It looks as if the Axis of Diesel has us over a barrel again. In order to break the European addiction to Russian hydrocarbons Boris Johnson is on his way to Saudi Arabia, hoping to persuade its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to boost oil production and thus lower prices. That’s the same MBS who barely conceals his fandom of Vladimir Putin, and who at home recently gave the go-ahead to the mass execution of 81 opponents.
It’s an obviously queasy moment. In order to punish one strongman leader with blood on his hands by (among other things) refusing to buy his oil we have to make up the shortfall by paying court to another of similar ilk.
Something of that sort has also been happening between the United States and the Venezuelan dictator, Nicolás Maduro, who has driven his once wealthy country to the brink of economic and social collapse. Maduro’s oil industry was sanctioned after he rigged elections in 2019. Now the US, hunting for alternatives to Russian oil and gas, has come knocking on Maduro’s door.
And then there’s the question of Iran. Washington is in a rush to revive a deal curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and thus ease sanctions that stop the clerical regime from selling oil on world markets. Russia was giving the Iranian foreign minister a ticking-off yesterday: it believes the Biden administration is trying not just to fill a hole in oil supplies but to drive a wedge between Tehran and Moscow.
Fair enough to conclude then that this holding-the-nose, talking-to-the-enemy policy swivel is the price for creating a solid collective wall against the No 1 villain in the Kremlin. Morally dubious, a little sleazy perhaps, but inevitable if the world is to place Putin into prolonged quarantine; and also the only way of keeping oil prices halfway under control. It is remarkable how quickly indignation about beheading regimes fades when petrol roars towards £2.50 a litre, when diesel could hit £3 and may even be rationed.
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But the deeper problem lies in the very nature of strongmen leaders and our easy acceptance they can dictate the rhythm of our lives. We used to write off authoritarian leaders as tinpot dictators unless they mounted, as Putin and Xi Jinping do now, a direct challenge to the global order.
For the most part the bad guys, the Rotters Club, barely infringed on western consciousness. That changed after the world financial crisis of 2008 when the West started to lose confidence in its institutions and in its mission. Gideon Rachman, in an intriguing new book The Age of the Strongman, acknowledges that Putin was around before then, at the helm since the year 2000, but sees him as the archetype of the kind of leader that followed.
The wannabe Putins sought out and touched populist nerves, often drew on the rancour of past national humiliations, sowed suspicion of the deep state and secret governance (while creating secret networks of their own), paraded a disdain for the rule of law. Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived as Turkish prime minister in 2003, Xi as Chinese leader in 2012, Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist, as Indian leader in 2014, Donald Trump in 2016. There were variations of these models across Europe, Asia and South America.
The striking thing was how many paid some kind of tribute to the man in Moscow. Here’s Nigel Farage on Putin: “The way he played the whole Syria thing. Brilliant.” MBS didn’t disguise his admiration, nor did Trump.
Well, Putin is floundering now and it’s time to recognise that the age of the strongman is stuttering to a close. When Putin goes, when his bloody war is lost, his disciples across the world had better check their yachts are in safe harbours.
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Strongmen leaders are seen as strong because they keep an eye open for the left-behind during a modernisation wave, they create jobs, they rekindle national pride, they win wars. When they stop doing that they crack down on critics. But one day the people eventually lose their fear, and the strongman is finished. Not immediately, perhaps, since all, even the feeblest of strongmen, Maduro, work out survival mechanisms, stash money abroad, have plan Bs and plan Cs to avoid the Hague. But security establishments change sides; the end then comes in a flash, in a Nicolae Ceausescu booed-on-his-balcony moment.
These are end times. Not, perhaps, the prospect of apocalyptic mushroom clouds, but rather a dawning realisation among the strongmen their time is running out. When the West tries to play off MBS against Putin, when Maduro is offered a rehabilitation deal to free up some oil, when the ayatollahs are given a chance to buy off their sins to keep our petrol tanks full, it is not a brilliant act of realpolitik on our part but rather a wilful looking-away from the corrupt dependencies that we have helped to create. In an ideal world, as the Polish satirist Aleksander Wat wrote in 1927, the planet’s despots, deposed kings and khans, should be put on a desert island and forced to rule over each other. That option does not exist.
Instead Putin must emerge in the coming months as the universally acknowledged loser of his war in Ukraine, even as he dances on the graves. It should be seen for what it is: the last crazed act of a dictator who has run out of road. And on every continent people should look more closely at their own mini-Putins and show them the door.
