×
David Shorr:
I have a question. How often do presidents make major foreign policy decisions on the spot, within a space of minutes? If the answer is not very often (or never), then if you lengthen the timeframe to hours or days doesn't it become much less an issue of a leader's ability to make snap judgments? I'd rather not get into the middle of the debate about experience; experience is good. I just want to clarify how we really see this aspect of the job descriptoin for POTUS.The "midnight phone call" made a lot more sense during the Cold War, where you could imagine the question being "we've detected Soviet missile activity -- how do we respond?" But there's really no analogue today. Insofar as snap decisions are possible, they have to do with projection, not protection. You can conceive of a call that says "we've got intelligence placing bin Laden in Waziristan. Should we take our shot?" It's much harder to imagine a scenario in which someone might be attacking us and the president needs to make a really tough decision as to whether we'll defend.
