Author: Barbara

The first book I ever wrote – this was decades ago – was titled All the President’s Kin. The point of the book was simple: we badly underestimate the political impact of the presidents’ – and presidential candidates’ – wives, children, parents, and siblings.* Usually, one or more has a profound effect on who gets elected and on how presidential power is exercised.

Never has this been truer than now, when it can reasonably be argued that the outcome of the next presidential election depends on the conduct of Jill Biden. Jill Biden, the wife of President Joe Biden. Jill Biden who, by every account, is his most ardent supporter and closer to him than anyone else. Jill Biden, who by every account has believed with all her being that come November the present president is the only one who can defeat the former president, Donald Trump.

Which raises the question of the morning after. What is Jill Biden thinking this morning? And what if anything will she do in the aftermath of the most disastrous performance in the history of American presidential debates – her husband’s?

Donald Trump was true to form. He was neither substantive nor focused and he lied as incessantly as shamelessly. But as Democratic operative David Plouffe pointed out, on the debate stage he seemed not three years younger than Biden, which he is, but thirty. So, because it was immediately clear that Biden was looking totally terrible and sounding even worse, what he said mattered not a whit.

From everything we know about Joe Biden, Jill Biden is the only person on the planet who could, maybe, persuade him to pull out of the presidential race. So long as she refuses to consider the possibility, so will he. Which means that if events in the next few months play out as they did in the last few, she, every bit as much as he, will be responsible for returning Trump to the Oval Office. It’s why, at this pivotal moment in American history, her civic responsibility could not possibly be greater.

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*Every presidential spouse has been a wife.

Have you ever seen the supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, grinning from ear to ear? No? Want to? If yes, check him out sitting in the passenger seat of a spanking new Aurus, with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin behind the wheel.* The scene took place last week in Pyongyang, a reflection of the affection between the two men whose relationship has gone from being wary allies to best pals.

Most of us associate Putin with his unprovoked attack on Ukraine, the result of which was a war that has now gone on for well over two years. The costs have been enormous. It is the largest land war in Europe since the end of the Second World War. The casualties – Ukrainians and Russians – tally in the hundreds of thousands. And the destruction is widespread. Reportedly more buildings have been wrecked in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan had been leveled four times over. In some places, such as the small city of Marinka (previous population 9,000), not one resident is left.

Meantime, Americans have by and large lost interest. In the early months of the war Ukrainian flags were flown clear across the United States. But by now the war has been relegated to the margins of our concerns. Still, we should make no mistake. Not only does Putin remain a major menace, the more he eats the greater his appetite.

In my most recent book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, Putin is mentioned but he is a sidebar. I deliberately chose not to focus on such a blazingly obvious example. But we should make no mistake. Putin is the archetype of a leader who – because he has not been stopped or even once during his entire tenure been seriously slowed – has gone from bad to worse.

The beat goes on. With every passing month Putin becomes more menacing. Only recently he authorized drills so Russians could practice the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Only recently he said he would consider changing Russia’s protocol as it pertained to the use of nuclear weapons. And only recently he implied that small European countries – think Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – would be easy for Russia either to conquer or obliterate.

But nothing Putin has done has greater implications for the United States – his archenemy – than his outreach in Pyongyang. Putin made clear that while the West might be concentrating on a regional chessboard, Europe, he is focusing on a global one, which includes Asia.

Russia and North Korea are now locked in their tightest embrace since the coldest days of the Cold War. As is usual in such arrangements, each side is giving the other what they want. Putin is getting the weaponry he needs aggressively to pursue his war against Ukraine. Kim is getting the energy and technology he needs aggressively to grow his space and missile programs.

The United States meanwhile has been watching Asia with a wary eye. But not because of Russia. It is because of China that President Joe Biden shored up America’s relations with its allies in the Indo Pacific, including South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines. Still, the West needs to be clear. There is one world leader who more than any other poses a threat to its interests. There is one world leader whose identity is so wrapped up in a victory that he will not, cannot, tolerate a loss.There is one world leader who rules with an iron fist over a country that has more nuclear weapons than any other. That world leader is not China’s Xi Jinping. It is Russia’s Vladimir Putin.   

Earlier in his tenure the idea that Putin would send arms to bolster North Korea was unthinkable. Now we know that he will do what he thinks he must to win in Ukraine. Which is precisely why, though he has already gone from bad to worse, it’s possible if not probable that, unless he is stopped by someone(s) or something(s), he will go from worse to worst. So far as the West is concerned there is not a single leader anywhere in the world who presents a greater threat to its political, military, and ideological interests.   

