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December 11 - December 25, 2022
Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution. Along this route, leadership is indispensable: decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed. Within human institutions – states, religions, armies, companies, schools – leadership is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.
Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.
For strategies to inspire the society, leaders must serve as educators – communicating objectives, assuaging doubts and rallying support. While the state possesses by definition the monopoly of force, reliance on coercion is a symptom of inadequate leadership; good leaders elicit in their people a wish to walk alongside them.
Leaders can be magnified – or diminished – by the qualities of those around them.
Courage summons virtue in the moment of decision; character reinforces fidelity to values over an extended period.
Leadership is most essential during periods of transition, when values and institutions are losing their relevance, and the outlines of a worthy future are in controversy.
In May 1953, an American exchange student asked Churchill how one might prepare to meet the challenges of leadership. ‘Study history. Study history,’ was Churchill’s emphatic reply. ‘In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.’[2] Churchill was himself a prodigious student and writer of history who well understood the continuum within which he was working.
Beginning in 1949, Adenauer shepherded Germany past the lowest point of its history by abandoning its decades-long quest for domination of Europe, anchoring Germany in the Atlantic Alliance, and rebuilding it on a moral foundation which reflected his own Christian values and democratic convictions.
Charles de Gaulle (born 1890) spent two and a half years during the First World War as a prisoner of war in Wilhelmine Germany; in the Second, he initially commanded a tank regiment. Then, after the collapse of France, he rebuilt the political structure of France twice – the first time in 1944 to restore France’s essence, and the second time in 1958 to revitalize its soul and prevent civil war. De Gaulle guided France’s historical transition from a defeated, divided and overstretched empire to a stable, prosperous nation-state under a sound constitution. From that basis, he restored France to
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Richard Nixon (born 1913) took from his experience in the Second World War the lesson that his country had to play an enhanced role in the emerging world order. Despite being the only US president to resign from office, between 1969 and 1974 he modified the superpower tensions of the high Cold War and led the United States out of the conflict in Vietnam. In the process, he put American foreign policy on a constructive global footing by opening relations with China, beg...
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Anwar Sadat (born 1918), as an Egyptian army officer, was imprisoned for two years for attempting in 1942 to collaborate with German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in expelling the British from Egypt and then for three years, much of it in solitary confinement, after the assassination of the pro-British former Finance Minister Amin Osman. Long animated by revolutionary and pan-Arab convictions, Sadat was projected, in 1970, by the sudden death of Gamal Abdel Nasser into the presidency of an Egypt that had been shocked and demoralized by defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. Through an astute
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Lee Kuan Yew (born 1923) narrowly escaped execution by the occupying Japanese in 1942. Lee shaped the evolution of an impoverished, multiethnic port city at the edge of the Pacific, surrounded by hostile neighbors. Under his tutelage, Singapore emerged as a secure, well-administered and prosperous city-state with a shared national identity providing unity amid cultural diversity.
Margaret Thatcher (born 1925) huddled with her family around the radio listening to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s wartime broadcasts during the Battle of Britain. In 1979, Thatcher inherited in Britain a former imperial power permeated by an air of weary resignation over the loss of its global reach and the decline of its international significance. She renewe...
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The historian Andrew Roberts reminds us that, although the most common understanding of ‘leadership’ connotes inherent goodness, leadership ‘is in fact completely morally neutral, as capable of leading mankind to the abyss as to the sunlit uplands.
Ordinary leaders seek to manage the immediate; great ones attempt to raise their society to their visions.
In short, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, united Germany had been by turns either too strong or too weak for the peace of Europe. By 1945, it had been reduced to its least secure position in Europe and the world since unification.
task of restoring dignity and legitimacy to this crushed society fell to Konrad Adenauer, who had served as lord mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Cologne for sixteen years before being dismissed by Hitler.
He chose a course both humble and daring: to confess German iniquities; accept the penalties of defeat and impotence, including the partition of his country; allow the dismantling of its industrial base as war reparations; and seek through submission to build a new European structure within which Germany could become a trusted partner. Germany, he hoped, would become a normal country, though always, he knew, with an abnormal memory.
In 1909, he was promoted to senior deputy mayor and in 1917 became lord mayor of Cologne.
Adenauer, in the month after Hitler’s designation as chancellor, undertook three public demonstrations of opposition. In the Prussian Upper House, to which he belonged ex officio as lord mayor of Cologne, he voted against the Enabling Act. He refused an invitation to welcome Hitler at Cologne airport during the election campaign. And in the week before the election he ordered the removal of Nazi flags from bridges and other public monuments.
in April Adenauer took up residence in Maria Laach Abbey, 50 miles south of Cologne on the Laacher See. There, his main occupation was to immerse himself in two papal encyclicals
Adenauer encountered doctrines that meshed with his political convictions: emphasizing Christian rather than political identity, condemning communism and socialism, ameliorating class struggle through humility and Christian charity, and ensuring free competition instead of cartel practices.
Adenauer helped to imbue the CDU with its political philosophy as the party of democracy, social conservatism and European integration, rejecting Germany’s recent past as well as totalitarianism in any form.
