The world is filled with dictators, despots and strong men. The world has pretty much always been filled with dictators, despots and strong men. I hate to say it, but I can find no reason not to expect that it will always be so. My entire life has intersected with these strong men, beginning with my earliest years growing up in Venezuela. My mother was a development officer at the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela from 1946 until 1958. Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez, a long-time military officer in the Venezuelan army was President of Venezuela from 1952 to 1958. I was born in 1954 during my ymother’s home leave to Florida and returned to spend my first four years of life under the dictatorship of Perez Jimenez. His regime was characterized by: 1. Brutal political repression, including torture and imprisonment of opposition figures, 2. Heavy emphasis on public works and modernization projects, including highways and buildings in Caracas, 3. Close relationships with other dictators of the era, particularly Spain’s Francisco Franco, 4. Strong anti-communist stance which gained support from the United States during the Cold War, 5. Economic policies that favored foreign investment and infrastructure development. After he left office, Perez Jimenez lived in exile in the Dominican Republic and then Spain, following the standard deposed dictator’s handbook. It should be said that while my mother worked to help the indigenous and impoverished of Venezuela, my father worked assiduously to get his piece of that public works pie mentioned in #2 above. The balance of good forces and self-serving forces are always in some degree of balance around us.
In the 1980’s my job was to retrieve $4 billion of questionable sovereign debt from the most challenging parts of the world, most notably Latin America. This took some creativity and the first country to work with us on a mutually beneficial creative solution was Chile. Chile had been a subject of a great deal of my study back in my last years of college. As we all know, in 1973 the Marxist President of Chile, Salvatore Allende, was ousted and killed in a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet ruled Chile as a dictator (in various official titular capacities) until 1990. From 1985 to 1989 I had occasions to meet with Pinochet on perhaps four occasions as we became the owner of the largest pension and life insurance companies in the country and thereby the largest foreign financial institution in Chile. Pinochet was long past wearing his uniform in those days. He was always in a brown suit, looking very grandfatherly and benign and Chile was prospering under his policies even though there were many Chileans not around to enjoy it since his Junta had disposed of them in the early days of his reign. After leaving office in 1990, he remained a political force in Chile until 1998. After that and until his death in 2006 his life was spent in exile in London, under arrest in London, and in one trial after another back in Chile. He did not have a pleasant end to his life, no matter how well Chile had prospered on the path he set for it.
From 1993 to 1999 I ran the Global Private Banking business of Bankers Trust. One of the biggest issues all private banks have is preventing money laundering, and the sorts of people that are always trying to launder money, besides mobsters, are foreign political actors, especially dictators, despots and strong men. We used to keep “red files” on anyone seeking services who we suspected of questionable foreign political involvement. The sheer number of those files was always daunting. I was shocked when I moved into the real estate arena in 2008 and found that the company I was trying to salvage a $3 billion distressed property developer owned by an Israeli public company that was controlled by a billionaire who is now on the U.S. Government’s OFAC (Office of Foreign Asset Control) list which is the government’s version of a red file list. It was during those years that I met with Donald Trump on perhaps four occasions. The deals he proposed never materialized in a productive way and while we were busy trying to sell condos to reputable buyers, he was trying to sell his condos in Trump SoHo to whomever would buy them. On more than one occasion I turned down Russian buyers who bid us for multiple condos in all-cash transactions, only to hear later that they had bought in Trump SoHo. Money laundering had found a perfect home in the real estate game after the Great Recession.
Why do autocrats always initiate wars in the final days of their waning tenure? Because they have to. Putin needs Ukraine to extend his term while the Ruble and the entire Russian economy goes down the drain. Iran’s leadership, under increased internal pressure and social unrest, has mobilized Hamas, the Houthi’s and Hezbollah to make war against Israel. I think its safe to say that President Xi of China will be making war in the South China Sea, first against the Philippines to sharpen their blade and then on Taiwan to reclaim their lost glory. With Russia, China and Iran being the main actors in the current axis of autocratic evil in the world, the bit players like North Korea and Syria are also near the end of their tenures. We do not know what pressures exist in North Korea, but its clear that South Korea is feeling the heat of autocracy these days. What we do know is that North Korea has been under the Kim family rule for three generations since 1945. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad’s family reign over Syria, which has lasted for 53 years (father and son) has suddenly come to an abrupt end this past weekend. Assad and his family are said to be in exile in Russia as I write this. How happy do you think that life in exile is likely to be for that family? What purpose does Assad and his family have for Vladimir Putin? Perhaps he will be a useful trading pawn for Putin at some point, but even that is hard to imagine in a world where Putin has no use for more money and Syria is just barely of any strategic value in a region where the Israelis are kicking pretty much all the Shiite asses they come across.
It is hard for me to imagine that any autocrat ranging from Putin to Trump doesn’t realize that the world and history does not treat dictators, despots and strong men kindly. It always ends badly and they seem to understand that, but I assume that the same delusions that drive them to seize power also keep them from realizing that their tenures will not last forever. I believe that the fall of the Assad regime may be one of the most meaningful changes to the geopolitical scene that we have seen in many years. So, while it always ends badly for the strong man, maybe it will end well for the rest of us.