On a Saturday morning, four days after the Haitian earthquake in 2010, I was sitting in my office finalizing travel schedules for Foreign Service Officers who had volunteered for temporary duty on the devastated island.  We needed to ramp up press support for the hundreds of journalists in Haiti and the thousands more around the world calling the U.S. Embassy for updates on the relief effort.  The phone rang, and it was a journalist from Nicaragua who wanted an official reaction to President Daniel Ortega’s claim that the U.S. was planning a military invasion to take over Haiti.  Chuckling to myself, I noted the U.S. military was really the only organization that could handle, in a timely way, the international relief effort for one of the worst disasters in human history.  I hung up, thinking I had put that falsehood to rest.

On a Saturday morning, four days after the Haitian earthquake in 2010, I was sitting in my office finalizing travel schedules for Foreign Service Officers who had volunteered for temporary duty on the devastated island.  We needed to ramp up press support for the hundreds of journalists in Haiti and the thousands more around the world calling the U.S. Embassy for updates on the relief effort.  The phone rang, and it was a journalist from Nicaragua who wanted an official reaction to President Daniel Ortega’s claim that the U.S. was planning a military invasion to take over Haiti.  Chuckling to myself, I noted the U.S. military was really the only organization that could handle, in a timely way, the international relief effort for one of the worst disasters in human history.  I hung up, thinking I had put that falsehood to rest.

Within days, Ortega’s comments had spread through a hemisphere that saw plausibility in his claim, based on an awareness that the U.S. had occupied that country for almost 20 years from 1915-1934.  I, on the other hand, did not know of that history, and I wondered later how many of the thousands of Americans representing multiple U.S. government agencies on the ground in Haiti were similarly unaware.    

It took a concerted effort involving press statements and interviews within the country and around the world to push back against the falsehood.  It was a distraction from what should have been a positive narrative about the full weight of the U.S. government and its people to come to the aid of the stricken nation.  The story only went away with the  departure of the military after they had wound down their mission of immediate relief and restoration of damaged infrastructure. 

The incident that quiet Saturday morning underscored, though, a growing uneasiness I had experienced in my overseas assignments related to understanding history.  I was either unaware of the history of the country and its relations with the United States, or I had a very different understanding than the people with whom I was interacting.  I came to call this sensation, “history shock,” a play on the broader notion of culture shock, with one exception.  I was actually prepared for the shock of experiencing cultural differences; I never anticipated the differences related to history.

As I delved into histories of U.S. relations in these countries, one recurring question kept arising – how come I didn’t know this before?  Not only was I unaware of the occupation but that atrocities had occurred, but that they had been fully investigated by U.S. Congressional committees.  It took subsequent research to learn that we had resorted to the French system of forced labor (the hated corvée) in a country that was unique in human history for its successful slave revolt leading to independence. Up to 11,000 people may have died because of bloody guerrilla fighting over the 19 years. 

Other histories likewise shocked me, a history major in college and teacher before joining the Foreign Service. Personal experiences were easy to amass. For example, I don’t recall in any course I took or taught any reference to the burning of the city of York (now Toronto) in the War of 1812, before the British burned Washington DC.  I hadn’t heard of Teddy Roosevelt’s blatant grab of Panama, manufacturing a revolt against Colombian rule to send in American forces and restore order so he could build a canal across the isthmus when the Colombians had denied him.  It was a maneuver repeated in Guatemala, in Nicaragua, in Iran, and attempted at the Bay of Pigs. I should have known how prominently the Platt Amendment played in Cuba, but my knowledge of the Spanish-American War in 1898 was limited to Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. Enacted after the war, the Platt Amendment gave the U.S. the right to intervene in Cuba and exercise control over its foreign and military policies.  It stood until 1934.  “Platt” became shorthand across the continent for U.S. interventionism, a term that Fidel Castro used repeatedly in his speeches as he took power in Cuba.

Further, I didn’t know that Malcolm X had been to Nigeria in 1964, and his statements about American diplomats trying to sugar-coat race relations in the U.S. as progress still resonated with the Nigerians we interacted with 20 years later. Nor was I aware that race relations in the U.S. was recurring fodder in Soviet anti-American propaganda during the 1950s and was one argument for eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act. 

All these incidents led me to explore this connection between history and foreign relations, between history and memory. I enrolled in a graduate history program at UMass Amherst, and my book is the result of my studies there, a coming to terms with my personal experiences.

I am not comforted especially that this “history shock” experience is not confined to me personally, as I hear from former and current colleagues, as well as people outside the profession, of their own encounters. Furthermore, it seems that every day new examples of history shock emerge. In the current impasse with Russia over Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is drawing on a competing history of the end of the cold War to justify his threatened invasion, citing an out-of-context remark by Secretary of State James Baker about NATO advancing “not one inch” eastward after the reunification of Germany.  

A number of people outside the profession have commented that they were amazed and even appalled that the U.S. would send out to Embassies representatives so ill-versed in history. Several historians who reviewed the book noted that this reflects the lack of historical awareness more broadly, across our society, reinforcing what the author Gore Vidal called the United States of Amnesia. And, my advisor at UMass asked that I insert in the text of my book the obvious reality that it is quite impossible for any single officer to arrive in the diplomatic corps knowing all these histories.

Beyond admitting my own ignorance, I speculate that a number of other factors are also at play. Ours is a culture that looks forward, not back. We are a society that has built a narrative that we are exceptional, an indispensable nation, and we choose to forget those accounts that don’t back up that view. In addition, we have opted for a Foreign Service that moves people around every couple of years, so that our diplomats don’t develop “clientitis.” In the process, though, they also don’t develop a truly in-depth understanding. We have a Foreign Service that prioritizes generalists, not specialists. Formal training for officers is insufficient.  My own experience is probably not the norm, but I had eight months of training. In a career of 26 years.  That leaves the process of learning about the host nation at the sole discretion and initiative of the individual officers. Finally, I would add to the list the decline in the study of history and general historical awareness in the broader culture. 

The question remains, though, how we can use history better in the conduct or our diplomacy, to advocate for U.S. interests abroad. Here, too, examples readily come to mind. The return of looted archaeological items to Peru helped our Ambassador weather the criticism he faced in his outspoken promotion of human rights and democracy there. Harry Truman helped his case to persuade Mexico to sign the Rio Treaty launching the Organization of American States by the simple act of laying a wreath at the Monument to the Niños Héroes commemorating the soldiers who threw themselves off the walls of Chapultepec Castle rather than be taken prisoner by invading U.S. forces. 

By acknowledging the history when the U.S. fell short of its ideals, our diplomats can reduce tensions.  By acknowledging the history that is important to our counterparts, U.S. diplomats can build bridges. and, by being aware of the gap in interpretations of the same events, the U.S. can work to find the common ground needed to advance both countries’ objectives.

Originally published in The Diplomatic Diary, January 23 2022