(JNS) “You are the president of two hundred million Americans. I am the prime minister of three million prime ministers.” — Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to US President Richard Nixon
Lists of difficult jobs are usually lists of large responsibilities. In politics, that frame is incomplete. Difficulty is not merely scale. It is the ratio between what an officeholder is accountable for and what he is permitted to do, levered by how securely the office is anchored because in a parliamentary system, any decision may be his last. Measured that way, the hardest job in the world is not held by the commander of the world’s largest army or the steward of its largest economy. It is the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel.
The usual candidates do not survive it. The president of the United States commands more of everything, but his errors are amortized over a continent, a Congress and two election cycles, and his four years are effectively guaranteed; no president has ever been removed by the process built...
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