Francis Gavin, "Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy" (Yale UP, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Patrick
Guest: Francis Gavin, author of "Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy" (Yale UP, 2025)
Date: December 4, 2025

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Overview

This episode dives into Francis Gavin's new book, "Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy," which argues that the discipline of history offers indispensable tools for understanding and navigating today's complex world. Gavin and host Patrick explore why the tradition of writing about statecraft has declined, the difference between historical sensibility and historical thinking, and how historians can (and should) contribute practically to policymaking and strategic decisions. The conversation is rich with anecdotes, case studies (from Thucydides to Ben Bernanke), and sharp, sometimes provocative reflections on the current state and future of history as a discipline.

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Main Discussion Points

1. Motivation and Audience for the Book

• Gavin’s motivation to write was “very personal,” rooted in his passion for history and concern about current global uncertainty ([03:35]).
• He describes the audience as policymakers and his historian peers, “to be more self conscious and aware both of the opportunities that they have in front of them, their responsibilities, and also perhaps some of the unfortunate choices and pathways the discipline of history has made” ([05:25]).
• The book aims to make history a “problem solving tool,” not just a civic or cultural ornament.

2. Why Statecraft and Strategy Became Unfashionable in History

• After the Cold War, historians shifted toward cultural, identity, and economic subjects, sidelining grand strategic themes ([08:28]).
• Gavin blames both cultural/political movements (e.g., Vietnam-era disillusionment) and academic trends (e.g., the desire to see history as a crime scene rather than a realm for empathetic reconstruction) ([10:02]).
• Quote:
  “There was a sense that if you studied these issues, you somehow had sympathy for them, which is obviously absurd, but that was a view that came about.” ([11:27])
• “You see this in declining enrollments...the state of history as a discipline...is an unmitigated disaster. While at the same time, the need for serious historical study...is greater than ever” ([12:54]).

3. What It Means to “Think Historically”

• Many laypeople believe they already “think historically,” but Gavin argues professional historical thinking is uniquely rigorous and difficult ([13:36]).
• The difference between memory, antiquarianism, and true history is underscored.
• Quote:
  “Thinking historically is more difficult than neurosurgery and aircraft design. But...everyone thinks they do it particularly well. They actually don’t.” ([15:40])
• Gavin lauds academic historians’ method and research as “nothing short of a miracle” ([14:39]), while warning against "historical mistakes people make that can sometimes honestly be worse than having no history at all" ([15:12]).

4. History at the Border of Humanities and Social Sciences

• History’s identity crisis: its methods and aims are distinct from the “muscular epistemologies” of economics and IR theory ([17:28]).
• Quote:
  “Generalizations across space and time are something that historians will do, but far more carefully...We’re always complicating things, talking about complexity, contingency, chance and circumstance.” ([18:23])
• Historians, Gavin insists, are best equipped to understand “fuzzy” problems, such as the relative value nations place on loss and tragedy, which aren’t quantifiable ([20:02]).

5. Application: Historical Sensibility & Historical Thinking

• Gavin uses his own experiences (e.g., teaching after 9/11) to show how U.S. policy often treats major shocks as exceptional, ignoring historical precedent ([27:53]).
• He distinguishes:
  • Historical Sensibility: A cultivated openness, curiosity, empathy, and epistemological modesty developed via “traveling to the past,” but not always made actionable ([29:28], [32:10]).
  • Thinking Historically: Translating that sensibility into usable decision-making tools under uncertainty ([33:42]).
• Quote:
  “You can have a historical sensibility and not think historically...but you can’t think historically without a historical sensibility.” ([34:20])

6. The Limits and Value of Historical Insight in Policymaking

• Historical thinking does not guarantee “the right” answer, but improves the quality of questions, prepares for surprises, and facilitates course correction ([28:23], [33:42]).
• Gavin highlights the need for humility—acknowledging that outcomes and judgments shift with time.
• Memorable Analogy: “It’s like what Churchill said about democracy. Thinking historically is the worst method, except all the others.” ([36:36])
• Give decision-makers better conceptual tools (e.g., recognizing that 9/11 was not the world’s “day zero”).

7. Historical Judgment, Uncertainty, and Changing Optics

• Cites Henry Kissinger’s concept of “51/49 decisions”—choices made under uncertainty, where even wise judgments sometimes end in failure ([44:43]).
• Our view of past decision-makers (e.g., FDR, Andrew Jackson) inevitably changes with time and context ([46:25]).
• Quote:
  “If we have grandchildren, they will look at us as fools and we have no control over it.” ([50:48])

8. Case Studies: When History Helped

• Ben Bernanke and the 2008 Crisis: As Fed Chair, Bernanke’s training as an economic historian pushed him to avoid mistakes of the 1930s, e.g., “flood the system with liquidity,” coordinate internationally, and innovate—actions that arguably prevented another Great Depression ([40:43], [41:16]).
• The Nobel Prize in Economics is increasingly recognizing the value of historical approaches ([43:22]).

9. Gavin’s “Historical Checklist” for Decision-Makers

• Inspired by Atul Gawande’s “Checklist Manifesto,” Gavin proposes a list of historical questions (e.g., “How did we get here? Was this inevitable? Is this unprecedented?”) to prompt reflection during decision crises ([55:52]).
• Unlike binary or technical checklists, these are open-ended, designed to widen debate and clarify options ([58:36]).

10. Why Historians Fail to Influence Policy—and How to Fix It

• Gavin sees the failure primarily on the “supply” side: most historians don’t offer policy-relevant frameworks or outreach; policymakers are “grateful for anything that can help them,” but don’t know how to access it ([61:20], [63:01]).
• Urges historians to create bridges with government, the private sector, medicine, and NGOs—fields that would benefit from professional historical thinking ([63:43]).
• Quote:
  “My plea is that history...should be saved from the historians or from history departments.” ([67:26])

11. The Case for Radical Disciplinary Innovation

• Argues that history as a discipline must innovate, perhaps even forging new interdisciplinary “departments” focused on statecraft—citing the example of MIT’s engineering departments which reorganize based on emerging problems, not old boundaries ([74:08], [76:09]).
• Expresses disappointment with history departments’ reluctance, but optimism about new movements and centers that prioritize practical and strategic thinking ([74:08]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Misconceptions About History:
  “Thinking historically is more difficult than neurosurgery and aircraft design. But...everyone thinks they do it particularly well. They actually don’t.” ([15:40])
• On History’s Identity Crisis:
  “History could be in the social sciences or you could take it in the humanities...what that reflected to me was history has an identity crisis.” ([18:38])
• On the Need for Humility in Judging the Past:
  “If we have grandchildren, they will look at us as fools and we have no control over it.” ([50:48])
• On Decision-Making Under Uncertainty:
  “By the time a decision has to be made and it gets to the office of, say, a national security advisor or president, if it had been an easier decision or an obvious decision, somebody else would have made it.” ([44:43])
• On Historians’ Responsibility:
  “My plea is that history...should be saved from the historians or from history departments.” ([67:26])
• Host Patrick’s Reflection:
  “What struck me is that historical thinking is more of a meditation on self-awareness and possibilities than a formula for easy answers.” ([54:00])
• On Innovation:
  “Applying insights from one discipline to another is really innovation...why not attach our undertaking to what it is they do? Because...it will help preserve historical thinking, the discipline, provide opportunities for all sorts of historians...” ([67:46])

