By Dan Henninger
As the year turns, the subject becoming impossible to duck is growing global disorder. The days before the New Year brought two suicide bombings in Russia and a major political assassination in Lebanon. Throw a dart randomly at a map of the Middle East or Southeast Asia and it will hit trouble.
It is no surprise that in conversations of late one hears invocations of the 1930s. Or that a popular book to give this season has been Margaret MacMillan’s “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.”
Whether the world in 2014 will tip from containment to chaos or war is not the subject here. The subject is rediscovering the antidote to war, which is strong global leadership. The world we inhabit now doesn’t have enough of it. Or any of it for that matter.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin runs Russia with soft Stalinism while he intimidates nations on the Russian periphery to bend under his control. Some are resisting the Russian heavy. President Xi Jinping governs a China that is rediscovering Maoist nationalism internally and challenges neighbors from Japan to the South China Sea. They, too, are resisting.
In the Middle East, the flowers have fallen from the Arab Spring. Egypt is run by a de facto military junta, Syria by a war criminal, and Iran by a Cheshire cat named Rouhani. The Saudis, after downgrading their alliance with the U.S., promised this week to send $3 billion in military aid to Lebanon as leverage against Iran’s ally, Hezbollah.
The West’s leaders are distracted or disinterested. President François Hollande has the lowest approval rating of any French head of state in 50 years. Angela Merkel can’t extend her leadership beyond Germany’s borders.
Only one thing really matters in an unsettled world: the quality of U.S. leadership. And so amid global unease came the disturbingly smug selfie photo of Barack Obama, David Cameron and the prime minister of Denmark at the Mandela funeral.
Of the three or four phrases from this presidency that will live past 2016, one we may see quoted in a future Margaret MacMillan-type history is that in the affairs of the world, Mr. Obama was leading from behind. What this often means is that the American president goes with the flow of opinion polls.
Because polls say Americans are in an isolationist mood, Mr. Obama won’t spend political capital outside the country—Ukraine, Syria, Asia. He wants to spend what capital he has left consolidating internal federal authority. The Iran nuclear deal is an obsession, similar to promoting windmills after the fracking revolution.
It falls to the rest of the political class in the U.S. to recognize that one of the clearest signs of a potentially dangerous breakdown in international order isn’t just poor leadership. Worse is when national populations in many places lose faith in their leadership. During normal times, what comes next is just another government. But in a world with as many disturbances as now, what comes with intense national disaffection and frustration is rarely good. Surly publics often open themselves to anti-political solutions.
To repeat, the antidote to a world running along the cliff’s edge is strong American leadership. That won’t return until 2017 at the earliest. But it is not too early to expect candidates for the U.S. presidency to start talking about the world. The next president will have no grace period and no learning curve. Barack Obama will leave behind two terms worth of restoration work with allies and redos of his resets with enemies. That will begin on day one, which is some 1,000 days away.
What we are likely to get from these candidates is hard to predict since both parties have internal factions with no interest in the world beyond Netflix’s international thriller queue.
The Democrats in their current progressive incarnation are the wrong party at the wrong time. The Obama edition of left-wing isolationism is about one thing: reprogramming money out of defense and global security back into domestic spending. Hillary Clinton must have learned something in all those foreign capitals about America’s AWOL leadership, but the left won’t want to hear it. What they want are acts of fealty, such as Bill Clinton yesterday swearing in New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive lifer. For the left, leadership is grandiose personalities riding populist waves of domestic economic grievance.
On the right, what we learned from this summer’s government shutdown is that even the U.S. can fill up fast with sentiment that wants to pull down the status-quo temple no matter how high the rubble. It’s a populism that sucks the life out of the possibility of serious political accomplishment.
The pedestrian reality is that politicians spend most of their time plotting to get power, then assume they’ll figure out how to lead once they’re in power. These are not pedestrian times. Barack Obama has proven that rookie leaders won’t work in the world we’ve got now. If the U.S. wants to remain a big-league nation, it’s going to have to elect a big-league president.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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