times that both the study of history in US schools and universities and history as a profession are in serious decline. The major powers are ignoring historical experiences altogether in formulating policies, abusing them, and manufacturing fictional versions. Three generations after World War II, the lessons from the Great Depression, the Cold War, the unification of Europe, and even the more recent “dot.com” bubble appear to have faded from decisionmakers’ memories. The tyranny of the present exacerbates the risk that Western governments will make the same mistakes again. 

The troubling consequence of this culture of ahistoricism is that the invaluable lessons of historical experience seem largely absent from the decision-making of current economic, geopolitical, and technological leaders in the United States and elsewhere. The use and abuse of history is, of course, not new. For centuries, governments, for purposes of legitimacy, nationalist bluster, and mythmaking, have made forgetfulness of past lessons their standard fare. When they do remember, the lessons they choose obliterate all others. For Serbs, all security emergencies are seen through the 1389 Battle of Kosovo; for modern China, it’s the “century of humiliation” that remains the obsession 75 years after it ended. History is often misused to rationalize irredentist claims, whether Adolf Hitler’s over the Sudetenland, or Vladimir Putin’s over Ukraine and the Russian “near abroad.” 

A deficit in historical understanding and culture has led to underestimating others’ nationalism, a big factor in failed post-WWII US foreign policies. In Vietnam, the United States discounted the fact that, despite being split, the North and South Vietnamese people had a common homeland and saw the United States as another invader like the French, whom they fought for seven years and ejected, and even China, with whom Vietnam had a 1,000-year history of conflict. 

Washington would have done better to support Vietnamese independence, something Ho Chi Minh, who worked with the OSS during World War II, requested in a letter to President Harry Truman. Ignoring Vietnamese nationalism and doubling down on the anti-communist “domino” theory explains why Washington ignored warnings from the State Department’s Asia hands that it could bomb Hanoi into submission. 

Similarly, in Iraq, flawed assumptions that Iraqis would welcome US occupiers as liberators and ill-conceived analogies to the successful US occupation and democratization of Germany and Japan led to a catastrophic outcome for the overconfident Bush administration. Warnings from Middle East hands in and out of government were disregarded. Many sought to explain Iraq’s complexity, pointing out that democracy would result in a Shia majority government that would all but certainly increase Iranian influence.

In stark contrast to these dark episodes, the post-World War II international system was shaped by fresh and painful memories of the failure of Wilsonian idealism after World War I and the beggar-thy-neighbor trade and financial policies of the 1930s. The Bretton Woods system (the IMF, World Bank, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade trade system), the United Nations, NATO, and US alliances in Asia that helped enable 80 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity were similarly animated by a memory of the failures of inter-war policies. The system was designed precisely to institutionalize relatively open trade, financial stability, and collective security that, in the following decades, led to the rise from the ashes of Europe, the Asian Tigers, and China. There were certainly flaws, but in the 80 years since, the great powers avoided another world war. 

In this protracted interregnum between a decomposing neoliberal order whose rules, norms, and institutions are fast dissipating and the profound uncertainty about what comes next, policymakers’ disregard for history’s lessons may be leading to dangerous outcomes. Many of the mistakes of the past can be discerned in current foreign and technological policy trends that are reshaping the world. 

The Outbreak of World War III

While many US policymakers see in China’s expansion a repeat of the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, they fail to understand that the growing US-China rivalry poses dangers of its own, akin to the Anglo-German competition before World War I. Just like today, neither side then wanted war, but mutual suspicion prevented decision-makers from finding a way to coexist or reconcile. Many Americans, including policymakers who can remember unrivaled American power after the end of the Cold War—what they thought was the “End of History”—cannot understand how Communist China could become a peer competitor. For them, China only rose illicitly. 

Canadian historian of World War I Margaret Macmillan has written about how the long peace after the end of the Napoleonic Wars lulled decisionmakers before  World War I into thinking that a prolonged, major war was impossible. In her view, a similar long period since World War II, coupled with globalization and the establishment of the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, is having a similar effect on today’s policymakers, who discount the possibility of war. 

President Donald Trump appears to have a more acute sense of the possibility of major war and its nuclear risks, accusing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky of “gambling with World War III,” and saying his administration is “working on a plan to denuclearize.” But so far, he hasn’t taken the steps to dissipate Washington’s anti-China fervor or slow the nuclear arms race. 

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