As often happens, Trump breaks with American presidential traditions more in style than in substance. In reality, the 45th and 47th president is in a tradition of realist presidents, going back to Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago, who have viewed world politics as a great-power club, rather than an arena for idealism.

In brokering the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, for example, Theodore Roosevelt accepted a Japanese sphere of influence in Korea, South Manchuria, and Sakhalin Island as the price of maintaining a balance of power in East Asia between Russia and Japan. In his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, TR said that “it would be a masterstroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others”.

This realist tradition endured the reign of the arch-idealist Woodrow Wilson. Following the entry of the United States into World War I, Wilson asked his adviser Col. Edward M. House to draw up plans for a postwar League of Nations. House suggested to Wilson that such a body “might be confined to the great powers”. In a diary entry at the time, House wrote: “Why permit [smaller powers] to exercise a directing hand upon nations having to furnish not only the financial but the physical force necessary to maintain order and peace? I am sorry to come to this conclusion, because it does not seem toward the trend of liberalism. However, the idealist who is not practical oftentimes does a cause more harm than those frankly reactionary.”

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Wilson’s eventual plan for the League of Nations failed to win ratification in the US Senate, thanks precisely to the realists. Some of these, like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, favored a US-British treaty with France to deter future German aggression but thought that the League of Nations was a utopian experiment doomed to failure.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often held up as an avatar by the internationalists, was much more in the realist grain than they would like to admit. FDR, who had served as assistant secretary of the Navy in the Wilson administration, sought to avoid his ex-boss’s mistakes in his own thinking about world order after the defeat of the Axis powers. Roosevelt put his hopes for the postwar world in “the Big Four” or “the Four Policemen”: the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China, which would dominate their respective regions, while smaller countries might have “ostensible” participation.

The only “policeman” with a democratic form of government was the United States: Winston Churchill’s Britain ruled its empire outside of the British Isles undemocratically, Stalin’s Soviet Russia was a communist dictatorship, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China was an anticommunist dictatorship. When the Declaration of the United Nations (the term for the anti-Axis alliance coined by FDR) was signed on Jan. 1, 1941, the Big Four signed it first; the other 12 members of the alliance had to wait until the following day.

In wartime Britain, too, realism dominated thinking about the postwar world to come. Like FDR, Churchill was skeptical about global institutions in which each state, no matter how small and weak, had equal authority. In 1943, Churchill proposed that a “Supreme World Council” run by the great powers that would oversee regional councils for Europe, the Pacific, and the Western hemisphere. In a visit with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill came up with what he referred to as his “naughty document” — a secret agreement that assigned shares of influence in Central Europe and the Balkans to Britain and the Soviet Union. Greece was to be 90% under British influence and 10% under Soviet influence, Yugoslavia and Hungary were to be 50% British and 50%, and so on.

Focused on winning the war, FDR delegated postwar planning for the permanent United Nations organization to his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, an ardent Wilsonian who recreated the flawed design of the League of Nations under a new name. Cold War rivalries immediately paralyzed the great-power-dominated UN Security Council, because each member had a veto.

The Soviet-backed takeover of China by Mao’s Communists turned the Middle Kingdom from a US ally into an enemy, while Britain’s postwar economic weakness left Washington and Moscow as the only two global military powers in a bipolar world. However, the postwar recovery of Western Europe and Japan and the Sino-Soviet split led President Richard Nixon to conclude in July 1971 that there were now five centers of economic power, if only two of military power — the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, and China.

According to Nixon, “these are the five that will determine the economic future and, because economic power will be the key to other kinds of power, the future of the world in other ways in the last third of this century”. Determined to extricate America from the war in Vietnam and to avoid similar entanglements, Nixon in 1969 had already espoused “the Nixon Doctrine”, declaring that “we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower necessary for its defense”.

Following Nixon’s opening to the People’s Republic of China, the Shanghai Communique in 1972 acknowledged China’s interest in Taiwan: “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position.”

Following each of the three global conflicts of the 20th century — the two world wars and the Cold War — idealist hopes for a “new world order” free of great power conflicts excited many Americans. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent republics in 1991 led liberal internationalists to call for “a league of democracies” to police a globalized world society, while neoconservatives dreamed of a single global market and “rules-based order” policed by the Washington alone as the “world’s only superpower”.

But China under Xi Jinping and Russia under Boris Yeltsin and his successors rejected American hegemony and called for a multipolar world in which they would be the hegemonic powers in their own regions. It is not “blaming the victim” to point out that invitations to join the US-led NATO alliance were followed by the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and of Ukraine in 2014 (and, on a larger scale, in 2022).

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The realists saw this coming. On Aug. 1, 1991, three weeks before Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the USSR, President George H. W. Bush, a consummate realist, told the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that it would be better for Ukraine and the other Soviet republics to remain together in a loose union, rather than make a hard break with Moscow. In the speech, derided as “Chicken Kiev” by the neoconservative New York Times columnist William Safire, the elder Bush warned: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”

For its part, the United States has continued to observe the Monroe Doctrine by treating the North American quartersphere as its own exclusive domain, toppling regimes it does not like and installing clients. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983, Bush I invaded Panama in 1989, and Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 in “Operation Uphold Democracy”. By abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban after 20 years of warfare, Joe Biden tacitly acknowledged that Central Asia is less important to Washington than North America. Similarly, by moving quickly to end the costly proxy war in Ukraine and opposing Ukrainian membership in NATO, Trump is signaling that Eastern Europe is not a core American interest, either.

Nor is enmity against Russia baked into the American tradition. For most of the time since the United States achieved independence, Americans have been morally repelled by successive forms of Russian autocracy — even as US diplomats have viewed Russia as a counterweight to powers that pose greater potential threats. During the Civil War, to deter Britain from intervening on the side of the Confederacy, the Lincoln administration welcomed the Russian fleet to American ports, including New York, where Russian naval officers paraded down Broadway past cheering crowds. Harper’s opined that it would “be wise to meet the hostile alliance of the Western Powers of Europe by an alliance with Russia”.

