We trust you, you know what you're doing

By a simple twist of fate, the prime ministers across the most beautiful sea in the world can be mentioned in a future edition of author Bill Fawcett?s popular book, ?Trust Me, I Know What I?m Doing: 100 More Mistakes That Lost Elections, Ended Empires, and Made the World What It Is Today.? No doubt, history will recall Prime Ministers Alexis Tsipras (the guest of honor in this column on Wednesday) and Ahmet Davuto?lu for their excellent ability at achieving the exact opposite of what they aimed for at the beginning of their political journeys.

But they will not be alone in the hall of historic misguidance. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin was stuck in Switzerland when German army intelligence hatched a wonderful idea: Ship him and his 18 revolutionaries secretly to Russia and give them some money to finance their revolution. The trouble-makers would disappear from Europe and perish in Russia. Without German help, possibly, the Bolshevik revolution might never have taken place. 

In 1938, when emboldened Nazis demanded a part of Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain convinced the Czechs to give up some land to ?buy peace in our time.? 

In 1941, just a few months before the Germans invaded Russia, Soviet military intelligence reported on the invasion plans. Stalin stubbornly insisted that it was merely a plot by the British to drag the Soviet Union into the war. 

Across the Atlantic, in 1929, President Herbert Hoover confidently decided to ?let the economy fix itself.? That?s precisely how the Great Depression deserved its title.

The radical leftist Mr. Tsipras would have been the noble warrior who defeated the evil capitalist powers that strangled his country. He would heroically rewrite his...