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Key Timestamps

• [03:35]—Gavin’s motivation and personal background
• [07:06]–[12:54]—Why statecraft and strategy became marginalized in the historical profession
• [13:36]–[17:28]—What distinguishes professional historical thinking from everyday memory or storytelling
• [18:38]–[21:13]—History’s identity crisis: social science vs. humanities
• [23:54]–[35:41]—Historical sensibility vs. thinking historically; pedagogical anecdotes
• [40:11]–[43:22]—Ben Bernanke, economic history, and the 2008 financial crisis
• [44:43]–[53:37]—Kissinger’s “51/49” choices, changing historical optics, FDR and long-term judgments
• [55:52]–[60:20]—Gavin’s proposed checklist for policy decision-makers
• [61:20]–[69:02]—Why historians don’t influence policy and practical steps forward
• [74:08]–[77:56]—The case for radical innovation within the field

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Final Thoughts

Francis Gavin’s “Thinking Historically” is both an urgent call for historians to reclaim a space in the realms of statecraft and public affairs, and a toolkit for decision-makers to make wiser choices by applying nuanced, professionally informed historical thinking. The episode is as much a meditation on the purpose of history as it is a practical discussion, marked by humility, wit, and a challenge to academic insularity.

Recommended for:

• Policy professionals, educators, historians, and anyone interested in how history can (and should) shape the decisions that affect our future.

Transcript

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[Patrick]

My guest today is the historian Francis Gavin, who's the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished professor and Director of the Henry Kissinger center for Global affairs at Johns Hopkins University. SAIS that's the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. professor Gavin has written extensively about statecraft, strategy, U.S. and global histories. A few of his recent books include the Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era that was published by Rutledge in 2024 Nuclear weapons and American Grand Strategy published by the Brookings institutions press in 2020 and chaos in the Liberal World Order, the Trump Presidency in International politics in the 21st century. That's a coded collection published by Columbia University Press in 2018. That's just three out of many of his publications. Today we're talking about his most recent book titled Thinking A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, published by Yale University Press this year in 2025. Frank, thanks for coming on Practical History.

[Francis Gavin]

Thanks for having me, Patrick. Very much looking forward to the conversation.

[Patrick]

Let me open by mentioning how much I enjoyed reading your book. It's really inspiring in how it develops and and connects ideas about academic history and the value of history in practical realms in policy and state graph. In particular, it's beautifully written too, which is always nice for a book like this. And so you propose ways to apply historical knowledge to understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us. It's a unique approach to history, I think, because there are many people out there who realize that a case for history has to be made and they emphasize that studying history is good for democracy and for good citizenship. But you propose using history as a problem solving tool. Who is your main audience and what motivated you to write this practically minded book? And why now also?

[Francis Gavin]

Well, thank you Patrick for your kind words. That really means a lot. I would say the motivations were very personal. As a person who cares deeply about history and believes history provides an extraordinary insight into understanding our world and who also looks around and sees the world in quite a bit of trouble and a world of great uncertainty and confusion, and trying to find ways to marry my passion, my devotion to historical thinking towards some of this problem solving. That's kind of the general view. There's a longer history that involves.

Various things in my life. I often tell the story about studying international relations as an undergraduate with one of the more prominent IR theorists in the world wanting to be a professor, graduating in 1989, 88 and then 1989, happening the revolutions in Eastern Europe and around the world and realizing that very little of what I'd learned had been particularly helpful then teaching at a policy school, particularly in the aftermath of 9 11. Then also the opportunity to engage through good fortune in my career with people who find themselves in positions of having to make consequential decisions, who are desperate for any sort of knowledge, insight or tool that can help them. And so my book was an effort to try to pull together what I thought were the lessons and the tools and the insights that could help people in decision making. Though I will say that it's also written a little bit for my historian friends to be more self conscious and aware both of the opportunities that they have in front of them, their responsibilities, and also perhaps some of the unfortunate choices and pathways the discipline of history has made in the past few decades.

[Patrick]

Thank you.

I agree that we are at an interesting juncture in terms of where history stands as it's kind of looking for ways to define or maybe redefine itself where institutions of higher education are a little bit also looking for guidelines. So I can see how this, this book will help us orient ourselves a little bit. And certainly the policy making community could use the type of guidance that you propose.

You trace the historical study of statecraft and strategy to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his history of the Peloponnesian War, which was written in the 5th century BCE but you also note something interesting.

That the tradition of writing about statecraft and strategy has fallen by the wayside at some point. And I remember as a graduate student in the 2000s, all that mattered to me was cultural history. I became a cultural historian. Over time, though, I realized that I can not get away from politics and thinking about strategy in some way. So I think it was a kind of an interesting flashback for me to think about this. But could you maybe talk a little bit more about why you think this tradition of writing about statecraft has. Has become unpopular?

[Francis Gavin]

Sure. And I think there's a variety of sources. I think, as historians, we are uncomfortable with acknowledging that our interest in the past is often shaped by our concerns in the present and future. And as historians, we somehow feel that that's not right, that we should care about the past for its own sake, that any element of the past is of equal value, when in actuality, any normal person would say, that's just ridiculous. Right? You have. The past is infinite. You have to have some sort of standard, some sort of explanation, some justification for taking some tiny sliver of this infinite past and crafting a historical narrative and explanation around it. And in fact, we are shaped by our current concerns. And so I would say the most benign interpretation is after the end of the Cold War and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a sense that the kind of issues that had shaped historical thinking for most of the 20th century, concerns about the origins of wars, the importance of diplomacy, the rise and fall of empires.

Those seemed less salient because we lived in a world where, even though he's misquoted, misunderstood, where Frank Fukuyama talked about the end of this kind of conflict. And if you look at the decades after this major geopolitical event, instead of which one would have hoped for, people studying it, trying to understand it, interrogate it, ask what we can learn from it, people turn to other issues. And so, you know, you mentioned culture, of course, for really understandable and powerful and important reasons in the last half century. Notions of identity, whether it's in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sense of belonging, sense of who we are, has been an extraordinarily important factor in how we think about the world and has gone through, you know, profound transformations. And that's important. And I think a lot of people thought, well, I need to understand the history and origins of this. And I think that was one element. I think there's another element where, particularly after the 2008 financial.

Crisis, people started being interested in what they called neoliberalism and interested in kind of, you know, sort of what we might call soft and Marxism, you know, trying to understand the workings of. Of capital. And these interests are what kind of dominated.

Our.