Under Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, an American naval squadron arrived at the Russian Baltic port of Kronstadt to a 21-gun salute and a display of American flags. To thwart British influence in North America, Johnson’s secretary of state, William Seward, bought Alaska from the Tsar and tried but failed to obtain Greenland for the United States. In 1946, the Truman administration offered to buy Greenland from Denmark; in 1955, the Joint Chiefs of Staff urged President Eisenhower to try to buy Greenland; and Trump has revived the idea at a time of increased tensions with Russia and China.

Tsarist Russia was America’s ally against Imperial Germany in World War I, and the Soviet Union was America’s ally against Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II. Only the elimination of other great-power threats led to rivalry between Washington and Moscow. Now that China is viewed as America’s greatest strategic rival, an American strategy of seeking to pry Beijing and Moscow apart, if possible, is only to be expected.

There may be sound arguments based on realpolitik to oppose Trump’s strategy toward Ukraine. But to be consistent, moralists who invoke American ideals ought to condemn FDR and Churchill for agreeing to a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe that lasted half a century after 1945. And they must condemn Eisenhower and Johnson for failing to take significant action to punish the Soviet Union from crushing democratic rebellions in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The ephemeral spasms of Wilsonian utopianism form the exception to the rule that American statesmen in every generation usually are guided by considerations of the national interest in their dealings with other major powers, including those whose internal regimes are repugnant to American principles. Uncle Sam may engage in flowery talk — but allies and enemies alike know that he drives a hard bargain.

Through the lens of Putinism, the global stage in 2025 looks remarkably similar to 1945. Russia’s sphere of influence, and even its heartland, is under threat from forces to its west. But like 80 years ago, in the eyes of Kremlin ideologues, Russia is pushing back the tide, militarily and civilizationally too. But think again to that picture: and who Stalin is slouched with. Not some lackeys from the Politburo, but his two rivals, who both, in their way, would help dictate his country’s imperial ambitions for decades to come. That, for me, is the real lesson of Yalta eight decades on — not that Russia was naturally destined to dominate Eurasia, but that it can only succeed with help from the West.

Even before Russia really existed, its rulers leaned on outsiders. Consider the early 17th century, the so-called Time of Troubles, when Muscovy was beset by succession crises, civil wars, and foreign incursions by the Swedish Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Contrary to the popular version of history most Russians know, Michael Romanov, the first tsar of Russia’s most storied house, was crowned in 1613 only after collaborating with foreigners. Nationalist epics, notably the 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, have paraded him as an austere hero, who fled the invading Poles instead of submit. In truth, his uncle supported Polish efforts to put a foreigner on the Russian throne, while Michael himself even lived for a time in the Polish-occupied Kremlin.

It’s a thread woven through the long centuries of Russia’s history, as it struggled to overcome the geographic prison that is Eurasia. Despite giving Russia ample space to expand, its geographic position leaves it vulnerable to land invasions from both the east and the west. Flanked, moreover, by mountains to the south, the Arctic ice to the north, and European competitors to the west, it traditionally had scant opportunities to develop its naval strength — vital for any modern superpower. Getting creative about securing sea access, and acquiring plenty of colonial possessions to act as buffers, was crucial if Russia wanted to be anything beyond a backwater outpost along the Moskva River.

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In practice, this could only happen through collaboration with outsiders, something clear enough far beyond the Time of Troubles. In the final decades of the 18th century, for instance, Russia had no qualms about flexing its military muscles. Yet when it came to vanquishing its old rival Poland-Lithuania, it relied on deal-making to carve up the Polish state alongside Austria and Prussia. In the process, it drew up a new balance of power in Eastern Europe, finalized at the Congress of Vienna and which mostly endured until 1914. It was a similar story at sea. Snatching windows on the Black Sea and the Baltic would have meant very little if Russia hadn’t equally secured passage through the Bosphorus (from the Ottomans) and the Kattegat (from Denmark) into the seven seas beyond.

Not, of course, that this heritage has stopped Russian rulers from parading their would be independence. All nationalisms are, to an extent, based on narrative-building and historical erasure, and just as A Life for the Tsar lionized Tsar Michael for the St Petersburg nobility, so too have these themes endured into the 20th century. That’s clear enough from Russian narratives about the Great Patriotic War, which describe how 20 million Soviets gave their lives to defeat the German invaders.

That sacrifice is indisputable: but Russia’s victory in Berlin would have been meaningless had it not been accepted by the Western superpowers. For if Nazi rule in Europe was undone at Stalingrad and Kursk, what came later was decided between 4-11 February 1945, at Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill gave Stalin their blessing to establish a new European order. In the space of just a week, Stalin convinced his allies to let him extend his reach right across Eastern Europe, annexing the Baltic States and adding a sizable chunk of Eastern Europe to his sphere of influence.

For Russian elites accustomed to thinking in historic cycles, a revised geopolitical compact, a Yalta 2.0, is therefore unsurprisingly long overdue. Not that we should think Putin is keen on just another power-grab. His famous 2005 quip that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” has been interpreted as a glib expression of Soviet nostalgia — but beneath the surface lurked a deeper fear. A new age had indeed arrived, but an updated balance of power to replace the Cold War order was never established, leaving Russia rudderless in wild geopolitical waters.

To an extent, then, Putin has long felt America’s unipolar moment was simply a delusion, an aberration of history that stubbornly denied the geopolitical realities of Russian power. And with American dominance now sliding, Putin can equally point to the revival of multipolarity, with great powers from Beijing to Delhi establishing geopolitical centers. To rephrase, then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never just about that country alone. Rather, it was Putin’s attempt to force America and the West to confront what it sees as its natural rights, to settle the destabilizing ambiguity between where Russia’s sphere of influence ends and where America’s starts, and to finally restore balance on Moscow’s terms — the wishes of the locals from Kharkiv to Aleppo be damned.

