The Rise of the Personalist Global Order

In the end, it may have been the dancing. “He gets up there and he tries to imitate my dance,” said U.S. President Donald Trump in a January 6 speech, explaining why he had ordered the American military to fly into Caracas in the dead of night, seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and bring them to the United States to face criminal charges. Trump had other reasons, too. Maduro, he said, was a drug trafficker. He led a repressive authoritarian government. He was reluctant to give U.S. companies preferential access to Venezuelan oil. But few experts believe that Caracas plays a significant role in the drug trade, and Trump has left the remainder of Venezuela’s violent regime nearly intact. And while the White House certainly wants Venezuelan oil, Maduro had already offered Trump nearly unlimited access to his country’s crude after months of pressure.

But Maduro kept on dancing. At rallies in Caracas, he jerked his arms back and forth in a slightly more acrobatic version of Trump’s own moves. And for the White House, that seems to have been too much. Maduro’s “regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some on the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them,” The New York Times reported the day after the extraction. “So the White House decided to follow through on its military threats.”

For scholars of American foreign policy, the idea that a U.S. president—even Trump—would decapitate a foreign government because he felt mocked may seem shocking. But Trump is a personalist leader: one that concentrates power around himself and his inner circle. Personalists differ from ordinary autocrats or dictators in that they hollow out the governing bodies and institutions—like political parties, militaries, and bureaucracies—that support the regime and would otherwise channel policy options through mechanisms of collective deliberation shaped by the authoritarian’s vision. Personalists are instead driven purely by their own private fixations and incentives rather than coherent national interests. In Trump’s case, those fixations include flattery, personal enrichment, gaining access to natural resources, and dominating the Western Hemisphere. And for a leader with these aims, attacking Venezuela and taking Maduro made sense. That it does not advance Washington’s global position—the strike was roundly condemned by many U.S. allies and is likely to prompt Latin America to hedge against a more menacing Washington—does not matter at all. “My own morality. My own mind,” Trump told The New York Times when asked if there were limits on his global power. “It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law.”

Trump is hardly the only personalist in power. For the first time since the 1930s, the world’s most powerful countries—China, Russia, and the United States—are all governed by personalist leaders. They hoard authority and silo themselves in informational bubbles. Chinese leader Xi Jinping, for example, has centralized policymaking and repeatedly purged senior officials, discouraging deliberation among his advisers. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also concentrated power and retreated into a self-made echo chamber. Driven by a personal preoccupation with revisionist Russian history, he lectures the world on historical figures like Rurik of Novgorod and Yaroslav the Wise, who he claims justify Moscow’s ownership of Ukraine.

The fact that personalist rulers are not bound by formal institutions or diplomatic norms may occasionally create space for surprise deals that resolve conflicts. But a world led by personalist great powers will not aid global stability. Studies of personalist regimes consistently show they are more reckless, aggressive, and conflict prone than other kinds of governments. They are more likely to break alliances, stumble into crises, and start dumb wars. These effects will be amplified now that the world’s strongest states are controlled by isolated and unaccountable leaders. A personalist global order, in other words, is one of increasing corruption, volatility, and violence.

THREE’S A CROWD

Personalist governments are hardly a new phenomenon. For centuries, absolutist monarchs around the world pursued foreign policy objectives based largely on their whims and familial grievances. They waged wars over personal slights and territorial claims rooted in family honor. Charles XII of Sweden, for instance, repeatedly refused reasonable peace offers during the Great Northern War because of a personal obsession with defeating Russia’s Peter the Great, ultimately destroying his own country’s great-power status.

But personalist systems declined over the course of the twentieth century as large parts of the world democratized and many autocracies professionalized, dispersing power among top officials or at least providing ways for regime officials to question the state’s leader. The world still had its personalist one-man systems, such as the Kim dynasty in North Korea, but they became the exception. Many twentieth-century autocracies, however brutal, were not personalist because they still allowed deliberation in service of the ruler’s vision. The Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev operated with a sclerotic but genuinely collective approach to leadership. After the death of Mao Zedong, China explicitly designed its political system to prevent one-man rule, instituting term limits and requiring consensus among top leaders. Even military juntas in Latin America typically governed through councils that rotated power or required agreement among service branches. These regimes were repressive, but they were not extensions of a single leader’s psyche.

Yet personalism, with its distinctive fusion of unchecked authority and individual caprice, has made a comeback, with Russia leading the way. Since coming to power 27 years ago, Putin has neutered opposition parties and the Russian parliament, stacked the courts with judges willing to defend his desired policies, and packed the bureaucracy with favored underlings. And he has increasingly routed his policies through a shrinking inner circle selected for their fealty instead of their expertise, which distorts his perception of reality.

