Masters of Illusion American Leadership in the Media Age Phần 9 ppsx

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How Public 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our reliance on outdated alliances, and thereby disentangling ourselves from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

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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:

For much 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

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How Public 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 insisting that good 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:

Both are answerable to constituencies;

Both desire to placate stakeholders of various kinds;

Both have to defend their rights against assault from domestic and foreign

sources;

Both must seek to balance short- and long-run considerations;

Neither can do all he or she promises, but must instead make accommo￾dations continually;

Both are constrained by the need for coalition building;

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;

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430 American Presidential Leadership

Both must chose subordinates to carry out their purposes; and

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 a myth 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.

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How Public 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

War period. 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 most Ameri￾can unions, and Ronald Reagan was one of them. When he became President

of the United States, he knew his adversary. He understood the significance of

this experience to his own preparation for the American presidency, and he

gives it clear 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 meet Soviet leaders on a larger battlefield of the cold war.