5-22-13
Joseph Nye: Do Presidents Really Steer Foreign Policy?
Roundup: Historians' Taketags: foreign policy, presidents, The Atlantic, leadership, Joseph Nye
Joseph S. Nye Jr. is a University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard. This article and the accompanying sidebar are adapted from his upcoming book, Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era.
The 21st century began with an extraordinary imbalance in world power. The United States was the only country able to project military force globally; it represented more than a quarter of the world economy, and had the world’s leading soft-power resources in its universities and entertainment industry. America’s primacy appeared well established.
Americans seemed to like this situation. In the 2012 presidential campaign, both major-party candidates insisted that American power was not in decline, and vowed that they would maintain American primacy. But how much are such promises within the ability of presidents to keep? Was presidential leadership ever essential to the establishment of American primacy, or was that primacy an accident of history that would have occurred regardless of who occupied the Oval Office?
Leadership experts and the public alike extol the virtues of transformational leaders—those who set out bold objectives and take risks to change the world. We tend to downplay “transactional” leaders, whose goals are more modest, as mere managers. But in looking closely at the leaders who presided over key periods of expanding American primacy in the past century, I found that while transformational presidents such as Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan changed how Americans viewed their nation’s role in the world, some transactional presidents, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush, were more effective in executing their policies....
Related Links
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Battle over Reproductive Freedom Still Rages at Dr. George Tiller's Former Clinic
- How Decades of Coal Mining Left West Virginia Vulnerable to Flooding
- Can 500 Dinner Discussions Bring Atlantans to Recognition and Reconciliation over the 1906 Race Massacre?
- Remember Vin Scully With His Classic Call of the Last Outs of Sandy Koufax's Perfect Game
- How Trumpism Changed the Claremont Institute (and Vice-Versa)
- Katherine Stewart Joins Jane Coaston to Discuss the Rise of Christian Nationalism
- Edward Miller on the Resurfacing of Bircher Conspiratorialism on the Right Today
- Review: Two Books on the Recent History of Polarization
- Corey Robin on the Enigma of Clarence Thomas
- Review: David Sehat on the Struggle to Make a Secular America