P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 HowPublic Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership 427 preserve American interests in a dramatically changing world by lessening our reliance on outdated alliances, and thereby disentangling ourselves from alliances just as urged upon us by our first President, George Washington, and simultaneously encouraging the world to make needed adjustments to changing configurations of national power. Furthermore, the Presi- dent is clothing this strategy in rhetoric that engages support even within the context of the national wishful thinking that is parent to our public culture. The merit of the president’s approach arises from two causes: 1. The end of the Cold War and the increasing obsolescence of the U.S. alliance with Western Europe; and 2. The dramatic changes in national power (economic, political and mil- itary) that are occurring in the world. As the world changes, relation- ships among nations are strained and power equations must change (perhaps including some borders). In this environment, the United States best defends itself and facilitates necessary change by acting independently. Alliances become primarily tac- tical and expedient – coalitions of the willing. The United States is right to break free of European entanglements which are the real remaining chains of twentieth century conflicts. The future of much of the globe is going forward without the Western Europeans who try to hang on to declin- ing power and influence in the world via limited military power, inter- mediate economic power and unlimited sanctimonious hypocrisy which they confuse with moral influence. The western Europeans have their fifth column in the United States, and its political expression is in our public culture. Strategic Independence should replace Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD, as the cornerstone of our nuclear policy. When Secretary of State John Foster Dulles mentioned “massive retaliation” at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in January 1954, the possibility of all-out, full-scale nuclear war with the Soviet Union or a Soviet satellite became a more frightening specter looming over the world scene. In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara modified the massive retaliation policy when he coined the term, Assured Destruction, to which his critics prefixed Mutual, thereby giving the world Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD. MAD relies on the economic concept of the law of diminishing returns – no one would launch a nuclear attack on America, McNamara reasoned, fearing an Amer- ican nuclear counterattack, or series of counter attacks, had the potential to escalate to massive retaliation. Even so, MAD means that we are always P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 428 American Presidential Leadership on the brink of nuclear destruction if our nuclear deterrence policy fails to prevent a nuclear first strike. Strategic Independence offers a possible defense short of nuclear retaliation. President George W. Bush deserves praise for seeing beyond the universal application of MAD. In 2002 at West Point he said: Formuch of the last century, America’s defense relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies. 18 Is President Bush a master of illusion? Certainly, if American policy in the Middle East succeeds, he will be thought to be so. By contrast, success could be merely the result of internal factors like those that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union should something of that nature occur in Syria and/or Egypt. What is more important is how a master of illusion should proceed amid the causal ambiguity. There is a danger that President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld aren’t masters of illusion, but that they see only part of the picture because they are ensnared by vari- ous delusions of the public culture. They have excessive faith in democracy and free enterprise and in building other nations on such a foundation. Excessive faith leads them to adopt policies that are counterproductive to containing terrorists and insurrectionaries in Iraq and compromise Ameri- can geostrategic autonomy by trying to accomplish too much (and thereby needing too much assistance from abroad). It is possible to commend Rice’s toughness on German reunification early in her career without believing that she is a paragon of the art of objective strategy today. President Bush in his first administration learned how to more effectively master the illusions of the public culture. Historically, his learning is very similar to that of President Abraham Lincoln during the first two years of the Civil War, leading to the freeing of the slaves in January, 1863, as an act to gain political support for the war. President Bush’s recent embrace of democracy as a goal for American military action in Iraq serves a similar purpose – to rally moral sentiment behind acts of defense. But it may lead us to a dangerous overreach in which we try to impose on the world our system in the belief that our illusions about the world are true. These comments make the limitations of the neoconservative and liberal worldviews clear. Most of our politicians are blissfully unaware of public P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 HowPublic Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership 429 culture in all its dimensions, although they operate in it, like fish who live in water but do not know it; they don’t appreciate the Federalist nuance of the American way when applied to other nations (that is, that we seek not a particular form of government abroad but accept any of a number that offer us no threat); and they lack a grasp of the reconfiguration of global wealth and power and the stresses and needs for change it is generating in the world body politic. Without knowledge in each of these two critical areas, our leaders cannot create effective strategies and cannot master the illusions of our collective life. DON’T RELY ON