Sort of sense of what mattered. And so we naturally studied those. I would hope and expect that now that we recognize that statecraft, strategy, global politics always mattered, but it's particularly highlighted now, we might see a return to this. Although I have some skepticism, the history discipline will. I'll say that there's perhaps two less benign explanations. The first is, and you get a sense of this if you read Peter Novik's this Noble Dream, which is a history of the American historical profession. It was published three and a half decades ago, so it's a bit out of date, but one of the most compelling aspects of it is how the histor historical profession really sort of imploded as a result of the Vietnam conflict and all of the very bitter, sharp debates that emerged from it. Some of it understandable, some less so. But one of the sort of victims of that was the studying of state corrupt and strategy. There was a sense that if you studied these issues, you somehow had sympathy for them, which is obviously absurd, but that was a view that came about. I also think all historians wrestle with the question of historical judgment. I make the case in the book that we can't escape judgment. We all have judgment. But the first history shouldn't be seen as reporting on a crime scene. Right? Because our responsibility is to be empathetic, not sympathetic, but to our historical characters, no matter where and when they acted. And there is an instinct, both in the larger culture and individually, to look to the past, not just to find explanations, but to find justifications and to point out right and wrong. And there's a place for that. But it's. It's difficult. And I think in a lot of ways the historical profession gave into a larger cultural desire to see the past as a crime scene, which I don't think has been especially helpful. So those all have led to a marginalization of the history of strategy and statecraft and a larger marginalization of the history of profession. You see this in declining enrollments. You talk to university leaders and their frustration at what history departments do. And so, you know, the state of history as a discipline as opposed to, you know, as. As an organizational discipline, as sort of represented by, say, the American Historical Association. You know, it's an Unmitigated disaster. Right. It has been. While at the same time the need for serious historical study, historical reflection, is greater than ever. And I would actually suggest the demand for it.

Is more robust than ever.

[Patrick]

One should hope so. And I'd like to come back to this question moment. Meanwhile.

Moving forward to this idea of thinking historically, I wanted to position it a little bit.

More closely, even in terms of your argument in your book. And for that, I was thinking about how history is often understood or misunderstood as reference points. You allude to this idea of memory, of historical memory, which is different from history. And you also talk about antiquarian history, which made me think of Nietzsche. Could you talk about how you position your understanding, the kind of. The professional understanding, really, of history vis a vis these two other ideas?

[Francis Gavin]

Of course. That's a great question. I would step back and say one of the real challenges towards making the case for thinking historically is that everyone already thinks they do it. And because our brains are neurophysics, biophysics are structured to look at reality around us and craft historical narratives. And so we all think we do it. And I'm sure you've had this experience. We've all had this experience. We go home for the holidays, we go to a cocktail party. Someone says, what is it you do? And you say, you're a historian, and somebody wants to give you their opinion about World War II or about slavery or about, you know, the founding in a way that no neurosurgeon goes to a cocktail party and says, I've got opinions on neurosurgery. Or no aircraft designer goes in and says, you know what? I really think this is how airplanes should be designed. And it's a dilemma because I think thinking historically is more difficult than neurosurgery and aircraft design. But the challenges. And I have. So I have this debate, and it's a serious debate. I have a very good friend, a historian, a very accomplished historian, who says, no, it's good that history is accessible to others. You want to pull them in. But my view is that, and this is why I spend some time in the book, talking about what it is a professional historian actually does and what. What they're. How they think about things. For all of my ragging on the historical profession as it's organized as an entity, what historians do is nothing short of a miracle. And it's regardless of its own culture. On social issues, whether it's the 8th century, the 18th century, whether it's Latin America or Africa, I find the sort of the process and the epistemology and the learning and the research. Just extraordinary. And so what I try to do in the book is identify certain things that the culture presents as history which are easily accessible. And people think, oh, well, I've gone to a museum site or I've collected various historical elements, or I've seen a documentary or listened to a podcast. Therefore, I know a lot about history. And I spend some time in the book talking about how there's a variety of historical mistakes people make that can sometimes honestly be worse than having no history at all. And there's this great quote from Ernie May and Dick Neustadt's Thinking in Time, which is a classic book written in 1986 that sort of tries to do some similar things to what I was doing, although there are important differences. But they have this great line where they say teaching history to policymakers is like teaching sex education to teenagers. You can't tell them not to do it, but you'd like to do them to do it safely and maybe derive some enjoyment out of it. And it's the same with thinking historically. Everybody does it. Everyone thinks they do it particularly well. They actually don't. And so spending some time reflecting upon how actually impressive historians go about their work, and they develop both a historical sensibility and translate it into thinking historically, I thought was important.

[Patrick]

And it's also important, I think, to kind of frame history in relation, in opposition to some extent, to some social sciences. Right. Like anthropology, sociology, economics. Right. There are some important differences that sometimes lead to interesting conversations between historians who are really maybe on the border between humanities and social sciences, but claim a space of their own.

[Francis Gavin]

Right, yes. Yeah, no, it's a very good point. And what I suggest in the book is there are the social sciences that I am most conversant with are economics and international relations theory. And I refer to them as more muscular epistemologies. They have certain goals, such as replicability or generalizability or the cumulative nature of knowledge or generalizability or parsimony. A variety of qualities that they hold up as important. And I understand them, they are very admirable qualities. But historians are skeptical of all of those. Right. They don't believe in rec. Ability. You know, history provides. It's the n plus one problem. Everything is unique. Right. Generalizations across space and time are something that historians will do, but far more carefully. Parsimony seeking the simplest explanation. We're always complicating things, talking about complexity, contingency, chance and circumstance. And in terms of accumulation of knowledge, like we keep going Back to the same question, say, the origins of the First World War. And like, re even if there's no new evidence, reevaluating, re sort of assessing. And I think those distinct qualities are somewhat unique. And I mentioned in the book, when I was an undergraduate University of Chicago, I was not a history major as a political science major, but Chicago was divided up into four divisions or colleges, Physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences and humanities. And there was only one major that could be in either, and that was history. History could be in the social sciences or you could take it in the humanities. And the only difference was in the social sciences you had to take one language in statistics, and you humanities, you took two languages. And what that reflected to me was history has an identity crisis. Now, I think that identity crisis is a reflection of its honesty and some of its great qualities, but it doesn't know whether it's fully a social science or a humanities. And given that we live in an age that is obsessed with data and science, yet most of the problems we face and most of the challenges we're looking at are completely immune to those sorts of approaches.

[Patrick]

They're fuzzy.

[Francis Gavin]

Yeah, they're fuzzy. Or, you know, going back to Thucydides, like Thucydides said, war is caused by, you know, fear, honor or interest. Scientific approaches are good at telling us interest. Right. We can do an indifference curve. We can find the Pareto optimal spot. We can run algorithms on interest, fear and honor. What economist is going to tell us anything of note about fear or honor or. I was rereading Peloponnesian War again. I'm obsessed with why some deaths matter more than others. Why did the United States lose its mind over 3,000 deaths on 9 11, but seems to have forgotten over a million people died in COVID 19. Right. And has moved on from it from a policy perspective. And Thucydides talks about how, you know, deaths that are caused by sort of these nameless forces opposed to those that are sort of connected to a particular enemy, shape how people respond to it. Like, what a great insight. You know, that's not an insight any economist is going to provide, but it matters for today. And so I think that is the world in which historians are comfortable and can contribute.

