"Those who do not know the past," said George Santayana, in a line endlessly quoted, "are condemned to repeat it." The unspoken corollary of Santayana's statement is that if we do know the past, we may be able to avoid repeating it; in particular, we may be able to avoid the mistakes and misfortunes of the past. In almost no realm of human endeavor is the concern to learn from past mistakes greater than in that of international relations. In international relations the price of mistakes is war, and since the beginning of the twentieth century war has cost several tens of millions of human lives, with perhaps as many more lives snuffed out by totalitarian governments whose rise to power was arguably the consequence of war.
In a nuclear age the potential price of mistakes is greater still; through most of the Cold War era, policymakers, diplomats, and their advisors lived with the spectre that a single afternoon's blunder might cost hundreds of millions of lives, or even conceivably extirpate the human race. The end of the Cold War has for the moment nearly eliminated the risk of a general nuclear exchange, but we cannot take for granted that there will never again be a confrontation of nuclear superpowers. Moreover, lesser confrontations around the world continue to cost lives, and it can be argued that the dissolution of the Cold War order, and a resultant rise of global uncertainty, has made such confrontations more likely, and generally made the practice of managing a great power's foreign policy more difficult and hazardous (Berman and Goldman, 1996, p. 293).
The desire to learn from the past in order to avoid future mistakes is thus still very much alive. This desire, however, raises a fundamental question: will the future indeed resemble the past, at least sufficiently for us to use past experience as a guide to the resolution of present and future conflicts?
The entire discipline of international relations i...