President Trump’s strategic foresight is being put to the test
COMMENTARY the same chorus screams “Genius!” in times of success.
Some American military leaders –– such as Gens. George Patton, William Tecumseh Sherman and Curtis LeMay –– sounded as scary in times of peace as they did in times of war. The traits ensuring that peacetime life stays predictable are not always the same as those required to return it to predictability when times turn utterly terrifying.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln knew the overwhelming advantages of the Union could eventually defeat the South, but only if he could hold the nation together through disasters such as the battles of Bull Run and Chancellorsville, and only once he found brilliant generals such as Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant.
In World War II, Winston Churchill proved perhaps the most impressive wartime leader in history. During Britain’s darkest hours of nonstop German bombing of London, he knew that declining British assets were still greater than an ascendant
Germany’s advantages. Eventually, despite razor-thin margins of error, these assets would ensure victory.
Franklin D. Roosevelt likewise had foresight. In the nightmarish days after Pearl Harbor, FDR calmly unleashed private enterprise to rearm America at what he knew would be an astonishing rate.
In the present crisis of the coronavirus, what will determine the effectiveness of President Donald Trump’s leadership is not what the media screams today or the polls say tomorrow. The praise of his supporters or the predictable damnation of his enemies won’t matter.
Rather, Trump will win or lose on whether he has strategic foresight. If he panics and keeps the country locked down for too long, we will go into depression that will cost more lives than the virus. But if Trump prematurely declares victory and urges Americans to rush back to normal life, he may reboot the virus and reignite another cycle of panic.
Instead, Trump will have to possess the confidence to see how the world’s greatest economy, greatest medical talent, greatest military and greatest energy and food production can all be marshaled in a symphonic fashion. That correct formula could fend off a potentially biblical plague without destroying the largest economy in history.
If Trump exhibits such cunning and wisdom, then he can balance the consensus of his medical experts that the virus is existentially dangerous with the warnings of his economic advisers that shutting down a multitrillion economy can become even more ruinous - and lethal - for Americans. Like Churchill, Trump must have the right information but also the instincts to determine which expert advice is suspect and which is inspired, and which orthodox recommendation is wrong and which unorthodox alternative is right.
Do that, and Trump can defeat the virus, save the economy and turn a disaster into a collective American victory over both infection and depression.