ADVISORS In general, American presidents are not very good at foreign affairs and they are poor war leaders. Can personal deficiencies be made up by reliance on advisors? Many of us excuse presidential lack of preparation for global and wartime leadership by insistingthatgood advisors will fill gaps in a president’s knowl- edge and experience. So the excuse is often offered in conversations among voters that though a favored candidate has few or no qualifications for run- ning the foreign and defense policy of America, he or she can get good advisors who’ll make up for the candidate’s deficiency. But this is an illu- sion. Carried to its logical extreme, as the voters sometimes seem to do, the absurd result of such reliance is that the voters shouldn’t care who is elected because whoever is president can get good advisors! Many Americans have taken the notion from business that a good exec- utive can manage anything – including businesses he or she doesn’t under- stand – by picking good subordinates. There is merit to this because the tasks of both president and corporate chief executive officer are much the same: r Both are answerable to constituencies; r Both desire to placate stakeholders of various kinds; r Both have to defend their rights against assault from domestic and foreign sources; r Both must seek to balance short- and long-run considerations; r Neither can do all he or she promises, but must instead make accommo- dations continually; r Both are constrained by the need for coalition building; r The president is supposed to abide by the will of the electorate, and the CEO by the will of the shareholders, but both in practice have substantial discretion and power; P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 430 American Presidential Leadership r Both must chose subordinates to carry out their purposes; and r Interestingly, the formal mathematical structure of the objective each faces is the same (to maximize a utility function subject to constraints). The president’s task is more complex, because the organization (the United States) is larger and includes more diverse interests than a corporation, but the leadership task is essentially the same. The leadership task itself cannot be delegated, including the choosing of advisors. In consequence, a president, like a CEO, with large gaps in his or her knowledge and experience won’t know when to get an advisor (instead choosing to make the decisions on his or her own) or won’t be able to choose well. It isn’t enough for presidents to get good advisors. They still make crucial decision, they still choose the advisors, and they determine what is acceptable performance by the advisors – presidents have to have personal knowledge, experience, and judgment. When they don’t, bad things happen. The advisors picked are often themselves devotees of the public culture. At worst, presidents pick not well-qualified advisors but political hacks from whom nothing can be expected but loyalty. It’s amyth that good advisors can make up for a lack of preparation of the leader – because the president chooses advisors and if the president is ignorant or prejudiced, the advisor is likely to be also; and because an advisor provides advice, and the president must decide whether or not to accept it and what to do with it. The only situation in which an advisor is able to surmount these limitations of his or her role is when the president virtually delegates to the advisor the running of key aspects of U.S. policy. This sometimes happens; but more often the president insists on being in on the decisions, often actually making them, and his or her limitations become the source of errors and failures in our approach to the rest of the globe. The most tragic example involves President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson. The war was under way when Johnson became president. The Kennedy Administration hawks, military advisors, and the foreign policy establishment, all convinced LBJ to continue prose- cuting the war, rather than take Option 1 that McNamara gave him in 1966, which was to cut our losses and get out of Vietnam. 19 In early 1965, Vice President Hubert Humphrey stated that he disagreed with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy’s recommendation for a torrent of bombing in the north. Bundy had just paid a visit to Vietnam and made that recommendation in response to what he saw. But, rather than keep Humphrey involved in these meetings, LBJ banished Humphrey from all war planning meetings for at least a year for opposing the bombing idea. P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 HowPublic Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership 431 There are only two exceptions to the lamentable record of presidential ill- preparation and consequent missteps during most of the twentieth century; one is understandable, the other somewhat of a surprise. The commonality is that both had substantial personal experience in dealing with our foreign foes before entering the White House. They were Eisenhower and Reagan. That Eisenhower is an exception is obvious – he had years of experience in the American military abroad; the leadership of the western powers in the war against Nazi Germany; close contact at top level with our Soviet allies, and then rivals. His experience carried us successfully through eight of the early years of the Cold War, ending the Korean War and avoiding conflicts from such incidents as that of our U2 spy plane that was shot down over the Soviet Union. The surprise is Ronald Reagan, whose career had been as a Hollywood actor, then governor of California, and who would seem to have had no experience in foreign affairs. But the appearance was misleading. Reagan had extensive experience in battling Soviet agents in the almost subter- ranean political conflicts that embroiled American unions in the early Cold Warperiod. Reagan is the only American president to have been president of a trade union, and was in that position at a time when the communists sought to capture American trade unions as part of the fifth column move- ment they sponsored in every Western democracy. For many nights anti – communist trade unionists in America stayed up late to keep communist groups from seizing control of union meetings after others had tired and gone home in order to push their radical agendas (a favorite tactic of small, well-disciplined minorities). Many noncommunist trade unionists worried that they would be murdered. Reagan had these experiences. 