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.And FDR’s inability to persuade the American people to rebuff German andJapanese militarism early in the career of both meant that a great war hadto be fought and won.“The first duty of a statesman,” FDR told the American people in oneof his first speeches as president, “is to educate.” 28 In so saying, FDR positioned education ahead of other possible priorities including preservingthe peace and defending our nation.Yet FDR understood that preservingpeace and defending America depended on knowledgeable voters, who willsupport a president’s leadership or not, and who will ultimately elect thenext president and thus set the course of American foreign policy.It tookFDR years to educate Americans sufficiently to the danger of the Nazisand the Japanese militarists to rouse us to their destruction, and even thenhe required the assistance of the Japanese through their attack on PearlHarbor.Today, there is as great presidential challenge – this time it is to defineAmerica’s place in the world so as to avoid the worst possible consequencesof Islamic extremism in the Middle East and across the Crescent of Fire,Russian instability, Chinese nationalism, and the dangerous persuasivenessof the leaders of the European Union.There is, however, a major difference.In the case of both Lincoln and FDRthe challenge was to pull the American people into a military effort sufficientto destroy the enemy.Today, the challenges are more subtly political and thethreats we confront are less well defined than slavery and Nazism.More,not less, judgment in foreign affairs is required, ironically at a time whenP1: KDD0521857449c18Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:30How Public Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership435the selections our country is making for president seem to be going towardever more inexperience.Without the necessary judgment, our presidentsare captives of our public culture, and prone to dangerous error in how weengage the world.CHAPTER 18: KEY POINTS1.America has generally had poor presidential leadership in matters ofour relations with the rest of the world.2.Our presidents haver Failed to take effective preventive action to avoid great wars we werelater drawn into;r Got us into smaller wars that led only to stalemate and sometimesdefeat;r Romanticized foreign dictators; andr Set us on unnecessary moralistic crusades with large costs in livesand treasures, and almost all unsuccessful.3.A key reason for the poor showing of American presidents on the worldstage is that they are victims of our public culture – either because theybelieve its tenets, or because they are such weak leaders that they haveto appeal to it in order to gain public support.In part, our presidentsare victims of public culture because we select presidents primarily onthe basis of domestic concerns, and our selections have little experiencein world affairs, and have to be trained on the job; they simply don’tknow enough to master the public culture.4.A lack of judgment in a president cannot be made up by advisors.P1: FCW0521857444c19Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:37nineteenChoosing a Great PresidentA great irony of the American political process – one can almost say theinternal contradiction in it that threatens to make a failure of the wholething – is that the Constitution grants the president power primarily inforeign affairs, while he or she is elected primarily on domestic issues.Putinto a nutshell – as an old saw says – in domestic matters the presidentproposes and the Congress disposes; in foreign affairs the Congress proposesand the president disposes! But the choice of a president presumes exactlythe opposite.The result is that we get a president ill-equipped for his or herforeign policy responsibilities, and frustrated by his or her lack of powerin domestic matters.In the preceding chapter, we’ve seen the unfortunateresult of this inconsistency.A key challenge today is whether the Americanpeople in their new maturity can overcome this limitation of our politicaltradition.A LEADERSHIP DEFICIENCYAccording 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 regionalallies to be a difficult and often unpredictable power.We are said to beerratic and unpredictable, adding a major element of instability to the world.Some panelists characterized the United States approach to security issuesin post–Cold War Asia as seeking to maintain an environment of stabilityand friendly relations, but doing so with ad hoc methods and on the basisof American primacy, with little effort to establish supporting institutionsor a viable balance of power structure.1The Russians have a concept of correlation of force – strength weightedby credibility of use of force.Russia and China can use force – both areauthoritarian governments in which electoral politics play no significant436P1: FCW0521857444c19Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:37Choosing a Great President437role.Their governments are able to use force both internally and externallyas they desire without concern for reaction at home.The EU and Japanare in very different situations.The countries of the EU possess militaryforce, but the various nations are both unable to coordinate effectively andtheir democratic electorates are largely pacifist in orientation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.And FDR’s inability to persuade the American people to rebuff German andJapanese militarism early in the career of both meant that a great war hadto be fought and won.