In truth, worries about Turkey melting down the global economy are misplaced. Unlike during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the collapse of the Thai currency unleashed regional upheaval, Turkey’s problems are less an indicator of systemic weakness across developing economies than the outgrowth of factors that are specific to Ankara. These include a politicized monetary policy, the highest current account deficit among the G20 developing economies, the most foreign-denominated private-sector debt of any emerging market, and a gratuitous fight with Washington that has escalated into sanctions. [...]
The rise of strongman regimes is, of course, organically linked to the well-documented erosion of democracy that has taken place globally over the past 15 years. But the impact of the strongman model is actually broader than this, not only breathing life into sham democracies like in Russia and Egypt—where elections are held but blatantly rigged—but also reshaping unabashedly authoritarian governments like in China and Saudi Arabia. Whereas a decade ago Beijing and Riyadh were both characterized by a kind of collective, institutionalized leadership, they have since moved away from this in favor of a paramount decision maker with decisive say over the country’s direction. [...]
The seductive draw of this logic, moreover, is not limited to nationalists and populists. Plenty of Western pundits and investors—including some of the same disciples of globalization who rage at the likes of Donald Trump or France’s Marine Le Pen—have a track record of going weak-kneed in the presence of modernizing autocrats, especially those who show up at Davos with PowerPoint decks promising painful structural reforms, crackdowns on corruption, and lucrative infrastructure projects. It turns out the case for enlightened despotism can be persuasive for self-styled liberals, too, especially when the despotism is in someone else’s country. [...]
It’s worth extending the analogy, however, to recall the fate that befell the Turkish and Russian empires. Indeed, personal autocracy in both the Romanov Court in Petersburg and the Sublime Porte in Constantinople was a source of debilitating weakness, not strength, especially as these regimes entered into direct competition with the West. An idiot sultan or czar—and there were quite a few of them—could paralyze systems for decades. But even the good ones never quite figured out how to reconcile the strong, modern state they sought to build with the autocratic prerogatives they were determined to preserve for themselves.
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