PAYING MINIMAL attention to the ironies of history is a key reason why America has failed at four wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and, as is often forgotten, Korea, with its doomed counter-invasion to “liberate” the north in 1950–1951. Each ended up unrecognizably and disastrously far from the mission declared at the start. It’s an unnerving record hardly offset by the ultimate, protracted defeat of the Soviet empire, or by 1999’s two-and-a-half-month Balkan aerial campaign, or by 1991’s celebrated one-hundred-hour destruction of a wretched army of conscripts strung out across two hundred miles of Kuwaiti desert. 

Vagueness about the past reaches deep into the country’s leadership, as well as into intellectual discussion. It is an underlying cause of failure because we neither understand our opponents’ cultures nor the shortness of our attention span, among other inherent vulnerabilities. Voters are blaming the twenty-first century’s forever wars on the foreign policy establishment, just as Washington’s best and brightest were blamed for Vietnam half a century ago. The culpability of today’s prominent mainstream historians, however, has gone unnoticed. 

Scholars, think-tankers, columnists and other practitioners who’ve shaped prevailing assumptions have been unable to get the facts straight on pivotal events. It’s time to examine the willful obtuseness that characterizes the study of postwar foreign relations and the myths that arise.

THE WORLD beyond Europe and the Americas in 1945 remained largely a colonial one. After the war, the United States had minimal influence in Africa, and little sway, except for Palestine, in a greater Middle East dominated by Britain. 

The eminent historian Fredrik Logevall disagrees. America, he writes, was “the only real superpower,” and was “uniquely able to affect the course of events in the developing world.” Yet America couldn’t affect a fracturing China. Even in Southeast Asia, which he has examined closely, America couldn’t do much: the future of Europe was at stake and Washington wasn’t going to block the return of Britain and France. 

Indeed, the United States was barely a “super Power,” a term coined the year before. It was the quickest of the three to demobilize; intelligence capacities were amateurish; no one knew what an atomic bomb might deter, let alone affect in far-flung regions; and, throughout this five-year period, sensible people expected the Great Depression to return. Talk of an “American Century” might be heard in the better drawing rooms of the Northeast coast, but the rest of this self-contained continental island-state—traditionally fenced off by oceans and high tariffs—wasn’t about to suddenly transform itself into a global political-military force.

Nor is it correct to believe “Britain was bankrupt,” as said in the Cambridge History of the Cold War. “Bankruptcy” is a hard word that doesn’t lend itself to shorthand, and bankruptcy didn’t occur for the world’s third-largest economy and the center of a trading regime that governed half the planet. The problem was more complex: Britain confronted an ongoing scarcity of hard currency, while its exports and productivity boomed beyond what anyone had dared to forecast. 

Nonetheless, it’s also believed that Britain suffered a “decline in aerospace, automobiles, and information technology,” as journalist and author Tom Ricks reports in his book Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom. In fact, the nation’s industrial base remained strong, and Britain led the industries of the future: jet aviation, life sciences, computing and soon, civil atomic energy. The sizeable U.S. loan signed in December 1945 was to be a one-time bridge to quick recovery after six years of war. 

When the global landscape of late 1945 is misconstrued this badly, it becomes easy to exaggerate what America could accomplish. 

By early 1946, hard men in Washington saw Stalin’s tyrannical ambitions—both in Europe and toward Iran—as not much different from those they’d just helped to crush in the Third Reich. In February, George Kennan, the forty-two-year-old chargé d’affaires in Moscow, sent a 5,327-word telegram to Washington describing Russia as implacably hostile. Kennan’s influence can be debated: these busy men wouldn’t have read anything that long if they weren’t already alert to Stalinist predation. What can’t be argued is the length of Kennan’s telegram, which he claimed to be “some eight thousand words.”

The discrepancy is significant. Americans tend to believe that long or large is equivalent to greater quality—in contrast to short and concise, as the French value in their essayists. The State Department didn’t tolerate even a five-thousand-word telegram from its embassies. A telegram of eight thousand words would have been seen as astoundingly, unquestionably important. 

It’s unlikely Kennan’s “some eight thousand words” was a mistake. He used the number in his 1967 memoir as he did with newsmen and colleagues. He published the full 5,327-word telegram as “Appendix C” in his memoir, but he labeled the pages as “excerpts from” his by then famously long but still-classified missive. When the State Department declassified the complete document in December 1972, however, the length of the full telegram proved to be the same as the so-called excerpts. 