20 To the great benefit of Americans since, noncommunist leaders prevailed in mostAmeri- can unions, and Ronald Reagan was one of them. When he became President of theUnited States, heknew his adversary. He understood thesignificance of this experience to his own preparation for the American presidency, and he givesitclear prominence in his autobiography. His biographers, however, failed to understand its significance, writing instead about an old politi- cal controversy – the Congressional hearings of the 1950s about communist influence in Hollywood, in which Reagan was caught up. 21 Thus, his biogra- phers missed one of the most important and most closely contested political struggles of the Cold War – the battle for control of American unions – and they miss the significance of Reagan’s role in it both for him and for the nation. With his background of fighting the communists in union halls, Reagan was well prepared to meetSoviet leaders on alarger battlefieldof thecold war. P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 432 American Presidential Leadership There was no major war during his presidency – no major test of his mettle by Soviet leaders who would otherwise have been tempted to underestimate him – and during his presidency the Soviet Union began to crack apart. Clinton was poorly prepared for the presidency in its foreign policy aspects. But he was the luckiest of all our presidents – entering the White House just after Soviet Union had collapsed and there was no great power to challenge him. Perhaps there is some mitigation for Clinton to be found in the cir- cumstances of being president today. “I can’t think; I can’t act,” Clinton complained while in office. “I can’t do anything but go to fund raisers and shake hands. I can’t focus on a thing except the next fund raiser.” 22 Apolitical cartoon described the situation rather well early in Bush’s presidency. In it, President Bush has one arm stuck in a bees nest labeled the “middle east,” another arm has a snake wound round it labeled “Iran,” one foot is painfully stepping on a porcupine labeled “North Korea,” and the other foot is caught in a vise labeled “Iraq.” Uncle Sam is watching the president and says to him, “Considering that you’re not a foreign policy kind of guy, Mr. President, you’ve picked things up quickly.” 23 To look hard at the American presidency and the people who’ve occupied it is not to be overly critical, and it’s not to imply that other countries have done better. For example, here’s what a historian has to say about Nikita Khruschev: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was the unquestioned leader of the Soviet Union from 1957 to 1964. In this fairly short span, he managed to provoke two major inter- national crises, survive a coup (a second toppled him), order two disastrous eco- nomic overhauls, and hold erratic confrontations with nearly everyone in sight – the Chinese leadership, President Kennedy and Vice President Nixon, the neo-Stalinists in his Presidium, and the Russian intellectuals in his midst. 24 This was the man with whom John Kennedy had to deal. Perhaps it is no surprise that a result was the Vietnam War. THE GREATEST PRESIDENTIAL CHALLENGES To assess the challenge to the American presidency in our time, we should revisit the major challenges of ourpast. We’ll find that they were surmounted only in part. In 1860, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln faced the situation that there was a great evil, slavery, in the country but the electorate was very divided about whether or not it ought to be disposed. Probably a majority P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 HowPublic Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership 433 didn’t want to end slavery. So Lincoln took the position that slavery was a great evil but that his duty was only to preserve the union, not end slavery, and he initiated the Civil War on that issue. He continued to educate the country against slavery, but to refuse to act against it, until, late in 1862, the conditions were ripe to move against slavery, and he did then act to begin its abolition. Lincoln had political genius, and it shouldn’t be unexpected that a suc- cessful politician is good at his or her trade. 25 Butpolitical genius is at best only a part of a presidential leadership. In fact, it may be a great shortcom- ing of democracy that the skills needed to attain office are impediments to performing an effective leadership role. We often recognize this in private discussion when we say that a president is still campaigning and hasn’t real- ized that he or she has been elected and now has to govern. Lincoln was an effective politician; yet his campaigning for office helped lead the country into a war that might have been avoided; and his frequent blunders in office made that war the most costly in lives we have ever had, exceeding greatly even World War II. For example, with the crisis of the Civil War at hand, in the months immediately proceeding Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg, and over the bitter personal objections of his top commanders in the field, “Lincoln was still making military appointments as political favors,” filling the Union Army with unqualified commanders who cost the nation much in blood and treasure because of their incompetence. 