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Evil Leadership – the leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women, and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can be physical, or psychological, or both.*

There is no doubt or dispute that, in keeping with the above definition, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is an evil leader. To skirt the threat of being weakened or overthrown because of protests associated with the Arab Spring, since 2011 he has come down so hard on the Syrian people that these are the results.    

• A long-running civil war, between pro-democratic insurgents on the one side and Assad and his loyalists on the other.
• Approximately a half million Syrians dead.
• Approximately half of Syria’s total population (about 21.3 million) displaced from their homes.
• Approximately 5.5 million Syrian refugees and asylum seekers.
• Approximately 90% of Syrians living below the poverty line.
• Destruction or impairent of Syria’s infrastructure, including roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals.
• Approximately 15 million people in need of emergency aid. (A number that was exacerbated by the recent earthquakes.)

Human Rights Watch summarized the situation:

“While the Syrian government, with its allies’ support, has regained significant territory using tactics that violate the laws of war, areas under its control also are rife with abuse. Security services arbitrarily arrest and torture hundreds, and millions are going hungry due to the government’s diversion of aid and failure to equitably address the crippling economic crisis.”

In a better world the man who presided over this already thirteen-year-long catastrophe – President Assad – would long ago have been toppled from within. Or, failing that, he would have long ago, and he would indefinately remain, an international pariah. Exiled permanently from the community of nations. But no such luck on either count.

After all the murder and mayhem, Assad and his strong-willed wife, Asma al-Assad, continue to reside in the presidential palace in Damascus. (It was built by his father, Hafez al-Assad, who immediately preceded the incumbent, and was himself president of Syria for nearly 30 years.) After all the murder and mayhem Russia remains an enduring and reliable ally, a partner in crime. (“In Syria,” David McCloskey wrote, “Russia created a foundational myth, twisting the war’s history to serve its own ends, and to justify its brutal military campaingn.”) And, after all the murder and mayhem, Assad’s neighbors in the Middle East are preparing to welcome him again into their midst. While for a time Assad and his enablers were shunned in the region, it appears that time is past.

The shift back to business as usual began slowly, in 2018, when the United Arab Emirates reestablished diplomatic ties with Syria. Now, as the geopolitics of the Middle East have been reordered – for example in a deal brokered by China’s President Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia and Iran have reestablished diplomatic ties – the region is increasingly open to Syrian inclusion.

To be clear, there is no agreement yet on how to proceed. A meeting of Arab foreign ministers held just yesterday in Dubai revealed that different leaders of different countries hold different views. But this handwriting is on this wall. As the Saudi foreign minister remarked in February, there is growing regional consensus that isolating Syria is not working. Which is another way of saying that Bashar al-Assad will soon be rewarded by being reintegrated.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for not enough people to do not enough good.

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*This definition is in Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

Remarkable, right? That one man should have achieved so much. Become world famous for how much money he made. And for how much money he gave away. And for his name now a symbol – a symbol of anti-Semitism. For about five decades George Soros has been making a fortune. For about three decades, George Soros has been giving away a fortune. And for about one decade, both in Europe and in the United States, the name George Soros, as in, for example, “Soros-backed,” has become synonymous with Jew-baiting.   

Soros is an American and a Jew who was born in Hungary. For frequently and lavishly contributing over the years to liberal causes in East and Central Europe he has aroused the unrelenting ire of nationalist and populist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. And for frequently and lavishly contributing over the years to liberal causes in the United States he has aroused the unrelenting ire of nationalist and populist former president Donald Trump. Even in the last year Orban has accused Soros of being a permanent political puppet master who has “ruined the lives of tens of millions” with currency speculation. And even in the last month Trump has accused Soros of “hand-picking” and “funding” the career of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had the temerity to indict Trump.   

Soros is not only one of the richest men in the world, he is also one of the most ambitious. As Todd Pittinsky and I wrote in our book, Leaders Who Lust, it never sufficed for Soros to make a mountain of money. His ambition was far greater and much more far-reaching. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soros’s goal has been nothing short of changing societies at their core. In Europe from authoritarianism to liberalism in countries such as Hungary and Poland. And in the United States from politics and policies that are more right-wing to those that are more left wing. In these quests Soros has never let up. Nor as is the nature of leaders who lust – leaders whose drive is unstoppable, whose thirst is unquenchable – will he ever.

