Rudderless - By Aaron David Miller

A couple years back, I gave a talk at Princeton on the indispensable role leaders play in successful Arab-Israeli negotiations.

A very smart professor from Turkey dismissed my argument as "reductionist," and wondered how I could have missed the broader societal and political forces responsible for success and failure. I simply responded that whatever her views on these matters, she herself hailed from a land in which one guy had fundamentally changed the entire direction of her country's modern history. We left it at that.

Shoot me if you want, but I'm a sucker for the great man (and woman) theory of history. Yes, broad social, political, economic, and cultural structural forces shape and constrain what leaders can do. And yes, Marx was right: People make history; but rarely as they please. Indeed, we have a cartoonish view of leadership in which presidents or prime ministers articulate a vision and then through sheer will persuade us to buy it. That's not how it really works. Instead, a leader more often than not intuits and exploits an opportunity when the times or circumstances offer it up.

Still, individuals count -- big time. For my money, it's human agency -- certainly in matters of war, peace, and nation building -- that is responsible for pushing societies toward the abyss or rescuing them from it. Wherever you stand on this issue, scholar John Keegan's stunning assertion that the history of much of the twentieth century is the story of six men (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mao) simply can't be ignored.

So here we are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a full eight decades after this bunch tried either to take over the world or save it. Where are the big, bold, ballsy leaders? Plenty of very bad guys have come and gone -- Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic -- and some larger-than-life good ones like Charles De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela. But by and large, today we face a leadership deficit of global proportions. Some might even say we're rudderless.

One hundred and ninety-three countries are represented at the United Nations, among them more than 80-plus democracies. Is there one leader of any of them whom we could honestly describe as great, heroic, inspirational, transformational -- the author of some incomparable and unparalleled achievement at home or on the world stage likely to be seen or remembered for the ages? There are courageous dissidents in China, and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi is indeed inspiring. But empowered leaders governing countries and directing change are harder to identify. Maybe we've entered the post-heroic era: tiny steps for tiny feet. And maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing.

But a look around makes you wonder about the quality and effectiveness of those leaders we do have. Forget the return of the greats we miss and the bad ones we don't want back. Do today's leaders have what it takes to deal with the problems and challenges at hand?

Start with the world's greatest nations -- the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. You might expect great leaders from great powers. But you don't see much greatness in the individuals who lead them: Barack Obama, David Cameron, François Hollande, Hu Jintao, and Vladimir Putin.

Instead, what you have is a bunch of talented, well-spoken guys facing a variety of economic and political challenges they cannot possibly overcome. At best, if they're lucky, they can be successful transactional leaders -- fixing a problem here and there, managing a crisis, or coping with one.

But transformational leaders who leave legacies that fundamentally alter their nation's trajectories? Not likely. Among them, Putin may actually prove to the most successful given his control and his objectives, but even this is no longer certain because of the generational divide he confronts, with so many younger Russians seeking change.

What about those consequential powers outside of the Perm Five -- Germany, India, Brazil? Surely there have got to be effective leaders here.

Angela Merkel is resilient, politically skilled. She's a survivor in German politics, but has been roundly criticized for failing to show leadership on broader European issues, particularly the eurozone crisis. And by all accounts, she won't make it into the Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl category. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may also be a skilled politician and technocrat who was once popular, but he's now too entangled in political intrigue and charges of corruption to join the ranks of Nehru and Gandhi. Brazil offered up an intriguing candidate in former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but, well, he's not in power anymore.

What about finding consequential leaders in the Arab and Muslim world? The Arab dictators whom we knew and never loved -- Saddam, the Assads, Qaddafi -- were and are brutal and extractive figures, taking so much more than they ever gave to their people. The next rung down weren't quite as bad -- Mubarak, Ben Ali, Abdullah Saleh -- but clearly better for the United States' interests than for their own peoples'. With the passing of the Ben Gurions, Sadats, Begins, King Husseins, and Rabins, the Middle East has been in the age of politicians not statesmen for some time now. A younger generation of Israeli leaders -- Netanyahu, Barak, Olmert -- bears this out.

What about the Arab Spring? After all, revolutions and crises have in the past been inspired and directed, indeed even produced consequential leaders. It's way too early to draw conclusions, but the trend lines don't look all that encouraging. The Arab uprisings have been effectively leaderless. Egypt's presidential election produced a pretty grey Muslim Brotherhood leader who will be constrained severely by the military and by his own party even if he wants to be bold.