The World’s Aged Major Leaders are a Menace
Nationalist myths, gerontocracy, and sheer delusion threaten us all.
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by Daniel Chirot
The world’s most consequential countries are now led by elderly, delusional, cruel men 70 or older. Several are obviously corrupt: Putin in Russia, Trump in the United States, Netanyahu in Israel. The same can be said for Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who relies on vastly corrupt Revolutionary Guards to stay in power. Others may be less openly so, but there are questions about who among their supporting cronies they favor and what they allow their families to do. That is the case with Xi Jinping in China whose anti-corruption campaigns seem to leave out his family and closest associates. Narendra Modi’s BJP Party regularly blackmails constituencies to make them elect his chosen parliamentarians. The BJP recently forced a Kerala Christian community to vote for a BJP candidate, threatening to legally harass and persecute its members if they refused. Whether Modi is personally corrupt does not matter, and he certainly benefits from the close support he gets from ultra-wealthy Indians, most obviously Gautam Adani. 70-year-old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is another one, both corrupt and cruel.
It is not their corruption, however, that is so menacing about these leaders but their delusions. Their ambitions, paranoia, and misreading of reality is not unique, but because they lead great powers in the world (even tiny Israel whose military might dominates much of the Middle East in a way that impacts the whole world), they are more dangerous than, say, the corruption and delusions of a thoroughly evil petty tyrant like Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. In Putin’s, Netanyahu’s, and Khamenei’s cases they have already immersed their countries in a state of perpetual war with little end in sight. China pushes in the same direction with its border conflicts, especially in the South China Sea and over Taiwan. A Trump administration will be less likely to engage in direct conflict, but if it carries out his stated isolationist policies, continues to condone Russia’s aggressions, and to fully support Israel’s unending, widening wars, greater conflicts are probable. There could eventually be some self-corrections in a war-weary Israel and the increasingly stressed Russia, but for the time being it has not yet happened. Erdoğan’s Turkey is involved in various direct and indirect kinds of aggression along its southern border, most obviously in Syria, as well as internally militarily repressing domestic Kurds.
What are these men’s dangerous delusions? They differ but have in common a sense that the nations they lead have fewer limits on their power than reality would suggest. They also have in common a belief that they can crush internal opposition no matter the consequences for the welfare of their countries. Something more surprising that they have in common is more symbolic but extremely meaningful to these leaders: a highly mythologized interpretation of their nations’ histories.
Xi Jinping’s delusional grandiosity is that he can repress even the slightest kind of domestic dissent but sustain a fully vibrant capitalist economy dependent on exports and a first-class scientific establishment while restricting dangerous contacts abroad. In China’s rise as an economic power, Taiwan played a disproportionate role as a provider of capital and expertise, but he seeks to destroy it. A takeover of Taiwan would ruin it, and badly damage the Chinese economy, but he persists in preparing for a war of aggression there. On a small scale that is what China has already done to Hong Kong, formerly an asset to the Chinese economy. Xi wants China to lead the world but bullies and plunders resources everywhere and needs to continue exporting to the United States while also openly seeking to turn it into a kind of economic dependency. China rearms at a frantic pace to prepare for a war that would not only ruin its economy but threaten the entire world with annihilation. It thus presents an immense danger because it can only succeed if America, Europe, and China’s neighbors all meekly surrender.
Xi’s China also peddles a view of Chinese history that highlights a mythical imperial antiquity, a claim that its present boundaries are very ancient, and most destructively that Mao Zedong was a hero who might have committed a few but not serious errors. In fact, China became a unified Empire in the late third century BCE, and prior dynasties controlled only parts of China. The supposed four-thousand-year-old Xia dynasty and its immediate predecessors are probably mythical, though many Chinese scholars disagree. Its present boundaries were set by conquests during the Qing (ruled by Manchu, not ethnically Chinese) dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. China’s historical claims to the South China Sea dates only from the mid-twentieth century. More destructively, Mao’s rule resulted in tens of millions of deaths from persecutions, politically induced famines, and lunatic industrial programs. To make him a founding hero of modern China means excusing such crimes, but it fits well with the Chinese claim that China never expanded by conquest, unlike Western Empires, but only because neighboring ethnic groups so admired it that they turned themselves into Han Chinese. That means that those who have not yet done so, most notably the Tibetans and Uighurs, must be savagely repressed and culturally eliminated. These historical fabrications legitimize Chinese policies that are anything but peaceful, especially when they are combined with a sense of extreme grievance and call for revenge to overcome the “century of humiliation” from the 1840s to the 1940s when Western powers and Japan invaded and dominated China.
