Applied History Project

In this TED talk, political scientist Graham Allison shows why a rising China and a dominant United States could be headed towards a violent collision no one wants -- and how we can summon the common sense and courage to avoid it.

Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard Kennedy School, said in an interview with Bloomberg that China is rivaling the U.S. in virtually every domain. Because of the dynamic between these two powers, Allison warned that the future will be "extremely dangerous."

Without overcoming their historical amnesia disorder about U.S. and British intelligence, citizens, scholars, and policy-makers cannot hope to understand the proper context for what secret agencies are doing today.

The authors analyze the U.S.–North Korea nuclear standoff and the role of back channel negotiations and then develop a game theory framework for understanding why back channels can be beneficial.

Calder Walton reviews Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman. He writes that the book not only sheds light on Israel's intelligence services, but also has wider significance: how and why a state uses extra-judicial killing—and the consequences of doing so.

The great Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote that “there can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have the insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.”

Billionaire founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio has taken it upon himself to break that mold by championing the use of history in the financial world.

Margaret Macmillan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and affiliate with the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about how to identify good history, dead white man theory, and Canadian vs. U.S. donuts.

Margaret MacMillan, Professor of History at the University of Toronto and affiliate with the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project, talks with Aroop Mukharji (@aroopmukharji) about how to identify good history, dead white man theory, and Canadian vs. U.S. donuts.

Having just returned from a week in China in which I had the opportunity to talk directly—and listen!—to all of its leaders beneath President Xi Jinping, I came away even more worried about the future of the relationship between the United States and China than I had been. While almost every day brings another tweet or announcement in the war of words, I see the current “phony war” as the proverbial calm before the storm. In one line, my bet is that things will soon get worse before they get worse.

The stunning revelation this week that CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un over Easter weekend is a stark reminder that the pieces of the puzzle posed by a nuclear North Korea are moving rapidly. According to President Trump’s Wednesday morning tweet, “Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed…Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!”

Most national security experts have criticized Trump’s decision to meet face-to-face with the North Korean leader at the beginning, rather than the end, of a long diplomatic process, and are predicting that the meeting will be a failure. In contrast, I see the potential for a significant win for the U.S. While forecasts about the unknown future are inherently uncertain, I sense the possibility of what I call a “six-win solution.”