Bruce W. Jentleson - The Peacemakers: Leadership Lessons from Twentieth-Century Statesmanship

THE
PEACEMAKERS

LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM
TWENTIETH-CENTURY
STATESMANSHIP

BRUCE W. JENTLESON

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Copyright 2018 by Bruce W. Jentleson

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To Barbara Ann, and Our We

ALSO BY BRUCE W. JENTLESON

American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century

The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas (with Steven Weber)

With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 19821990

At crucial moments, at turning points... individuals and their decisions and acts... can determine the course of history.

ISAIAH BERLIN

A ny proper study of political leadership has to start with this question. At one end of the debate is the nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyles heroic conception that the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here... all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment of Thoughts that dwell in the Great Men sent into the world. At the other end is his English contemporary Herbert Spencer deriding the universal love of personalities going back well before People magazine and Yahoo! Celebrity to when round the camp-fire assembled savages tell the events of the days chase and he among them who has done some feat of skill or agility is duly lauded. Carlyle is too much the romanticist and overstates the role of individuals while undervaluing conducive conditions that create opportunities for leadership. Spencer is too much the sociologist, overstating social processes and context and undervaluing what the twentieth-century American philosopher Sidney Hook calls the individual to whom we can justifiably attribute preponderant influence in determining an issue or event whose consequences would have been profoundly different if he had not acted as he did.

The academic literature digs deeper than the latest whos up and whos down, but with some notable exceptions too often stays at a level of abstraction that glosses over the impact that leaders do have. The talk inside the DC Beltway and among journalists can get too caught up in personalities but often does consider critical decision making. Analytic balance requires a 3 Cs approach: recognizing that history and broad social forces create constraints as well as conducive conditions but dont determine the choices that are made. Although no individual is so extraordinary as to achieve transformational impact irrespective of the context, it also is not a given that any and all leaders would have been able to pull off comparable statesmanship accomplishments. Its a matter of man or woman and moment, fit and timing, bounded by constraints and conducive conditions with choices to be made.

We actually think this way a lot when it comes to bad guy leaders. Take Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Deep sociopolitical dynamics and a severe economic crisis in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s fed instability and resentment, but the particular road Germany took, from the pursuit of continental conquest to the perpetration of the Holocaust, had much to do with who the leader was. Similarly, policies such as the Soviet Great Terror of 19371938 and the deliberate starvation of Ukrainians, as Princeton historian David Bell writes, were a function of Stalins character and his particular strategies for seizing and maintaining power for himself. And in Cuba, decades of repression and corruption made the country ripe for revolution, but Fidel Castro put his own stamp on the kind of revolution it was.

In deciding on which twentieth-century peacemakers to focus on, Ive had three main criteria in mind:

Transformational statesmanship more than transactional diplomacy: Drawn from scholars such as James MacGregor Burns and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., this distinction is between efforts at making major breakthroughs in global peace and security and efforts at diplomacy geared to managing and resolving issues in the normal course of events. While transactional diplomacy is often undervalued for its day-to-day, issue-by-issue utility, our focus here instead is on those crucial moments and turning points at which, as in the opening quote from Isaiah Berlin, individuals and their decisions and acts... can determine the course of history. If our criterion were full transformational success, it would yield a rather brief book. Still these are critical junctures, breakthroughs marked by significant progress on issues long thought intractable. They make further progress possible but cannot guarantee it. Backlashes and backsliding may follow. We draw lessons both from what was achieved and what wasnt.

Statesmanship moneyball: The wins-against-replacement-player statistic (WARP), which calculates how much one player contributes to team victories over alternative players at the same position, is one of the most useful parts of the Moneyball craze in Major League Baseball. Scholarly studies of political leadership use more formal language, such as actor indispensability, where a leader acts significantly differently than another leader in the same situation would have acted. Actor indispensability has been shown to bear especially on situations such as transformational statesmanship when, as political scientist Fred Greenstein put it, the more demanding the political act... the greater the likelihood that it will be influenced by personal characteristics of the actor. While there is no neat diplo-ball statesman-above-replacement-leader (SARL) sabermetric, evidence can be marshaled to make the same point: who the player or leader is makes a big differenceand not only with some already prominent figures but also with some lesser-known ones.

Impact hadnot position held: Typically, when we think of statesmanship we turn to presidents and prime ministers, secretaries of state and ministers of foreign affairs, and other leaders of nation-states. While emphasizing national leaders, I also include transformational leaders from international institutions, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who did for peace and justice what governments were unable or unwilling to do.

To get a handle on international peace and security, I break it out into the following five component dimensions: (1) Managing Major Power Rivalries: limiting the geopolitical competition and conflict between major powers that historically has been a leading cause of war; (2) Building International Institutions: creating and strengthening global bodies for preventing conflict with the United Nations as the principal example; (3) Reconciling the Politics of Identity