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Is the self-proclaimed “history buff” journalist the best reporter to have in a war zone? Not necessarily, according to historians, political scientists and former U.S. military officers, who say faulty interpretations of the past may confound a writer’s understanding and bolster invalid comparisons to the present.
While these sources praise the work of journalists like Tom Ricks and C.J. Chivers, they caution against what they see as the pitfalls of journalists acting as armchair historians.
“The problem with history is you can probably prove anything by it depending on the examples you choose and consequently, if you’re careless with your examples, you’ll be erroneous in your conclusions,” says John A. Lynn II, professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Most people who use history casually are very picky in what they choose to learn, and it feeds into their preconceptions.”
Expectations of journalists’ historical knowledge
Jonathan Caverley, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, says that due to how quickly news organizations can send journalists around the globe, it’s unfair to expect journalists to know everything about the conflict zone when they arrive.
“It’s important for a journalist to not get ahead of his knowledge base,” Caverley says. “You can’t fault a journalist for showing up when a war starts, when you’re running out of people to send, and you embed someone with a unit. You can’t expect them to be very knowledgeable about this. Tom Ricks has done a lot of work, in defense — he’s read a lot. There’s just not a lot of Tom Ricks out there. … So after a couple embeds, you’re much more likely to speculate on stuff than you could before, when you’re just gonna report the facts.”
Ironically, journalists’ lack of military knowledge—to a degree—can be a boon for them to learn on the job and disseminate information to the general public. Caverley, who was a Navy officer in the ’90s and dealt with the press, describes most journalists as “generalists.”
“The journalists knew nothing about the submarine,” Caverley says.
While adding the caveat that there are credible beat reporters, he says because many journalists are “generalists,” their time spent with the military is a learning experience: “The point of having a reporter ride on the submarine is to teach them about the Navy.”
The speed with which journalists are expected to report often trumps their ability to properly ground themselves in the history of a region or conflict, Caverley says.
“Whatever profession you’re into, in my case academia, you will read stories about your profession, and they contain inaccuracies and poor analysis because reporters are on deadline; you only have a few minutes to think about something; you’re just trying to get a few facts together and spit it out and get it into the paper or increasingly online,” Caverley says. “So it’s important to know military history, but I surely don’t expect it.”
At the same time, uninformed journalists may further dubious historical parallels by loosely mapping historical events onto current conflicts.
“This is not an across-the-board charge here, but, I mean, many journalists have a tendency to rely on superficially plausible historical comparisons, and I would just urge a sort of wariness in that regard,” says Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew Bacevich, who is a retired Army officer.
Journalists should also be cautious in how they approach the field of military history itself. Popular perceptions of military history are often misleading, says Lynn, singling out the cliché that “generals are always preparing for the last war.” The British failure to learn from World War I set the stage for an underwhelming performance in World War II, he says.
“Sometimes what you really need to do is learn the lessons of the past as a guide to the future,” Lynn says.
The oft-cited claim that history is written by the victors is similarly complex, Lynn says.
“For example, when one writes the history of imperialism, certainly in the imperial age it was being written by the imperialists and it was done to glorify what they had done,” Lynn says. “The history that one studies now, for example, of India will stress the position of the indigenous populations and the exploitation of the indigenous populations, and you could say that in a sense the history is written by the victors, because the imperialists have been driven away, but you could also say that this is a history of those who at the time were subjugated and defeated.”
The centrality Of World War II
Journalists and politicians don’t often explicitly compare World War II to current U.S. foreign policy, but that war, as a framework, continues to inform both geopolitical developments and people’s historical understanding.
Lynn says that the world wars provide the “two great historical metaphors” concerning war and foreign policy. World War I cautions against war that “almost occurs by accident” as arms races and bellicose foreign policies spiral out of control. By contrast, the metaphor of World War II highlights how military weakness can lead to a war that could have been otherwise deterred.
“Frankly, I think we need to keep both those metaphors in mind, and given the tremendous armament of the United States and our, I think, over-willingness to employ military force, I am more drawn to the metaphor of World War I than the metaphor of World War II,” Lynn says.