The personalist nature of Putin’s rule helps explain his catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine. His historical musings, coupled with his physical isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, produced the flawed thinking that led him to conclude that conquest was necessary and easily achievable. As many analysts observed before Russia began its drive toward Kyiv in 2022, any attempt to conquer Ukraine was likely to be prolonged and extremely costly. But no one, it seemed, dared tell Putin. Even today, he has blind spots in his assessments about the Russian army’s ability to fight and Ukraine’s capacity to resist—illusions nurtured by his small cadre of yes men who tout Russian tactical gains, inflate the numbers of Ukrainian casualties, and emphasize Russia’s material advantage.

Personalists are more likely to break alliances, stumble into crises, and start dumb wars.

As Russia has fallen ever deeper into personalism, so has its southern neighbor: China. The People’s Republic of China has never been a democracy, but for a while its governing Communist Party adopted a relatively collaborative style of leadership. The party’s leader had term limits. Other members of the Politburo had independent power and, behind closed doors, the freedom to debate and question decisions. But no more. Under Xi, China has become an increasingly tightly controlled system. Xi has, for example, abolished term limits and fired internal critics. Repeated purges of senior military officials reflect Xi’s lack of trust in the loyalty and preparedness of the People’s Liberation Army. His top advisers, like Putin’s, also appear to be yes men. The result has been a series of high-profile errors. Xi’s government, for instance, refused for months to abandon its “zero COVID” policy, which implemented extraordinarily severe social restrictions, even though it failed to contain the disease and resulted in immense economic damage. Beijing’s aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy, which involved berating and insulting officials from other foreign governments, needlessly alienated potential partners but played well with Xi. China’s economy has continued to expand, and Xi may thus far appear to be more rational than Putin to outside observers. But personalist systems tend to corrode rationality and promote overconfidence as leaders become entrenched over time.

And then there is Trump. The U.S. president leads an unusual type of personalist system. He still faces legal constraints and meaningful opposition, unlike Xi or Putin. But he is bypassing long-standing institutional checks in pursuit of personally motivated actions, such as his threats about Greenland and the lucrative real estate and crypto deals his family has secured abroad. Dragging Greenland into American custody would be wildly counterproductive to U.S. interests, eviscerating the NATO alliance that has helped the United States project power across much of the world for over 75 years. Existing treaties already allow Washington to set up multiple naval bases across the island. But that is no matter for Trump, who insists the United States should possess Greenland because he has been denied the Nobel Peace Prize, or because possession is what he personally desires. “That’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” he said on January 8.

The United States, unlike China and Russia, has plenty of loud critics of its leader. But that does not mean the president is giving them any consideration. Trump has cultivated an inner circle that resembles Putin’s in its capacity for subservience. The president has sidelined the normal interagency policymaking process and pushed out career officials. In doing so, he has eliminated channels for disciplined, professional advice in favor of courtiers and sycophants, like Steve Witkoff, real estate friend turned U.S. special envoy, and Pete Hegseth, Fox News host turned defense secretary. Meanwhile, he mistrusts and attacks traditional experts if their beliefs run contrary to his own, such as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump has threatened to fire and prosecute for refusing to lower interest rates. Unlike in his first term, nobody close to Trump now has the desire or resolve to contradict him.

This system has weakened Trump’s already tenuous relationship to reality. Consider, for example, the Trump-Putin summit last August. In the leadup to the event, Witkoff, acting as Trump’s Russia envoy, assured Trump that Putin was ready to negotiate a fair cessation of hostilities based on mutual respect while simultaneously signaling to Moscow that Washington was prepared to force Ukrainian territorial concessions. It was a classic example of information filtering: a courtier telling his patron what he wanted to hear rather than the truth. The result was a disastrous meeting for the White House. Instead of jumpstarting peace talks, Trump endured another historical lecture from Russia’s leader. The fighting in Ukraine, meanwhile, has continued.

THE PERSONALIST IS POLITICAL

The rise of personalism makes it difficult to speculate about the future of the global order. Many commentators, for instance, have pointed to Trump’s apparent affinity for strongmen, including Xi and Putin, as evidence that the United States is preparing to form a kind of tripartite pact with the world’s biggest authoritarians. There is something to this. Trump’s actions in Venezuela and rhetoric on Greenland, his apparent willingness to concede Russian primacy in eastern Europe, and his transactional approach to Taiwan all suggest a world view amenable to spheres of influence. But personalist leaders make poor partners, even for one another. To really grant one another spheres of influence, Putin, Trump, and Xi would need to exercise mutual restraint, which personalist leaders lack. Other analysts continue to proclaim a return to great-power competition. But this framework, too, does not fit a personalist global system. Today’s great-power leaders want the things they are fixated on—oil, Taiwan, Ukraine—and will compete over those. But they will not jockey to make their countries more prosperous and secure on the whole.