Kennan’s exaggeration is an early glimpse into his unreliability. Moreover, scholars have repeated Kennan’s “eight thousand” figure so often—as does his authorized biographer, historian John Lewis Gaddis in The Cold War: A New History and in Strategies of Containment—that the exaggerated word count has entered the textbooks. We start to see a shallowness in portrayals of Kennan by writers who uncritically accept whatever he said. 

Kennan at least seemed to get Stalin right. As 1947 began, Secretary of State George Marshall moved to “contain” Soviet expansion. Stalin appeared to be backing communist rebels against Greece’s brutal Hellenic monarchy, which was upheld by British subsidies and troops. That’s why the State Department was appalled to hear, on February 21, that Britain would imminently withdraw all assistance. 

The weight of evidence shows this to have been a bluff. An ongoing British presence was essential to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin: Greece was key to the Royal Navy’s control of the Mediterranean, and he saw Greece as a critical link between Europe and the Middle East. He told his staff he was using “shock tactics” to “cast a net” over the Americans. Once shocked, there’d be a stampede into Greece and he could then better spread Britain’s resources throughout an empire and commonwealth that covered a quarter of the globe. 

Regardless of whether he was bluffing, what followed is clear, and it’s the reverse of what nearly all historians believe—with a few telling exceptions like William Roger Lewis, renowned authority on Britain in the Middle East. Getting the story wrong is unhelpful because it is in Greece that Washington deployed its first Military Assistance Group for security and nation-building. 

William Russell Mead, a professor of foreign affairs and columnist who writes on U.S. history, turns this episode into fantasy. “The British gave up trying to maintain a global empire,” he avers, due to “destruction at home.” From his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations, economist Benn Steil discerns a “global political vacuum created by the collapse of the British empire” in 1947, with imperial “liquidation” underway. Yet Britain didn’t “terminate assistance to Greece,” as another oft-cited historian, Hal Brands, asserts. The opposite occurred. Britain intensified counterinsurgency, deployed fighter planes and bombers, debated sending more troops and kept soldiers in Greece until the country joined NATO in 1951. 

Even so, a dean of postwar diplomatic history, Melvyn Leffler, adds that Britain believed it had no choice but “to withdraw from the eastern Mediterranean,” which, once more, is the opposite of what happened. Britain hadn’t even begun to flex its muscles in the eastern Mediterranean. That would be seen in summer 1951 when Britain used its Mediterranean Fleet and such colonial bastions as Cyprus to prepare to invade Iran with seventy thousand fighting men, and when, that October, it staged the largest airlift of troops anywhere since World War II by swooping six thousand soldiers into Egypt. 

Nevertheless, the belief persists that British power “vanished,” and Bret Stephens, also an author and New York Times columnist, sees Washington in 1947 being “hand-delivered the job of world policeman” to fill various “vacuums.” Stephens, who clamored for war in 2003, is projecting. What were the Americans to police? China? The Indian subcontinent? Southeast Asia? Africa? Iraq? And with what? 

TIMELINES ALSO get skewed once mistakes of this order are set in stone. Even Anne Applebaum, renowned for her Gulag: A History, errs when she uses history to explain today’s national security dramas. “The German-American relationship,” she writes, was the “core of the transatlantic alliance” in 1947—except no such alliance existed then, and a prostrate western Germany remained under Allied occupation. Elsewhere she writes about a “Pax Americana” of U.S.-backed rules in 1947, but here she’s accepting the conventional wisdom that a superpower “world policeman” had sprung to life. 

President Harry Truman‘s speech to Congress on March 12, 1947 didn’t create a “Pax.” He sought huge appropriations largely directed against “terrorism” in Greece. Americans soon dashed forth with aid teams, checkbooks and military advisors, while U.S. warships began visiting every harbor deep enough to enter. America got itself onto the expressway to Saigon, observes Kati Marton in The Polk Conspiracy, her riveting account of murder and coverup in Greece’s civil war. 

Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was in the thick of things. He’d rise to head the department, from January 1949–1953, and he may be the most effective individual to ever hold the office. Today, we can’t appreciate his decisions, nor fully grasp the history of this era, without knowing the influences that shaped him. 

