In the study of the Middle East this discussion has been rather heated since at least the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism. Part of Said's argument was that western study of the Orient was part and parcel with efforts to carry out the agenda of western powers in the region, and that that nexus between academics and policy makers continued down to the time of his writing the book in 1978. It obviously still continues on in 2016, not least because Bernard Lewis, one of the examples of Said's argument, is still alive. There are of course examples I could point to ad infinitum, including a forthcoming book that I briefly helped work on, of historical analysis that nonetheless clearly have and are intended to have contemporary policy implications.

On the one hand, some of these uses of history are clearly necessary. I am not actually an academic historian; I'm a Middle East security analyst. But my job, perhaps more than in any other region that we have people working on, would be incomprehensible without a pretty solid understanding of at least the past 100 years of Middle East history, not to mention an equally solid background on Islam and religion in the Middle East. The need for that kind of "applied history" is not true, for instance, of our east Asia team, where most of what they write about are natural disasters like Typhoon Nida last week.

At a grander level, I think applying the lessons of history would be incredibly useful to policymakers in certain circumstances. (Since this is a bit of a meta thread I assume we're a bit freer to discuss 20 year issues/politics.) To give one example, I think the occupation of Iraq in 2003 would have been greatly served by having a much better understanding the challenges Britain faced when they occupied the country during and after WWI. Instead the US and its allies had to learn those lessons from scratch, or worse, applied historical models and analogies that simply didn't fit.

Which brings me to what I see as one of the biggest problems with applying history in this way: false analogies. During the Cuban missile crisis Kennedy famously looked to Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August as a kind of anti-model as he sought to prevent an escalation to nuclear conflict. But we now know that not only is Tuchman's own analysis of how that conflict broke out questionable, but that Kennedy's own application of her analysis wasn't necessarily reflective of what was actually happening.

That's what happens even when you have what seems like a relatively sensible approach to applying history (i.e. trying to prevent an escalatory conflict by looking at a previous escalatory conflict.) Then there are really bad applications of historical analogy. If I hear one more half-assed political analyst or European historian compare what is going on right now in the Middle East to the 30 Years war I am going to scream so loudly that you, dear /r/askhistorians readers, will be able to hear my cry from wherever in the world you may be.

That that analogy gets made so often I think is evidence of the ways in which a Eurocentric historical understanding that most people have can be so misleading. If the only "history" you know is from early modern to contemporary European and American history, you're going to apply these false analogies again and again and make terrible mistakes in doing so. To go back to my Iraq example, one of the reasons why I think that occupation went so badly is that the only history of occupations that the administrators seemed to know or refer back to was the occupation of Germany and Japan after WWI, which among other things produced a completely nonsensical de-baathification policy, which, to my understanding, didn't even resemble de-Nazification in Germany anyways.

But even when you're directly applying the lessons of history from the right country, things can still go terribly awry. I think I first read about this on this sub, but one of the reasons why Bill Clinton apparently demurred on intervention in the Balkans is because he had read Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts and was convinced that the conflict there was ancient and intractable and that US intervention would not succeed. In the end, US intervention in the Balkans did succeed and was the only thing that stopped the conflict there.

So I guess my view is that while applying history to policy would in many spheres be beneficial and is often necessary, I am unaware of any with which such a program could be applied in a rigorous or scientific sense. In other words, I think I would rather have an informed policy making apparatus, that are aware of what lessons history can teach, than to having historians making the case that their historical lessons are correct and objectively applicable.

First off, I think Graham Allison's case study of the Cuban Missile Crisis (co-authored with Philip Zelikow, another academic-policymaker), Essence of Decision, is one of the best examples of "applied history". The book is definitely oriented toward political scientists--it discusses at length topics like neo-realism and organizational behavior models--but I think it's a great book for historians to see how history can be effectively applied prescriptively to current events.

On the other hand, I don't think the creation of a "council of academic historians" is either practical or beneficial to policymakers. As anyone who has sat in on a graduate history seminar can attest, historians tend to be a bloviating and quibbling bunch, even more so than most other academic disciplines. As Henry Kissinger, probably the most renowned historian-policymaker, once said, academics are both "passionately intense and [their] subjects are extremely unimportant." I can imagine a council of academic historians being gathered together to help create, for instance, a new American grand strategy, yet spending hours on end debating what grand strategy is while never actually getting to the important part of creating policy. (This concern has, in fact, become a problem for historians hoping to influence government policy. A history professor I'm acquainted with who helped develop Army Field Manual 3-24, the military blueprint for the Iraq and Afghanistan surges, has stated that government officials have told him they rarely look to historians for advice because they take too long, their advice is overly contextualized, and are too often impractical with their recommendations.

