A Fateful Decision

Democracies always have difficulty making coherent foreign policy, and American democracy, perhaps not unhealthily, has excruciating difficulty when it comes to making war. That’s why U.S. diplomacy, to be successful, has always required clear, consistent and strenuous presidential leadership--and all the more desperately requires it when the prospect looms of putting U.S. lives on the line. Right now, that kind of leadership is conspicuous by its absence. In this void lies the makings of a disaster.

“It is a fearful thing,” President Woodrow Wilson declared in his war message to Congress on April 2, 1917, “to lead this great peaceful people into war.” Fearful, indeed. Gavrilo Princip’s pistol shot in Sarajevo had shattered the peace of Europe in the summer of 1914, but Wilson hesitated for nearly three years to ask Congress for a declaration of war. He waited so long with reason. He knew he faced a traditionally isolationist people deeply divided about the European conflict and America’s relation to it. As Wilson confided to a friend, “It was necessary for me, by very slow stages . . . to lead the country on to a single way of thinking.”

In nurturing that “single way of thinking,” Wilson shaped the very vocabulary and syntax of the modern American diplomatic tradition. The echoes of many of his inspired oratorical flourishes still linger--”peace without victory,” “self-determination,” “the war to end war,” “war to make the world safe for democracy.” At war’s end, Wilson literally broke his own body in the campaign to persuade his countrymen to modify their isolationism and join the League of Nations, the supposed guarantor of a lasting peace.

As it happened, even Wilson’s rhetorical gifts and personal exertions were not enough. The president was felled by a stroke, the Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty, voters repudiated Wilson’s own party at the polls in 1920 and the United States lapsed into the most isolationist phase in its history, while the Nazis in Europe and Japanese warlords in Asia were brewing a catastrophe even more vast and terrible than the Great War of 1914-1918.

The lessons of Wilson’s failure were not lost on Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the moment he assumed the presidency in 1933, Roosevelt approached foreign affairs with the gingerly, cautious reflexes of a man made twice shy by having witnessed the spectacle of his predecessor’s political immolation. Not until 1935 did Roosevelt propose a modest departure from the parochialism that characterized U.S. affiliation with the World Court. To Roosevelt’s dismay, the Senate handed him the same rebuke it had given Wilson 15 years earlier: The treaty was almost instantaneously defeated. “I do not intend to have these gentlemen whose names I cannot even pronounce, let alone spell, passing upon the rights of the American people,” huffed Louisiana’s Sen. Huey P. Long, in a proudly provincial boast echoed in the blusterings of some present-day congressional ignoramuses that they do not possess a passport and have never traveled abroad.

“We face a large misinformed public,” Roosevelt said in the wake of the World Court debacle. He might just as well have said he faced an apathetic or indifferent public, one neither against international involvement on principle nor incapable of moral sympathy with the victims of aggression and persecution, but one that accidents of geography and history had spared from routine awareness of events beyond North America. Americans, in short, needed tutelage if they were to understand just how dangerous a place the world was becoming in the 1930s and if they were to appreciate America’s stake in international stability and justice.

Roosevelt, a master politician with an almost preternaturally keen sense of his countrymen’s needs and moods, now resolved to provide it. After the World Court defeat, he turned systematically to the task of educating his fellow Americans about the swelling menaces of Nazi and Japanese aggression and America’s stake in the international order.

Teaching that presidential civics lesson took six years. In the course of it, Roosevelt repeatedly stumbled, and at times, to be honest, he waffled and dodged and flip-flopped and even dissembled. But he never lost sight of the fact that undertaking the fearful task of leading this great democracy into the international arena, and perhaps eventually into war, required sustained and artful effort. In making that effort, Roosevelt turned in one of the most admirable and fateful examples of presidential leadership in U.S. history.

Roosevelt’s labor bore fruit, first in a modest rearmament program beginning in 1938, followed by the nation’s first peacetime military draft in 1940 and culminating in the 1941 Lend-Lease Act that unmistakably put U.S. industrial weight on the side of Britain, and later Russia, in the struggle against Adolf Hitler. Along the way, Roosevelt added some phrases of his own to the lexicon of American diplomacy: “arsenal of democracy,” “Atlantic Charter,” “United Nations” and, perhaps most resounding, “freedom from fear,” one of the “four essential freedoms” he declared in 1941 to be America’s highest war aims. (The others were freedom from want, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.)

Thus, the shock of the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941 did not fall on an entirely unprepared nation. By then most Americans understood what was at risk on the world stage and accepted their nation’s responsibility to play a major role in the ghastly drama then unfolding. As a consequence, national unity during World War II was guaranteed, as was maximum national effort to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion, even in the face of sometimes daunting obstacles, including the loss of American lives--eventually more than 400,000. Americans willingly shouldered those burdens because their president had helped them see what was worth fighting for.

Now, Kosovo is not Pearl Harbor, and God forbid that the Balkan crisis of the century’s last decade should detonate the kind of global explosion that another Balkan crisis did at the century’s opening. But it is a crisis, one that has already put many Americans in harm’s way and threatens to put many more at risk as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic refuses to knuckle under. Yet, the American people still await a coherent explanation from their president of why U.S. pilots, sailors and soldiers are there at all; what exactly is at stake for their country in the undeniably wretched treatment of the Kosovars at the hands of Milosevic; what, precisely, are the administration’s objectives; and what is the supposed match between the specific military means being applied and the ultimate ends of U.S. policy. Without credible answers to those questions, Americans cannot be expected to support the administration’s action, especially if the conflict drags on interminably and begins to take a toll in American lives.

Can it be that President Bill Clinton believes modern military technologies have exempted him from the obligation to educate us about these matters? Has he fallen victim to the seductive allure of air power, whose champions conjure the prospect of a swift, sanitary conflict waged and won with smart bombs but no American bloodshed, a conflict that promises to be over before anybody can ask any questions? Has the example of the Gulf War--an air-conditioned, air-brushed simulacrum of combat, a singular case of virtually cost-free and instantaneous military gratification--bewitched him into believing he need pay no attention to the examples of his predecessors and the requirements of his office? Has he concluded that the Monica S. Lewinsky affair has so stripped him of credibility that the effort to persuade us of the necessity and rightness of his policy will be futile, so what’s the use?

Wilson and Roosevelt knew better. They recognized the public’s legitimate need to know why it was being asked to take up arms, and their own duty to educate. To be sure, they tasted frustration and failure, Wilson especially. Even Roosevelt, after a boldly internationalist speech delivered in the isolationist heartland of Chicago in 1937 failed to ignite a favorable public response, confided to an aide, “It’s a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you’re trying to lead--and find no one there.”

But at least he tried. If Clinton looks over his shoulder in the next weeks and finds no one there, he’ll have no one to blame but himself. If there is a persuasive case to be made for U.S. intervention against Milosevic, let’s hear it. It’s called leadership, Mr. President. Now’s the time for it.*