Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian.
Episode Summary
From Bolsonaro to Orbán, what drives leaders who reject democratic norms—and what keeps them in power? One Decision hosts Kate McCann and Sir Richard Dealove sit down to explore the makings of an authoritarian leader, including the times Sir Richard met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. Later, they speak with historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat about the modern autocrat’s playbook, and how tech oligarchs may be helping to shape a new version of authoritarianism from inside the system.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
Listen & Subscribe
- Watch on YouTube
- Listen on Apple Podcasts
- Listen on Spotify
Transcript
COLD OPEN
Ben-Ghiat: In my estimation, the United States is right now a laboratory for a new model. If you don't wanna call it autocracy, you can say anti-democratic politics.
INTRODUCTION
Mccann: Hello and welcome to One Decision. I'm Kate McCann and I'm joined as always by Sir Richard Dearlove. We are joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Now she is an expert in, well, Italian history really. But she uses that context to look forward into the way that leaders are in the current climate, and there are plenty of them to analyze. And we talked to her about some of the complexities around the leadership models we see, whether they're necessary, and how democratic countries can work with them when, you know, the stakes are very, very high. We're talking about people like Putin, like Xi, and we're also talking in the context of wars and potentially nuclear war too. Richard, you've met Putin before. He's probably top of my list of people I would like to interview, if I possibly could. What's he actually like as a person? Did you get any sense of what type of a man he is?
Dearlove: Well, I think the problem was I met him a long time ago when he was relatively new in office and he did make an attempt to sort of cleave to Blair. I don't know whether you remember this because he invited Blair when he was running for president of Russia, to go to the opera with him in Saint Petersburg, and I was partly responsible for persuading Blair to go with him in the belief that this was a new Russian leader who we might have a different relationship with and who we could talk to, and for a period of time, a really brief period of time, that seemed to be true, but then it changed. And I think that it's actually quite hard to judge Putin from appearances and what he's like, but he's obviously got this fixation on Russian history.
Mccann: Why was Tony Blair hesitant? I mean, it might sound like an obvious question now, but why was he hesitant about meeting Putin at the time? You said you were responsible for convincing him.
Dearlove: Well, I was one of the people responsible for convincing him. I think because it was unprecedented. He wasn't elected, so it was really showing favor to a presidential candidate, you know, before he was elected. So there was a real reason for standing back. Plus, you know, we'd never had that degree of involvement in Russia's sort of internal politics. So you can understand that the context was very, very unusual. And early on, I mean, Putin did seem to be quite reasonable, but I think that what we underestimated about him was this fixation with being a historical Russian leader. And as it were, making good Russia's humiliation, which many people felt characterized the end of the Cold War. And I think that's a lot of what Putin is about, is to restore, you know, Soviet glory, to restore the Soviet empire, and to be seen as a powerful leader. And, of course, if you have that perception, the loss of Ukraine is fundamental to the identity of greater Russia. And if one remembers that, you have a better understanding of why there's a war in Ukraine at the moment. But, I mean, Putin, he was sinister. He was discomforting, and he had this sort of aura around him that you weren't sure which direction he would go in. I mean, even going right back, you know, there was an element of uncertainty. And then after that, most of the people I dealt with were people who were close to him, and they were obviously very much his supporters and backing his vision.
Mccann: Do all of these guys, I mean, you've met more of these types of men. I mean, I say men because it always is men. Colonel Gaddafi, do they all have this kind of weird obsessional side? Putin's obsession is with going back to the good old days. Do they all have this slightly weird thing that drives them to do what they do?
