Wars and Pandemics

History, Analogies, Lessons: Wars and Pandemics develops a set of propositions about why policy elites learn some kinds of lessons and not others, why some lessons become deeply embedded, how they influence thinking more generally when they do, and why and how they lose traction.

Lebow and Zhang evaluate their propositions in two foreign policy and two public health cases: the Munich lesson for the US and the Korean lesson for China, and the COVID pandemic for China and the West. The book examines the similarities and differences of foreign policy and public health learning, the problems of updating, revising, and rejecting lessons, and the reasons why and the ways in which lessons can become politicized, as the latter did during COVID. It makes a series of policy recommendations for the public health community and draws out the theoretical implications of the authors' findings for the study of international relations.