Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy

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Join Frank Gavin, Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS in this first live lecture of a series of three. During this hour, Dr. Gavin will argue that history can be employed to better understand and improve statecraft and strategy.  It is not a history of a particular event, person, place, or process. Nor is it strictly a discussion about methodology, or how to do historical work effectively.  Instead, explore something he calls “historical sensibility.” Come along with him as he makes a bolder, more controversial claim: decision-makers, especially those making foreign, foreign economic, and national security policy, would greatly benefit from developing and employing this sensibility, as well as applying a set of skills and insights the emerge from wrestling with the past. Thinking historically, I will argue, is an under-appreciated, and underutilized lens to help decision-makers understand and wrestle with contingency, complexity, uncertainty, and difficult choices.

Tune in for Dr. Gavin's future talks on Hopkins at Home.

Thursday, May 21st at 7 PM EDT | Reflections on World Order: Past, Present, and Future

Tuesday, June 9th at noon EDT | Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy
 

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University. In 2013, Gavin was appointed the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies and Professor of Political Science at MIT.  Before joining MIT, he was the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas.  He directs the Nuclear Studies Research Initiative and, with James Steinberg, the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network.  From 2005 until 2010, he directed the American Assembly’s multiyear, national initiative, the Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions.  Gavin is the Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Texas National Security Review, a Non-Resident Senior Advisor at the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an affiliate of MIT’s Security Studies Program, a senior fellow of the Clements Center for National Security, a distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center, a senior advisor to the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and a life-member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He received a PhD and MA in history from the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in modern European history from Oxford University, and a BA in political science from the University of Chicago.

His writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age.  His latest book, Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy, was published by Brookings Institution Press in January 2020.