I recently came upon a jarring quote by a distinguished international relations scholar, starkly describing politics, policy, and decision-making in the United States:
It may appear banal to assert once again that America is in the throes of a crisis—or rather a series of crises—more threatening to its survival as a civilized society and a liberal, democratic polity than any previous ones have been. Yet the government, whose legitimacy rests upon its willingness and ability to protect us from the dangers that threaten us, prefers manipulating the politics of these dangers to confronting their substance. . . . The government [has raised] “neglect” . . . to a maxim of statecraft—and substitute[d] rhetoric and repression for effective substantive policies.
Is this a quote about the political behavior and grand strategy pursued by the current Trump administration? In fact, these are the words of the great scholar of world politics, Hans Morgenthau, writing about the United States in The New York Review of Books in February 1971.1 Morgenthau was right to be worried about America over a half-century ago. While rewatching Ken Burns’s outstanding documentary series The Vietnam War, I was vividly reminded of how deeply polarized and angry American politics were when Morgenthau wrote those lines, and how unpromising American prospects appeared.2 No one could have imagined that two decades later, the Cold War would be over, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the United States military triumphant over Iraq after less than a week of fighting, while a technology-driven boom would transform the global economy.
To be clear, I highlight Morgenthau’s passage not to sane-wash contemporary politics and foreign policy, or to say to my worried friends that over time things that look terrible today will turn out fine. There are more than enough reasons to be worried. Few Americans observing the nation and the world in, say, 1927, or even 2000, had any sense of the traumas that were to follow in the years and decades ahead. In a document shared with President George W. Bush, which laid out thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, then–Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Linton Wells pointed out that we have no idea where the future is going: “If you had been a security policy-maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age old enemy, France.” After going through a series of similar puzzles every decade, Wells concluded, “I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly.”3 Indeed, five months later saw the 9/11 attacks on the United States, which transformed the priorities and trajectory of the nation. The simple fact is that neither Wells nor anyone else knew what was coming, nor do we today.
Morganthau’s and Wells’s quotes intrigue me because they highlight the challenge of undertaking contemporary history. We are understandably eager to make sense of and navigate the complex and confusing world we see around us. To do so, we often construct historical narratives, even if we are employing other social science methods or tools. These “stories,” though, explicitly (or more often implicitly) reveal our thoughts about who or what matters and why things are happening. As hard as this is to do for the past, however, practicing “regular” history has several advantages that attempting to undertake contemporary history—that is, crafting the narrative in real time—does not. First, we pursue regular history years, decades, or centuries removed from the event, subject, or phenomenon, which allows for better perspective. With the passage of time, we have a better sense of which events and phenomena mattered in the outcomes we care about, and which turn out to be less important. Crafting history in real time makes it harder to drain the emotion and to look at events objectively, removed from our own passions and personal commitments. Second, when we undertake traditional history, we usually know how the story we are telling has turned out. The most compelling stories have interconnected beginnings, middles, and ends, with the conclusion of the narrative set in motion by events or actors on the early pages. In real time, the future is unknowable, and our grasp at where we are going is tenuous at best. How can we tell convincing contemporary histories when we don’t know how the story ends?
You would think that these daunting circumstances would induce humility and caution among analysts and practitioners of international affairs making critical choices in real time, but as Jeffrey Friedman reveals in his study in this journal, “The World Is More Uncertain Than You Think: Assessing and Combating Overconfidence Among 2,000 National Security Officials,” the opposite is the case. Decision-makers (and, as psychologist Phil Tetlock has demonstrated, scholars and analysts)4 are overly confident in their predictions and in the stories they tell to back them up, despite a consistently unimpressive track record of being right. Friedman wisely suggests practical ways decision-makers can tame and redirect their overconfidence. One worries, however, that larger sociocultural incentives reward even unearned confidence and dismiss epistemological modesty. As a species, humans aren’t big on punishing the cocky and rewarding the humble, especially in politics.
