Not knowing what command you are doing before you submit it is poor design. There are alternative ways to access old commands where you can see the actual command you are about to run before you submit it. The physical teletype era is over.
For this reason I recommend avoiding using history expansion features with any commands in history that might destructively modify file contents, such as `find ... -delete` in GNU find.
In the default Bash Emacs readline bindings, you can type Alt/Meta-^ to expand history on the current line without executing. You can also set `shopt -s histverify` to expand the history substitution on the following line after pressing enter/submitting the history substitution and it also does not execute the command.