When wider global events threatened to distract attention from the need to defend the freedom of Berlin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, America’s 34th President and former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, reminded everyone that success in Berlin was essential for freedom everywhere. So too, events in the Middle East must not be allowed to distract from Ukraine.
Eisenhower had a simple way to prioritize his greatest challenges, whether that was implementing the liberation of the European continent or founding the American Space Agency NASA.
Indeed, so simple was Ike’s approach that it has since been enthusiastically embraced, not just by military leaders, but by all those who love dreaming up management matrices. They even call it the ‘Eisenhower Principle.’
Ike was confronted with a veritable tornado of competing demands on his time, especially in the later phases of the Second World War. To make sense of the world, he decided that life was made up of matters that were either important, urgent or both.
Important matters are those weighty, often long-term, demands that shape the world order, our future and way of life.
The defense of freedom is important. No matter what diversions pass in front of us in the immediate horizon, important matters should never be sidelined.
The scale of the disruption emerging in the Middle East might easily lure people into a view that the drawn-out battle for Ukraine is not important. This error is to confuse the resoluteness and determination to fight for principles, which require the long view, with the exigencies of global wildfires which must be extinguished.
No matter how much chaos there is in the world, Ukraine is important.
This brings us to the second category of problems which Ike recognized: those things that are urgent. Urgent matters are those that must be resolved to prevent short term chaos, loss of life, unnecessary destruction, or any of those things that jeopardize our immediate plans.
Needless to say, situations that are neither urgent nor important need not concern us; they can be put aside or confined to quick decisions with little consequence if they are incorrectly taken.
Your lunch choice today, in the broader questions of Ukraine’s future, is not important or urgent (even if for a fleeting moment of hunger, it may appear so). Eisenhower simply eliminated things that were not important or urgent from his field of view as quickly as possible.
There are some situations that are important, but not urgent. During peace time, building the institutions of states and public works fall into this category. Discussions on parliamentary procedures and road building plans are important, but usually do not require urgent action.
These long-term issues can be deliberated with cautious thought and discussion. In time of war, they can be put to one side, although their importance might leave them at the top of the pile when quieter times emerge.
There is other business that is urgent but not important, although in time of war, urgent things often impinge directly on the ability to achieve important ends, and so must be resolved with immediacy. They might include the upkeep of air raid sirens or ensuring that shelters are operational. These challenges can generally be delegated.
This brings us to the most consequential decisions: those that are both important and urgent. These are the challenges to which a devoted focus and unyielding determination must be applied.
Eisenhower would have categorically defined the defense of Ukraine as important and urgent.
Important because there the idea that a free people should be able to determine their own future, and that their borders and nationhood should be respected, is being defended. Much of his military career in leading the Allied Expeditionary Force was dedicated to fighting for this principle across occupied Europe.
Urgent because these long-term and important goals depend absolutely on the provision of the means to defend Ukraine, business of significance on a day-to-day timescale.
Those world events that are both important and urgent cannot be delayed, delegated or diluted. Eisenhower reserved special energy and single-mindedness for the category of circumstances that fell within their realm. The events in Japan and on the Eastern front were consequential in determining the conditions for the Allied success in Europe, and especially D-Day, but they had no impact on the urgent goal of the liberation of Europe to achieve the important objective of securing the freedom of European people.
Likewise, Eisenhower would no doubt have insisted that whatever transpires in Iran and the Middle East must not divert resources and effort from securing Ukraine. It sits squarely, unambiguously, in the important and urgent.
There is a real risk that the short-term intensity of the situation in the Middle East causes the media, politicians, and then their military leaders to become distracted from Ukraine. This would be as catastrophic as allowing local Axis successes in the Far East in 1944 to have caused a loss of Allied resolve on the European Continent.
There is a particular menace that Europe will get deflected, bullied even, into making military commitments in the Middle East to shore-up a potentially intractable situation there for the US, leaving Ukraine abandoned.
Recent comments from the White House criticizing Biden for giving weapons “for free to another country, a very distant one named Ukraine” show that The White House still seems unable to grasp the importance and urgency of Ukraine. Even if the current administration cannot develop the global strategic insight of Eisenhower, Europeans can.
Europe would do well to take inspiration from Eisenhower’s speech on March 16, 1959, ‘Security in the Free World’ in which he urged the world to maintain the focus on Berlin, no matter what the scale of turbulence elsewhere: “We must avoid letting fear or lack of confidence turn us from the course that self-respect, decency, and love of liberty point out. To do so would be to dissipate the creative energies of our people upon whom our real security rests. This we will never do.”
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.