Myth has it that Acheson was an “Anglophile” (“of the first order,” writes Logevall) and a “wasp aristocrat” (“a caricature of the breed,” says the cultural critic Jeffrey Hart). In truth, he was the opposite of both stereotypes, and to call Acheson an “anglophile [is] laughable” concludes his foremost biographer, Robert Beisner. Acheson’s record of bitter comments and harsh judgments toward Britain shouldn’t be a surprise for a man of Irish-Scots background, a people famous for disdaining English prerogatives. Acheson adored his father, who had arrived in steerage as a sixteen-year-old working-class immigrant, and it’s revealing that Acheson avoids even saying his father was born in England. 

The main reason for labeling Acheson an “Anglophile” seems to be because he wore decent suits with well-polished shoes and a slightly formal homburg on a slim 6’ frame. Henry Kissinger describes his “Bond Street tailoring,” but there were no tailors on Bond Street in those days. Acheson’s suits simply came from Brooks Brothers in New York and a local shop, Farnsworth-Reed, in Washington. Another reason for the label is that Acheson was an Episcopalian, which to some people means being part of a slavishly Anglophile elite. Of course, Acheson had English friends, like Bevin. But there’s no serious person of those years who was less of an “Anglophile.”

For historians to get Acheson so wrong suggests they could be equally wrong about who the era’s key decisionmakers might be, and how decisions were made. 

Secretary Marshall’s famous speech at Harvard on June 5 was the third great event of a fifteen-week sequence that began with Bevin’s shock tactics over Greece. Marshall had little to do with preparing the speech. He was negotiating overseas, and his undersecretary for economic affairs, Will Clayton, was also spread thin. Kennan by then had returned to Washington to direct State’s policy planning bureau. Marshall’s speech “was largely my own,” Kennan recalled. What could go wrong? 

At this point, the Treasury Department was more involved in international affairs than ever before and, from 1946–1953, it was led by John Wesley Snyder—who was both the most powerful secretary since Albert Gallatin in 1801 and Truman’s closest friend and advisor, as well as second in line to the presidency. In June 1947, Snyder additionally chaired the National Advisory Council, recently created by Congress to be the “coordinating agency for United States international financial policy.” This made him responsible for the terms of foreign loans and assistance programs. 

His lieutenant throughout was William McChesney Martin, known as the “boy wonder of Wall Street,” who’d go on in 1951 to be the longest-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve. Both men had the reputation of being “hard bankers” concerning politically motivated loans. Martin, too, sat on the Advisory Council. Ignoring them might be a bad idea. 

Paul Kennedy, who like Gaddis is part of Yale’s distinguished department of history, rhapsodizes about the launch of the Marshall Plan. Marshall’s words were crafted by “the most brilliant minds at the State Department and on its Policy Planning Staff,” he writes. He neglects the chaos that followed. 

At Harvard, Secretary Marshall had unwittingly made an outright offer that the United States would pick up the entire relief and recovery tab for Europe. Or such was the impression as fantastic sums were quickly attached to his speech—a score, or maybe two, of billions of dollars was being bandied about in the press, on Capitol Hill and in Europe (for a country with a gdp of $250 billion). Meanwhile, stock markets were plunging. To Snyder and Martin, the dangerous confusion was due to a certain cluelessness at the middle rung of the State Department about how the country actually worked. 

Fortunately, Marshall and Snyder were close. Officials could be startled to hear them using first names, which the austere general did with only four or five intimates. Yet three weeks after the Harvard speech, Snyder slammed on the brakes. The United States was still burdened by war debt, and no one knew if the Depression had been licked. To imply that Washington could meet open-ended outlays for goods and services overseas, he told the nation, jeopardized the U.S. economy. Any such enormous undertaking required cautious, knowledgeable preparation. 

Truman had to intervene the next day, on June 26, at a press conference. He agreed with both his two most senior cabinet secretaries. But Moscow had gotten the jump by igniting a campaign to persuade stunned European observers that the Americans were packing up for home as they had after World War I. Moreover, Congress now had excellent reason to fear a spending spree. It wouldn’t allow the Marshall Plan to be run by State no matter what the Bureau of the Budget might recommend; and it would tightly control the money, with major restrictions—like requiring Western Europe’s recipient nations to unite. 

All histories of the Marshall Plan ignore this turmoil. Instead, readers encounter the usual tale of brilliant diplomatic minds at work and maybe some new anecdotes from the archives. Big incidents meanwhile get missed, like Averell Harriman, who ran the Marshall Plan in Europe, not being allowed by the British to attend meetings of the sixteen recipients. The Foreign Office, observed Walter Lippmann, intended to “sabotage” Congress’s demand for a European federation, which is an insight of some interest today.

