In authoritarian systems, national interests and objectives often conflict with the leader’s beliefs, desires and insecurities. The more centralized power is, the more likely it is that the latter will win out. Versions of this dynamic are currently playing out in China — where President Xi Jinping’s paranoid purges recently claimed the two most senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) — and in Russia and the United States.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 perfectly illustrates this tension. Just a few years earlier, Russia was emerging as a global force in financial technology, with Brand Finance Banking 500 ranking the majority-state-owned Sberbank as the world’s strongest banking brand. In 2019, the Russian Direct Investment Fund reportedly raised $2 billion from foreign investors to support domestic companies developing AI solutions — part of Russia’s broader effort to strengthen its start-up ecosystem.

As Putin put it in 2020, “high-level technology” was vital to secure the future of Russia’s “distinct civilization.” But technological innovation cannot flourish without intellectual freedom and access to global knowledge. The Ukraine war — a product of Putin’s great-power fantasies — has led to the destruction of both. It also exposed the corruption of Russia’s military industries and officer corps: the war’s early months were defined by shoddy equipment and incompetent battle plans. This incited a purge of military officers and corporate bosses unseen in Russia since the fall of communism.

Today, Russia remains locked in a grinding war of attrition. And while Putin still emphasizes the importance of technological leadership, Russia is undergoing “reverse industrialization,” with high-tech industries largely taking a backseat to the more labor-intensive sectors of the military-industrial complex.

Like Putin, Xi lets his personal whims and weaknesses — including a historical chip on his shoulder and dreams of an imperial legacy — shape his policies, not least his “unstoppable” plan to deliver “reunification” with Taiwan. But his apparent obsession with eliminating threats to his own power, whether from powerful generals or corporate titans like Jack Ma of Alibaba, might be his Achilles’ heel.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has culled more than 200,000 officials, including many PLA officers, under the guise of an anti-corruption drive. Last October, nine generals were removed for “disciplinary violations” and “duty-related crimes.” Some 29 of the country’s 42 most senior military leaders have been sacked and some disappeared, since 2023. Add to that the recent removal of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, who are now being investigated for “serious violations of discipline and law,” and the PLA is now all but devoid of senior officers with actual combat experience.

China could pay dearly for Xi’s paranoia — as could Xi himself — because creating a power vacuum in the military is risky business. Josef Stalin learned this after the Great Terror of 1936-38, when 80 out of the Red Army’s top 100 admirals and generals, and as many as 30,000 of its members, were executed. The purged officers — including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army’s modernizer, as well as Vasily Blyukher and Alexander Yegorov — were accused of conspiring with Germany to oust Stalin.

So desperate was the Red Army for competent military leadership as war in Europe erupted that one purged commander, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, was released from the gulag in 1940 and subsequently returned to high command. He would go on to lead one of the Red Army’s pincer arms in the 1945 march to Berlin. When Nikita Khrushchev delivered his bombshell “secret speech” to the highest-ranking Soviet communists in 1956, he said the quiet part aloud: Stalin’s desperation to protect his own power had left the Soviet Union vulnerable to the Nazi invasion and likely prolonged World War II.

This lesson is lost on U.S. President Donald Trump. There was a time when Trump (who avoided service in Vietnam) delighted in surrounding himself with respected generals. During his first term, he named James Mattis as secretary of defense, John Kelly as secretary of Homeland Security and then chief of staff and H.R. McMaster served as a national security adviser, often referring to them as “my generals.” But Trump soon became frustrated with their commitment to maintaining U.S. alliances and upholding the military’s apolitical norms, and fired them.

When Trump returned to the White House last year, he was determined not to make the same “mistake.” He selected a defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who is fully committed to the MAGA cause, including eliminating diversity initiatives, ousting many senior military leaders (many of them black or female) and erecting new barriers for women and racial minorities. Never mind that Hegseth, a former Fox News talking head, is woefully unqualified. Devotion to Trump absolves mistakes that would get an intern fired — like accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal chat in which senior officials are discussing the details of an impending military strike.

Putting a smarmy loyalist in charge of the U.S. military means there is no one to caution Trump against his pursuit of an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, including an attack on Venezuela, threats to annex Greenland, a blockade of Cuba and preparations for an assault on Iran. The Trump administration now refers to the Department of Defense as the Department of War (though Congress has yet to approve a name change).

But, like any good authoritarian, Trump is as concerned about projecting power at home as he is about doing so abroad. So, he has sent poorly trained Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, decked out in military gear, to sow terror in U.S. cities. The peaceful protesters ICE agents have beaten, pepper-sprayed and shot dead, have been branded domestic terrorists, and citizens who so much as complain about ICE’s actions online are reportedly being put on a watch list. MAGA is an ideology of domination, enacted by loyalists of varying competence.

This hardly scratches the surface of all the ways Trump’s loyalty tests and insecurity are undermining America’s interests. The difference between him and his authoritarian counterparts is that midterm elections are approaching fast in the U.S., and, with his approval rating at just 37%, he may not yet have the ability to purge the country of the majority of voters.

© The Japan Times