CENS Distinguished Visitors Program, S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Singapore

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, New America DC

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

September 12, 2017

12:15 pm – 1:45 pm
Where

New America

740 15th St NW #900

Washington, D.C. 20005

On a summer afternoon in 1928, world leaders assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within a year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, was ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal. Within a decade, the states that signed the pact were again at war, and as a result many dismissed the pact as folly.

In their new book The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that this dismissal was mistaken, and that the pact ushered in a sustained march towards peace. While doing so, they tell the history of how the pact came to be and of the lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals whose ideas have shaped our understanding of war’s role in a just world order.

Oona Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law and Counselor to the Dean at the Yale Law School. She is also Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, on the faculty at the Jackson Institute for International Affairs, and Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science. In 2014-15, she took leave from Yale Law School to serve as Special Counsel to the General Counsel for National Security Law at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is, with Scott J. Shapiro, the author of The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World.

Scott J. Shapiro is the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School. He joined the Yale Law faculty in July 2008 as a professor of law and philosophy. He previously taught law and philosophy at the University of Michigan and before that, was a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He is the author of Legality (2011) and editor (with Jules Coleman) of The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law (2002).

Follow the discussion online using #Internationalists and following @NewAmericaISP.
PARTICIPANTS

Oona Hathaway, @oonahathaway
Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
Author, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

Scott J. Shapiro, @scottjshapiro
Professor of Law and Philosophy, Yale Law School
Author, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World
MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America

Future of Terrorism, Arizona State, Tempe, AZ

Designed to introduce Political Thought and Leadership students and members of the community to local and international leaders from a variety of fields, the Political Thought and Leadership Dialogue Series provides lively presentations and opportunities for discussion about a range of topics.

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist, author, documentary producer and vice president at New America where he directs the International Security and Fellows programs; a professor of practice at Arizona State University; a fellow at Fordham University’s Center on National Security and CNN’s national security analyst. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Date:
Monday, October 30, 2017 –
5:00pm to 6:30pm
Price:
Free
Campus:
Tempe campus
Location:
Coor Hall, room 4403
Contact:
Roxane Barwick
Phone:
480-727-5436
Website:
http://cptl.asu.edu
Ticketing:
http://conta.cc/2eFxH7C

Domestic Terrorism & Mass Casualty Incident, Georgetown University

START experts to headline conference on domestic terrorism and mass casualty incidents

START experts to headline conference on domestic terrorism and mass casualty incidents
October 17, 2017Zane Moses

START experts, alongside federal, state and local authorities, will speak about the changing state of terrorism during an Insight Exchange Network conference at Georgetown University, Nov. 15-16. The conference, “Best Practices in Preparing for and Responding to Domestic Terrorism & Mass Casualty Incidents” will cover topics such as the steps in preparing for incident response, how to effectively partition state and federal resources, coping with the mental fallout resulting from incidents among other topics.

William Braniff, Kieran Quinlan and Patrick James will headline the START panel following a keynote address from Peter Bergen, a CNN national security analyst.

Law enforcement officials, terrorism analysts, homeland security professionals, community leaders and hospital coordinators are all encouraged to attend the event to learn how to change policy in response to the changing face of terrorism.

Those interested in attending can use the discount code “UMD15” for 15% off. For more information or to register click here.

Domestic Terrorism & Mass Casualty Incidents
Best Practices in Preparing and Responding
November 15-16, 2017
Georgetown University Hotel & Conference Center Washington, DC
Purchase order. Register now and pay by credit card, or call Will Adams at 870-543-2295 to inquire about group discounts or if you plan to pay by purchase order or prefer to be invoiced.
Terrorism has changed: are you changing with it? Vehicle rammings, nightclub attacks, school shooters, the Boston Marathon attack…the list goes on. How can you best prepare for this new face of terrorism and mass casualty incidents? What do you need to know—both in terms of best-practice preparation and response? Insight Exchange Network’s conference brings together federal, state and local authorities, along with industry subject matter experts, in a unique discussion aimed at keeping our country safe—don’t miss it!

