Author: Barbara

The war in Ukraine – Putin’s War – is a testament to leadership. It testifies that leadership can matter. It testifies that the impact of leadership can be transformative. It testifies that leadership without restraint can be leadership run amok – and that is evil. And it testifies that single individuals – ‘great men,” as Thomas Carlyle wrote – can change history.

We feared, correctly, that if the war in Ukraine lasted longer than a few weeks it would become normalized. And so, it has. For most Americans certainly it is now just one among many other items in the news, not trivialized but normalized, part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

It’s worth reminding ourselves, then, not just of how catastrophic this war is, but of how it defied nearly every one of our ostensibly commonsense assumptions of how the world works. Even the experts had trouble believing that what happened in Ukraine – on February 24, when Russia invaded – happened.

The pre-eminent historian of Ukraine, Serhii Plokhy, admitted after the fact, “I think deep down we really believed that history had ended. Maybe not literally … but in terms of unprovoked war.” Putin’s war, he added, was so unimaginable because it “discounted the entire history of the 20^th century, when the Ukrainian national idea grew.”

Notwithstanding our disbelief, our sense the invasion was surreal, it wasn’t. It was real. A leader, a single individual, did “discount the entire history of the 20^th century,” thereby overturning what had seemed safe assumptions. How then did this destruction and devastation – hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, millions dislodged and displaced either within Ukraine or without, large swaths of land laid to waste – come to pass?

In the weeks before the war American intelligence warned that Russian troops were amassing in large numbers along the border with Ukraine. Still, as Plokhy attests, even the best and the brightest in America and Europe found it almost impossible to believe that Putin would be so reckless, so brutal, and so cruel as to start a war solely for his own aggrandizement. A skirmish maybe. But a war?

Were we all asleep at the switch? Maybe. At a minimum nearly all of us, experts and non-experts alike, held fast to these two major though mistaken assumptions. First, that a land war in Europe 75 years after the end of World War II was inconceivable and therefore impossible. Second, that Russian President Vladimir Putin might long for the old days, the glory days of imperial Russia, but that he would not be so reckless as to try singlehandedly to recreate it.

Wrong on both counts. Putin came to believe the possibility of regaining Ukraine, reuniting Ukraine with Russia, was worth the risk of war in Europe. And Putin turned out not to be the rational actor leader the West had presumed. More precisely, while Putin behaved irrationally from our perspective, not so from his. From his perspective the prospective benefits of invading Ukraine were worth whatever the costs in blood and treasure. Whatever the costs in lives, including Russian lives, permanently destroyed, or at least disrupted. Whatever the costs to Ukraine, a free and independent state starting to find its footing. And whatever the costs to the rest of the world as in, say, a devastating shortage of food in parts of Africa.

What has Putin – along with, it goes without saying, his enablers – wrought? A major land war in Europe.  A transformed NATO. A global energy crisis. The threat of global famine. A reframed international system.

His has been one of the strongest testaments to leadership – to the ability of a single individual to make a colossal difference – in a half century or more.  

They said there were none left. They said it couldn’t be done. They said American institutions had failed. They said the United States of America – the erstwhile bastion of liberal democracy – was a basket case.  Well, they were wrong.

There are some left – political leaders who are both ethical and effective.

It can be done – reverse six years of corruption and destruction of the American body politic.

They have not failed – there is strong evidence the Congress, specifically the House of Representatives, will save us from ourselves.

The United States of America is not a basket case – with every hearing of the January 6^th commission we witness democracy in America is not only alive but well or, at least, well enough.

Far be it from me to play the part of Pollyanna. Still, let it be said that the U. S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol is the most important and best managed such committee in American history. If any single group of people can turn the tide of our miserable recent history, it is they. These five men and these four women.

• Bennie Thompson from Mississippi, who serves as Chair.
• Liz Cheney, from Wyoming, who serves as Vice Chair.
• Pete Aguilar, from California.
• Zoe Lofgren, from California.
• Adam Schiff, from California.
• Adam Kinzinger from Illinois.  
• Elaine Luria, from Virginia.
• Stephanie Murphy from Florida.
• Jamie Raskin from Maryland.

The hearings being held by the above committee are more significant than those that brought down Senator Joseph McCarthy. And they are more significant than those that brought down President Richard Nixon. They are more significant because the corruption, cruelty, and toxicity that characterize former president Donald Trump are more extreme than anything that stained McCarthy and Nixon. They are more significant because Trump has wormed his way far deeper into the American psyche than either McCarthy or Nixon. And they are more significant because neither McCarthy nor Nixon came as close to knifing the heart of American democracy.

