US chaos is catnip for wannabe autocrats around the world
AS the Game of Thrones character Littlefinger once put it, “chaos is a ladder” for the conniving. In the real world that insight applies to the strong, too, and provides as useful a lens as any through which to view Donald Trump’s unleashing of international mayhem.
In fact, for wannabe authoritarians anywhere, still struggling to break free from the constraints of freely contested elections and independent institutions, there has never been a better moment to climb the last rungs of the ladder to absolute rule.
Take Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He recently had a tame judiciary jail his primary political rival Ekrem Imamoglu, confident he could now deal with any backlash. Prosecutors charged the popular Istanbul mayor with corruption, but this was a clearly political decision, taken just days before he was to be named a presidential candidate.
Erdogan’s move provoked large street protests, but little of the fierce international criticism it would have drawn a few years ago. At a time of economic chaos and military insecurity, Europe simply cannot afford to prioritize the spread of democracy over those imperatives. Its overwhelming concern is to keep Turkey — a major arms producer, trade partner and NATO member — onside.
In Washington, meanwhile, Erdogan has received only praise from the chaos-maker-in-chief. Trump sees him as a kindred spirit, whose cooperation he needs on Syria, Russia and Iran. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House on Monday, the US president talked about his great relationship with the Turkish leader, and how smart he was for “taking over” Syria. Not a peep about Imamoglu.
Turkey’s main opposition party has even accused Erdogan — without offering evidence — of asking the US for permission, before making the arrest. Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, said in a Tuesday Financial Times interview that he saw upsides for Turkey’s beleaguered economy in Trump’s global trade war.
Netanyahu is another good example. You might think he’d be keeping a low profile, given his contributions to the spectacular security failure that allowed Hamas to launch the most devastating attack on Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, 2023. That’s since been compounded by his failure to bring back all hostages, or to destroy Hamas as he promised, after a full year and a half of war.
He’s also facing multiple investigations and court cases, at home for fraud and security leaks, and in The Hague for war crimes. He’s trying to fire Israel’s top lawyer and top domestic security official, both for transparently self-serving reasons. Israel’s high court began hearings Tuesday on whether to back those judicial constraints, or let the government fire the domestic intelligence chief responsible for investigating Netanyahu’s advisers over the leaks.
And yet, Israel’s prime minister seems anything but chastened. He recently ended a US-negotiated ceasefire in Gaza to relaunch the war with a more ambitious goal of carving out so-called buffer zones. He also blocked access for humanitarian aid and called on Palestinians to “freely make a choice to go wherever they want,” from the territory he’s making uninhabitable.
Netanyahu nonetheless scored the first visit to Washington by any leader since Trump launched a trade war with the world. He also received red carpet treatment on the way, when he stopped off in Budapest. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban chose not only to ignore the ICC warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest, but to announce that his country would be leaving the international court’s jurisdiction.
Orban himself just launched a campaign to eliminate the “bugs” who oppose him, including non-profits such as the anti-corruption group Transparency International and what remains of Hungary’s independent media. Like Erdogan, he’s progressed much further in eliminating judicial constraints on his power than either Trump or Netanyahu. And he’s seizing the opportunity to do more.
Last month, he introduced a new LGBTQ+ law that will make gay pride marches illegal. That’s likely to meet less international resistance than it would have before the departure of Ambassador David Pressman, a US diplomat in a same-sex marriage, who was a vocal Orban critic during the Biden administration.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, continues to get a free pass from the new US administration, including on tariffs. That’s something Israel, Ukraine, allies with which the US already runs a trade surplus, and even the penguins of Australia’s uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands failed to achieve.
There is, though, a major caveat to all this winning for fledged and nascent autocrats. Russia, for example, may still be the major beneficiary of Trump’s decision to dismantle the US-led world order, but it’s unclear how America’s supremely transactional leader will react to the continued snubbing of his efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Netanyahu, meanwhile, got a valuable Oval Office meeting, but he also had to kotow for it on tariffs, like a tributary leader prostrating himself before a Ming dynasty emperor in Beijing.
The key here is that a new international order of the kind people like Putin, Netanyahu and Orban crave — one without rules and institutions to limit their powers or regulate issues of trade and war — is, by definition, a world of competing nationalisms.
For now, the world’s growing crop of leaders from the populist right are united with each other, and for the most part Trump, in their opposition to the old “liberal world order” that the US created after World War II. But they should be careful what they wish for. As that common liberal enemy disappears, they’re going to find themselves increasingly at odds with each other.
Just ask Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Until a few weeks ago, his tax cutting, “Canada First” message had seemed a winner, giving him a consistent 10-percentage-point opinion poll lead ahead of elections later this month. Now he’s fallen behind as supporters defect, worried that this MAGA look-alike may not be the man to stand up to the new, raw, nationalist threat next door.
BLOOMBERG OPINION