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[Patrick]

I'm glad you mentioned 9 11, because it takes me to one of the examples that you give in your book and to sort of dive into your argument a little bit more. Your claim about the usefulness of history to statecraft and strategy revolves around two concepts. One is this idea of historical sensibility and the other is historical thinking. Could you describe maybe each and give an example of each of what you mean?

[Francis Gavin]

Sure, sure. Although I can talk a little bit first about the 911 thing because, because I, I can't remember if I mentioned this in the book or not, but it's, it's what I was thinking because I mentioned the 1988, 89 story. The other story that stayed with me was when I was recruited to the University of Texas in the year 2000. And it's kind of a funny story because the LBJ school, which is a school public affairs that I was recruited to, is, is governed by something called the LBJ foundation. And under it is the LBJ Presidential Library, which has all the presidential documents. And then the school and they have a foundation and the dean and the head of the school report to the foundation twice a year. They ask for money. And so in the late 90s, the director of the LBJ Library became a very dear friend. Harry Middleton convinced Lady Bird Johnson to release the presidential tapes, the recordings that Johnson had made far earlier than had been in the deed. And they released and it caused a media sensation. So everybody was obsessed with them. And the LBJ foundation, when they met with the head of the library, they're hearing about all this great stuff with the tapes and they asked the dean, what are they doing? And the dean of the school at the time, they taught, you know, like road management and local education reform and municipal policy, made this decision to advertise for a presidential historian. Well, I was not a presidential historian, but as you know, when you're trying to get a job, you'll say whatever it is. And I got the job. I arrived at LBJ in the fall of 2000 and I said to myself, what can I teach? Most of my colleagues were economists, public management folks, people who did local governance, state and local governance. And so they had a course called Policy Development. And I decided to teach the course. And the way I taught it was I did two cases over the semester, one of which I thought was a success in American grand strategy and foreign policy, American policy on the German question in the post war period. And one which I thought was a failure, American policy in Southeast Asia. And as a result.

Since we were next to the LBJ library, we would do an exercise where they would role play Dean Russ, George Ball, you know, Westmoreland, people like that, in order to make arguments to the president and see if they would come up with a different outcome. And we would also read Fred Lugoval's terrific. Choosing war. And I taught at the first semester and the students really liked it. I taught it the second semester and at the end of going through several weeks in this exercise and seeing what had gone wrong with Vietnam, I wrote in my notes, at least we don't have to worry about this again. This was literally several months before the 911 attacks in the United States, where the American response was to invade not one, but two distant countries and try to change their government, which. And highlighting how, regardless of having overwhelming military force, this is a very, very difficult task. So I didn't mean to suggest necessarily that decision making would have been different because I do think there was a sense of passion, a sense of the lack of a better term, bloodlust, a sense which again, historians can understand. But what really struck me was everyone acted like after 9 11, this was day zero, the world didn't totally change, all the rules were different. And historians are always. That should always prick up their ears. Like, when is there. I think about this with AI all the time. Time when people are like, this is unlike anything before. I'm like, have you not studied electrification? Right. Have you not studied the printing press? Like, this idea. That doesn't mean we can directly import lessons, but.

I don't think necessary. It doesn't necessarily mean decisions would have been different, but people would have asked different questions. They would have mined the past differently. And then when things, when reality was not what they expected, they might have been quicker to adjust and reevaluate, given their association with history. So that, that's. That was what I meant to say there. But I can also. That answer was quite long. I can talk about the historical sensibility, thinking historically, if you like as well.

[Patrick]

Yeah, that'd be great. I was leading up to it. I mean, just to touch very quickly on. On that, on that case. Yes. Actually, you anticipated my question in the sense that I was thinking about to what extent this idea of historical thinking, the process of historical thinking would have changed the course of events. And that was supposed to be my devil's advocate question, because.

Historians often go into the mindset of these people and I mean, we observe the reality as it is right now, and we see that reason is not always the main driver of what we do and that there are passions that are, as you said, there's ego, there's ill will, there's greed. There are all these things.

That trump, to use a word.

Our capacity to reason. So that's why I was going to ask, could we talk first about historical Thinking, historical sensibility, to kind of get a sense of, of what it can do for us.

[Francis Gavin]

Yeah, no, and you're absolutely right about that. I don't mean to suggest. In fact, one of the things I wrestle with, you'll recall in 2006 and 2007, there was a big debate in the United States about counterinsurgency. And James Baker and Lee Hamilton have been involved in a report at the Wilson center, which did involve some historians, basically said, this is a disaster. The United States needs to get out. Right. And it was based on some historical awareness. And the George W. Bush administration, the president himself decided to do the opposite, to double down. There was a Sunni awakening, there was the surge, and there's some in that world who will argue, well, that was the right choice. Right. And so what? I don't think it was actually. But the. My point is that thinking historically doesn't necessarily tell you the right thing to do, because when you face radical uncertainty about the future, it's totally unclear often what to do. It's, we look, you know, we look through the pass, through rear view mirror, but we're looking in the forward, through a fog where we can't see. It's only to ask better questions and to make better connections so that we hopefully arrive at better decisions and if we don't, to be more aware when we are, but in terms of the historical sensibility and thinking historically. So when I first started thinking about this project, I thought to myself, one of the great things about being a historian and all the historians I know is they have, they develop, given their traveling to the past, to different worlds, to different cultures, to different times, to different perspectives. They develop qualities and characteristics, a sort of openness, a curiosity, an empathy, a sort of an eye for seeing the unexpected that I believe generate really, really powerful and important qualities. A certain epistemological modesty, a certain sense of an awareness of what the shared human experience is, while being recognizing profound differences between how individuals, societies, cultures and countries have organized and pursued their lives. And that awareness, that sense struck me, if everyone had it, you would have far more tolerance, you would have far more empathy, you would have far more recognition of perspective and difference, and that.

[Patrick]

Would be a good thing.

[Francis Gavin]

But as I reflected upon it, I thought, for someone who has to make difficult decisions under enormous time pressures on behalf of a particular entity, be it a state corporation, a university, that sensibility only gets them so far. And so the thinking historically was trying to generate usable skills and try to sort of say this particular epistemology, this way of understanding the world can be converted into tools to help you as you're in that moment, hopefully make better decisions or at least be more aware of why you're making, the choices you are, and what the options are in front of you. And no method is perfect because one of the things historians believe is that it's foolish to predict the future. And there's a lot of other epistemologies who don't believe that. Right? So right off the bat we're disadvantaged because people want to know the future and we say you can't. Right. There's just no way of knowing the future. And so we're often dismissed. But if you can get people to accept they're facing a radically uncertain future and facing complex trade offs and, and to say you're not going to get some parsimonious, simple hedgehog explanation, then you can say this particular way of understanding and navigating the world will actually help you more.

Maybe in concert with others, maybe in addition to others, maybe instead of other ways of knowing the world, be it economics, be it physics, be it law. And so thinking historically, you can have a historical sensibility and not think historically. I think most of my fellow historians, through their extraordinary work, develop profound senses of historical sensibility, but they don't. They either are uncomfortable with, unwilling to or unaware of the possibility of translating that into.

