Both heroes and mediocrities will decide the fate of Ukraine

The role of the “great” man or woman in history has fascinated thinkers since at least Plato, who believed the ideal society should be ruled by a philosopher king. The fascination with heroes and heroines is understandable: they’re charismatic personalities with the capacity for great good and evil.

As the sociologist Sidney Hook argued in his 1943 work “The Hero in History,” such figures have changed the course of world events. Directly taking on the Marxist belief in the primacy of “forces” and “contradictions,” Hook even claimed that the Bolshevik coup of November 1917 would not have taken place had Vladimir Lenin not returned to Russia and persuaded his reluctant comrades to seize the Winter Palace.

Unsurprisingly, great men and women are also of interest to contemporary policymakers and analysts, especially those following Russia’s war against Ukraine. Some claim that Vladimir Putin is a devilishly clever leader; others suggest he’s a mediocrity. Whatever one’s view, there’s no escaping Putin’s dark presence and his impact on history.

The war has also cast light on the flip side of greatness — mediocrity, of which President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, and House Speaker Mike Johnson are embodiments. We should resist the temptation to underestimate mediocrities; contrary to Hook’s focus on great men and women, they can shape history, just as heroes do. They do so by committing errors, either of commission or of omission.

Mediocrities either make bad choices at critical moments or fail to recognize the portentous nature of the times and choose inaction over action. Fortunately, mediocrities can also overcome their mediocrity and surprise everyone by measuring up to the demands of the occasion.

Such mediocre figures demonstrate that anyone, not just heroic individuals, can make history, as long as that person presides over powerful institutions and has the requisite authority. Two examples will illustrate my point.

President George W. Bush wrongly concluded that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was concealing a weapons of mass destruction program and decided that the U.S. and its allies had to launch a preemptive attack. No weapons were found, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and much of the Middle East was destabilized, with no evident benefit to anyone. Bush’s blunder was an act of commission.

In contrast, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous blunder was an act of omission. He failed to resist Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, effectively encouraging Hitler’s expansionist designs. Chamberlain didn’t see the obvious: that Hitler’s Germany wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill state with limited irredentist goals, but an evil polity with genocidal designs.

Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine provides several instructive examples of mediocrities acting according to script — but also of how someone can break with mediocrity and act heroically.

President Biden’s error was one of commission. To his credit, he recognized that Putin and his regime posed a threat to Ukraine, North Atlantic security and world stability. But Biden failed to realize that Putin needed to be stopped immediately, not eventually. Biden therefore supplied Ukraine with weapons, but always too little, too late. He could’ve helped end the war with a Ukrainian victory in 2023. Instead, by acting timorously, he ensured that the war would continue indefinitely and eventually be termed “unending.”

Former President Trump’s and House Speaker Johnson’s errors were ones of omission. Trump failed to do much of anything to stop his friend Putin during his presidency (the delivery of Javelins to Ukraine was a one-off) or after, when he boasted he could end the war in 24 hours. Johnson knows full well that he could change the course of history by letting the House vote on a bill that would provide Ukraine with $60 billion in armaments. Instead, he has thus far resolved to remain true to his mediocrity, kowtowing to Trump and ignoring the dangerous consequences of his fear of heroism.

There are also two examples of mediocrities who rose to the occasion. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was pretty much a nonentity expected to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors, who invariably sought to appease Putin in one way or other. Instead, Scholz chose to shed his mediocrity and become a hero by radically shifting his country’s policy toward Putin from that of Russlandversteher (“Russia-Empathizer”) to levelheaded opposition to Russian imperialism.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s conversion was even gutsier. The former comedian with an undistinguished record as president proved that he could don the mantle of heroism by staying in Kyiv after the Russian invasion, putting his life on the line and leading his country’s fight against Putin’s regime. No one expected him to act this way, but Zelensky demonstrated that heroes are not just born, but can also be made — but only if they let themselves be made.

Sadly, the fate of the world, Europe, America and Ukraine lies in the hands of two powerful mediocrities who insist on remaining mediocre and one ex-mediocre comedian-turned-leader with fading global clout. Whatever the outcome of the war, Trump and Johnson will go down in history as pusillanimous nobodies who chose to ignore Zelensky’s courageous example. They will have no excuses for their purposeful impotence and will be damned by future generations.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”