The role of history in strategic thinking and policymaking according to Mr Lee Kuan Yew

What role should history play in strategic thinking and policymaking?

LEE KUAN YEW:

If you do not know history, you think short term. If you know history, you think medium and long term.

To understand the present and anticipate the future, one must know enough of the past, enough to have a sense of the history of a people.

One must appreciate not merely what took place, but, more especially, why it took place and in that particular way. This is true of individuals, as it is for nations.

The personal experience of a person determines whether he likes or hates certain things, welcomes them or fears them when they recur. So it is with nations: it is the collective memory of a people, the composite learning from past events which led to successes or disasters, that makes a people welcome or fear new events, because they recognize parts in new events which have similarities with past experience.

Young people learn best from personal experience. The lessons their elders have learned at great pain and expense can add to the knowledge of the young and help them to cope with problems and dangers they had not faced before; but such learning, second hand, is never as vivid, as deep, or as durable as that which was personally experienced.

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Source:
Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World” published in 2012.