*** 3/20/26 - Populist Strongmen Are Winning the Long Game.......
Buzz Sawyer
"I have met Benjamin Netanyahu twice in my journalistic career.
....... On both occasions he brought the discussion to the threat from Iran.
He argued that Iran was intent on building a nuclear bomb and using that nuclear
Other strongmen also have much to boast off. Narendra Modi has devoted himself to serving
Populist Strongmen Are Winning the Long Game
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”
I have met Benjamin Netanyahu twice in my journalistic career. The first time, I was interviewing him about Israel’s start-up economy. The second time, years later, I was part of a small group of mostly American academics and journalists. On both occasions he brought the discussion to the threat from Iran.
He argued that Iran was intent on building a nuclear bomb and using that nuclear bomb to eliminate the state of Israel. The threat was both existential and obvious: You only had to listen to what the Iranians were saying or look at what they were doing. Netanyahu left no doubt that he thought that his purpose on Earth was to prevent a second Holocaust. Everything else — the tireless fight for survival in Israel’s fractious political system and the equally tireless dealmaking on the global stage — was a means to that end.
It is now a commonplace that we live in an age of strongmen. More interesting is that we also live in an age of patient men. That our frenetic age should also be an age of patience is surprising. Thanks to our 24-hour media, we are bombarded by contradictory messages; and thanks to the fragmentation of the global order, we are drowned by events. But frenzy and fragmentation can be good for people with fixed purposes and iron plans. To adapt Rudyard Kipling: If you can keep your focus when all about you are losing theirs, yours is the Earth and everything that is in it.
The greatest players of the long game are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Putin decided that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century, and that the expansion of the liberal order was a mortal threat to Mother Russia’s interests; he devoted himself to reversing both processes, building up his military and securing his“near abroad.” All else was noise. Xi devoted his life to making China Number One under the iron rule of the Communist Party. He took everything he needed from the capitalist world, relying on his rivals’ short-term greed and countered every threat to his and the party’s power.
Other strongmen also have much to boast off. Narendra Modi has devoted himself to serving Hindu nationalism and turning pluralist India into an ethno-state. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has transformed Turkey from a secular country into a Muslim one, and from a parliamentary system to a presidential one.
These authoritarian strongmen have been helped by patient institutions. Putin was the chosen instrument of the KGB’s plan to preserve Russian power after the collapse of communism. At the age of eight, Modi joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu paramilitary group now closely associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party, becoming the BJP’s general secretary in 1998. The West’s would-be strongmen, on the other hand, have had to rely on their inner resources.
Marine Le Pen, the most patient French politician since General Charles de Gaulle, took her father’s scrappy start-up and turned it into a streamlined political machine which, if this week’s results in the first round of the municipal elections are any guide, is headed for victory in the 2027 presidential elections. This took enormous personal discipline: She expelled her beloved father Jean-Marie from the party in 2015 when he became too much of a liability, endured three humiliating defeats in her bids for the presidency, in 2012, 2017 and 2022, and may, unless the courts change their mind, have to stand aside for her young protégé, Jason Bardella, in 2027.
Britain’s Nigel Farage did not inherit a brand name, like Le Pen, but nevertheless spent 30 years as the face of British Euroscepticism, first dismissed as a “fruitcake,” later feared as a revolutionary. He has outlasted seven prime ministers, from Tony Blair to Rishi Sunak, and has arguably had a bigger impact on British politics than any prime minister since Margaret Thatcher. “Am I different than 10 years ago? A bit greyer. I haven’t changed a bit,” he told a Financial Times interviewer over a boozy lunch. “I’m the Duracell bunny! I just keep going. I’ll do it till I keel over.”
I would also suggest that Donald Trump is an example of patience. A counterintuitive suggestion, perhaps, given Trump’s frenetic, distracted style, but he is, in fact, a strange paradox: a patient man with a short attention span. He has repeatedly returned to the same obsessions since he began pronouncing on politics in the 1970s and 1980s: the evils of free trade, the virtues of Russia and the willingness of the rest of the world to freeload off America’s wealth and power. The current campaign against Iran feels like revenge for the humiliation of the hostage-taking of the late 1970s.
Focus can easily degenerate into monomania if it is disconnected from political talent or a sense of timing. Our patient men have all made serious mistakes — Netanyahu by dipping his fingers in the honey pot, for example, and Putin by underestimating Ukraine’s determination to survive. But they are all redeemed by their sense of timing. Putin and Xi recognized that America’s overreach, after the end of the Cold War, represented an opportunity for rebalancing. Netanyahu recognized that Trump’s re-election provided him with a unique opportunity to strike Iran. Le Pen and Farage recognized that the decadence of the liberal establishment created unique opportunities for outsiders.
Can centrists ever compete with strongmen when it comes to the waiting game? There are all sorts of reasons to answer in the negative. Centrists have no choice but to pay attention to the rhythm of electoral cycles and the changing moods of the electorate. They also have to listen to media that claim to be free but are more and more driven by the quest for clicks. Some political scientists have even posited an “impatience tradeoff” between autocracy and democracy.
Angela Merkel spent 16 years as chancellor of Germany, from 2005 to 2021, pretending to be patient but in fact focusing on quick wins. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has produced so many U-turns since winning a landslide election in 2024 that he has forgotten where he is headed.
Yet we should beware of pronouncing that centrist liberalism is incompatible with patience. The two greatest politicians of the 20th-century West — Churchill and de Gaulle — were both masters of patience and timing. Churchill was dismissed as a has-been in the 1930s but continued to warn of the evils of Nazism from his country house, Chartwell. De Gaulle withdrew from national life to la France Profonde in 1946-58, all the time convinced that the instability of the Fourth Republic would force the nation to call for his return. The Wise Men who reconstructed the liberal world order after the Second World War created a structure that lasted for decades and that, despite the actions of Putin and Xi, continues to function after a fashion. Some of the most important of these liberal giants, such as John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Konrad Adenauer, were already old men in 1945.
The reason why centrists are losing the patience wars is nothing to do with the demands of democracy and everything to do with the failure of the liberal philosophy forged in the 1980s and 1990s to deal with new challenges, such as the power of the tech companies, the strains of mass immigration and social disorder. Churchill and de Gaulle survived prolonged periods in the wilderness because they knew what they wanted to do with power. Starmer has squandered a huge majority because he does not know what he stands for.
Extremists have enjoyed a temporary advantage because they know what they want to destroy — the liberal world order — and have been relentless in destroying it (including suborning Western politicians). But there is nothing to prevent liberals from playing and winning the patience game by recalibrating their thinking for an age of new challenges and new opportunities.