"The past is never dead.  It's not even past."  William Faulkner isn't often recognized as a geopolitical strategist, but he enunciated one of the most fundamental axioms of that discipline in his famous aphorism (from his Requiem for a Nun).  

(Quick aside: It may seem strange to insert a humanist into geopolitics, but honestly, most of the IR theorists I know would allow that their insights are not especially esoteric or derived from technical theurgics.  In fact, you can almost comprehensively picture the intellectual conversation around geopolitics as a structured debate begun 2500 years ago, between a Thucydidean attention to the sheer realities of structure and polarity, and the immanent patterns of power and vulnerability (thus Thucydides's famous "The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable"), and a Herodotoean attention to local culture, the specifics of history, and the granular differences between peoples (which is why, if Thucydides is attractive to policy-makers and people abstract from the battlefields and localities--the analysts, if you will--Herodotus is attractive to journalists and ethnographers, people embedded, enmeshed in the dirt of particular spots, as is evidenced by Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus).  In light of this contrast, Faulkner is more Herodotoean than Thucydidean in his position, and highlights an important facet of the Herodotoean argument.)

Of course, the past is legion, almost an infinitely wide delta, but all channelling into the singular point of the present; what aspects or features from history gain salience to us at any one moment are always a matter of negotiation between the present and the past.  It is not that "age-old tensions" are always and everywhere and stably felt as tensions at every moment; they must be nurtured, cultivated, the resentment must be given time to ferment before it can be used as motivation.  The story of how those of us who were politically conscious in the 1990s were first told about the Yugoslav wars as "ancient ethnic hatreds," then came to see how those hatreds had had to be mobilized and aggravated in the 1980s and early 1990s by "grievance advocates," is an allegory for this lesson about the need to cultivate saliences.

I think of all this because of a current geopolitical crisis happening between Japan and Korea.  Fred Kaplan has the story.  It's about the failure of the Trump administration to be competent, but that's not a headline these days; that's obvious to anyone except the most stupid or morally corrupt, of whom admittedly there are a great number. 

No, the issue is not about Trump, but about the interesting way the piece ends:

Obama didn’t fully grasp the larger dimensions, either. Sneider recalls him telling the Japanese and South Korean leaders, “You have to look forward,” as if history was something that merely happened long ago rather than a force that pervades daily life and shapes streams of consciousness several decades after the slights and furies began to accumulate. 

This is a common failing of Americans, especially when we gaze at disputes agitated not merely by decades but by centuries of animus—sectarian wars in the Middle East, border wars in South Asia, tribal wars in Africa, civil wars everywhere—and wonder why the combatants can’t just move on.

It’s a strange blindness, since we Americans still very much carry the wounds of our past, notably the sin of slavery, which continues to animate our politics, culture, economics, and society. The myth of the melting pot exerts such a strong force that, in many corners of life, it’s come true—and where it hasn’t, it has allowed many of us to pretend that it has. (Look at the preposterous backlash to the New York Times’ recent 1619 Project, revealing that many conservatives deny that slavery has exerted any legacy on modern life whatsoever.) Maybe that’s why we have avoided a resurgence of civil wars. Maybe that avoidance, brought on by evasion, lies at the heart of “American exceptionalism”—though now we too are wondering how long that can sustain itself.

Many other countries face the force of history all the time. South Korea and Japan are unusual in that they’re divided by this force yet at the same time are both our allies. The challenge, which previous presidents have taken up to some degree, is to recognize this fact, to confront its complexities, to help the countries contain the natural tendency for conflict: in short, to act like the leader of an alliance, not just for their benefit but for our own.

This seems to me really insightful about a basic problem in American foreign policy, and as Kaplan notes, genuinely puzzling about the United States.  After all, anyone can see that we are hugely driven by our past.  In terms of foreign policy, our memory basically doesn't go back behind World War II and the Cold War, which is a convenient triumphalist narrative for us; but before we were brutally imperialist in the Caribbean, Pacific, Latin America, and beyond; and at other times we were coldly isolationist.  But though it doen't go back behind 1941, it definitely sees us as informed by that historical moment.  And in terms of domestic policy, we oscillate between 1776 and 1863, between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address: both moments of high rhetorical grandeur, but also complicated by the larger stories that serve as their background.  We are historical thinkers, but we're bad historical thinkers.

Will the current events we are in make us better?  It is unclear to me.