Ukrainians have not, in other words, been the only ones taking to the streets in recent months. The world over there is continuing evidence that ordinary people are feeling politically empowered – even though, as we see this weekend (the Crimean election), the products of protest are impossible to predict.
In a piece published yesterday titled “The Leaderless Doctrine,” New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in part the following:
“The Cold War was a competition between clearly defined nation-states.
Commanding American leaders created a liberal international order. They preserved that order with fleets that roamed the seas, armies stationed around the world and diplomatic skill.
Over the ensuing decades, that faith in big units has eroded – in all spheres of life. Management hierarchies have been flattened. Today people are more likely to believe that history is driven by people gathering in the squares and not from the top down. The liberal order is not a single system organized and defended by American military strength; it’s a spontaneous network of direct people-to-people contacts, flowing along the arteries of the Internet.
The real power in the world is not military or political. It is the power of individuals to withdraw their consent.”
Brooks was echoing an argument I made two years ago, in my book, The End of Leadership.
What’s even clearer to me now though than it was then, is that what best characterizes the world in the second decade of the 21st century is what I will from here on in refer to as the “leadership gap.”
Here’s what I mean. The end of leadership, or the leaderless doctrine, best applies to institutions and systems that generally adhere to principles of democratic governance. Those institutions and systems that are less linked to these principles, not to speak of those that dismiss them altogether, are not similarly characterized by the end of leadership, or by being leaderless.
However…by and large these latter groups and organizations are led by leaders who in my simple parlance are “bad.” They are autocratic, tyrannical, or even “evil.”* They are not in any case, by any definition, democratic.
This gap – between leadership in democracies on the one hand and leadership in autocracies on the other – is nowhere so blatantly in evidence as it is in the contrast between Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Again, I refer here not to the men themselves, but to the situations in which they find themselves. One is, you might say, victimized by the context of leaderless-ness within which he perforce operates. The other enjoys, you might say, free rein. Of Putin it’s fair to say that he is a “bad” leader. But he is bad as measured by his ethics, not by his effectiveness. Of Obama you might conclude that he is ineffective; but there is no evidence whatsoever that during his presidency he has been in any way unethical. This difference between the two men is emblematic of the leadership gap that has increasing implications for, among many other things, international relations.
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*See my book Bad Leadership for my definition of “evil leadership.”
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Imagine that you had just started a new job. Then imagine that just two months into your new job you were evaluated by a large number of people – the overwhelming majority of whom were in no position to render judicious judgment. And then imagine that the results of this evaluation were made public, available for anyone and everyone to dissect as they saw fit. No fun.
I’m no great fan of New York City’s new mayor, Bill De Blasio. But give the guy a break! Not necessary a scant nine weeks into his mayoralty to have a big, bold headline reading “De Blasio Approval Rating at 39% in Poll… Lower than Bloomberg’s at Same Point” (Wall Street Journal, 3/7/14).
Such constant, in this case also wildly premature, assessment is demoralizing, not only for those being assessed, for leaders, but for those of us doing the assessing, for followers. Americans are so skeptical of those in positions of political authority that those in positions of political authority are being undermined. It’s become something of a vicious circle, to which incessant polling is contributing factor.
Next time you’re asked your opinion about someone who recently assumed political office, say you don’t know. Because you really don’t. Like any of us new to any task, it takes a while for others correctly to determine if we’re doing it well.
The rap on Obama is that the crisis in Crimea has confirmed that he is weak and Putin is strong. Given that Crimea is near-certain to revert to being Russian, this charge in particular will not soon go away.
I myself have been strongly critical of American foreign policy under President Obama, particularly, ironically, of the agreement with Russia on Syria’s chemical weapons. But any comparison between Obama and Putin cannot be confined to who they are and what they consist of – personally, psychologically, and temperamentally. Any comparison between them must be expanded to consider context.
Fact of the matter is that Putin is free more or less to do what he wants. This is not to say that he does not have some contextual constraints. As I have previously pointed out, he does. But the constraints on the Russian president pale in comparison with those on the American president. Obama’s hands are tied to a very considerable degree by a difficult if not downright recalcitrant Congress, by a press corps that carps 24/7; and by a body politic that has been increasingly less approving. Putin on the other hand has no such concerns. Russia’s parliament is in the palm of his hand. Russia’s press is near uniformly endorsing. And Russians themselves are generally admiring.