*

MIT Club of Washington

Dinner and Talk
Peter Bergen
Vice President at New America

The Future of Terrorism
What we know then, now and Future Expectations.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017; 6:30 PM
Kenwood Golf & Country Club, 5601 River Rd, Bethesda, MD

The MIT Club of Washington cordially invites you to an exciting and stimulating evening with a talk by Mr. Peter Bergen on The Future of Terrorism. Peter Bergen is Vice President at New America, a Journalist, Documentary Producer, CNN National Security Analyst, and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. Peter will focus on what we know then about terrorism, what we know now, and future expectations. He will discuss the state of the current jihadist terrorist threat to the United States; an assessment of how ISIS is doing; an examination of what the big drivers of jihadist terrorism are; a discussion of some future trends in terrorism, and, finally, what can be done to reduce the threat from jihadist terrorists? He will evaluate the architects of current terrorism, adaptive capabilities, and the application of new technologies.

Bergen produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997. The interview, which aired on CNN, marked the first time that bin Laden declared war against the United States to a Western audience. In 2011 he published The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda. The book won the Washington Institute’s $30,000 Gold Prize for the best book on the Middle East. In 2012 he published Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for Bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad. It won the Overseas Press Club award for the best book on international affairs. HBO based the film “Manhunt” on the book, which won the 2013 Emmy for best documentary.

He has a degree in Modern History from New College, Oxford. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. For many years he was a fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security. He has testified on Capitol Hill seventeen times about national security issues.

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Today’s terrorism didn’t start with 9/11 — it started with the ’90s, CNN.com

Today’s terrorism didn’t start with 9/11 — it started with the ’90s
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 1:35 PM ET, Wed August 2, 2017

Bergen: Most Americans see the era of jihadist terrorism as beginning with 9/11
But many features of terrorism as we know it today actually have roots in the ’90s

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s National Security Analyst. For CNN he produced Osama bin Laden’s first television interview. He is a vice president at New America and the author of “United States of Jihad: Who Are America’s Homegrown Terrorists and How Do We Stop Them?” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.”

(CNN)In the remote mountains of the Hindu Kush in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, CNN correspondent Peter Arnett asked Osama bin Laden, “What are your future plans?”
With the slightest smirk, bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.”

That interview took place in March 1997. It was bin Laden’s first television interview, and it was the first time the al-Qaeda leader declared war on the United States to a Western audience.

But there’s another reason why this interview still stands out two decades later. It shows how much the features of terrorism that we live with today — from jihadist acts to eruptions of violence from the far right to the concept of the “lone wolf” — all had their roots in the 1990s.
For most Americans, the era of jihadist terrorism aimed at the United States began on September 11, 2001. But, as seen in CNN’s Original Series “The Nineties,” this terrorist campaign was actually intensifying in the decade prior.

Indeed, a group of jihadist terrorists attacked New York’s World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. The aim of the attack, which involved driving a bomb-laden truck into the basement of the complex, was to bring down both towers of the Trade Center.
That mission wasn’t accomplished, but the explosion did kill six people.
The mastermind of that 1993 attack was Ramzi Yousef, whose uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, would go on to be the operational commander of the far more lethal terrorist attack at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
We would later learn that when bin Laden publicly announced his war against the US in 1997, four years after the first Trade Center bombing, he had already met with KSM to discuss large-scale terrorist plots designed to kill thousands of Americans.
It was in 1998, one year after the landmark CNN interview, that al-Qaeda suicide bombers drove truck bombs toward the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people were killed in the simultaneous attacks.
This demonstrated that al-Qaeda could carry out gruesome acts of violence thousands of miles from its base in Afghanistan, and that it had no compunction in killing as many civilians as possible. Up until this point most terrorist groups had largely tried to avoid doing this, fearing that mass-casualty attacks might limit their appeal to their followers.
Al-Qaeda’s leaders simply didn’t care. In their minds, God was on their side so they could do no wrong.