Dearlove: Well, I think that's what they turn into. I mean, I met Orbán when he was prime, but that was during the first time he was elected, and he was a young, quite dynamic prime minister in whom there was a great deal of hope. And, you know, and he developed this persona and this rather sort of thuggish political presence. But I guess even when I met him originally, the seeds of that were there, and you were discomforted by the sort of character which was projected, and you had uncertainty about what he would be like and how he would behave. But I mean, the most marked of this group, really, that I had met is Gaddafi. But, I mean, by the time I met Gaddafi, and this was, you know, when over the disarmament of Libya, he was an extraordinary figure. He looked like a sort of degenerate Mick Jagger with a little pillbox hat and a very puffy face and long hair and sitting on in wrapped up in a camel blanket. And, I mean, when we met him, you know, he talked in a monologue for an hour and a half before we could get a word in edgeways. And that was all about, you know, the iniquities of Saudi Arabia, the iniquities of the West, you know, the fate of Libya. And the historical picture was completely batty if you sat down and tried to analyze it. And you thought, my god, you know, this man's running this country, and he has a lot of power and a lot of ability to disrupt. And, you know, his feet are not on the ground.
Mccann: Do you get the sense that, you know, that that is really one of the only ways to be a successful leader in the age that we're now living in? And I ask that question in that way because you're not the most powerful man in the world anymore if you run a big country or the most powerful woman. Ideally, we'd have some women in there. But you could be more powerful arguably if you're in charge of a big tech company or a big defense company or if you're fighting for space and airtime, even with people who are not politicians, do you have to be like Trump, like Xi, like Putin to really make any headway?
Dearlove: That's a fascinating question because actually, if you look at big companies, the leaders of big companies are pretty authoritarian. Okay. In terms of governance, they're answerable to a board. But on the other hand, they're very powerful autocratic figures and the big successful businessmen. I mean, you know, Thiel and Musk and, you know, some of the other figures of, let's say, the big energy companies, they lay the law down inside their companies. Obviously, outside their companies, they act in a different way. And, you know, I've had that. I've been able to watch some companies from the inside, having been on various boards. And, you know, some of these characters are quite extraordinary, and they get away with pretty extraordinary behavior too, or occasionally they do. And let's say the business of government as opposed to the business of business, the business of business making money has much more clarity about it and less options. The business of government in the day and age in which we live is so complex.
Mccann: And it's not clear who your customers are. No. I mean, in theory, it should be the voters, but it's not really clear that that is always the case. No. And getting it right in this day and age is really difficult.
Dearlove: And I mean, I certainly lecture and talk about this, that most of modern leaders, unless they're really exceptional people, are not up to the complexity of governing. And, I mean, I think this is one of the problems that we see across many big countries, you know, that even well-meaning leaders are just flawed by the complexity of the problems facing them and what levers they should pull to try and solve them.
Mccann: Which is maybe why we end up with some of the types of authoritarian leaders that we do in some cases. This feels like a good moment to introduce our guest for the day, not least because, I mean, she is an expert, a historian. She's an authority herself on leaders and the different types of government, but particularly on authoritarian regimes. But you were very nearly a historian.
Dearlove: The irony is I would have done a PhD at Oxford or a DPhil at Oxford, and my chosen subject was the political theory of elites, which is just what we're talking about. And most of the political writing, the original political writing about the political theory of elites is Italian. It's Mosca and Pareto, and nineteenth-century Italian political theorists. So it's a very, very interesting subject, and it's completely tangential to what we've been discussing.
INTERVIEW
Mccann: That is the perfect place to introduce our guest on the podcast today. We are joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Thanks so much for joining us. Shall we set the context? Because the type of work you do, when we were researching kind of your own background, we could take this chat in so many different directions. So I thought a good way to start would be to set some context in a way. So who do you think are the most powerful leaders in the world right now?
Ben-Ghiat: Delighted to be with you. I would say in terms of making an impact on the world, whether we're saying that's positive or negative, President Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin in his own way, people who are causing global instability as well, which is all of those characters. Those are the main drivers right now.
Mccann: And they are all a very similar type of person, aren't they? What do you think it is? Is it something to do with the time that we're in? Or is it something to do with the characteristics that they share that makes them so powerful at this moment in time?
