The Eighth Annual Ernest May Memorial Lecture

Stuart Chair in International Studies

Dickinson College

Iam very honored to have my name linked to Professor Ernest May, who personified the engaged academic. One of Professor May’s most important insights was that, whether one is a scholar attempting to explain a specific foreign policy decision or a policy maker engaged in the formulation of foreign policy, it helps to think of time as a stream—in which carefully selected lessons from the past inform the discussion of current issues and help shape plans for the future.1 But Professor May would also have been the first to admit that this is easier said than done. One big problem that both analysts and policy makers confront when they attempt to derive lessons from the past is deciding how far back one needs to go to make sense of any contemporary situation. We might call this the challenge of infiite regress. How far back do we have to go to explain the Obama administrations pivot to Asia? To the debates surrounding the Truman administration’s decision to create a network of military alliances in the Pacific in 1951? To Teddy Roosevelt’s deployment of the Great White Fleet in 1907? To the geostrategic arguments of Admiral Mahan in favor of the Open Door to Asia in the late nineteenth century?

There have been a few instances in American history, however, where there is no doubt about how far back we need to go, because a specific event or decision clearly served as the starting point for a new era in U.S. foreign policy. One such event was the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This single incident set in motion a series of debates and investigations—including 25,000 pages of congressional testimony—which culminated in the development of a new networ