Facing a chilling wind and the sun’s harsh rays, I stared straight ahead. The grave markers were arranged in a sweeping curve on the manicured grass along the 40-acre Aisne-Marne cemetery in Northern France. The cemetery contains the remains of some 3,000 American soldiers who died in the nearby area during World War I. Walking among these soldiers’ graves, I thought about the names I saw on the stones and the stories of these men who had died fighting in one of the most brutal wars in history.
I visited this cemetery and others as part of the staff ride organized by Duke’s Program in American Grand Strategy. Staff rides enable undergraduates, graduate students, professors, and alumni to engage in interactive learning by retracing a famous battle in American military history. Previous Duke staff rides have included trips to Normandy, Grenada, and Vietnam. Participants are assigned to research military and political figures and present their findings during the trip, which helps provide a nuanced understanding of competing interests and strategies at play.
This year’s staff ride over Spring Break was to Belgium and France to retrace the 1918 Spring Offensive and Hundred Days Offensive that marked the end of World War I. Hearing participants present as strategists and tacticians and question one another, as well as visiting the sites of important battles and seeing the conditions that combatants faced, provided the kind of up-close learning experience that cannot be gleaned from a textbook or lecture.
There were more than 40 million casualties in World War I, making it among the bloodiest conflicts in history. I thought about the parade of calamitous mistakes made by civilian and military leaders a century ago that led down the path to destruction at places like the Somme and Passchendaele, and what their modern-day equivalents might resemble.
The staff ride provided many lessons, but two in particular stand out. First is the value of empathy in analyzing decision-making. Deriving a single lesson from an historical event can be challenging because people internalize different lessons from different events based on their particular experiences. Learning accurate lessons from history is difficult if one is unwilling to put oneself in the shoes of historical actors—even and especially if one disagrees with those historical actors.
Empathy is particularly important in foreign policy and international relations, where understanding the motives of an adversary can mean the difference between war and peace. Believing that an enemy is maniacal and illogical can encourage military action, even though more peaceful solutions through diplomacy could be achievable. Comprehending the historical factors that motivate an autocrat to believe that his survival depends on possessing nuclear weapons can ensure the viability of a diplomatic agreement that can prevent war.
A sense of empathy was important to understanding the interests and strategies of leading figures during World War I. Walking around Versailles and listening to the presentations of participants assigned to research Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau, I began to understand how history, geography, personal background, and domestic politics shaped disagreements over reparations and a post-war order. I was assigned to research the Commander in Chief of the British Forces and gained an appreciation for how relations between political leaders and military generals can be strained by the former’s need to consider domestic opinion and the latter’s compelling military imperatives, such as the desire for more troops.
The second lesson reinforced by the trip deals with the contemporary lessons of a war that ended a century ago. In her seminal history, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman identifies the strategic failures and political miscalculations that propelled Europe to war in the summer of 1914. Tuchman effectively shows how the failure of the Great Powers to reach a diplomatic settlement and prevent war after the June 1914 assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand ultimately resulted in the outbreak of a war that in her words, “grew and spread until it drew in the nations of both hemispheres and entangled them in a pattern of world conflict no peace treaty could dissolve.”
Tuchman’s observations had particular salience as we visited the cemeteries, walked through muddy trenches, and explored the cramped tunnels where soldiers lived. Lessons from the outbreak of World War I are still relevant today. With the recent appointment of John Bolton as National Security Adviser, the prospect of war with North Korea and Iran has increased. Bolton has encouraged a preventative military strike against North Korea and recklessly wrote that “to stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran.” Bolton’s rhetoric and his career show a troubling trend of prioritizing the use of military force over diplomacy and twisting intelligence to fit his view.
There are some foreign policy wonks who counsel against being overly concerned. Obviously, fear-mongering is unproductive, or worse. After all, it is important to understand how experiences shape viewpoints, and how reasonable people disagree. Yet upon hearing Bolton’s announcement, I couldn’t help wondering if Duke would take a staff ride in 50 years to study the consequences of an ill-advised invasion of Iran or North Korea.
Policymakers face political, strategic, and military constraints, and operate in a whirlwind environment. They make mistakes. Appreciating these constraints is important to understanding why a decision went wrong. Yet, Bolton seems cavalier about learning from history. While many now refer to the Iraq war as perhaps the most disastrous foreign policy blunder in recent decades, Bolton has consistently and arrogantly continued to be proud of his mistaken endorsement of the war.
This inability to critically analyze previous decisions—especially bad ones—is troubling and deeply at odds with what we experienced on the staff ride. Seeing the vast array of tombstones at Aisne-Marne, and visiting towns that were destroyed by the fighting, made me appreciate the terrible costs of war—on both combatants and civilians. I hope that those in power can recognize the dangerous consequences of their proposals and the devastating results if their rhetoric becomes reality.
Max Labaton is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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Max Labaton is a Trinity senior and a Managing Editor of the Editorial page. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.