Ben-Ghiat: I think that when we talk about how these authoritarians get to power, and obviously China is a completely different context because it's a closed system that's continued. But if we talk about people who democracies and how they get power, it's kind of a meeting of circumstance and personality. And one thing we see, regardless of whether they're communists or neo-fascists or whatever we're gonna call them, is personality traits that are, they are amoral pragmatists. They are totally transactional people. And so they will do things that others will not. They see opportunities that others don't. Include Netanyahu, Erdoğan, Orbán. They really see people in a kind of use and discard frame. It's very bleak. But this personality trait and type has not really changed from the days of Mussolini. And that is how starting in 2016, I was able to recognize Donald Trump for as being in this tradition.
Dearlove: And partly from my own experience, having met a few of these characters face to face, is that they absolutely don't listen to other people. They love to hold forth about their view of the world, and they're completely impervious to argument or you stating a different position. And they don't listen. This is part of what I call autocratic backfire eventually.
Ben-Ghiat: What these authoritarians, the strongmen do, is they create these structures around themselves. They surround themselves with sycophants and loyalists and often family members. It wasn't just Trump who had Jared Kushner. It's Erdoğan and Orbán. They have their family members. And so professionalism counts for less than loyalty. And so they create these echo chambers. And some of these people, certainly Idi Amin and Gaddafi in the past, they were highly unstable people. Many of the ones in power now are highly unstable, impetuous, impulsive. So they have these idiosyncratic ideas that they force into policy. And no one tells them no. And those who try are demoted or worse. And so it's the echo chamber and ultimately this often backfires on them and creates conditions that weaken them.
Mccann: Given who we're talking about, the group of people we're talking about, I mean, most people wouldn't argue with the idea of Putin as an authoritarian leader and China, as you've explained, is a different thing all to itself. Can we really call Donald Trump an authoritarian leader?
Ben-Ghiat: In my estimation, absolutely. And starting when he was running for office in 2016 and he said this was January 2016. So the very beginning of his campaign. And he said, I could stand on 5th Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn't lose any followers. And this is completely fascist or also could be completely communist thing to say. That you are associating yourself with violence. You are gonna be a rogue kind of outlaw figure and that you will be loved for it. If you want to know who is a kind of authoritarian on the way up, you look for things like this. Duterte was the same. Bolsonaro in Brazil who Trump is now trying to save. And the other thing is that regular politicians, if they're under investigation, they don't really want to run for office because, you know, investigative journalists will start looking at them. It's messy. Their secrets could come out. If you're a strongman, you feel compelled to run for office and run for office repeatedly because the point is to get into power and perform a kind of autocratic capture of the judiciary to make your troubles go away forever. And so Trump ran, this is three times ran for office while under investigation. Putin ran for the first time when 1999, 2000 was under investigation. Netanyahu, Berlusconi, three times. And so being in office becomes a way to make yourself feel safe and escape accountability. So Trump, he checks every box in terms of motivation, methods, policies, temperament. And so I have no doubt that of my classification of him in this way.
Dearlove: Ruth, can I challenge you on that? Having spent a lot of time in the States and then having lived behind the iron curtain under an authoritarian government and having met Putin face to face, I honestly think that there is a qualitative difference, which is pretty fundamental. I personally, I would have called Trump, and we don't have to, as it were, go into the detail of this, a false authoritarian, because he did actually lose an election and had to stand down. And it's quite possible in the future, when he really does face up to American institutions, the institutions will be more powerful than he is. The problem in Russia is with Putin, that there are no institutions at all which are built into the structure of the state, which can challenge him. I mean, similarly with someone like Gaddafi, there were no institutions whatsoever that would challenge Gaddafi's power. I think there is a distinction to be made between democratic leaders who have a clear attraction to authoritarianism and sit normally on the right of politics. We've got this situation in Germany too. And those who actually live in countries where the institutions are completely oppressive. And having lived under in a communist state, I can tell you that the feeling between spending a month in the United States even under a Trump government is one of being in a free country. Whereas living in communist Czechoslovakia as I did was quite terrifying in many ways, even if you're a westerner.