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*Aurus Motors is a Russian luxury car company. Putin’s own presidential car is an Aurus, and when he paid Kim a state visit, he came bearing gifts, one of which was, you guessed it, an Aurus.

One of the most important things to know about Donald Trump is that he has no real friends. Never did. Not a single friend with whom he has connected over a long period of time and with whom he has had anything resembling a close relationship. Trump is a loner and has been so lifelong.

As a teenager at the New York Military Academy, he usually disappeared into his room after dinner. Years later his classmates did not remember a single class member “that he was particularly close to.” At Fordham University, where Trump spent his freshman and sophomore years of college, his experience was similar. He was friendly with some of his peers but had no real friends. It was the same at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump finished college. Years later, one of his Wharton classmates recalled that Trump had no one close to him, and that he never “palled around with anyone, quite frankly.”

Things were no different years later, after he became a successful and wealthy real estate developer. Once, in an interview, Trump was asked if there was anyone in whom he confided. He replied, “No… I tend not to confide…. I don’t trust people. I’m a non-trusting person.” One of his biographers, Tim O’Brien, captured the consensus, when he described Trump as “one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met. He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build relationships with other people.” *

If there are any exceptions to this general rule, one could argue, if lamely, they are his first three children, whose mother was Trump’s first wife, Ivana. By all accounts his relationships with his two sons from his marriage to Ivana, Donald Trump, Jr, and Eric Trump, have a history of being fraught, and there is no evidence they ever were personally close. But they have long been in business with their father – they play prominent parts in The Trump Organization – and they were and still are politically active on their father’s behalf.

Not so much though Ivanka, his daughter from his first marriage, who by every account was forever her father’s favorite. It’s hard to exaggerate her role in Trump’s affective life. Until he lost his second campaign for the White House, Ivanka was his Golden Girl, his Golden Child who could do no wrong. By every account it was she and she alone who was singled out for his special attention and affection. Trump admired, and adored, everything about his first-born daughter, from what he saw as her singular beauty to what he deemed her singular brain. (Trump has a second daughter, Tiffany, by his second wife, Marla Maples. Maples raised Tiffany as a single mother with an absentee ex-husband who largely was an absentee father.)

Though Ivanka had no qualifications for the post, none, soon after he became chief executive Trump appointed her Assistant to the President. During his four years in the White House, he would refer to her as “unique,” suggest that if she ever wanted to run for president she would be “very, very hard to beat,” and sometimes call her “Baby” during meetings.

Nor did it suffice to bring Ivanka into his Oval Office orbit; her husband, Jared Kushner, was part of the package. Despite his equally complete lack of relevant experience, Kushner was named Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor. In short order, he became an indispensable presidential aide, a power in his own right, presumed an expert in everything from the criminal justice system to the border wall, to tensions in the Middle East, to politics and the pandemic.

In this case though blood was not thicker than water. After the American electorate voted Trump out of the Oval Office, Ivanka and Jared made haste for the exits. They promptly sought to reestablish their own lives and rebuild their reputations, which inevitably meant distancing themselves from her father and his father-in-law. As they were embarrassed by their past and worried that it would taint them for years to come, It meant pretending that the White House years had never happened. Until now.

Now, as Trump comes close to securing his second Republican nomination for president, Ivanka at least is reassessing her situation. Reportedly she is “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again” – helpful, that is, to her father – and privately assessing “when it might make sense to reengage with the campaign – and even whether to take a job in the administration if Trump wins.” **

Will Ivanka return to her father’s fold – or will she not? No matter. The transactional nature of her relationship to her father has become painfully apparent. Same with the rest of Trump’s clan, including his wife, Melania, who remains as she did during her four years as First Lady. Largely – and for months at a time entirely – invisible.

Did I mention the leader was a loner? A lifelong loner with no capacity for intimacy with anyone else but himself?  

In his private life Trump is deeply, completely alone. To suppose this is irrelevant to his public life is to ignore the intersection between politics and personality.

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*The quotes in this section are from Barbara Kellerman, The Enablers (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

** The quotes in this section are in Bess Levin, “Ivanka Trump Has Gotten the Urge….” in Vanity Fair, May 3, 2024.

Does it suffice for leaders to be accountable only to their own followers and not to anyone else? For example, do leaders in the private sector have any responsibility for what happens in the public one? Or are business and government entirely separate?

