If you’re still surprised by the chaos that U.S. President Donald Trump is fostering at home and abroad, I fear you weren’t paying sufficient attention over the past eight years. At this point in his long and twisted life, it is obvious that his vision of a perfect world is one where men with power and wealth (i.e., men like him) can do whatever they want, unconstrained by norms, laws, or a broader commitment to the public good. This attitude was most clearly revealed back in the 2016 campaign, when he boasted on tape that he just grabbed women wherever he wanted. Rules? Decency? Restraint? Public-mindedness? That’s for losers and dupes.
Given this core belief, it is hardly surprising that the leaders Trump admires and feels most comfortable with are autocrats with unchecked power. He praises Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” and rhapsodizes about how well he gets along with men (and, yes, they are all men) such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Even the democratically elected leaders he prefers—like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel—have strong illiberal or autocratic tendencies. Notice also that many of these leaders have used their control of the state to enrich themselves or their supporters; corruption is a nearly universal symptom in autocratic systems. This attitude helps explain Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk and some of the other tech bros; like Trump, they want to eliminate any rules that might prevent them from extracting as much wealth as possible from the rest of us. And it is right in line with his affinity for proud misogynists like the infamous Tate brothers.
If you’re still surprised by the chaos that U.S. President Donald Trump is fostering at home and abroad, I fear you weren’t paying sufficient attention over the past eight years. At this point in his long and twisted life, it is obvious that his vision of a perfect world is one where men with power and wealth (i.e., men like him) can do whatever they want, unconstrained by norms, laws, or a broader commitment to the public good. This attitude was most clearly revealed back in the 2016 campaign, when he boasted on tape that he just grabbed women wherever he wanted. Rules? Decency? Restraint? Public-mindedness? That’s for losers and dupes.
Given this core belief, it is hardly surprising that the leaders Trump admires and feels most comfortable with are autocrats with unchecked power. He praises Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “strong leader,” and rhapsodizes about how well he gets along with men (and, yes, they are all men) such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Even the democratically elected leaders he prefers—like Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel—have strong illiberal or autocratic tendencies. Notice also that many of these leaders have used their control of the state to enrich themselves or their supporters; corruption is a nearly universal symptom in autocratic systems. This attitude helps explain Trump’s relationship with Elon Musk and some of the other tech bros; like Trump, they want to eliminate any rules that might prevent them from extracting as much wealth as possible from the rest of us. And it is right in line with his affinity for proud misogynists like the infamous Tate brothers.
By contrast, the leaders Trump loathes are those with a deep and genuine commitment to limited government and democratic institutions, such as former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, every recent British prime minister except Boris Johnson, and current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. No wonder his second stint as president has begun with a full-blown assault on the existing limits to executive power here in the United States, including explicit hints that he thinks of himself as a king.
It follows that Trump’s vision of an ideal world order is one where autocrats and other strongmen get together and carve up the world for themselves. Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times recently referred to this approach as making the world “safe for autocracy,” and former U.S. national security advisor Susan Rice referred to Trump’s new friends as an “axis of autocrats.” To me, it sounds a bit like a modern version of the Concert of Europe, the post-Napoleonic arrangement whereby the major powers tried to ward off a renewed assault on monarchical rule by coordinating their actions and keeping conflicts between them within bounds. Call it an emerging “Concert of Kingpins.”
Would it work? At first glance, it might seem tempting for the United States to dispense with complicated international institutions like the United Nations, the G-20, G-7, the European Union, etc., and just have regular powwows with a group of powerful potentates. Dealing with democracies can be messy, because you have to take into account what their citizens want and whether the public will support whatever deal their elected representatives make. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just cut deals with one’s fellow dictators and be done with it? One might even argue that the United States would be in a pretty good position among those various powers, given the size of its economy and its geographic separation from Eurasia. The other autocrats would still be eyeing each other warily and be eager to curry favor with Washington, which would give the United States more leverage. Moreover, if the United States openly abandons its professed commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights, and all those other pesky liberal values, it won’t be accused of hypocrisy or face awkward trade-offs between its professed ideals and its less-than-ideal behavior. Maybe Trump is right: Liberal democracy is so last century, and we’d all be better off letting the world’s alpha males run the show.
Don’t bet on it.
For starters, a Concert of Kingpins requires these unchecked autocrats to trust each other, and it assumes that their common interest in exploiting or oppressing their publics will override other differences. Trust is hard to sustain, however, when you know that your fellow leaders have near-total latitude to act as they wish, whatever they might have agreed to previously. You’d think Trump would understand this by now, given that he couldn’t reach an agreement with Pyongyang even after he flattered Kim, cajoled him, and gave him the prestige of a personal summit meeting with the U.S. president. He also got stiffed by Xi, who promised that China would buy $200 billion in U.S. exports as part of the “beautiful” trade deal Trump negotiated and never followed through. Does Trump think he’s the only world leader who is capable of deceit and duplicity, or the cleverest negotiator out there? The record suggests otherwise.
International relations scholars have long recognized that democratic states tend to be more trustworthy and that this feature makes them more valuable partners. Democratic states tend to be preferred trading partners, for example, because commitments that reflect a broad national consensus and that have been ratified by a democratic process are less likely to be abandoned without warning. Historically, alliances between democracies are more durable as well, because they tend to reflect more enduring interests and are less vulnerable to a leader’s individual whims.
Second, trying to run the world on a purely transactional basis, and primarily by negotiating deals with other strong leaders, is inherently inefficient, and even more so when the participants can’t be sure that any agreements they reach will be kept. Even in a world that lacks a central authority, states need rules and institutions to manage all the complicated interactions that occur every single day. Just imagine how chaotic life would be if there were no traffic laws, and each day every driver had to figure out a set of rules to follow with every other person behind the wheel of a car. The result would be gridlock, lots of accidents, and some very angry motorists.
Norms and institutions also provide a way to discern other states’ intentions: Governments that adhere to established rules are typically less threatening than those that repeatedly defy them. Get rid of all the rules, however, and you can’t tell the lawbreakers from the law-abiding. Trump may think he can tear up today’s admittedly imperfect rules-based order and just do whatever he wants, but he will soon discover that a world without any rules at all is one that is poorer, more conflictive, much less predictable, and more difficult to manage.
Third, although autocratic governments invariably generate mountains of propaganda portraying the ruler as an infallible genius, history warns that leaders with unchecked power are prone to monumental errors. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong made big decisions that caused millions of unnecessary deaths, Benito Mussolini led Italy into disastrous wars, and Adolf Hitler’s strategic blunders and megalomania helped bring about Germany’s defeat in World War II. Democratic leaders make mistakes, too, of course, but a freer flow of information and ability to replace failed leaders makes it easier to correct errors quickly. This fact helps explain why democracies have historically outperformed autocracies on a wide array of indicators, including economic growth, longevity, educational performance, and basic human rights. To believe that the world (or the United States itself) will be better off under autocratic rule is to ignore one of the more important lessons of the past two centuries.
Fourth, the problem is not that Trump is reaching out to Russia and trying to end the war in Ukraine. Former Vice President Kamala Harris would probably have tried to do so, too, albeit in a very different way. The problem is that he is realigning the United States with several of the world’s leading dictatorships and doing whatever he can to weaken, disparage, and discredit the democracies that have been America’s principal allies for decades. Former U.S. President Richard Nixon and then-national security advisor Henry Kissinger were acting as smart realists when they reached out to China in the early 1970s, but they didn’t abandon NATO and pick pointless quarrels with Canada and Mexico at the same time.
This is so shortsighted. Having friendly neighbors to the south and north has been an extraordinary benefit to the United States, and Trump’s bullying is putting that remarkable good fortune in jeopardy. Having stable and like-minded partners in Europe and Asia for the past 70 years has been a net benefit as well. There were good reasons for the United States to seek a new division of labor with its European allies, but realigning with Russia and treating Europe as an adversary means trading the friendship of some 450 million people (with a combined GDP of $20 trillion) for an uncertain connection with the leader of a declining power with a population just over 140 million and an economy of only $2 trillion. This approach might make sense if Trump’s primary goal is to weaken democracy everywhere and consolidate his own power at home, but it won’t make the United States safer, more popular, or more prosperous.