One more thing: the January 6^th Committee is operating in a context in which collaboration and cooperation have become rare commodities. Political leaders especially have become known for nothing so much as their contentiousness and divisiveness.  Yet here we have five men and four women able to temper whatever their differences and able, therefore, to model what good leadership in 21st century America looks like.

They do not walk on water. Nor are they likely to pull a rabbit out of a hat.  But if any group of people can begin – note I write “begin” – to lead us out of the wilderness it is this one. No grandstanding or showboating. Instead, to a person they make the work of the country their priority.       

The leaders in yesterday’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which had given women the right to have an abortion, were six justices who sit on the Supreme Court: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and chief justice John Roberts. The followers were the remaining three justices: Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.  Given the leaders held the majority view, the minority was, effectively, helpless. Their dissent, no matter its eloquence, was meaningless.

The same held true for other, similar, recent decisions.  And it will hold true for other, similar, future ones, whenever the tension is between the right and the left, between conservatives and liberals. This is because the math of the court is simple: 1) nine justices in total; 2) six justices who are lifelong conservatives; 3) all justices with lifetime tenure.  This math trumps the other math – the math in which a sizable majority of Americans hold views on a wide range of issues that are opposed to those of the six justices who constitute the majority on the supreme court. As in the case of Roe v Wade, which most Americans did not want overturned.  

The ability of six justices legally to enforce their will on many millions of Americans who deeply object is a problem not only as it applies to the court but as it applies to other failures of American governance that are less political than systemic.  For example, the electoral college. Three of the court’s conservative justices were appointed by Donald Trump who, in 2016, was elected president of the United States for one term, even though he had fewer votes than did his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

What is to be done? What are the remedies for systemic, structural, failures such as ours?  The specifics are not clear. But what is clear is this. They, the remedies, lie not with people in positions of power, but with people who are not. Not with leaders, but with followers. With ordinary Americans who are so fed up with being manipulated and dictated to by those who do not represent them they take matters into their own hands. At the polls, or in the streets, or both.  

In what once was thought the cradle of democracy, the United States, the pandemic will be remembered certainly in part for the refusal to obey authority. For the refusal of millions of Americans to follow the simplest of public health guidelines, to wear a mask. Masks became politicized to the point where not to wear one was seen by large parts of the populace as a sign of their freedom and independence.

In autocracies the pandemic had just the opposite effect. In autocracies Covid was used, is used, to compel compliance. Governments around the world have employed the pandemic as an excuse to curtail freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. According to Human Rights Watch, in at least 18 countries either the military or the police physically assaulted journalists, bloggers, and protesters for criticizing in some way their government’s response to Covid-19.

Russia used Covid precautions as a pretext effectively to ban all political demonstrations. According to Daniel Treisman, writing in Foreign Affairs, those who defied the ban were quickly arrested. “The first six months of 2021 saw more than 14,000 people convicted of violating rules regarding public events, more than six times the annual average over the preceding 15 years.”

Similarly, even more dramatically, is what happened in China. The Chinese authorities have used the virus as bludgeon, as an instrument of power. Their capacity to control enhanced by the latest technologies, city officials tracked whether residents were, as they had been ordered to do, wearing masks. Home power consumption was monitored to check if residents were, as they sometimes were also ordered to do, following quarantine protocols. And some cities had sensors installed, placed on the doors of residents quarantining at home, to notify government officials if the doors were opened.

The Chinese government also ordered, implemented, and then strictly enforced total lockdowns, including in China’s two largest cities. The lockdowns were of a size and scope that Americans can scarcely imagine. In Shanghai alone, some 25 million people were forbidden to leave their homes for weeks and then months, with no permission to exit for any reason other than to get tested. While a few occasionally registered their anger – “We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures,” complained one Chinese citizen on the highly censored social media platform Weibo – overwhelmingly people complied. To stay out of the clutches of the state they had no choice.     

As it pertains to our behavior during the worst of Covid, or to our record on Covid, we, we Americans, have nothing whatsoever to boast about. But the degree to which Covid has been used by leaders to increase their power over their followers is in some cases terrifying.

What’s worse than mindlessly disobeying orders? Mindlessly obeying orders.  

When national leaders run into trouble at home they sometimes look abroad. They look beyond their own border for an opportunity to restore their tattered reputation.

This is not to say they necessarily fabricate these opportunities. Not at all. Winston Churchill did it and with, to understate it, good reason.  He was a marginalized member of parliament in the mid-1930s when he started regularly to call out Adolf Hitler. To warn his British brethren that Hitler was going to pose an unparalleled threat not just to Great Britain but to all Europe.

