Analogies at War

From World War I to Operation Desert Storm, American policymakers have repeatedly invoked the "lessons of history" as they contemplated taking their nation to war. Do these historical analogies actually shape policy, or are they primarily tools of political justification? Yuen Foong Khong argues that leaders use analogies not merely to justify policies but also to perform specific cognitive and information-processing tasks essential to political decision-making. Khong identifies what these tasks are and shows how they can be used to explain the U.S. decision to intervene in Vietnam. Relying on interviews with senior officials and on recently declassified documents, the author demonstrates with a precision not attained by previous studies that the three most important analogies of the Vietnam era--Korea, Munich, and Dien Bien Phu--can account for America's Vietnam choices. A special contribution is the author's use of cognitive social psychology to support his argument about how humans analogize and to explain why policymakers often use analogies poorly.

In terms of methodology, Khong make good use of interviews with participants of the decision-making process, in particular, George Ball and also memoirs of former statesmen for his analysis.

The strength of the book lies in explaining how the option to escalate the war in Vietnam was arrived; through analogical reasoning by various participants of the decision-making process. Secondly, the form it took: the "slow squeeze" or incrementalism based on the last "lesson of history" of U.S. involvement in Korea. In short, Khong utilising the process tracing method, clearly links the decision- making process to the implementation/outcome of U.S. foreign policy.

The weakness of the book is not that it does not consider other views why the U.S. was drawn into the Vietnam owing to "containment", "domino-theory" and U.S. credibility. Rather the author misses out on possible "reconciliation" between the analogical reasoning approach with that of the U.S. national interest approach.

Nevertheless, a must read for those interested in other approaches to explain why U.S. escalated it's involvement in Vietnam apart from the "realist" paradigm and those interested in decision-making processes!