Which raises the unsettling question of how George Soros went from being a leader in finance and philanthropy to being a symbol of anti-Semitism – more of a symbol of anti-Semitism than any other single individual anywhere in the world. To answer with precision how this happened is impossible. Rising tides of hate are elusive, impossible to explain in a single stroke. This is not, however, to suggest they are not real. In 2022 was a significant increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes in the United States, for example in New York City, where attacks on Jews were up 41 percent compared with a year earlier.

Attacks on George Soros for ostensibly pulling the strings behind the scenes have become blurred with attacks on Jews for being, well, Jews. Whatever the connection between the two, if any, it has become connection by implication and association.

Anti-Semitism is ancient – it is called the “longest hatred.” Soros, in contrast, epitomizes a current phenomenon, especially in the United States where certainly post-Holocaust, since the end of the Second World War, blatant evidence of hatred of Jews had diminished to near the vanishing point. But those days are over. Soros’s name now comes up regularly, used in the United States by right-wing figures, especially prominent Republicans (for example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis) and hosts on Fox News, to connote loathing of his commitments to liberal candidates and causes and also, certainly in some cases, by extension or implication an unspecified antipathy to Jews more generally. 

To be clear, not everyone who mentions the name Soros is anti-Semitic. Nor does everyone who hears it even know that Soros is Jewish. But enough do – the very frequency with which the name is uttered distinguishes “Soros” from every other American political funder, left, right, or center. Jonathan Greenblatt, C.E.O, of the Ant-Defamation League, a Jewish Civil Rights group, put it this way: “When a person or a political party repeatedly and relentlessly makes wild claims such as that there is a ‘cabal of globalists backed by Soros that is destroying our country,’ that is invoking a classical anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, and it should be condemned.”    

On the one hand it is, of course, reasonable and acceptable to criticize Soros for his partisan donations to liberal, even progressive causes and the Democratic party. Soros is, in fact, by far the largest single donor to the party and its candidates. But on the other hand, this is not, as Charles C. W. Cooke has argued in the National Review, about “shutting down the debate.” Instead this is about the regular invoking of the name “Soros” which has led, fairly or unfairly, to suspicions of Jews more generally. The connection is between Jews who are perceived to be “globalists” and “cosmopolitans” and Soros who is perceived to be a “globalist” and “cosmopolitan.” And it is between Jews who are perceived to be liberal and left-leaning and Soros who is perceived to be liberal and left-leaning. But these connections are tenuous to the point of being specious. The connection that counts – that is unsettling and even upsetting – is between past anti-Semitic tropes and present anti-Soros tropes.

Soros has come – as a nonagenarian, no less – to epitomize everything purportedly crafty and conspiratorial about Jews now not only historically but contemporaneously. Just as Jew-hatred has historically stemmed from Jews being seen as if not all-powerful then at least as too powerful, so Soros-hatred stems from his being seen as if not all-powerful then at least as too powerful. Again, Soros is using his pile of money to support those, and that in which he believes. But numberless Republicans are doing the same and they are not being singled out or called out – identified, repeatedly, by name. Which is precisely why, especially given the sensitivities on anti-Semitism, you would think, or maybe not, that Republicans would cease and desist from blowing their by now familiar dog whistle.       

George Soros is no saint. But he survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary in Hungary to become one of the most brilliant, successful, and yes, generous men of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. If someone had told him when he was young that he was destined to be first at the cutting edge of finance, second at the cutting edge of philanthropy, and third at the cutting edge of a resurgence of European and American anti-Semitism, he might well have believed the first two. But he would never, could never, have believed the last.

Yoav Gallant is a former commander of the Israeli navy, a much-decorated war hero, a member of Israel’s parliament and, since last year, Defense Minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Until the end of March Gallant fell into line. He said nothing publicly that was pertinent to what had been happening in Israel for weeks and then months – which was hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to protest the government’s plan to overhaul the Israeli judiciary. But then Gallant stopped doing what his superior, Netanyahu, wanted him to do, which was only to go about his business.