HISTORICALLY INCLINED journalists have heroized Acheson, Harriman, Kennan and lawyer John J. McCloy—whom Snyder designated president of the World Bank in March 1947 and kept on a tight rein—as the “Wise Men,” along with two other luminaries, Charles Bohlen and Robert Lovett. Yet the notion of six highborn wasps from the best schools rebuilding the world is misleading. For instance, Snyder—without college, like Truman—had tremendous clout, whereas Bohlen had little influence under Truman. Acheson, in turn, was no “lifelong Anglophile,” and three of these six were anything but aristocratic. A graver mistake is to believe that anyone in Washington was fashioning cohesive policies. 

Today, the desperate improvisations of these fateful months—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and Kennan’s articulation of “containment”—are described as the formation of a “strategy,” or even of a “grand strategy,” as by Gaddis. But this view doesn’t fit, even when adding in the North Atlantic Treaty two years later.

 The underpinnings of a strategy must have as few contradictions as possible. All the entities engaged need to be coordinated and aware of the others’ necessities. Stepping higher, a grand strategy entails unifying long-term ends with the most broad-based means. In a constitutional nation, it involves conciliating and encouraging those who form the currents of national opinion and energy. Significantly, it takes time and knowledge to formulate a grand strategy, or at least be aware of the many steps underway. In 1947 there wasn’t any time, or so it seemed.

Instead, the sequence of Truman Doctrine-Marshall Plan-Containment was just shy of winging it. The American public was up for little of this. Emergencies were being met with a mélange of tactics and with minimal long-term perspective. There was little interconnectedness—witness the difficulties between State and Treasury. Not least, had these efforts been brought under any strategic direction, the U.S. armed forces would not have been kept on a shoestring.

In 1948, orders from the Pentagon underscored this fact. 

Democratic Czechoslovakia fell to a Communist coup in February, and the nation’s foreign minister, well known to official Washington, was soon murdered. It’s incorrect to say, with Benn Steil, that “Marshall was unmoved” by either outrage. On the contrary, Marshall evoked “the high-handed procedure of the Nazi regime,” and his words rang coast-to-coast. The year-long Berlin Blockade, which Stalin imposed, followed in June.

Yet all historians who examine these events miss an essential point: the scattered and shrinking number of remaining gis in Europe (around eighty thousand, with twelve combat-ready tanks) had been ordered the previous August not to retaliate should the Red Army blitz to the English Channel, as was widely feared. They could fight only if the Russians hit the U.S. occupation zone in Germany. That was unlikely: the quickest route to the Channel would be through the British zone to the north, which bordered Holland and Belgium. The Americans, as in 1941, weren’t about to go to war unless they were attacked directly. 

As tensions rose with Moscow, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to worry Russia’s war plans might be counting on another such “fatal delay.” A month after November’s presidential election, Truman finally rescinded the order. The Joint Chiefs hoped his decision would give “notice to Russia and to the world that we are allied to Britain and will readily come to her defense,” but the National Security Council insisted the authorization be kept secret. 

When told correctly, the story of these years is one of enduring American insularity, which also has insights for today. Main Street was so cautious about politico-military ties that few people risked stating the North Atlantic Treaty would be ratified after it was signed in April 1949. Its very name, the North Atlantic Treaty, was a concession to lingering isolationism. It was necessary to emphasize the security of the defending ocean, the Atlantic, and not of the sinful continent, Europe. 

No U.S. troops would ever be garrisoned in Europe, pledged the Truman administration. That the country had slid into recession by early spring added to restraint. The scary thing about recessions is there’s no telling how deep they’ll go. The return of the 1930s seemed at hand. 

Scholars of diplomatic history pay little attention to economics, even if they happen to be trained as economists, and the epic near-smashup of the Western economies in 1949 is today unknown. The savviest of policymakers, such as Walter F. George, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and twice chairman of Foreign Relations, expected what was slouching on stage to be worse than the crash of 1929. 

Twenty years later, in summer 1949, Britain faced financial calamity, and this time, “bankruptcy” not only looked real but also might encompass that half of the non-communist world which used sterling as a reserve currency. Britain’s collapse would ruin fragile European economies before the North Atlantic allies had time to build themselves an “organization.” Worse would follow. “If Britain goes down, we’ll go down, too, in a matter of months,” said the exceedingly influential Senator George.

