The Leader Follows

In a NY Times article published two days ago, about the climate change conference in Bali, one can find the following, highly indicative passage:

Kevin Conrad, the negotiator from Papua New Guinea, rebuked the American delegation. “If for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us,” he said. “Please, get out of the way.”

He was alluding to remarks made by an American official, James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, last week to a Reuters reporter, who quoted him as saying, “The U.S. will lead, and we will continue to lead, but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.”

That statement had become a sore point to many delegations.

And well it might. But seeing one's self as being a big component of the World's No. 1 Superpower carries its risks, as surely as does drinking a quart of moonshine just before trying to drive an 18-wheeler through the streets of Manhattan. Actually more than risks. Absolute deleterious certainties, and one of the worst of those is arrogance. It can't be helped.

There were 186 other sovereign nations at the conference, and, to various extents, human nature being what it is, each of those likewise see themselves as being at the center of the universe. Therefore they could never have been expected to take kindly to being told to "fall into line." No, and definitely not by one of the two chief parties -- the other being the countries of Europe, including Russia -- who are responsible for sending the lion's share of all those heat-trapping gases up into the atmosphere in the first place, over the last several centuries.

In that light, knowing that they wouldn't be able to propose anything serious about slowing down the heating up of the greenhouse that the Bushers wouldn't try to block, it's hard to understand why the conference would have been considered wrecked if the Bushers hadn't climbed aboard, which they finally did, at nearly the last possible moment.

Was it the strategy of the Bush team, then, to fight hard against everything they could to keep anything from getting done, and to agree with the consensus only if the gathered nations made enough compromises to make that worthwhile, even if it was just a couple?

And it turned out to be just a couple, consisting mainly of rejecting the developing nations requests for equipment to help combat global warming, and also of staying quiet about the emission standards that the EU wanted stated.

Maybe it was. The Republicans seem to have perfected the strategy of reaching compromises that are a relief to their half-exhausted opponents, but that actually accomplish almost nothing. That can often be seen in the workings of the U.S. Senate.

Or maybe, after the reps from Canada, Japan, and Australia, their only real allies at Bali, finally fell away, too, the Bushers saw no option but to finally join in the agreement, and so the would-be leaders became followers instead, belatedly bringing up the rear.

Maybe you've often seen this kind of thing, where the leader goes in one direction while the followers all head off into another, after which the leader has to shift gears and hustle mightily to regain his position of first in the line, usually unsuccessfully. Most often seen in slapstick movies, it can also be seen in politics.

GW Bush just provided another instance of this when he said yesterday that he supported Russia supplying Iran with enriched uranium., which Russia started doing also just yesterday.

This nuclear material is supposed to be for use only in reactors for civilian purposes. But I thought that one point all along, to justify all the warm drums, was that it could also be used for making bombs.

Obviously, since Russia is in reality also a comparable Superpower, with its nuclear foot always on the U.S.'s throat, the same as in the reverse, there was nothing the Bush forces could do in the way of leadership. Instead they had to go with the flow. That is, they followed.