OPINION:
History is indispensable. Nations that forget history often repeat its mistakes. Historical memory provides lessons, warnings and perspective. Yet there is a profound difference between learning from history and living inside it. When history ceases to be a source of wisdom and becomes a prison of political imagination, it turns from an asset into a liability.
Across the Indo-Pacific, some of the greatest strategic blunders today arise not from ignorance of history but from an obsession with it. Nations trapped by historical grievances, obsolete identities and long-dead geopolitical realities risk sacrificing the future for the sake of the past.
Nowhere is this danger more visible than in the Chinese Communist Party’s manipulation of anti-Japanese narratives, the Kuomintang’s inability to escape the ghosts of China’s civil war, and the persistent misuse of SEATO’s failure to oppose deeper regional security cooperation.
The Chinese Communist Party offers perhaps the most cynical example of weaponized history in modern geopolitics. For decades, Beijing has portrayed Japan as a perpetual threat, invoking memories of wartime atrocities to justify xenophobia, military expansion and hostility toward Tokyo. Conveniently omitted from this narrative is the CCP’s own heinous record of repression, political violence and manmade disasters that have inflicted suffering upon the Chinese people on a scale far exceeding that of any foreign intervention.
More importantly, the CCP’s narrative bears little resemblance to contemporary reality.
Japan today is not Imperial Japan. It is one of the world’s most successful democracies, a leading defender of free markets, human rights, international law and peaceful conflict resolution. For more than 70 years, Japan has maintained a fundamentally pacifist orientation and has become one of the principal pillars of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Few nations in modern history have undergone such a profound political and moral transformation.
Yet Beijing continues to speak of Japan as if the year were 1937.
This is dishonest and intellectually frozen. The CCP’s portrayal of Japan remains remarkably similar to the shrill propaganda advanced by Beijing and Moscow during the early Cold War, when both viewed the American-led reconstruction of Japan as a capitalist conspiracy to contain communism in Asia.
Decades later, the language and ideological fervor have changed little.
History is preserved selectively because it serves a political purpose. By keeping old wounds permanently open, the CCP manufactures external enemies, mobilizes nationalist sentiment and distracts attention from its own revisionist ambitions. It sacrifices an honest assessment of present realities in favor of politically useful memories. It lives in history while claiming to lead the future.
Taiwan’s Kuomintang — the island’s Chinese Nationalist Party — represents a different but equally dangerous form of historical captivity.
The KMT’s political identity was forged in an era when it governed China and fought the Chinese Communist Party for control of the mainland. That struggle ended nearly eight decades ago. The CCP won. The KMT retreated to Taiwan. History moved on.
Unfortunately, parts of the KMT did not.
Modern Taiwan has undergone one of the most remarkable political transformations in Asia. The authoritarian state of the 20th century gave way to a vibrant democracy. The democratic transition of the 1990s created what can be called only a new birth of freedom. More importantly, Taiwan has long moved beyond the obsolete question of who represents China. The overwhelming majority of its people simply seek the right to represent themselves, as Taiwanese, not Chinese.
The political reality is unmistakable. Taiwan possesses democratic elections, an independent political system, a distinct civic identity and a thriving civil society. It functions in every meaningful sense as a self-governing democratic nation. Only a tiny minority now identifies primarily as Chinese.
Yet elements within the KMT continue to interpret politics through the lens of an unfinished Chinese civil war. They behave as if they remain participants in a struggle for China rather than competitors in Taiwan’s democratic system. This is not realism but strategic nostalgia.
The truth is straightforward. The KMT’s future exists entirely within Taiwan. It contests elections in Taiwan, serves voters in Taiwan and derives its legitimacy from Taiwan’s democratic institutions. It has no meaningful political space in the People’s Republic of China. Any strategy rooted in the political geography of 1949 is disconnected from the political realities of the 21st century.
Like the CCP, the KMT risks becoming a prisoner of history at precisely the moment when strategic clarity is most needed.
The third example concerns Southeast Asia and the persistent invocation of SEATO’s failure as proof that deeper regional security cooperation is impossible.
Critics frequently argue that any Indo-Pacific equivalent of NATO is doomed because of the collapse of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which dissolved in 1977. This argument misunderstands both history and strategy.
SEATO failed because of conditions unique to its time. Most Southeast Asian nations had only recently emerged from colonial rule. Anti-colonial sentiment often outweighed fears of communist expansion. Democratic institutions were weak, shared strategic interests were limited, and a common political identity was largely absent.
None of those conditions defines the region today.
The strategic environment has changed fundamentally. China now poses the most significant challenge to sovereignty, maritime freedom and regional stability across the Indo-Pacific. Territorial disputes, economic coercion, military intimidation and gray-zone warfare affect countries throughout the region.
The threat is no longer distant or theoretical. It is immediate, persistent and widely recognized. China represents a common threat to all, and a common threat demands common defense.
Equally important, the political foundations for cooperation are stronger than at any other point in modern history. Since the 1980s, democratic governance has expanded across the Indo-Pacific. Shared commitments to sovereignty, freedom of navigation and international law are far more robust than they were during the Cold War. Countries that once lacked common values increasingly recognize common interests.
To reject future security arrangements because SEATO failed 70 years ago is to commit a fundamental strategic error: assuming that history never changes.
Yet history always changes. Moreover, history provides context, not destiny. It should illuminate reality, not obscure it.
The future belongs to nations that understand history without becoming enslaved by it. Strategic wisdom requires remembering the past while acting in the present. Those who cling to history as a substitute for reality eventually lose both.
The Indo-Pacific cannot afford that fate.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.