TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND US GRAND
STRATEGY
By J.S. Nye Jr.
2006
Summary: George W. Bush wants to be remembered as a
president who left a lasting mark on U.S. foreign policy. His emphasis
on spreading democracy and reshaping the Middle East
is a manifestation of this drive. But the results of his management style and
policy choices -- especially the invasion of Iraq -- may have already denied him
that legacy.
JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University. His most recent books are
Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics and The Power Game: A Washington Novel.
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE?
George W. Bush likes to boast that
he does not play "small ball." The Economist describes him as
"obsessed by the idea of being a 'transformational' president: not just a
status-quo operator like Bill Clinton but a man who changes the direction of
history." But will he become that man?
Bush's bid for a legacy of
transformation rests on the three major changes he made to U.S. grand strategy after the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001: reducing Washington's
reliance on permanent alliances and international institutions, expanding the
traditional right of preemption into a new doctrine of preventive war, and
advocating coercive democratization as a solution to Middle Eastern terrorism.
Those changes, codified in the 2002 National Security Strategy, were widely
understood as revolutionary at the time. The British journalist Philip
Stephens, for example, wrote in March 2003 that he felt as if he were
"present at the destruction" of the international order the Truman
administration had created half a century earlier.
Transformation in this regard is
more than ordinary adaptation; it implies a major alteration of U.S. grand strategy.
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the
failure to find either weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or evidence of a
connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, two of the three pillars of Bush's
effort at transformation have been shaken. Accordingly, Bush has increasingly
emphasized the democratization component of his grand strategy. The 2006
National Security Strategy refers to democracy and freedom more than 200 times
(three times as often as the 2002 document), downplays preventive war, and even
includes a chapter on globalization (a subject Bush once privately derided as
"mushy Clintonism"). The shift has been more than rhetorical: Bush's
diplomacy toward North Korea
and Iran
has recently been much more multilateral than it was during his first term.
Senior administration officials
believe that Bush's aggressive democratization will prove successful and that
the next president will be bound to follow the broad lines of Bush's new
strategy. Vice President Dick Cheney expressed the administration's confidence
in January, predicting that in a decade observers will "look back on this
period of time and see that liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and
Iraq really did represent a major, fundamental shift, obviously, in U.S. policy
in terms of how we dealt with the emerging terrorist threat -- and that we'll
have fundamentally changed circumstances in that part of the world." An
analysis of leadership theory and of previous presidents' efforts to transform U.S. grand
strategy, however, suggests that history's verdict will be less favorable.
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL CENTURY
In the nineteenth century, U.S. grand strategy was simple, and its means
were mostly unilateral: avoid entanglement in the European balance of power,
dominate the Western Hemisphere, and keep an open door for trade in Asia. As the twentieth century dawned, however, the
industrial power of the United States
overtook that of Germany and
the United Kingdom, and the
transportation revolution effectively brought the New
World nearer to the Old. These conditions led six presidents to
attempt major transformations of U.S. grand strategy over the next
hundred years.
Although William McKinley started
out as a status quo president when he took office in 1897, he succumbed briefly
to the temptation of colonial expansion after the Spanish-American War of 1898,
leading the United States to
acquire Guam, the Philippines,
and Puerto Rico. But the vogue for colonialism
did not last long: popular and congressional opinion shifted decisively against
it after the beginning of a costly insurgency in the Philippines in 1899.
Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's
successor, sought to transform U.S. foreign policy to match the United States'
new position in world politics by combining the use of hard power (expanding
the U.S. Navy and enforcing the Monroe Doctrine) with that of soft power
(mediating great-power disputes and supporting the creation of the Permanent
Court of Arbitration in The Hague). He persuaded Congress to back his efforts
to bolster U.S. hegemony in
the Western Hemisphere (building the Panama Canal, pressing the Platt Amendment
-- which gave Washington the prerogative to
intervene in Cuban affairs -- on Havana, and
intervening in the Dominican
Republic) but failed to overcome
long-standing suspicions of balance-of-power politics in Congress and among the
American public. As a result, his transformation proved untenable.
