Machiavelli on Modern Leadership
Ledeen, Michael A.
Hard Guy Discourse Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago Michael A. Ledeen St. Martin's Press / 202 pages /...
...We would have seemed bloodthirsty, and we have a reputation to uphold...
...L edeen is among the readers of Machiavelli who see him above all as the champion of republican virtue, and who tend to regard the Discourses rather than The Prince as his definitive work...
...Tail hopefully wagging, we intend to show the Chinese that they have nothing to fear from us...
...Imperium is something you acquire by your own virtue...
...The American Spectator • December /999/January 2000 91...
...When decent regimes like the Western democracies and Israel have enemies who are devoted to their destruction, good men find themselves obliged to "enter into evil...
...To maintain the charade, the Soviets contrived that some of their own installations be sabotaged and some of their own men assassinated...
...Machiavelli famously and infamously remarks that it is better for a prince to be feared than to be loved, "since men love at their own pleasure and fear at the prince's pleasure...
...when events compel us to fight, we declare victory and go home while the enemy remains alive and dangerous...
...The more they have, the more they covet the things they don't have yet...
...Reportedly Bush eschewed disposing of Saddam, not because it would have been too difficult, but because it would have been too easy: Delivering the The American Spectator • December r999/January 2000 89 death blow would have been unsporting, like shooting fish in a barrel...
...Under the Clinton administration, improvidence nothing short of suicidal has marked our dealings with China...
...Machiavelli expands the earlier paradox: just as the quest for peace at any price invites war and, worse than war, defeat and domination, so good acts sometimes advance the triumph of evil, as there are circumstances when only doing evil ensures the victory of a good cause...
...and however one might Ledeen knows this, and one understands admire his daring and force of mind, one readily enough his need to make an inteldoes so with a shudder...
...for if they are unwilling to soil their hands, then the indecent people, who are not vexed by such reservations, will have goodness entirely at their mercy...
...Ledeen has a laugh at the expense of Ted Turner, who complained a couple of years ago that the "Star-Spangled Banner" was "a war song," and proposed that, now the world was at peace, we adopt a gentler ditty as our national anthem...
...Ledeen assumes that acquiring glory is more desirable than acquiring imperium, or dominion...
...Machiavelli writes, "A prince must have no other objective or other thought or take anything for his craft, except war...
...Ledeen is adamant that only the most extreme circumstances call for such measures, that those who enter into evil must make their exit from it as soon as they can, and that any necessary evil be done strictly with the common good in view...
...These are the principles of a stern moral understanding that recognizes how hard a place the world can be, and, although doing anything wrong even for the sake of good will be unpalatable to many, most reasonable people will admit the justice of Ledeen's imperatives...
...90 December 1999/January 2000 • The American Spectator the word soul does not appear even once from nations that have abolished the soul in either The Prince or the Discourses, or from those that have perverted an the two books in which he said he wrote estimable faith, it is essential that we pre-everything he knew...
...The only problem with Ledeen's Machiavellian teaching is that it rests upon a bowdlerized Machiavelli...
...The clash of competing wills and appetites is endless, so that peaceableness can be more hazardous than pugnacity...
...Operating on the assumption that, if we supply them with our best weapons, they will never think of using them against us, we have sold the "hot section" technology that makes our fighter jets the best in the world, and more supercomputers crucial to advanced weapons design and communications coding and decoding—than we currently use ourselves for military and intelligence purposes...
...Brief but rich, Machiavelli on Modem Leadership is a tribute to the matchless "brutal clarity" with which Machiavelli spells out "the political and moral requirements of leadership...
...In the world of lectual and spiritual hero of so great a our own time, when the gravest threats to figure as Machiavelli, who believed othdemocracy and freedom come either erwise all the same...
...The British and French were so taken with the Trust that they paid for its upkeep and put its agents in touch with real anti-Communists...
...periodically that fact is brought to the national attention in the rudest fashion, and our might and ire are roused for a time, only to subside as soon as the inconvenience is dealt with and we can return to life as it is supposed to be lived...
...Needing on the one hand to eliminate his rivals for the leadership of the PLO and on the other to secure his reputation as a moderate, Arafat secretly begot Abu Nidal, a terrorist outfit that targeted his Palestinian political enemies and whose rampaging murderousness made him look all the more demure and agreeable...
...which modes enabled him to acquire imperium, but not glory...
...Of course there are always those who insist on being difficult and spoiling everybody else's good time: among them, the occasional intellectual saboteur who will attempt to stop the orderly flow of traffic on the bridge to the twenty-first century by executing a perfect swan dive from its thrilling height, a chain saw clenched between his teeth, and, once he is in the water below, will cut every last stanchion off at the knees...
...Ledeen has written an astute book about modern leadership, but his Machiavelli is only a shadow of the real thing...
...We are never warlike for long, and tend to consider war, or even the tension that accompanies serious international disagreement, as an untoward interruption of the pursuit of happiness that is ours by inalienable right...
...For if one considers the virtue of Agathocles in entering into and escaping from dangers, and the greatness of his mind in standing up to and overcoming adverse things, one does not see why he should have to be judged inferior to any of the most excellent captains...
...He knew about pol- serve such souls as we have left...
