The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2013 35 David Galbraith was a Rusk Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University from 2012 to 2013, and is cur- rently on a detail at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. His previous Foreign Service assignments include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Venezuela and Washington, D.C. The analysis and views offered in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the views of the Department of State. Whenever proponents of a policy cite a historical analogy as their main justification, listeners should beware. BY DAV I D GALBRA I TH THE USES OF HISTORY: LESSONS FROMA GEORGETOWNCLASSROOM T he Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Instruc- tion begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner.” My stu- dents at Georgetown University and I certainly learned together this past semester, but that did not surprise me. What I was not expecting was how applicable what I learned in the classroom is to being in the Foreign Service. I had the good fortune to spend the 2012-2013 academic year as a Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. The highlight of my fellowship was developing and teaching an undergraduate seminar on U.S. policymaking in response to the Arab Spring. I conducted the course from a practitioner’s perspective, but sought to develop more general lessons from the specific issues at hand. (I think I succeeded, at least at the macro level. One student, following a simulation of a National Secu- rity Council meeting on Syria, exclaimed: “That was a great exercise. I never realized policymaking was so f------ hard!”) One of the central questions we considered in the course was when the United States should use force, with Libya and Syria as case studies. On the surface, there are many similari- ties. Both countries were run by unfriendly dictators, and threatened by humanitarian catastrophes (which have come to pass in one). But I also sought to tease out the many dif- ferences between the two, exploring why President Barack Obama chose to intervene militarily in Libya but not (at least directly) in Syria. The students did an excellent job of identifying these con- trasts, ranging from terrain and demography to geopolitical complexity and the nature of the regime. Historical analogies frequently came up in the conversation: Rwanda, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. But I didn’t let the class dwell on them. For their final papers, I asked the students to write a memo FEATURE