Woodrow Wilson, the next president
to attempt a transformation of U.S.
grand strategy, came into office focusing on domestic issues. He tried for
years to avoid U.S.
involvement in World War I, even winning reelection in 1916 on a peace
platform. But Germany's
adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 prompted Wilson to enter the conflict, leading him to
envision a transformation of world politics through the spread of democracy and
the creation of new international institutions. Wilson's reach exceeded his grasp, and the
1920s and 1930s witnessed the rejection of his policies and the return of
American attitudes that favored a more traditional distancing of the country
from the European balance of power.
Franklin Roosevelt was the fourth
president of the century to attempt to transform U.S. grand strategy, and, according
to the historian John Lewis Gaddis, he was the first to succeed. After trying
with limited success to educate Americans about the threat Hitler posed to
international security, Roosevelt seized the opportunity provided by the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to commit the United States to multilateralism.
He scrapped both isolationism and unilateralism and linked Wilsonian ideals to
a pragmatic vision of the postwar world, combining the soft power of his Four
Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom
from fear), which were incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, with the hard
power of the four (later five) policemen of the UN Security Council. He also
laid the foundation for global economic stability by helping to set up the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at Bretton Woods. Roosevelt was adept at combining hard and soft power, and
his vision of the postwar world showed his understanding that, in Gaddis'
words, "power is far easier to maintain ... when it's there by consent
instead of coercion." Unlike Wilson, Gaddis
argues, Roosevelt never neglected "the
need to keep proclaimed interests from extending beyond actual
capabilities."
The broad outlines of Roosevelt's
strategy endured for more than a half century because Roosevelt's
successor, Harry Truman, included some of its aspects when he created his own
transformational policy in the postwar period. Using Roosevelt's
strategy as a jumping-off point, Truman introduced such transformational
elements as containment and permanent alliances. Crises such as the Soviet
takeover of Czechoslovakia
and the Korean War helped Truman overcome resistance from isolationists.
Subsequent Cold War presidents worked within the framework Roosevelt and Truman
had established and made incremental changes to it: Richard Nixon tilted toward
China,
Jimmy Carter emphasized human rights, and Ronald Reagan rejected détente. Even
the successful foreign policy of George H. W. Bush, who presided over the end
of the Cold War, was more a matter of brilliant intuition and management of
rapid change on the ground than an attempt to change the world.
George W. Bush began his presidency
as a traditional realist with little interest in foreign policy; his ambitions
to transform U.S.
grand strategy developed only after 9/11. As Gaddis argues, Bush's emerging
doctrine was "Fukuyama
plus force" and was designed to make terrorism obsolete by spreading
democracy everywhere. Afghanistan
was the obvious first target of the policy, and "Iraq was the
most feasible place to strike the next blow." In the aftermath of 9/11,
Bush was able to get the majority of the public to support his policy. He
obtained a congressional resolution approving the use of force in Iraq and won
reelection in 2004. But public and congressional support has eroded as the main
rationale for the war, Saddam's pursuit of WMD, has proved hollow and the
occupation of Iraq
has become a long and costly endeavor.
STIMULUS AND RESPONSE
Surveying these attempted shifts in
grand strategy, it is notable that only Franklin Roosevelt's and Truman's
proved to be durable (the jury is still out on George W. Bush's). Given the
challenges of foreign policy leadership, this is not surprising. Although
presidents often prefer the relative freedom they enjoy in foreign policy to
the frustrations of domestic affairs, they hardly have a free hand abroad. A
president pursuing transformational objectives faces many obstacles. He must
intuit the direction and pace of events, devise appropriate and feasible
strategies, win the support of diverse audiences at home and abroad, and find
the right mix of hard and soft power to implement his policies. Moreover,
although the president can undertake some initiatives on his own, major foreign
policy transformations fail without congressional support. Even Truman's policy
of containing the Soviet Union was not firmly
established until Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg organized bipartisan
congressional backing for it.
A crisis -- Germany's torpedoing of American ships in 1917, Japan's bombing of Pearl
Harbor in 1941, al Qaeda's attacks in 2001 -- is usually needed to
liberate a president from the constraints of pressure groups and bureaucratic
inertia. In the absence of a crisis, even a significant threat may not
galvanize public and congressional support for a president's transformational
foreign policy. Despite the rise of German power before the United States'
entry into the two world wars, the American public was reluctant to use force
until directly threatened. The challenge is greater yet in the absence of such
threats, which is a major reason why Clinton's
talk of democratic enlargement and engagement was never translated into
transformational policy. Many presidents, such as Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt
(before 1941), and Lyndon Johnson, have found it easier to leave a legacy of
transformation in domestic policy than in foreign policy.