But just as it always has, Russia cannot set up this new international system alone — despite what he might claim, Putin relies just as much on the West as his precursors in the Kremlin. One good example is that perennial quest for warm-water ports, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria forcing Moscow to pursue good relations with its revolutionary successor. In an irony of history, and thanks to Ankara’s influence in Damascus, Russia is again forced to bargain with Turks to keep its empire afloat. On the far side of its territory, meanwhile, Russia must reckon with the presence of NATO states like Norway and Canada, as they race to establish facts-on-the-water while the ice caps melt. Faced with America and China, certainly, brute force alone is not a realistic option.

Putin will also be conscious of what happens when Russia tries to act unilaterally. Following the October Revolution, in 1917, communist fervor compelled the Bolsheviks to spread their revolution westwards. Eschewing the diplomatic waltzing of the tsars, they rejected dialogue with Europe’s bourgeois states. Following some initial successes — against newly independent Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — they were stopped by the Poles at the gates of Warsaw. After defeat in 1920, Lenin was forced to sign the Treaty of Riga, delineating the Soviet Union’s boundary with Poland. The young USSR thus had little to show for this brute display of force, and had failed to regain much of the territory Nicholas II had lost through the First World War.

Stalin’s approach two decades later took vital lessons from this historic mistake, combining the military might of the Red Army with clever diplomatic maneuvering at Yalta. Through tough negotiating and sleights of hand, Stalin convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to accept a dramatic expansion of Soviet territory, alongside a bevy of buffer states from Bulgaria to Hungary. In exchange, Stalin promised to hold free elections in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, a vow he never had any intention of keeping. The results of this maneuvering spoke for themselves: Russia extended its power further than it ever had under the tsars, and governments as far west as Berlin answered directly to Moscow.

These days, there are signs that Putin is ready to talk once more. Even before he attacked his neighbor, he had effectively demanded that Nato expel all new members since 1997. That was clearly unrealistic — but nonetheless hinted at an awareness, somewhere behind that inscrutable facade, that negotiations with the West were necessary. That’s doubly true now there’s someone new in the White House. An instinctive dealmaker, ruthless and transactional, Donald Trump may be the partner Putin needs to formalize the bounds of Russia’s new empire, establish a new balance of power in Europe, and ultimately lay down the ground rules of international relations for the rest of the century.

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The President’s other foreign ventures speak vividly to this shift. With Trump on the verge of launching a trade war with the EU, and pushing to construct a new geopolitical pole stretching from Greenland to Panama, Putin’s threats, once fantastical, now seem eminently achievable. And if all this clearly has significant implications for Ukraine — American recognition of Russian sovereignty over swathes of the country beckon — a range of far-reaching issues are also on the agenda for a future Trump-Putin meeting. Among other things, that includes nuclear arms control and energy prices. Worryingly for the Europeans, meanwhile, it’s becoming ever clearer that any such summit will exclude Ukraine, at least at first, and that Trump won’t merely represent the United States, but rather personify Nato and the whole Western world. Putin certainly sees him that way: with the precedent of Yalta at his back, he’ll view the talks as a generational opportunity to clarify the global playing field from the Pacific to the Danube.

That still leaves the question: what exactly might Putin try and secure from his negotiations with Trump? Once more, Yalta is a guide. Trump himself may see Europe as a sideshow, but for Putin, like Stalin before him, it will always be ground zero for the country’s ambitions. Ukraine may have replaced Poland as the primary object of Russian geopolitical maneuvering, but like in 1945, conversations about its future will form only the backdrop for wider questions about Russia’s sphere of influence. Moldova and Georgia are two obvious candidates here, even as Hungary and Romania, both firmly within the Nato orbit, could yet be up for discussion.

In other words, then, whether or not Ukraine is eventually included in the talks will ultimately be irrelevant. For Putin, the country is little more than an American puppet, and for Trump, it’s a burden. Like Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in 1945, Ukraine’s fate will be decided by Russia and the United States alone, and any subsequent involvement by Kyiv will be little more than window dressing. Once again, we’ve seen this play before. Harry Truman wholeheartedly disagreed with the terms Roosevelt had reached with Stalin — but by the time he took office after FDR’s death, it was too late, and he had no choice but to rubber-stamp Yalta at the Potsdam Conference five months later.

In the end, the green light Moscow received from America was a more powerful tool for its expansionist ambitions than any tank or bomb. Even so, Soviet leaders saw no hint of irony when they played the orchestral finale of A Life for the Tsar at their victory parade in June 1945, a musical retreat to a Russia that never truly existed. Eight decades on, if Yalta 2.0 does indeed come to pass, it will be curious to see if Putin goes for the opera once more. Either way, Michael Romanov would surely be proud.

Now the race for the next leader of the Democratic National Committee, to be elected on 1 February, is an opportunity to confront the party’s utter collapse in Middle America and chart a new course. Whether the Democrats will seize the chance turns on the resolve of the winner to buck the party’s subservience to donors and allocate resources to fresh candidates in former swing states.

The two most prominent contenders — Wisconsin party chairman Ben Wikler and Minnesota chairman Ken Martin — are workhorses adept at the art of coalition management. As Midwestern white guys, Martin and Wikler could help the party stanch the hemorrhage of Democratic support among their own demographic. But while they have sounded populist notes, their appetite for a shake-up has yet to be tested.

The backdrop is bleak. Progressives are demoralized over The Squad’s diminished size. Red-state Democrats are reeling from the loss of Sens. Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, and Bob Casey. And establishment liberals such as Chuck Schumer have rationalized defeat by explaining that workers “didn’t realize” how much Democrats “care for them”. Party activists can’t spot any would-be saviors in the distant horizon.

The job of the next DNC chairperson won’t be easy or glamorous. He or she will face the daunting task of rebuilding the Democratic coalition in nearly every part of America. Not only are Democrats on a backfoot in the Rust Belt and former Sun Belt strongholds like Florida, they must reckon with Trump’s surprising inroads among working-class voters and people of color in deep-blue areas.

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To be effective, the DNC leader will have to intervene forcefully in big debates over ideology and strategy. Grassroots activists, Left-wing intellectuals, and labor leaders such as Shawn Fain of the United Autoworkers are urging a showdown with the donor class and corporate power to compete with Trump’s GOP. Others who are close to the party elite are proposing a “common-sense” approach to economics, which some suspect is code for a Wall Street-friendly tack.

