Roman Krznaric has recently written a book (History for Tomorrow) of suggestions for how we can learn useful things from history to navigate our way into the future: from how to nurture tolerance, bridge the inequality gap and revive faith in democracy to how to break fossil fuel addiction, kick consumer habits and secure water for all. In the introduction to all of this, there is a particularly arresting paragraph (perhaps particularly so for me as I was born in October 1962):

“Can history really live up to such promise as a guide in a complex world? In October 1962, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F Kennedy turned for counsel to a recent work of popular history, Barbara W Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which chronicled the series of misperceptions, miscalculations and bungles by political and military leaders that had contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. Kennedy was worried that an aggressive policy response from the US might lead to a similar cascade of decisions that could provoke Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to push the nuclear button. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time – The Missiles of October‘, the president told his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. ‘If anyone is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move’.”

Unfortunately JFK did not fully get his wish. Yes nuclear war was averted but a movie was made in 1974 with the title The Missiles of October, starring William Devane and Martin Sheen and with JFK’s brother getting a writing credit! JFK was assassinated a year after the events of October 1962 and his brother was assassinated in 1968.

Sometimes history can just put what seem like current quite extreme events into a broader context.

For instance, which US Secretary of State said of the UK:

All we needed was one regiment. The Black Watch would have done. Just one regiment, but you wouldn’t. Well don’t expect us to save you again. They can invade Sussex and we wouldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Sounds like the kind of thing JD Vance would have said at Munich, doesn’t it? But it was in fact Dean Rusk in 1964 after the UK declined to send troops to Vietnam (something I discovered from Alan Johnson’s biography of Harold Wilson). So immediately we can see that, objectionable as Vance is, Vances have happened to us in the past and we’ve survived them. If, as seems likely, we are going to be reversing many of the assumptions of globalisation over the next few years, we should perhaps expect international diplomacy to look more like the 1960s than the 2010s.

Another example, courtesy of Ed Conway. Trump’s bid to secure minerals in return for continued support of Ukraine seems extreme to us. Until we realise that FDR considered all kinds of possible things from the UK in return for the Lend-Lease deal which allowed the UK to continue fighting the Second World War.

Once we realise that some aspects of Trump’s behaviour merely belong to a period of international relations that we thought we had evolved beyond rather than being totally unprecedented, then we can understand it better and respond accordingly.