Snyder and Martin were visiting U.S. Treasury offices in Europe that July. As the crisis erupted, Acheson claims in his memoir, Snyder “flew back like a modern Paul Revere crying ‘The British are coming!’” But Snyder did no such thing. He and Martin coolly held meetings in London and spent two more weeks completing their work in Europe’s capitals. Such hyperbole adds to the fun of Acheson’s acclaimed Present at the Creation but keeps muddying the record.

Fortunately, Acheson and Snyder got along well. By 1968, they’d co-author an essay on party politics. They reflected wryly on themselves during this era. “All of us in the Cabinet knew who the whipping boys were,” they chortled. “We were.” Each had abrasions with Congress and the press. 

Stakes were immense. That’s why President Truman decided that Snyder, his widely respected Treasury secretary, rather than Acheson, would conduct negotiations with the British—and would do so from within the State Department. 

In all his writings on the early Cold War, Kennan’s biographer, Professor Gaddis, uses only four words to identify Secretary of the Treasury John Wesley Snyder, and does so just once. He is described as “a Missouri political crony” of Truman’s. However, Gaddis is parroting Kennan who, in his memoir, moves from opinion about Snyder to fabrication.

Right before the negotiations began, Undersecretary of State James Webb, a White House favorite, told Kennan why Snyder was placed in charge. “There was no one in Washington who knew the British like Snyder,” the president had explained to him that morning. Nonetheless, Kennan writes that Truman’s decision was due to “obscure reasons of domestic politics,” though Webb had explicitly said otherwise.

Since the war, Snyder had in fact developed fine relations with Britain’s leaders. Unlike Acheson, he had affection for the Mother Country. Moreover, Webb added, in trying to mollify the prickly Kennan, Truman hadn’t quite taken to Acheson whom he found “austere and aloof.” Webb’s remarks exist in Kennan’s unpublished papers but have gone unnoticed.

Kennan wrote about these seismic negotiations in his memoir, and documents show everything he says to be false. He was also backchanneling to Foreign Office contacts that Snyder had been given the chair “for reasons of political expedience,” but his intrigues changed nothing. On August 31, Foreign Secretary Bevin and his top team of negotiators embarked from Southampton, and Bevin told the press they were “probably on one of the most important missions in history.” No one in the West disagreed.

Snyder sat at the head of the table with Acheson in the middle during the Sterling-Dollar Talks of mid-September. For three days, and several weeks after, Snyder navigated the two countries through what could have been political/military/economic/financial catastrophe. Kennan was barely involved, but his memoir says that, despite all the cronyism and politicking he had to endure, the U.S. government ended up following his advice “with the greatest fidelity in all the practical aspects of the talks.” Gaddis, for his part, elaborates on this in Kennan’s biography. “Acheson,” he concludes, “was grateful to Kennan for having rescued the British negotiations from the Anglophobic Snyder.” A careful reader is puzzled by this judgment, but then discovers Gaddis’s sole reference is an assertion by Kennan.

BY SEPTEMBER 1949, Acheson was easing Kennan out of the policy-planning directorship. He had many reasons, including Kennan’s habit of leaking to the press, which became so severe as to get Bevin’s attention. Kennan’s departure wasn’t “self-propelled,” as even the astute biographer Robert Beisner concludes. Pink slips aren’t handed out in such roles, and a dismissal can be hidden behind soothing words.

Kennan, however, still had a task to complete, which he handled reluctantly: he needed to conduct the first interagency meeting of a huge effort that would produce a top-secret National Security Council report for President Truman. Snyder and Acheson had initiated this study because the financial crisis, a Soviet atomic weapons test and China’s collapse had just all occurred at once. What were U.S. national security objectives, and how might those objectives, lots of them involving London, be affected by the future of the British Empire? 

Work began on September 1.

Apparently, historians haven’t read this study, judging from the absence of citations. But it’s in the archives with detailed supporting materials (NSC 68, a staple of Cold War literature, is a spinoff). That neglect is unfortunate, because consensus across the top echelons of State, Defense, Treasury and the cia was profound, as shown once NSC 75 landed on Truman’s desk in mid-July 1950. 