As the DNC’s 448 members gear up to vote, it’s far from certain that the victor will have a mandate to court the working-class voters who have defected to Trump since 2016. Still, there are hopes for serious change following the hapless tenure of Jaime Harrison, a friend of elite lobbyists who staunchly defended the party’s embrace of identity politics after critics blamed it for November’s humbling results.

At first glance, Martin and Wikler, the two frontrunners, seem well-positioned to oversee a “reset”. Each boasts of having overhauled his respective state party. Each enjoys the backing of labor unions, grassroots organizations, and reform-minded establishment figures. And both have bluntly stated that the party lost the working class this past election.

The basic assumption is that either of these two middle-aged white men from the Upper Midwest is suited to reconnecting the party with Gen-X and Millennial men without a college education — a demographic group that extended its shift to the right in November. A victory by either Martin or Wikler, the thinking goes, would install a competent leader bent on revamping the party’s message and cultivating down-ballot insurgents in states that have swung to the GOP since the Obama era.

Yet there are reasons to doubt the Democrats will be so easily led out of their morass. Most centrally, there is no obvious basis for a truce between the party’s Left flank and its more centrist members. Many progressives are unwilling or afraid to discipline “the Groups” — the professional advocacy organizations that are widely seen as responsible for the party’s unpopular and outré positions on race, immigration, gender, sexuality, drugs, and criminal justice. This reputation has overshadowed progressives’ support for a strong welfare state, consumer protection, and workers’ rights, limiting their appeal among workers who lean Right or simply hold mainstream views on cultural questions.

The “moderates”, meanwhile, comprise two factions that generally disagree on economic priorities: Rust Belt populists who shrink from the excesses of the “woke” Left, and neoliberals who once exploited identity politics but are now willing to muzzle “the Groups” if that means regaining control of the party.

Although both moderate factions have recently stressed the importance of tackling high prices, they are divided on tariffs, corporate oversight, and the need for long-term re-industrialization. Team Biden’s gamble on industrial policy failed to stir the electorate, leaving populists who supported such efforts without a clear framework to move forward. And they diverge from progressives on key questions such as border security, the pace of the green transition, and the economic threat posed by China. This impasse has emboldened neoliberals backed by major donors to discourage a push toward populist economics.

Bridging these divides while preventing a return to neoliberal orthodoxy will require clearheaded leadership. An effective DNC leader must bend progressives and neoliberals on the issues where they are most vulnerable. Given Martin’s and Wikler’s Midwestern backgrounds, it is reasonable to wager that both would favor the pragmatic populists. Neither contender, however, seems terribly inclined to force hard choices on the party’s dominant factions.

Take Wikler, whom pundits have depicted as more likely to excite the progressive base and who just garnered the endorsements of seven Democratic governors. While some high-profile commentators see him as bolder than Martin, he has embraced the same naked appeals to identity politics that have backed his party into a corner. Wikler has also been credited with “nationalizing” elections in Wisconsin to make them more competitive for Democrats. This involves attracting major media to lesser-known contests and mobilizing party activists behind local candidates whose election could have a decisive impact on Democratic priorities.

In the right context, this strategy can generate momentum and pool resources for progressive challengers to Republican incumbents. But as disastrous races elsewhere have demonstrated, it can also exacerbate perceptions in places typically ignored by Democrats that the party elite is only interested in flashy contests that fill up campaign war chests.

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Martin, meanwhile, may be too mild-mannered to forge meaningful compromises. A leader possessing sangfroid still must be able to throw a punch, particularly in the age of Trump. Avoiding gaffes that reinforce perceptions that Democrats are as much in the pocket of Wall Street as the GOP is also crucial. In a recent candidate forum, Martin appeared to astound himself when he blurted that Democrats will take money from “good billionaires … who share our values,” but not from “those bad billionaires”. Oops.

Still, there is some evidence he has more of an independent streak than Wikler. Martin has focused on strengthening the autonomy of local party branches and irritated the elite by establishing a group of state leaders that is separate from the DNC. For the sake of rebuilding local trust, such a strategy might be worth the price of angering consultants and grandees from the Northeast and California. Democrats are in desperate need of someone willing to clean house and keep the liberal establishment at arm’s length.

Whoever prevails, however, must do more than hone a new image. For Democrats to have any hope of winning back the working class, they need to recall the policies but also the party vision that gave succor to struggling Americans from their party’s founding in the Jacksonian era to the New Deal and the Great Society.

Egalitarianism, the vitality of a free society, and a belief that active government could spur national progress: these were the ideas that the Democratic giants of the past masterfully combined in their appeals to ordinary people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman could denounce injustice in plain language while arousing the spirit of optimism once considered inherent to the American experience.

In more practical terms, that meant adapting the original progressive tradition of the Midwest, predicated on reining in monopolies and forging alliances between workers, small businesses, and farmers. For decades, this approach to coalition-building was embraced by Left-leaning Democrats, from populists like Oklahoma’s Fred Harris to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. It flourished until the end of last century, when Bill Clinton’s commitment to globalization sundered his party’s ties with small towns and fading industrial regions.

Biden, to his credit, did draw on this older progressive tradition through his administration’s antitrust policies. Despite stark obstacles in the heartland, rallying the party once more to the anti-monopoly banner is probably the best way to revive its fortunes. The alternative is to court America’s wealthy suburbs — an approach that would close the door on New Deal liberalism for good and that may not even be worth the candle, judging by Harris’s campaign.

Yet with the exception of Howard Dean, a former presidential candidate who pursued a 50-state strategy in the mid-aughts, all of the party’s recent leaders have been careerists beholden to the donor class. This has deepened the sense among disenchanted activists that the obstacles to major reform also run through the DNC. To rebuild the Democratic coalition, the DNC will have do more than serve as the gatekeeper of critical campaign funds.

The overarching task of the next four to eight years, then, is to build the bridge to a new era that Biden himself couldn’t deliver. That demands identifying future leaders who speak to the common interests of American workers, while encouraging stances that serve America’s long-term security.