Use of useful capabilities for people up to make choices. You can't think historically without a historical sensibility, but you can have a historical sensibility and not think historically is the way I think about it. And it's not uncontroversial. A lot of historians would say that's not our job, that's not what we do. And that's a problem. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who say you can't do history until a certain period of time passes. Right? Because you need both the evidence and the perspective. And there's. Those are powerful arguments. But I'd say our way of understanding the world, I believe, generates such value and insight that it's worth recognizing that those costs are worth making and that we have an obligation to help out where we can. And that our way of knowing and understanding is as good as, if not superior than, other ways currently in vogue in decision making circles. And how anyone can look at decision making in the last quarter of a century and say everything's going well is sort of mystifying to me. There's plenty of economists and IR theorists and lawyers running around, yet we're in a heap of crisis. Perhaps Trying to think historically.

Would benefit.

[Patrick]

I agree. It's an interesting time to be thinking along these lines. I also think it's a very difficult maneuver that you're doing because as you pointed out, we're trained to find problems. Problems in quotation mark. Right. To kind of define issues, to dissect them, sometimes even. Is sometimes even to judge them, as you noted at the very beginning. Right. For better or for worse. But we're not really trained to find solutions to problems. And many people in our discipline think that this is not even our job, as, you know. Right. So it takes some mental acrobatics, I think, to kind of go over from that space of finding problems to actually finding solutions or finding formulas that would help us advance in terms of solving these problems. Yeah, yeah.

[Francis Gavin]

It's like what Churchill said about democracy. Thinking historically is the worst method, except all the others. Right. Things are very, very difficult and hard. And I think as concerned citizens of a country or of the world, look, why Thucydides wrote about a war that was going on in his time to generate insights and lessons. And it strikes me that we should be doing the same. And I'll say one other thing that is, it comes out less in the book. But I've been thinking about a lot, which is. I think a lot of our hesitation is that as historians, we have the luxury of knowing the outcome. So when we craft a narrative.

Because we like to have a beginning, middle and end, and the fact is, how we craft the story is very much shaped by how it turns out. Decision makers don't have that luxury. They're facing a future not knowing what's happening. And the way I put it is like, this is. I'll tell my students. Imagine you were. You got a book contract to write the history of European great power politics in the century after Vienna, Congress of Vienna. And your book contract deadline was June 1, 1914. You look at the century, you say, there's been a war here and there. But it's been remarkable how we've avoided major conflagration. We've grown enormously. We've handled a variety of crises. With these two crises in the Balkans in the last three years, they didn't go anywhere. Keep on keeping on. This looks great, right? Like, you know, we should keep doing whatever it is we were doing. Like, there's been issues and nothing's perfect. Pretty good record. You know, you send it to your editor. He's. She's on vacation. She finally starts reading it in August, and she says, what the hell? You've got to rewrite the whole thing because the reality had changed over six weeks after June 28th. Right. And we're in a moment right now. We have no idea how the story ends. We don't even know what the story is. And as historians, that makes us uncomfortable. If the United States and China have a war in three years, we'll know what the story is. If we wake up one day and it's 185 degrees outside, we'll know what the story is. But we have this anxious sense of dread that something's wrong, but we don't know what it is and we don't know how to tell the story. And I think even though it makes us, as historians, uncomfortable with that, we still have an obligation and much to offer by trying, knowing that we're going to get it wrong. But we might get it wrong a tiny bit less than others.

[Patrick]

And it seems that for all the anticipated skepticism about the power of historical thinking and its capacity to help us in some practical ways, there are actually examples where it work. Right. I mean, you quote the famous book by Neustad and May, where they analyze the decision making during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where, you know, they focus on analogies. Their focus is much narrower than yours. But, but, but it's interesting in how they highlight the fact that Kennedy, you know, if Kennedy didn't stop and think, and if he were to rush into the decisions, then, then the world would have probably turned out differently. And you also bring up the example of Ben Bernanke, more recent. Right. Could you talk more about this and how he was invested in history and how potentially that kind of shaken out?

[Francis Gavin]

Sure. Bernanke is an extraordinary character and an economic historian who had done great scholarly work on the causes and consequences of the great financial collapse and Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. And when you think of the traditional type of person who might be named Federal Reserve chairman or who's an economist there, think of my alma mater and kind of a micro economist from University of Chicago.

Or you might think of somebody from the business world, and I don't think they would have had as keen an understanding of what the mistakes of the past were and what to avoid. And if you go back and look at what some economists were saying in 2000, 2007, 2008, there were a couple who were saying there were problems, but there were very few who kind of predicted it. And then some of the options that were offered by more mainstream economists.

Were not necessarily palliative. Right. Bernanke Understood he from his research. A couple lessons. First, flood the system with liquidity, right? Which not everyone suggested, and of course, the European Central bank did not do. Second, coordinate internationally.

In a way that. And then third, be creative. This is kind of one of those lessons of history where you say, here's an opportunity to do something new that we didn't see in the past. Don't let history handicap you. And he generated a whole sorts of really novel interventions. And if you look at the liquidity numbers and in December 2008, they're as bad, if not worse, than they were at the peak of the depression in 32, 33. And Bernanke's understanding of the historical moment and his willingness to learn from the past while also trying novel things, I think prevented another Great Depression. And you know, there's just. There's this term in sports, wins above replacement, right? Whoever the particular person is, how much better they are than the. The mean average person who would be in there. And so if you take your average economist who might've been a Fed chairman and compare it to Bernanke, Bernanke is much better. And the reason he was much better, I believe, was his historical sensitivity, his knowledge of what had happened in the past, and his willingness to act upon it to generate better outcomes. So I think it's a clear example. And by the way, the recently the Nobel Prize in Economics has been recognizing this, right? With Robinson ASO and with Mokard, you know the economic history and you know the Milkyard book. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name, but highlights culture and society as important variables in terms of innovation and economic outcomes. So I think there is increasingly a general awareness that.

Mathematizing every political, economic and social problem can be helpful sometimes, but only gets you so far. And so I think Bernanke's kind of comfort with and excellence in history made an enormous difference.

[Babbel Narrator]

This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers.

[Promotional Voice]

We were returning home, and one of.

[Francis Gavin]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck.

[Promotional Voice]

And we.

[Patrick]

Captain Andrew I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Promotional Voice]

I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Babbel Narrator]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Promotional Voice]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Patrick]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Francis Gavin]

Allowing my son to see the flight.

[Promotional Voice]

Deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.

[Patrick]

Could you talk about something you referenced? I thought was very interesting in the context of our discussion of the kind of fun fuzziness of the world and fuzziness of choices. And also your earlier reference to history being or developing in the 20th century as a kind of potential crime scene. Something that probably shouldn't be there, but it is. And I noticed your reference in your book to Henry kissinger's idea of 51, 49 choices. I think that it's related to this. Could you talk about what that means?

