The optics are deceptive. Seen through western spectacles, Vladimir Putin appears as a lonely figure shunned by the civilised world. But look again at the United Nations voting figures on his invasion of Ukraine. On March 2, 141 out of 193 member states condemned the Russian leader for a clear breach of international law. That left a handful of the usual suspects — among them North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad — to come out in his favour and 35 abstentions. The abstainers included China, India, Vietnam and Iraq. Lump them together, the naysayers and the not-particularly-bothered, and you end up with leaders representing more than half of the world’s population.
These are the strongmen who in Gideon Rachman’s telling “threaten democracy around the world”. Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Putin and the like construct governing systems built around their personal whims rather than institutions, override the rule of law, crush opposition rivals, stifle free speech and centralise power. Their reigns run into the decades. China’s Xi Jinping looks set to rule for at least another ten years, perhaps for the rest of his life, despite the complex problems facing his country. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) already behaves as though he will be shaping his country for the next two or three decades.
It is certainly worth taking seriously, this age of strongmen. When they co-ordinate they can make the western liberal order look feeble, strapped as it is to the inconvenience of regular, freely contested democratic elections. Saudi Arabia and Russia can, and do, stitch up world oil prices together. Xi, at the helm of a huge economy, can make top businessmen bend their knees at his court.
The evidence so far has been that these dictators get away with murder — only consider the latest death tolls out of Ukraine. At home, helped along by a complaisant media, they can present themselves as benign autocrats who channel popular resentments, who guarantee stability and offer a degree of prosperity. Abroad, they are more than ready to pick fights with weaker neighbours.
Rachman, as foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, has been writing about autocratic rule for many years and his chapters sometimes read like expanded columns. But they always prompt deeper thought about how the West should be dealing with the challenge. Not perhaps, as has too often been the case, by embracing new authoritarian rulers as modernisers and reformers. Erdogan, for example, seemed to western decision-makers to supply a forward-looking version of political Islam. He abolished the death penalty and strengthened minority rights. A man with whom we could do business! Closer examination of his biography would have revealed him to be lead actor, director and scriptwriter of a student play in the 1970s called Mason-Communist-Jew. And as mayor of Istanbul in 1996 he remarked: “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination. And then you step off.”
Advertisement
It was a similar story with MBS — a young virile heir to the throne with ambitious plans to build a new city in the desert and some progressive ideas about allowing women to drive, he seemed irresistible to western investors when he entered government in 2015. Early Putin also seemed to be a hot tip. In his first presidential address on New Year’s Eve 1999 he promised to protect the freedom of the press and, unlike his patron Boris Yeltsin, didn’t seem likely to go off on a vodka-fuelled bender. There was talk of bringing him into all the big talking shops of global politics.
None of it lasted long, of course. After a botched military coup in 2016, strongman Erdogan struck out at Kurdish sympathisers (the opposition leader, Selahattin Demirtas, faced a 142-year jail sentence) and filled up his prisons with journalists. Strongman Putin showed his cold side in August 2000 when he failed to turn up at the dockside as the crew of a damaged submarine ran out of oxygen — he was pictured enjoying his summer holiday at a villa on the Black Sea instead. There was an iciness too about the way he crushed a Chechen rebellion between 1999 and 2000, razing the capital, Grozny, to the ground in the process. As for strongman MBS, he did nothing to impede trusted followers from killing and dismembering the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had criticised his regime in The Washington Post, in 2018.
We have enabled the rise of these autocrats and find ourselves quite often managing their portfolios. After some years of turning a blind eye to their peccadillos, it becomes that much more difficult to regain the moral high ground. The strongmen (and they are overwhelmingly men) are accepted as important global players because they offer stability. Since their vanity prohibits a sensible succession plan, they tend to stick around for decades, amassing money (Putin has been called “the world’s richest man”) and properties and horses and cars and surgical enhancements and state-of-the-art weaponry. Londongrad and a dozen other favoured capitals have regiments of enablers who make dictators more comfortable.
Perhaps Rachman should have paid more attention to these service industries. The reputation-washers and the palace architects, the libel and divorce lawyers. They’re doing more than making a fast buck, they are often helping crooked leaders to swindle their subjects. Their kowtowing feeds their client’s delusions of omnipotence. We tolerate it because there is merit, in an anxious fast-moving world, in being able to deal with characters whose weaknesses we know, whose futures are not bound by the vagaries of the democratic process, and who are capable of making swift decisions that serve our interests.
But if the autocrats fail to deliver, if they wrong-foot us, drag us into wars, then our decades of sycophancy and mercantilism serves us not at all. Angela Merkel probably imagined she was playing her cards well with Putin by using Russian gas not only to fuel the German and European economy but also to tie the Kremlin into a functional, co-operative relationship with the West. That is what the realpolitik playbook dictates. In fact, she was allowing him to weaponise gas supplies, in the first instance against Ukraine and ultimately against the West.
Advertisement
Rachman wrote his lucid, well-argued book before Putin’s supposed blitzkrieg against Ukraine. The prospect that Putin could, if not lose, then at least be damaged by that war actually suggests an alternative, more upbeat conclusion than the one Rachman offers. Strongmen are under contract to their subjects. Leaders take away certain civic liberties promising to steer towards prosperity and literacy, exhibit competence and fairness, and give people pride in their state. To be seen as credibly strong, however, they have to win the wars they embark on. The greatest weakness of MBS, certainly in the eyes of other Arab leaders, is his inability to crush the Houthi rebels of Yemen. Now Putin is demonstrating, as his notional three-day smash-and-grab war stretches into its sixth bloody week, that he is a feeble commander.
Putin won’t be forgiven for that and although he will certainly hunt out scapegoats and contrive ways to extend his rule, it’s plain that Rachman’s subtitle, How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World, could turn out to be plain wrong. So far at least the Putin war has brought democracies closer together, has reminded them of a common enemy and presented them with clear choices. Rachman identifies Putin as the archetype of the strongman. Now, if the Kremlin leader wobbles, so too could the mini-Putins flexing their muscles across the globe.
The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World by Gideon Rachman, Bodley Head, 288pp; £20
