Dr. Bernard Finel, after a hiatus, has returned to blogging:
Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan
….Now, I am not really making an original argument here, but there is some truth here. In a very significant sense, a president (and, by the way, I hate the way he uses “Commander-in-Chief” rather than “President” in describing his role as a foreign policy decision-maker), any president, is not really a “strategist.” When Libya began to blow up, no 
one went to Obama and said, “Mr. President, what should we do?” Instead, ultimately, Obama was presented with a series of courses of action developed and proposed by his staff and various other agencies and departments, and the president was asked to select from a relatively constrained set of choices.
Now, obviously, a president is not wholly constrained. He or she could strike out in a new direction, or demand more options, or whatever. But there is, ultimately, a lot of truth to the notion that the president is ultimately more of a traffic cop than a “policy maker” per se.
….And look, this is not a Cain/Perry problem alone. I mean, Obama was tremendously thoughtful and eloquent on the campaign trail, and in the end allowed himself to be borne along with the tide on the Afghanistan surge decision. The only case I can think of where this was not the case was Nixon who, essentially, spent much of his administration waging war on his own executive departments. I’m not sure that is a better model.
Richard Nixon was a genuinely gifted geopolitical strategist, albeit one who came with serious psychological baggage, the effects of which H.R. Haldeman and Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker, Nixon’s sometime psychotherapist, strove to mitigate. Henry Kissinger, so valuable to Nixon as a diplomatic tactician, aggravated Nixon’s darker instincts as frequently as he calmed them (and in turn, Nixon deliberately stoked Kissinger’s anxieties to the point where Kissinger having a nervous breakdown seemed a possibility to WH staffers). I agree with Finel that presidential strategists are quite rare, but while there are more than just Nixon, they too had their share of problems.
Abraham Lincoln, who evolved into America’s greatest strategic leader by dint of circumstance, intelligence and latent talent suffered from bouts of major depression. Dwight Eisenhower, whose discernment recognized the value of strategic restraint in statecraft, had an explosively bad temper that spared neither aides nor grandchildren nor himself, contributing to Ike’s heart attacks. Even by the standards of politics, Franklin Roosevelt was unusually manipulative, deceptive and egocentric, lying with such frequency to his closest advisers that it is sometimes difficult to understand what FDR had really intended on certain issues, particularly in his last years when the weight of the war led FDR to procrastinate on making decisions.
Does strategic thinking come easier to those with psychological flaws?