But on March 25^th Gallant refused any longer to obey authority, to follow where it was that Netanyahu led. Instead, the defense minister gave a speech in which he publicly called for the prime minister to change course, or at least to delay the process. “The security of the state of Israel is my life’s mission,” said Gallant. “Clothed in the IDF’s [Israeli Defense Forces] uniform, I have risked my life dozens of times for the State of Israel, and at this time, for the sake of our country, I am willing to take any risk and pay any price.” He said that he had been speaking to military officers and to the rank and file about the government’s plan to reduce the power of the courts. He went on to say that he had heard their voices and was “worried.” “Unprecedented feelings of anger, pain and disappointment have risen from all over,” he continued, going on finally to withhold his support for how Netanyahu was proceeding. Concluded Gallant, “I will not lend my hand to this.”

Netanyahu was enraged. He was enraged at Gallant for speaking his truth to the prime minister’s power, for being, as he saw it, insubordinate. What did Netanyahu do? Within approximately 24 hours he fired Gallant. What was the result? Mayhem. What had been massive protests morphosed in an instant into demonstrations so enormous and disruptive they threatened to bring Israel to a total halt. To the point where its economic and political stability, and its military security, were at risk.

Gallant had backed Netanyahu into a corner. About 48 hours after the defense minister spoke out the prime minister felt forced to call for a pause. He announced he would delay the proposed judicial reforms – which had proved so inflammatory as nearly to paralyze the state everyone professed to love.  

Curiously, or maybe not, for now Gallant remains in his job. Perhaps he’ll help Netanyahu save face by apologizing for what he did or, more likely, how he did it. But whatever the short term outcome, when the history of this period is written Gallant’s speaking out will be seen as a pivotal moment. The subordinate forced his superior to stop in his tracks.

On Tuesday April 4, at 2:15 pm former president Donald Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in a New York City courtroom on charges of one or more crimes. In a perfect world this would happen quietly, in reasonable accordance with a reasonable law. However, in this imperfect world, the event will generate hysteria “unlike the world has ever seen.” The media, all media, will be apoplectic. The American people will be ginned up, riled up by political passions right, left, and center. And the world will be, despite numberless bigger fish to fry, riveted by the spectacle. Trump is the consummate showman, and this will be his biggest show yet.

This post focuses on one man, one leader, Trump. It does not focus on his followers, his enablers who are, of course, integral to the story, especially prominent Republicans who in recent days have crept like lemmings again to defend him. I focus here on Trump because it’s worth being reminded at this critical juncture of how aberrational he is. How mentally unstable; how deviant and delusional; how paranoid and narcissistic. He is not normal, he is abnormal. Still,he has realized his wildest and yes, fondest dream: being stage center, the center of global attention.       

This post is short and simple. It’s no more than – but no less than – a reminder of Trump’s extreme paranoia and deep-seated narcissism. Just before the circus starts it’s appropriate remind ourselves yet again of how psychologically unstable and unfit for public life is our former president.

Points on Political Paranoia

The principal components of political paranoia are:

• Suspicion – Trump tirelessly engages in a relentless search for the enemies that he assumes without question are out there somewhere. (Which by now of course they are. Even paranoids have enemies!)
• Centrality – Trump’s world is one in which everything has meaning only as it pertains to him.
• Grandiosity – Trump believes that he alone knows the whole truth and nothing but. And he has no tolerance, none, for dissent or disagreement.
• Hostility – Like all paranoids, Trump is angry and aggressive; bellicose and belligerent; inordinately defensive and perennially poised to attack.
• Fear – Of all Trump’s many fears, his worst is loss of autonomy. For him even to conceive of giving in is intolerable, as is the idea of being less than the dominant agent.   
• Delusion – Trump clings to his habitual lies, deceits, and false beliefs, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
• Conspiracy – Trump’s thinking is extreme thinking, conspiratorial thinking. He sees the world as essentially a struggle between evil on the one hand, and good on the other.
• Certainty – The absolute certainty with which Trump radiates his many hatreds is compelling to his followers This includes but is not limited to those who otherwise have lost their moorings.