[Francis Gavin]

Sure. I think what Henry was talking about there was that. And you hear presidents with similar quotes. By the time a decision has to be made and it gets to the office of, say, a national security advisor or president, if it had been an easier decision or an obvious decision, somebody else would have made it. And there are often times choices are made with all the best intentions and you still get bad outcomes. And sometimes you luck into a good outcome. That's just the nature of the complexity, interconnectedness and radical uncertainty about the future. And so, and this also gets. It's related to the question of judgment because our judgment over time changes about these things. A decision that looks wise six months after it's made may look unwise six years after it's made. Right. So Ernie May and the Lessons of the Past, which is a terrific book written in 1973 and where he really interrogates the poor use of analogies, makes it clear that not only was Vietnam a mistake, but. But America's intervention in the Korean War was a mistake, which is a reflection of how things looked in 1973 when the United States had. Was in a disastrous position losing the war in Southeast Asia. In a sense, the political and socio cultural cohesion of the country was coming apart 20 years after that. America's intervention in the Korean War could be argued was a key, if painful.

Thing that had been done that was that was necessary or a key part of the Cold War ending out on terms that were beneficial to the United States. Right. And so I have another book out now. It's called Wonder and Worry, Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty. And it's a series of essays that I've written. And the penultimate essay is one that I wrote after the reelection of Donald Trump and, you know, put my cards on the table. I was depressed, you know, and so I went back to reread some of my favorite books, some fiction, some nonfiction. And I read Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson. And I read it because Jackson was the president that had been most compared to Trump. When we think about Schlesinger we think of someone who is, you know, you're kind of Cold War liberal. You know, he was very progressive on social issues, but saw the United States as needing to be committed in the world and the Age of Jackson's a remarkable book because it's mostly about how American culture, economics and society flourished during Jackson's period. It's seen as a good period. And in the introduction he talks about, it's written in May 1944, in the middle of, towards the end of the Second World War, weeks before Normandy, where he says, basically, the world needs more Andrew Jackson and that FDR's hero was Andrew Jackson. Now, in our current times, we don't see Andrew Jackson as a hero. He was a racist. He treated, you know, he was, you know, he did terrible things to the Second bank of the United States that created a depression for his successor, Martin Van Buren. You know, he had this spoil system kitchen cabinet seen as uncouth. We don't see him as somebody necessarily to held high esteem, but he was Roosevelt's favorite president. And for Roosevelt and Schlesinger, Jackson was a hero because he brought democracy to America against these sort of snobbish elites, the founding Fathers, who we all now love. Right. And the reason I make that point is that historical judgments will shift over time. Right. You know, you go visit Harpers Ferry in West Virginia and you reflect on John Brown. We see John Brown as a hero, right. John Brown was understood by Almost everyone in 1859 during Harper Ferry raid as a terrorist. Like even Frederick Douglass kept his distance from him. Even the abolitionists said, this guy's crazy. Right? Because historical judgment changes. And I think about this often as I wrestle with Trump, because when I was reading the Age of Jackson and I thought about fdr, I thought, let's say FDR is one of our greatest presidents. But let's say I didn't like FDR at the time. What would I say? Well, one of the things I would say is a fact few people don't know. Do you know why we have inauguration day on January 20th, not March 4th anymore? Do you know the answer to that? It's because when Hoover lost the election, the country was in the midst of this terrible, much worsening economic crisis. And Hoover begged FDR to cooperate with him, to have a bank holiday to announce that they would do the London Economic Conference, and FDR refused. And the reason he refused was he recognized that politically it was to his advantage for the economy to be in absolutely the worst shape possible when he took over. Right and so he did the opposite of what Obama did in 2008. And so for politically expedient reasons, you know, millions of people lost their jobs and hundreds of banks went out of business that might not have otherwise if FDR had listened to Hoover. Right. And then the first thing that one of the first things FDR does is he scuttles the London Economic Conference, announces an American first economic policy. Now again, I still think FDR was a great president, but this is a guy who tried to pack the Supreme Court. He ran for not just three terms, but four terms the last term when he knew he was dying. Right. So all of this is to say we thinking historically helps remove the arrogance that we think we know everything. Right. If we have grandchildren, they will look at us as fools and we have.

[Patrick]

No control over it. Right.

[Francis Gavin]

And no control over it. And if nothing else, that should generate some humility in our own judgments and help us avoid catastrophizing things when we shouldn't, but recognizing dangers when we should, which is hard and we're going to get it wrong. And those fall into the 5,149 problems. And that's, that's part of the kind of historical judgment thing that I try to wrestle with in the book.

[Patrick]

It's fascinating. It's interesting you should mention Roosevelt. The other day I was watching with my students documentary about Jan Karski, the post Polish underground member who infiltrated the ghetto and then the Auschwitz and then came back to the US and talked to Roosevelt about the Holocaust and its reality. And Roosevelt was very indifferent and he left through the back door to avoid all the rabbis who gathered in front of the White House to talk to him about this. That was not a good portrayal of this ultimate American hero president who is a hero in so many ways. But it's interesting how that optics sort of also changed the student's response rather easily, I would say. Right. So that kind of underscores that fact about how fragile the optics of the moment can be and how historians have a way of kind of thinking about it in the long term.

[Francis Gavin]

Right. And also, I mean it's not to forgive or overlook any of these things. A political leadership is hard in a way that we don't like to recognize. It involves trade offs, second best solutions, compromises. And you know, frankly, our greatest presidents, if you look at some of the compromises Lincoln had to make. Right. If you look at it, there's. And we're uncomfortable with that because we want to look at the past, we want to be validated we want to see stories of heroes and villains, and that's understandable. And sometimes there are heroes and villains. But the reality is that, that making choices, consequential choices that really affect people's lives is very, very, very difficult. Especially and again, when you're pursuing statecraft and strategy in a country like the United States, where anything you do is going to have profound consequences for many, many people. And even if you don't act, you think about Rwanda, the United States not acting and deciding not to act and having horrendous consequences for hundreds of thousands of people, right? There's, there's no getting around the idea that you have to make these choices. And so the whole point that I argue is thinking historically helps you make those choices, helps improve your ability to make those choices.

[Patrick]

I love what you just said and I think that one thing that stood out for me in your book is this, first of all, the expectation that practical doing of history can bring some kind of easy answers, easy formulas. But in fact, as I was reading your examples.

And your argument.

And the questions that you're posing, it struck me that that historical thinking is more of a historical. Is more of a form of meditation on self awareness and kind of meditation on the possibilities and the meditation about the state of the world. Would you agree with it in that sense?

[Francis Gavin]

I love how you formulate that. That's really. I wish I'd used that. That's quite a moving way to say it. And it includes, by the way.

Recognizing when we're over reliant on history. You had mentioned in the introduction, my double I double S.

Mini book, the Taming of Scarcity, the Problems of Plenty. And in that I argue that our current, I think misuse of the term Cold War II or obsession with geopolitics.

Is based on not recognizing that the historical realities we face today are different than the ones that shaped the late 19th through the middle of the 20th century. And that that world which created war, imperialism, revolution, horrendous violence, upended the world was driven by very particular historical circumstances that don't exist now, that are different now. But other historical circumstances which potentially are equally as threatening, we're blind to because we're relying too much on our past models. And we think the world of 1910 translates to the world of 2025 when it doesn't. So it's an awareness too of not just when history can help, but not being trapped by history.

