Why do U.S. leaders struggle to end military interventions? William McKinley’s 1898 decision to annex the Philippines reveals why, through a phenomenon called the “meddler’s trap.” This concept denotes a situation of self-entanglement, whereby a leader inadvertently creates a problem through military intervention, feels they can solve it, and values solving the new problem more because of the initial intervention. 

Aroop Mukharji writes that the moment the United States became a major military power in Asia can be traced to a single day, Oct. 28, 1898. It is a story about the difficulty of letting go, and it teaches scholars and policymakers an important lesson: An everyday psychological bias can lead to years of entanglement. Foreign policy commentary is awash with debates about why one region or another is more or less relevant to U.S. national interests. Those debates are important, but they miss a general point. It is always hard to let go.

Aroop Mukharji writes that nothing is more important to an accurate retelling of diplomatic history than good methods. What people believe happened, how it happened, and why it happened, all come from good methods.

George B. Cortelyou, a mostly forgotten historical figure, authored one of the most important insider accounts of the final days before the Spanish-American War. His diary is one of the few contemporary descriptions of what was happening in the White House and what was going through President William McKinley’s mind before he requested authorization to use military force on April 11, 1898.  One word from a critical diary entry on April 2, 1898 has never been translated — until now. Aroop Mukharji's translation of that single word dispels two longstanding, powerful myths about the war that launched a sprawling overseas American empire.

This paper argues that historical analysis, necessarily written with hindsight, often underestimates the uncertainties of the past. The authors call this tendency explanation bias. This bias leads individuals—including professional historians—to imply greater certainty in causal analyses than the evidence justifies. Their analyses will treat what is plausible to be probable. The authors offer a few intuitions about why explanation bias exists, its relation to other well-established psychological biases, what it leads to, and how it might be combatted. 

Norman Roule, a 34-year CIA veteran and Middle East expert, sits down with with Aroop Mukharji to talk about the culture at the CIA, Yemen, and theater.