The Humility of True Greatness

This Memorial Day we will hear a great deal, rightly, about the magnitude and nobility of the sacrifice that our veterans have made for their country. What we will not hear about is the humility demanded by that sacrifice; the humility, in Dwight Eisenhower's words, that "must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends." Eisenhower, like Lincoln before him in our nation's greatest memorial address on the bloody field of Gettysburg, understood humility not as weakness or groveling, but as the strength and wisdom to recognize and admit error and to move forward in a way that expressly acknowledges that we do not know everything and we cannot do everything.

No one apparently understood this dimension of great leadership better than George W. Bush. As candidate Bush, debating Al Gore in 2000, he memorably called for America to be a "humble superpower." And in the first months of his presidency he told a graduating class of naval cadets, "as you wear your nation's uniform, remember also to wear the humility of true greatness." Our foreign policy today badly needs a dose of that humility, to get us out of Iraq, fight nuclear proliferation, and do something serious about climate change.

The humility of true greatness today would lead President Bush to do the seemingly unthinkable: actually to say to the American people and to the world, "we were wrong," "we thought we would find weapons of mass destruction but we were mistaken," "we thought we could bring security and stability and democracy to Iraq but we misjudged what it would take to do that." As both a young Marine captain who served in Iraq and an experienced diplomat who spent years in the Middle East recently said to me, admitting error with dignity and the determination to rectify it is the first indispensable step toward a plan that could actually achieve at least a measure of those goals. Like the heroes of so many Greek myths, we have been brought low by our own hubris, a fact not lost on the millions of people around the world who have been only too happy to see us bogged down in a mess of our own making. Yet if we were ourselves finally to acknowledge that we have learned our lesson, and to couple that admission with a plan for moving forward on a new basis, we would in one stroke defuse a huge part of the resistance to doing anything we propose. We could then work much more productively with both the nations in the region and with our other allies in Europe to reach a political settlement that would probably fall well short of liberal democracy but that would at least provide security and the longer term prospect of genuinely representative and rights-regarding government.

Humility would similarly serve us well on non-proliferation policy, where an essential first step toward restoring global support for the basic bargain reached in the non-proliferation treaty is to acknowledge that the nuclear "haves," led by the U.S., have not lived up to their commitment to reduce their own nuclear weapons to as close to zero as possible in return for the commitment of the "have-nots" not to acquire them. Or on climate change, where an admission that we have been wrong about both the immensity and the immediacy of the threat would be the first step toward moving beyond the endless wrangling over the Kyoto Protocol toward a new global agreement that works. And even on terrorism, the U.S. could get enormous mileage and substantive policy benefit out of convening a global conference on terrorism based on the premise that we actually have something to learn from the experiences of the many other nations that have been wrestling with terrorist attacks for decades.

In the White House today the humility of true greatness has been replaced not by bravery but by bravado, the swaggering and bluster that, deep down, is nothing more than a mask for fear. On this Memorial Day, as we remember and honor the bravery and sacrifice of our soldiers past and present with the humility that is their due. Let us have the honesty to acknowledge error and the courage and strength of character to confess it. Let us remember that humility is our best weapon against political and religious extremism, which go hand in hand with dogmatism. It is the secret to leading through learning and persuading, rather than dictating. As President Bush once knew, that path to a humbler America is the path to a greater America.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of the new book The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World.