The world is suffering from a dearth of great leaders
National Post, 11 December 2022
Perhaps we get the leaders we need only when we need them — a more comforting thought than that we get the leaders we deserve
Has it become impossible to mock the current quality of our political leadership? The federal byelection in the Ontario riding of Mississauga—Lakeshore on Monday will have a first-ever double-column ballot to accommodate the most candidates ever to run in a single riding.
An explosion of participatory democracy? Not really. It’s a “stampede of rhinoceroses,” as a clever subheadline in iPolitics put it. The Rhinoceros party decided to register as many independent candidates as possible, along with their leader, Sébastien Corriveau. They got 33 of them qualified, in a mocking protest of the Trudeau Liberals abandoning electoral reform in 2017. So voters will be faced with a ballot with more options than a takeout menu.
Remember the Rhinos? In the 1980s, they were something of a farcical force, and their political satire got significant attention.
They ran a candidate named John Turner against Liberal Leader John Turner. Their platform has included some far-sighted reforms, such as running lotteries where the prize was not cash but Senate seats, anticipating in a vague way the current Trudeau model. Their response to the unity crises was to bulldoze the Rocky Mountains in order to fill in the Great Lakes, thereby equalizing the federation. And so forth. A good time was had by many, if not all.
In recent years, the Rhinos haven’t got much attention. Mockery is much more difficult when those to be mocked are themselves often comically dubious.
All of which painfully came to mind in reading the latest book from Henry Kissinger, who will be 100 years old next May. Called “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” it has been judged by his friend Conrad Black to be one of his best books. I concur, and would recommend it for Christmas giving and reading.
The book presents six figures with whom Kissinger had at least some encounters, and presents them as emblematic of different strategies of leadership: Germany’s Konrad Adenauer (the strategy of humility), France’s Charles de Gaulle (strategy of will), America’s Richard Nixon (strategy of equilibrium), Egypt’s Anwar Sadat (transcendence), Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew (excellence) and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher (conviction).
Whether these are strategies or styles, calculation or character, the point is that sometimes a very great deal depends upon a very few people — sometimes just one. During the Second World War, there was no equivalent to Winston Churchill available in Britain, and after the war, only one Adenauer for the repentance and reconstruction of Germany.
Great leaders are willing to be on the outside if necessity and principle require it. Indeed, it was essential to their capacity to lead that Churchill accepted political isolation in the ’30s for his warnings against Adolf Hitler; that de Gaulle went into exile; that Adenauer, deposed as mayor of Cologne by Hitler, took refuge in a Benedictine monastery and then was on the run from Hitler’s goons, sleeping every night in a different place toward the end of the war.
The book is vintage Kissinger. The historical sweep is vast, beginning with Themistocles of Athens. The anecdotes are personal, recalling this or that conversation he had with his principals. With Nixon and Sadat, he not only discussed policy, but shaped it.
“Most leaders are not visionary but managerial,” Kissinger writes. “But during periods of crisis — whether of war, rapid technological change, jarring economic dislocation or ideological upheaval — management of the status quo may be the riskiest course of all.”
It’s a fascinating take from Kissinger, who’s usually associated with the “realpolitik” school of managing what is possible and setting aside the allure of grand visions. Kissinger’s argument here is that sometimes the only way forward is the grand vision, and therefore managing only the art of the possible is the failure. The apparently impossible is the wiser, even safer, course.
Continue reading at the National Post.