The Red Cell Project
The Red Cell series is published in collaboration with The National Interest. Drawing upon the legacy of the CIA’s Red Cell—established following the September 11 attacks to avoid similar analytic failures in the future—the project works to challenge assumptions, misperceptions, and groupthink with a view to encouraging alternative approaches to America’s foreign and national security policy challenges.
It is a sign of our times that both the study of history in U.S. schools and universities and history as a profession are in serious decline. The major powers are ignoring historical experiences altogether in formulating policies or abusing them and manufacturing fictional versions. Three generations after WW2, the lessons from the Great Depression, the Cold War, the unification of Europe, and even the more recent dot.com bubble appear to have faded from decision-makers’ memories. This represents the tyranny of the present and the risk of Western governments making the same mistakes again.
The troubling consequences of this culture of ahistoricism are that the invaluable lessons of historical experience seem largely absent from current economic, geopolitical, and technological decision-makers in the U.S. and elsewhere. The use and abuse of history is, of course, not new. For centuries, governments, for purposes of legitimacy, nationalist bolstering, and mythmaking, have made forgetfulness of past lessons their standard fare. When they do remember, the lessons they choose obliterate all others. For Serbs, all security emergencies are seen through the 1389 Battle of Kosovo; for modern China, it’s the “century of humiliation” that remains the obsession 75 years after it ended. History is often misused to rationalize irredentist claims, whether it was Hitler over Sudetenland, or for Vladimir Putin, Ukraine and the “near abroad.”
A deficit in understanding history and culture has led to underestimating others’ nationalism, a big factor in failed post-WW2 U.S. foreign policies. On Vietnam, the U.S. discounted the fact that despite being split, North and South Vietnamese people had a common homeland and saw the U.S. as another invader like the French, who they fought for seven years and ejected, and even China with whom Vietnam had a 1,000-year history of conflict. Washington would have done better to support Vietnamese independence, something Ho Chi Minh, who worked with the OSS during WW2, requested in a letter to President Harry Truman. Ignoring Vietnamese nationalism and getting mentally stuck on domino theory explains why warnings by the State Department’s Asia hands were discounted, and Washington thought it could bomb Hanoi into submission.
Similarly in Iraq, flawed assumptions that Iraqis would welcome U.S. occupiers as liberators and ill-conceived analogies to the successful U.S. occupation and democratization of Germany and Japan after WW2 led to a catastrophic outcome for the over-confident Bush administration.. Warnings from Middle East hands in and out of government were disregarded. Many sought to explain Iraq’s complexity, pointing out that democracy would result in the Shia majority suppressed by Saddam Hussein becoming the first Shia government in the Arab world since the Fatamid dynasty was overthrown in 1171, and that this would all but certainly increase Iranian influence. Ignored was the British experience, T.E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and the fiasco of London trying to impose a colonial system in the 1920s.
In stark contrast to these dark episodes, the international system created from the ashes of WW2 was shaped by fresh, painful memories of the failure of Wilsonian idealism during WW1 and the beggar-thy-neighbor trade and financial policies of the 1930s. The Bretton Woods system (the IMF, World Bank, and General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs trade system), the United Nations, NATO, and U.S. alliances in Asia that helped enable 80 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity were animated by the understanding of failed inter-war policies. The system was designed precisely to institutionalize relatively open trade, financial stability, and collective security that, in the following decades, led to the rise from the ashes of Europe, Asian Tigers, and China. There were certainly flaws, but in the 80 years since, the great powers avoided another world war.
In this protracted moment of interregnum between a decomposing neoliberal order whose rules, norms, and institutions are fast dissipating, and huge uncertainty about what comes next, a disregard of history’s lessons by policymakers may be leading to dangerous outcomes. Many of the mistakes of the past can be discerned in current foreign and technological policy trends that are reshaping the world.
Risks of Ignoring History
Major War Outbreak
While many U.S. policymakers see a repeat of Hitler’s rise and European appeasement at Munich with an expansive China and want to push back hard, they fail to see that the growing US-China rivalry has dangers of its own akin to the Anglo-German competition before WW1. Just like today, no one then wanted war, but the hostilities on both sides prevented decision-makers from finding a way to coexist or reconcile. Many Americans, including policymakers who can remember unrivaled American power after the end of the Cold War — what they thought was the “End of History” — cannot understand how Communist China could become a peer competitor. For them, China only rose illicitly.
