The Power of the Past - by Hal Brands & Jeremi Suri (Paperback)

About the Book

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Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present.

History, with its insights, analo...

Book Synopsis

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Leading scholars and policymakers explore how history influences foreign policy and offer insights on how the study of the past can more usefully serve the present.

History, with its insights, analogies, and narratives, is central to the ways that the United States interacts with the world. Historians and policymakers, however, rarely engage one another as effectively or fruitfully as they might. This book bridges that divide, bringing together leading scholars and policymakers to address the essential questions surrounding the history-policy relationship including Mark Lawrence on the numerous, and often contradictory, historical lessons that American observers have drawn from the Vietnam War; H. W. Brands on the role of analogies in U.S. policy during the Persian Gulf crisis and war of 1990-91; and Jeremi Suri on Henry Kissinger's powerful use of history.

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Review Quotes

Brands and Suri have assembled a fine collection of contributions that should attract historians and policy-makers alike, but it could also be of great interest to other professionals such as journalists and activists. Hopefully this book will inspire more of this kind of work and an increasingly fruitful dialogue between historians and practitioners.--International Affairs

About the Author

"Hal Brands is a Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).
Jeremi Suri is the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. "