Points on Pathological Narcissism

          The principal components of pathological narcissism are:

• Lack of empathy – Trump is, literally, unable to consider the needs, wants, wishes, and feelings of others.
• Entitlement – Trump is convinced of his own centrality which is why he always assumes he owes nothing and is owed everything.
• Exploitation – Trump badly needs other people around him for the primary purpose of making him feel special. He does not, because he cannot, return the favor.
• Impaired judgement and volatile decision making – Trump exhibits both. Both are symptoms of pathological narcissism and both are especially dangerous in political leaders because of their potentially enormous impact on others.  
• Mary Trump on Trump’s narcissism – “His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak. His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered at every moment because he knows that deep down he is nothing of what he claims to be.” (Mary Trump is Trump’s only niece. She is a clinical psychologist.)*

“I alone can fix it,” Trump famously said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. More accurate would have been, “I alone can break it.”

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  *This post has drawn on three books: 1) Robert Robins and Jerrold Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitcs of Hatred; 2) Bandy Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President; and 3) Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.  

Former President Donald Trump’s enablers are a recurring nightmare. Just when we begin to forget them, they reappear as if deliberately to taunt us and haunt us.

My book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America, was about followers, specifically Trump’s. Those at a greater remove, including his base. And those up close and personal who were the president’s enablers, who on a regular basis facilitated and sometimes even exacerbated his bad behavior. They consisted of rather a large cast of characters, including some well-known names such as Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president; Lindsey Graham, long term Republican senator and short-term Trump toady; Jared Kushner, Trump’s serf and son-in-law; and Mark Meadows, Trump chief of staff and fixer in chief.

They also included members of the media, most regularly and visibly at Fox News. And, since I was writing about the year that was the worst of the pandemic, they also included some who worked at the C.D.C., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is this twofer, some of whom were well intentioned but all of whom were enablers, who reappeared this week to remind us of how complicit in Trump’s wrongdoing were so many who could so easily have done otherwise.

We now know that at Fox were two different scenarios, one private, one public. Because Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox for defamation, information came out that made clear that some of the network’s biggest stars and highest paid executives did not for one moment believe Trump’s claim that he had won the 2020 presidential election. Did they however go public with what they knew to be true? They did not. Instead, they pandered to the president as they pandered to his crowd, their viewers who they did not want at all costs to alienate.  

This week it also came out that some C.D.C. scientists were in despair as the agency squelched their Covid-related alerts and research.  “All of us knew tens of thousands were going to die, and we were helpless to stop it,” testified one. Said another, “I’m [still] angry about this every day.” As the New York Times reported it, these scientists were not alone. Many at the agency reported their sense of frustration and powerlessness had led them to seek therapy or to turn to medication to “cope with their frustration and disillusionment.”

Because we do not teach or even discuss how to follow wisely and well, we foster a culture of silence in situations such as these, in situations in which a bad leader has a stranglehold. If groupthink prevailed at Fox, at the C.D.C. was the widespread sense that no one had the power or maybe even the right to speak up and speak out.

By failing to educate our young people that there are times when they ought to take a stand, and when they ought to speak truth to power, we are failing ourselves.   

What if a leader is democratically elected? What do they owe those who elected them? What if what leaders believe to be right and good and true is different from what their followers believe to be right and good and true?

It’s one of the oldest questions to bedevil democratic theory. Specifically, to what extent should leaders who are democrats follow their followers? Hold their fingers to the wind and see which way it blows. Or, conversely, consider themselves not one of the people but of the people, their representative, selected to lead in what they decide is in their constituents’ best interests.

Nowhere is the democrat’s dilemma, the democratic leader’s dilemma, more vividly exemplified just now than in France. For better and worse, French President Emmanuel Macron has thrown caution to the winds to pursue what he thinks best for the country – the peoples’ preferences be damned!

