Looking for Leadership

A disordered world devoid of U.S. leadership is not going to produce peace and prosperity.

By Daniel Henniger

The upwelling of support for the new pope, Francis, was about more than the Catholic Church. It reflected a felt need that what the secular world could use now, but does not have, is leadership. It is a yearning born of experience: When poorly led, the world tends toward disorder.

The one we've got just now looks to be coming under an unhealthy amount of negative pressure all at once—from the Middle East to the South China Sea to the Korean peninsula, atop a never-ending European financial crisis and a building fiscal crisis in the U.S. Scan the political horizon for a significant head of state willing or able to lead in this moment and you will see no one.

President Obama, for reasons of policy and personality, is inclined not to step forward, but to step back. Germany's Angela Merkel presides over a great nation whose people have little stomach to lead anything ever again. In Tony Blair and David Cameron, Britain has had two recent prime ministers who've been eloquent on the goals of world leadership; but persistent national economic drift diminishes their authority, as it does Japan's.

Hopes for a leadership role from post-Soviet Russia have vanished amid what looks to be Vladimir Putin's genetic authoritarianism. Last week, Mr. Putin without irony rolled out uniformed men on horseback to greet new President Xi Jinping of China, the latest head of the world's oldest Communist party. Patching cracks in the party's legitimacy occupies the best energies of what one may loosely call China's leadership.

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Does it matter, or can the world muddle through? A fair portion of the U.S. population spent many evenings recently watching "Downton Abbey" on PBS and "Parade's End" on HBO. Both British series resurrected the savage, senseless slaughter called World War I. In last weekend's Wall Street Journal, the reviewer of a new history of World War I, which plumbs the continuing mystery of why that war seems to have just happened, described how nations across Europe were led by men with feckless ambitions or diminished authority.

This isn't to suggest that a leadership vacuum inevitably fills with wars that spread across many borders. Let's just say there's not much precedent for the assumption that a global vacuum of leadership will fill with peace and prosperity.

The pope, however terrific this one may become, can't go it alone. John Paul II resisted Soviet communism, but he had Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher riding shotgun. Even non-fans of Reagan and Thatcher will admit that whatever else, they led. And because they were willing to lead in the 1980s, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl rose in stature to stand with them. Leadership at the top begets leadership below. And its opposite.

We are led today in a different way. Barack Obama has dedicated his presidency to revising the internal political and economic order of the United States. He wants to create a permanent progressive majority. Whatever one thinks of this, it is a heavy lift. When something as pedestrian as a budget sequester arrived, the president left Washington to fly around the country delivering speeches whose purpose, as widely reported, was to marginalize his opponents.

Populism is a full-time job. The payoff is the possibility of accumulating great political power. But a populist movement led by an American president runs two big risks. It alienates the other U.S. party. And it ignores the rest of the world, for which a busy populist has little time or interest. Barack Obama is in the red zone with both risks.

Syria's war, kept on Mr. Obama's back burner, is destabilizing an already disordered region. North Korea's Kim Jong Eun is escalating tensions with South Korea and the U.S. to a startling degree. Iran's bomb program spins forward. And it is disturbing to see a flyspeck like Cyprus so unsettle Europe's financial leadership at this late stage of the challenge to the euro-based system. All these matters have been treated so far with degrees of U.S. diffidence.

If in the next four years one of them falls over into a world crisis demanding big leadership, Mr. Obama is going to need the support of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the rest of the Republican Party in Washington. Conventional wisdom holds that at crunchtime, it will always be there. But the Rand Paul filibuster challenging the president's authority, its merits aside, makes clear that this bipartisan bond is broken, and at an increasingly dangerous moment. (Of course the bipartisan breakdown began in the previous presidency.)

Barack Obama may be smart, but he isn't very wise. A wise or shrewder president would change course on his relations with Republican leaders because if the left-alone world blows and goes looking to him for leadership, he's going to need them, like it or not.

But he doesn't like it, so he probably won't.

A version of this article appeared March 28, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Looking for Leadership.