Khamenei fantasizes that Iran can dominate the Middle East, endlessly repress its population, and spread its version of extremist Islam. That vision has already failed, but its aged, unpopular, fanatical leader remains in power. Iran has spread violence through proxies, several of whom, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and its (now collapsed) ally Syria have been largely destroyed. The Iranian economy is in terrible shape, and if it persists in building a nuclear bomb it risks a major defeat itself. Today, Iran is less of a risk than before because its string of alliances and proxy war with Israel have proved to be disastrous. Will that keep it from trying again?
Some of the history on which Iran’s Twelver Shia Islam is based has to do with the hidden twelfth descendant of Ali, himself a descendant of Muhammad, murdered by Sunni opponents. This twelfth Imam disappeared but will one day reappear as a kind of messiah to reinstate true Islam. Care is required when dealing with religious stories. What is divine truth for believers may be mythology for non-believers, but all religions have such explanatory narratives. It is what is made of them that matters. The founder of the clerical Iranian regime, Ayatollah Khomeini, allowed his followers to believe that he might be the returned Imam, and thus a legitimate messiah. There was from the start of this regime another interesting distortion of history. In 1953, “the Great Satan,” the United States, with British help, overthrew the moderately leftist reformist prime minister Mossadegh who had nationalized Iran’s British-owned oil fields. That intervention is used to explain hostility to America, but what the ruling Ayatollahs conveniently overlook is that most of the clerical establishment at that time was entirely in favor of increasing the Shah’s power and overthrowing a secular leftist reformer. Furthermore, the hated Shah, a supposed puppet of America and Britain, subsequently nationalized Iran’s oil. Among the Shah’s many errors was his emphasis on pre-Islamic Persian glory, but he was hardly an American puppet.
Putin’s delusions have been the most obviously exposed of all these cases. The war against Ukraine can produce no benefits as Russia has neither the capital nor the ability to restore a destroyed society. Areas it has conquered are mired in poverty and vicious repression. Far from turning Russia into the great world power it seeks to be, on par with the dead Soviet Union, Putin has reduced it to being a Chinese dependency. In his frustrated fury Putin sends saboteurs to Europe where he supports criminal gangs. Waging cyber war he tries to destroy European democracies, and, though he can claim some success, it is not obvious how that helps make Russia overcome its economic stagnation, population decline, and the departure of so many of its most capable younger people. To show how great his international reach has become Putin sends mercenaries to Africa where they plunder, rape, torture, and support local juntas in a set of impoverished countries that have little to offer except some minerals and expressions of love for Russia. Waving Russian flags in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali may make their citizens feel pleased about showing their middle finger to France, the former colonizer, and to the United States, but it doesn’t make Russia a great imperial power and it only further impoverishes already desperately poor Africans. Russia no longer has the economic or demographic strength to revive its original empire, so Putin resorts to threats of nuclear war.
Russia’s historical self-image is as mythologized as China’s. The Orthodox Christian ideologue Aleksander Dugin, sometimes considered admired by Putin, promotes a comprehensive, false narrative. The West, now led by America, is inherently fascist and hostile to what he terms “Eurasian” society. Eurasianism places Orthodox Christian Russia at the center of a great civilization that resists Western domination. Dugin admires Stalin, and that is for Russia what the myths about Mao are for China. Under Putin, whether or not he listens to Dugin, Stalin is a hero. Statues of Stalin are being erected in Russia. The West supports fascism and has installed it in Ukraine, requiring Russia to invade it. Furthermore, as Putin told then-American President George W. Bush, Ukraine is not a real nation as it was always, from medieval Kievan times, part of Russia. To make matters worse, Putin has allied himself to the Russian Orthodox Church which has canonized Czar Nicholas II (murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918). That an antisemitic, foolish to the point of incompetence, failed monarch who thought he could lead his armies to victory in World War I should become the other modern Russian hero is telling. With historical models like Nicholas and Stalin, one can suppose that Russians are supposed to view their present leader as combining the best qualities of both: religious, nationalist, belligerently anti-Enlightenment and hostile to Western liberalism. Their crimes and failures don’t count.
Erdoğan’s dream is to create a kind of neo-Ottoman Empire. He enjoys dressing up his guards in antique Ottoman costumes and makes sure to emphasize that past in official histories. He interferes militarily in Syria and Iraq and tries to help anti-Israeli actors. He has backed Hamas and Islamic anti-regime factions in Syria. Can Turkey reclaim some sort of control over former Ottoman domains? At what price and to what end? His successes do not, however, improve the economic mess he has created. Erdoğan thinks he can manipulate interest and exchange rates, but that produces inflation and has hurt what was previously a thriving economy. He has endangered NATO with pro-Russian policies, but Russia is closely allied with Turkey’s rival Iran and until recently held up the Assad regime in Syria. World politics is not a game played lightly, and hubristic authoritarians are not the wisest of players.
