Missions Critical

Stanislaw Ciosek was once a member of the Polish communist regime that tried to suppress Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement in the 1980s. It imposed martial law and arrested many of Solidarity's leaders, but later negotiated the "roundtable" accords that led to the partly free elections in 1989. That ballot produced a landslide victory for Solidarity that signaled the end of one-party rule and the collapse of communism in Poland, triggering ripple effects throughout the region.

A few years later I met with Ciosek—then serving as the Polish ambassador in Moscow—and asked him what had prompted the Communist Party to take the risk of negotiating with Solidarity. With the economy imploding, mounting social unrest and no possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev would send Soviet troops to help with a new crackdown, he described the previous decade as a period "when it was obvious that our plane had lost its undercarriage, the engines were not working—but you had to make some sort of landing." The roundtable constituted the party's last hope of controlling the landing. Despite the fact that the negotiated settlement allowed the communists to retain a majority of uncontested parliamentary seats for themselves and their allies, the party still lost power. But the landing was soft enough to allow for a peaceful transfer of power without any violent retribution against the former rulers.

Ciosek's metaphor comes to mind because of the breathtaking real-life emergency landing of the U.S. Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River three days before Barack Obama's inauguration. Pilot Chesley ("Sully") Sullenberger, who made sure everyone aboard was safely off the plane before getting out himself, shrugged off the accolades for him and the crew afterward. "We were simply doing the jobs we were trained to do," he said. But as other pilots have pointed out, it was a remarkable achievement to perform such a maneuver with both engines out without losing any of the 155 people on board. Sullenberger has been hailed as the "hero of the Hudson" for good reason: he demonstrated leadership and skill when it was most needed.

It's the kind of leadership a lot of Americans—and many others around the world—feel has been sorely missing of late. Now that Barack Obama has taken office, it would be nice to believe that the new president can demonstrate a similar level of leadership and skill in piloting a much bigger plane. But no matter how well he performs, Obama won't be able to handle all the current crises alone. In effect, he'll need both American and allied copilots who can fly their own missions. And like Ciosek's metaphorical and Sullenberger's real planes, some of these flights will also end up making high-risk, emergency landings.

In dealing with the economic crisis, Obama and every other major political leader face a dual task. The first part concerns the mechanics of stimulus packages: determining their size and scope, and bargaining with opponents to produce deals that enjoy the broadest possible political support. The second part is equally vital: instilling a sense of confidence that these measures will actually produce results—if not a speedy recovery, at least allowing for a soft landing, adequate repairs and then preparations for a new takeoff. The current crisis has demonstrated once again how much economic performance is tied to human psychology: when investors and others expect an upturn, this increases the chances that it will happen. But the downside scenario can be similarly self-fulfilling.

In dealing with key foreign-policy challenges, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have already tapped two co-pilots to go on separate missions. Former Senate majority leader George Mitchell got the always dicey Middle East portfolio, and he was promptly dispatched on his first foray into the region. Obama explained that this first trip would be largely a listening tour, but he also declared that Mitchell's longer-term task will be to achieve "progress, not just photo ops." The former senator from Maine earned international recognition by playing a key role in forging a peace deal in Northern Ireland, but his current assignment is far more daunting. While Hamas leaders have talked about their "high hopes" for dealing with the new administration, Mideast special envoys have a long record of frustrating, aborted missions.