I thought about both the appeal and dangers of overconfidence not long ago as I reread E. H. Carr’s “classic,” The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939. Ask around, and you’ll find it is one of those books everyone says is great and foundational; indeed, it is held up as a canonical text for realism, next to Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations. Rereading the first edition, however, I was less impressed. It is a ponderous and not especially well-written or organized book that somehow manages to be both too theoretical and not theoretical enough. Carr’s caricature of President Woodrow Wilson and the United States was a straw man, while his underplaying of Soviet ideology and advice to appease Nazi Germany were unwise. Carr was an unpleasant person, even by academic standards. As for the field of international relations (IR) scholars that worshipped him, Carr—who considered himself a historian—“seemed to ignore the discipline altogether, even suggesting at one point that he wished he had nothing to do with the launching of IR in the first place.”5 What explains the continued popularity of the book in a field he looked down on?6 I have two guesses. First, Carr is confident, even cocky, in his own verdicts of the world and in his dismissal of those with contrasting views. Second, he benefited from great timing; he finished writing in 1939, the year the Second World War started in Europe, and readers believed that he offered a prescient view of how and why the global conflagration began. In other words, Carr stumbled upon the end of one story—the interwar period of 1919–1939—which ushered in a far darker one, the Second World War, which people desperately wanted to understand. If he published his book in 1937, with the subtitle “1919–1937,” the book may have not been as popular.
The compelling scholarship we publish in Texas National Security Review plays an important role in tempering such overconfidence. When you talk to former Biden administration officials, one of the policies they are most proud of is their finely tuned export controls targeted against China’s high-level technology, a policy that officials believe has succeeded in limiting their competitor’s ability to get strategically sensitive capabilities without compromising the larger economic relationship. Jennifer Lind and Michael Mastanduno warn against such confidence in their article, “Hard Then, Harder Now: CoCom’s Lessons and the Challenge of Crafting Effective Export Controls Against China.” They explore the historical case of the US Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) oriented against the Soviet Union. Their study reveals that controls are hard to keep limited, seed resentment amongst allies, and rarely account for the target’s ability to elude or innovate around restrictions. Our Strategist feature accomplishes the same. In “US Policy Toward North Korea: Quo Vadis?” Cory Gardner, Igor Khrestin, and Chris Walsh remind us that, despite various approaches over multiple administrations, the United States has failed to limit North Korea’s nuclear capabilities.
Indeed, overconfidence is, ironically, endemic in the nuclear studies field, despite there being so few nuclear events since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan eighty years ago. Experts have made two predictions almost annually since Morgenthau gave his quote: First, that the dollar would cease being the global reserve currency and the linchpin of the international economic system, and second, that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) would collapse. In 1971, these were good bets; the United States was months from unilaterally and brutally ending the Bretton Woods system of dollar-gold convertibility, while America’s tilt towards Pakistan in its war with India helped spur the latter to a “peaceful” nuclear test three years later. Yet in 2025, the dollar remains entrenched and the NPT, buffeted every year by challenges, remains standing.
Our roundtable feature, “The Evolving Global Landscape of Nuclear Security,” makes me wonder if I should reassess my own confidence in the underlying factors that shape nuclear proliferation and nonproliferation. The essays look at the dynamics in regions around the world, connecting them to the larger global security landscape while expertly identifying the domestic drivers of policy. I write this in the aftermath of President Trump’s decision to launch strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Will this action undermine the NPT and drive states to acquire the bomb, or will the NPT persist, as it has for six decades? Will the world see the conflict in the Middle East simmer, escalate, or provide the path over the long term for—if not stability—some form of order? We will no doubt hear confident predictions by experts in the weeks and months ahead. The truth is, however, that no one knows.
As Neils Bohr—or Yogi Berra—supposedly quipped, “Making predictions is hard, especially about the future.” One thing I can predict with confidence, however, is that the Texas National Security Review will continue to offer the smartest, best-researched, and most accessible scholarship on the questions of national and international security that matter most.
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli distinguished professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He serves as chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review. He is the author of, most recently, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era (2024), Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (2025), and Wonder and Worry: Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty (2025).
Image: “Hans J. Morgenthau” by Levan Ramishvili, Public Domain Mark