Although a crisis is usually
necessary for a transformational policy to succeed, it is never sufficient.
Luck often plays a major role (think of Wilson's
untimely stroke in 1919 or Hitler's foolish declaration of war on the United States
in 1941). Each president's personality and leadership skills also matter. Three
capabilities relating to the exercise of soft power are particularly relevant
to a president's ability to attract followers at home and abroad. The first,
policy vision, is the ability to articulate an inspiring picture of the future.
Grand speeches are not enough; anyone can produce a wish list. Effective
visions must accurately diagnose the world situation, balancing realism with
risk and ideals with capabilities. Roosevelt was good at this; Wilson was not. The second is emotional
intelligence, the self-knowledge and discipline that allow leaders to project
personal magnetism. Successfully managing the impression one makes requires
some of the talents good actors possess. Reagan's Hollywood
career served him well in this regard. The third, communication, helps a leader
to inspire domestic and foreign audiences.
Three other abilities are more
closely related to a leader's exercise of hard power. Organizational capacity
is a president's ability to manage the structures of government to shape and
implement policy, including supervising advisers in order to ensure a flow of
accurate information about the inputs and outputs of decisions. Without sound
organizational skills, presidents can easily fall into the emperor's trap of
only hearing how beautiful their new clothes are. Political skill, the art of
finding the means to achieve the ends set forth in one's vision, whether by bargaining,
buying, or bullying, is obviously crucial. A president cannot achieve goals
just for narrow groups of supporters; he must use his successes to build
political capital with wider circles of followers. Johnson, for example, was a
brilliantly successful politician for most of his career in the Senate, but he
could not replicate that success in the international sphere. Finally, a
successful foreign policy leader needs what theorists of business leadership
call "contextual intelligence," the ability to understand an evolving
environment and to match resources with objectives by moving with rather than
against the flow of events. Contextual intelligence allows a leader to act on
hunches based on informed intuition, what Bismarck
once described as the statesman's task of hearing God's footsteps as he marched
through history and trying to grasp his coattails. Although often faulted for
his purportedly limited cognitive skills, Reagan had good contextual
intelligence.
GRAND (AND NOT SO GRAND) STRATEGISTS
Bearing these aspects of leadership
in mind, it is interesting to compare George W. Bush with Wilson and Franklin
Roosevelt. At first glance, the courses of their presidencies suggest that
crises and their contexts, rather than the traits of individual presidents,
determine whether a president becomes a successful transformational leader. All
three started their terms focused on domestic concerns but then faced a foreign
policy crisis that led them to seek transformational objectives through the
hard power of war wrapped in the soft power of democracy promotion. But that is
not the whole story. Individuals matter. Roosevelt displayed the best
contextual intelligence of the three leaders, and his efforts to rearm in the
face of Hitler's threat before Pearl Harbor
helped prepare the national response after the crisis. In contrast, Bush paid
little attention to the threat of transnational terrorism before 9/11. For his
part, Wilson could not draw a clear picture in
his mind of U.S.
interests during the early years of World War I. Moreover, his deficiencies in
transactional leadership skills (the ability to bargain and build coalitions),
particularly in his later years, contributed to his failure to achieve his
transformational objectives.
All three men devoted considerable
effort to trying to persuade their followers to accept their picture of the
world and the appropriateness of their transformational policy. Wilson initially
succeeded in educating a majority of the American people about his
transformational policy. He was a highly skilled communicator, and at one point
his vision of the League of Nations was quite
popular. Indeed, Wilson's rhetoric about
democratization has become part of the canon of U.S. foreign policy even though it
was rejected in the two decades that immediately followed his presidency.
Former presidential adviser David Gergen argues that Roosevelt
was "also much more of a public educator than Bush, talking people
carefully through the challenges and choices the nation faced, cultivating public
opinion, building up a sturdy foundation of support before he acted. As he
showed during the lead-up to World War II, he would never charge as far in
front of his followers as Bush."
