Sublime

They’d found decision analysis promising but ultimately futile. They went back and forth on writing a general interest book about the various ways the human mind deals with uncertainty; for some reason, they could never get beyond a sketchy outline and false starts of a few chapters. After the Yom Kippur war—and the ensuing collapse of the public’s

when the United States entered World War II, US Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall dismissed three-quarters of division and corps commanders and five hundred colonels during the course of the four-year conflict.8 However, by the time President Johnson was the commander in chief, the careful promotion system of Secretary of Defense

he cautioned me ‘never to confuse energy with strength’.

The U.S. geopolitical leadership has shown two faces to the world. One was the U.S. interest in building law-based multilateral institutions, including the global institutions of the UN system and regional institutions such as the European Community (and later European Union), of which the United States was a champion from the start. The other was

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]

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.