In addition to providing a common historical metaphor, World War II determined the balance of power in U.S.-Asia relations that exists to this day. The defeat of Japan in 1945 established the U.S. as the dominant Pacific power, says Bacevich, of Boston University.
“As a consequence of that, after World War II, we were the dominant power and I think that we’ve become accustomed to that status, we want to retain that preeminent position, and some people in Washington think that China is intent on challenging American primacy,” Bacevich says. “But again, it’s quite unclear what China’s purposes actually are in that regard.”
Michael Mazza, a research fellow on defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, views World War II as providing a useful context for current geopolitical relations.
“Well, I think it’s always useful to look back to World War II because it’s useful in understanding the effect of the geography of the region can have on the way states interact and the decisions they make,” Mazza says. “And obviously geography doesn’t change and leads to certain types of strategic choices and tactical choices, and those things are still relevant when we look at it today. Now that’s not to say we’re looking at any sort of war in Asia anytime soon, but understanding the geographic context helps us understand the way that China in particular is modernizing its military.”
Historical knowledge therefore is useful in understanding the relationships among countries; problems can arise when journalists carelessly indicate the causality of history informing current actions.
“Everything is circumstantial,” Lynn says. “I’ll tell you, history to me is a tremendous guide to the kinds of things you should look at, not the kinds of conclusions you should come to.”
Russia
Is there a link between past U.S. attitudes toward the Soviet Union and relations with Russia today? Caverley and Mazza both say that the Cold War has ended.
“We’ve had continuous relations with Russia for many years,” Mazza says. “Even though the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Russia is its heir, if you will, and so obviously when we look back at relations that are part of the history, New START Treaty follows previous arms control agreements with Russia more recently, and with the Soviet Union before that. That being said, our Russia policy today is — as it has always been — is driven by what U.S. interests are in Eastern Europe, and in the Caucasus, and in the Middle East, and in East Asia, and looking how Russia impacts those interests.”
Caverley puts it succinctly: “I think Russia’s more interested in the grammar of the Cold War than the United States is, just because we’re a much bigger power now. So I don’t think there’s a new Cold War.”
China
If Russia is the declining power in Asia, then China is the rising power. To what extent do the attempts to contain Communism during the Red Scare affect current U.S. attitudes toward China? For journalists, the danger in military history lies in misattributing historical relevancy when there are often vast differences between past and present conflicts.
While there may superficially appear to be ties between U.S. “containment” of Communist China in the 1950s and current policies to rein in the rising power, Caverley says characterizing current U.S. policy exclusively as containment is wrong: “It’s a combination of hedging strategies; some of it’s containment. It’s not a coherent strategy, but it’s a consistent strategy.”
Caverley adds, “In the ’50s, we thought Communism was a monolith, so we just lumped [China] in with the Soviet Union. Soon as we got past that lacuna, then we basically became allies with China. China was going nowhere fast geopolitically. It’s different now. We trade with China and its rapid growth makes us nervous.”
Mazza agrees that describing current U.S. policy as containment is problematic.
“I don’t find ‘containment’ to be a useful analogy for understanding our Asia policy today,” Mazza says. “During the Cold War, the intention was to isolate the Soviet Union diplomatically, economically, [and] militarily, and bring down the Soviet regime. . . . Where China’s concerned, we aren’t trying to contain it. We welcome its economic rise. We welcome its growing diplomatic influence to a certain extent. What we don’t want to see happen is China upset the global order which has benefited U.S. interests — and frankly those of China as well — since the end of the Cold War.”
Lynn sees things differently. He says that the “terminology of containment” still informs U.S. policy, citing a meeting of scholars and Air Force officers in Chicago that he attended earlier this year.
“There was a strong sense in the discussion of the need to reorient to contain China and it was very similar to notions of containing the Soviet Union back in the days of the Cold War,” he says.
Therein is a risk: If journalists promote this mindset and incorrectly label Cold War—or any war—history as repeating itself, they may help to bring about future conflict.
