The crisis on September 11, 2001 produced an opportunity for George W. Bush to express a bold new vision of foreign policy. But a successful vision is one that combines inspiration with feasibility. And Bush did not get that combination right. Among past presidents who have been able to combine inspiration and feasibility in an effective vision, Franklin Roosevelt was quite good, But Woodrow Wilson was not. My colleague at the Kennedy School, David Gergen, has described the difference between the boldness of FDR and the boldness of George W. Bush: "FDR was also much more of a public educator than Bush, talking people carefully through the challenges and choices the nation faced, cultivating public opinion, building up the sturdy foundation of support before he acted. As he showed during the lead-up to World War II, he would never charge as far in front of his followers as Bush." President Bush's temperament has been less patient. As Bob Woodward put it, "he likes to shake things up, and that was the key to going into Iraq."
I think the next president is going to have to learn from these lessons of the past. In my new book, The Powers to Lead, I argue that a key skill for the next president will be contextual intelligence. And this will be true for all the three contenders. Contextual intelligence is the intuitive diagnostic skill that helps you align your tactics with your objectives so that you get smart strategies in different situations. What we need to look for in the candidates is an ability to understand the current context of American foreign policy and where we stand in the world.
A decade ago, the new conventional wisdom was that the world was a unipolar American hegemony. Neo-conservative pundits drew the conclusion that the United States was now so powerful it could do whatever it wanted and others had no choice but to follow. For example Charles Krauthammer, the columnist for The Washington Post and Time Magazine, wrote a column celebrating this view as "the new unilateralism." That was a very strong, powerful theme of the first years of the Bush administration.
This new unilateralism was based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of power in world politics. Power is the ability to get the outcomes you want. And whether certain resources will produce power or not depends upon the context. Contextual intelligence means a president who understands the strength and limits of American power. We are the only superpower, but our preponderance is not empire, it can influence but not control other parts of the world. In fact, if you want to understand power and its different context in the world today, I have suggested the metaphor of a three dimensional chess game, in which you play on a top board, a middle board, and a bottom board, both horizontally and also vertically. On the top board of military power among countries, the United States is the only superpower, and nobody is about to replace us, I would argue, for at least a couple of decades, and that includes China or whoever else you want to nominate for that position. On the middle board of economic relations among countries, the world is already multipolar. We cannot get what we want in trade, antitrust, or other things without the European Union, China, Japan, and others cooperating with us. And on the bottom board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, whether it be pandemics, climate change, drug trade, or transnational terrorism, this is a situation where power is chaotically distributed. Nobody is in charge; nobody has control.
To call that American empire or American unipolarity is nonsense. It's taking a theme which fits the top board and applying it to the bottom board. And yet ironically, it's that bottom board where some of our greatest threats now come from. After all, it was from the bottom board that we got 9/11. And in that sense, if you're playing on a three dimensional chess board you have to realize that the instruments that you use have to be appropriate to the board you're playing on. What we did nationally was focus so heavily on the top board and our preponderant military strength, that we thought that was going to solve things on the middle board and the bottom board where economic power and soft power are more important. Understanding the context of foreign policy - the contextual intelligence that I'm talking about - requires a president to know when and what instruments to use in what context so that we will understand the limits and sources of American strength. When the press quizzes the candidates in debates, they should do a better job of probing for evidence of that contextual intelligence.