History, in the hands of a policymaker, can be a dangerous thing. When officials recruit the wrong historical analogy—or misinterpret an apt one—in the decision-making process, the consequences can be catastrophic. During the Vietnam War, to take one notable example, some American leaders perceived in North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh another Adolf Hitler. The comparison helped fuel the United States’ misadventures in Southeast Asia by making any accommodation in Vietnam tantamount to the notorious appeasement of the 1938 Munich Agreement. This case became a central example in Ernest May’s 1973 cautionary tale, “Lessons” of the Past. May advocated for more nuanced approaches to historical precedents and argued that analogies might be used responsibly and effectively “to point out criteria for a choice rather than to indicate what the choice ought to be.”

Thirteen years later, in 1986, May teamed up with Richard Neustadt to publish Thinking in Time, a how-to for decision-makers. Instead of searching for perfect analogies, May and Neustadt proposed, policymakers might find more success by looking for not only the similarities but also the crucial differences between the present and potential historical parallels. Building on this work, in 2016, the scholars Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson launched the Applied History Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center. “Applied history,” they explain, “is the explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing historical precedents and analogs.”

Analogy is likewise the motor of Odd Arne Westad’s The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings From History. “This world is unlike anything any of us have experienced in our lifetimes,” argues Westad, a professor at Yale and a specialist in modern international and global history. “But it does look quite a bit like the world of more than a hundred years ago, from the late nineteenth century to 1914.” This comparison—between the great-power competition that ultimately erupted in World War I and the increasingly multipolar twenty-first century, characterized by contests for regional dominance among a growing number of great (if no longer decisively super) powers—frames the book.

“China, Russia, and India,” Westad notes, “are not the only Great Powers that are gradually undoing the era of American global hegemony.” Brazil and Turkey (the latter not a great but an expanding power, according to Westad) are exerting stronger regional influence, while two “economic great powers,” Japan and the European Union, have been “increasingly supplementing their productive powers with hard power.” The book’s aim is to warn of the real and looming threat of great-power war. Westad writes that such a war would be nothing short of a “global catastrophe” and proposes that political leaders’ best chance of averting it lies in a sophisticated, historically informed mode of strategic thinking.

Westad makes readers feel the urgency of his task. Large numbers of people living “within the Great Powers believe that those who live in other Great Powers, or at least their leaders, are out to get them” and therefore think that the next war is only a matter of time. He reports high levels of “mutual suspicion,” especially between American and Chinese publics but also between those of other countries. “Two thirds of Russians believe that the war in Ukraine is a life-or-death ‘civilizational struggle’ with the West,” Westad notes, “and about the same percentage of Indians have an unfavorable or very unfavorable view of China. In Europe, a staggering three quarters of Germans and French view China unfavorably.”

Compounding today’s multipolar mistrust, Westad argues, is a widespread ignorance of the true “intensity and scale” of great-power wars and the wholesale devastation they leave behind: “Less than half of one percent of the world’s population,” Westad notes, “has experienced Great Power war.” Post–World War II generations have grown accustomed to limited (often proxy) wars, such as the Vietnam War or the Syrian civil war. Victims of these wars understand the work of violence, but publics viewing these conflicts from afar have lost the ability to imagine war as global apocalypse. Except perhaps in the movies, war in the twenty-first century has lost its epic scale. Westad brings war’s boundless horrors back into view on the book’s very first page with a........

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