Germany’s attitude after the Second World War needed to be the opposite of its reaction to the First. Instead of indulging in self-pitying nationalism once again, Germany should seek its future within a unifying Europe. Adenauer was proclaiming a strategy of humility.
Adenauer’s Germany would instead anchor its democracy domestically in its Catholic regions and ecumenical Christian values and internationally in federation with the West – especially in security ties with the United States.
On May 23, 1949 – four years after unconditional surrender – the new German constitution (the Basic Law) took effect, and the Federal Republic was formally established, comprising the three Western zones.
His strategy of humility was composed of four elements: accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe.
On October 7, 1949, the Soviet Union turned its occupation zone into a sovereign (though satellite) state, sealing the partition of Germany.
A trip by Adenauer to Washington in 1953 marked a high point of these efforts. On April 8, he visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The German flag – the black, red and gold tricolor of the Federal Republic, not the black, sword-bearing eagle of Prussia or the swastika of the Thousand Year Reich – was raised above Arlington National Cemetery. As the chancellor strode toward the tomb, a twenty-one-gun salute sounded in a scene with which Adenauer would end the 1945–53 volume of his memoirs: An American band played the German national anthem. I saw how tears were running down the face of one
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Adenauer rebuilt the German armed forces throughout his remaining years in office without resurrecting Germany’s historical intermittent militarism. By early 1964, the Bundeswehr had reached an overall strength of 415,000 officers and enlisted men.
When the treaties took effect on May 5, 1955, the Federal Republic became a sovereign state once more. Whereas, six years earlier, Adenauer’s election had been ratified by the Allied high commissioners, now they accepted their own dissolution.
In six fateful years, Adenauer had brought his country from postwar partition, restrictions under the Occupation Statute and reparations to participation in the European Community and full membership in NATO.
Adenauer considered reparations to the Jewish people a moral duty as well as unqualifiedly in the German national self-interest; his commitment to the denazification process was more opaque, since he was also head of the CDU and in that capacity keenly aware that a rigorous effort would affect a significant proportion of voters.
Adenauer’s strategy relied on the containment policy devised by George Kennan and implemented by US Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles. It assumed that the Soviet bloc would eventually weaken if confined to its own resources and obliged to confront its internal dilemmas. That, in Adenauer’s view, would be the moment to negotiate unification.
Adenauer saw his task as rebuilding democratic values on the basis of Christian morality amid the chaos of unconditional surrender; Kennedy’s sweeping purposes reflected unchallenged belief in America’s providential mission based on its historic democratic values and dominant power.
Kennedy saw his objective as first reducing and then ultimately eliminating the possibility of nuclear war; in that effort, he meant to engage Soviet participation in a long journey that required tactical flexibility, including on the part of the German chancellor. From Adenauer’s perspective, however, the American president’s tactics threatened to dissipate the stability and solidity he had wrought from the disintegration of Hitler’s Germany.
Adenauer’s policy was based on treating the partition of the country as provisional; he believed that unification would come eventually through the dismantling of the Soviet satellite orbit, the Federal Republic’s superior economic growth, the strength and cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance and internal tensions arising within the Warsaw Pact.
Containment’s shortcoming, however, was that it included no prescription for the conveying of Western strength to the adversary, nor the diplomacy that would implement it, unless there was a direct attack or other pressures.
Kohl solved the problem in a decisive and courageous act of leadership. When the East German regime announced free elections, Kohl conducted himself as if the GDR no longer existed and simply scheduled campaign visits to East Germany as if the election were in West Germany. The East German counterpart of the CDU achieved an overwhelming electoral victory, opening the way to the formal unification of Germany – together with continued German membership in NATO – on October 3, 1990.
To prevent it, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had gone so far as to propose a merging of French and British sovereignty to forestall the most feared outcome: a complete collapse followed by the absorption of France into the German sphere.
‘a penniless Brigadier exiled in a land whose language he did not know’.
On August 15, 1914, he had been among the first French soldiers to be wounded in the First World War
In his most influential book, Toward a Professional Army,[14] de Gaulle challenged the defensive policies of the French military, urging instead a strategic posture based on offensive armored warfare.
In an essay I wrote over fifty years ago, I described him as an illusionist.[16] First as a leader of the Free French during the war, later as founder and president of the Fifth Republic, he conjured up visions that transcended objective reality, in the process persuading his audiences to treat them as fact.
For de Gaulle, politics was not the art of the possible but the art of the willed.
Wartime London teemed with Poles, Czechs, Danes, Dutch and nationals from a half-dozen other countries who had fled their occupied homelands. All considered themselves part of the British war effort. None made any claim to an autonomous strategy. Only de Gaulle did so from the start.
Britain and, after 1941, the United States fought for the defeat of Germany and Japan. De Gaulle fought for these aims too, but primarily as a waystation to his ultimate goal: the renewal of the soul of France.
‘reasons of state’ (raisons d’état): that is, the flexible pursuit of the national interest based entirely on a realistic judgment of circumstances.
Richelieu and his successor Jules Mazarin supported the Protestant states in the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated Central Europe, leaving France the arbiter of its rivalries.
De Gaulle considered Napoleon a once-in-a-millennium genius but also blamed him for squandering French power and prestige: ‘He left France smaller than he found her.’