[Patrick]

You develop a checklist of 12 historical questions that can help policymakers make better decisions by contextualizing these decisions properly. And the questions include, for instance, how did we get here? Very simple ideas. Was this inevitable? Was this unprecedented? And you write that over time, decision makers, institutions and societies that regularly and rigorously apply such questions to their choices will generate wiser and better outcomes. So my question to you is, how do you see the process potentially being implemented in places that would matter, like in higher education, government organizations? Something that goes to the core of the practical side of your argument of how we can actually take your insights and start working with them in a way that benefit our societies and policymaking.

[Francis Gavin]

Yeah, it's a great question. And I would say that I offered this to start a discussion rather than have final answers because I feel like what I offered in terms of your correct question about institutional responses incorporating this is still incomplete. But the idea of the checklist came from Atul Gawande, who's this great emergency room doctor, who's also a beautiful writer, wrote a book called the Checklist and it was based on his research and understanding of. In the late 1930s, as the United States was preparing for war and the Army Air Force started developing longer range bomber aircraft of increasing complexity and sophistication. As they were testing these out, the crash rate was very, very high. And as they started to investigate why the crash rate was high, they realized there was a lot of pilot error. But the pilot error came from. They recognized that if you were to get the pilot and co pilot and the crew to ask a series of questions, you know, are the flaps on? Are the engines set? And. And that you ended up dramatically reducing pilot error and crashes and fatalities. And Gawunde applied this to emergency rooms. He realized that simple things like washing your. Did you wash your hands? Did you sterilize this instrument? Did you take the temperature? Did you. And because in the heat of pressured moments, we often forget to do the most basic things and that can lead to danger. And so my thought was were there questions, simple questions that could be asked in the heat of the moment when decision makers were facing and they're in the situation room and they're facing a crisis somewhere, or they're facing a decision, decision and the briefing of principal president or prime minister, a leader that they could ask that would generate more clarity, highlight what the options were, maybe eliminate mistakes. Now there's differences, right? The, the checklist in aircraft and medicine, they're more often binary. My questions are a bit more open ended and they're interpreters, right. Which is reflective of policy, because policy is often we. Policy is part of a Political process. Politics often involves values and often involves preferences. And so those are hard to sort of categorize in a binary yes or no. But I thought if you had these set of questions and I offered them to open the debate, like people can offer different questions and the questions could be fine tuned to the particular issue you're facing. But if you just had a list where you said, all right, let's calm, let's be calm, we're under this pressure, how do we get here? What else is going on? What are our unspoken assumptions? You know, just go through the list. My belief was that would generate a richer conversation debate and would improve the option set, improve the understanding of the problem in front of people, and generate better decisions.

[Patrick]

That makes sense. Do we have time for a couple more questions?

[Francis Gavin]

Sure.

[Patrick]

They're also very practical questions. But it goes back to what you said earlier about our academic propensity to kind of stay.

In the zone of thinking through issues rather than applying them. And you write that historians can't really be trusted in promoting the idea of thinking historically in statecraft and strategy. And I'm quoting here, the organizations and professions that conduct our statecraft and design geopolitical strategy are largely unaware of the benefits of ahistorical sensibility. And I see your book as a great step in terms of overcoming that communication gap because it articulates these ideas so clearly. What do you think can be done in terms of other immediate measures maybe that could be done to, to overcome this communication gap?

[Francis Gavin]

So when I first started thinking about this, I thought you could think about it as a supply problem or a demand problem. And what you just highlighted was the demand problem. Do decision makers want this kind of knowledge? Are decision makers even aware that exists? And the supply problem is, are we as historians providing something useful or something helpful? And over time, as I have thought about this question and engaged in thinking about possible solutions, I've become convinced it's a supply problem, not a demand problem. It's us. It's our fault. As historians, anyone who finds themselves in a difficult decision making circumstance facing consequential choices about an uncertain future, unless they're craven or not smart or corrupt, they are grateful for anything that can help them. And I think one of the things we as academics, we often look at these people and these decisions and we decision making positions, we see them as far in, we see them as, as problematic. I have found them to be some of the most intelligent, thoughtful, ethical people I've ever met. Not all of them, but who are, who really do Want help and guidance. They don't know where to access it. And many of them professionally, they came up through politics and if they came up through an academic background, many of them were trained in law or maybe international relations here or economics. So they're curious people.

They're just, they don't really have an understanding or really much exposure to what it is we have on offer. So I think, I believe, and I would apply this also not just to the public sector, but the non governmental sector and the private sector as well. There are people there saying, I get, I can't algorithm my way out of this. I get that I can't indifference curve or you know, do a statistical regression to get the answer I need right, I need other help. So the demand is there. But for any number of reasons, some of which I alluded to earlier, the historical profession has just.

Completely muffed this opportunity. I mean, as we talked about earlier, they've abandoned supporting or encouraging the serious study of statecraft or strategy, which to most people is just bizarre when you think about the consequences in the world we live in and how much, whether it's from medicine to culture to art to social relations to demographics, how much we're shaped by international politics, decisions of war and peace, diplomacy, and then even the avoidance of war in great power of war in the thermonuclear age, that any citizen or policymaker would not want to have some understanding of how thermonuclear weapons shape world politics. It's just, I think for a normal person, bizarre. But like this is just something that the history duplicates discipline for its own particular pathologies, has decided not only not to support but to actively discourage. And so I would like to find the sensibility which history departments do train and which do encourage, but then to be both applied to other subjects of concern. And again, I make it very clear in the book it's not either or I think the understanding of culture, society, history from below, looking at things that we, you know, his. One of the great things about history is, you know, I talk about Historical sensibility is like a magnet and it pulls the unseen from under the surface. Thinking historically as like a chemical dye that then is applied ruthlessly says what matters but that historical magnet. I've learned so much from the wide array of subjects and periods and geographies and perspectives that historians pursue. Which is why it's puzzling to me they would not apply those same skills to understanding issues of statecraft and strategy, which are inarguably of enormous consequence, even if you don't care about decisions. But in understanding your own subject, there's not a subject you can't understand. Slavery, for example, without understanding war, it's just impossible. Right? You can't understand the development of modern medicine. You can't understand the development of race relations in the United States without understanding the consequences of war and the Cold War. Right. So, you know, history, as a discipline, as an organization, has just decided not to do this. I don't think there's any reason why, given their shameful handling of the discipline and the fact that students aren't taking these classes, that, you know, faculty are shrinking. I would love to see this epistemology placed in areas where it could be supported. And we know, if my argument's correct, then I think not just policymakers or people in business or law think about medicine. Right? If you're a doctor, if you go to the doctor and you have, say, you know, a stomach problem, basically what doctors do is construct a history of how you got to where you are. And we know as historians that how medicine does that changes. In the 1920s, when most of the modern medical curriculum was established, you would focus clearly on the anatomy and focus on the stomach, right. And see what happened. Then maybe 30 or 40 years after that, as the importance of genetics came about, you would start asking about genetic history. Then maybe a few decades later, as medicine became more integrative, you would say, well, how does the digestive system interlate with the respiratory system, with the neurological system? And now we understand the incredible importance of environmental factors on health, stress, income, you know, geography. And so how a doctor tells a story of why you're sick and what to do about it is history. They're not aware of it. We should help them do it better and by being aware of it. So I believe doctors should think historically both about their own undertaking, understand that all practices have a history, and they should understand that. But as they are crafting a causal narrative to their patients, there are better and worse ways of doing it. So my plea is that history, you know, there, you know, history should be saved from the historians or from history departments. And I do think there's no shortage of demand for doctors, lawyers, business people, technologists, and policymakers. And if my argument is correct, correct that they would all do their jobs better learning history, why not attach our undertaking to what it is they do? Because if, if anything, it will help preserve historical thinking, the discipline, provide opportunities for all sorts of historians, which, even if you don't believe my story, is. Is instrumentally good thing. So that that's the wild dream I have.