Ben-Ghiat: Russia was a communist society for many years and never really had experience with democracy. So completely different than the United States or even Italy under Berlusconi, which was very damaged by Berlusconi, who was a partner of Putin, but remained a democracy. If you go to Hungary today, for example, Orbán has been there as long as Hitler. Putin, by the way, has been in office as long as Mussolini now. And so these things also happen in a continuum and they also happen in a different way in every place. So Trump did lose an election. He tried his best to overturn it. He has never complimented any democratic leader. The people he looks up to and compliments publicly are even Kim Jong-un, Xi, Putin, Orbán, those are his models. Whether the United States will ever look like those places, of course not. It's going to be different.
Mccann: Is that right though? Because he was very, I mean, I suppose it depends on your definition, how you see whether what Donald Trump does is offer fake praise or whether he really means it. But he's got a reasonably warm relationship with Keir Starmer in the UK. He was very complimentary about Mark Rutte. I mean, I suppose that the question there is Rutte, who is of course the head of NATO now, pursued a policy of insane flattery with Donald Trump. I mean, to the extent where he called him daddy. Does that then negate any warm words that come back from somebody like Donald Trump?
Ben-Ghiat: A lot of these strongmen and Trump in particular, they're very insecure underneath their bluster. And so many people feel they can be easily manipulated. It's difficult. I would never underestimate Trump. There've been many cases where he's been flattered by people and Netanyahu has been very skillful because he's known him for a long time.
Mccann: You mentioned Benjamin Netanyahu there. And I'm interested because we're talking to you in the context of a really huge moment in politics in Israel and in relation to what's happening in Gaza. There is the potential for Israel and it looks now very likely to launch a further offensive, a significant offensive in Gaza. When we think about how democracies like the UK, like countries in the European Union, try to manage the actions of a state like Israel led by someone like Netanyahu, what is the best way to approach that? Because it's very obvious. We've seen Emmanuel Macron, we've seen Keir Starmer, we've seen others suggest, well, we might recognize the Palestinian state. That's very severely backfired politically, domestically here in the UK and in other areas, too. But it also doesn't look to be solving the conflict. What is the answer for trying to manage that kind of a situation as we see playing out with Israel?
Ben-Ghiat: It's really difficult because high-ranking Israelis, former intelligence officials, etcetera, have said people like Netanyahu, if they go into war, they need to prolong the war to stay in power. And so there's an incentive not to and that's always been Netanyahu's mode of operation. There's been an incentive to escalate, not to de-escalate. And that's separate from his ideological belief that you cannot have a two-state solution. That's just one of the foundations there. So how do you get to that? Now the old playbook was collective security, collective pressure, and the big test case has been Russia aggression in Ukraine. I think it's an important moral and other step. I'm not sure if it's a long-term backfire to have France and other countries recognizing the Palestinian state because what's going on there now. But it's very difficult to when you have a leader who wants to prolong the war in order to keep himself in power because that's always the aim. They are completely self-interested and all they care about is not being prosecuted. Right now Netanyahu is trying to fire the attorney general who's investigating him. And so in a way you might think that it's too much of a tunnel vision. But when you study these people, this is actually what most motivates them even in conditions of conflict.
Dearlove: I mean, I agree with your analysis of Netanyahu and remaining in power. But one of the extraordinary byproducts of Netanyahu's government, maybe this is accidental, is that, you know, the new Sparta, which is Israel, has destroyed the axis of resistance built around Iran. So all these other authoritarian governments which had signed up with Iran, Syria in particular, and Hezbollah, have, you know, disintegrated. And many of us would regard that as, okay, it's instability, but it's a positive development out of which other initiatives may arise. And if you look across the Middle East, pretty much every other government in the Middle East is authoritarian. The criticism is aimed at Netanyahu, but every other leader, whether it's Sisi in Egypt or whether it's the Saudi royal family or whether it's the Bahrainis, they're terrible autocrats. Just one or two of them are benign. Maybe the Sultan of Oman and one or two other smaller countries are very benevolent despots, but they are all despots.