If they are siloed, then CEOs of major banks are accountable only to their own stakeholders – most obviously their boards, stockholders, and employees. But, does this seem right? That corporate leaders are accountable only to their own – as opposed to having some responsibility for the commonweal more generally.

Was it fine for CEOs of major tobacco companies to fight labels warning that smoking could be bad for our health? Is it fine for CEOs of major oil companies to fight efforts to reduce carbon emissions?   

In January the CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, surprised many when he suggested that a second Trump presidency might have significant virtues. In an interview with CNBC, he said, “Take a step back, be honest. [Trump] was kind of right about NATO, kind of right about immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade reform worked. He was right about some of China.”     

In May it was reported that hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman was likely to support Donald Trump in the upcoming election. This meant following in the footsteps of another financial services heavyweight, Blackstone CEO, Stephen Schwartzman, who had already announced that he would “vote for change” by voting for Trump in November.

This month it became clear that leaders such as Dimon, Ackman, and Schwartzman were hardly alone. The Wall Street Journal reported that despite many having previous misgivings, especially in the aftermath of the January 6^th attack on the Capitol, America’s “top CEOs are flocking to Trump again.”

Their willingness to cozy up, to toady up, to Trump is curious. It would make sense if they genuinely thought that another four years of Donald Trump would be better for them and their companies than another four years of Joe Biden. But during Biden’s presidency, both have done stunningly well. CEO pay packages have continued to soar, and the stock markets are at or near all-time highs. Corporate profits are up, inflation is down, and so far has been no sign of a recession. It would also make sense if they disbelieved all the warnings about Trump, including those out of his own mouth, that if he becomes president a second time, he will do what he can to edge the country away from democracy and toward autocracy.  

Whatever their reasons for supporting Trump, his fanboys in the private sector should be clear: what they do and do not do in the private sector will impact the public sector. Business and politics are irrevocably entwined, as are capitalism in America and democracy in America. Moreover, history testifies that no autocratic leader anywhere at any time became an autocratic leader without the support, explicit or tacit, of many followers – and of many other leaders in many other silos who chose in the end to bend to the wind.

In one of my earlier books, Bad Leadership: What It Is, Why It Happens, How It Matters, I identified seven different types of bad leadership. One of these was Insular Leadership.

Insular Leadership is when the leader and some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of “the other” – that is, of those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.

To know anything about the lives of George Washinton and Abraham Lincoln is to know how much grief pockmarked their lives, not just militarily and politically, but personally. Nor were several of our more recent presidents immune to calamity and difficulty. But if ever was a president who has endured more tragedy on a purely personal level than Joe Biden, he does not come to mind.

The facts are well known. Biden lost his wife and baby daughter in a car crash in 1972. He lost his golden son in 2015, Beau Biden, who succumbed at age 46 to brain cancer. And his remaining son, Hunter Biden, has now been found guilty of three felony counts for lying on a federal firearms application. This, after years of extreme alcohol and drug abuse, which we now know, courtesy of the trial, wreaked havoc on many in his family, including his children. Nor is Hunter done. He is slated to stand trial again in September on a different charge, this one for violating tax laws.

Still, whatever the calamities that rained down on Joe Biden in the last half century – including his own life-threatening aneurysm on an artery wall at the base of his brain – none diminished his overweening ambition. His lifelong ambition to become president of the United States. Biden has prided himself on doing it all: being a devoted and loving husband to his wives, being a devoted and loving father to his children, being a devoted and loving grandfather to his grandchildren, while simultaneously, decade after decade after decade, serving first as United States Senator, then as vice president, and finally, as president.

Joe Biden’s ambition was so great he was not to be deterred. Not by repeated personal tragedies, nor by repeated political setbacks. Nor, even now, has the dream died. Biden is running for president a second time, at age 81, when his health is less than robust and at a moment in his life when family might be presumed to take precedence. Still, his priority remains the presidency. Biden is there for his family; he remains a steady and caring presence. But even his day has only 24 hours – which, given his fixation on his office, means his focus on his family must be finite.

Shakespeare’s tragedies – such as Hamlet, Henry V, and Julius Caesar – all have heroes with tragic flaws. In most cases they are not ordinary men. They are royalty with domains over which they preside. They are leaders with followers over whom they rule. But there is nevertheless a chink in their armor, a flaw that is not, simply, a defect. It is a flaw that is fatal, that leads ultimately to disaster, even to death.

Is Biden so afflicted? Especially in the eight years since Beau Biden passed, has Joe Biden’s unquenchable ambition been his fatal flaw? Did it cost his family – and if so, how much?

