PATRICK LAWRENCE: New Year’s Notes on Purported Leaders

It is no use hoping for any alteration in the collective West’s course so long as today’s “purported leaders” remain in office. 

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

“Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” So did Chinese peasants celebrate their distance from the Forbidden City over many centuries now past. I imagine a similar sentiment may prevail in the hyper-centralized People’s Republic.

When power is to one or another degree autocratic, power is best when power is distant. So it was for me, if briefly, as 2025 drew to a close.

I spent the Christmas holidays, courtesy of my kindly mother-in-law, in the Pacific Northwest and was blessedly far from post-democratic power in any of its manifestations.

The nearest elected official purporting to competence was Kim Lund, the mayor of Bellingham, Washington, whose purview extends to one of those downtown revitalization plans you often come across in our deindustrialized republic.

It seemed an occasion to view from afar those major figures who, for better or worse but decidedly the latter in almost all cases, now determine the destiny of what we call, a little quaintly at this point, the Western world.

I had never previously considered these people as if they make a single group, a motley (very) crew. And it has been an interesting exercise by way of some year-end conclusions.

Here in no particular order are a few of my “takeaways,” as headline writers at the mainstream dailies so tiresomely put it.

One, the distance between the Western powers’ purported leaders and their citizens is more or less complete. Power now operates in supreme sequestration.

Two, wars, a genocide, drone invasions, assassinations, deportation gangs, censorship, sanctions, eroded civil liberties, lawlessness: There is no assuming post-democratic electorates favor any of this over peace and a moral order.

No, people are better understood as resigned to impotence—stunned into silence as power is no longer answerable and they, those now ruled rather than governed, have no connection to their rulers.

We are all Ming Dynasty peasants now, to put his point another way.

“Two, wars, a genocide, drone invasions, assassinations, deportation gangs, censorship, sanctions, eroded civil liberties, lawlessness: There is no assuming post-democratic electorates favor any of this over peace and a moral order.”

Two, it is no use hoping for any alteration in the collective West’s course so long as this crowd of self-interested second-raters remains in office. These people have condemned us, while acting in our names, to regimes of wanton brutality.

Three and more significantly and imposingly, it follows that the systems and political processes that thrust them into positions far beyond their capacities have to be dismantled or otherwise radically reformed before there is a chance of restoring ourselves to any kind of just, humane order.

Four and reading out of Nos. 1, 2, and 3, post-democratic disempowerment and the West’s sponsorship of rampant disorder burdens citizens with great responsibilities.

Chas Freeman, the emeritus ambassador and energetic commentator, surprised me this past autumn by stating during a podcast that we—we Americans—have entered a pre-revolutionary period in American history. I will let Chas’s remark stand as an explanation of what I mean by responsibilities. The future is up to us, to put this point another way.

Finally, there are a few exceptions to this assessment of the West’s purported leaders, and we must look to them for slim rays of light—suggestions of what is still possible when people of integrity serve in high office genuinely in the names of those who put them there.

It is time to face these truths—long past time, indeed. The year to come will bear this out. The collapse of democratic processes and the prevalence of what looks like indifference but is better understood as resignation—these have landed the Western world with a mob of “leaders” who are clinically neurotic, narcissistic, sociopathic, megalomaniacal, operating well beyond their competence—or some or all of these in combination.

Only 20 years ago it was a not-done to speak or write of the West’s decline. One was a “declinist”—remember that word?—and this left one somewhat in the desert. Now that our late-imperial decline is beyond denying, who would have guessed that it would prove so shabby, so undignified, so embarrassing in its way—and, of course, so careless of human life and law.

Have you ever studied a photograph of Bibi Netanyahu—the features, I mean? I never miss a chance, so fascinating do I find his visage, and I urge this if you have not taken a  close look. As any good psychiatrist or clinical psychologist will tell you, this is the face of a psychotic as defined in the good old DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The Israeli prime minister’s record is well-enough known. A 76–year-old with a tenuous relationship with reality, I mean to say, is now the most powerful person in West Asia—and at this point well beyond.

But Netanyahu is not a Western leader, you say. Oh, no you don’t: The power Bibi exerts in Washington and most of the European capitals transcends geography by a long way. He takes a prominent place in this pencil-sketched group portrait. At writing, Netanyahu has just finished his fifth visit to President Trump during this, the Trumpster’s first year back in office. Think of it: A psychotic and an emotionally-arrested narcissist who seems to have something to prove to somebody, probably his father, spent the Monday of Christmas Week planning another military operation against the Islamic Republic — this one to destroy its missile program and air defenses.