This is my third post on Macron. The first was on May 7, 2017, shortly after he was first elected. I wrote then that he was a “boy wonder.” At not yet 40 the newly minted French president was an excellent pianist, exceptionally clever in economics and finance, highly literate, a self-made man of considerable wealth and, presciently, “as bold as he is brilliant.”           

My second post on Macron was on April 28, 2022. It was occasioned both by the election in which Macron had just won a second term (the first French president to be reelected in 20 years), and by the war in Ukraine which Macron was trying diligently if ultimately unsuccessfully to mediate. I wrote then that while Macron was in many ways a visionary who had an impressive list of political accomplishments already to his credit, he was also seen as an elitist, one who was not only poor at working a room and playing to a crowd but didn’t much care about winning the crowd over. He was a leader who did what he thought right when he thought it right. He did not lead from behind – he led from out front, sometimes far out front. As I wrote in 2022, “For the entirety of his [first] term the French president has been seen as arrogant and remote, and as not much, if at all, interested in the day-to day travails of the lower and working classes.”

At the time I thought it possible that Macron had been chastened by his political rival, Marine Le Pen, who had come closer to defeating him in the election than he anticipated. In this I thought wrong. Not only was the French president not chastened he was emboldened. He was emboldened by his reelection to among other things promote a pension reform plan that an overwhelming majority of the French people hated. Despised. Detested … and protested in numbers so enormous they resulted in the largest demonstrations in France in decades.

Macron’s pension bill would, or now more likely will, push the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64. “What’s the big deal?” say Americans, who have long been used to working well into their sixties and even into their seventies. Given we’re living much longer in the present than we did in the past, it only makes good fiscal sense to push back the age at which we pull back.  Not so say the French, who for social, political, and cultural reasons see themselves as being different from other Western countries, and to whom their now relatively young retirement age is a right to be protected not a privilege to be amended not to speak of abandoned.

Though Macron has just (barely) survived two votes of no confidence, France is slated again to come to a halt on Thursday when people in massive numbers will take to the streets to protest the man they rather recently reelected president. For his part, Macron is doing what he thinks is right – advocating for modernizing, pushing for reform that is fiscally responsible and demographically sensible. But for their part, the French are doing what they think is right, taking on head on a leader who refuses to hear what his followers have to say.

The democrat’s dilemma. The democratic leader’s dilemma – which President Emmanuel Macron appears to have resolved, if only to his own satisfaction.  

Since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a child, everyone has called him “Bibi.” Though he is now age 73. they still do.  In fact, he refers to himself by that name – his recent autobiography is titled, Bibi: My Story.

Despite Netanyahu’s being as controversial a figure in the United States as he is in Israel, American reviewers were generally kind. The Wall Street Journal, for example, called Bibi “compelling” and “fascinating.” Which, if exaggerated, generally is true. Netanyahu tells his story with vigor and conviction – though obviously, maybe necessarily given he is still a working politician, he is strongly opinionated and even jaundiced. His book reflects his passions and proclivities, his preferences and biases, his formidable strengths, and his many, many weaknesses.

Netanyahu is the most successful elected official in Israeli history. He has easily dominated the country’s politics for the last quarter century, and he currently serves, again, as its prime minister. (To date his longest tenure was between 2009 and 2021.) But notwithstanding his remarkable political successes and economic accomplishments, for many Israelis he has long been an object of contempt. There was never any doubt of his intelligence and talent. But his enemies have long thought him narrow-minded and hard-headed; dogmatic and autocratic; and corrupt. Even his allies have conceded he is argumentative and arrogant; excessively assertive and sometimes dangerously aggressive. Withal, in December, Netanyahu managed to forge a right-wing coalition, form a government, and become prime minister the third time over.

To read Bibi is to be reminded of how he got to be who he is. His father, Benzion, was an historian and political activist of prominence and eminence. And his brother, Yoni, who died leading the legendary raid at Entebbe, is one of Israel’s most revered heroes. No wonder Benzion’s son and Yoni’s brother has been so driven. So driven he has finally come perilously close to driving himself – and his country – into the ground.

