“Strongmen”: the most dangerous rivals of Western oligarchs

Three weeks ago, just hours after Iranian retaliation against military targets in Israel, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to issue a statement condemning Iran and expressing strong support for Israel's right to self-defense. His description of the event was instructive: the Iranian regime launched more than 200 ballistic missiles at civilian targets in Israel. Of course, it was widely accepted that no missile had hit a civilian area or damaged non-military infrastructure. Yet this seems to be irrelevant. As might be expected, what was to be declared publicly was proclaimed literally.

Last week, Starmer's remarks on Israel's counter-response once again fell as expected. This time, he characterized the Israeli strikes as strikes against military targets in Iran, emphasizing his selective but very precise understanding of the nature of the targets. And his clarity on Israel's right to self-defense was, as always, unblemished. As robotic and boring as it was, his speech did not fail to meet what was expected of him.

Could Starmer have done otherwise? Would he have dared to deviate from the beaten path? Such a divergence seems unthinkable, not only for him but also for many Western leaders caught in similar situations. Here we see the force of influence wielded by the empire, an influence that resists all challenges except, it seems, a handful of so-called strongmen.

The strongman label itself is telling. It serves a distinct political function, reserved for leaders who resist total submission to the United States and its demands for loyalty. These figures, whether guided by national interest or, sometimes, personal ambition, fail to meet the empire's standards of servility. Instead, they are tied to their electorate or sense of self-determined autonomy, two motivations that are almost synonymous when driven by electoral legitimacy. The roll call of these figures includes Latin American leaders like Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega and Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), as well as heads of state from the United States' main global rivals, Russia and China. Trkiyes Recep Tayyip Erdoan, the most elected politician in his country's history, is also a recurring name on this list.

Yet we rarely see this label applied to figures in the American establishment, no matter how concentrated their powers or unchecked influence, particularly in international affairs. The term “strongman” is primarily reserved for leaders of nations who act in a manner that contravenes the economic or geopolitical interests of the United States, so that no serious observer will have the slightest doubt about this procedure. However, some experts (like William Partlett in a recent article in The Conversation) have also called former US President Trump a strongman (or, at least, suggested that he aspired to be one). In attempting to portray him as some sort of exception within the empire's political establishment, Partlett inadvertently depicts an American power structure attuned to precisely such a figure on the world stage, an international strongman under a other name.

And who is behind this image if not the upper echelons of American economic power, the leaders of transnational corporations, those who profit from and thus defend the rules-based international order that the United States is determined to uphold? This effort is remarkably coherent, as corporate interests feed into government policy, forming a mutually reinforcing force that dictates international conduct. In this sense, the national application of the term strongman seems misplaced. This implies that strongman authority as a concept is incompatible with the American power structure when, in reality, it is actually an essential part of how the empire exercises its influence abroad .

If this thesis is correct, then the arbiters of strongman designation can be most effectively challenged by a rival economic and geopolitical structure, and it is precisely these strongmen who must accomplish this task. From the point of view of the Western oligarchy, the autocratic character of a strongman constitutes the most dangerous obstacle to global hegemony; and what they call democracy, on the other hand, provides the tools necessary to maintain a structure in which they can accumulate wealth and democratically assert dominance among themselves. I suspect that it is by challenging the legitimacy of this structure that BRICS poses a serious threat to American interests. The empire might view the recent BRICS summit in Kazan as a strongman meeting, that is, a gathering of leaders who are not just career politicians but who, for better or worse , demonstrate a certain form of character in their political decisions. They seem to find common ground in not slavishly obeying the orders of what is essentially a powerful and grotesquely arrogant men's club.

The Sabah Daily News Bulletin

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