By then, NSC 75 was prosaically titled British Military Commitments. It concluded that the British Empire had done no liquidating or giving up; this enormous entity had instead evolved after 1945. There was no “abandonment of the Indian subcontinent,” as Kennedy writes: the world’s largest democracy and the largest Muslim state were (apparently) now within Britain’s tightknit alliance structure, which made it all the stronger. Moreover, the costs of “replacing” the British Empire’s globe-girdling commitments would be “uncountable”; and Americans weren’t prepared to do so anyway, NSC 75 continued. London’s financial crises seemed resolved, and its assertions that the Empire and Commonwealth were as daunting as ever, with an A-bomb soon to come, sounded plausible.

NSC 75 mostly examined the world beyond Europe. It assessed the Middle East, of course, and saw an ongoing British politico-military presence. There’s no conception that, during 1948, Britain “cut and ran” in Palestine, as yet another historian, Niall Ferguson argues, using today’s heated Middle East-related argot: Britain had skirted a snake pit and NSC 75 showed the sprawling ally to be dominating Jordan, Iraq, essentially all of Egypt, the Gulf, Iran and much else.

America was at war in Korea when NSC 75 was completed in July 1950, and in October, U.S. troops and un allies would cross the 38th Parallel and thrust to the border of China. Then the jaws of history’s biggest ambush snapped shut.

The best that can be said is South Korea was rescued from an attack by Stalin and Kim Il-sung at a cost of 5,394 Americans dead. Yet the counter-invasion into North Korea was a fiasco that resulted in the deaths of 28,345 more Americans. 

France and Britain—and increasingly the United States—saw a common battlefront against Sino-Soviet Communism from the Korean Peninsula down through Indochina to the British Federation of Malaya. Thankfully, Malaya hadn’t vanished or been given up, because its hard currency exports amounted to no less than one-seventh the value of all U.S. exports. Malaya was central to Britain’s economy and, thereby, to the recovery of the other Marshall Plan nations. Yet since 1947, Malaya had been besieged by communist insurrection. Relentlessly, Washington heard from the British that Malaya’s best line of defense was along the Mekong River in Indochina, where French colonial rule was withering before the Viet Minh. 

Given how much about the world of 1945–1950 is misunderstood, it’s unlikely that chronicles of America’s early slide into Vietnam would be better informed. One example suffices. 

From 1946 into 1955, Britain’s Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, Malcolm MacDonald, was his country’s most important figure east of Dover, it was said in Whitehall. Based in Singapore, he was one of the “two Macs” of East Asia (the other being General MacArthur, whom MacDonald consulted when in Japan for his own meetings with the emperor). The fate of Malaya was inseparable from whatever befell Indochina, MacDonald insisted, and from 1948 onward, U.S. leaders and opinionmakers trundled to Singapore to seek guidance from “the wise man of Asia,” as he was known to Time, Inc. Just a few of them included Governor Thomas Dewey (titular head of the Republican Party), Congressman John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, Richard Nixon and Adlai Stevenson, columnist Joseph Alsop, publisher Barry Bingham, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Cardinal Francis Spellman, who was called “the Powerhouse” for his influence on American politics. Every top U.S. commander responsible for Asia and the Pacific went to MacDonald’s Singapore headquarters as well. 

MacDonald was the only senior Western official who was on the scene in Southeast Asia for those nearly ten critical years, drafting dispatches for the novice U.S. ambassador in Saigon (once the post was established) and profoundly influencing the Americans. No French politician or general, no American congressman or admiral, comes close to having his impact on the U.S. decisions that led America step by step into Vietnam. Perhaps that can be debated, but to write an 864-page book about the origins of America’s war in Vietnam, as Logevall did, and not know of MacDonald, with nary a mention, is like an historian writing of the early days of America’s war against Japan without noticing Douglas MacArthur.

A U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group soon arrived in Vietnam, but the expressway kept going beyond Saigon, and it went onward to Baghdad and Kabul. 

THE CORRECTIONS above are just a sample for 1945–1950 but oblige us to ask why leading students of diplomatic history get so much wrong. 

 First is the temptation to write backward. Because America has long been a superpower, it’s easy to assume it became one right after history’s greatest war. Because of its industrial heft and atomic monopoly, surely it could affect events in vast colonized “developing” lands. Similarly, because the British Empire ended sometime after the war, and because of Britain’s financial crises, the Empire must have been “liquidated” in the thousand days after August 1945 due to “destruction at home” as America took over. Another eminent professor of history, Andrew Roberts, distills prevailing wisdom in an essay titled “Becoming the World’s Policeman.” An “exhausted Great Britain,” he writes, “handed on the baton to the United States,” and did so in 1947. Fantasies of batons and policing derive largely from that year’s over-the-top American headlines and from a hyperbolic bestseller of 1955, by which time the jig truly was about up for colonial Britain (The Fifteen Weeks: A Dramatic and Revealing Account, from Inside the Government, of the Momentous Days in Which We Assumed World Leadership). Why go deeper? 