A lot of Turkey’s mythological history was not invented by Erdoğan’s historians. A good start was made under Kemal Pasha, otherwise called Ataturk, before World War II. The Turks are an ancient race who conquered Eurasia and founded all of its civilizations, including the Greek one. The Hittites (who spoke an Indo-European, not Turkic language) were actually Turks. Thus, as the originators of all that is civilized, Turkey is owed respect and primacy. This fits neatly into Erdoğan’s aggressive push into the Middle East and opposition to NATO. All he wants is more respect and acknowledgement that Turkey has a right to fulfill its destiny as a great power.
Modi’s militant Hinduism persecutes India’s huge Muslim minority of about 200 million. He allied himself with Sheikh Hasina, until recently Bangladesh’s corrupt dictator, and now that she has been overthrown he finds himself with a hostile Muslim neighbor. He has global ambitions, and his management of the Indian economy has been mostly successful, but his push to make Hindi the only national language and Hinduism the dominant religion threatens that success. The most dynamic parts of India are not in the poor Hindu north that supports Modi, but in the south that speaks different languages and is more dynamic and prosperous. Modi’s use of assassins to kill and harass perceived political enemies abroad has embroiled him with Canada and brought a warning from the United States. His political paranoia threatens the allies whom he needs to stand up to China. He has already been hurt when his spies and agents were expelled from Australia because they were stealing industrial information and targeting some of Australia’s large Indian community.
Indian history under Modi makes claims about how Hindus discovered a lot of modern science, for example genetic science and cosmetic surgery. It is not sufficient to point out that India did make significant contributions to modern mathematics by creating the number system sometimes called “Arabic” because it entered the West through Arab cultures. Modi has suppressed universities and called for the return to pre-English and pre-Muslim knowledge. Lower caste and Muslim scholars are being excluded from their positions. In general, because Hinduism was repressed by India’s longtime Muslim Mughal rulers, it is right to now persecute the Indian Muslims who are unwelcome intruders from the past. And so it goes in what claims to be the world’s largest democracy.
Perhaps Netanyahu has been too successful to be included in this list? No, because his tactical victories carried out by an astoundingly powerful, skillful military only cover up a fundamental weakness that threatens Israel’s future. To begin, the successful Hamas invasion in October 2023 was only possible because his right-wing, ultra-Orthodox religious allies wanted intelligence and military presence concentrated in the West Bank to force out more Palestinians while Jewish settlers took more land. Netanyahu neglected warnings about what Hamas was planning. Then, crushing Hamas was so thoroughly done that what remains a substantial Palestinian population in Gaza has no government. As Netanyahu refuses to let the Palestinian Authority, now in the West Bank, take over Gaza, there is no exit plan. The clear intention of Netanyahu’s religious allies is to get rid of the Gaza Arabs and turn the territory into a part of Israel, but that obviously calls for mass ethnic cleansing. Such forced expulsions, provoked by tens of thousands of deaths, fit the UN definition of genocide. Israel, as a result, is turning into an international pariah. All this is compounded by the more tactically brilliant but strategically worrisome Israeli war in Lebanon. Hezbollah has been disarmed, Shiite Lebanese communities destroyed, and Iranian air defenses decimated. Now what? Netanyahu’s political alliance with ultra-orthodox religious fanatics, the Haredim, is a long-term internal menace for Israel. They are about one-fifth of Jewish Israelis, but a key political ally for Netanyahu. These are not the Israelis at the heart of its tremendously successful science and technology. They take resources away from the state, but they inadequately educate their children, and many won’t even serve in the military. As they have higher fertility than other Israelis the Haredim are gaining in demographic strength. Netanyahu is dependent on them to stay in power, and out of jail on corruption charges. So, at war without end and losing most of its international friends, is Israel getting stronger?
Israel itself was founded on the basis of that land’s ancient Jewish kingdoms. Those were not all mythical, but their suggested boundaries and policies have been used and continue to be ever more emphasized by those who want to drive out all Arabs from the old boundaries of Palestine. The West Bank that is increasingly filled by Jewish settlers is not the West Bank of the Jordan but the traditionally named Judea and Samaria. These were the names of ancient Jewish kingdoms in those areas. References to the great empire of Solomon (itself a vast exaggeration of what then existed) have even been used occasionally to claim more land. More sinisterly, Netanyahu referred to Palestinian Arabs in October 2023 as “Amalekites.” In the Jewish Bible Amalekites were enemies of the Israelites who had passed through their territory on the way from their Egyptian exile to their promised land. They had persecuted the Israelites, and in revenge God commanded that they be exterminated. This is not the only genocide called for in the Bible, but to refer to Amalek as a justification for contemporary Israeli policies in Gaza does say something about intent.
