Applied History Project

An approach that requires the United States to accept what it longed deemed “unacceptable” will strike many people in Washington as irresponsible.

In Destined for War, the eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison explains why Thucydides’s Trap is the best lens for understanding U.S.-China relations in the twenty-first century. Through uncanny historical parallels and war scenarios, he shows how close we are to the unthinkable. Yet, stressing that war is not inevitable, Allison also reveals how clashing powers have kept the peace in the past — and what painful steps the United States and China must take to avoid disaster today.

"It is arguably one matter to spy on colonial delegations, but quite another to bug the president of the United States. Could the Russians have done it? The Trump administration's confusion about whether the TASS reporter in the Oval Office was photographing for private use, as the White House thought but apparently did not check, or acting officially for publication, as the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed, does not inspire confidence."

"To make matters worse, this intelligence was derived from a US ally, reportedly Israel. Never before has a US president unilaterally disclosed to a hostile power, Russia, ultra secret intelligence derived from a US intelligence ally without permission from that country. If the reports are true, we are now in historically uncharted territory. Trump's disclosures to the Kremlin—pundits are calling it LeakGate—pose a serious risk to US national security. America and its intelligence allies are not equipped for a leaker-in-chief as president. No wonder Lavrov and Kislak are smiling in the pictures of their Oval Office meeting."

"A leader who accesses raw intelligence risks short-circuiting this entire enterprise, bypassing agencies that are supposed to prevent partial assessments. An inevitable risk is that a decision-maker with access to raw data that has not been professionally assessed will look for information that confirms his or her preexisting beliefs. Far from intelligence agencies telling leaders what they do not want to hear, in these circumstances, intelligence risks becoming self-fulfilling sycophancy."

A video based on Calder Walton's op-ed, "Trump Risks Making Stalin’s Disastrous Mistake On Intelligence Analysis."

For nearly ten years, Harvard's President Drew Gilpin Faust has led the university with a historian's perspective. On June 30, she joined the Belfer Center's Applied History Project Faculty Working Group and shared her views on applying history to current situations.

"Trump's power has depended on his control over his Make America Great Again movement. And that's why he needs the Bannons of this world to keep pumping the zeal, in permanent campaign mode. But how long is it before the overthrow-the-world stuff that propelled a political insurgency starts to sound like tired regime propaganda uttered by tedious apparatchiks?"

To all who declare that American democracy is broken—riven by partisanship, undermined by extremism, and corrupted by wealth—history offers hope. In nearly every generation since the nation’s founding, critics have made similar declarations, and yet the nation is still standing. When should we believe the doomsayers? In Democracy: A Case Study, historian David Moss adapts the case study method made famous by Harvard Business School to revitalize our conversations about governance and democracy and show how the United States has often thrived on political conflict.

Democracy’s nineteen case studies were honed in Moss’s Harvard course, which is among the institution’s most highly rated. Each one presents readers with a pivotal moment in U.S. history and raises questions facing key decision makers at the time: Should delegates to the Constitutional Convention support James Madison’s proposal for a congressional veto over state laws? Should President Lincoln resupply Fort Sumter? Should Florida lawmakers approve or reject the Equal Rights Amendment?

These vibrant cases ask readers to weigh choices and consequences, wrestle with momentous decisions, and come to their own conclusions. They provoke us to rethink which factors make the difference between constructive and destructive conflict, and they provide an opportunity to reengage the passionate debates that are crucial to a healthy society. Democracy: A Case Study invites us all to experience American history anew and come away with a deeper understanding of our democracy’s greatest strengths and vulnerabilities as well as its extraordinary resilience over time.