While I don't think a council of academic advisors would be beneficial, I certainly think the president can benefit from appointing academics well-versed in history into prominent positions within the administration. Recent presidents certainly have benefited from such appointments. Samantha Power, for example, who has written an excellent history on the US response to genocides, has by all accounts been an effective adviser to President Obama.

As for whether "applied history" should be taught at universities, I would whole-heartedly support it. My general impression is that academic historians that research and write on my primary topics of interest are incredibly interested in using history to assist policymaking. At the same time, I know that many other historians would inherently dislike an "applied history" sub-field for even existing as they believe it would corrupt the supposed objectivity of history. The topic has been brought up within the history department I'm in, with many professors stridently opposed; on the other hand, the professors whose interests are in international relations or politics in general seem much more amenable to the idea. Because so many historians would be opposed to the idea of applying history to current affairs, any applied history academic program could probably only work as a graduate level, interdisciplinary program. But perhaps there wouldn't even need to be such a program--it could be equally beneficial and easier just to place more academic historians in universities' public policy or international affairs programs. Duke University has recently added several PhD historians to their Sanford School of Public Policy (ex: Hal Brands), as has University of Texas' LBJ School of Public Affairs (ex: Jeremi Suri). So perhaps instead of creating a new sub-field of applied history, perhaps other departments like those in public policy or international affairs should be more willing to bring in historians.

I have a lot of sympathy for Guy Halsall's views on the relevance of history, which is that knowledge of the past by itself does not matter. Instead:

What is (I propose) unique to history is not simply the knowledge of things that happened in the past, but the investigation of why they happened, of why people said they happened and of why they want you to think they happened; more so (perhaps) the knowledge of understanding why things happened involves the awareness of the other options that were available - the things that could have happened but didn't (and grasping why they didn't) - and of how no one historical state of affairs or set of outcomes is preordained to be the only, natural one. It didn't have to be like that then; it doesn't have to be like this now. This is the emancipatory potential of history, specifically.

From another post:

All that gives us enormously important skills in dealing with, and acting within, our world in the present. When the papers tell us that this or that category of people are doing this, or are like that, or are to blame for something else, historical analysis gives us the skills of source criticism; it also accustoms us to think twice before accepting a judgement; it allows us to try and see other possibilities, the other side of the story. If we make a judgement it will almost certainly be a more sophisticated and less extreme one, but wherever we end up it will be a more responsible and informed choice of opinion and action, and if we spread that, we do good.

I'm a firm believer that studying history is relevant and should be used to inform public policy, but drawing parallels with the past and using that knowledge to make decisions is, whilst interesting, I think a fruitless exercise. A better use of history is surely to use the same skills to critique the available evidence and to analyse the data in order to draw out a balanced conclusion. The results of these studies will be biased and should be (rightfully) contested, but that is the joy of doing history. Historians are not objective observers and we should not be granted some hallowed status as experts who can somehow draw from the past definitive answers for the future. Any recommendations by historians, advice that we ought to embrace according to this article, will be mired in bias, whether through their personal historiographical approach, political ideologies, or their position in their academy; hardly the sort of impartial advice that Ferguson and Allison envisage it to be. I think it is instead more useful to embrace the bias and to raise more questions than answers, to bring the same sceptical approach to the public consciousness and so influence political discourse.

One of my favourite tweets is the following, and I think the same lesson is just as applicable in modern politics as in analysing medieval sources:

'The question is not ‘Is this bastard lying to me?’, but ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’

On a more personal level, I feel that Ferguson can hardly be the standard-bearer of any attempt to bring history to greater relevance. A historian who admitted that he did 'not know enough about the fifth century' but then proceeded to invoke the 'fall' of the Roman empire in the aftermath of the Paris attacks last year is not someone I care to associate myself with. There is more work to be done in making history relevant, but that requires a great deal of introspection and an understanding that we really don't know all that much about the past, let alone the present.