Since the majority, with sufficient will, can seemingly coerce the minority, the question does arise as to why the majority should forbear if the minority wishes to secede. The answer, it seemed to Obama, was that political unions, among men and women so different, must be founded on mutual consent. To accept that principle, he came to believe, was the key to peace and reconciliation. Seeking sustenance for his newfound vision, Obama turned to the study of America’s own secession crises. “A husband or wife who can only keep the other partner within the bond by locking the doors and standing armed before them,” wrote the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, “had better submit to peaceable separation.” “I love the Union as I love my wife,” wrote John Quincy Adams in 1801. “But if my wife would ask and insist upon a separation, she should have it, though it broke my heart.” Thomas Jefferson had conveyed in 1820 the same message about a potential split between North and South: two or three years of a trial separation, he predicted, “will bring them back, like quarreling lovers to renewed embraces, and increased affections.” Then Obama burrowed yet further, all the way back to Burke: “The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.” In a private message, Obama sent the gist of this advice to Cameron, who brusquely rejected it. In an email later leaked to the press, Cameron wrote back that Obama should “read up on the history of Abraham Lincoln.” They never spoke again.

It is odd that so few observers in 2014 seemed to appreciate that the principle at stake in Britain and Ukraine was essentially the same, but this was due primarily to the bevy of other crises then occurring—in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Gaza, the South China Sea, South Sudan. Early in 2015, however, a new slogan emerged among the Scots—“What was good for the Donbass is good for Scotland,” referring to the popular referendum that was seen as appropriate in the one case, but not in the other.

Cameron lost big by abandoning his previous enlightened policy. Boris Johnson, his successor, led the peace negotiations after Cameron’s death by suicide in early 2017. Cameron’s penknife, critics said, proved more potent than his pen. However, Ukraine gained by accepting Obama’s mediation on the basis of the same principle that Cameron had formerly championed. The reversal of policy by two great leaders within the Anglosphere was one of the most important turning points in modern European history, showing that individual leaders can make a big difference, for good or ill.

David C. Hendrickson is professor of political science at Colorado College. He takes the view that truth is stranger than fiction.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Sasha Maksymenko/CC by 2.0