More to the point is that when Putin does encounter opposition – by the people, say, or by the press – he tends to crush it, without reprisal. Amazing what you can do in the 21st century if you’re leader of an autocracy – not democracy!
For all our fixation now on Putin – a fixation I myself generally share – let’s be clear here. The crisis in Ukraine did not start with him. It started with the Ukrainian people whose overthrow of their democratically elected, though feckless and corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych, gave Putin all the excuse he needed to step into what he correctly perceived as a vacuum.
No doubt the Russian autocrat had long considered how to reclaim the Crimean peninsula. But he needed an ostensible reason, a putative justification for Russian occupation. As it happened, he was handed one on the political equivalent of a silver platter. Once Yanukovych was overwhelmed by the street and fled his post as president, Putin had what was required to take what he wanted.
This is not of course to excuse Putin from his land grab. Rather it is to remind how all this started. Not with him, not at the top, but at the bottom, with ordinary people pressing for political change. Of course, as we have seen elsewhere in the world, once change takes place all bets are off.
As anyone who has read my blog since its inception will know, I regularly write a column titled as above. Why? Because I have long been interested in Russia – and I have long been interested in the man who long has been its leader. Putin has always struck me as the worst kind of autocrat who, however, interestingly, is constantly being constrained by the context within which he lives.
Most of the world’s markets soared yesterday – especially the American market, where the Dow Jones was up over 225 points. The reason was obvious: the crisis in Ukraine seemed to have ebbed, if only slightly. And Putin seemed to have blinked, if only fleetingly. Nothing is settled, of course. The situation remains volatile and the outcome uncertain. But early evidence suggests that Putin wants to go only so far – and no further.
Let’s look at why this could be the case. Is it President Obama who scares President Putin? Is it the European Union? Is it the United Nations? Not hardly. None of these more traditional actors have the capacity to put the fear of God into anyone, certainly not the Russian leader.
But here’s who does scare him: his own people. What Putin did not anticipate was the instant economic impact of his incursion into Crimea, an impact that immediately affected Russia itself. In no time flat the ruble had dropped precipitously. And in no time flat the Russian stock index had dropped similarly precipitously – over 10% in a day. Moreover Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas monopoly, which accounts for no less than one quarter of all Russian tax revenues, lost $15 billion in market value, in the same single day. These are big numbers – big enough to sober if not scare President Putin, big enough to remind the rest of how deeply entwined are politics and markets, and of how deeply entwined is one nation’s economy with other nations’ economies.
The Russian people generally strongly support their incumbent president. But there is dissent in Russia. And while Putin typically suppresses dissent, he cannot, especially in the wake of what happened in Kiev, necessarily count on suppressing dissent smoothly and swiftly. And he cannot necessarily count on suppressing dissent without erasing entirely the image he so carefully cultivated at Sochi: that of a man of the world ready to hobnob not only with his own kind, but with movers and shakers the world over.
For all his miserable Machiavellianism, Putin is not Stalin. And for all the echoes of the Cold War, the second decade of the 21st century is strikingly different from the seventh decade of the 20th.
In 2004 Harvard Business School Press published my book titled, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. In the book I identified seven different types of bad leadership.
I made clear at every turn that “bad” refers not only to bad leaders but also, inevitably, to bad followers. There is no bad leadership without bad followership, which is precisely why the book was titled Bad Leadership, as opposed to Bad Leaders.
My focus here is on Insular Leadership, which I defined as follows: “The leader and at least some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of ‘the other’ – that is, those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.” Think, for example, of the leaders astride cigarette companies in the 1960s and ‘70s. They were beginning to suspect if not know full well that smoking was bad, really bad, for people’s health. But, they did everything they could to conceal this fact from their customers, even resisting until they could no longer labels warning of the dangers.
Insular leaders and their followers establish boundaries between themselves and their immediate constituencies on the one side, and everyone else on the other. To a degree, of course, this is simply human nature. My group – my family, my tribe, my country, my company – competes with your group for resources, and in every other way as well. Still, in this day and age, when everyone knows what’s happening to everyone else, it should be difficult to turn a blind eye to danger, not to speak of tragedy, even when it befalls people who are “the other.”