The wave of far-right terrorism

Growing in parallel to this gathering storm of jihadist violence in the 1990s was the wave of far-right terrorism in the US.
Terrorism — which is commonly defined as politically motivated violence directed at civilians by entities other than a state — can and does come from all sides of the political spectrum. But in the decade before 9/11, it was violence motivated by right-wing ideologies that appeared to be the greatest threat to the American homeland.
The most well-known of the era’s far-right terror attacks is the Oklahoma City truck bombing on April, 19 1995, which destroyed the Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people. At the time, it was the deadliest terror attack ever on American soil.
Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran in his late 20s who subscribed to a number of conspiracist views about the federal government and hung around far-right militia groups, was the mastermind behind the attack. McVeigh was quickly arrested and later executed.
The year after the Oklahoma City bombing, another far-right terrorist, Eric Rudolph, detonated bombs at Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the 1996 Olympics. He also targeted an Atlanta gay nightclub and abortion clinics in the South. Rudolph, a survivalist, spent five years on the lam and was arrested in Murphy, North Carolina. He is serving multiple life sentences at the Supermax prison in Colorado.
While the 9/11 attacks made jihadist terrorism the top concern of the public and law enforcement, the far-right strain of terrorism in the United States hasn’t disappeared in the years since al-Qaeda’s targeting of New York and Washington. New America, a non-partisan think tank that has tracked terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11, found that far-right terrorists have killed 67 people in the past decade and half.

The ‘lone wolf’

“The Nineties” also tells the story of “the Unabomber,” Ted Kaczynski, a hermit-like eccentric who lived in a small cabin in Montana. Between the late ’70s and the mid ’90s, Kaczynski, who subscribed to obscure neo-Luddite beliefs, mailed his targets more than a dozen bombs that killed three people and injured many others. Kaczynski did this entirely by himself without any help from an organization. He was a classic “lone wolf.”
Since Kaczynski we have seen more of these lone-actor terror attacks. One example is Omar Mateen’s attack at the gay nightclub in Orlando last year, in which he killed 49 people. Mateen was inspired by ISIS but had no formal connection to the group. He was killed by police who responded to the scene.
Similarly, Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009, was inspired by al-Qaeda but was not part of the group, nor was he aided by it. Hasan was convicted in 2013 of 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.
We in the 21st century are often deluged with headlines about the prominence and reach of terror attacks. But when we look back to the ’90s, we realize it was really the last decade of the 20th century that saw the beginning of this wave.

For more on the 1990s, watch CNN’s Original Series on the decade Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

“Sixteen Years After 9/11: Assessing the Terrorist Threat.” New America DC

September 11, 2017

New America holds a discussion on “Sixteen Years After 9/11: Assessing the Terrorist Threat.”

SECTION: DISCUSSION; ||TRUMP/SECURITY/OUTLOOK|| Homeland Security

LENGTH: 94 words

TIME: 12:15 p.m.
PARTICIPANTS: Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO of Valens Global; Joshua Geltzer, fellow in the New America International Security Program; Nadia Oweidat, middle east fellow at New America; and Peter Bergen, vice president of New America
LOCATION: New America, 740 15th Street NW, Suite 900, Washington, D.C.

The general now in command at the White House faces ultimate test, CNN.com

The general now in command at the White House faces ultimate test
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 11:09 AM ET, Sun July 30, 2017

Peter Bergen: White House chief of staff was a no-nonsense leader at Homeland Security
Gen. John Kelly now faces the bigger challenge of taming White House chaos

“Peter Bergen is a CNN analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.””

(CNN)In November, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly was at home on a Saturday afternoon with his wife Karen watching college football when the phone rang.
On the phone was Reince Priebus — the man that Kelly would later supplant as White House chief of staff — who told Kelly, “Mr. Trump would like to have an opportunity to talk to you about maybe going into the administration.”
After serving 45 years in the Marine Corps, Kelly was only eight months into his retirement. Kelly consulted with his wife about the offer from the Trump team. Karen said, “If we’re nothing, the Kelly family is a family of service to the nation. If they think they need you, you can’t get out of it.” She added jokingly, “Besides, I’m really tired of this quality retired time we’re spending together.”

Kelly soon met with Trump who told him, “I’d like you to take the hardest, and what I consider to be the toughest job in the federal government.” Kelly says he panicked, briefly thinking that the offer was to run the State Department, but Trump said he was asking him to run Homeland Security.
Kelly says he was surprised by the offer: “I literally did not know Mr. Trump at all and I didn’t know anyone that knew Mr. Trump.” Kelly recounted how he made his way into the Trump Cabinet at the Aspen Security Forum earlier this month in a wide-ranging interview with Pete Williams of NBC News.
Running the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is indeed one of the toughest jobs in the government. DHS is an ungainly giant of 22 different federal departments and agencies that merged together in the wake of 9/11 and is now made up of 240,000 employees who handle everything from hurricanes to cyber security to border security to terrorism.
As White House chief of staff, Kelly, 67, is taking on what is arguably an even harder job then running DHS. He will surely try to bring a general’s discipline to a chaotic group of presidential advisers.

