The vagaries of history come through loud and clear in two new books from Brookings

History is a tricky thing to ignore, and it tends to repeat itself under different guises. A poignant new book, just being issued in paperback from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Brookings, distributor), is Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, by French global affairs expert Thérèse Delpech. The critics raved about this one, as Rolf Ekéus reminds us “contemporary leaders of the West {are} sleepwalking into the new century without any strategic concepts and suffering from collective historical amnesia.” Ekéus is a former UN official with experience in Iraq, and currently serves as a commissioner with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Delpech is a French academic, and director of strategic affairs with the French Atomic Energy Commission.

You might not expect a book that’s been described as philosophical, psychological, or even literary from a professor of International Relations, but this book vividly reminds us that clear warning signs were ignored, and the “civilized” world failed to prevent two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet death camps, the Cambodian killing fields, and a host of other atrocities that plagued the 20th century. Delpech warns that these things can easily happen again, and she describes various flashpoints throughout the world where violence and lawlessness could slip out of control. There’s a “fierce argument against repeating the mistakes that have led to our dire straits,” says Peter Brooks, professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Continuing with Brookings French connection, we have a new book by Hubert Védrine, author of a previous book from Brookings called France in an Age of Globalization (2001), with Dominique Moïsi, translated from the French by Philip H. Gordon, a senior fellow at Brookings. The new book is called History Strikes Back: How States, Nations and Conflicts are Shaping the 21st Century. This is also translated by Gordon, and carries a foreword by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. It was a bestseller in France. Védrine offers an overview of world politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he illustrates the pitfalls that the U.S. has experienced in their erroneous beliefs that with the collapse of the East bloc they had won a complete battle of history. Védrine thinks that the U.S. has been too bellicose in dealing with the world, and the Europeans have been too meek to overcome such daunting challenges as relations with emerging powers, managing runaway globalization, and dealing with the devastation of the environment. Nations still matter in Védrine’s brave new world, and this is a hyper-realistic look at the past, and it shows how Westerners have been misguided by illusions that globalization and free markets will ultimately make a better world for everybody. Leaders need a good tonic of history and common sense to fashion a better world, and Védrine lays out for Europeans what they can expect from the new U.S. Administration to come. He lays out his arguments with an acerbic wit and a French sensibility that will reward readers with a renewed sense of “Realpolitik.”