Second, Pulitzer-winning memoirs by Dean Acheson and George Kennan have dazzled historians as well as journalists. Acheson’s embellishments are generally harmless, and his friends joked about what he’d left out. Kennan’s memoirs are different because of their grave, self-serving distortions, starting with the word count of his telegram. His exaggerated reputation comes from literary men and women—like professors and pundits—who make false assumptions about one of their own. Because Kennan himself proved to be such a good historian and essayist after leaving the government in 1953, he must have excelled while in office. So he stays an unimpeachable source. In contrast, John Wesley Snyder, like his friend Marshall, never wrote a memoir and kept the press at a civil distance. 

Third, few writers of American foreign relations are familiar with business, economics or technology. Or they become distracted by big-picture politico-military dramas. It’s unusual to delve, say, into the dusty details of the U.S. Treasury Department, which can be trickier to grasp. At the same time, historians get themselves entangled with contemporary affairs, like “national security” which has become as much an academic field as a field of practice. Both fields, however, are heavy on opinion (i.e., What might deter Iran?), and less so on rigor like physics or languages. Faculty members are seduced by the excitements of “security studies”—advising government, editorializing on TV—at the price of lasting scholarship. Roberts, for example, made himself a persuasive voice in 2003 for the policing of Iraq, including in the ears of President George W. Bush; Gaddis, while directing Yale’s international security program, concluded a year after the invasion that “the various parts of the strategy interconnect with each other in a fairly impressive way.”

Except Americans rarely do strategy, as four failed wars might indicate. Historians should know it and blow the whistle. 

What passes for considered policy is instead a twisting sequence of ad hoc decisions hammered out under the stresses of sudden foreign urgencies and heavily politicized responses. Why would it be otherwise given America’s freewheeling mode of policymaking, particularly in foreign affairs?

Meanwhile, legends of wisemen and a foreign policy golden age remain. President Kennedy’s “action intellectuals,” as described by journalist Theodore White, would regard themselves as heirs. After the Cold War, with America as the sole superpower, it wasn’t hard to assume we could remake the world, or at least “realign” and “transform the Middle East,” with a “dream team” War Cabinet in place. A certified wise man like Kissinger provided guidance in the runup to Iraq, as he has done recently about Afghanistan. “Munich!” reverberates in cries for action and the use of analogies—a primitive way to reference history—becomes part of the national style of policymaking. Huge and amorphously expanding objectives are rationalized. Every crisis heralds the next hinge moment of fate.

Disregarding the history of our opponents enables a deputy secretary of defense (formerly a professor of international relations at Johns Hopkins) to explain in 2004 that any differences between Sunni and Shia in Iraq were “exaggerated.” Vagueness about the past encourages us to believe in quick, easy high-tech solutions like computer-laden netcentric capacities in today’s forever wars. Is much said that helicopters were also expected to provide an easy win in Vietnam, like B-29 Superfortress bombers were in North Korea? America’s insularity is also forgotten as we exaggerate our ability to affect faraway places, which we don’t bother to understand. 

Ultimately, an explicit desire “to look forward as opposed to looking backward,” which President Barack Obama preferred, results in Americans forgetting their worst behaviors. Officials who, after 9/11, practiced torture in the service of the United States weren’t held to account, and now remain in the talent pool for high appointments. Another Johns Hopkins professor, Eliot Cohen, who writes on contemporary U.S. history and also held high office following 9/11, reflects on what he calls “lesser forms of torture,” such as waterboarding. He believes, despite all evidence, that it “probably yielded useful information.”

Historians of American foreign relations—like many journalists who write of war and national security since 1945—have succumbed to intellectual lethargy, much like Washington’s foreign policy community has succumbed. The callings of history and “national security” become intertwined, and not to the advantage of historical integrity. Mistakes of fact about how we got from there to here prove impervious to correction. So, choose any predicament that Washington labels a “crisis” and watch habits unfurl—many of which stem from misremembering what America lived through not long before.

Derek Leebaert is author of Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan, among other books. He was a founding editor of International Security and is a cofounder of the National Museum of the U.S. Army.