For ten weeks have been massive protests in Israel, primarily (though not exclusively) against the government’s plan to overhaul, effectively to gravely weaken, the Israeli judiciary. This weekend it was estimated that some half million Israelis took to the streets to demonstrate – this in a country whose total population is about nine million.

The last few months have so seriously strained the national fabric of Israel that talk has been of civil war. But even short of civil war, Netanyahu has presided over a state now so bitterly divided that closing the chasm will be, certainly in the short term, impossible. Impossible given that trust in their leader among huge swaths of his followers can now never be restored.

It was, however, one thing for Netanyahu to govern a state that was newly threatened from within. Now it’s quite another – for it turns out he simultaneously governed a state that is newly threatened from without. The recently announced rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia that was brokered by, of all countries, China, came out of left field. Who knows what Bibi knew? But for the rest of us this freshly crafted détente came out of left field.

We cannot know how this will all play out over the long term. But in the short term the détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a severe blow to Netanyahu’s personal and political prestige, and to his cherished reputation for keeping Israel safe. Iran is Israeli’s most unrepentant enemy. And Saudi Arabia’s effective ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin-Salman, is a man with whom Netanyahu long thought, apparently erroneously, he could do business.

It’s a tragedy. Israel, specifically Israel’s demoracy, is vulnerable as it has never been before. Vulnerable to unmitigated strife from within – now not only between Israelis and Palestinians but between Israelis and Israelis. And vulnerable to unmitigated hostility from without – now not only from Iran but, potentially, from a shifting balance of power  in the Middle East.

Bibi concluded Bibi as follows:

The rebirth of Israel is a miracle of faith and history. The book of Samuel says, “The eternity of Israel will not falter.” Throughout our journey, including in the tempests and upheavals of modern times, this has held true.

The people of Israel live!       

How deeply sad that Bibi’s insatiable lust for power – which explains his deal with right-wing extremists, to become prime minister yet again – has sundered the Israeli people, threatened the Israeli state, and fractured his claim to greatness.

Larry Fink is the Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, with some $10 trillion under its management. The son of a shoe store owner, Fink is somewhat bookish looking and, for a leader of his enormous accomplishment and great power, mild in manner and unprepossessing in demeanor.   

For at least five years Fink has been a leader not only in financial services but of a corporate movement. In 2018 he put his considerable heft behind ESG – the idea that in addition to corporate leaders having purely corporate responsibilities, they have larger ones as well. To the Environment. To Society. And to good Governance. Fink has been particularly associated with climate change, specifically with the push to cut carbon emissions.   

For several years Fink was widely admired – not in all circles, but in many – for staking out his position, especially on the environment, with such clarity and temerity. Moreover, there was no doubt that on ESG more generally Fink was at the forefront of a movement that had a significant impact. As the New York Times summarized it late last year, “Investing with consideration for climate change, diversity, gender and pay equity, the welfare of employees, and the impact of technology on society – broadly lumped under the ESG banner – has become a big focus in recent years, with BlackRock leading the charge.”

However, as leaders are wont to do, they get punished not so much for being out front as for being too far out front. Which is precisely what happened to Larry Fink. As America’s political discourse has continued to coarsen, Fink has become a whipping boy for naysayers. Those on the left fault him for not doing enough. Those on the right accuse him of badly neglecting his fiscal responsibilities in the interest of his other goals, specifically those that are social and environmental. In response to the charges from the right, Fink has backtracked, somewhat. He has denied that BlackRock is ideologically driven, affirming that it does not intend to divest from fossil fuel investments and that it isn’t pressuring any of its clients to do so.  

The complexities of what Fink is trying to accomplish have become clear. What exactly constitutes ESG investing invariably is up for debate, sometimes nasty debate. There can however be little doubt that Fink is well intentioned. That he is, or maybe he was, simply saying that business leaders have responsibilities that extend well beyond the businesses they lead.

Still, the attacks on him get ever uglier, reflecting the bitter cultural and political divide that afflicts America more generally.  At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Fink went out of his way to say that BlackRock was trying to address the misconceptions of ESG investing. But he went on to add that for the first time in his professional career the attacks on him were “personal.”  His opponents, he said, were “trying to demonize the issue” by creating a narrative that was “ugly.”