So I fault President Barack Obama not so much for finding it difficult to respond to Russian aggression in Ukraine. His options are limited given the circumstances and given how, in my view at least, Putin will stop at nearly nothing to hold on to a country that he views as essential both to greater Russia and to himself, personally and politically.
Rather I fault the president for insularity in his foreign policy leadership more generally. Obama’s foreign policy has been one of restraint, of holding back, of letting events follow their natural trajectories, of leading, if at all, “from behind” – whatever that means. His restraint has been in evidence at every turn, most strikingly arguably in America’s policy toward Syria, which has been to let history take its course while we stand by and do nearly nothing.
To be sure, there is a single exception to this general rule: when Obama had no where else to turn, he turned to Vladimir Putin to strike a deal on Syria’s chemical weapons. But, as we now know, this had the miserable effect of strengthening the hand of Putin’s client, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. It gave Assad free rein to continue to punish severely the Syrian people, and to further contribute to the worst humanitarian crisis in at least a generation. Let’s be clear: the number of dead in Syria, the vast number of Syrian refugees (two million and counting), and the overwhelming misery of the Syrian people more generally will be a reminder for many to come of how high the price of Insular Leadership. In the end the cost of doing nothing is way more – practically, politically, and obviously morally – than the cost of doing something. Don’t tell me that the Americans, the West more generally, and the United Nations could not have come up with a policy somewhere between military intervention and being a bystander to catastrophe!
Is there a connection between Obama’s general insularity and the situation in which he finds himself now – threatened, however indirectly, by yet another Russian dictator? Who knows? Safe to say though that pulling back from world politics, letting events unfold while we Americans stand by and watch, is not a foreign policy that history will judge one of distinction.
A key player in the crisis in Ukraine is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She is known to want nothing so much as to avoid international conflict that would in any significant way drag in Germany. So what she did was to pick up the phone and call President Vladimir Putin, twice in recent days, to urge him to play nice.
The connection however must have been poor – for evidence is Putin heard not a syllable she said. Evidence is Merkel’s words fell on deaf ears.
Surprise, surprise! Putin did what some of us predicted he would do: stake his personal and political reputation on refusing to stand by and do nothing while Ukraine slipped into the embrace of the West. As of this morning, thousands of extra troops, presumably Russian, have been sent to Crimea, to make clear that if Kiev continues on its current course, away from the East and toward the West, it will do so without Crimea. It will lead either to a breakup of the Ukrainian state, or to considerable civil strife if not all out civil war, or to some brokered arrangement in which Crimea is given a high degree of autonomy within a larger Ukraine.
The ultimate outcome of this standoff is obviously unclear. What is completely clear is that no amount of ordinary chit chatting will get Putin to stand down. For once, Chancellor Merkel, just like President Obama, will have to get deeply involved and her hands somewhat soiled.
For all the years that I have been teaching a course titled “Women and Leadership” – both at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth – one of the running themes has been what most women experience as a tension between family and work. While the demographics of my students skew toward women eager “to lead,” the theme has become a commonplace, a constant commentary on the stresses associated with trying to “have it all.”
Until recently these stresses have been owned nearly entirely by women, especially by those who are intent on having one or more babies while at the same time striving toward achieving a successful career. The “biological clock” was thought to tick for women, not men, the former not the latter saddled with the issue of how to get ahead while first being pregnant and then parenting young children.
But, in the last year or two, in the wake of sometime studies suggesting that men too had some sort of biological clock, our attitudes began gradually to change. Moreover now, with a major new study just out of Sweden reporting that children born to middle-aged men are more likely than those born to younger men to develop mental difficulties ranging from autism and schizophrenia to attention deficit and bipolar disorder, the discourse will have to shift. Now whatever the concerns associated with when to have a baby and when to focus on career will have to be more equally shared.
The new study is by no means the last word on the subject. Researchers are quick to say that the results will have to be replicated, and that the vast majority of children born to older fathers will in any case be just fine. But the evidence is accumulating and suggestive if not stark: men are not immune to some of same concerns about when to have a baby that for years now have bedeviled women.
This is not to say that gender does not matter. When last I looked women were still the ones able to bear babies and when last I looked women were still the ones able to suckle them. Still, the fact that men now also need more carefully to decide when to have a baby should in time change the debate. It should in time make more accommodating the workplace, which generally continues to require a commitment incompatible with raising young children – especially in a society that usually provides no obvious, affordable day care alternative.
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