Old man rule is lacking critical wisdom

Times

a day ago

Vladimir Putin, I'm reliably told, has developed a nasty morning cough. In quieter times, doctors would probably have urged the 72-year-old to soak up the sun in a Black Sea dacha. But as demonstrated by last weekend's Ukrainian drone raid on an oil refinery near Sochi, air space over the Russian seaside is no longer entirely safe. There's no rest, it seems, for the wicked.
Still, the health of world leaders should be of public concern. Gerontocrats, like it or not, currently hold the future of the world in their palms. Are they up to it or are they beginning to buckle? Should we trust them? Do we have a choice? As AI algorithms infiltrate everyday lives, as populists revolt and postwar institutions crumble, so the political realm is changing at galloping pace — and guiding us through the tangle will be a bunch of old men (all men so far), analogue boomers who barely know how to organise their emails.
I know these people; they are my cohort. My birthday this week reminds me I'm still older than Putin and Xi Jinping, both 72, and Tayyip Recep Erdogan at 71, but a bit younger than Binyamin Netanyahu (75), Narendra Modi (74) and, of course, Donald Trump at 79. Some of them are autocrats, endlessly inventive in devising wheezes to extend their terms in office. Others are democrats with an autocratic bent.
Their lives are ordered a bit like mine. We all (I'm sure) enjoy an afternoon nap and work best in rooms with sofas. We procrastinate. Our recall isn't perfect. We pretend we are putting in work while flying or travelling by armoured train but really our daily productivity is about four hours a day. Much depends on whether one's back is playing up.
Do young people want the future to be determined by this crowd? The premise of gerontocracy is that ageing leaders construct governing networks around the principle of long­standing and tested loyalty rather than standout merit. Those born in the 1970s are seen as a threat, their ambition too naked. As a result these log-jammed 'youngsters' are finding it difficult to progress beyond the level of political middle management.
It is said of Xi that he will rule China until he 'gets to meet Marx', and to this end he has two trusted side­men, Cai Qi, his de facto chief of staff, and an ex-chief of staff and now prime minister, Li Qiang. Their task: to watch over all critical appointments inside the bureaucracy, head off any challenge to Xi when his third five-year term ends. When you reach the final stretch of a marathon you want to be sure there are no lurking surprises.
The creepy 2019 Sweden-set film Midsommar features a cult in which the elders, unquestioned and revered because of their wisdom, serve until the age of 72, then, watched by the brainwashed community, jump off a cliff. If they fail to die, a disciple finishes them off with a mallet. I saw the film with younger people and they were broadly in favour: there should, they argue, be an age cut-off point for political leaders not because oldies were out of touch but because the whole system slows down if gerontocrats set rules of promotion and succession binding on younger generations. Anything else will destabilise society. That is an argument understood by Xi critics, wary of what happens when a paramount leader with control of party, state and military, grows old and fallible.
Since Joe Biden fell victim to an act of political senicide (real word alert!), Trump has found a way of dividing and ruling by destroying the global trading system and replacing it with ad hoc arrangements. That's grounded in Old Manpolitik: bad for long-term stability, bad for growth, but turns the rest of the world into supplicants.
Cooked up in part with his 76-year-old maverick adviser Peter Navarro, it is a model that retires the idea of allies as people you stick with until death do us part and replaces it with the world as a grand bazaar. Modi was hugged by Trump as a great friend in February then heard India described as a 'dead economy', punished with 25 per cent tariffs for buying cheap Russian oil. Trump plays hot with Putin (a reset in the offing?) and cold (two US nuclear submarines mobilised because of Russian insults). There are variants of the same power game on everybody; social media has taught him that saying things can be just as effective, and much less work, than doing things. Ultimately, the weak surrenders to the strong.
The 70-plus leadership club should know better. They should be posing the questions that Trump glides over. Should the US mimic China's industrial policy in order to beat it? If so, will Trump ever recognise the essential role of America's traditional trading allies? If the US becomes too brutal to love but too irrelevant to fear, what happens to its orphaned allies? The Oldie response is to leave the fundamental choice — China or America — to future generations, to hide under the duvet until Trump goes.
They know that's cowardice because a solitary 79-year-old leader, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has already been doing some straight-talking. 'At no point will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country,' he tells Trump. The power of the US, he says, 'doesn't make us afraid, it makes us concerned'. The other Oldies should take a leaf out of Lula's book. Age is supposed to bring critical wisdom. Let's use it.