It may seem counterintuitive that someone who spent over half a century in Whitehall offering historical advice to  government should argue against bringing history to bear on current problems. But I find myself increasingly alarmed (as well as irritated) by the explosion of false analogies and desperate parallels appearing in all corners of the media. There is no question that we are living in tumultuous and challenging times, or that the international situation is both threatening and urgent. Yet constant references to Munich and Yalta, or comparisons invoking Hitler or Mussolini, are not going to help 21st-century global statesmen make informed decisions about the future.

History is an important part of our understanding of the present, but it carries within it the pitfall of hindsight. We know that the Second World War broke out less than a year after the Munich agreement of September 1938; we know that agreements reached at the end of that conflict, including at Yalta, helped to sow the seeds of what we now call the Cold War; just as we know that hopes for the transformation of the Soviet Union into a western-style democratic Russia were unrealistic. But though there was no shortage of contemporary comment on any of these developments, no one could know in advance what was going to happen.

To take the Cold War as an example: we now know that growing East-West divisions in 1946-47 were the beginning of a long period of confrontation that never escalated into open conflict, but none of the parties knew that at the time. The fact that it is important to remember this seems to require restatement.

Knowing what happened is important, but it can also distort the way we look at what is happening today. Analogies are dangerous because everyone concerned has a different interpretation of the past: this applies not just to states or their leaders, but also to political groupings within states. As former British Foreign Secretary Douglas (Lord) Hurd said, ignorance of history is foolishness. Nonetheless, the false analogy can be more disastrous than the blank mind.

As I learned in my long career as an official historian, what matters above all is context. For history to provide a useful input to policymaking, we need to try to appreciate the situation as it was faced by those taking decisions at the time, the competing pressures they confronted and what they thought and believed. That does not mean we have to accept their reasoning or agree with their conclusions: but we must try to understand them if we want to take the best possible decisions about our own future.

Let’s take Munich as an example. When Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich on 30 September 1938 – his third visit to Germany in as many weeks; no small feat for a man of nearly 70 who had never flown previously – he felt he had achieved his objective. Instead of an immediate Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, there was to be a phased occupation of the German-speaking areas and, most importantly, no general European war – at least not yet.

Hitler broke the agreement, as he had broken many others, and ‘Munich’ is now used as shorthand for a kind of abject surrender to aggression. Chamberlain’s approach was, however, one of hard-headed calculation: he knew Hitler did not want to fight if he could get what he wanted without it, and that, short of unlimited war, Hitler could not be stopped from taking Czechoslovakia. Britain was not ready for that war, which would also involve fighting Italy and Japan, in 1938; and Chamberlain knew the British people did not want war. Munich bought some time, which was his intention.

What about the international context? Did the Munich agreement provoke a chorus of disapproval from other countries? Hardly. In the United States Roosevelt, a Democratic president facing fierce Republican opposition, was accused of being both a communist – for the New Deal – and a fascist – for giving the government too much power. Meanwhile, his rearmament programme was branded as a diversion from domestic failure. The only thing everyone agreed on was keeping America out of European wars.

In France, the foreign minister had begged the British ambassador to urge on Chamberlain how vital it was that an arrangement should be reached at Munich ‘at almost any price’. In Italy, Mussolini could not understand why the British would contemplate fighting over Czechoslovakia. In Tokyo, Munich was seen as a sign of British weakness. Hitler himself saw Munich as a chance to achieve his aims without an early war, while for Stalin, Munich was seen as proof of his conviction that the British and French wanted to give Hitler what he wanted in central and eastern Europe in order to lure him into attacking the Soviet Union.

An illustration of the enduring attraction of this particular historical analogy can be found in the argument developed by Vladimir Putin in his 2020 article on the ‘Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II’, where he insisted that the Munich agreement was directly responsible for the outbreak of war. This argument was a useful way of deflecting attention from the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 as a trigger for the conflict, while skating over the fact that in 1938, despite the Franco-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union was no more willing to fight for Czechoslovakia than Britain or France. Stalin had also resented being left out of the negotiations at Munich, a matter of prestige as well as security.

A further piece of the contextual jigsaw can be found in the evidence provided by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, following his defection to the West in 1992. According to Mitrokhin, so many NKVD officials had been recalled or liquidated during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s that in 1938 no foreign intelligence reports at all were received in Moscow for 127 consecutive days. Stalin’s views of western objectives were ill-informed as well as paranoid, something to which Putin did not, of course, refer in 2020; but the idea that Britain and France intended at Munich to draw Hitler’s attention eastwards, into an attack on the Soviet Union, fitted well with Putin’s narrative of Russia as victim.

Munich shows how context can affect interpretation, but all historical analogies are susceptible to such analysis. Reaching for ‘Suez’, like ‘Munich’ has also been a favourite, and lazy, option for British politicians. Yet in 1956, Harold Macmillan referred to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser as ‘an Asiatic Mussolini’, invoking a historical parallel that did the British government no favours when deciding how to respond to Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Anthony Eden, in his memoirs, would refer to the need to ‘stop’ Nasser as Hitler should have been ‘stopped’.

Yet during the Suez crisis itself neither man, nor their ministerial colleagues, nor indeed the whole of the British Foreign Office, appears to have given any consideration to the far more proximate analogy, the Abadan crisis of 1950-51, when British attempts to reverse the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company proved humiliatingly unsuccessful, not least because of the lack of American support. The use of analogy and historical parallels can be subject to selective amnesia.

There are deep historical roots to all contemporary conflicts, and those taking different sides will have different views on what happened in the past and its interpretation. The current war in Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion is a case in point, but trying to apply an earlier template is doomed to failure, however deeply embedded those historical roots may be. The world of 2025 is very different in many respects from that of 1938, 1945, 1991 or even 2008, and there are underlying trends, such as climate change and migration, which affect every part of the globe in different and unpredictable ways and are bound to have an impact on international events.

How, therefore, can we make the best use of history in facing contemporary problems? First, we must avoid thinking ‘this is just like…’ or even ‘this is just what we said would happen’. Second, using history to help us understand the mindset of potential or actual adversaries, and even of our allies, is more important than ever. That includes acknowledging, even if rejecting, their interpretation of that history. There will always be those who distort the historical record for their own purposes or practise selective memory. But history, in the sense of what ‘actually happened’, is always there. It can be of great help, particularly in illuminating the all-important context to past and present events. But please – despite what I’ve written above – let’s leave Munich out of it.