A personalist global system is one of uncertainty, corruption, and private bargains. Self-interested leaders are open to showy deals that discard or weaken alliances and entrenched commitments in exchange for immediate personal victories. The Trump administration’s attempt to orchestrate a comprehensive land-for-peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is one example. So is Trump’s effort to secure a grand bargain with China, in which Beijing would increase its purchases of U.S. goods and, if the past is any guide, offer commercial advantages to businesses that are connected to him. In exchange, Trump might consider reducing U.S. support for Taiwan—the president has vacillated on how much to back it—or lifting export restrictions. Trump has already loosened restrictions on computing chips, giving China a boost in its artificial intelligence rivalry with the United States. This decision prompted widespread dismay among Washington’s foreign policy establishment but could prove extremely lucrative for Trump’s allies in the tech world, who have been able to lobby the president directly thanks to Silicon Valley billionaire David Sacks, his crypto and AI adviser.

Such settlements may become more likely in a personalist global system. But they will also be fleeting. In institutionalized governments, international deals depend on bureaucratic machinery, but personalist arrangements are leader-to-leader productions marketed as a ruler’s special genius. They are thinly institutionalized and therefore brittle, guided more by theatrical summits than enforceable provisions. Trump’s first-term deals with North Korea offer a clear illustration. Trump’s outreach to Pyongyang produced a flashy meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but pledges to denuclearize in exchange for sanctions relief and security guarantees went nowhere. After the cameras left, Pyongyang returned to building warheads even as Trump proclaimed victory. A future bargain between Trump and Xi over Taiwan could have the same fate.

Personalist leaders make poor partners, even for one another.

Alliances, likewise, waver in a personalist world. Leaders might embrace a country one day only to abandon it the next. Trump’s hostility to NATO, for example, stems directly from his personalist view of statecraft. He believes that foreign policy is a running ledger of payments and favors, and because other NATO states have spent less on defense than Washington, they all owe the United States money or other resources. The fact that the organization has a long-running history, with joint planning committees, a central organization, and intergovernmental relationships, is irrelevant. Personalist leaders dispense with these formalities. They loosen and tighten alliances according to private preferences or relationships. Trump is therefore uniquely able to offer Putin concessions on NATO, including, perhaps, a tacit acceptance of Russian primacy in the former Soviet states the Kremlin claims as its sphere of influence. But such personalist flexibility also makes Washington into a less reliable partner. U.S. allies will hedge more and spend greater amounts on their own militaries in the years to come, weakening American leverage. The same is true for China’s and Russia’s partners; neither Xi nor Putin can make credible commitments. The result is a fracturing global system with countries that strike out on their own.

The global system will also be less democratic. Personalist leaders may occasionally spring from liberal states—as did Trump—but their style of governance is extremely hard to square with electoral democracy, and they care little for it. Putin, Trump, and Xi all appear to agree that democracy is an outmoded way to manage a country, and this shared disdain suggests a future in which it continues to erode worldwide. Washington has effectively abandoned democracy promotion and is forging links with authoritarian leaders who provide benefits to Trump in exchange for their own protection. When illiberal Argentinian President Javier Milei was faltering, for example, Trump handed his government a $20 billion lifeline, allowing the country to right its finances just in time for its midterm elections. Milei’s party then mounted a furious comeback. The bailout rescued the investments of a hedge fund manager with close personal ties to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had lobbied for the deal.

TOMORROW’S TROUBLE

The flexibility that personalist rulers afford themselves might make it easier to solve some conflicts. But it is just as likely to start others. Russia is so overstretched in Ukraine, for instance, that further confrontation now seems reckless and unlikely. But many experts thought that Putin wasn’t rash enough to start a major war before the 2022 invasion, and he did so anyway because his insular system had become incapable of producing accurate risk assessments. If his yes men tell him the the Baltics will fold in a two-day operation, he might believe them.

In a fractured personalist world, there will be far fewer checks to stop these leaders from acting on their impulses. If personalist leaders wind up squaring off against each other during a crisis, they may be more likely to escalate than would normal leaders. Personalists, after all, are reassured by sycophantic advisers and thus have fewer reasons to stand down. This tendency is alarming given that China, Russia, and the United States possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenals and that guardrails against further proliferation appear to be collapsing. (Research shows that personalist regimes are more likely to seek nuclear weapons.) The United States withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia in Trump’s first term, and the president has recently floated a return to nuclear testing.

The potential flashpoints are already visible. In Europe, Putin’s appetite for territorial expansion hasn’t been sated by Ukraine, leaving the continent’s east vulnerable to aggression. (According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Russian sabotage operations across Europe have already quadrupled over the past year.) In East Asia, Xi has implied that Taiwan’s absorption is a matter of personal legacy, not merely national interest, and as Ukraine shows, personalist leaders are willing to pay high costs for legacy projects. Trump has outwardly pledged to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the Middle East, already volatile, offers especially rich ground for personalist miscalculation, given that China, Russia, and the United States all have energy interests in the region

The emerging global system is one in which three nuclear-armed leaders, insulated from dissent, pursue risky gambits. The result will not be the relatively stable if tense competition that characterized the Cold War. It will be something more volatile: a world in which the most consequential decisions rest on the whims of men who have systematically discarded anyone willing to tell them no.

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