Bush seems to be less patient than Roosevelt was. In the words of a prominent journalist who
spent many hours interviewing Bush, "He has a transformational
temperament. He likes to shake things up. That was the key to going into Iraq."
Political scientist Hugh Heclo noted in a largely sympathetic appraisal written
during Bush's first term that "Bush clearly understands the need for
persuading people to his point of view, but it is also possible to sell people
on things without broadening their horizons. The paradox is that successful
teaching requires ongoing learning on the teacher's part." Yet Bush's
disposition and poor organizational skills discourage such learning. It is true
that in his second term Bush has made an effort to change the debate on Iraq by
publicly acknowledging new facts. But as one of the designers of this strategy
told The New York Times, this required "admitting some mistakes and that
was quite a fight, because the president doesn't talk that way."
Overall, the similarities between
Bush and Wilson are uncanny. Both highly religious and moralistic men, they
were both elected president initially without a majority of the popular vote.
Bush portrays the world in black and white rather than shades of gray; so did Wilson. Bush was
successful in Congress at first with his transformational domestic agenda and paid
little heed to foreign policy until a crisis struck; same with Wilson. Bush has proposed the promotion of
democracy and freedom abroad as the central feature of his foreign policy
vision, as did Wilson.
In fact, many of Bush's speeches sound as though they could have been delivered
by Wilson, although Wilson was a better rhetorician. Bush defined
a vision that failed to balance ideals with national capacities; Wilson made the same
miscalculation. Both, moreover, failed to manage information flows in their
administrations.
A close adviser remarked of Wilson: "Whenever a
question is presented he keeps an absolutely open mind and welcomes all
suggestion or advice which will lead to a correct decision. ... Once a decision
is made it is final and there is an absolute end to all advice and suggestion.
There is no moving him after that." Secretary of State Robert Lansing
noted in 1917 that "even established facts were ignored if they did not
fit in with [Wilson's]
intuitive sense, [his] semi-divine power to select the right." Bush
displays many of Wilson's
flaws. Gergen describes Bush as "a top-down, no-nonsense, decisive, macho
leader who sets his eye on the far horizon and doesn't 'go wobbly' getting
there." But strength of character is not an adequate substitute for
contextual intelligence and organizational competence.
Persistence can be admirable, but it
is dangerous when it slows the process of making corrections. Like Wilson, Bush is not very
receptive to new information once his mind is made up. Former Secretary of
State Colin Powell has said of Bush that "he knows kind of what he wants
to do and what he wants to hear is how to get it done." In the words of
Powell's former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Bush was, in
dealing with Iraq,
"too aloof, too distant from the details of postwar planning. Underlings
exploited Bush's detachment." A former White House official told me
privately that Bush believed his military commanders had enough troops in large
part because he was insufficiently aware of the climate of fear in Donald
Rumsfeld's Pentagon that impeded full and frank answers to questions.
Bush also did not manage the
intelligence-gathering process well before the war: he neither pressed for
second (and third) opinions nor took unwelcome advice into account. Like
others, Bush may have been misled by faulty intelligence about weapons of mass
destruction, but he and Cheney compounded the problem. A 2004 report by Richard
Kerr, deputy director of central intelligence under George H. W. Bush, concluded
that the White House "apparently paid little or no attention to prewar
assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency that warned of major cultural
and political obstacles to stability in postwar Iraq." Robert Hutchings, chair
of Bush's National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, has noted that
"frankly, senior officials simply weren't ready to pay attention to
analysis that didn't conform to their own optimistic scenarios."
Fortunately for Bush, there are also
important differences separating him from Wilson.
Bush appears to have an emotional intelligence and self-mastery that Wilson lacked. He relies
less on inspirational oratory than did Wilson
and is reportedly less brittle and more likeable than the stiff and aloof
Wilson, who was supposedly more interested in people than persons. Whether
these differences in leadership traits and skills will allow Bush to succeed
where Wilson
failed is unclear. Successful transformations have been rare in the history of U.S. grand
strategy. Bush's legacy now depends largely on the still uncertain outcome of
the preventive war he launched in Iraq. His case remains open, but
the odds are against him and he is running out of time.¶