[Patrick]

I love it and I completely agree, I have to say. And what struck me about what you just said is the fact that you've met a lot of people who are decision makers. And I think that part of our reluctance as historians to engage with the world of practical decision day to day decision making is the fact that we isolate ourselves. Sometimes it's not intentional, but we live in an isolated world and we imagine these people to be in a certain way in part because we get a very small snapshot of their humanity. So to say, that is to say we focus, for instance, on.

The outcomes of what they do that aren't always ideal and then we fill in the rest. But in fact, as you say, a lot of people in power, either on the side of statecraft or in the C suite in the business, are actually extremely curious and they look for guidance. And it's kind of interesting that we aren't able to provide it as a discipline because, because we think that they are like this or like that. And, and we have this idea of speaking truth to power which has its place, but maybe this is not everything that we can do.

[Francis Gavin]

Right, yeah, no, that's a very good point. And I think they call it an ivory tower for a reason you don't get out of it. And I have had the good fortune. I was involved in a project about 20 years ago called the Next Generation Project, which, which involved identifying young leaders from different non traditional fields to help think about American foreign policy and international affairs. So I met like, you know, a rancher from Montana, someone who was a pastor of a, of a megachurch in Southern California, you know, small town mayor in Ohio. And you recognize that, huh? These people are incredibly smart, incredibly effective, have a different way of viewing the world. I, I get smarter hanging out from different people. I know what my historian friends think, I know what my academic friends think. I don't know what a small town mayor in Ohio thinks. I don't know what a mega church pastor thinks. But they're obviously successful, right? Because they're leading something and they. How do they understand the world? And so, you know, we live in a, we all know we live in a very siloed world, but I think history also does provide a connective tissue, which is another thing we can do, right? Because as I said earlier, both for better or worse, everyone thinks historically, they just do it badly. If you were to convince them that there was some benefit to sort of doing this more rigorously and it would actually improve their lives.

Then I think that generates that connective tissues to communities we don't normally see. And I see this with policymakers all the time. And something I learned from, you know, someone I dedicated the book to and is my dean, who's one of my closest friends, Jim Steinberg introduced me to this concept of second best solutions that economists talk about. And when we think about outcomes in the world, we all have our preferences, but the world is so complex, there's so many other players who have a vote in things that happen, that normally the best we can get is what economists call second best solutions, which are not just the first best, a little less, but may face a totally different causal path than what you would have done for first best. And we also as historians have to push back against outcome bias because we know how things come out, we judge them based on the results. But actually as historians, we recognize the.

Entities we study don't know the future. And they're making choices and decisions not knowing the future. And so judging them on the outcomes is to a certain extent unfair. Right, because nobody knows the future. And thinking historically should generate a little bit more empathy for people in those decisions. It doesn't mean you forgive them if they, if they make mistakes, doesn't mean you don't hold them accountable. But you ask yourself, all right, what if I was in their shoes? How would I think about that? Because what is history? But we're trying to travel to different worlds and imagine what it's like to be in other times, other circumstances, other cultures, other situations. Why can't we accord the same sort of mental grace to those who are facing these choices today?

[Patrick]

Absolutely. The concluding remarks that that comes to my mind is that what you're in fact proposing is a kind of a radical innovation in the field of history. Because when you think about it, applying insights from one discipline to another is really innovation. And we often pride ourselves on innovating, but within our fields, right? What about innovating the field by transposing certain ideas and applying them and engaging in a conversation. And I wonder if this current climate of so called crisis in the humanities and enrollments going down and soul searching among university administrators is actually not a good moment to think this way.

[Francis Gavin]

I would hope so. I mean, sadly, I've given up on history departments. I always joke with people. But for this book I have given talks at Stanford, Yale, Penn, William and Mary. I'm going to Harvard next week, Princeton. I have not been invited to one history department. I've never given a talk in the history department. In my 30 year career, right. I've talked at every political science, international security and maybe I'm a bad historian, maybe like they don't want that's fine. But.

And sometimes my historian front saying, aren't you think you're being too tough on the field of discipline? I think I'm not being tough enough. And I do think there are these movements about you look at one of my best friends is Will Inboden. He's now the new provost at the University of Texas. And he had run this Hamilton center in Florida, creating this new Civitas center at University of Texas, which people see through a political lens. And they're not all perfect, but the idea is to recapture some of this humanistic thinking to, you know, and not just in history, but political philosophy and not just history of statecraft and strategy, but just sort of all sorts of different types of history. And I do think there are places where people are frustrated and they recognize you see this when I talk to university leaders, they it is you're be hard for us to find a history president in the United States who says I just love with my history department's doing and it's meeting the needs that I think my alumni and my students and society at large. You know, if you ask them, are you happy with your, you know, biomedical group? Are you happy with, you know, so. And I so I do think it's an opportunity, how it's seized, who takes advantage of it. I would love for the discipline of history to prove me wrong, would love nothing more. But my hope is that this movement, even if it means creating a new discipline, I mean I'll say a final thing about this. I was at MIT in the political science department and I had the good fortune of hanging out with the nuclear engineering department a lot because I was asked to help them with the search. And nuclear engineers are amazing. They're obviously brilliant. They all want to blow stuff up and put it back together again. And one of the things I realized when hanging out with them was that there's no such thing as a nuclear engineering discipline. There are problems in the world to be solved. So depending on the problem, they would bring in a material science person, a computational digital person, a physicist, you know, a molecular biology person, a biochem person. All that mattered was what was the problem in the world they were trying to solve. And as the problems in the world changed and shifted, they shifted their epistemology and they shifted who they brought in. And so at MIT in the last 50 years, there have been a proliferation of new engineering departments because the nature of the problems have changed. You know, 60 years ago, we didn't have biochemistry. Paul Doty said, you can't understand biology without chemistry, and you can't understand chemistry without biology. So he created biochemistry. That is what I think we need for the history of statecraft and strategy. We need a new way of organizing how we teach research and engage the public that it's its own, sort of. Because the set of problems that we're facing are distinct. And if our fellow historians don't want to be involved in that, that's their choice. But there is a large demand for it, and I think there's a lot of talent to do it, and we should just create new ways of offering this knowledge.

[Patrick]

I'll take your book as a call to arms and recommend it widely to all the listeners. Thank you so much for your time for this extremely stimulating conversation. Frank.

[Francis Gavin]

Thank you, Patrick. I really enjoyed our conversation.

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