It also means resisting pressure to cede control of the party’s direction to powerful presidential aspirants. The 2028 field is already anticipated to feature ultra-wealthy players such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and celebrity tycoons like Mark Cuban. A party leader intent on protecting democracy from oligarchy would do well to act as Martin has and defy efforts to centralize power in patronage networks that resemble Trump’s.

No matter how ambitious the next DNC leader turns out to be, stoking an anti-donor insurgency won’t come naturally. Democrats in the Trump era have become the party of institutions — so much so that they can’t see the powerful interests that have suffocated reform in the cradle. But if the party has a soul, its salvation begins with a revolution against its own monopolists. A venerable tradition calls out to those willing to take up the gauntlet.

While ostensibly addressing an important issue — concentrated wealth and power — Biden ultimately offered a shallow and pettily partisan account in a way that embodied his political failure as he exits the stage of history.

As many have noted, there was plenty of irony to be found in the address. Democrats, not Republicans, have recently been favored — in donations and votes — by corporate America, including Big Tech, a few prominent defectors notwithstanding. But the issue with Biden’s speech wasn’t that it was hypocritical given his party’s fundraising prowess and increasingly upscale base. Ike himself, after all, had overseen the expansion of the very military-industrial complex he decried, but at least he ended his presidency with a memorable articulation of the problem that pointed the finger at an institution with which he was closely associated.

Biden, in contrast, followed up his comments on a real crisis that has been mounting for decades — a rising oligarchy — with some indications that the main such people he’s concerned about aren’t oligarchs writ large, so much as a few in particular: Donald Trump and his cronies. In this respect, he showed little understanding of why his presidency is ending in such lousy fashion: a governing vision that has vacillated between a broad critique of concentrated wealth and a far narrower one focused on the crisis represented by Trump.

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“Never let a good crisis go to waste”: This phrase, attributed to Winston Churchill, was notably repurposed by Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama. Emanuel’s reference was to the 2008 financial crisis, which brought an end to two decades of bipartisan optimism about the US economy. But as former Obama adviser Reed Hundt argued in his 2019 book, A Crisis Wasted, Obama failed to seize on the opportunity to remake the economic order. Infamously, he bailed out the banks but left homeowners underwater; he also initiated quantitative-easing policies that juiced the markets but redounded heavily to the benefit of the asset-rich; and presided over a dramatic worsening of inequality. Trump’s successful defiance of GOP economic orthodoxies around free trade and entitlements and his defeat of Hillary Clinton amounted to a belated verdict on Obama’s inability to deliver real reform.

The Biden presidency, which began amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic, offered the possibility of a do-over. Many saw the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, enacted under two months after Biden’s inauguration, as proof his administration had discarded the excessive caution that got in the way of Obama’s hope to be a transformative president. After campaigning mostly as a moderate with the modest goal of helping lead the nation out of crisis, Biden entered office promising to be the “most progressive president since FDR,” whose portrait he hung above the fireplace in the Oval Office.

If we didn’t know Biden’s party had lost decisively after his ignominious withdrawal from the campaign, his farewell address might have sounded like a victory lap. To be sure, he can’t be faulted for an unwillingness to “go big”, between the stimulus packages, the revival of a trust-busting agenda targeting big corporations, and the industrial policy aimed at, as Biden put it, “creating new businesses and industries, hiring American workers, using American products”. Congressional progressives are happy to give him credit for all this. So why weren’t working-class voters, who not only didn’t bring back the FDR-era Democratic supermajority, but drifted even further from the party?

Many plausible answers have already been offered to this question: Biden couldn’t overcome the global anti-incumbency wave fed by inflation; he failed to control the border; the industrial and infrastructure projects he subsidized will take too long to come online to generate immediate benefits; his own senility and Kamala Harris’s inept candidacy doomed them; and so on. But Biden’s farewell address highlighted something more fundamental. Despite his administration’s sweeping economic reforms, it remained wedded to the Democratic Party’s main post-2016 sales pitch, which is roughly: whatever we are, at least we aren’t Donald Trump.

Consider the “real dangers” of the “tech-industrial complex” highlighted in Biden’s speech: not, for instance, the immense power wielded over employees by companies such as Uber (whose general counsel, as it happens, served as one of Kamala Harris’s main advisers in the 2024 race), but an “avalanche of misinformation and disinformation”. He went on to lament that “social media is giving up on fact-checking”, an allusion to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he would retire Meta’s fact-checking program in favor of community notes.

The notion that the gravest crisis affecting the country is “misinformation”, to be countered by fact-checking, can be traced back to the frantic postmortems that followed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. That Biden is sticking to this message up to his final day in office suggests his party has hardly evolved since then, even though the misinformation narrative has been widely disputed and the eight-year war on “fake news” utterly failed to achieve its main objective: preventing Trump’s return to office.

It is unsurprising that constant warnings about these supposed threats failed to turn many voters against their nemesis, and may have done the opposite. Misinformation worries political and media elites, but barely registers for most people — for good reason. The circulation of unapproved ideas, stories, and messages is symptomatic of gatekeepers’ loss of control. If you’re a gatekeeper, that’s a crisis for you; if you’re not, it isn’t. Not only that, the misinformation narrative exudes contempt for the ordinary citizen, who is treated as an ignorant rube in need of constant supervision. No wonder this message’s resonance barely extends outside a few small precincts.

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No less than Obama, then, Biden let a crisis go to waste. But part of the reason for this was he and his party, for self-interested reasons, misrecognized what the crisis was. A whole series of threats — Vladimir Putin’s Russia, fake news, authoritarianism, Covid — were conjured up or made to stand in for the crisis ostensibly represented by one man. Yet while Trump has been a crisis for the political class, most of the public hasn’t viewed him that way; even many who didn’t vote for him were unreceptive to the Democrats’ “saving-democracy” messaging. Moreover, in 2024 even more than earlier cycles, many saw his disruptive presence as a necessary response to crises they do care about, and the political class doesn’t: affordability, crime, out-of-control immigration.

