By Andrew Latham
The threat of nuclear Armageddon hangs over the war in Ukraine today as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago. And that has prompted some in the commentariat to call for President Biden to handle his adversary in the Kremlin in 2022 the way President Kennedy handled his in 1962. They assume or assert, in other words, that the situation now is analogous to the one then. And that being the case, they further argue that the president of the United States today should employ the same basic approach as his predecessor back then. If the situations are analogous, the logic runs, what worked then should work now.
The problem is, this is not only a faulty analogy, but also a downright dangerous one.
Now, I readily concede that analogies have their place. But analogical arguments can also be profoundly misleading and, in the geopolitical domain at least, very dangerous indeed.
They can be misleading in that they are sometimes faulty or false. Such flawed analogies can involve likening one case to another when the differences between the two outweigh the similarities. Similarly, they can involve treating one version of a historical case as objective history when in fact there are multiple, competing versions of the narrative, any of which could lead to quite different conclusions about the contemporary case. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, analogies can be fatally flawed in that they may be based on a historical fantasy or myth rather than the objective historical record.
This piece was originally published in The Hill on October 31, 2022. Read more HERE.