Questions like these are of course unanswerable. Who can know what would have happened within the Biden family had the patriarch not remained, even after Beau’s death, consumed by his desire to become president. To run for and then win the presidency not immediately, in 2016, but in 2020, even though his family was still demonstrably traumatized by Beau’s premature demise.

Sometimes life does imitate art. So though so far as I know Shakespeare never used the phrase “work-life balance,” it’s possible that Joe Biden’s prioritizing the first over the second, was, is, his fatal flaw. Prioritizing work over life not in his heart or even in his head – but in how he has chosen to spend his time.

In the immediate aftermath of Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict Joe Biden flew to Delaware to give his son a very public hug. But in short order, the chief executive left to resume his public duties. “I am the president,” Joe Biden said, “but I am also a dad.” Notice the sequence.

John Roberts is reportedly Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But can this be accurate? And, if it is, where is he? Where is John Roberts during what is arguably the Supreme Court’s greatest crisis of confidence, ever?

Once upon a time the nation’s highest court was one of its most venerated institutions. Those days are gone. Now (April 2024) only 36 percent of Americans approve of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job, whereas 51 percent disapprove. Moreover, two of the nine justices are under a cloud of suspicion, suspected in both cases of extreme judicial bias and in one case of corruption. Meantime the Court’s leader, the Chief Justice, has gone MIA. So far as the American public is concerned, Roberts is missing in action.

To be clear: the Court has significant systemic problems. For example, the nine justices are appointed for life, even though life spans now are decades longer than when their forever tenures were enshrined in the Constitution. It is also true that the Chief Justice has little power over his colleagues, nearly no carrots to reward them for doing what he wants them to do; nearly no sticks to punish them if they do not. But in the past Roberts was reputed to be an institutionalist who would protect the Court against debasement first because he cared deeply about the institution, second, because he cared deeply about the law.

It cannot be known what Roberts is doing in private, behind the Court’s closed doors. But now is the time if ever there was one for him to make a gesture in public. He recently turned down an invitation to meet with Senate Democrats to discuss the Court’s ethics crisis. Further, if the Court is developing, of its own volition, new ethics rules, or new procedures, or new codes of conduct or new anything to prompt its own ethical conduct, we the American people have not been told about it.   

Chief Justice John Roberts appears a leader who is exceedingly old-fashioned, steeped in tradition, buttoned-up, cautious in the extreme. But what if the moment demands a different kind of leader? What if Americans need, even crave, reassurance by word and deed that their institutions are holding fast? That under the leadership of John Roberts the Supreme Court will not succumb to the mood of the moment?   

If John Roberts is so hidebound he cannot adapt even slightly, history will not judge him kindly. He will be remembered as a little leader – not big or brave enough to take on changing challenges in changing times.

How to understand yesterday’s verdict rendered in an American court: a former president found guilty by a jury of his peers on 34 counts of falsifying records? And how to understand where Americans are today, faced with the real possibility that Donald Trump, now a convicted felon, will be elected president a second time?

How not to understand what happened – is happening – is to fixate, obsesively, on the man himself. On the leader. This is not to say that Trump is unimportant. Rather it is to say that he is not all-important.

Without question he will go down as one of the most significant figures in American history. Politically inexperienced and inexpert when elected president, Trump has nevertheless dominated American politics during the eight years since. Notwithstanding his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020, to this day it is Trump who sucks the air out of our room.

But leadership is not about single individuals. Leadership is a system with three parts – each of which is as important as the other two. Part one is the leader – here Trump. Part two is the followers – here the many Americans who continue to support Trump. Part three is the contexts – here the domestic context, the United States at this moment in time; and the global context at this moment in time, within which democracies everywhere are struggling.

In my book The Enablers, I divided Trump’s followers into two groups: his Tribe and his Team.* His Tribe consists of Trump followers who remain at a distance. They include among others those who make up his often rabid and always reliable base; and members of his party, intractably constant Republicans who continue to support the former president no matter what he does or says.

Trump’s Team is different. It consists of followers who are up close and personal. For example, during Trump’s time as president, it was Vice President Mike Pence’s fulltime job to slavishly follow where the president led. Similarly, Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, who during the four years of Trump’s time in the White House was among his closest advisors, prepared at all hours to do his father in law’s bidding, without questioning.

