Occasionally, I indulge in a daydream, envisioning autocrats or wannabe dictators like the US MAGA ex-president Trump, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, Russia’s President Putin and China’s President Jinping talking on their cells egging each other on to start insurrections and to plan or execute wars just to further their own selfish interests of staying in power and/ or accumulating territory.

But what if this fantasy has some basis in reality…

Thomas L. Friedman’s October 3, 2023  NYT opinion piece, “How Four Leaders Are Turning the World Upside Down” is prescient in discussing Israel’s national security being in a horrible state, just before the October 7, 2023 brutal massacre on Israel by Hamas:

Excerpts:

“Before last year, young Ukrainians had been enjoying easier access to the E.U., embarking on tech start-ups, thinking about where to go to college and wondering whether to vacation in Italy or Spain. And then, like a meteor, comes this Russian invasion that turns their lives upside down overnight.”

“A lot of people’s plans — and a lot of countries’ plans — have gone completely haywire lately. We’ve entered a post-post-Cold War era that promises little of the prosperity, predictability and new possibilities of the post-Cold War epoch of the past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

“There are many reasons for this, but none are more important than the work of four key leaders who have one thing in common: They each believe that their leadership is indispensable and are ready to go to extreme lengths to hold on to power as long as they can.”

“I am talking about Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The four of them — each in his own way — have created massive disruptions inside and outside their countries based on pure self-interest, rather than the interests of their people, and made it far harder for their nations to function normally in the present and to plan wisely for the future.”

“Take Putin. He started off as something of a reformer who stabilized post-Yeltsin Russia and oversaw an economic boom, thanks to rising oil prices.”

“But then oil revenues started to sag, and as the Russia scholar Leon Aron describes it in his forthcoming book, “Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War,” Putin made a big turn at the start of his third presidency in 2012, after the largest anti-Putin rallies of his rule in 100 Russian cities broke out and his economy stalled. Putin’s solution: “Shift the foundation of his regime’s legitimacy from economic progress to militarized patriotism,” Aron told me, and blame everything bad on the West and NATO expansion.”

“In the process, Putin made Russia into a besieged fortress, which, in his mind and propaganda, only Putin is capable of defending — and therefore requires that he stay in power for life. He went from Russia’s distributor of income to a distributor of dignity, earned in all the wrong ways and places. His invading Ukraine to restore a mythical Russian Motherland was inevitable.”

“Events in China have also unfolded quite unexpectedly of late. After steadily opening up and loosening internal controls since 1978, making it more predictable, stable and prosperous than at any other time in its modern history, China experienced an almost 180-degree U-turn under President Xi: He dispensed with term limits — respected by his predecessors to prevent the emergence of another Mao — and made himself president indefinitely. Xi apparently believed that the Chinese Communist Party was losing its grip — leading to widespread corruption — so he reasserted its power at every level of society and business, while also eliminating any rivals.”

“It has made China more closed than any time since the days of Mao — complete with the sudden disappearances of the ministers of defense and foreign affairs — and sparking talk that we may have already seen “peak China” in terms of the country’s economic potential, which would be an earthquake for the global economy.”

“It was certainly not in my plan that after nearly a lifetime following Israel’s struggles with foreign enemies, I would end up writing about how the biggest threat to the Jewish democracy today is an enemy within — a judicial coup led by Netanyahu that is splintering Israel’s society and military.”

“The former director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Dan Harel, told a Tel Aviv democracy rally last week that “I have never seen our national security in a worse state” and that there has already been “damage to the reserve units of essential IDF formations, which has reduced readiness and operational capability.”

“This is no small problem for the United States. For the past 50 years, Israel has been both a crucial ally and, in effect, a forward base in the region through which America projected power without the use of U.S. troops. Israel destroyed both Iraq’s and Syria’s budding attempts to become nuclear powers. Israel is the main counterweight today for containing the expansion of Iranian power across the whole region.”

“But if we have three more years of this extremist Netanyahu government, with its aspiration to annex the West Bank and govern Palestinians there with an apartheidlike system, the Jewish state could become a major source of instability in the region, not stability, and a much more uncertain ally — more like Turkey and less like the Israel of old.”

“And why? In a recent Times profile of Bibi, Ruth Margalit quoted Ze’ev Elkin, a former Likud minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, as describing Netanyahu thus: “He began with a worldview that said, ‘I’m the best leader for Israel at this time.’ Slowly it morphed into a worldview that said, ‘The worst thing that can happen to Israel is if I stop leading it, and therefore my survival justifies anything.’”

“Needless to say, watching Donald Trump’s effort to overturn our 2020 election by inspiring a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and then seeing this same man become the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024, makes our next election among our most important ever — so that it won’t be our last ever. That was not the plan.”

“To the extent that there is a common denominator that binds these four leaders, it’s that they have all breached the rules of their game at home — and, in Putin’s case, started a war abroad — for an all-too-familiar reason: to stay in power. And their local systems — the Russian elite, the Chinese Communist Party, the Israeli electorate and the Republican Party — have not been able to effectively or entirely constrain them.”

“Trump, ultimately, is the most dangerous of the four — for one simple reason: When the world becomes this chaotic, and such key countries go off the plan, the rest of the world depends on the United States to take the lead in containing the trouble and opposing the troublemakers.”

“But Trump prefers to ignore the trouble and has praised the troublemakers, including Putin. It’s what makes the prospect of another Trump presidency so frightening, so reckless and so incomprehensible.”

“Because America is still the tent pole that holds up the world. We don’t always do it with wisdom, but if we were to stop doing it at all — watch out. Given what’s already going on in these other three important countries, if we go wobbly, it will birth a world where nobody will be able to make any plans.”

“There’s an easy name for that: the Age of Disorder.”