Caitlin Johnstone put it best in her Dec. 28 newsletter. “They’ve stopped making up pretend nonsense about nuclear weapons,” she wrote, “and now they’re just going, ‘We need to attack Iran because Iran is rebuilding its ability to stop us from attacking it.’”

There are also Netanyahu’s various predicaments at home to consider. He is on trial on multiple corruption charges, he faces elections in 2026 he is likely to lose, and he is cravenly beholden to the Zionist fanatics with whom he has stocked his cabinet. Does this mean Itamar Ben–Givr, Bezalel Smotrich, et al. have an indirect but powerful influence in global politics? I propose we skip the question, as I cannot bear to risk the answer.

During my Christmas idyll among the firs and soaring cedars of the Pacific Northwest, the others who came to mind were those across the Atlantic who account for what we call Core Europe. Kier Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz — the British prime minister, the French president, the German chancellor: I would write these guys off as palookas except that palookas are oafish louts who never get anywhere in life.

These three are oafish and loutish in their way but have got way too far. Since Merz’s election last spring they have formed a sort of triumvirate that more or less dictates Europe’s collective direction. Russophobes all — Merz the worst of them — they’ve got Britain and the Continent all stirred up about a purely imaginary Russian invasion while  burdening their populations with generations’ worth of debt to keep the criminal regime in Kiev going in a war Ukraine lost (by my reckoning) more than a year ago.

Yet worse, across much of Europe, and certainly in the U.K., any expression of support for the Palestinian people is now effectively criminalized. As someone remarked on “X” the other day, you get arrested and jailed in Britain for denouncing Israel’s genocide in Gaza while the Starmer regime gives red-carpet welcomes to Israeli officials directly  responsible for it.

What is our word for these people? To study them together, it seems to me it must be feckless or immature — juvenile, maybe, or underdeveloped. Accustomed to sheltering under the umbrella of American hegemony, they prove incapable of thinking or acting responsibly and so seek a new refuge in the citadel of “centrist” ideology, which is not the center of anything unless it is liberal authoritarianism.

A clinically disturbed prime minister, a solipsistic president bought by the Zionist lobbies, three Europeans without a leadership bone in their bodies: I refer repeatedly to these as the West’s “purported leaders” because they do not lead anything. Let me call them “PLs” for the rest of this commentary.

The PLs of our time are entirely comfortable in their sequestration from their citizens, as this leaves them free to act entirely in their own interests. And self-interest is fine if that is the god one wants to serve, but not when a grotesquely violent world order is the price of it. I celebrated last October, when the Irish elected Catherine Connolly their president by a very wide margin. It is a ceremonial post, O.K., but Connolly’s principled politics, notably but not only on Israeli terror and the Palestine question, stand for Ireland’s.

To bring this point home but briefly, the Irish now plan to turn the former Israeli Embassy, empty since its Zionist ambassador was hounded out of Dublin this past year, into a museum dedicated to Palestinian art and artifacts. Is this splendid or what? There is no beating the Irish gift for mixing irony, humor and politics. They have been at it for some centuries, after all.

I saw a map of Netanyahu’s flight path on “X” just before he departed for Mar-a–Lago over the weekend. His plane flew over Greece and Italy before turning sharply northward toward France so as to avoid Spanish airspace. This reminded me, although one needs no reminding, of the principled position the government of Pedro Sánchez has taken on Israel and its crimes.

Spain’s Socialist premier seems to miss no chance to denounce the Zionist regime. “Those responsible for this genocide will be held accountable,” Sánchez said in a speech this past year. And: “We do not do business with a genocidal state, we do not.”

To wit, the Spanish parliament imposed a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel last summer and immediately began to enforce it. In the autumn Banco Sabadell, an old-line Barcelona institution, began freezing the accounts of Israelis.

There are other such honorable cases, although they may not be so forthright as the Irish and Spanish. Their righteousness is important in itself, of course, but also for what it shows the rest of us.

The PLs will be the end of the West’s story only if Westerners acquiesce to them. Resignation is not native to the late-imperial Western consciousness: It is conditioned. And there is a point to overcoming it.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored. 

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