Republicans especially ought to be judged in part on whether they understand the Bush administration’s foreign-policy mistakes. Rubio fails all of these tests. This is illustrated by stances he takes, like his 2010 declaration that America is better off for having invaded Iraq in 2003. But it’s also evidenced by his general approach to U.S. history. He seldom if ever invokes the past as something that should complicate our understanding of the present. For Rubio, the past only confirms his ideological instincts.
.. Rubio’s look back at the Barbary pirates suffers from the same flaw as his analysis of contemporary foreign policy. He looks at every problem in isolation, as if priorities, available resources, and what can be realistically accomplished are irrelevant.
What Rubio regards as “moral clarity” and consistency in ideology are far more important to him than analytic rigor, strategic flexibility, or empirical results. The last of these failings is most clearly illustrated by Rubio’s gloss on terrorism. “During what many referred to as a ‘procurement holiday’ under the Clinton administration, we both shrank the size of our armed forces and shifted away from modernizing our inventory,” he said. “This happened just as emerging technologies were revolutionizing weapons capabilities around the world. The result was that we failed to be prepared for the challenge that revealed itself on 9/11.”
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class
Christian, who was teaching a course on Russian history, liked to examine his subjects from a number of unconventional angles. In the 19th century, “on average, 40 percent of Russia’s revenues came from vodka sales, so what I realized is that if Russians stopped drinking vodka, you can’t pay for the army, and the superpower collapses,” he told me. “So I thought, Here’s a modern government building its power by selling a mind-altering substance. I was looking at it at the fiscal level, at the treasury level — but also in the village and also in the tavern.”
Christian began wondering if he could apply this everything-is-connected idea to a larger scale: “I began thinking, Could I teach a course not of Russia but of humanity?”
.. “What this course can do, however it’s taught, is validate big questions” — How did we get here? for instance, or Where are we going? — “that are impossible to even ask within a more silo-ized education.”
.. “Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there’s nothing to build connections between the courses that they take,” says Bob Bain, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan and an adviser to the Big History Project, who has helped devise much of the curriculum. “The average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class, third-period gym class, fourth-period literature — it’s all disconnected.
.. “Instead of actually working with teachers and listening to what teachers needed to make public eduction better,” she said, Gates’s team “would work around teachers, and that created tremendous distrust.”
.. Wineburg’s deepest concern about the approach was its failure to impart a methodology to students. “What is most pressing for American high-school students right now, in the history-social-studies curriculum, is: How do we read a text? How do we connect our ability to sharpen our intellectual capabilities when we’re evaluating sources and trying to understand human motivation?” he asked. “When we think about history, what are the primary sources of Big History?
.. Big History may one day become an heir to Western Civ or World History, but that didn’t seem to be Gates’s goal; it was more personal. Really, Big History just seems like a class that he wished he could have taken in high school.
Does it help to know history?
What should, say, the advisers to Lord Grey, the British foreign secretary, have told him a century ago? Surely something like: Let’s not lose our heads; the Germans are a growing power who can be accommodated without losing anything essential to our well-being and, perhaps, shaping their direction; Serbian nationalism is an incident, not a cause de guerre; the French are understandably determined to take back Alsace-Lorraine, but this is not terribly important to us—nor to them either, really, if they could be made to see that. And the Ottoman Empire is far from the worst arrangement of things that can be imagined in that part of the world. We will not lose our credibility by failing to sacrifice a generation of our young men. Our credibility lies, exactly, in their continued happy existence.
Hitler: A Military Liability. Allies Cancelled Assassination Plans
The list could go on but the upshot is Hitler, a talented politician, was an incompetent military leader. He was so bad that there are assertions the Allies decided he was one of their greatest assets and cancelled any attempts to assassinate him.