In the past six months the White House has lost not only its first chief of staff but also other key officials such as a national security adviser, a deputy national security adviser, a communications director, a deputy chief of staff, a press secretary, and a top Middle East adviser.
Kelly certainly has leadership qualities in great abundance. In person, in Aspen, he came across as a no-nonsense, doesn’t-tolerate-fools-gladly kind of leader who also treats his staff with respect and listens carefully to what they have to say.
He will need all of his experience and hard-won leadership skills to help correct course at the White House which suffered this past week what historians will surely mark as Trump’s single biggest failure hitherto: his inability to push through any kind of repeal of Obamacare.
Kelly has earned Trump’s admiration for his aggressive efforts to enforce immigration laws and his support for the travel ban from half a dozen Muslim-majority countries.

These were, of course, among the key issues that Trump campaigned on and a large drop in illegal immigration is one of the few concrete wins that Trump can point to. Apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the southern border are down by more than half since last year, according to the US Customs and Border Patrol.
Illegal immigration is an issue with which Kelly is quite familiar as his last job in uniform was as the four star general in charge of Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) that is focused laser-like on Central and Latin America and protecting the southern border.
As DHS head, Kelly also deftly handled a significant threat to commercial aviation, which was the discovery in March that terrorists in the Middle East were manufacturing hard-to-detect bombs disguised in laptops.
DHS announced that eight Middle Eastern and African countries that have direct flights to the States could not allow passengers to carry on devices larger than a cellphone. By late July this ban had been lifted following the implementation of enhanced security procedures at airports in those eight countries.
In June DHS announced enhanced security measures at all 280 airports around the world that have direct flights into the States, including greater scrutiny of electronic devices and the use of more bomb-sniffing dogs.
Kelly also has the military credentials that Trump values as much as he does those who have made fortunes on Wall Street. The troika of Kelly, National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Secretary of Defense, retired four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, now hold the key levers of American power. Kelly, Mattis and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Joseph Dunford, are also all Marines who have worked well together for decades.
Like Mattis, his fellow Marine and confidante, Kelly is blunt when he wants to make a point. When he was asked by a reporter in April 2003 as the Marines were closing in on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad if was he was worried about the strength of Saddam’s forces, in the distinctive accent of his native Boston, Kelly said, “Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t s—.”
Follow CNN Opinion

The Kellys have also given much to the nation. In 2010 Kelly’s 29-year-old son Marine 1st Lt. Robert Kelly was killed by a landmine in Afghanistan. Kelly has another son who is an also Marine officer and a daughter who works for the FBI.
On Veteran’s Day, four days after his son’s death, in a speech in St. Louis, Kelly was clear that he sees the United States’ war against jihadist terrorists as a generational conflict. “The American military has handed our ruthless enemy defeat after defeat, but it will go on for years, if not decades, before this curse has been eradicated … We are at war and like it or not, that is a fact. It is not Bush’s war, and it is not Obama’s war, it is our war and we can’t run away from it.”

Is the fall of Mosul the fall of ISIS? CNN.com

Is the fall of Mosul the fall of ISIS?
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 12:33 PM ET, Tue July 11, 2017

Story highlights

Peter Bergen: The conditions that gave rise to ISIS in the Mideast are still very much present
They will produce other sources of terrorism, even if ISIS is ultimately eradicated, he says

“Peter Bergen is a CNN analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.””

(CNN)The tidal wave of tens of thousands of “foreign fighters” that once flocked from around the Muslim world and beyond to ISIS’ black banners has slowed to a trickle. Estimates cited by The Washington Post suggest that the flow of foreign recruits to ISIS had dropped from a high of 2,000 a month to 50 a month by last fall.

Few foreign militants want to join the losing team.

On Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared the defeat of ISIS in Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq and the place where three years ago the terror group first announced its self-styled caliphate.

The loss of its Iraqi capital as well of much of its territory in Iraq and Syria dramatically undercuts ISIS’ claim that it is the caliphate because the caliphate has historically been both a substantial geographic entity such, as the Ottoman Empire, as well as a theological construct.

