Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has dismissed more than 200 officials, including many People’s Liberation Army officers, under the pretext of an anti-corruption campaign last October, where nine generals were removed for “disciplinary violations” and “crimes in office.”
By Nina L. KHRUSHCHEVA
In authoritarian systems, national interests and objectives often clash with the beliefs, desires, and insecurities of the leader. The more centralized power is, the more likely it is that the latter will triumph. Versions of this dynamic are currently playing out in China—where President Xi Jinping’s paranoid purges recently removed the two most senior officers in the People’s Liberation Army—as well as in Russia and the United States. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 perfectly illustrates this tension. Just a few years ago, Russia was emerging as a global force in financial technology, with Brand Finance Banking 500 ranking Sberbank, majority state-owned, as the strongest banking brand in the world. In 2019, the Russian Direct Investment Fund reportedly raised $2 billion from foreign investors to back domestic companies developing artificial intelligence solutions – part of Russia’s broader effort to strengthen its startup ecosystem.
As Putin said in 2020, “high-end technology” was essential to securing the future of Russia’s “unique civilization.” But technological innovation cannot flourish without intellectual freedom and access to global knowledge. The war in Ukraine—a product of Putin’s fantasies of great power—has led to the destruction of both. It has also exposed the corruption of Russia’s military industries and officer corps: the early months of the war were characterized by poor equipment and inept battle plans. This prompted a purge of military officers and corporate bosses untouchable in Russia since the fall of communism.
Today, Russia remains locked in a tedious war of consumption. And while Putin still stresses the importance of technological leadership, Russia is experiencing a “reverse industrialization,” with high-tech industries largely giving way to the more labor-intensive sectors of the military-industrial complex. Like Putin, Xi allows his personal whims and weaknesses—including a historical inferiority complex and dreams of an imperial legacy—to shape his policies, particularly his “irrefutable” plan to achieve “reunification” with Taiwan. But his apparent obsession with eliminating threats to his power, whether from powerful generals or corporate titans like Alibaba’s Jack Ma, may be his Achilles’ heel.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has dismissed more than 200 officials, including many People’s Liberation Army officers, under the pretext of an anti-corruption campaign last October, in which nine generals were removed for “disciplinary violations” and “crimes in office.” Some 29 of the country’s 42 top military leaders have been dismissed, and some have disappeared, since 2023. Add to that the recent departure of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, who are now being investigated for “serious violations of discipline and law,” and the People’s Liberation Army is now almost empty of senior officers with real combat experience. China could pay a high price for Xi’s paranoia — as will Xi himself — because creating a power vacuum in the military is a dangerous business. Josef Stalin learned this after the Great Terror of 1936-38, when 80 of the Red Army’s top 100 admirals and generals, and up to 30 of its members, were executed.
The purged officers – including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army’s modernizer, as well as Vasily Blyukher and Alexander Yegorov – were accused of conspiring with Germany to overthrow Stalin. The Red Army was in such dire need of competent military leadership that one purged commander, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, was released from the gulag in 1940 and later returned to high command. He would later lead one of the encircling Red Army wings in the 1945 march on Berlin. When Nikita Khrushchev delivered his shocking “secret speech” to top Soviet communists in 1956, he said out loud what should have been left unspoken: Stalin’s desperation to preserve his power had left the Soviet Union vulnerable to Nazi invasion and had likely prolonged World War II.
This lesson has eluded US President Donald Trump. There was a time when Trump (who avoided serving in Vietnam) enjoyed surrounding himself with respected generals. During his first term, he appointed James Mattis as defense secretary, John Kelly as homeland security secretary and later chief of staff, and HR McMaster as national security adviser, often referring to them as “my generals.” But Trump soon grew frustrated with their commitment to preserving US alliances and upholding the military’s apolitical norms, and fired them. When Trump returned to the White House last year, he was determined not to make the same “mistake.” He picked a defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who is fully committed to the MAGA cause, including eliminating diversity initiatives, excluding many senior military leaders (many of them black or women), and erecting new barriers for women and racial minorities.
Never mind that Hegseth, a former Fox News analyst, is woefully inadequate. Loyalty to Trump justifies mistakes that would get an intern fired — like accidentally adding a reporter to a Signal chat where senior officials were discussing the details of an impending military strike. Putting a servile loyalist in charge of the U.S. military means there’s no one to advise Trump against pursuing an increasingly aggressive foreign policy, including an attack on Venezuela, threats to annex Greenland, a blockade of Cuba, and preparations for an attack on Iran. The Trump administration now calls the Department of Defense the Department of War (although Congress has yet to approve the name change).
But like any good authoritarian, Trump is as anxious to wield power at home as he is to do so abroad. So he has sent poorly trained Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, dressed in military uniforms, to sow terror in American cities. Peaceful protesters who have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, and shot dead by ICE agents have been labeled domestic terrorists, and citizens who even complain about ICE’s actions online are reportedly being placed on a watch list. MAGA is an ideology of dominance, enforced by loyalists of varying degrees of competence. This barely scratches the surface of all the ways in which Trump’s loyalty tests and insecurity are undermining America’s interests. The difference between him and his authoritarian counterparts is that the midterm elections are rapidly approaching in the US, and, with an approval rating of just 37 percent, he may not yet have the ability to purge the country of a majority of voters.
(The author is a professor of International Affairs at The New School)