“The first duty of a statesman,” FDR told the American people in oneof his first speeches as president, “is to educate.” 28 In so saying, FDR positioned education ahead of other possible priorities including preservingthe peace and defending our nation.Yet FDR understood that preservingpeace and defending America depended on knowledgeable voters, who willsupport a president’s leadership or not, and who will ultimately elect thenext president and thus set the course of American foreign policy.It tookFDR years to educate Americans sufficiently to the danger of the Nazisand the Japanese militarists to rouse us to their destruction, and even thenhe required the assistance of the Japanese through their attack on PearlHarbor.Today, there is as great presidential challenge – this time it is to defineAmerica’s place in the world so as to avoid the worst possible consequencesof Islamic extremism in the Middle East and across the Crescent of Fire,Russian instability, Chinese nationalism, and the dangerous persuasivenessof the leaders of the European Union.There is, however, a major difference.In the case of both Lincoln and FDRthe challenge was to pull the American people into a military effort sufficientto destroy the enemy.Today, the challenges are more subtly political and thethreats we confront are less well defined than slavery and Nazism.More,not less, judgment in foreign affairs is required, ironically at a time whenP1: KDD0521857449c18Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:30How Public Culture Inhibits Presidential Leadership435the selections our country is making for president seem to be going towardever more inexperience.Without the necessary judgment, our presidentsare captives of our public culture, and prone to dangerous error in how weengage the world.CHAPTER 18: KEY POINTS1.America has generally had poor presidential leadership in matters ofour relations with the rest of the world.2.Our presidents haver Failed to take effective preventive action to avoid great wars we werelater drawn into;r Got us into smaller wars that led only to stalemate and sometimesdefeat;r Romanticized foreign dictators; andr Set us on unnecessary moralistic crusades with large costs in livesand treasures, and almost all unsuccessful.3.A key reason for the poor showing of American presidents on the worldstage is that they are victims of our public culture – either because theybelieve its tenets, or because they are such weak leaders that they haveto appeal to it in order to gain public support.In part, our presidentsare victims of public culture because we select presidents primarily onthe basis of domestic concerns, and our selections have little experiencein world affairs, and have to be trained on the job; they simply don’tknow enough to master the public culture.4.A lack of judgment in a president cannot be made up by advisors.P1: FCW0521857444c19Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:37nineteenChoosing a Great PresidentA great irony of the American political process – one can almost say theinternal contradiction in it that threatens to make a failure of the wholething – is that the Constitution grants the president power primarily inforeign affairs, while he or she is elected primarily on domestic issues.Putinto a nutshell – as an old saw says – in domestic matters the presidentproposes and the Congress disposes; in foreign affairs the Congress proposesand the president disposes! But the choice of a president presumes exactlythe opposite.The result is that we get a president ill-equipped for his or herforeign policy responsibilities, and frustrated by his or her lack of powerin domestic matters.In the preceding chapter, we’ve seen the unfortunateresult of this inconsistency.A key challenge today is whether the Americanpeople in their new maturity can overcome this limitation of our politicaltradition.A LEADERSHIP DEFICIENCYAccording 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 regionalallies to be a difficult and often unpredictable power.We are said to beerratic and unpredictable, adding a major element of instability to the world.Some panelists characterized the United States approach to security issuesin post–Cold War Asia as seeking to maintain an environment of stabilityand friendly relations, but doing so with ad hoc methods and on the basisof American primacy, with little effort to establish supporting institutionsor a viable balance of power structure.1The Russians have a concept of correlation of force – strength weightedby credibility of use of force.Russia and China can use force – both areauthoritarian governments in which electoral politics play no significant436P1: FCW0521857444c19Printer: cupusbwCUNY475B/Rosefielde0 521 85744 9November 6, 20067:37Choosing a Great President437role.Their governments are able to use force both internally and externallyas they desire without concern for reaction at home.The EU and Japanare in very different situations.The countries of the EU possess militaryforce, but the various nations are both unable to coordinate effectively andtheir democratic electorates are largely pacifist in orientation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]