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“Real” Presidents and Demands for “Leadership”

Krauthammer makes a typically ridiculous but revealing argument: A real U.S. president would give Kiev the weapons it needs, impose devastating sectoral sanctions on Moscow, reinstate our Central European missile-defense system, and make a Reaganesque speech explaining why. In other words, “real presidents” cave in to Krauthammer’s demands for aggressive policies. Unless the U.S. wants […]

Krauthammer makes a typically ridiculous but revealing argument:

A real U.S. president would give Kiev the weapons it needs, impose devastating sectoral sanctions on Moscow, reinstate our Central European missile-defense system, and make a Reaganesque speech explaining why.

In other words, “real presidents” cave in to Krauthammer’s demands for aggressive policies. Unless the U.S. wants to be sucked deeper into the war (and Americans clearly don’t want that), it is very unwise to send arms to a government engaged in a conflict with Russia. As we should understand very well by now, providing arms and ensuring that they are used responsibly are two very different things. In any case, the U.S. shouldn’t want to do anything to stoke and escalate the conflict. The U.S. could impose sectoral sanctions on Russia, but without broad international support those sanctions would have limited effect. In the meantime, these sanctions would invite Russian retaliation against U.S. business interests, which are naturally strongly opposed to the imposition of more sanctions. Bringing back the flawed, expensive missile defense system in central Europe is a boilerplate demand from hawks too ignorant to know how ridiculous and irrelevant the demand is. It would serve no purpose, it would represent the undoing of more recent agreements with European allies, and would likely be unwelcome in the countries where it was originally going to be based. Obama could certainly give a big speech to announce all of these reckless, ineffective, and useless measures, and that would put him in the absurd position of making another set of bold declarations that he wouldn’t be able to back up later. If that’s what a “real” president would do, it’s just as well that we don’t have one.

Krauthammer isn’t unique in equating “leadership” with doing whatever he happens to want. It is commonplace for pundits to call for a president to exercise “leadership,” when what they really mean is that they want him to adopt their preferred policies. This has nothing to do with leading in any meaningful sense, and everything to do with yielding to pressure from the loudest ideological factions and interest groups. Refusal to capitulate to these demands is equated with weakness, while caving in is celebrated as proof of a politician’s far-seeing statesmanship. It is a kind of political extortion that ideologues practice to try to get an administration to pay attention to their preoccupations, and the louder their complaints get the more likely it is that the president has avoided making a serious error.

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