Taking Global Politics Personally

welcome to the age of Omnipotent Toddlers

Trump’s summit with Putin last August was supposed to jumpstart the peace process and win him the Nobel Prize. Instead he got a history lecture. Putin quickly declined the American offer and vowed the war could only end with Ukraine’s surrender. The decision, he said, was guided by Rurik of Novgorod and Yaroslav the Wise, dusty historical ghosts he regularly summons to justify his invasion.

Trump, dumbfounded, nearly stormed out and cancelled the planned lunch meeting, according to insider accounts. He came expecting a deal; aides had persuaded him that Russia was ready for peace. But Putin seemed certain of victory, his confidence sustained by optimistic military reports that tout Russian tactical gains. “He still thinks he can win,” a senior western intelligence official told a reporter.

Over his years in power Putin has built a system that has hollowed out every institution capable of telling him no. And he’s not alone, as Semuhi Sinanoglu and I argue this week in Foreign Affairs. The world’s most powerful states are now governed by leaders who purge all opposition, ignore formal institutions, and rule through inner circles of sycophants, making policy based on private fixations instead of national interests. In political science terms, these are personalist regimes.

As you might expect, the convergence toward personalism in Russia, China, and the United States creates an unpleasant international system:

Studies of personalist regimes consistently show they are more reckless, aggressive, and conflict prone than other kinds of governments. They are more likely to break alliances, stumble into crises, and start dumb wars. These effects will be amplified now that the world’s strongest states are controlled by isolated and unaccountable leaders. A personalist global order, in other words, is one of increasing corruption, volatility, and violence.

One could easily add others like Erdogan or Modi to the list. Trump is the most recent and consequential addition and, despite still facing legal constraints and loud critics, has plowed ahead with personalizing his administration, cultivating an inner circle that resembles Putin’s in its capacity for self-abasement.

Check it out if you’re interested. The article is available open access here (no subscription needed).

Neo-Feudalism or Neo-Royalism?

You know how Hollywood occasionally releases two very similar movies at the same time for some reason? I had a similar experience with this piece.

(Warning, the rest of this is a little inside baseball unless you enjoy IR theory.)

I’ve been interested in the personalist nature of global order for some time, starting with this 2020 piece co-authored with Adam Casey on the drawbacks of personalist rule. Two weeks before the 2022 invasion, we wrote another piece highlighting Putin’s informational isolation and the trouble he would face with the invasion.

But with Trump back in office, personalism came to define American foreign policy. In a March 2025 piece for The New Republic I described Trump’s global order as “a strange blend of neo-feudal hierarchy with transactional politics.” In this world

[o]rder is preserved not through law but through tacit understandings between dominant leaders. There is always a deal to be made, a profitable arrangement to be reached. It’s a peace pact between competing mafia families who jealously guard their own turf.

Trump’s approach is erratic and personalized, replacing “national interest” with patronage and personal rule. It’s almost pre-modern, rejecting even seventeenth-century Westphalian sovereignty as a pretense while elevating vassal-like tribute and gratitude, kleptocracy and brute power — a kind of primordial politics that prizes dominance over cooperation, loyalty over legitimacy, and short-term gain over systemic stability.

A Substack essay a few days later summed up my basic view of this order with the title “Geopolitics, But Make It Dumb and Personal” (April 3, 2025), in which I wrote:

This is what I mean by pre-modern. Allies are told to pay for protection. Corporations are pressured to show loyalty. Agreements are replaced with ad hoc deals, brokered not through institutions but by personal decree.

This is not the liberal order created after 1945, or even the balance-of-power realism of the 19th century. It’s closer to palace courts and tributary arrangements, orders maintained through personal bonds of obligation rather than formal institutions.

The FA piece above, based loosely on these considerations and combined with Semuhi’s vast knowledge of personalist regimes, had been commissioned and completed in October, but various delays and world events intervened until this week.

So in late November I was gratified but also, let’s face it, mortified to see a special issue of International Organization with an article titled “Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System” by Stacie Goddard and Abe Newman.

Same idea! What’s worse, they are both talented scholars whose work I admire, so I was pretty much bound to like it.

And in fact, our core diagnosis is essentially identical. We both argue that Trump’s order is something pre-modern — what I call “neo-feudal” and they call “neo-royalist.” The key shared insight is that this order replaces state-based, rule-governed interactions with personal bonds, tribute extraction, and hierarchy centered on individual sovereigns.