The concentrated wealth of a man such as Elon Musk, who has now used it to buy himself a place in the president-elect’s inner circle, is a genuine concern — a crisis, perhaps. But Biden and his party have spent most of the past eight years claiming not that they will confront such influence-peddling, but posturing as the defenders of an establishment we all know was corrupted by the wealthy long before Trump first took control of the GOP.

In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR could declare that “business and financial monopoly” were “unanimous in their hatred for me — and I welcome their hatred”. In 2024, Kamala Harris could say no such thing — and on the contrary, she regularly cited the plaudits she received from Goldman Sachs and other corporate interests as the ultimate proof of her competence. To anyone who remembers this, Biden’s warnings about oligarchy ring hollow.

The experience hardened his belief that European colonialism was out of date. In August 1941, in discussions on the Atlantic Charter  —  which laid out the Allied goals for a post-WWII order  —  FDR stressed the inclusion of an article on self-determination, much to Winston Churchill’s anxiety. Roosevelt insisted that a precondition for a peaceful world was the development of “backward countries”, but that one-sided colonial trade agreements — like those of the British Empire — were why those countries “are still as backward as they are”.

American leaders have long liked to position themselves as opponents of European colonialism. John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 Presidential election, declared that the US should side with third world nationalist movements. After all, America itself is the product of thirteen colonies emancipating themselves from the British Empire and building a democratic republic. That revolution, which took place 245 years ago, has since been a model for movements worldwide. Vietnam’s nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, explicitly invoked the American Declaration of Independence as inspiration.

America, then, claims to stand for a liberal international order composed of independent nations, dedicated to promoting peace, prosperity and freedom. In theory, anyway. In practice, America did not become a benign superpower after the Second World War; it became an empire in its own right. It did not liberate European colonies; it inherited them and made them American.

In Indochina, the US supported the French colonial regime, before replacing it as the occupying force — leading to the original forever war. In the Middle East, the US replaced Britain as well as France as the imperial power ne plus ultra — a project that, as recent front pages graphically demonstrate, hasn’t ended well. But American interventionism in Africa is less widely understood. A revelatory, meticulous new book by Susan Williams — based on declassified documents and new testimony — has done a lot to correct this.

Africa, Williams suggests in White Malice, has long been of “central importance” in the vision of American foreign policy planners. During the second world war, in response to Hitler’s armies conquering most of North Africa, the US built a number of air bases on the continent  — in Liberia, for instance  —  to prevent its enemies using West Africa as a platform to attack the Americas. The OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) established an Africa service with three field bases in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. And the Manhattan Project — the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons — made the Congo, with all its natural resources, central to American foreign policy.

The Uranium used to create the first atomic bombs originated from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province in Southern Congo. In 1942, a band of OSS agents were assigned to secure the mine, holding the richest Uranium in the world, to stop it falling into Nazi hands. They were also tasked with covertly transporting the Uranium  —  disguised as “diamonds” —  to the US, via airports in Elizabethville and Leopoldville designed by the Americans to ensure reliable transport. Shinkolobwe’s role in the Manhattan Project, as Williams notes, “was shrouded in secrecy”. Journalists were not allowed any information about the mine — let alone to visit it. It’s name and location was wiped off the map in 1942 and security was akin to a “fortress”, with armed guards patrolling 24/7.

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The Congolese miners were hyper-exploited. They were paid terribly, were frequently whipped by overseers and had little protection as they handled high-grade Uranium — which caused many to suffer long term health conditions. In other words, they were no better off than they had been under the Belgian colonisers.

After the war, the withdrawal of European empires left a void. And so most of America’s military bases in Africa remained. Pan-Africanism, on the ascendancy, was influencing civil rights and black radical movements among black Americans. The Soviet enemy was threatening to gain influence over the newly independent African nations. America, Williams writes, had to “recapture Africa”, putting it back into Western hands “by any means necessary”.

The CIA was anxious to get a foothold in these newly independent nations early to contain any possible spread of Communism. In the 1950s, the CIA’s African division developed an elaborate network of front organisations to acquire information and intelligence from across Africa. It funded journals and concerts, and established contacts with journalists, writers and businessmen who would become informants. For instance, Maurice Tempelsman (known for his relationship with Jackie Kennedy), who had big financial interests in Africa, sat on the board of the African-American Institute, a CIA front group. His business associate, George Wittman — whose company operated in a dozen African countries — was recruited into the agency in 1951, and helped produce a massive study of Ghana. The CIA also developed a close relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was they who informed the South African police as the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.

Meanwhile American policymakers, like the European colonisers before them, believed that Africans weren’t quite ready for “orderly development” and “progress towards self-determination”. Williams quotes the vice-President Richard Nixon advocating that the US side with the “strong men of Africa”  —  the tyrants, in other words  —  to maintain stability and cultivate military regimes. This would counter the Communist threat. President Eisenhower agreed. Despite grandiloquent rhetoric in support of democracy, then, US foreign policy actively supported anti-democratic movements in Africa.

Because of this, the US was perpetually irritated by the two main heroes of Williams’ book: Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC. Both were huge icons of anti-colonialism. And both were Pan Africanists, who believed in the dream of a united, strong and sovereign African continent  —  one that would be an influential power bloc on the world stage independent of both the West and the Soviet Union.

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Nkrumah was initially well-disposed to the US; immediately after Ghana’s independence, relations were relatively “friendly and fruitful”. But by 1960, Accra was promoting an “African centric” foreign policy and Ghana was becoming the HQ for anti-colonial insurgents from all across Africa. With his quest for an atomic reactor, and his close relationship with Lumumba, Nkrumah was now seen as a “subversive”. His “tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries”, as a State Department document put it, troubled America.

The motivation behind Nkrumah’s nuclear program was the aim to modernise Ghana within a generation. According to Williams, Nkrumah got support from Canada to build a reactor, but US pressure ceased this collaboration, so he decided to appeal to the Soviet Union instead — raising US suspicions. It is worth noting here that the US gave a nuclear reactor to Congo in 1958, when it was still a Belgian colony, and also supplied enriched Uranium to apartheid South Africa for its nuclear program. It seems that, for the US, “a necessary qualification in Africa for access to a reactor”, as Williams notes, “was colonial occupation or white minority rule”. In other words, atomic energy was only appropriate in white hands, not sovereign black hands.

