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  • JUAN CLAUDIO DE RAMÓN

    @JuanCladeRamon

Updated Saturday,27May2023-15:04

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"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm." This sentence by the Latin author Publius Sirius is not quoted in Leadership: Six Studies on World Strategy, the book that Henry Kissinger (Fürth, 1923) has given to the press at the majestic age of 98. A similar idea emerges from his reading: the leaders are sailors willing to climb the bridge when the keel of the ship capsizes, the waves rise like mountains and no port is visible. The leader is a domestic

Adorer of adverse realities. He expands the field of the possible and traces a route that before being traveled only existed in his imagination. "The yardstick by which a leader is judged in history does not change: transcending circumstances through vision and dedication."

"Vision" is the key concept of the book, to the point that the "strategy" of the subtitle operates as a synonym.

. You have strategy because you have the anticipatory vision of where to get and where society has not been before. The leader can make explicit his vision at the beginning of his career or watch over it until the occasion lends itself to carry it out.

The leader, Kissinger points out, is a mediator between the past and the future.

. An emissary of fate that appears in times of transition. He knows what part of his country's heritage must be guarded at all costs and what part is ballast to be released. Leaders are not messiahs, but ambitious realists. They do not recognize the jurisdiction of common opinion, but if they propose a different ideal it is because they know it is achievable. Leaders are masters of the limit.

Kissinger opens and closes his voluminous treatise with general considerations about the qualities of leaders. It's the theory. The practice is provided by six biographical essays on six twentieth-century leaders whom he had occasion to deal with in his long diplomatic career. These are the names:

Konrad Adenauer

,

Charles de Gaulle

,

Richard Nixon

,

Anwar el-Sadat

,

Lee Kuan Yew

and

Margaret Thatcher

. Let's quickly admit that the weakest point of this very interesting book is the inclusion of Nixon. Let's look first at the merits of others.

Humility and dignity

From reading the chapter on Adenauer one emerges with the certainty that Europe would not have healed so quickly after the war apocalypse if the destinies of federal Germany had not fallen into the hands of this successful and integral Christian Democrat. Chancellor in 1949 by one vote of difference (his own),

Adenauer inherited not only a country in ruins: also a guilty country

. His political genius was to accept blame, nipping in the bud any relapse into the will to dominance that had intoxicated German politics for more than a century. Germany would seek its redemption by building a united Europe. The vision was splendid and self-sacrificing: to put the reconciliation of the Europeans before the reunification of the Germans, which Adenauer would die without seeing. Kissinger calls it "the strategy of humility."

In very different ways de Gaulle led. If the pages dedicated to the German chancellor induce emotion and gratitude, the Frenchman's adventures are read with astonishment bordering on astonishment. One fails to understand how de Gaulle, from London and with little more than his voice and his uniform of a brigadier general, could persuade the world that France had not been defeated in 1940, and that there was a free France embodied by him that continued to wage battle. His enemy was not so much Berlin, which he could not subdue, as the Vichy government, which he successfully contested the moral representation of his country. De Gaulle still had a chance to save France a second time, severing the colonial link with Algeria and thus avoiding a civil war between the French. A boast of

realpolitik

that only the mystical leader who had preserved the dignity of

France

On the night of the occupation he could afford it.

Instructive and captivating are the trajectories of two non-European personalities, to whom Kissinger devotes detailed chapters. One is Egypt's Anwar el-Sadat, who orchestrated the historic peace of

Egypt

with

Israel

(He paid for it with his murder at the hands of extremists.) The other is Lee Kuan Yew, creator of the modern

Singapore

, which turned a malarial multi-ethnic island between Malaysia and Indonesia into the most successful city-state in history. The last chapter is reserved for

Margaret Thatcher

. It is not necessary to subscribe entirely to his ideological creed to notice in the Iron Lady a leader of tom and loin. Among his achievements: defibrillating Britain's moribund economy, maintaining the rate against the IRA and winning the pulse of

Argentina

in the

Falkland Islands

.

Leadership

Henry Kissinger

Translation by Ramón González Férriz and Marta Valdivieso.

Debate. 648 pages. 27,90 euros

Ebook: 12.99 euros

You can buy it here

í.

Knowing how to give up

Although Kissinger does not highlight it, he does show that all its leaders had something in common: to have been, at some point in their lives, heroes of the retreat.

Adenauer renounced an early reunification of Germany, De Gaulle to

Algeria

, el-Sadat to pan-Arabism and the staunch defence of

Palestine

, Lee Kuan Yew to his federative project with Malaysia, Thatcher to

Hong Kong

. Knowing when it's time to lose is part of the grammar of leadership.

The inclusion of Nixon in this line of giants is forced. Unlike the other five leaders, the 37th president of the United States lacks a recognizable national legacy. And the external merits alleged by Kissinger (more than interested party, since he was his Secretary of State) are very nuanced. The

Treaty of Paris

which put an end to the

Vietnam War

It soon fell apart. His arms negotiations with the USSR did not prevent a Cold War festering in the following decade. And his historic journey to the

China

Mao's journey was a journey that did not prevent the emergence of a dangerous systemic rivalry between his country and China. For the rest, Kissinger keeps a pious silence about other less stellar foreign companies, especially in Latin America.

The end of leadership

Take away the chapter on Nixon and you have a great book that provides abundant and illuminating insights into critical episodes of the Cold War and decolonization. In the epilogue, Kissinger asks wistfully if in today's world the conditions exist for the emergence of leaderships like those of yesteryear. The answer is pessimistic. The meritocratic school that turned people of modest social extraction into statesmen is in retreat. In the waning quarter is also the once-widespread belief that the noblest destiny for a person is to serve his country.

The author adds another insightful cause for alarm.

The shift from a culture of the word to a culture of the image means that aspiring leaders are today unable to read works of a certain thickness deeply.

, depriving them not only of a granular knowledge of the subjects, but of the dialogue with the past, the main ferment of the leaderships of all times. Kissinger does not believe, in short, that today's politicians can have the time or desire to approach a tochazo like his. Should.