For his troubles Churchill continued to be marginalized – and his warnings ignored – until he wasn’t. Until 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and Churchill was seen, almost overnight, as the only leader who might save Britain from defeat at the hands of the Nazis.

To compare Winston Churchill taking a stand against Adolf Hitler to Boris Johnson taking a stand against Vladimir Putin might seem silly. But not so fast. Depends on how you look at it.

Johnson has had a hard time of it almost since he became prime minister. He was forced by circumstance to deal with Brexit and Covid, and with a sharply shrinking economy, and with the first major war on European soil since the end of World War II.  

He also ran into trouble of his own making – the scandal known to all in the know as “Partygate.” This was of course a self-inflicted wound. Johnson bringing on himself the wrath of his constituents for permitting and, sometimes, participating in, partying at 10 Downing Street while the rest of the United Kingdom was banned (during the pandemic) even from seeing family and friends.

So, what might a leader in Johnson’s position do? Of course, look abroad. Which is precisely what Prime Minister Boris Johnson is doing and has done for months. He has been at the forefront of European leaders supporting – by word and deed – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Johnson has visited Kyiv twice. Johnson has provided Ukraine with extensive military support and is promising more. Johnson has promised other kinds of help such as training tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. Johnson has explored with Zelensky how to end or circumvent Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade, which is precluding the export of massive amounts of grain to places that desperately need it. And Johnson has promised to do everything in his power to “expel the aggressor from Ukraine.”

Given his unpopularity at home, even among members of his own party, small wonder that Johnson has looked elsewhere for love. And small wonder that he found it in Ukraine where Zelensky is obviously grateful for all his attention and support, and where the people regard him, according to the New York Times, as “something of a folk hero.”

Still, the fact that Johnson is a leader in search of a cause and a constituency, does not mean he necessarily is misguided. It’s possible if not probable that on this issue – defending Ukraine against Russia’s unprovoked, criminal aggression – he, more than any other single Western leader, is on the right side of history.    

When a leader with great power says something, followers should listen. When the leader with great power is evil, followers should listen carefully.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a leader with great power who, by my definition, is evil. Specifically, he readily inflicts pain on large numbers of others, both psychological and physical.

He is also a leader who trumpets what he does – in advance. He does so in deed and in word.  Putin’s War, his invasion of Ukraine, was heralded by a whole host of assaults, initiatives over a period of at least 15 years that by any measure were aggressive. So, if the West was surprised when he invaded Ukraine, it wasn’t paying attention.

Similarly, what Putin says. He has not been shy about hiding his intentions or illusions, which is precisely why what he said last week should be seen as a threat. Yet another shot across the bow.

At a recent event commemorating the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great, Putin compared himself to the legendary Russian czar, who was known for, among other things, his relentless expansion of the Russian empire.  “What was [Peter] doing during the Great Northern War?” Putin asked aloud. “He was taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did. And it looks like it fell on us to take back and reinforce as well.”  (Peter’s land grab was from Sweden; the Great Northern War went on for 21 years.)

Putin has long-lionized Peter, who ruled Russia from 1682 to 1725. (He keeps a bronze statue of Peter over his desk in the Kremlin’s cabinet room.) Trouble is that Putin idolizes only part of Peter. The Peter that is the warmonger and territorial aggrandizer. He has no interest in the other part of Peter, that is, the Peter who was great because he was as interested in culture, education, and religion as in aggression. The Peter who leaned toward Europe, not away from it. Putin, in short, admires only those parts of Peter that to the West are the least attractive, most offensive, and most dangerous.   

By most measures, the West, NATO, has been helpful to Ukraine as it has tried, valiantly, to fight Russian aggression. But, by most measures, the West, NATO, has not been very helpful to Ukraine – certainly not as helpful as it could be. It has taken several measures off the table (for example, sending in ground troops). Its delivery of weapons and weapons systems to the beleaguered nation has been relatively niggardly and notably sluggish. And sanctions have had some effect, but not nearly enough in large part because of Europe’s (and India’s, and China’s) continuing demand for gas and oil.   

Whatever happens in Ukraine, to Ukraine, the West has been forewarned. By comparing himself to Peter the Great, Vladimir the Great has made unambiguously clear that he is prepared to fight to the finish. Ukraine will lose this war, Europe will lose this war, the West will lose this war, unless it reads Putin loud and clear. Which is to say unless it decides it will do what it takes to defeat this latest in the line of Russian czars.