Throughout the 1960s, relations between Accra and Washington would deteriorate. Nkrumah publicly called the US a “neo-colonial” power in a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. He became paranoid and more dictatorial in his rule. The state monopolised the media; critics who “disrespected” the President were jailed. Economic mismanagement was rife; many state-run companies made losses. The cost of living rose dramatically, which led to protests on the streets, and repression in return. Discontent with Nkrumah’s rule within the armed forces produced easy allies for the CIA, who had been flirting with the idea of regime change in Ghana since 1961. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup indirectly supported by Britain and America, while on an official visit to China. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Western military junta swiftly shut down the Kwembaya atomic reactor.

America’s main gripe against Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was his desire to keep Katanga  —  Congo’s richest province, where separatism was building  —  as part of the Congo. The province was the home of lucrative American and Belgian mining companies; Lumumba wanted to nationalise the industry. And so the CIA suspected Lumumba was a secret Communist and in “Soviet pay” — even though ideologically he was a nationalist. His reputation tarnished by these suspicions, Lumumba’s appeal for UN intervention during the Congo crisis of 1960 fell on deaf ears. With Belgian support, Katanga seceded. Around 100,000 people were killed. Lumumba was captured and executed by Katangan separatists in January 1961.

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In 1960, as Williams reveals through recently declassified documents, the CIA had officially approved a plan to fund and help organise opposition to Lumumba — with the expressed purpose of overthrowing him and replacing him with a “moderate”, pro-Western strong man. The prime candidate mentioned for this role by CIA Director Allen Dulles was Colonel Mobutu, who organised a coup against Lumumba on later that year, but wouldn’t fully come to power until 1965  —  via another American-backed coup. Williams presents unequivocal evidence that Mobutu had been an informant for Belgian intelligence and the CIA for years previously.

The ousting of Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Congo followed a similar pattern of US interventions: such “deliberate violations of democracy” had taken place in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA would support in various ways  — indirectly, and sometimes directly  —  the overthrow of governments that had been democratically elected. These governments were deemed unacceptable by America because they had the misfortune of believing that their nations deserved to exercise self-determination, not simply have it in name. The US would then help install brutal dictatorships — like Mobutu’s — that used torture to repress critics and treated the national treasury as their own personal piggy bank. For American policymakers, this was an acceptable outcome, even though it contradicted the values of their own constitution. Communism was kept in check. Black lives did not matter.

We are in the midst of a frenzied post-colonial “reckoning” but, with notable exceptions (like Vincent Bevin’s absorbing Jakarta Method, published last year), this reckoning has focused on events that took and take place on American soil. For all the interest in black people, there has been little interest, even on the Left, in the African continent — except as a historic victim of Europe. The enemy is 19th century colonialism, which gave rise to the slave trade; 20th century American imperialism has been largely ignored.

But as refugees pour out of Kabul, dragging the failures of American intervention into the spotlight, the revelations in White Malice are perfectly timed. Perhaps now we’ll collectively object to the fact that American companies  —  Apple, Google, Dell  —  are using child miners in Cobalt mines in the Congo. Perhaps we will realise that little has changed in America’s relationship to Africa since the Cold War.

The problem was that Cable, who later became an interesting Cabinet minister then a poor Lib Dem leader, struggled to connect his economic insights to practical politics. The ever-smaller band of hacks attending used to leave that room each week wondering what his seminars had to do with the Blair government, the Lib Dems’ prospects, or anything else that was then on the agenda at Westminster.

Those Commons sessions — erudite, informative, almost devoid of politics — came to mind while I read Cable’s latest book. Money and Power is good and interesting, but fails utterly to deliver on one of its key promises. The book is 16 portraits of world leaders who made a real economic impact, and if you’re looking for a brisk, slightly old-fashioned “great man” primer on modern economic history, pre-order it today. But if you’re taken by the publisher’s promise of a book “examining the fascinating interplay of economics and politics”, prepare for disappointment.

Because this is economics largely estranged from — and sometimes wholly divorced from — politics. Time and again, the matter of whether and why economic policies and their authors are approved or rejected by their populations is an afterthought, treated like a weather event: something that just happens. And in his intelligent but bloodless way, Cable unwittingly says quite a lot about what can go wrong with economic policymaking. By omission, he points towards some things that the next generation of economically-interested politicians should be thinking hard about now.

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Maybe the first and biggest question is: how important should economic policy be to politicians? Cable quite rightly notes that for most of the post-war period, countries around the world have given national priority to rising living standards and economic wellbeing. He goes on to describe how a variety of leaders have sought to do that, with varying degrees of success. Cable’s measure of success for the politicians he profiles is largely based on economic outcomes: did they deliver more wealth and wellbeing for their populations?

The importance of that barely needs to be explained: sustained economic growth in recent decades has transformed human experience in ways that were barely conceivable even a generation ago. Infant mortality has plummeted, lifespans are soaring, and the years of life we have are happier and healthier than ever before.

But is that enough? And is the pursuit of growth above all always the right thing for politics to do? Cable’s economic policymakers often come across almost as Platonic guardians, distant and superior beings making decisions about the best interests of the masses who will eventually benefit, whether they know it or not and whether they welcome it or not. One of Cable’s most revealing observations is about Margaret Thatcher: “One of her traits — and an admirable one — was to introduce and persist with measures that she knew to be unpopular but judged to be necessary.”

In this book, elections, opinion and consent are peripheral; where Cable says “politics”, he often means a leader’s ascent through the hierarchy of a party, not anything directly involving the people who feel the results of economic policies. His depiction of Ludwig Erhard, father of social market economics, is crisp, informative and challenging (I speak as Director of the Social Market Foundation) but says almost nothing about post-war politics in West Germany. He writes about Franklin D Roosevelt’s success in establishing a generation-long post-war consensus around a “strong, active federal US government, labour rights and social protection”, but he does so in a single paragraph and offers no explanation of how FDR turned economic success into political wins.

