Three weeks ago, only a few hours after Iran’s retaliatory strike on military targets in Israel, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had to issue a statement “condemning” Iran and expressing his firm support for Israel’s “right to self-defense.” His description of the event was instructive: “The Iranian regime has launched over 200 ballistic missiles on civilian targets in Israel.” Of course, it was widely understood that not a single missile struck a civilian area or damaged non-military infrastructure. Yet this, it seems, was beside the point. Predictably, what needed to be publicly declared was proclaimed to the letter.
Last week, Starmer’s remarks on Israel’s counter-response again adhered closely to expectations. This time, he characterized Israeli strikes as “strikes on military targets in Iran,” underscoring his selective yet very sharp grasp of the nature of the targets. And his clarity on “Israel’s right to self-defense” was, as always, without blemish. As robotic and dull as it may be, his address did not fail to deliver what was required of him.
Could Starmer have done otherwise? Could he have dared a deviation from the well-trodden path? Such divergence seems unthinkable, not only for him but for many Western leaders caught in similar binds. Here, we see the sheer force of influence wielded by the empire, an influence withstanding all challenges save, it appears, for a handful of so-called strongmen.
The “strongman” label itself is telling. It serves a distinct political function, set aside for those leaders who resist full submission to the U.S. and its demands for loyalty. These figures, whether guided by national interest or, occasionally, by personal ambition, fail to meet the empire’s standards of subservience. Instead, they are tethered to their electorate or their sense of self-determined autonomy – two motivations that are nearly synonymous when driven by electoral legitimacy. The roll call of such figures features Latin American leaders like Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega and Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), along with heads of state from the U.S.’ primary global rivals, Russia and China. Türkiye’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the most elected politician in the history of his country, is also a recurring name on this list.
Yet, we rarely see this label applied to figures within the U.S. establishment, no matter how concentrated their power or unchecked their influence, particularly in international affairs. The term "strongman" is primarily reserved for leaders of nations who act in ways that contravene U.S. economic or geopolitical interests so that no serious observer would have any doubt about this procedure anymore. However, some pundits (like William Partlett in a recent article at The Conversation) have called former U.S. President Trump a strongman, too (or, at any rate, implied that he aspires to be one). In attempting to paint him as some sort of outlier within the political establishment of the empire, Partlett inadvertently depicts a U.S. power structure in line with precisely such a figure on the world stage – an international strongman by another name.
And who is behind this image but the upper echelons of American economic power – the executives of transnational corporations, those who profit from and thus uphold the “rules-based international order” that the U.S. is determined to enforce? The effort is remarkably consistent, as corporate interests feed into governmental policy, forming a mutual reinforcement that dictates international conduct. In this sense, the domestic application of the term “strongman” appears misplaced. It implies that the authority of a strongman figure as a concept is incompatible with the U.S. power structure when, in fact, it is really a staple of how the empire wields influence abroad.
If this thesis is correct, then the arbiters of the “strongman” designation can be challenged most effectively by a rivaling economic and geopolitical structure, and it is precisely those “strongmen” who have to carry out this task. From the perspective of the Western oligarchy, the “autocratic” character of a strongman is the most dangerous obstacle to global hegemony; and what they call “democracy,” on the other hand, provides the tools to sustain a structure in which they can accumulate wealth and assert their dominance “democratically” among themselves. I take it that it is in contesting the legitimacy of this structure that BRICS poses a grave threat to the U.S. interests. The empire may see the recent BRICS summit in Kazan as a meeting of strongmen – that is, a gathering of leaders who are not simply career politicians but who, for better or worse, display some kind of character in their political decisions. They seem to find common ground in not slavishly obeying the orders of what is essentially a club of mighty and grotesquely arrogant men.