Twice before I’ve written about Representative Liz Cheney. (Links below.) She is that singular a leader, that fascinating a figure. In the first of the two posts, I focused on her exceptional lineage. Not just her illustrious father, but her pathbreaking mother. In the second, I emphasized her no-nonsense style, a striking contrast to another Elizabeth prominent at that moment, Elizabeth Holmes. 

In this third piece I address her daring and determination. Though she stands nearly alone among Republicans, Liz Cheney is breathtakingly eager to slay the dragon, who happens also to be a Republican. Moreover, the fearlessness and the audaciousness with which she is leading the charge against Former President Donald Trump is reminiscent of nothing so much as a mythical figure, a dragon slayer, who struggled against the monster, alone.

In doing what’s she’s doing Cheney’s risks are real and they are considerable.

• Marginalization, defamation, and elimination in her home state, Wyoming, where she faces an uphill fight for reelection in November.
• Marginalization, defamation, and demotion in her party. (A year ago, in punishment for her opposition to Trump, House Republicans stripped her of her leadership role.)
• Marginalization, defamation, and demotion in the chamber in which she serves.
• Marginalization and defamation that crosses from the professional and political into the personal.
• Marginalization and defamation by certain segments of the American public, especially those on the far right.
• Marginalization and defamation by media such as Fox News and social media.

Have these various threats to her well-being in any way intimidated Cheney? Not so far as I can tell. Hard to imagine she could be any fiercer or more determined a political opponent.

Perhaps the best indicator of her combativeness and tenaciousness is the scope of her attack. For it appears Liz Cheney will not be content to slay a single dragon – the 800-pound dragon. She’s after the whole herd! Her prey includes any Republican, nearly all Republicans, who in the face of the overwhelming evidence that Trump is completely corrupt and somewhat crazy is still staying loyal. Loyal to a leader who by no conceivable measure should ever again hold public office – or even a smidgeon of political power.      

We have known for some time that by attacking Trump with all the personal, political, and legal resources at her disposal, Representative Cheney was alienating herself from her party. What we did not know until last week was that the party itself was in her sights. Especially Trump’s toadies, sycophants, and enablers. She is taking on the lot of them, warning them that, “There will come a day when President Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”

Tough talk not from a dragon slayer – from a dragons slayer.

https://barbarakellerman.com/leader-mother-lynne-cheney/

Women and Leadership – Elizabeth Holmes and Elizabeth Cheney

For over a year now erstwhile enablers of former President Donald Trump have tried to save themselves. Save themselves from the judgement of history.

There’s been a slew of them – Trump toadies who while he was president went along with everything he said and did. Only recently to come out of the cold to turn on him and, or, to justify their behavior.

In my book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, I define enablers as “followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.” Additionally, I name names. The book has a large cast of characters, men and women who performed the part of enabler to a fault. Literally.

Most of Trump’s enablers have stayed silent. Maybe because they remain true believers. Maybe because they fear his wrath. Or maybe because they think they’re better off shutting up and leaving the national stage.   

But some of Trump’s enablers have sought to redeem themselves. They have tried publicly to justify why they served a leader who so obviously was bad.  Misguided and malignant, and completely corrupt.

Former Attorney General William Barr, for instance, wrote a book titled, One Damn Thing After Another. In his memoir cum self-serving case for the defense Barr describes himself as serving not just Trump but also the American people. How exactly? Because he took on militant secularists, left-wing agitators, and members of the “Maoist left.” Barr moreover went further. In his zeal to rehabilitate his reputation he testified for public consumption that Trump’s claims of election fraud were “bullshit.”

Ivanka Trump, the fabled first daughter, has also backtracked, in public. In The Enablers I describe Ivanka as the one person on planet earth who seemed, on occasion, to reach President Trump. He adored her. First and foremost, her beauty. But he also “extolled how she behaved and what she accomplished and thought her future limitless.” He called Ivanka “Baby” in official meetings, described her as “unique,” and insisted that if she ever ran for president, “she’d be very, very hard to beat.’” In return, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, were among President Trump’s most loyal allies and advisors, members not only of his family but of his inner circle. Still, when it came her turn to testify about Trump’s Big Lie, that he won not lost the 2020 presidential election, she did. Her voice was faint, and her words brief, but she said for the record that she believed William Barr, that her father’s claims of election fraud were “nonsense.” Why did Ivanka Trump turn on Donald Trump? To create distance between her and her father – to rehabilitate herself.  