26 This is not to say that there wasn’t much to admire in Lincoln – there was, and some of it is cited in this book; but the overall record was more destructive and bloody than necessary. Interestingly, many of the same people who today denounce the use of even moderate force in political affairs continue to praise Lincoln for what was unparalleled, in American history at least, resort to force in a political dispute. Apparently the slavery of African Americans was a suffi- cient evil to justify massive bloodshed; why isn’t the indiscriminate murder of thousands of American citizens by Islamic terrorists sufficient to justify moderate bloodshed? Judgments that violence is justified in one circum- stance and not another are political – not historical nor even, in the broader scope (that is, divorced from political convictions), objective. FDR’s situation paralleled Lincoln’s in 1933 when he took office. In Germany a great evil was emerging. Hitler was coming into power, and although FDR opposed Nazism he didn’t act against it because of isola- tionist sentiment in America. Our country was not prepared militarily to act, because although it was one of the victorious powers of World War I and party to the Versailles treaty that had ended the war, we had disarmed after the war and retreated into internal considerations. FDR recognized the P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 434 American Presidential Leadership danger, but the American public wasn’t ready to act, didn’t see the need, and was stuck in isolationism and the Depression. So for almost a decade FDR maneuvered in support of the other western democracies without being able to tip the balance against Hitler. In April 1939, in an especially significant incident, FDR sent a telegram to Hitler asking him to guarantee the territo- rial integrity of twenty small nations in Europe and the Mideast. Hitler read the telegram in a mocking voice to the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament), amid thunderous laughter from the Nazis who were the audience – an insult that FDR waited a chance to repay. 27 In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor causing Hitler to declare war on the United States, and finally FDR had his opportunity to destroy Nazism with the American people standing united behind him. This is how the story of these two momentous periods in our history is ordinarily told. But there is more to both stories. Lincoln’s initial failure to persuade Americans to end slavery meant that the war was fought for two years without abolition as its goal, and was almost lost in the process. And FDR’s inability to persuade the American people to rebuff German and Japanese militarism early in the career of both meant that a great war had to be fought and won. “The first duty of a statesman,” FDR told the American people in one of his first speeches as president, “is to educate.” 28 In so saying, FDR posi- tioned education ahead of other possible priorities including preserving the peace and defending our nation. Yet FDR understood that preserving peace and defending America depended on knowledgeable voters, who will support a president’s leadership or not, and who will ultimately elect the next president and thus set the course of American foreign policy. It took FDR years to educate Americans sufficiently to the danger of the Nazis and the Japanese militarists to rouse us to their destruction, and even then he required the assistance of the Japanese through their attack on Pearl Harbor. To day, there is as great presidential challenge – this time it is to define America’s place in the world so as to avoid the worst possible consequences of Islamic extremism in the Middle East and across the Crescent of Fire, Russian instability, Chinese nationalism, and the dangerous persuasiveness of the leaders of the European Union. There is, however, a major difference. In the case of both Lincoln and FDR the challenge was to pull the American people into a military effort sufficient to destroy the enemy. Today, the challenges are more subtly political and the threats we confront are less well defined than slavery and Nazism. More, not less, judgment in foreign affairs is required, ironically at a time when P1: KDD 0521857449c18 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:30 HowPublic Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership 435 the selections our country is making for president seem to be going toward ever more inexperience. Without the necessary judgment, our presidents are captives of our public culture, and prone to dangerous error in how we engage the world. CHAPTER 18: KEY POINTS 1. America has generally had poor presidential leadership in matters of our relations with the rest of the world. 2. Our presidents have r Failed to take effective preventive action to avoid great wars we were later drawn into; r Got us into smaller wars that led only to stalemate and sometimes defeat; r Romanticized foreign dictators; and r Set us on unnecessary moralistic crusades with large costs in lives and treasures, and almost all unsuccessful. 3. Akey reason for the poor showing of American presidents on the world stage is that they are victims of our public culture – either because they believe its tenets, or because they are such weak leaders that they have to appeal to it in order to gain public support. In part, our presidents are victims of public culture because we select presidents primarily on the basis of domestic concerns, and our selections have little experience in world affairs, and have to be trained on the job; they simply don’t know enough to master the public culture. 