By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
1. Do not deflect blame onto others. Take personal responsibility
when foreign policies implode — and at least a few will. Read Churchill’s
speech after the fall of Tobruk. Presidents do not scapegoat Congress, the
opposite political party, the secretary of state, the last president, cable
news, obscure video-makers — or the American people — for an intervention gone
badly. Telling the truth is far easier and simpler than inventing a web of
Sunday-morning-television talking points, excuses, lies, and pretexts.
2. Share credit for success with Congress and Allied
leaders, rather than chest-thumping and spiking the ball over supposedly
unilateral presidential achievements where the real work was often done by
unsung military heroes or intelligence operatives. A good way to start is by
curbing the presidential use of “I,” “me,” “mine,”and “my.” Avoid especially
the narcissistic monotony of “my team,” “my staff,”and “my advisers.” The
public knows well enough that the president of the United States runs the
country and influences the world without hearing ad nauseam from him that he is
the center of the universe. The president is supposed to be larger, not
smaller, than the rest of us.
3. Do not utter threats: no red lines, step-over lines,
or deadlines. Failing to enforce an ultimatum only weakens U.S. credibility,
while dutifully carrying out a loud warning becomes anticlimactic and merely
dutiful. Teddy Roosevelt’s century-old advice to “speak softly and carry a big
stick” still remains wiser than backing brutes into a corner — only to let them
worm out — or trading insults with thugs. When a president is forced to say, “I
don’t bluff,” we know that he does.
4. By the same token, do not publicly insult foreign
leaders — whether enemies or friends. Avoid ridiculing Russian president
Vladimir Putin as some sort of class cut-up, or Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu as an insensitive ideologue, or France’s then-president Nicolas
Sarkozy as a showboater, or British prime minister David Cameron as
ineffectual. Even presidents and prime ministers are creatures of emotion.
Enemy strongmen, once insulted, are more likely to cause gratuitous problems.
Friendly leaders will keep their distance if they feel the president of the
United States is an adolescent name-caller. Inspiration demands elevation; the
commonplace earns contempt.
5. Praise soft power, but put little faith in it. Until
the nature of man changes, hard power will matter more than all the noble
appeals to shared aspirations and similar economic and cultural interests.
Soaring rhetoric about global ecumenicalism has a shelf life of about two
speeches; after that, audiences can fill in the blanks and snooze no matter how
eloquent the cadences. The amoral Chinese and Russians will win over our
allies, if the latter feel they are safer and more secure joining with dictators
than remaining friends with the United States. Deterrence is won or lost not
just by force or the lack of it, but by either the likelihood or the
impossibility that it could at any moment be used.
6. Do not expect to make a lasting bargain, break-through
treaty, or new friendship with a thug. Democratic leaders lie far less and can
be trusted far more than dictators, who have misleading and cheating imprinted
in their DNA. Age-old vocabulary like “allies,” “enemies,” and “neutrals” has
not suddenly become invalid. The Castros in Cuba, Recep Erdogan in Turkey,
theocratic Iran, Bashar Assad in Syria, and Kim Jong-un in North Korea have
long been renegades for a reason: If they were not the brutes that they are,
they would not have power. The ancient Athenian playwright Aeschylus was right
when he warned, “It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man
the oath.”
7. Do not trust periodic bursts of hysteria from
politicians, celebrities, media figures, or pundits. Most members of those
categories in the Boston–New York–Washington corridor have no real ideology;
they simply align for a while with perceived success or distance themselves
from assumed failure. If a bombing or a rescue operation goes badly, there will
be few who will admit that they once demanded such action. If an intervention
goes well, even its opponents will claim parentage. Obsequious reporters and
politicians have a moth-to-flame addiction to the flicker of power; they are
not especially fond of, or loyal to, the person who happens for the moment to
wield it.
8. Accept that some problems are for the present
intractable. They won’t go away until larger geostrategic conditions change —
or current leaders lose power. There is a reason why most Palestinians do not
and will not accept Israel, and why Israel cannot be willing to grant
concessions until they do. To believe that a president of the United States can
by force of personality, charisma, ego, or skill cut the Middle Eastern Gordian
Knot is sheer narcissism — and dangerous.
9. Speak nicely of, but never rely on, the leadership of
the United Nations. Its resolutions were of no value in Libya. It did nothing
to stop genocide in Syria. It is run by a majority vote of its members — and
the majority of the members of the General Assembly are crudely non-democratic,
and many of them are themselves targets of the U.N.’s sanctions. If
multilateral action becomes necessary, only the United States can assemble and
lead the necessary coalition. Multilateralism is neither better nor worse than
unilateralism. (The greatest multilateral force in history was the varied and
huge contingent of 500,000 soldiers from Hitler’s allies who joined the
3.5-million-man Wehrmacht to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941.) The
mission, not the breadth of the coalition, determines the morality.
10. Listen to Winston Churchill’s advice and never
criticize or apologize for the United States while abroad. Plenty of foreigners
will trash America without the president of the United States joining in the
rebuke while on foreign shores. The job description of the president is not
that of the secretary general of the United Nations or of a campus activist. If
a president does not believe that, then he should not be president.
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