Final case in point (here) of an enabler seeking to be saved, Dr. Deborah Birx.  After Trump was out of the White House Birx wrote a book, Silent Invasion, that centered on her role as Coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She, and Doctors Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield were Trump’s main medical advisors during his last year in office, which coincided with the first year of the Covid crisis. In Silent Invasion Birx describes her White House tenure as excruciating.  Still, she stayed, apparently reasoning that leaving her post would be more hurtful than helpful. “I am not a quitter,” she wrote in her book. It was what one reviewer called “one of her many self-testimonials with which she bolsters herself throughout the book.” Bolsters herself because she wants to justify herself. Too late though. Before 2020 was over Birx’s credibility was shot. As I wrote in The Enablers, her willingness “to forgive her boss his numberless lies,” and her readiness to “heap on her boss the flattery he craved,” makes her redemption impossible.

No one can ever undo what was done.  An enabler who enabled a very, very bad leader can never be saved. Redeemed perhaps, but not saved.    

Seems all Great Britain and large swaths of the Commonwealth are turning themselves inside out. All to honor, to celebrate over a four-day period, the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II, who has sat on the throne 70 years.   

But what exactly is she, this long-lived and long-reigning Queen? Is she a leader? Or a figurehead? Or a symbol of something, maybe a people, or a country, or a memory of times past when Britain was an empire, a great empire, that at its peak ruled 25 % of the earth’s surface and all the world’s waves.    

Thing is she might be a figurehead, and she might be a symbol. And for that matter she might be, merely, a celebrity. But she is not just any one of these. She is not just even all of them. She is also a leader. She is a leader who has great throngs of followers, many of whom are strongly tied to her emotionally, psychologically, arguably even spiritually.

For of all the different kinds of leaders, the Queen most closely resembles a religious one. She has remained remote, almost other worldly. She has been private and, especially given the length of her time in public life, said little. She has never issued an order or initiated an obviously new idea. She has never seemed to want to run anything or manage anyone. Moreover, she has never tried in any obvious way to exercise any power, or even in any perceptible way to exert any influence. Mostly she just was, still is.

Elizabeth II does occupy a position of authority. That’s evident in the pomp and circumstance; in the crowns that sit sometimes on her head; in the multiple castles she owns and in which she continues still to dwell. But compared with times past her authority is greatly diminished. Older generations might still be intimidated or impressed by the Queen’s position, but younger ones mostly are not. They are waving flags this weekend not because of Elizabeth’s position but because of her persona.

When she dies there will be genuine mourning. To many members of the British public her death will feel personal. But her loss will be more than that. For the Queen has been source of stability – in Great Britain, but not only in Great Britain – that in this day and age will be difficult, maybe even impossible ever to replace.      

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is now more than three months old. Seems to me the romance of it is over. War is never, of course, romantic. Like all wars the war in Ukraine has been deadly and cruel, destructive and disruptive. Still, the narrative associated with it, has had, as many wars do, an element that was romantic.

The romance in this case was on two levels. First, on a general level Americans especially saw the war as Ukrainians willing to fight to the death for the ideals Americans hold most dear. (At least in theory.) Ideals such as freedom and independence. Second, more specifically Americans have been in love with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. We have embraced the short, cute, onetime comic actor as the greatest wartime leader since Winston Churchill.

To be fair, Zelensky has done a remarkably good job. He has played what certainly seemed a miserably weak hand brilliantly well. Moreover, he has been preternaturally effective not only within Ukraine but without, tailoring his message to his various audiences, convincing people from Israel to Italy that he is a leader for all seasons. And … persuading them that Ukraine, Ukraine alone, is what stands between them and the Russian bear.       

In the first couple of months of the war this narrative felt good. It felt especially good because it was buttressed by events on the ground, by Ukraine’s readiness, willingness, and effectiveness at pushing Russian troops away from the capital, Kyiv, back to the eastern front. But now, on the eastern front, things are different. The news out of Ukraine is far grimmer than it was earlier in the war. The Russians are now advancing, and the Ukrainians are now not only retreating but suffering the heavy costs and casualties that all along likely were inevitable. After all, whatever its weaknesses, Russia’s military is among the largest in the world.

Russia expert Stephen Sestanovich is a realist who this week took note of the obvious. “Russia occupies much of Ukraine,” he wrote. Look at a map, he tells us! “Yes, Russia’s armed forces have suffered some major setbacks…. But the territory Russia has [already] seized is roughly four times larger than the two separatist regions it controlled in eastern Ukraine when the war started.”  (Italics mine.) Put directly, Russia did badly early in the war and, as a result, it changed course. Now Russia is doing well, quite well, in fact, all the while laying waste to large swaths of eastern Ukraine.   

The war has crystallized into a contest between two leaders, Putin and Zelensky. For both it’s figuratively if not literally a fight to the death. Nothing romantic about that.