While the victory over ISIS at Mosul is certainly to be celebrated and its fighters are now more concerned about simple survival than plotting attacks in the West, it’s worth recalling that ISIS continues to hold the Iraqi towns of Tal Afar (population 100,000) and Hawija (population 115,000) and its de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa (population around 200,000).

The campaign to liberate Raqqa is now underway, but given the fact that it took around eight months to expel ISIS from Mosul we should expect a long battle for Raqqa.

Also, the one thing that really brought together the fractious sects and ethnic groups of Iraq — the Kurds, the Shia and most of the Sunnis — was their shared hatred of ISIS. With ISIS sharply declining in power, the tensions that have long existed in Iraq between these various groups will likely reassert themselves.

Which brings us to the bigger picture: ISIS was never the root problem in Iraq — even though it certainly created great misery among those it lorded over — but rather the group was the symptom of deeper problems that exist in the Middle East that are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

ISIS, after all, is a branch of al Qaeda in Iraq, which was founded more than a decade ago. After suffering a near total defeat by US forces in Iraq between 2007 and 2010, al Qaeda regrouped in neighboring Syria as that country descended into a civil war beginning in 2011.

ISIS emerged in Syria because it was seen as one of the few Sunni groups truly capable of standing up to the brutal Shia Alawite regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Similarly, ISIS did well in Iraq when it swept across the country in 2014, in part, because many Iraqi Sunnis were fed up with the deeply sectarian Shia government of then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The deep divisions between many Sunnis and Shia in both Iraq and Syria and also in countries such as Yemen, where Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran are fighting a proxy war, are likely to continue for many years. These are the conditions that will surely set the stage for the emergence of a son of ISIS (and even a grandson of ISIS).

At the same time, the collapse of governance in Arab countries such as Libya, Yemen and Syria has provided the breeding ground for groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda that thrive in countries where there is a leadership vacuum.

This is also compounded by the post-Arab Spring collapse of many Middle Eastern economies.

In turn, these factors have produced a massive and unprecedented wave of Muslim immigration into Europe. This influx has caused great political turbulence in Europe, enabling the rise of ultranationalist parties from France to Poland.

All of these factors have interacted to produce Sunni jihadists in the Middle East and to create fertile soil in Europe for the ideology of jihadism to take root among alienated, young Muslim men such as the ISIS recruits who carried out the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels and Manchester, England, over the past two years.

That takes us to the unhappy conclusion that the war against the terrorists is far from over.

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Learning from history, CNN.com

Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 8:08 PM ET, Mon July 3, 2017
Story highlights

Peter Bergen: On July 4, it’s worth reflecting on the importance of studying our history
History allows us to understand our own fallibility, and if we heed its lessons, prevents us from repeating the same mistakes

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.””

(CNN) As Americans celebrate July Fourth, memorializing the birth of the United States almost two and half centuries ago, we should ask what we gain from the study of history.
It seems like a simple question with an even simpler answer: We don’t know where we are going if we don’t know where we’re from.

But there is a deeper reason, which is that history allows us to understand our own fallibility and hubris, helping us to approach our shortcomings with some degree of humility.

It also emphasizes that progress is not linear, nor is it irreversible. With every step forward, we can still take two steps back. But if we study history’s trajectory and learn from our mistakes, perhaps we can be better attuned to what President Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” in his 1861 inaugural address.

History shows us our limits

History teaches us that the past is indeed a foreign country, so foreign that even a great scientist like Sir Isaac Newton believed in alchemy and thought that he might have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, a substance that could purportedly turn iron into gold.
This, of course, was entirely false. But a visitor from the 24th century would likely find some of our most cherished beliefs to be as laughable as Newton’s embrace of alchemy is to us.