And as Cable acknowledges — but cannot explain — there is no certainty that good economics is also good politics. He profiles Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s finance minister at the fall of communism: his “Big Bang” liberalisation of the Polish economy put the country on track for years of strong growth and, eventually, EU membership. But Balcerowicz lasted barely two years, as Poles rejected him and his allies. By contrast, Cable notes that Peronism in Argentina “has combined one of the most abject, sustained failures in economic policy with continued political popularity, evidenced by the 2019 election of a sixth Peronist president”.

What makes the difference? Cable doesn’t know and doesn’t really try to answer. His puzzlement over voters’ curious choices is evident in his last and probably unwise profile, of Donald Trump, which appears to have been hastily finished in the strange days following the November election.

Trump’s eclectic but not haphazard approach to economics perplexes Cable (and others), who cannot understand how Reaganomic tax-cuts could sit with a fixation on protectionist bilateral trade policy and nostalgia for inefficient manufacturing — and command the support of a large section of the American electorate.

All of which leads to one of the questions Cable doesn’t ask, but which emerges clearly on reading his book: what happens to economic policy when people decide there are more important things in life than economics?

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To be fair to Cable, he’s hardly alone in this. All sorts of people — politicians, journalists, academics — have been keen to try to explain the politics of recent years in solely economic terms. Trump won in 2016 because white non-college incomes fell and jobs disappeared; Britain voted Brexit because of austerity.

And economics may have been one factor for some voters. But that economics-first view overlooks other things, the cultural and the social, which some people consider more valuable than GDP growth. Philip Hammond used to say that none of the 17.4 million who backed Brexit voted to be poorer, but some of them did. Some were quite happy to forego some portion of future economic growth in exchange for what they saw as sovereignty, national pride, a sense of control.

That’s not a choice I’d have made, but I think people who make policy need to accept it as a valid choice. They also need to think more about why some people feel able and compelled to make such choices: free trade made America richer in aggregate, but didn’t benefit everyone, or make everyone feel happier about themselves or their country. Economic policy should acknowledge such perceptions and experiences and reflect them more, rather than — as Cable’s analysis sometimes seems to imply — regarding voters’ irrationality as an inconvenient obstacle to be overcome or just avoided.

Here, I should note that I have a lot of sympathy for Cable’s Platonic view of policymaking: both as a columnist and a think-tanker, I’ve often argued for politicians to do unpopular-but-sensible things. (And I still do: the sooner we start taxing housing assets to fund social care the better.) But my guess is that it’s going to become even less viable to make economic policy by doing complicated and contentious things for the greater good of the electorate in the hope of securing their weary consent later. I suspect electorates empowered and (sometimes) informed by social media and possessing a very(historically speaking) high level of wealth and comfort are only going to expect more from their leaders than sound economic management.

My bet is that sooner or later, that’s going to mean people in politics start talking a lot more about central banks. A conversation about their role in modern economics — and politics — is surely overdue. Our elected leaders have handed vast power to technocrats whose legal mission is to do what’s best for the masses, not what they want. There’s nothing wrong with this — it’s better than the alternatives — but where’s the political process to deliver consent? The economic guardians of monetary policy routinely make decisions with profound political consequences: ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing are effectively transferring great wealth to older property-owners, at the expense of younger people struggling to buy a home and amass decent pension. Yet in the UK at least, politicians barely talk about any of this. In QE, economics trumps politics to such an extent that politics is barely present.

That cannot last. Cable several times cites Bill Clinton’s campaign slogan — It’s the economy stupid — as a truism that explains all politics. Not anymore.

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There’s another even deeper canyon on the politics-economics faultline that Cable highlights without apparently noticing. Can economics be used to suppress politics? Can you provide enough wealth to buy your way out of the political need to win arguments and elections? These questions arise in Cable’s analysis of east Asian leaders, in which he has disappointingly little to say about political freedom.

His portrait of Lee Kwan Yew, for instance, has more to say about the academic background of Lee’s economic advisers than about the people of Singapore and their view of a leader who delivered economic growth and an increasingly authoritarian state.

And then there’s China, which is posing one of the biggest questions of all about politics and economics. Is it possible to make a country and a people rich without making them free? Our entire idea of the West is premised on the assumption that economic growth and political freedoms proceed together: as people own more stuff, they demand and acquire legal rights over that stuff, and in due course a say in how those laws are made. Educated, property-owning masses cannot be denied political freedom forever, we trust.

China is doing a depressingly good job of proving us wrong on that. The CCP’s embrace of the market has made many of its people — by global and historical standards — rich. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people have smartphones and flatscreen TVs, but not one of them has a vote. Effective economic policy is trumping politics.

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This is the stuff I’d like to read about in a book that offers to guide our understanding of the future relationship between politics and economics. Sadly Cable barely touches on this and his book sometimes goes beyond being simply apolitical and borders on the amoral. His chapter on Deng Xiaoping treats Deng’s role in Mao’s mass murder of their countrymen — and direct responsibility for the Tiananmen Square massacre — as mere factual context for the man’s views on markets, industrialisation and agricultural reform.

The results are jarring, especially when Cable writes blandly about the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, when private farming was banned and crops seized by the state. This horror took place when Deng was one of the three men running China, yet Cable presents it as little more than a bump in the road to economic success:

 “…countless millions died in the famine: 45 million according to some Western sources; 16-17 million on Chinese official estimates. It was an epic disaster which appears to have persuaded Deng (working with like-minded senior leaders) to press for ‘adjustments’: radical economic changes designed to raise living standards.”

After all, what other response could a good economic policymaker have to helping cause the worst famine in human history than to seek to raise living standards for those still living? Deng may have been, in Cable’s phrase, an effective economic architect, but he was a gravedigger too. Shrugging off a state’s murder of its own people because it made the ones it didn’t kill richer is the logical, dismal conclusion of a worldview that accords economics priority over politics.