What if, in the ruins of the liberal international order, the world is spiralling back not to the fascist 1930s, not to the gunboat imperialism of the late nineteenth century, but all the way back to the rule of warrior princes, and their predatory cliques, in early modern Europe?

That’s where two American political scientists, Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman, believe we are headed: a world ruled by authoritarians who extract resources from their subjects and from their neighbours, with violence or threats of coercion, to enrich their families and their courtiers.

They think we’re being forced back into a pre-modern past before the United Nations Charter, before Westphalia, before the emergence of the modern state order. Calling this future “neo-royalist,” however, doesn’t sound quite right. It gives the new authoritarians a royal prestige that the princes of old—Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Bourbons—had by virtue of birth and lineage, but which the new authoritarians can only pretend to.

Our new leaders are more John Gotti than Louis XIV. When United States president Donald Trump shows up at Davos, he parades like the Sun King and threatens like a mafia don. If, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said, we are not in a transition but a rupture, what has been ruptured is the very way the world’s most powerful leader understands his power, exercises it, and performs his legitimacy.

Neo-royalism is too kind to this performance. It doesn’t capture the modern authoritarians’ opera buffa, made-for-television, rhetorical style. For just beneath the mafia don’s menace, there is the frantic belief that if he doesn’t “flood the zone” with insatiable bids for attention, the emperor will be seen without clothes.

What the scholars have gotten right, on the other hand, is that the new authoritarians, not just Trump, do exercise power like the lawless princes and condottiere of old. These........

© The Walrus