Of course, not all followers – subordinates – follow all the time. Some of Trump’s underlings quit, such as his onetime Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis. But most have been loyal all along – and they remain so now, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict. Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, spoke for the lot of them when he declared that yesterday, the day the jury handed down its unanimous decision, was a “shameful day in American history.” Johnson then launched a frontal assault on America’s judicial system by calling Trump’s trial “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”

The contexts within which the trial took place are as important as Trump himself – and as those who remain unfailingly faithful. In the domestic context consider these: the declining trust in American institutions; the declining respect for authority and expertise; the declining belief in the American dream; the declining sense of American community and commonality; and the declining faith in America’s ideology, notably democracy.

And in the global context consider these. First, according to Freedom House, the non-profit organization that measures democracy globally, “Global freedom declined for the 18^th consecutive year in 2023. The breath and depth of the deterioration were extensive. Political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries, while only 21 countries made improvements.” Second, rightwing parties in Europe are rising in popularity – notably among young people. What becomes immediately clear is that the United States is not an exception. Leaders in most liberal democracies are having a hard time persuading followers in most liberal democracies not only of their own virtues but of the virtues of everything for which they stand.

Whatever your view of Donald Trump, the bottom line is he is a convicted felon. But to make sense of the next several months, attention must be paid not only to him. Attention must equally be paid to the American people – and to the America within which their drama will unfold.

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*The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

He is chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (F.D.I.C.). Moreover, he has been in a top leadership role at the F.D.I.C. for almost twenty years. But as a leader of any sort, anywhere, Martin Gruenberg is on his last legs. He is in any case slated to step down from his present post as soon as President Biden can name a successor.

Gruenberg agreed to resign only very reluctantly. Moreover, given there are politics involved – to keep the F.D.I.C. in line with Biden’s agenda the Democrats must continue to control three of the five board votes – the president was not keen to replace him. But so far as his underlings are concerned, Gruenberg’s departure cannot come soon enough. They were the ones who threw him under the bus – followers who rebelled against their leader.

In America incidents of follower power have gone from being very rare to not so rare. The recent spate of campus unrest is an example of how increasingly subordinates take on their superiors. But Gruenberg’s turned out a textbook case of how people without power and authority can and now do take on those with.

Gruenberg agreed to resign only after the chair of the Senate Banking Committee called for him to do so. After reviewing a report that was commissioned in response to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, and hearing some of Gruenberg’s subordinates testify, Senator Sherrod Brown said he was left with one conclusion: “There must be fundamental changes at the F.D.I.C. Those changes begin with new leadership, who must fix the agency’s toxic culture and put the women and men who work there – and their mission – first.”  

The report by a prominent law firm, Cleary Gottlieb, concluded that the F.D.I.C. was a “patriarchal, insular, and risk-averse culture” where management’s responses to misconduct were “insufficient and ineffective.” While Gruenberg was not the sole target, he was held responsible for a workplace that had long since been unpleasant to the point of being uncomfortable. Moreover, some of the attacks on him were personal, not just managerial. Gruenberg was said to have an “explosive temper” and to be “misogynistic.” His promise during the Senate hearing to take an anger management course was under the circumstance preposterous – far too little, far too late.

Changes in technology, and in culture, are key to understanding why Gruenberg fell. Both have emboldened followers at the expense of leaders. Moreover, both have made it easier, and more acceptable, for those without authority to take on those with. Here is the sequence they make possible.

• Step 1: Information. Information used to be the private preserve of people with power and, or, authority. No longer.
• Step 2. Expression. Expression once was available only to those granted permission. Now most can speak, and most can be heard, anywhere in the world.
• Step 3. Communication. In the past it was impossible for people in large groups and organizations to communicate with each other. Those days are over – many if not most of us can connect, one to another, in an instant.
• Step 4. Action. Information prompts expression. Expression prompts communication. Communication can and sometimes does prompt action.

It’s a sequence to which Martin Gruenberg can testify. Within the F.D.I.C. information about him and his management style was eventually widely distributed. Employees at the agency were increasingly willing to express their anger and frustration, in some cases so loudly everyone could hear. Eventually one complainant connected with another, and then another and another. Finally, action was taken. Which is why Gruenberg’s time at the top was finally, humilatingly, up.

I’m trying – and failing – not to get frustrated!

Repeatedly, experts on women and power are asked why their numbers remain so low. And, repeatedly, they give the same answers. Answers they’ve given for decades – which, however, have proved insufficient and, therefore, unsatisfactory.

This is not to suggest the answers they give are wrong. Or that their efforts to improve the situation – to increase the number of women in positions of authority – have been for naught. They have not: good intentions have made a difference; with measurably more women leaders now than a generation ago. Still, progress has been slow. Women are stuck in a rut and wonder why.