And just as Newton was both a scientist and an alchemist, the founding fathers declared “we are all created equal” while many of them owned slaves.
Were the founders simply hypocrites? Or were they largely prisoners of their own era? Or maybe a bit of both?
Trying to sort through these hard questions enables us to have empathy, or the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of our forebears.
And what about the American original sin — slavery? That Thomas Jefferson was also a slaveholder should remind us that the story of human progress is hardly the magnificent, linear journey toward the promised land of peace and justice that we often believe it to be.
President Barack Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s aphorism that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Progress is fragile and reversible
That said, the case of Weimar Germany reminds us how fragile human progress is. In many ways, Weimar was one of the most liberal polities of the early 20th century, yet it birthed Nazism, which in turn led to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust shows us that one man can be both good and evil, depending on the circumstances he finds himself in. As the American historian Christopher Browning showed in his landmark 1998 study, “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland,” it was ordinary Germans who willingly participated in the Holocaust.
And who among us can honestly say that they would have been one of the few Germans who stood up to the Nazis. Almost all of those who did oppose the Nazis perished under ghastly tortures.
History reminds us that the forces of darkness are ever-present in the human soul and that few of us really have the capacity to be heroes.

The power of chance

History also teaches us about the power of chance. Nothing about Hitler’s ascent to power — from an obscure blowhard spouting crackpot racial theories in beer halls in 1920s Munich to becoming the master of much of Europe — was preordained.

Hitler benefited greatly from those in the German upper class who saw him as a former Army corporal they could manipulate to advance their own interests, while other European leaders such as Neville Chamberlain greatly underestimated Hitler’s will to power. The German upper class and leaders of Europe both passed up a number of chances to confront and undermine Hitler before he took control first of Germany and then of continental Europe.
Similarly, the American Revolution could easily have been derailed by General George Washington’s foolhardy decision in the spring of 1776 to keep much of his army in Manhattan as a great British fleet of 400 ships — one of the largest fleets hitherto assembled — surrounded the island.
The British commander General Sir William Howe’s much larger forces of soldiers could have finished off Washington’s army in New York, but instead the British general dithered — allowing Washington to organize a hasty retreat and survive to fight another day.

History isn’t a march to the promised land

Americans largely subscribe to the “Whig view” of history: the belief that our liberal values enshrined in the Constitution are powering us forward to an ever-freer and ever-richer future.
This belief is deeply rooted in a Judeo-Christian conception of history, one in which we are all trying to reach the Promised Land, which some have conflated with the United States itself.
President Ronald Reagan famously described the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” which echoed an important 1630 sermon by the Puritan John Winthrop, one of America’s first colonists who said “we shall be as a City upon a Hill.”
History warns us, however, that a steady march to the promised land is fallacious — as much as we all might want to believe in it.
In the summer of 1914, there was arguably no more peaceful, prosperous and well-connected world that had ever existed on earth. Countries were bound together by new trade routes, which were enabled by steam ships, trains and the telegraph. Important strides in public health such as the germ theory of disease and the discovery that cholera was spread by contaminated water had been made in the West. And for a century, since the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, there were no pan-European wars.

None of the great powers thought that the Great War would cause the collapse of the Turkish, Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires and would contribute to the eventual dissolution of the British empire. Yet all these monarchies and peoples went into the war with the firm belief that God was on their side. 17 million people died during World War I. The Spanish influenza at the end of that war killed tens of millions more.
It would be deeply ahistorical to believe that we might not face similar problems ourselves.
“History never repeats itself but it rhymes,” is an observation sometimes attributed to Mark Twain. The 20th century almost certainly was the peak of American power, but as Americans now face a rising China, history suggests that at some point both China and the United States will end up in some kind of war that will greatly damage both powers.
President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster, has frequently observed that “People fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest.”
“Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment,” Harvard political scientist Graham Allison wrote in 2015. “Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.”
Just as the Spanish influenza killed 50 million in the wake of World War I, the fast rate of the warming climate and the rise of antibiotic-resistant super viruses may also trigger a massive pandemic that we will have scant resistance to.
Current advances in gene editing technologies may also allow states or terrorists to construct viruses that simply wipe out whole categories of humans whom they don’t regard as people. Does anyone doubt that if Osama bin Laden had had access to gene editing technologies, he would have used them against his enemies?

Getting it right

We also study the past to understand how great leaders come to grasp and master the currents of history more deeply than others.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill understood the gathering threat posed by Nazi Germany long before his peers did. And Abraham Lincoln felt that slavery had to end before many of his colleagues did.

George Washington learned from his narrow escape from New York that fighting pitched battles with the British — the world’s then-superpower — was unlikely to win the war and that he would have to modify his tactics and fight a long war of attrition against them, which is why we can celebrate July Fourth in peace today.
Hopefully we can continue to do so. But history suggests that this is more of an aspiration than a certainty.