We both reject Westphalia as the frame, explicitly pushing back against the idea that we’re returning to great power competition or balance-of-power politics. I described Trump’s order as “rejecting seventeenth-century Westphalian sovereignty even as a pretense” while G&N write that “reading the emerging order as Westphalian amounts to donning intellectual blinders.” (Goddard also wrote insightfully about the order’s spheres-of-influence logic here.)

We both focus on tribute and rent extraction as the central logic. I describe it as a “multipolar tributary system” that emphasizes “vassal-like tribute and gratitude” (how many times must Trump and Vance demand thanks). G&N have a full section on this — “Replacing Rules with Rents” — arguing that tariffs function as tribute extraction rather than mercantilist state-building.

As good Tillians we both even employ the mafia/protection racket analogy.

But I should also note a few important differences. One is our treatment of capitalism, which they frame it as parasitic on capitalist interdependence, in the sense of using global supply chains and financial networks as extraction mechanisms. I describe it as a rejection of neoliberal capitalism itself, an order “no longer governed by rules or prices but by power and favor.” In other words, they see neo-royalism as instrumentalizing economic interdependence for clique enrichment; I see neo-feudalism as replacing market logic altogether, partly in the service of the geopolitical logic of spheres-of-influence.

This leads to different predictions. If G&N are right, the order still needs functioning supply chains and financial networks. Otherwise, we might expect those systems to degrade or be subordinated to political command in ways that make them less recognizable as markets at all.

Another difference is G&N’s use of cliques, which they borrow from network literature, and which “denotes groups of tightly connected actors within a social system”. They use these to describe the actors driving policy in a post-Westphalian system. I think it’s key to dig down into the mechanics of who does what in such systems, so the focus on actors is commendable. Another term for these might simply be elite factions.

I also think G&N implicitly assign more foresight to its actors. They write: “What appears as arbitrary demands and threats of coercion can be understood as ‘regulated injections of distrust,’ which increase the demand for protection.” This is analytically elegant in that it takes seemingly irrational behavior and recuperates it as strategic within a neo-royalist logic. But as my “Dumb and Personal” title indicates, sometimes there’s just not much thought behind these demands. They are enacted through instinct and self-interest rather than any sense of a plan.

This synthesis of territorial ambition, kleptocratic extraction, and instinctive overreach is already playing out. Writing about Trump’s Venezuela operation, Greg Sargent argues that we need to combine the tripartite division I wrote about earlier this month with the domestic corruption lens:

Trump appears to envision something like a ‘hegemonic carve-up’ that also gives regional MAGA-friendly oligarchies a major stake in our ‘share’ of that tripartite division’s spoils. This is already the Putin model: authoritarian rule that enables smash-and-grab oligarchy by those in the regime’s good favor.

Casey Michel, quoted in the piece, puts it succinctly: “Putin envisions a world in which a small group of imperialists loot their portions of the globe as they see fit. Trump has been envious of this model for a long time. He’s implementing it himself in the Western hemisphere.”

So. Which term is better overall, neo-feudalism or neo-royalism? Each has advantages. Neo-royalist is more precise about the structure of authority, centered on a singular sovereign claiming absolute rule. It also connects to a specific literature on dynastic politics (Nexon, Duindam, Zarakol) and emphasizes the personal, monarchical quality of the sovereign’s claim. I think neo-feudal captures the relational quality better, i.e. the web of obligations, tribute, and vassalage. It emphasizes the hierarchical system rather than just the sovereign at the top and suggests economic as well as political dimensions (feudalism as a mode of production, not just a political form).

Neo-royalist may be more defensible in an academic context because it specifies the locus of sovereignty. I think it’s also more catchy. Neo-feudal is broader and fuzzier but may better capture the tributary economic relations and the web of conditional loyalties.

In any case, I’ve cast my terminological lot.

Whatever the differences, the convergence is itself worth noting, and suggests we’re onto something real. I think the hard task is to tease out precisely how rival elite factions operate in such a system; Lachmann’s theory of elite autarky (the tendency of elites within satisfied hegemons to become self-contained and pursue their own interests) may be helpful here, at least for the American case. More on that another time.