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Some may visualize crisis management as a frenzied affair in which key policymakers converge on the White House in limousines, when harassed officials are bombarded by nervous aides rushing in with the latest flash cables. I have found this not to be accurate; periods of crisis, to be sure, involve great tension they are also characterized by a strange tranquillity All the petty day-to-day details are ignored, postponed or handled by subordinates. Personality clashes are reduced; too much is usually at stake for normal jealousies to operate. In a crisis only the strongest strive for responsibility; the rest are intimidated by the knowledge that failure will demand a scapegoat. Many hide behind a consensus that they will be reluctant to shape; others concentrate on registering objections that will provide alibis after the event. The few prepared to grapple with circumstances are usually undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane. All around them there is commotion; they themselves operate in solitude i a great stillness that yields, as the resolution nears to exhaustion, exhilaration or despair.
During fast-moving events, those at the center of decisions are overwhelmed by floods of reports compounded of conjecture, knowledge, hope and worry. Only rarely does a coherent picture emerge; in a sense coherence must be imposed on events by the decision maker, who seizes the challenge and turns it opportunity by assessing correctly both the circumstances and his margin for creative action. In crises this agility is akin to an athletes. Decisions must be made very rapidly; physical endurance is tested as much as perception, because an enormous amount of time must be spent making certain that the key figures act on the basis of the same information and purpose.
Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deterred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.
FACING A DIFFERENT WORLD
"Whereas in the 1920s we had withdrawn from the world because we thought we were too good for it, the insidious theme of the late 1960s was that we should withdraw from the world because we were too evil for it." So writes Kissinger. What, then, should be the philosophy behind U.S. foreign policy?
Richard Nixon was President when the conventional wisdom decried the exercise of power; his critics asserted that America would prevail if at all because of the purity of its motives. But it was precisely the unpredictable, idiosyncratic nature of a policy founded on this illusion that needed to be overcome. Emotional slogans, unleavened by a concept of the national interest, had caused us to oscillate between excesses of isolation and overextension. The new "morality" was supposed to extricate us from excessive commitments. But moral claims lent themselves as easily to crusades as to abstinence; they had involved us in the distant enterprises to begin with. What the intellectuals' loathing of Nixon kept them from understanding was that we agreed with their professed desire to relate ends to means and commitments to capacities. We parted company with many of them because we did not believe it sensible to substitute one emotional excess for another. Indeed, one reason why the Viet Nam debate grew so bitter was that both supporters and critics of the original involvement shared the same traditional sense of universal