Canadian historian of the First World War, Margaret Macmillan, has written about how the long peace after the end of the Napoleonic Wars lulled decision-makers before the First World War into thinking that a major war was impossible. In her view, a similar long period since the Second World War, coupled with the growth of globalization and the establishment of the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, is having a similar effect on today’s policymakers, who discount the possibility of war. Trump appears to have a more acute sense of the possibility of major war and its nuclear risks, accusing Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky of “gambling withWW3,” and saying nuclear weapons were horrible and that he was “working a plan for denuclearization.” But so far, he hasn’t taken the steps to dissipate Washington’s anti-China fervor nor slow the nuclear arms race.
Economic Renewal
The work of all three 2025 Nobel prize winners in economics emphasized the importance of investing in science and technology to avoid an economy from stultifying. For years, the U.S. has been a leader in research and development (R&D) investment, including basic science championed by the U.S. Government’s DARPA that ended up fueling the digital revolution, including the latest AI iteration. But Trump’s attacks on elite universities, involving the freezing of science grants along with threats against the enrollment of international students, pose a challenge to the United States’ continued science and technological leadership. The number of international student arrivals in the U.S. dropped by nearly a fifth for Fall 2025 university enrollments. Trump is substantially increasing the cost of the temporary H1B visas that tech companies have used to draw in talent from overseas.
Immigrants account for a disproportionate share of patents, especially in key strategic industries, and are more likely to start high-growth companies. Immigrants are also crucial to the functioning and viability of many graduate-level science and engineering programs. In 2021, 44% of Fortune 500 companies were established by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. The xenophobic clampdown could not come at a worse time given China’s growing investments in science and technology that have made the country a peer competitor. After the Second World War, the U.S. brought in Nazi scientists in a program called Operation Paperclip to work on rocket and missile technology. Germany’s loss was the United States’ gain. There are other historical examples of countries losing their talent, from Louis XIV’s expulsion of the Huguenots to the difficulty many developing countries have in keeping their talent at home and preventing their citizens from being enticed by opportunities abroad. America has been lucky to be the destination for much of the world’s talent.
Nuclear War
One dangerous feature of unbounded Great Power competition is the new nuclear risks related to the surge of vertical, and potentially horizontal, proliferation unfolding in a third nuclear era (US-USSR, post-Cold War, strategic competition) without arms control, one of the lessons of the Cold War. The world has gone from the Cold War-era balance of terror, to the collapse of the USSR and a post-Cold War period when the U.S. and Russia reduced their nuclear weapons by more than 80%, eliminating whole categories of missiles (e.g; INF Treaty), to an unraveling of the architecture of arms control accords. It’s unclear if New START, which set limits on numbers of nuclear weapons, will be extended when it expires in 2026.
All three major nuclear powers (the U.S., Russia, and China) are in a nascent triangular arms race. The U.S. has begun a modernization of all three legs (land, sea, air) of its nuclear triad at an estimated cost of $1.5 trillion. Russia is also modernizing its nuclear forces, and China is modernizing and rapidly expanding its nuclear forces, which the U.S. says will reach 1,000 warheads by 2030. In response to Russian and Chinese tactical nukes, the U.S. has developed its own short-range nuclear cruise missiles.
As reflected in Moscow’s threats of tactical nuclear use in Ukraine, this category of nukes has led some to consider lowering the nuclear threshold, suggesting limited nuclear war is feasible. This risks lesser nuclear powers — including North Korea, which has massively built-up its missile and nuclear capabilities, and India and Pakistan, whose nuclear rivalry continues apace — also lowering the threshold. South Korea debates the virtues of nuclear weapons while Japan is also rethinking its posture. More broadly, nuclear strategists are again “thinking-the-unthinkable,” planning to fight two major nuclear wars simultaneously. Notions of mutual assured destruction and peaceful coexistence seem all but forgotten.
Lastly, the experience of the nuclear era is a useful prism for thinking about the risks of artificial intelligence. The inventors of nuclear weapons knew, as the movie Oppenheimer dramatized, they had unleashed a new technology that could destroy humanity, feared its awesome power, and as WW2 ended, debated how to control it — whether to put it under UN or civilian control, or to share it with others.
Keeping Humans in Charge of AI
Similarly, AI is a transformational technology that can both benefit and destroy humans. AI inventors have expressed existential fears of AI’s potential. Elon Musk estimates that there is a 20% chance that AI could destroy humanity; Open AI founder Sam Altman believes it could overpower people entirely. In March 2023, Musk, along with dozens of AI scientists, signed an Open Letter calling for a pause in the training of more advanced AI systems, asking bluntly: “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us?” Yet, there remains a deficit of global norms, rules, and limits for AI. Will it take a near catastrophe before an AI equivalent of arms control accords are adopted to manage AI?
As Mark Twain famously said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” A bit more due diligence by policymakers, gleaning the lessons of the past could make it rhyme a lot less.