My best guess is that Larry Fink’s leadership trajectory will ultimately be in three seperate and distinct phases. First, his astonishing level of professional success. Second, his arguably noble but still highly controversial effort to translate his professional wins into ones that are political, social, and even cultural. Third and last his legacy in history which, I believe, will judge him not only as well-intended, but as far-sighted.     

For some time now I’ve been interested in the question of why – for all our efforts over the last three decades or so – there are still so few women, relatively, at the highest rungs of the leadership ladder.

It’s not for lack of trying. Enormous amounts of ink of been spilled and enormous efforts have been made attempting to ameliorate the situation. Sponsors and mentors; explicit bias and implicit bias; parttime and flextime; remote work and hybrid work; diversity and inclusion – each refers to initiatives taken with the best of intentions trying to fix what’s broke. Or what’s ostensibly broke – too few women at the top.

Obviously, there are many more women near the top and even at the top than there used to be. But in comparison with men the numbers are still puny. There has not been a single woman president of the United States or France. There has never been a president or Communist Party chair or prime minister of Russia or China or Japan who was a woman. The percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who are women finally climbed out of the single digits – for the first time ever, this year, it’s just over 10%. In top U.S. law firms, the percent of women equity partners remains under a quarter. And while more women serve in the U.S. Congress than ever before, the total figure is similar, just over 25 percent.  

So… is progress toward gender equity being made? Yes. Is this progress after all this time sufficient? No – certainly not ideally.

What then is the problem? Well, it’s not really a “problem.” It’s a truism. Women and men are different. Women and men are physically, psychologically, and sociobiologically not one and the same. The differences between them necessarily have an impact on gender and leadership. Moreover, the differences between (among) them are greatest when pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare are involved.  

For a book that was published in 2019 titled Women’s Leadership Journeys (edited by Sherylle Tan and Lisa DeFrank-Cole), I wrote a chapter titled “Leadership and Lactation.” My thesis was simple: “that the evolutionary origins of gender divisions explain to a considerable extent the meager numbers of women leaders.”

Remember… humans are primates. This explains why a section of my chapter discussed being a primate parent. I observed that among the commonalities of being a primate parent is a level of attachment between mother and child that nearly always far exceeds that between father and child. This impacts on women and leadership. Specifically, woman have a far harder time leaving their child behind while they go off to work – while they go off to lead – than do men. In Sweden, for example, men and women are both given the same amount of time off for parental leave. However, men return to full time work far faster than do women. 

At the time I pointed out that scientists were only starting to get serious about studying the similarities between human and nonhuman primates. I further suggested the similarities would someday prove consequential – they would include “many psychological and social mechanisms underlying parenting.”

As it turned out, scientists did pursue this line of research. And they did find the impact of pregnancy and parenting on women – as on any other primate – was considerable. This was nicely summarized in a recent article in the Washington Post that read in part: “Neuroscience, which has long studied the effect of pregnancy on animal brains, has finally turned its attention to the effect on the human brain – and the results are challenging commonly held assumptions about women’s intellectual abilities during and after pregnancy.”*

The article makes clear the following:

• When a human mother is pregnant and then gives birth her brain changes. It undergoes “an extraordinary period of reorganization known as neuroplasticity.”
• These changes have some effects some of the time that are negative, such as “mental fogginess.”
• These changes have some effects some of the time that are positive, such as improved multitasking and stress endurance.
• Though the article does not explicitly say, its content makes clear that some of the time some of the changes are likely to have an impact on women and leadership. This includes the wish to, the will to, the determination to, the capacity to, lead. To, that is, prioritize leading over time with, and energy on family.  

Of course, not all women are mothers. But about 86% of women in the U.S. between the ages of 40 and 44 have given birth to at least one child. Moreover, 25% of all American mothers are raising their children on their own.  Finally, not only do women who are pregnant have to deal with changing bodies, once they deliver their babies they have to deal with changing expectations. According to the Pew Research Center (in a report published in 2019) “the public sees vastly different pressure points for women and men in today’s society.” Roughly 77 percent of responders say women face a lot of pressure to be an involved parent. A significantly smaller share, 49 percent, say the same about men.

