Letter from America: President Bush’s Foreign Policy

Extract

CRITICS ONCE ACCUSED PRESIDENT BUSH OF LACKING VISION. Why anyone would want a visionary's hand twitching over the nuclear button is, however, most unclear. Our recent visionaries — Marxist, Islamic and Nazi — do not inspire confidence in human justice and intellect. Actually, the ‘vision’ that people apparently had in mind is the limited kind that business school professors say chief executives must impart to their companies. More appropriately, ‘vision’ means a clear sense of where one is leading people and also every evidence that the leader believes that the destination is good, and that he and his followers will arrive there. Ronald Reagan had such vision in abundance: from the political perspective, ‘vision’ is the part of statesmanship composed primarily of persuasive charm in the service of a degree of strategic intelligence.