Ben-Ghiat: Yes. And also all of these countries and Jordan, they have never been friends of the Palestinians. A completely different solution could have been found many years ago up to this moment. And a lot of these countries have plenty of money to provide all kinds of aid and pressure and completely different politics could have been pursued. Had this goes back to many decades had the Palestinians not been an unwanted people by Arab autocrats as well. And that's part of the tragedy here.
Mccann: But I suppose the question, we're thinking about, if you were thinking about a strategy now, if you were a leader, I mean, we've seen similarly with Trump and Putin. And again, another key moment has been happening this week with the Steve Witkoff meetings. You know, it doesn't always work. It doesn't always help the situation if you've got two leaders, two men who are very, very similar. So what can other people do? These guys must have a weak spot. There must be something that makes them feel unstable or makes their success less obvious or less likely. What is the answer here? Or is the answer that ultimately every country can only really play the game if they elect a leader like Netanyahu or Trump or Xi or Putin?
Ben-Ghiat: You know, many of these autocracies are actually becoming weaker in places where you have an autocratic-leaning leader like India, and yet trying to destroy democracy in different ways, going after journalists, etcetera. They're not doing as well in the elections. And Orbán now he's impoverished the country, he's wrecked public education, and he has a new challenger of Péter Magyar. They are banding together. They are allying in much more entrenched and entangled, entwined ways, I think, because they're individually weaker. And that's where we get Putin having to import North Korean soldiers because the Russian military has always been wrecked by corruption. They're also more fearful, and we know from lots of political science studies that autocrats dose out their censorship and they dose out their violence as every time there are these cycles of when, like, 2012 in Russia, 2019, when there are challenges, they become more repressive. Right? But the challenges don't go away. There is the cycle that ends with popular movements gaining speed and that is how communism fell. And some of these states can rot from within and Russia is a good candidate for that.
Dearlove: You mentioned Péter Magyar in Hungary, and you've got maybe a similar development in Romania with Nicușor Dan, who defeated the authoritarian candidate, Simion, in the recent presidential election. But looking generally across Europe, okay, you've got a development in those two countries, but we have a situation where extreme right leaders could be elected in Germany, in France, in Austria. You could maybe count Meloni, although she's not really gone in the direction of the Brothers of Italy and become very, very right-wing. She's more pragmatic. But are you worried about, let's say, the infection of authoritarianism affecting European politics generally?
Ben-Ghiat: Yes. I'm very worried. And two main reasons. One is that the influence of billionaires, right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel and especially Elon Musk, these people operate transnationally and they are capable of doing an enormous amount of damage. They also can buy support. They have unlimited funds. In my estimation, the United States is right now a laboratory for a new model or a new development. If you don't want to call it autocracy, you can say anti-democratic politics. And that is, Elon Musk, he had all the riches in the world. He has Twitter with the Saudis and others, but he did not have a way to access to get inside a superpower sovereign, the reins of power inside of the government. And so Doge was created. He may have stepped back personally de facto but Doge has expanded. It's in 38 federal agencies. It has done operations. It's like a digital shop troops. It has been a kind of coup in a way that is there inside government. They have captured data of tens of millions of Americans. They are still there. They are entrenched in government now and they are still loyal only to Musk. And Peter Thiel's Palantir is the software being used for surveillance. So there are things going on in the United States right now and this was made possible because of the venality and greed of Trump who let them in.
TECH POWER AND THE NEW MODEL
Mccann: We spoke with Geoffrey Hinton about AI and about the sort of the uses of huge data sets, the type of data that Doge would be gathering. And we've spoken about Elon Musk in that context. But do you feel that these men, these tech entrepreneurs, are they more dangerous now than some of these leaders of countries in your view?
Ben-Ghiat: They're dangerous in a different way. The old oligarch model, the Putin model still going on with Orbán and a little bit with Modi is that the oligarch is outside of government, and he buys up property, media properties, banks, and he becomes the ally. Fine. That's the old model. The new model is that Trump and Scott Bessent, his treasury secretary, allowed Musk to infiltrate government and they were locking out democratically elected US congressmen. They were locked out of government agencies. They took them over and look what they did to USAID. But they are, again, they are in 38 agencies now and they are entrenched. So the oligarch was inside government. That's a new development, a different relation and so it was like a kind of a co-presidency for the first month. And I just want to say that there is no parallel. If you look at the first year of Putin, the first year of Orbán, first year of Erdoğan, there's no parallel with the amount of destruction to democratic institutions and government, the purging, the hollowing out of government. No, there's no parallel there when we compare it to people who came in democratically elected.
