The Strongman Delusion

In politics, rhetoric is easy. A leader can pound a podium, raise a fist, and declare that problems which have stumped experts for decades are, in fact, simple. Trade deals? Easy. Wars? Winnable. Diplomacy? Personal. This illusion—that the world will bend to willpower—is the oldest political fantasy. It wins elections, fills stadiums, and fuels movements. But once the rally ends, the world remains stubbornly complex. Governing is not performance. Reality does not yield to slogans.

Again and again, history punishes those who forget this.

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan under the pretense of restoring order and propping up a friendly regime. The Kremlin believed it would be a short, decisive mission—an assertion of Soviet strength, a reaffirmation of ideological superiority. But the terrain was brutal, the tribal divisions ancient, and the mujahideen—armed covertly by the CIA under Operation Cyclone—were relentless. What Moscow expected to be a stabilizing intervention devolved into a ten-year quagmire that drained resources, morale, and political credibility. The Soviet withdrawal in 1989 wasn’t just a military failure. It was a symptom of imperial hubris, and a harbinger of collapse. The fantasy of control had shattered on the rocks of a reality no ideology could tame.

That lesson—about the danger of oversimplifying complexity—has been taught repeatedly, and just as often ignored.

President Donald Trump made a career of believing he could bend global systems through personal force of will. He ignored intelligence briefings, ridiculed expert consensus, and dismissed foreign alliances as bad deals to be renegotiated like real estate contracts. He believed, or at least claimed to believe, that long-standing geopolitical fault lines could be massaged into submission through charisma and threat. In the case of Ukraine, he tried to coerce an ally into political favor rather than bolster their defenses. He gambled that transactional bullying could substitute for strategy. When war eventually broke out, the scaffolding meant to prevent it had already been weakened by neglect.

This pattern was not limited to foreign policy. Trump's economic agenda was built on another seductive fiction: that global trade, supply chains, and decades of industrial migration could be undone by decree. His administration launched a trade war with China, insisting that tariffs would punish Beijing and bring jobs back to American soil. But tariffs are not paid by foreign governments—they are paid by domestic consumers and businesses. Prices rose. Manufacturers rerouted to other low-wage countries. Farmers lost vital export markets and were bailed out with subsidies funded by taxpayers. The very policies sold as a path to prosperity ended up requiring government intervention to soften their self-inflicted wounds.

The strongman fantasy rests on the belief that economic complexity can be bulldozed. That with enough force—enough threats, enough tweets, enough flags waved from podiums—an economy built over generations can be reshaped in weeks. But the global economy is not a game of chess. It is a lattice of interdependent relationships, laws, labor flows, and logistics networks. Breaking one strand creates ripples far beyond national borders. It’s not about making deals. It’s about understanding systems—and strongmen don’t do systems. They do spectacle.

The United Kingdom learned this the hard way. Brexit was marketed as an act of liberation—freedom from Brussels bureaucracy, a restoration of sovereignty, a rebirth of British industry. The slogans were simple, emotional, and effective. But once the vote was won, the reality of unraveling decades of economic integration set in. Trade deals that were promised as quick fixes took years. Labor shortages hit key sectors. Inflation rose. Small businesses folded. Britain found itself diminished on the world stage, not empowered. Sovereignty had not returned—it had fractured.

Diplomacy, too, has not escaped the allure of simplicity. From Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated handshake with Adolf Hitler in 1938 to modern-day photo ops between Western leaders and authoritarian regimes, there persists a fantasy that charm, unpredictability, or personal chemistry can tame despots. Chamberlain’s famous “peace for our time” declaration dissolved in smoke within months. In recent years, President Trump insisted that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un would denuclearize simply because he had made a good impression. He praised Vladimir Putin while undermining NATO. He sided with autocrats over his own intelligence agencies. None of it brought peace. What it did bring was emboldened aggression, weakened alliances, and a global order increasingly shaped by opportunists.

Even in war, strongmen continue to promise what history does not support. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, orchestrated by the Bush administration, was sold as a clean break—a swift regime change, a grateful populace, and a domino effect of democracy. The reality was insurgency, civil war, the rise of ISIS, and a legacy of regional destabilization that endures to this day. “Mission Accomplished” was declared long before any mission had been achieved. It was yet another example of strength mistaken for strategy.

The common thread through all these failures—Soviet, American, British—is the refusal to engage with the world as it is. It is the belief that expertise is elitism, that complexity is cowardice, and that willpower alone can reorder reality. This mindset does not come from ignorance, but from arrogance. It is seductive because it promises clarity in a world that offers none. But that promise is a lie.

Strongmen win elections by feeding that lie. They speak in absolutes, scoff at nuance, and brand anyone who urges caution as weak. They conflate loyalty with obedience, and confuse disruption with reform. But governing is not about domination—it’s about navigation. It requires listening to unglamorous experts, honoring boring treaties, and making compromises that don’t fit on campaign posters.

The fantasy persists, though. Every generation produces its own strongman, and every time, a segment of the population buys in, convinced that this time, the myth will be made real. That this time, the world will yield. That this time, force will work where thought has failed.

But it never does.

Wars are never as easy as they seem. Economies do not submit to slogans. Authoritarians do not respond to charm. The reality is uncooperative. It resists simplification. And no matter how loud the rhetoric or how firm the handshake, it will not bend.

It breaks those who try to bend it.