Finally there is Donald Trump. Will he enact his high tariff policy? That would start the kind of trade war that prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would neither bring in enough revenue to compensate for massive tax cuts or help more than a few American industries. It would stoke inflation. Will Trump strip America of its allies? That would embolden America’s enemies, chiefly Russia and China, to be more aggressive. Will his appointees destroy key institutions like the FBI, the CIA, or the IRS? Only criminals, foreign enemies, and tax dodgers can benefit. His is a delusional world peopled by personal, mostly American, enemies to be destroyed, and by sycophantic followers to be humored. Personal greed motivates him. A lot of businesses think they can benefit, and Wall Street agrees, but the less-than-rich, less-white, less-traditional Americans will be left out. Good luck America!
Trump appeals to a mythologized recent past when America was great, had no problem with immigrants, racism, much crime, or international dangers such as the former Soviet Union. So does America no longer need allies in this dangerous world? No, because Trump will return America to a past when there were no international dangers. NATO, created to counter past threats, is irrelevant and practically an enemy. There is much more, because part of the right-wing version of history downplays the evil of slavery, glorifies Confederate heroes, and denies American genocidal policies toward its indigenous population. There is much to praise in the Enlightenment views of America’s founders that has been a beacon for gradual but real progress. Trumpian policy, however, belittles exactly that aspect of America’s foundation by flouting constitutional rules. It preaches intolerance, rejection of America’s immigrant past, and questions even the constitutional amendment that gave freed slaves citizenship by saying that anyone born in the United States is automatically an American citizen. Trumpism rejects much of the science that is a crown jewel of the Enlightenment admired by America’s founders. It is therefore a very selective history full of convenient distortions and outright lies.
We have now gone through why those elderly, cruel, and mostly corrupt leaders of major contemporary states present so much danger. Their ambitions, world views, paranoid delusions, and warped sense of history endanger us all because they have already led to wars and promise far more.
We have been there before. In the early twentieth century some major European powers were led by delusional leaders. They stumbled into an entirely useless, meaningless World War I. It destroyed Europe, killed over ten million, and this later led to World War II when over fifty million more died.
In a picturesque Basque village near the Spanish border of Southwestern France, in a churchyard, I recently saw a plaque with some 30 names of young men who had “Died for France” (Mort Pour la France) in World War I. That was a lot for such a small place. The Basques were until recently one of the most devoutly Catholic people in France; in villages and towns less fervent, the plaques commemorating these war dead might be in a central square rather than by a church. There was a much smaller list of World War II dead because in June of 1940 France had surrendered to Germany and had far fewer killed.
I wondered how many of those Basque WWI dead had known exactly why they had been drafted and sent off to die in the wretched cold, muddy, stench of trenches in Flanders or Verdun, far north of their homes. “For France,” of course, but had they been asked for their opinions?
There are commemorative reminders of WW I throughout Europe. In the 1970s in a formerly ethnic German village deep in the Romanian Carpathians, I had seen such a plaque written with Germanic Gothic letters inside a tiny, ancient church. They had died for doomed Austria-Hungary in WWI, the state that ruled Transylvania back then, before Romania took it after 1918. Had they been asked whether or not they wished to be sacrificed for a failing Empire governed by distant, delusional officials?
There are huge numbers of books about World War I’s causes: who to blame, could it have been avoided, why was it so deadly and long? The main conclusion to be drawn is that the war was pointless. There was no deep ideological division between the Germans, English, and French, just fears, exaggerated ambitions, and paranoid delusions harbored by elites. Russia, the most autocratic state in Europe, was an anachronism governed by a superstitious, anti-Semitic Emperor even more delusional about what was best for his country than other major state leaders. Whatever guilt was born by the French and British, or by the greedy tiny Balkan states already at war before 1914, a larger part of the blame should be assigned to Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, all three of whom marched blithely into a catastrophe that destroyed them and did away with their “Caesars” (Kaiser in German, Czar in Russian).
