In 1999 the late Boris Berezovsky had lunch with the editor and senior journalists of the FT. I had already met him in Moscow on several occasions. Berezovsky had just played a role in persuading those close to Boris Yeltsin to appoint Vladimir Putin, then head of the FSB, Russia’s security service (whom Berezovsky had known when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg), to be prime minister and his successor as president.
“Why”, I asked, “did you trust a former KGB agent with power?” I have long remembered his reply: “Russia,” he said, was “now a capitalist country. In capitalist countries capitalists hold power.”
My jaw metaphorically dropped. Berezovsky was an intelligent, ruthless and cynical man who had lived much of his life in the Soviet Union. He was also a Russian who knew Russia’s brutal history. Yet he appeared to believe Marxist claptrap about where power would lie in supposedly “capitalist” Russia.
Of course, he was wrong. Power lay in the hands of the man in the Kremlin, where it always had. Perhaps I am too harsh on him. Western leaders seem to think that sanctions on Russian oligarchs might influence Putin. I have no idea why.
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In any case within a year of Putin’s accession, Berezovsky, who had become a severe critic, had been driven out of Russia to the UK. In 2013 he died either by suicide or by murder.
Berezovsky’s fate says something important. Wealth is a source of power if and only if it is protected by a law-governed state. Under a despotism power gives wealth. It is the tyrant’s plaything: he can give, but he can also take away.
The US is not Russia. Donald Trump is not Putin. Nevertheless, Trump has made it clear that he would like to use the office of president to punish his enemies. Indeed, he has specifically referred to former representative Liz Cheney, president Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris as his targets.
His “justification” is what he sees as his own persecution. But he did in fact try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election by encouraging an invasion of the Capitol by “patriots” on January 6th, 2021, and putting pressure on vice-president Mike Pence not to certify the results. The “big lie” of a stolen election has even become a shared belief of the Republican Party.
The question arises: are the oligarchs who are trying to make Trump president and JD Vance vice-president – the latter a man who has declared he would not have certified that election – about to learn what it means to have a tyrant as president? Yes, someone who attempts a coup against the electoral process – the very heart of democracy – is a would-be tyrant. So is someone who may fill his government with people personally loyal to him. Nobody then can truly be safe except loyalists and sycophants.
In the past the power of the US president has been contained by a strong civic morality, by the decency of its senior political figures, by an independent judiciary and by independent political parties. But much of this has been eroded.
Given all this the re-election of Trump will have global implications. The damage done to the credibility of democracy is already noteworthy: confidence has been eroded, not just in US democracy but in democracy itself. This will get worse.
Liberal democracy in the US is not all that is at stake. So too is America’s future in the world. It does not seem to have occurred to the new American right that abandoning Ukraine and possibly current Nato members to Russia will affect US ability to make alliances against China. If I were Japanese I would be nervous.
It has not occurred to them either, it appears, that reneging on the trade agreements the US itself helped to create, including the World Trade Organisation, will inevitably make the country appear an unreliable economic partner. Trump the businessman has been a serial bankrupt. The US will not retain its credibility as an economic actor if that is how it behaves.
Then there is the Trump who believes not just in high tariffs but in tax cuts for the rich and a weak dollar. He is also, when convenient, a believer in low interest rates and no believer in the independence of the Federal Reserve. The idea that one can simultaneously support a huge hike in the costs of imports, via tariffs, which would reduce US demand for foreign exchange, while expecting the dollar to fall in value against those very currencies is incoherent. The opposite should normally happen.
But if the already large fiscal deficit were to be further expanded and the Fed were bullied into loosening monetary policy, the dollar might indeed crash, as in the 1970s. That would be a big mess.
Most important of all for the world’s future might not be Trump the would-be tyrant, Trump the betrayer, Trump the protectionist or Trump the devaluer, but Trump the man who pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate when president.
Right now we have a very slim chance of keeping the increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels below 1.5C. If another Trump term sabotaged hopes of progress that chance would almost certainly have gone, with possibly disastrous consequences. But Trump, the “very stable genius”, just “knows” that the greenhouse effect is a hoax. It is in fact a threat, but one we can, just about, still defeat. Trump might be the leader who ensures failure.
The plutocrats who support Trump may remain safer than Berezovsky. But can they really be as free as they want? Yes, a further erosion of democracy might protect them from interference by the elected politicians they detest. But the men they put in power in their stead have a tendency to turn themselves into absolute rulers. Nobody can then be truly safe. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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