My return to this subject was prompted by a piece in Monday’s Financial Times, whose headline reads, “Number of US Women Executives Falls.” It’s not, however, the numbers that are disappointing.  No surprise there. What’s exasperating is that experts on women and leadership are still giving the same old answers to the same old questions.

Jennifer McCollum, head of Catalyst, a non-profit that speaks for women in the workforce, is quoted in the article as saying that an “unconscious bias persists” against women.  She adds that women and men with the same talents and skills are still thought of differently, which creates “invisible barriers that can have an enormous impact on women’s advancement.” Carolyn Childers, chief executive of Chief, a network of women executives, also provides a familiar explanation: the post-pandemic return to the workplace has disproportionally hurt women who “still have the majority of childcare.”

McCollum and Childers are not, of course, wrong. But their answers are shopworn. Even in a country such as Sweden, where business and government have done an excellent job developing policies that, for example, encourage equal responsibility for caregiving, the number of women leaders still lags.

Which is precisely why we need a radical relook at the gender gap. This relook focuses not on the similarities between women and men but on the differences. Women are different from men – their brains, their bodies, their minds, their psyches. These differences are relevant to why the number of women in power remains low, and they are important. Until they become part of the discussion, and until their implications are aggressively addressed, large numbers of women are destined if not doomed to be excluded from the C-Suite.

As I wrote in the post linked below: “We pretend the distinctions between the genders either do not exist or do not pertain. But they do.” They do exist and they do pertain – and they matter a lot.

A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap – Barbara Kellerman

Last October, in an earlier post on the increasingly close ties between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, I remarked on their similarities – and their coincident interests. (The link is below.) In the intervening months their alliance became still stronger. Right now Putin is in Beijing to reaffirm his alignment with Xi on a range of geopolitical issues – and their shared antagonism toward the West. A joint statement approved by both leaders declared that China-Russia relations had demonstrated “strength and stability” and were experiencing the “best period in their history.” Putin and Xi were, they agreed, “priority partners,” a claim supported by their having now met, in person, 43 times!

Both leaders recently survived, at least for now, adversity. In Putin’s case among his other challenges a miserable, humiliating start to his war against Ukraine. In Xi’s case among his other challenges a period of China’s declining economic growth and emigrating entrepreneurs. Further, both have recently become more oppressive domestically and more adventurous internationally. Both also realize, even more than before, that the other has something they want. In Putin’s case he wants, and badly needs, China as a trading partner. (China has become Russia’s most important trading partner, buying its commodities, and supplying it with goods including wartime technologies.) In Xi’s case he wants, and badly needs, Russian oil and gas. (Last year Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia as Russia’s biggest supplier of oil.) Finally, both Putin and Xi have come even more than before to recognize that whatever their differences, they pale in comparison with those they have with the West generally, and the United States specifically.

Nothing unsettles the two gorillas – they’re both 800 pounds because while Xi’s China is a much bigger and stronger, Putin’s Russia has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons – more than the thought that they might be dethroned, pushed from their perch. Given that both have either literally or effectively anointed themselves leaders for life, it’s of primary importance to them that they stand up to the West. That they establish themselves as an immutable, impregnable, bulwark against anything vaguely resembling messy, and threatening, democracy.

An article in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs titled, “The Axis of Upheaval,” makes the argument that along with Russia and China, Iran and North Korea constitute “a collection of dissatisfied states converging on a shared purpose.”* This purpose is to challenge the dominance of the United States, which even now remains the epitome of democracy globally, and presides over the principles and institutions that continue to underpin the international system.

Presuming this axis of upheaval is real, the junior partners are Iran and North Korea; the senior ones are Russia and China. What this means is that Putin and Xi have an outsized impact not only on what happens in Russia and China but on what happens on the entire global stage: in Ukraine and Europe; in Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East; in Taiwan and the South China Sea; in South Korea, Venezuela, and Nigeria.

And … in the United States. At a time when America’s politics are so fraught, and its body politic is so fractious, make no mistake. It’s in the political, economic, and military interest of Putin and Xi further to roil our waters. Moreover, together these 800-lb gorillas present a far greater threat than either would alone.

The point of this piece is that they are not alone. By joining forces, Putin in alliance with Xi will bestow on whoever is American president foreign policy and domestic challenges greater than any the U.S. has experienced since the coldest days of the Cold War.  

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Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin

*The authors are Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine.