{"id":14863,"date":"2023-10-04T03:52:16","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T10:52:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14863"},"modified":"2023-10-04T03:54:10","modified_gmt":"2023-10-04T10:54:10","slug":"14863","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14863","title":{"rendered":"“How Four Leaders Are Turning the World Upside Down”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By\u00a0Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist, Oct. 3, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ever since learning that in 1947, Walter Lippmann\u00a0popularized<\/a>\u00a0the term \u201cCold War\u201d to define the emerging conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, I thought it would be cool to be able to name a historical epoch. Now that the post-Cold War has expired, the post-post-Cold War that we\u2019ve entered is just begging to be named. So here goes: It\u2019s the age of \u201cThat Was Not the Plan.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
Credit…Pridannikov\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I know, I know, that doesn\u2019t trip off the tongue \u2014 and I don\u2019t expect it to stick \u2014 but boy is it accurate. I stumbled across it on a recent trip to Ukraine. I was speaking with a Ukrainian mother who explained that since the war started, her social life had been reduced to occasional dinners with friends, kids\u2019 birthday parties \u201cand funerals.\u201d After typing her quote into my column, I added<\/a> my own comment: \u201cThat was not the plan.\u201d<\/em> Before last year, young Ukrainians had been enjoying easier access to the E.U., embarking on tech start-ups, thinking about where to go to college and wondering whether to vacation in Italy or Spain. And then, like a meteor, comes this Russian invasion that turns their lives upside down overnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is not alone. A lot of people\u2019s plans \u2014 and a lot of countries\u2019 plans \u2014 have gone completely haywire lately. We\u2019ve entered a post-post-Cold War era that promises little of the prosperity, predictability and new possibilities of the post-Cold War epoch of the past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many reasons for this, but none are more important than the work of four key leaders who have one thing in common: They each believe that their leadership is indispensable and are ready to go to extreme lengths to hold on to power as long as they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am talking about Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The four of them \u2014 each in his own way \u2014 have created massive disruptions inside and outside their countries based on pure self-interest, rather than the interests of their people, and made it far harder for their nations to function normally in the present and to plan wisely for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take Putin. He started off as something of a reformer who stabilized post-Yeltsin Russia and oversaw an economic boom, thanks to rising oil prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then oil revenues started to sag, and as the Russia scholar Leon Aron describes it in his forthcoming book, \u201cRiding the Tiger<\/a>: Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia and the Uses of War,\u201d Putin made a big turn at the start of his third presidency in 2012, after the largest anti-Putin rallies of his rule in 100 Russian cities broke out and his economy stalled. Putin\u2019s solution: \u201cShift the foundation of his regime\u2019s legitimacy from economic progress to militarized patriotism,\u201d Aron told me, and blame everything bad on the West and NATO expansion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the process, Putin made Russia into a besieged fortress, which, in his mind and propaganda, only Putin is capable of defending \u2014 and therefore requires that he stay in power for life. He went from Russia\u2019s distributor of income to a distributor of dignity, earned in all the wrong ways and places. His invading Ukraine to restore a mythical Russian Motherland was inevitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Events in China have also unfolded quite unexpectedly of late. After steadily opening up and loosening internal controls since 1978, making it more predictable, stable and prosperous than at any other time in its modern history, China experienced an almost 180-degree U-turn under President Xi: He dispensed with terms limits \u2014 respected by his predecessors to prevent the emergence of another Mao \u2014 and made himself president indefinitely. Xi apparently believed that the Chinese Communist Party was losing its grip \u2014 leading to widespread corruption \u2014 so he reasserted its power at every level of society and business, while also eliminating any rivals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has made China more closed than any time since the days of Mao \u2014 complete with the sudden disappearances of the ministers of defense and foreign affairs \u2014 and sparking talk that we may have already seen \u201cpeak China\u201d in terms of the country\u2019s economic potential, which would be an earthquake for the global economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was certainly not in my plan that after nearly a lifetime following Israel\u2019s struggles with foreign enemies, I would end up writing about how the biggest threat to the Jewish democracy today is an enemy within \u2014 a judicial coup led by Netanyahu that is splintering Israel\u2019s society and military.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The former director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Dan Harel, told<\/a> a Tel Aviv democracy rally last week that \u201cI have never seen our national security in a worse state\u201d and that there has already been \u201cdamage to the reserve units of essential IDF formations, which has reduced readiness and operational capability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is no small problem for the United States. For the past 50 years, Israel has been both a crucial ally and, in effect, a forward base in the region through which America projected power without the use of U.S. troops. Israel destroyed both Iraq\u2019s and Syria\u2019s budding attempts to become nuclear powers. Israel is the main counterweight today for containing the expansion of Iranian power across the whole region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if we have three more years of this extremist Netanyahu government, with its aspiration to annex the West Bank and govern Palestinians there with an apartheidlike system, the Jewish state could become a major source of instability in the region, not stability, and a much more uncertain ally \u2014 more like Turkey and less like the Israel of old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And why? In a recent Times profile<\/a> of Bibi, Ruth Margalit quoted Ze\u2019ev Elkin, a former Likud minister in Netanyahu\u2019s cabinet, as describing Netanyahu thus: \u201cHe began with a worldview that said, \u2018I\u2019m the best leader for Israel at this time.\u2019 Slowly it morphed into a worldview that said, \u2018The worst thing that can happen to Israel is if I stop leading it, and therefore my survival justifies anything.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, watching Donald Trump\u2019s effort to overturn our 2020 election by inspiring a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and then seeing this same man become the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024, makes our next election among our most important ever \u2014 so that it won\u2019t be our last ever. That was not the plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the extent that there is a common denominator that binds these four leaders, it\u2019s that they have all breached the rules of their game at home \u2014 and, in Putin\u2019s case, started a war abroad \u2014 for an all-too-familiar reason: to stay in power. And their local systems \u2014 the Russian elite, the Chinese Communist Party, the Israeli electorate and the Republican Party \u2014 have not been able to effectively or entirely constrain them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there are also important differences among the four. Netanyahu and Trump are facing pushback in their democracies, where voters may yet oust or stop both of them \u2014 and neither has started a war. Xi is an autocrat, but he does have an agenda to improve the lives of his people and a plan to dominate the major industries of the 21st century, from biotech to artificial intelligence. But his increasingly iron-fisted rule may be exactly what prevents China from getting there, chiefly because it\u2019s sparking a brain drain.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Putin is nothing but a mafia boss masquerading as a president. He will be remembered for transforming Russia from a scientific powerhouse \u2014 which put the first satellite into orbit in 1957 \u2014 into a country that can\u2019t manufacture a car, a watch or a toaster that anyone outside of Russia would buy. Putin had to dial 1-800-NorthKorea to scrounge for aid for his ravaged army in Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump, ultimately, is the most dangerous of the four \u2014 for one simple reason: When the world becomes this chaotic, and such key countries go off the plan, the rest of the world depends on the United States to take the lead in containing the trouble and opposing the troublemakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Trump prefers to ignore the trouble and has praised the troublemakers, including Putin. It\u2019s what makes the prospect of another Trump presidency so frightening, so reckless and so incomprehensible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because America is still the tent pole that holds up the world. We don\u2019t always do it with wisdom, but if we were to stop doing it at all \u2014 watch out. Given what\u2019s already going on in these other three important countries, if we go wobbly, it will birth a world where nobody <\/em>will be able to make any plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an easy name for that: the Age of Disorder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist, Oct. 3, 2023 Ever since learning that in 1947, Walter Lippmann\u00a0popularized\u00a0the term \u201cCold War\u201d to define the emerging conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, I thought it would be cool to be able to name a historical epoch. Now that the post-Cold War has expired, the post-post-Cold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14863"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14863"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14865,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14863\/revisions\/14865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}