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Foreign Affairs
Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy
Joseph S. Nye, Jr.
JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University. His most recent books are Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics and The Power Game: A Washington Novel.
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE?
George W. Bush likes to boast that he does not play "small ball." The Economist describes him as "obsessed by the idea of being a 'transformational' president: not just a status-quo operator like Bill Clinton but a man who changes the direction of history." But will he become that man?
Bush's bid for a legacy of transformation rests on the three major changes he made to U.S. grand strategy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: reducing Washington's reliance on permanent alliances and international institutions, expanding the traditional right of preemption into a new doctrine of preventive war, and advocating coercive democratization as a solution to Middle Eastern terrorism. Those changes, codified in the 2002 National Security Strategy, were widely understood as revolutionary at the time. The British journalist Philip Stephens, for example, wrote in March 2003 that he felt as if he were "present at the destruction" of the international order the Truman administration had created half a century earlier.
Transformation in this regard is more than ordinary adaptation; it implies a major alteration of U.S. grand strategy. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the failure to find either weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, two of the three pillars of Bush's effort at transformation have been shaken. Accordingly, Bush has increasingly emphasized the democratization component of his grand strategy. The 2006 National Security Strategy refers to democracy and freedom more than 200 times (three times as often as the 2002 document), downplays preventive war, and even includes a chapter on globalization (a subject Bush once privately derided as "mushy Clintonism"). The shift has been more than rhetorical: Bush's diplomacy toward North Korea and Iran has recently been much more multilateral than it was during his first term.
Senior administration officials believe that Bush's aggressive democratization will prove successful and that the next president will be bound to follow the broad lines of Bush's new strategy. Vice President Dick Cheney expressed the administration's confidence in January, predicting that in a decade observers will "look back on this period of time and see that liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq really did represent a major, fundamental shift, obviously, in U.S. policy in terms of how we dealt with the emerging terrorist threat -- and that we'll have fundamentally changed circumstances in that part of the world." An analysis of leadership theory and of previous presidents' efforts to transform U.S. grand strategy, however, suggests that history's verdict will be less favorable.
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL CENTURY
In the nineteenth century, U.S. grand strategy was simple, and its means were mostly unilateral: avoid entanglement in the European balance of power, dominate the Western Hemisphere, and keep an open door for trade in Asia. As the twentieth century dawned, however, the industrial power of the United States overtook that of Germany and the United Kingdom, and the transportation revolution effectively brought the New World nearer to the Old. These conditions led six presidents ...