4. Alack of judgment in a president cannot be made up by advisors. P1: FCW 0521857444c19 Printer: cupusbw CUNY475B/Rosefielde 0 521 85744 9 November 6, 2006 7:37 nineteen Choosing a Great President Agreat irony of the American political process – one can almost say the internal contradiction in it that threatens to make a failure of the whole thing – is that the Constitution grants the president power primarily in foreign affairs, while he or she is elected primarily on domestic issues. Put into a nutshell – as an old saw says – in domestic matters the president proposes and the Congress disposes; in foreign affairs the Congress proposes and the president disposes! But the choice of a president presumes exactly the opposite. The result is that we get a president ill-equipped for his or her foreign policy responsibilities, and frustrated by his or her lack of power in domestic matters. In the preceding chapter, we’ve seen the unfortunate result of this inconsistency. A key challenge today is whether the American people in their new maturity can overcome this limitation of our political tradition. A LEADERSHIP DEFICIENCY According to a report from a conference in the fall of 2003 of leading special- ists on international relations in Asia: America appears even to its regional allies to be a difficult and often unpredictable power. We are said to be erratic and unpredictable, adding a major element of instability to the world. Some panelists characterized the United States approach to security issues in post–Cold War Asia as seeking to maintain an environment of stability and friendly relations, but doing so with ad hoc methods and on the basis of American primacy, with little effort to establish supporting institutions or a viable balance of power structure. 1 The Russians have a concept of correlation of force – strength weighted by credibility of use of force. Russia and China can use force – both are authoritarian governments in which electoral politics play no significant 436 [...]... falling on Berlin The Soviets would not accept the Nazi assertions that England was finished when their own senses told them otherwise Similarly, in 2003, reporters in Baghdad, like Molotov in Berlin, refused to accept the assurances of Iraqi ministers of state about a supposedly ineffective enemy (Britain in 194 0 and the United States in 2003) when their eyes and ears told them otherwise The openness in. .. and therefore connecting what was being done in the present to what was needed ahead; and 5 Difficulty integrating what was going on in one part of the world with what was occurring in another, combined with a growing realization that the interconnections are in fact crucial The result of these factors was confusion in the president’s mind about what he was doing and as a result, an inability to articulate... fissures of inconsistency in the Administration’s policy Initially, the PR offensive was a great success, because: 1 It abandoned and replaced the fiasco of the justification of the invasion of Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction; 2 Tactically, it put the Europeans and Democrats in a tough spot (because they don’t want to oppose exporting democracy) and so for a while took the heat off the Administration... the Bush administration would have to be preparing the American people for a long period of conflict of one sort or another on the Crescent of Fire If the administration were simply using democracy and free enterprise as a tactic in the conflict, then it should be preparing our population at home for the problematic nature of the task in the Middle East, and building support for staying the course But... religious minorities and because the administration’s real objectives – in the battle against Islamic terror and in the large power rivalry of geopolitics – were not being truthfully acknowledged To couch America’s true motives for invading Iraq in the cloak of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, when they’re not to be found; and of liberating women when the administration has done little to indicate... politicians in this sort of situation, yet the administration seems to have been very straight about this It’s surprising – why is it happening this way? The answer is in large part that the American people are more mature Truth didn’t undermine the support of the American people for the president or the administration It lessened support when the president was suspected of misleading us about the causes of the. .. backfired There is certainly a consideration about oil in our involvement in the Middle East There is much discussion that if the United States were less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, we could avoid involvement in the turmoil of the region There is truth in this At this point, however, there is no likely other source of sufficient oil for ourselves or the other major nations of the world Russia is the. .. with the measurement device – the survey, survey-taker – and more to do with the person answering the questions in the poll “Sometimes collective preferences [measured by polls] seem to represent something like the will of the people, but frequently they do not In the final analysis the primary culprit is not any inherent shortcoming in the methods of survey research Rather it is the limited degree of. .. had experience in the Department of the Navy in Washington, which makes even more perplexing his failure to deal with the rise of Hitler short of World War II Yet he also embraced the idealism of the public culture, embracing Stalin as a way of pretending that idealism was merited, an action that almost certainly contributed to the dangers of the Cold War 7:37 P1: FCW 0521857444c 19 Printer: cupusbw... manipulation are continuing to strengthen the hands of propagandists In consequence, there is a temptation to use propaganda just as our opponents do But for us to go that direction risks our becoming lost in a wilderness of disinformation to the point of befuddlement The Bush administration is due a compliment for the greater degree of honest information than in the past that it has shared with the American people . coalitions of the willing. The United States is right to break free of European entanglements which are the real remaining chains of twentieth century conflicts. The future of much of the globe is going forward. delegates to the advisor the running of key aspects of U.S. policy. This sometimes happens; but more often the president insists on being in on the decisions, often actually making them, and his. the crisis of the Civil War at hand, in the months immediately proceeding Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg, and over the bitter personal objections of his top commanders in the field, “Lincoln