The Ambassadors:Thinking About Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times | American Diplomacy Est 1996

The first is to preserve their society by manipulating circumstances rather than being overwhelmed by them. Such leaders will embrace change and progress, while ensuring that their society retains its basic sense of itself through the evolutions they encourage within it. The second is to temper vision with wariness, entertaining a sense of limits.

The early twentieth-century philosopher of history Oswald Spengler captured this task when he described the ‘born’ leader as ‘above all a valuer – a valuer of men, situations, and things . . . [with the ability] to do the correct thing without “knowing” it’.[3]

Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.

Leadership is most essential during periods of transition, when values and institutions are losing their relevance, and the outlines of a worthy future are in controversy.

The historian Andrew Roberts reminds us that, although the most common understanding of ‘leadership’ connotes inherent goodness, leadership ‘is in fact completely morally neutral, as capable of leading mankind to the abyss as to the sunlit uplands. It is a protean force of terrifying power’ that we must strive to orient toward moral ends.[14]

“No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance,” Clausewitz writes of war in On War. It’s a “paradoxical trinity,” composed of the passions that cause combatants to risk their lives, the skill of their commanders, and the coherence of the political objectives for which the war is being fought. Only the last is fully