...Ledeen cannot bring himself to admit that Machiavelli might find admirable virtue in the cruelest tyrant: "Machiavelli wants virtuous leaders who create great enterprises, not usurpers of power who dominate others for their own pleasure...
...Nothing can be gained, or kept, or increased, without a fight...
...Turner's own life, Ledeen points out, has been "a constant battle" for wealth, power, and distinction...
...Yasir Arafat has shown himself similarly accomplished in the Machiavellian game of deadly dissembling...
...An arresting ambiguity that is commonly lost in translation adds a revealing complication: "Non si puo ancora chiamare virtu ammazzare li sue cittadini" also reads, "One cannot yet call it virtue to kill his fellow citizens...
...They itics in a world where men have no souls are ultimately what we are fighting for...
...Harvey C. Mansfield, a reader of exceeding delicacy, has called it the most famous and the most infamous book ever written on politics, and it is known for offering instruction in how to win power to tyrants and republicans alike...
...In a letter written toward the end of his life, Machiavelli declares that he loves his country more than his own soul...
...to speak of...
...the worst sort of political devilment...
...his reputation as a moderate and a man of peace grew apace withthe increasing tempo of the killing of Israelis by Palestinians whom he publicly praised and embraced...
...Soon after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks surreptitiously founded "the Trust," an apparently anti-Soviet organization operating in the West...
...In our peace-loving foolishness, Ledeen contends, we have already given away certain safeguards of our freedom and power to those who, much as we might wish for their affection, can hardly be called ourfriends...
...Ledeen derides President Bush's and General Pow-ell's conduct of the Gulf War, with its pitiable spectacle of "victory interruptus": We pulled out just as the Iraqi Republican Guard was about to be done in, and with it Saddam Hussein's dictatorship...
...and what more do they need for proof...
...Thus Ledeen argues that Machiavelli simply denounces the immensely successful Syracusan tyrant Agathocles, the most wicked man in any of Machiavelli's books, who entered into evil and found it so much to his liking that he never left...
...Machiavelli intimates that the time will come when one can indeed call it virtue, and he is doing what he can to usher in that time...
...Decent people don't do that kind of thing...
...This morally gnarled passage shows a new understanding of virtue —the sort of virtue Agathocles has in abundance—attempting to drive out the old...
...Ledeen offers chilling examples of the way the enemies of decency go about their everyday business...
...In Machiavelli on Modem Leadership, Michael Ledeen has written a book of admonition and exhortation that deserves more notice than it is likely to get...
...The foundation of Machiavellian wisdom is the cer-tainty—distress-ing for some, exhilarating for others—that the natural condition of mankind is war...
...he examines the late twentieth century through the eyes of the great Italian Renaissance philosopher NiccolO Machiavelli, author of The Prince and Discourses on Livy, whose name is synonymous with ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...
...More recently, Arafat has presented himself as a man of peace to the peaceable and a man of blood to those whom only blood will satisfy: "Throughout the 'peace process...
...Martin's Press / 202 pages / $22.95 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas T he world is crueler and more dangerous than most Americans like to believe it is...
...nevertheless, his brutal cruelty and inhumanity and his infinite wickednesses do not allow that he be among the most excellent celebrated men...
...The Prince must be given its due...
...A want of moral stamina underlies this potentially ruinous policy: We did it because we wanted to relax...
...So Agathocles evidently got what he most wanted, and did not concern himself unduly with what other men thought of him...
...Arafat had even the Israelis fooled, until the head of Romanian intelligence defected in the late liro's and gave the game away...
...but Machiavelli suggests the opposite...
...We prefer not to think of ourselves as the sort of people who have enemies...
...A t the heart of Ledeen's book is the Machiavellian insistence that decent people must on occasion do indecent things...
...Although Ledeen does not overlook The Prince altogether—that life is war and that good men must sometimes enter into evil are precepts found in that book—he does disregard or misconstrue some of its more repugnant aspects in order to bring it into line with the less distressing teaching of the Discourses...
...Ledeen scornfully cites the usual reasons that Bush apologists give for not finishing off Saddam—Vietnam, quagmire—but a reason he does not mention is more maddening still...
...In this case, they even paid for the rope...
...Men are made in such a way that they want everything but can never get everything they want...
...The payoff was rich, "exceeding Lenin's prediction that the capitalists would [sell him] the rope he would use to hang them...
...Here is what Machiavelli has to say about Agathocles, in Chapter 8 of The Prince: Still, one cannot call it virtue to kill his fellow citizens, to betray his friends, to be without faith, without pity, without religion...
...Why then should he expect his country to renounce the same desires that have driven him all along...
...The most disturbing thing about this dealing is that we did not even do it for the money...
...We hate war so much that the thought of actually doing what is necessary to win one troubles us as much as losing would do...
...glory is something you acquire if others are willing to give it to you...
...Machiavelli cranks up the tension between what can be called virtue and what virtue really is...
...The Communist threat was supposed to be finished with the fall of the Soviet Union, and any confrontation that even hints at the prospect of another Cold War is simply unthinkable...
...Something has to be done to get the attention of the advancing multitude, or at least of those leading the advance...
...In Ledeen's domesticated republican, there is little trace of the utterly fearless audacity that makes Machiavelli so dangerous...
Vol. 32 • December 1999 • No. 12
