Trump, Putin and Xi – a year of tough-guy leaders and foolish brinkmanship

A look back at 12 months of spreading authoritarianism and huge egos the world over, with Beijing and Moscow making the most of weak and volatile US leadership

It was the year of the hard man – the tough-guy leader with a ruthless streak and a big ego. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin, a role model for the genre, strengthened his harsh grip on domestic politics while intensifying Russia’s cyber-digital “war of influence” with the west. In Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, attained a kind of immortality when his unoriginal thoughts were enshrined in the Communist party constitution. In Washington, Donald Trump enacted a charlatan parody of the US presidency, blending power and ignorance to an alarming degree.

The heavy mob attracted a cohort of emulators and imitators – “little big men” such as Kim Jong-un, the inexperienced, nuclear-armed North Korean dictator and Rodrigo Duterte, the homicidal president of the Philippines. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s choleric president, worked assiduously to dismantle his country’s secular democratic tradition, using a failed 2016 coup as a pretext. Saudi Arabia’s uncrowned leader and ostensible reformer, the youthful Prince Mohammad bin Salman, made a series of clumsy regional power plays.

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