Robert Gates, our current Secretary of Defense is clearly a realist.  This excellent speech he just gave in Great Britain looks at the many lessons of history and how caution is so neccessary.  In this, I believe he is right.  He invokes the lessons of Munich and of WOrld War I to show how adhering too closely to any paradigm of thinking blinds leaders from the uniqueness and urgency of individual circumstances.

I believe history has many lessons to teach.  I am not so sure I think it only has "One Big" lesson as Mr. Gates articulates, but, his sobering reflection at the complexity of the world and contingenices of the moment do make one have to consider long and hard adventerous actions.  While, no doubt, there will be times for boldness, it should be a boldness well informed.

Here is a snippet of the speech:

"The world is a rough and nasty place. Absent a change in human nature, it will remain so. As one of the great, if unsung, heroes of World War Two, Sir William Stephenson, wrote in his book, A Man Called Intrepid, “Perhaps a day will dawn when tyrants can no longer threaten the liberty of any people, when the functions of all nations, however varied their ideologies, will be to enhance life, not to control it. If such a condition is possible, it is in a future too far distant to foresee. Until that safer, better day, the democracies will avoid disaster, and possibly total destruction, only by maintaining their defenses.” George Washington, a realist, would have agreed. And, I am confident, so would Winston Churchill."