The Quiet Warrior

A new paradigm for the presidency. A response to Joseph Nye, Jr.

Leadership ultimately resides within the mystery of character. But character, like culture, is not immutable. It can grow and–with experience–change for the better. Joseph Nye, Jr. has written a profound essay that, at root, seeks to explore the character of an ideal twenty-first-century leader [“Picking A President,” Issue #10]. His emphasis on contextual intelligence acts as a guide to flesh out and add structure to a truism that we all learn through life: Emotional intelligence is far more important than intellectual intelligence. Mastering complexity–which, as Nye intimates, is the real art of leadership nowadays–is not just a matter of a high IQ, but of temperament.

But Nye doesn’t quite go far enough, for he is opening up a subject that contains a wealth of implications. Indeed, emotional intelligence demands not just a strong character, but more specific abilities that elaborate further on Nye’s argument: the ability to deal with solitude, to be a good manager, to be highly organized, to possess cultural street smarts, and to think methodically while emotions swirl around you. Moreover, Nye downplays the need for what I have called the “pagan ethos”: We need leaders who can be both emotionally intelligent and politically ruthless. Ironically, in a twenty-first century defined by networks and dispersed power centers, we need strong leaders more than ever.

The more complex our civilization becomes–with its rapidly expanding scientific and policy-making mandarinate–the more comfortable a leader in our age must be with loneliness. For it is lonely being the only non-expert in the room when you are being briefed. But because it is the very vast size and intricacy of our political and military establishments which make them so singularly vulnerable, our salvation will lie with generalists who are not intimidated by the specialists under their command. Of course, this can be taken too far. As retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told me, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had “an astonishing ability not to listen to experts.” The value of experts–and, for that matter, of all the policy papers churned out by Washington think tanks–is that collectively they provide leaders with boundaries on individual issues, beyond which they venture at their own risk. Effective modern leadership is less about thinking boldly out of the box so much as it is about working out creative solutions within the box. So just as modern leadership is lonely, it is also consultative.

Complex civilizations beget complex organizations. And as leaders run governments and militaries, which are ever more immense human machines, management experience will increasingly be a factor defining character. As Nye puts it, “nurture” is becoming more important than “nature” in leadership selection. There is a reason why so many of our general officers in the military are impressive: They have risen through the ranks. One of the idiotic notions raised during this autumn’s presidential campaign has been that experience doesn’t matter. Sure it does. Yes, Vice President-elect Biden made some big analytical mistakes regarding Iraq, in opposing the first Gulf War as well as the surge. But these very mistakes, and the decades he has spent in Washington, add seasoning to his character. He has been around. He has likely felt intellectually humbled at times. He knows how vast government machines of different parts work and don’t work. Unless he is truly full of arrogance and bombast (as, admittedly, some have alleged), he should be a better leader for it. Contrarily, what we should fear more is someone green, who has made few mistakes, and who is thrown into a whole different context of leadership. For that situation would require someone, as Nye suggests, of extreme emotional intelligence to continue to function well.

A key ingredient that makes our world so different than those of previous centuries, and therefore so much more challenging for leaders, is speed, not just of interactions, but of military deployments, and of war itself. In an age when it took weeks to mobilize and transport armored divisions across the seas, it was possible for American presidents to consult the people and Congress about doing so. In the near future, when combat brigades can be inserted anywhere in the world in 96 hours and entire divisions in 120 hours, and with a great deal of our military actions focused on lightning air and computer strikes, the decision-making time to use force or not will be severely compressed. We still think too often of war as grand, set-piece affairs with long overtures, battles, and finally victory parades. To the contrary, the twenty-first century will see virtually non-stop deployments, limited wars, and humanitarian rescue operations in a plethora of geographical and cultural milieus around the globe. Nye’s contextual intelligence will be at a premium, because of the quick pace and constancy of decisions that will need to be made. But so too will seasoning and emotional street smarts, amplified by the kind of instinct that comes from years of managerial experience, be crucial, even as impulsive judgments will be the enemy of good leadership. Everyone is attracted to the proverbial genius with a messy desk, with papers that he never gets to the bottom of. But reading Nye, I feel more secure with someone who is organized and methodical in his decisions, who works gradually towards a solution rather than has a rash inspiration at the last minute. Because of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the increasing speed of military actions and reactions, risk and bravado will exact ever more severe penalties as the years go on. Of course, there is always a danger in being overly rational: Ronald Reagan may not have been rational in believing in the early 1980s that communism would collapse, while British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was quite rational in seeing the ascent of German military power as inevitable. Still, despite these exceptions, good twenty-first-century leadership will veer toward the one who is systematic rather than inspired.

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