Implicit in my theory about the importance of the differences between men and women as they pertain to becoming, or to being, a leader is that these differences will endure and that they will have an enduring impact on the numbers. This is not to say that equity between men and women in top leadership roles is not a goal we should continue to pursue. Rather it is to understand more clearly and fully what exactly we are dealing with – gender differences not entirely amenable to social engineering.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2023/02/23/mommy-brain-symptoms-benefits/

It does not diminish the accomplishments of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to point out that he is at the mercy of leaders far, far more powerful than he. What Zelensky can do, and cannot do, and what happens, and does not happen to the Ukrainian people, depends largely on three other men whose power and personality dominate the stage on which they stride.

They are the three 800-Pound Gorillas: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, China’s President Xi Jinping, and United States President Joe Biden.

I posted at length about Vladimir Putin in January, when I named him “Leader of the Year.” As I made clear at the time, in 2022 he was the world’s most impactful leader – an 800-pound gorilla who forced others to react to his cruel and brutal attack on a neighbor. Putin led not only his followers, the Russian people, into war. He led other leaders, pushed other leaders, to respond to the war, specifically leaders of countries and companies all over the world who felt they had to react to Putin’s primal aggression. None of this is obviously to say that Putin was a “good” leader. He was not. He certainly was not ethical. Nor was he effective. In fact, in the United States is a cottage industry of Russia-watchers who list his many mistakes and miscalculations. Still, given Putin launched a war of aggression, in the heart of East Europe, and given he remains ruler of a state that has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, when he makes a move attention is paid.  

President Xi has perhaps seemed a marginal actor during the year of Putin’s War. But not for a moment did he distance himself from the conflict. To the contrary. Just a few weeks before Russia’s invasion, Putin and Xi signed a sweeping long-term agreement that declared the friendship between their two states “had no limits.” It was a direct and deliberate swipe at the United States and NATO, and at liberal democracy. Though Xi had his hands full during 2022 and into 2023, above all with Covid, he never backed down even an inch either from his alliance with Putin or from his support of Russia in its war against Ukraine. As I write the Biden administration’s concern over China’s alliance with Russia continues. Just a few days ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Beijing that if it provides lethal aid to Russia it will pay a price. Xi though will not easily be cowed. The war in Ukraine is in his interest. It costs the West, and it distracts the West. Therefore, so long as the price he has to pay for its continuation, maybe even for its escalation is not too high, he will continue in some way to meddle.

However awful the war in Europe, and however uncertain still its outcome, history will credit Joe Biden with meeting the moment. With seizing the occasion to reaffirm American values, to reassert American power, and to revive the Western alliance. Biden’s advanced age has some obvious disadvantages. But when Putin invaded Ukraine, Biden’s long history as a public servant, his deep expertise in foreign affairs (he was a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee), and his considerable knowledge of the Soviet Union and then Russia were to his, to the Ukrainians, and to the West’s great benefit.

Biden first entered the Senate in 1973. It was the height of the Cold War, and Leonid Brezhnev was leader of the Soviet Union. The president has therefore dealt with the Russians directly and indirectly for fifty years! Moreover, Biden has for the moment no overseas Western competition. After the start of Putin’s War, France’s leader Emmanuel Macron tried but so far has failed to get his Russian counterpart to negotiate. Britain’s leader Rishi Sunak is new to the job and remains in consequence inexperienced and untested. And Germany’s leader, Olaf Scholz, has yet to prove he can even begin to fill his predecessor’s (Angela Merkel’s) ample shoes.

So, Biden stands alone – the best 800-pound gorilla, really the only 800-pound gorilla, the West has to offer. But on this issue, on Putin’s War, the American president has proven himself a tough opponent who, though visibly old, is still fit for a fight. A fight against his foreign foes, and a fight if necessary against his domestic ones. President Zelensky is weathering a damnably difficult and dreadful storm. But at least he has President Biden in his corner.