Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy

by Francis J. Gavin

A compelling and insightful argument for historical study as a way to understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world of decision-making
 
It seems obvious that we should use history to improve policy. If we have a good understanding of the past, it should enable better decisions in the present, especially in the extraordinarily consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. But how do we gain that knowledge? How should history be used? Sadly, it is rarely done well, and historians and decision-makers seldom interact. But in this remarkable book, Francis J. Gavin explains the many ways historical knowledge can help us understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us.
 
Good historical work convincingly captures the challenges and complexities the decisionmaker faces. At its most useful, history is less a narrowly defined field of study than a practice, a mental awareness, a discernment, and a responsiveness to the past and how it unfolded into our present world—a discipline in the best sense of the word. Gavin demonstrates how a historical sensibility helps us to appreciate the unexpected; complicates our assumptions; makes the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar; and requires us, without entirely suspending moral judgment, to try to understand others on their own terms. This book is a powerful argument for thinking historically as a way for readers to apply wisdom in encountering what is foreign to them.

Genres: History, Politics, International Relations

256 pages, Hardcover

Published September 2, 2025

Reviews

[Clifford Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book attracted me because I have the belief that we should try to learn from history, to use history for policy decisions. From what I can see the leadership of the United States does not seem to pay attention to history, and keeps making the same mistakes. I was wrong—there are cases when learn from history, and one case was the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He was a scholar that was deeply familiar with the Great Depression, and his policies were based on lessons learned. I have seen so many presidents do things that is they understood history they could have used that to avoid making the so many disastrous decisions they have made, particularly the current president Trump.
History is traditionally viewed as one of the humanities, but is it really, or should scientific rigor be used as part of the study of history. I would agree with the author. After all there is Political Science and there are a lot of similarities between the study of history and political science. There can be great advantages in looking at history scientifically—looking at events in history and looking for similarities between events in history—the similarity in causality. I think there is a lot of similarity between the failure of the United States in Vietnam and the Middle East. It is also well understood that bombing a people has consistently been a failed strategy as it alienates the people against the bomber and not their own government, actually bringing the people of a country together. To me it seems that understanding these similarities in disparate events is an important area of study.
I had the impression that American policy makers do not try to apply the lessons of history in creating policy, and the author feels the same—but there is not just a lack of demand but also supply. Not only are experts in history not used in creating policy, but there people studying history have made no effort to apply what they understand to creating policy. There have been efforts to try to use history in policy—there was a course taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, and then later wrote the book “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers.” Based on the material.
The author points out that history as we know it is not set. There is so much that is not known and often the information is contradictory, so the source material can be used to support whatever the result the history wants. There are very different views of some significant people in history. Churchill is usually revered in the west with almost all popular books portraying him as the hero that stood up to Hitler but the Inidians have a very different view. He was a terrible bigot and the people he expressed he hated the most were the Germans and Indians. And he was rightfully in my opinion described as having too much power for his steerable. Still a very talented man but in my opinion was a terrible disaster. The study of history is a constant effort to reveal new truths that can be discovered from primary sources., and there are many levels of study from the micro to the macro.
He does an interesting exercise where his gives a task to write a history of the world from the end of World War II to 1991. One published in 1991 would almost exclusively focus on the Cold War, but later editions the Cold War would find that the importance of the Cold War is not so great. We know that Russia was not really totally defeated, that the Middle East will take up far more relevance, in particular the Arab Israeli conflict, that the rise of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan would take on far more relevance. That when history is viewed changes what are viewed as important events.
He also talks about how there are much that is not in the historical record because it was considered well known facts that from a modern perspective are not understood, and of course perspective can be very different even within the people that have a similar perspective.
He presents a checklist, the use of which (Checklist) can be learned from the success of checklists in the past. They are certainly good to keep in mind was the past is examined for lessons. What I really liked were the traps that can be fallen into when attempting to learn from history: Facile Historical Analogies, Historical Inevitability (not thinking there are not reasonable alternate histories), Monocausal Explanations (trying to fit one factor into being responsible), and Binary Morality (that there is on a total good or a total evil).
The US lost the Vietnam War—he states that maybe that was for the best—if the US had won there could be a large number of negative consequences like the strengthening of the communist alliance, and the need to support the South Vietnamese government, and get more strategically committed (particularly financial implications) to South East Asia).
These are the questions that he thinks should be asked when examining and applying history
Question 1: How Did We Get Here? (Vertical History)
Question 2: What Else Is Happening? (Horizontal History)
Question 3: What Is Unsaid? (Unspoken Assumptions)
Question 4: How Are Things Trending? (Time Lags and Historical Anamnesis)
Question 5: How Is This Understood by Others? (Historical Perspective)
Question 6: Why Does This Matter? (Chronological Proportionality)
Question 7: What Are the Possible Unexpected Outcomes? (Unintended Consequences)
Question 8: Was This Inevitable? (Outcome Bias)
Question 9: Are Things Changing Rapidly? (Punctuated Equilibrium)
Question 10: Are We Using the Past Correctly? (Historical Malpractice)
Question 11: Was This Unprecedented? (Historical Myopia)
Question 12: What Does It Mean? (Historical Purpose)

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the example of the history of cold war being rewritten without changing the facts simply by focusing on the sources of the issues that are important today which change with decades - feels obvious now but never really thought it through. Other than that there's a lot of hand wringing about how past performance is no indication of future returns and historical analogies have no predictive power.

[Ili Giannakis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I attended Gavin’s book launch at King’s college London. Not only did Francis Gavin study under John Mearsheimer - but he writes an excellent book about historical sensibility and the importance of historians in policy making.
Currently taking a foreign policy and national security module and it blends wonderfully

[Devin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterful tour de force with sparkling insights on every page. Gavin's work puts him in the rarefied company of all-time greats John Lewis Gaddis, Ernest May, Paul Schroeder, and Marc Trachtenberg.

[Zoey Bornstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m excited to meet with the author and hear his thoughts on what it was like to write this book. It combined May and Neustadt, “thinking in time” and MacMillans “The uses and abuses of history.” I enjoyed it as a scholarly read.