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Europe, not America, is the great exception. In a world of nation states, it has the supranational EU. In a world that understands the permanence of violence, it came to believe that it had transcended such things. (Hence the embarrassed rush to re-arm now.) And in a world of old leaders, its Macrons and Melonis stand out ever more as prodigies.
The numbers should amaze us. Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin are all in their seventies. So are Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. The president and supreme leader of Iran are 70 and 86 respectively. The presidents of Nigeria and Indonesia are each 73. More than half of the world’s population, and much of its land area and military capacity, is in the hands of men who are older than Ronald Reagan was when he entered the White House at what seemed a dicey 69.
One of the destabilising forces in the world today is the advanced age of those who run it.
For one thing, old leaders have an incentive to secure a legacy — a defining achievement — before time runs out for them. The unification of mainland China with Taiwan is an example of such a project. So is avenging the loss of Russia’s prestige and “strategic depth” after the cold war. Even Trump’s haste to find a settlement in Ukraine, however invidious the details of such a peace might be to that nation, and to end world trade as we have known it, whatever the economic cost, suggests an old man in a hurry.
The problem with aged leaders is not their health — almost all those named above are robust and lucid — but their incentives. As well as not having much time to leave a mark, they won’t have decades of retirement in which to suffer the legal and reputational penalties of any disastrous act committed in office.
We have to get our heads around, if not a paradox, then a surprise. Age, which “should” instil caution and restraint in people, quite often emboldens them. This is as true of voters as of their leaders. Who would have guessed that western electorates would turn more anti-establishment as the median age increased? It was disproportionately the old who brought us Brexit and Trump.
But it is the leaders who are worth dwelling on here.
Even if all these septuagenarian office-holders were governing with care, the other problem is that replacing long-established leaders is itself destabilising. In democracies, at least, there is a process — if Trump chooses to respect the 22nd Amendment — but what is the succession plan for a Putin or Xi? There is scope not just for palace intrigue and counter-intrigue, but for the kind of public dissent that would be unthinkable when a regime is at its peak. The Arab spring happened in part because a cohort of north African leaders, such as Egypt’s then octogenarian Hosni Mubarak, had grown old together. Imagine several far more powerful countries having to replace calcified regimes at the same time.
And imagine trying to anticipate what comes after them. Putin and Erdoğan have led their countries as head of government or state for almost all of this century. Xi and Modi have been in place for over a decade each. When Ali Khamenei became Iran’s supreme leader, the Soviet Union still existed. Netanyahu, like Lula, is a retread. To some extent, these countries — or at least their states — are products of their current leaders. There are few eerier experiences than asking a western spy or diplomat how a post-Putin Russia might act in the world. What comes back is elegant guesswork, or a shrug.
Someone will correct me, but I can’t think of another point in history when so many world leaders were reaching old age at the same time. (If “old age” sounds drastic, remember that nowhere is male life expectancy higher than 85.) Even on the eve of the first world war, now remembered as an era of whiskered decrepits sending teenagers into hell, the Kaiser was in his mid-fifties.
How then has Europe, which now has the highest median age of any continent, mostly avoided the trend to oldness among its leaders?
It might have something to do with those other ways in which the continent is exceptional. In parts of the world that think in terms of hard power, clear lines of authority and the nation as something of a family to be guarded, it is natural enough to find “parental” leaders. Where government is a technocratic exercise, the gradual fine-tuning of a prosperous peace, that won’t be so true. Notice that since Europe woke up to the harshness of the world with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Britain and Germany have elected unusually old heads of government. (Even then, neither Sir Keir Starmer nor Friedrich Merz is yet 70.)
Either way, the world is living through a lesson in the perverse consequences of age. It seems that age confers wisdom, but also a certain liberation. It imposes a sense of social duty, but also a deadline for personal achievement. To explain the disorder of the modern world, it is far more intellectually proper to cite economic trends and grand historical forces. But perhaps part of the story is that a few old men are striving for a legacy in the time that is left to them. If so, it follows that things will get worse as their numbered days go by.
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