“Every terrorist situation, every insurgency, nearly every war, is unique,” Lynn says. “And one has to look at its unique characteristics and not simply find some close historical metaphor that will justify what you want to do.”
Bacevich, too, emphasizes the limits of history.
“It could be that there are no historical comparisons, that this is something different,” he says.
China’s drones and a new arms race?
Although drone warfare is one of the more controversial and technologically advanced methods of enforcing U.S. interests, neither Mazza nor Caverley see the growth of China’s own drone program as capable of striking an arms race for the new millennium.
“I think drones have been growing in popularity now over the past decade,” Mazza says. “The U.S. pioneered their use, but others have been using them as well. It’s only natural that China would get into that game also. We know that Japan is also investing in drones; countries across the Asia-Pacific region have expressed interest to the United States in purchasing the drones we’re making. So I wouldn’t describe it as an arms race in it that these things are mostly designed … for surveillance and reconnaissance, and that’s what they’re most useful for in the Asia context. And so everybody’s investing in ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance].”
Caverley highlights that drones are only a small part of broader military strategy, and there’s a pitfall in getting caught up with associating the danger of China having that technology with the small amount of applications drones actually have in practice.
“What are UAVs for? What are they good for? They’re good for killing people; they’re good for surveilling people,” Caverley says. “ … They’re pretty limited-application. It’s inevitable they’ll be used by other countries.”
Pivoting toward East Asia
While the Obama administration has begun to strategically “pivot” toward East Asia, experts question both the feasibility and wisdom of this approach.
“Try as he might, I think the president won’t be able to move away from the Middle East,” Mazza says. “There’s just simply too many stressing and in many ways more imminent problems than there are in [East] Asia. … But the idea of the “pivot” was always problematic in it that we were never going to be able to decrease our focus on the Middle East. It’s simply too important a region where our strategic interests are, our concerns.”
Caverley says that he even sees, “in my more optimistic moods,” that the U.S. could shift its focus from the Middle East to East Asia.
“The best case scenario would look like the end of the Cold War,” Caverley says. “Will it take us awhile to extract ourselves from the material and mental infrastructure of being obsessed with that part of the world? Our interests in that part of the region are diminishing if we’re even half as good at making hydrocarbons as we think we might be.”
Bacevich says that the Obama administration’s Asian pivot reflects what he considers “great ambivalence about the implications of China’s rise to a great power status” among U.S. policymakers.
“On the one hand, it’s very clear that the economic relationship between the United States and China is tremendously important to both countries, and I would imagine that both countries have a keen interest in sustaining that relationship,” Bacevich says. “On the other hand, my impression is that there’s a wariness in China about U.S. purposes in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly with regard to our military presence and activities, and there’s a concern in Washington as to whether or not once China fully achieves great power status, whether it will be a status quo power or will be a power that wishes to change the East Asian status quo in ways that would be disadvantageous to the United States.”
Lynn, of the University of Illinois, warns against the notion that conflict is inevitable.
“The China 20 years from now could be very different from the China we see today,” Lynn says. “It may be less of a dominant manufacturing power than it is today, the economy might look different, the energy situation might look different. Why do we have to think that we’re going to automatically be locked into a death struggle with China?”
Lynn says cultural expectations of conflict with China are fueled by alarmist Tom Clancy novels and movies like “Red Dawn,” which he calls “a bad remake of what was a bad film to start with.”
Another possible contributor is public complacency with the American use of force. While U.S. military actions are widely reported, Bacevich says, the news fails to resonate with many Americans.
“We’ve become as a people, become inured to the United States using force,” Bacevich says. “We treat this as routine. It’s what the United States of America does. If any other nation in the world behaved in comparable ways, we would profess shock and horror but because it’s us, the American people basically shrug it off and don’t pay any serious attention even though they know about it.”
Lynn says that people often try to create a reality that matches their cultural expectations—something that journalists reporting on U.S.-Asia relations should keep in mind.
“You tend to create what you expect, and if you expect war, where are you headed?” he asks.
