RaveThe Financial Times (UK)... could not be more geopolitically relevant ... is essentially a polemic, warning that the difference between liberal democracy and authoritarianism is at risk of being eroded by the ego-driven antics of the strongman. It contains a who’s who of the modern autocrat, from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, Rodrigo Duterte to Jair Bolsonaro ... I began the book with a concern that lumping together such a broad spectrum of leaders was a real stretch — Britain’s current prime minister will no doubt be aggrieved to make the pick. The focus on democratic autocrats risks, ironically, making it easier for liberalism’s critics to claim the very moral equivalence between value systems that the author seeks to forestall. I have met the majority of the strongmen in this book and sparred directly or vicariously with a number of them, and so was alert to oversimplification ... My concerns were misplaced. Not only were the portraits solidly constructed, engaging and factually sound, but they built on each other as well. The result is a penetrating distillation of the essential ingredients of the strongman that effectively demonstrates a worrying commonality between wildly different personalities and circumstances. This lends weight to the author’s call for vigilance. We would be wise to heed it.
