Filenews 11 April 2025 - by Marc Champion
As Game of Thrones character Littlefinger once said, "chaos is a ladder" for those who trick. In the real world, this observation also applies to the powerful and provides a useful perspective on the creation of a climate of international chaos at the hands of Donald Trump.
In fact, for the would-be authoritarians in the world, who are still striving to free themselves from the constraints of freely contested elections and independent institutions, there has never been a better time to climb the last steps to absolute power.
See, for example, the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He recently put his main political rival Ekrem Imamoglu in jail, through a docile judiciary, in the belief that he can now handle any backlash. Prosecutors accused the popular mayor of Istanbul of corruption, but this was a clearly political decision, made a few days before he was nominated for the presidency.
Erdogan's move sparked large street protests, but few of the strong international reactions it would have provoked a few years ago. At a time of economic chaos and military insecurity, Europe simply cannot afford to prioritise the spread of democracy over these emergencies. Its overwhelming concern is to keep Turkey – a major arms producer, trading partner and NATO member – on its side.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Erdogan has received only praise from the "creator" of chaos. Trump sees him as a spiritual brother, whose cooperation he needs for Syria, Russia and Iran. In remarks alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday, the U.S. president spoke of his great relationship with the Turkish leader and how smart he was in "taking control" of Syria. Not a word about Imamoglu.
Turkey's main opposition party even accused Erdogan — without offering evidence — of asking for U.S. permission before making the arrest. Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, said in an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday that he sees positive prospects for Turkey's ailing economy in Trump's global trade war.
Netanyahu is another good example. One would expect him to keep a low profile, given his contribution to the spectacular security failure that allowed Hamas to launch the most devastating attack on Jews since the Holocaust, on October 7, 2023. Since then, the climate has worsened due to his failure to bring back all the hostages, or to destroy Hamas, as he promised, after a year and a half of war.
He is also facing multiple investigations and court cases, in his home country for fraud and security leaks, and in The Hague for war crimes. He is trying to fire Israel's top judge and the top official of the internal security service, both for apparently selfish reasons. After a noisy hearing on Tuesday, Israel's Supreme Court issued an interim order aimed at preventing the government from firing the head of the domestic intelligence service investigating Netanyahu's advisers over the leaks.
And yet, Israel's prime minister seems to be anything but remorseful. He recently ended the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in Gaza to restart the war with a more ambitious goal of carving out so-called buffer zones. It also blocked access to humanitarian aid and called on Palestinians to "freely choose to go wherever they want" from the uninhabited territory.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu made the first visit by a foreign leader to Washington since Trump launched a trade war with the rest of the world. He was also greeted with a "red carpet" on the way when he stopped in Budapest. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban chose not only to ignore Netanyahu's arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, but also to announce that his country would withdraw from the jurisdiction of the international court.
Orban himself has just launched a campaign to eradicate the "bugs" that oppose him, including non-profit organizations such as the anti-corruption group Transparency International and what is left of Hungary's independent media. Like Erdogan, he has gone much further in eliminating judicial restrictions on his power than Trump or Netanyahu. And takes the opportunity to do more.
Last month, it introduced a new law for LGBTQ+ people that will make Pride marches illegal. This is likely to meet with less international resistance than would have been the case before the departure of Ambassador David Pressman, an American diplomat who has married a man of the same sex, who was also a fierce critic of Orban during the Biden administration.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, continues to have a free pass from the new US administration, including on tariffs. This is something that Israel, Ukraine, allies with whom the US already has a trade surplus, and even the penguins of Australia's uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands, have failed to achieve.
We must not, however, ignore a significant limitation on all these gains for the hopeful and budding authoritarians. Russia, for example, may still be the main beneficiary of Trump's decision to dismantle the U.S.-led world order, but it is unclear how America's quintessentially transactional leader will react to his continued disregard for efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Netanyahu, meanwhile, won a valuable meeting in the Oval Office, but he also had to back down on the tariff front, as a vassal leader venerating the Ming Dynasty emperor in Beijing would do.
The key here is that a new international order of the kind that people like Putin, Netanyahu, and Orban crave—a class without rules and institutions that limit their powers or regulate trade and war issues—is, by definition, a world of competing nationalisms.
For now, the growing crop of leaders of the populist right in the world are united, and mostly pro-Trump, in their opposition to an old "liberal world order" created by the U.S. after World War II. But they should be careful what they wish for. As this common liberal enemy disappears, they will find themselves increasingly at odds with each other.
Just ask Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. Until a few weeks ago, his message of tax cuts and "Canada First" seemed victorious, giving him a solid 10 percentage point lead in the polls ahead of elections later this month. Now he has been left behind, as his supporters defect, worried that this MAGA lookalike may not be the right person to confront the new, raw, nationalist threat next door.
Rendering – Editing: Lydia Roubopoulou
