Ramachandra Guha,
Men in power are often animated by the desire to retain and consolidate their power—but not always by that alone. Sometimes, personal aggrandizement goes hand in hand with a sense of personal destiny that embraces a world larger than oneself. Consider in this regard Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
All three populist strongmen have been ruthless in their exercise of power and in their suppression of any threats to its perpetuation. At the same time,
each is also propelled by the wish to make his country a more powerful and respected voice in global affairs. Whether they have, or can, is another matter. (I myself think not.) But that they have this ambition is indisputable. Erdogan, Modi, and Putin each believe that their once great countries lost their way due to external pressure and internal decay and that history has sent them to redeem their homelands and restore them to their past glories.
At first sight, Donald Trump may seem to fit this bill, in so far as his professed aim is to “make America great again.” Yet, as his actions in his first term as U.S. president and even more so in his second show, unlike Erdogan, Modi, and Putin,
Trump is animated almost exclusively by personal vanity. In this, the current leader of the world’s richest and most powerful nation is strikingly akin to a past leader of a country with which it shares a so-called special relationship. Indeed, perhaps the best way to understand Trump is to view him as Britain’s Boris Johnson on steroids.
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