Recent events such as the war in Ukraine have generated a wave of lamentations over humanity’s inability to learn from the past. Yet comments like these illustrate the true problem with most commentary on history: a failure of depth, nuance and analysis. “Half the truth is often a great lie”, as American founding father Benjamin Franklin said, and misreading is a far greater threat than ignorance. Three mistakes define historical punditry. The first is seeing the world in black and white, unsurprising given our schooling has historically conditioned us to identify heroes and villains. Yet, in reality, the logic of survival ensures most people and institutions are neither. Accepting this is not to abandon moral judgment, but rather to carefully contrast the world’s various shades of grey. The second mistake is a lack of nuance regarding unfavourable actors. There is usually a sympathetic logic behind “bad” actions. Ideally, there should be explanation without justification. The final common mistake is taking analogies too far: keep in mind the maxim, “History never repeats, but often rhymes”. A good historical analogy is marked by the sharing of analogous aspects. For example, an analogy for the Russo-Ukrainian war should share ideological, cultural, diplomatic, domestic and strategic aspects. A good analogy is the second Sino-Japanese War. (Bad ones include the Great Patriotic War on both sides, the 1939 invasion of Poland and the American invasion of Iraq.) Both the Russo-Ukrainian war and the Sino-Japanese war had similar ideological justifications (new imperialism/anti-imperialism versus neo-imperialism/capitalism). The Empire of Japan was a territorial empire that believed in Asia for Asians while the Russian Federation seeks the annexation of territory against Nato expansion. Both invaded territories could be seen as puppets. Culturally, both wars were cast as “brother wars” within one cultural sphere. Both aggressors therefore used “similar but inferior” protective rhetoric. Diplomatically, both the Republic of China and Ukraine were notorious for lobbying in Washington. Both the Republic of China and Ukraine were internally corrupt. Strategically, neither Japan nor Russia declared war (“incidents” versus “special military operation”). Both relied heavily on proxies (Manchukuo and the Shanghai regime versus the Donetsk and the Luhansk people’s republics) and underestimated their enemy. Analogies are comparative context for events past and present. They help in making limited predictions based on shared factors (for example, the resilience of industrial states) and to inform value judgments and decisions, such as which side to support. Learning from history is the one escape from the curse of its repetition, either, in Karl Marx’s terms, as tragedy or as farce, and as such deserves far more attention. Shun Kwok, Tsuen Wan US policy on Taiwan needs recalibration I refer to the op-ed , “US talk of defending the ‘rules-based order’ is fooling no one” (January 21). Washington is locked into a fierce struggle with Beijing, especially over Taiwan . The possibility that the war of words and ideas will transmute into a more deadly conflict occupies think tanks and war gamers on both sides. War gaming detects weakness and strength on both sides of the equation. Do US “gamers” assess public opinion on the sacrifices our forces would have to make for a faraway ally that most Americans cannot locate on a map? Chinese gamers already have that information for their own population which is convinced that Taiwan is an integral part of the motherland. The US State Department opinion, which seems to be that losing Taiwan would end America’s status as a credible global power, is faulty. A recalibration by these officials and our allies might very well provide a realpolitik view of our prowess, to wit, that an overweening US is finally coming to grips with great power and budgetary realities and that pulling our forces into a more easily defensible core is smarter than our status quo as protector of all we view and want. US President Joe Biden’s policy of encouraging chip production here at home where amber waves of grain can mingle with the coming wave of semiconductors is prescient. Paul Bloustein, Cincinnati, Ohio