Dearlove: Ruth, my understanding is that Peter Thiel, for example, and others now subscribe to a sort of political theory which sees the mega corporations of the governments of the future displacing central government in practice. I mean, okay, that's an extreme interpretation. But I mean, basically, what you're saying is the seeds of this are already planted in Washington inside the federal government.
Ben-Ghiat: Yes. I'm not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist. It's just a fact that when you have a new paradigm that's emerging, the old words are perhaps not correct. So you could use hostile takeover, which is a word from business and corporations. But when I saw that members of congress were being locked out by Doge with the complicity of the Trump administration from government buildings, I thought, okay, something is going on. And when I saw that media lost interest when Musk took a hit financially, Tesla and all that, so he stepped back. But Doge continued to expand, and Peter Thiel's power continued to expand. There are new developments in America, and America is a laboratory right now for something new that is connected to this scheme that they espouse. And in a way, when we think about authoritarianism, often we just use a political definition. The executive expanding and over the, you know, taking away independence of institutions and intelligence sector, judiciary. But there's another definition which is more appropriate for our situation, and that is you're taking away or restricting the rights of the many, voting rights, reproductive rights. The liberty you give the very few, the oligarchs, the billionaires, unheard-of liberties to do what they could never do in a healthy democracy.
Dearlove: Aren't we living through a period of, let's say, industrial revolution? What I mean by that is an obviously, a new technological revolution. And, you know, if you go back, let's say, to the industrial revolution, the sort of social upheavals that it caused in the developing world were probably closely parallel, but maybe not on a quantitative basis, with what we're experiencing now. Do you think that there's a direct link between the phenomenon of authoritarianism and, let's say, social meltdown that we're talking about and the speed of technological change, which is so disruptive both at the governmental level and in the lives of individuals?
Ben-Ghiat: I would put it differently. The human fallout of the technological revolution, Trump said everyone's replaceable. We'd like to get, you know, everybody out of government or all the jobs that will be lost. Authoritarians have been better at marketing themselves as saviors.
Mccann: Does that matter? Is that important, the idea of a savior? It's almost like a religious thing. Is that important?
Ben-Ghiat: Yes, it's, think about Bukele, El Salvador, who kind of positioned himself, very savvy use of social media. All of this is an old playbook, Mussolini used it first. The strongman comes in and says, I will be more efficient, I will save you. I alone can fix it. That's what Trump said. Behind that lies and the reason they need their propaganda is that as we discussed, they are actually very incompetent, many of them. They are very inefficient. They are impetuous. They have wrongheaded policies and they need the repression and the corruption and the buy-offs of people and the propaganda apparatus to keep their illusion of competent government going. There's a good book on this called Spin Dictators by Sergei Guriev who had to leave Putin's Russia, is a distinguished economist, and Daniel Treisman about the spin dictators who the more that proving competency and acting as though you're the savior are very compelling to people. And yet it's, I think it's mostly a sham.
Mccann: Well Ruth, I tell you what, you wouldn't get any of this with female leaders.
Ben-Ghiat: Yeah, that's a different conversation, but yes.
Mccann: I won't contest your argument. I think we can all agree on that. Ruth, thank you so much. It's been a really fascinating conversation, so thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us. And that is it for this week's edition of One Decision. A big thanks to our guest Ruth Ben-Ghiat for joining us today on the episode. It's been really fascinating to speak to her and get her insight into what's going on around the world. For more conversations like this one, with leading experts in their field and world leaders too, you can check out onedecision.com and our YouTube page, of course, where you'll find additional videos, short stuff, commentaries and explainers. I'm Kate McCann. Thanks for listening.
