Sublime

Without realizing it, too many leaders assume that the role of leadership is to control. They espouse Plato’s “division of labor,” which, according to social thinker Hannah Arendt, has influenced government and military structures for thousands of years.

Instead of testing men and institutions, we must examine the structures through which they work and explore how those structures stand up to the stresses they encounter.

I believe that the answer is yes, but it’s hard. Mastering both wartime and peacetime skill sets means understanding the many rules of management and knowing when to follow them and when to violate them. Be aware that management books tend to be written by management consultants who study successful companies during their times of peace. As a resul

Clinton’s Libya problem encapsulated the weak point of the technocracy. The argument for expertise as the basis for political authority depends on the experts’ success at managing both their small niche and society as a whole.

Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation. In the words of John Brennan, one of President Obama’s closest advisers whom Obama eventually tapped to run the CIA, instead of the “hammer” America now relies on the “scalpel.”

So why not? Why not choose ease and bask in the adulation of the world as we serially renounce, withdraw and concede? Because, while globalization has produced in some the illusion that human nature has changed, it has not. The international arena remains a Hobbesian state of nature in which countries naturally strive for power. If we voluntarily r

In a way, all of this was summed up in the wars fought after September 11. The president overwhelmingly controlled those wars, and yet his ability to create a goal that could be reached, or define a means of achieving it, became impossible.

ERIC SCHMIDT Former Chairman, Google/Alphabet