Blaming the big powers does not excuse the petty Balkan states that started it all. The conflicting claims by those new Balkan states that sought to regain overlapping boundaries of the medieval Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek Byzantine Empires led to their wars against each other. It was when the resulting conflicts involved the greater European powers that the Great War was launched. Serbia’s secret service organized the murder of Austria-Hungary’s heir to further Serbia’s claim to Bosnia, then in the Habsburg Empire. It was the proximate cause of the Great War. Otto von Bismarck had said in 1888, “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” Ruthless and contemptuous of lesser people as he was, he also understood the dangers if great powers took those miserable little Balkans too seriously.
The hyper-nationalism originally used by Napoleon to first conquer Europe, and then ruin France in endless bloodshed, had spread throughout the continent in the nineteenth century. But how much sense did it make? Germany was already the leading economic and military power in Europe by 1914. Had there been no war, it would have become the center of European culture and power. So why did it need to build up a huge fleet to conquer an overseas empire to challenge Britain? By 1914 it is doubtful that Britain itself was making much of a profit from its huge Indian colony or its African ones, and France’s African and Asian Empire was a net loss except for a few privileged French businesses. Russia was huge, industrializing, and finally making significant progress. Everyone would have been better off without a war, and the conflict about conquering colonies was itself senseless.
Multi-ethnic and multi-religious Austria-Hungary, where WW I began, was gradually democratizing by 1914, at least the Austrian part. (Hungary, then as now, was an illiberal obstruction to democracy and reform.) Could it have held together, perhaps as a series of loosely united ethnic national states, like the British Commonwealth of that time? Vienna was a jewel of advanced European culture, despite rising anti-Semitism, and had there been no war it would have continued to thrive. But the aged Habsburg Kaiser’s government thought it needed to crush Serbia, the main instigator of the terror that had killed the heir to the throne. The Austro-Hungarian generals thought they could win a quick decisive war and bring Serbia to heel. Germany agreed to support the war. Russia had its own Balkan ambitions and its Czar thought that all Slavic speakers loved Russia and needed to be supported. He ordered a mobilization to stop Austria-Hungary from destroying Serbia. The bombastic German Kaiser who loved to parade with his army dressed in spectacular uniforms was told by his generals that they had to defeat Russia before it became too strong, but, before that, they had to defeat Russia’s ally, France. The “Schlieffen” plan, worked out in minute details, with railroad timetables, logistical provisions, and mobilization schedules, was set to knock out France. The war would be over quickly. Unfortunately, to swing around French defenses it was necessary to invade Belgium. That made it certain Britain would join France, but no matter, it would all be over soon. Of course, that too was a delusion.
History does not repeat itself, but there is one lesson to draw from what happened in 1914. Delusional leaders with vast ambitions who think they can control events by resorting to violence if necessary, are a menace. Their delusions make them paranoid. Can the current crop of delusional leaders wind up letting rationality slip to the point of starting a major global war? Why not? Where will “some damned foolish thing” start a greater disaster? Taiwan? The Middle East? Eastern Europe? The South China Sea? In the Indian Ocean? Or perhaps one of those endless civil wars and disasters that beset much of Africa? Let us hope we never find out.
Daniel Chirot is Emeritus Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School. He is founder of the journal East European Politics and Societies.
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Mr Chirot, you are 82. And you are still there, talking, teaching, influencing people. So, spare us this kind of hypocritical pseudo-wisdom.
Old age has been either glorified or vilified across several different periods of history, and actually the lionization of youth is a very recent phenomenon, one of the symptoms of a world hinged on the constant surpassing of its previous achievements and obsessed with growth per se.
Age has little bearing in the failings of today's world leaders, except as an easy negative charge. These people are not supported just by a gerontocracy, but by vast numbers of the young as well. And the younger leaders, left and right, are neither more reasonable, more moderate, or less corrupt: does youth make a positive difference between Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping? Vance and Trump, or Ocasio-Cortez and Biden? Just Stop Oil and Corbyn? Et cetera, et cetera.
You are a social scientist, Mr Chirot, and truly such easy judgements based on an identitarian category like advanced age are below you.
It is not age that makes a difference, it is ideas, and the reasons why people embrace such ideas. It is, like you have pointed out often in your research, the enthusiasm for righteousness that is willing to ride roughshod over everything and everyone to obtain the one goal reputed worthy and saintly -- in religions, in revolutions, in counter-revolutions.
It is ideas that are supported not by reason but by emotions of the worst kind: fear, egoism, envy, hatred, greed. Even where the ideas have some worthy point in theory, being fed by this kind of emotions warps them beyond redemption.
And this is the Spiritus Mundi of the beginning of this century, unfortunately. East and West, North and South, everywhere. It is difficult to remain untainted.
But it has very little to do with age.