XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: Xi Jinping’s Faltering Foreign Policy.

To say that Xi has consolidated power in China is to state the obvious. Few dispute that Xi holds a singular position within China’s bureaucratic apparatus, and it is increasingly hard to deny that something akin to a personality cult is developing in state media and other propaganda channels. Yet the implications of this reality are insufficiently appreciated, especially its impact on the behavior of the Chinese party-state.

Consider a pattern that has emerged across authoritarian political systems in which leaders remain in office far longer than their democratic and term-limited counterparts. The longer a leader stays in power, the more state institutions lose their administrative competence and independence as they evolve to fit that leader’s personal preferences. Successive rounds of purges and promotions shape the character of the bureaucracy, moving it incrementally in the same direction as the leader’s grand vision. What might begin as formal punishment for explicit opposition to the leadership eventually becomes a climate of informal self-censorship as members of the bureaucracy come to understand the pointlessness of dissent and grow better attuned to unspoken expectations of compliance. The leader also becomes more distant and isolated, relying on a smaller and smaller group of trusted advisers to make decisions. Most of those individuals remain at the table because they display absolute loyalty.

This small circle, in turn, acts as the leader’s window to the world, leaving much dependent on how accurate a depiction of external reality its members choose to provide. Such an opaque decision-making process makes it difficult for external observers to interpret signals from the central leadership. But even more crucially, it makes it hard for actors within these autocratic systems to anticipate and interpret their leaders’ actions. The result is an increasingly unpredictable foreign policy, with the leader formulating snap decisions in secret and the rest of the bureaucracy racing to adapt and respond.

Putin is is a similar situation and started a war because, apparently, his generals told him he could win quickly and at a reasonably low cost. What he’s gotten is an expensive slog. Worse, it’s revealed serious weaknesses in the Russian military that a decade’s worth of reforms and modernization were supposed to have fixed.

Maybe Xi can learn from Putin’s bad example, or maybe he’s so cloistered that he can’t.