A Leader Considers History
There are many qualities required of a worthwhile leader. Having good advisers is an excellent start. Another key quality is the ability to think in terms of tomorrow.
Earlier today I sat on a plane reading about Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, who spent much of her work examining humanity’s capacity for cruelty when restraint disappears. Chang died by suicide in 2004 while working on another book on similar themes. Next to her several drafts of her final letter was found. Among the drafts was a line that has stayed with me throughout the day:
“When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.”
It is not only a reflection. It is also a description of leadership.
In my experience, nearly every leader I have met or advised has thought primarily about tomorrow. Not just out of altruism, often out of self preservation, but the concern for consequences was always present. Hard leaders, consequential leaders, tend to think in terms of continuity, stability, and most of all – consequence.
Even flawed systems retain this logic. Good leaders tend to think in historical terms, not merely in immediate outcomes. They see themselves not as managing events, but as participating in continuity. This is partly why France, which still behaves as a consequential geopolitical actor, tends to think in terms of history as something still being written, while Germany often treats history as something concluded. One thinks in continuity, the other in settlement.
This difference is not merely cultural. It reflects how leadership understands consequence. French leadership has long drawn from historians, philosophers, and public intellectuals to contextualise decisions within longer arcs of power, identity, and continuity. The future is therefore not an abstraction, but an extension of history. Even when mistaken, the calculation remains anchored in consequence. The narrative sells the strategy, but the strategy comes first, and the future remains part of the equation.
“Les hommes font l’histoire, mais ils ne savent pas l’histoire qu’ils font.” —Raymond Aron
What is more unsettling is when that order reverses, when rhetoric replaces calculation and the sense of tomorrow recedes from decision making. Most leaders, even hard ones, think in terms of consequence. They weigh escalation against continuity, immediate gain against long term stability. Even when they are wrong, the calculation remains visible.
More unusual is leadership where the future has been diminished to a tertiary consideration rather than a foundational one. Even flawed leaders typically understand that their decisions must still exist within tomorrow. When that dimension weakens, the logic of leadership itself begins to change.
When leadership begins to operate through means better described as tactical rather than strategic, minute by minute rather than generation by generation, matters do not necessarily collapse, but they rarely build toward durable outcomes. And that is, to a consequential leader, unacceptable.
John Sjoholm, for LIMA CHARLIE WORLD
[Main image: The Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Winston Churchill, MP (wearing the uniform of an air commodore) with General de Gaulle during the inspection of French troops at Marrakesh in Morocco, January 1944.]
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John Sjoholm is Lima Charlie’s Middle East Bureau Chief, Managing Editor, and founder of the consulting firm Erudite Group. A seasoned expert on the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans, he has a background in security contracting and has served as a geopolitical advisor to regional leaders. He was educated in religion and languages in Sana’a, Yemen, and Cairo, Egypt, and has lived in the region since 2005, contributing to numerous Western-supported stabilisation projects. He currently resides in Jordan.
Lima Charlie World provides global news, featuring insight & analysis by military veterans, intelligence professionals and foreign policy experts Worldwide.
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