By: Martin Makaryan

Edited By: Aakrith Harikumar

The SAIS International Staff Ride for Spring 2024 took us to France and the United Kingdom where a realization I had been contemplating for a while, crystallized in front of my eyes. 

We learn history wrong. We grow up learning history in a context and tone that seeks to direct us politically. In many countries, the teaching of history is based on dangerous simplifications of the complicated web of events, personalities, and decisions that make up the actual history. These simplifications are often deliberate, aimed at whitewashing undesired parts of history and reinforcing certain beliefs. All of this is a political choice. 

I have been contemplating this realization since I was in middle school. The fact that I immigrated to the United States in 2017 gave me an even better opportunity to think about the weaponization of history for political purposes. Going to college in California allowed me to think about historiography and the methodology of teaching history comparatively. The longer I spent in the academic realm while also exploring contentious historical topics on my own, the more I realized how gray history is.

What does this seemingly abstract argument have anything to do with a week-long spring break trip organized by the SAIS Merrill Center for Strategic Studies? Well, a lot. 

Every year, the Merrill Center organizes domestic and international staff rides—essentially an academic and fun remake of the staff rides that the military conducts for officers to study battle tactics and strategy—with students eager to study different battles in history in an interactive format. Every student is assigned a historical character from the era to do research about and present a 5-10 minute stand to answer a key question. The program is designed so that the sequence of presentations and the historical places visited come together to tell a coherent story and make students reflect on the most challenging questions, such as what guided the thinking of military or political leaders during a conflict or how we can learn from past mistakes to chart the right course today.

This year, the International Staff Ride took SAIS students, faculty, and special guests on a trip to study the Battle of Britain, Nazi Germany’s unsuccessful but massive air campaign from July to September 1940 to achieve air superiority over Britain. To set the scene, we first arrived in Dunkirk in Northern France, where the massive evacuation of British forces came to symbolize the fall of continental Western Europe to Hitler’s army at the beginning of WWII. 

In Dunkirk, I gave my stand. An important reason I wanted to go on the staff ride was understanding the dynamics within the British government regarding policy-making—something that resonates with several global crises today. I wanted to learn how Winston Churchill, now remembered as a fierce war hero who led Britain to victory, navigated the challenging moment when France was about to fall. 

I knew that my character would have something to do with British political or military leadership since I had explained my reasoning in the application. But little did I know that I would be assigned to portray the infamous British Foreign Secretary and a close ally of even more infamous former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—Edward Wood, Lord of Halifax. People also called him “Holy Fox” for his religiosity and love for hunting. 

Lord Halifax, who refused to lead the country after Chamberlain’s resignation and paved the way for Churchill to take power, was a staunch advocate for making peace with Germany. He was convinced that should France fall, Britain was next and that a scenario in which Britain faced Nazi Germany alone was too risky for the preservation of the British empire and the territorial integrity of the island nation. Between May 25 and 28, the British war cabinet held the most contentious meetings in which Halifax and Churchill battled to decide whether Britain would stay in the war or pursue negotiations with Hitler. 

Halifax lost the political fight as Churchill swayed the rest of the government to support his decision. Eventually, as the Luftwaffe’s air campaign was ravaging Britain, Halifax would turn more hawkish. But, as of late May when France’s fall was imminent, he was convinced that only through negotiations could Britain avoid destruction. That put him on the pedestal of appeasers along with Chamberlain, reducing his position to that of a mere defeatist or capitulant. 

I was tasked with speaking as Halifax and making the case for why we [the British government] should seek Italian mediation to strike a deal with Hitler. It was a challenging task: I disagreed with the position and was sure to face an audience who was equally if not more averse to such a position. Not only did Halifax’s position run contrary to the established orthodoxy about WWII today, but the very term appeasement has returned as the label of ad hoc attacks in many foreign policy debates today. 

But in crafting my arguments and seeking to understand  Halifax’s rationale, I came to find more on someone else: Churchill himself. In examining the war cabinet debates of that time, I learned that Churchill did not fully disagree with Halifax’s reasoning. I also discovered new angles, including personal ones, that pushed Halifax to advocate for negotiations at a time when British society was divided over Britain’s commitment to the war effort. 

During the staff ride, contemporary parallels from Ukraine to China were part of our everyday discussions as we sought to make sense of the lessons that the Battle of Britain taught us. In an interview for a piece in a previous edition, Professor Thomas Mahnken who helps run the staff ride told me, “Staff rides show that decisions were made by imperfect humans,” and that the program is meant to teach us “strategic empathy.” Strategic empathy is often missing in the classroom—both in schools and universities—because we cannot truly answer the “why” questions if we come with our preconditions, prejudices, and ideas of what happened and why. In my case, the staff ride helped me examine England’s “darkest hour” from the perspective of a figure largely forgotten or almost universally condemned as an “appeaser.” 

But more importantly, the lack of strategic empathy dehumanizes history. We start seeing leaders, historical figures, and regular people as abstract, not actual people who lived, thought, erred, changed their opinions, or fell sick. Our selection bias pushes us to cling to certain actions or ideas that a figure did or harbored and we instinctively or deliberately dismiss the ones that do not fit the narrative we want to push. 

And if we seek to take lessons from history to apply to contemporary problems in world affairs, how can we ensure that we are not drawing the lessons we want to draw, but the real lessons that can make us wiser and more successful in dealing with today’s problems? How can we ensure we do not turn into President Vladimir Putin and go on a 30-minute personal account of a millennium to fit our agenda? Putin is by no means the only one to do that: Washington is also full of those for whom selective history is their sword for the crusades they wish to embark on. That is a tough challenge indeed and the reason I am not planning to become a historian.