Leadership is crippled and politics is hobbled when those who hold the levers of power are caught in circumstances rather unforeseen or unwarranted. The extent to which Joe Biden was unprepared for a second term in the White House, indeed the egregious manner in which his close advisers, among whom was his wife Jill, went carefully into concealing the state of his health conditions from the public has come through in Original Sin, the revealing publication on Biden’s 2024 objective of seeking a second term by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
There was never any doubt about Biden’s inability to go for a second term as President. By the middle of his presidency, to which he was elected in November 2020, his physical shortcomings and lack of mental acuity were beginning to show.
His sentences trailed off into incoherence; his gait became a shuffle; he lost track of conversations and his attention to others in his presence was perfunctory. He thought Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al Sisi was President of Mexico and referred to his meeting with the long-dead Helmut Kohl when it was Angela Merkel he had met. And yet he decided he could wage a second battle against Donald Trump in 2024, his argument being that since he had beaten Trump in 2020, he could beat him a second time.
It was too late when Biden was persuaded to abandon his second term ambitions. Vice President Kamala Harris had no more than 107 days (and she has written a book on it) to campaign against a resurgent Trump. She lost the race. Her fellow Democrats lost the races for both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In effect, a hobbled Biden had created the perfect conditions for Democrats to become crippled in their ambitions of defeating the Republicans at the election.
Instances of leaders crippled by age or by upended politics have there been aplenty in our times. President Richard Nixon, physically a healthy man, was nevertheless rendered a political cripple by Watergate. There was no way he could recover.
Before him, the war in Vietnam left President Lyndon Johnson hobbled, enough to force him into renouncing a second term. In his time, Jimmy Carter’s hopes of a second term as president were derailed by the Iran hostage crisis. With American diplomats and other employees kept hostage in Tehran for 444 days, there was little chance for Carter to ward off the challenge to his hold on power by Ronald Reagan.
Biden is not the only politician defeated by age despite his dreams of a continued presidency. In the former Soviet Union, gerontocracy led to the death in quick succession of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko.
Never before, and that means in the post-1917 revolutionary situation in the USSR, had Moscow been witness to doddering and wheezing old men keeping their grip on power before mortality took hold of them. Theirs was crippled leadership in the five years before Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power in March 1985. Gorbachev himself was crippled by the abortive coup d’etat in 1991. Neither he nor the Soviet Union survived.
Politicians have often been crippled by such other factors as foreign and local conspiracy against the governments they presided over. Chile’s Salvador Allende remains a prime instance of how his local opposition, in the form of trade unions and the political elite, and in cahoots with America’s CIA, made his presidency increasingly vulnerable. President Allende faced enemies on too many fronts. Unable to govern, he was brought down by his army, which like so many armies around the world felt no compunction in launching a violent coup against Chile’s elected leader.
Military dictators all too often stumble into conditions where their arrogant hold on power begins to loosen at a point where citizens rise in mass protest against them. Pakistan’s Ayub Khan was crippled towards the end of his regime in a couple of ways. He fell gravely ill in 1968, though Pakistanis had the information carefully hidden from them.
By the time he returned to work, nationwide demands for a restoration of democracy were beginning to render his rule untenable. He hobbled out of power a decade after he had seized the country in a coup d’etat. His one-time protégé Z.A. Bhutto experienced similar crippling when rigged elections in March 1977 led to countrywide mass protests, eroding the government’s ability to reassert authority. A crippled Bhutto was then ejected from power by the army.
In Bangladesh, the regime of General Hussein Muhammad Ershad found it impossible to assert its power once the movement for democracy against it by political parties and professional citizens’ groups gathered force toward the end of the 1980s. A lame-duck presidency was what Ershad led, with predictably nothing to show for it, until his final moment of reckoning came in December 1990. Where crippled politics is the issue, no example can be better than the restive Iran the Shah tried to govern in the hope that the monarchy would survive. The Shah forgot that the late 1970s had little similarity with the early 1950s, when the CIA engineered the fall of Mohamed Mossadegh and restored him to power. A crippled Reza Pahlavi left Iran in January 1979, never to return.
In Myanmar, the former Burma, politicians have always borne the brunt of military dominance. The coup led by General Ne Win in 1962 overthrew the civilian government of Prime Minister U Nu. Ne Win was forced to throw in the towel in the 1980s, but that did nothing to force the army back into the barracks.
A brief experience in putative civilian administration, with Aung San Suu Kyi as its international face, did not survive. Suu Kyi was hobbled from day one of her government; and when it became clear that her National League for Democracy was headed for an impressive electoral victory in 2020, the soldiers pounced. Suu Kyi, now in prison in an undisclosed location, will probably die there.
Politics is generally never a smooth process of ensuring democracy or governance. The health of politicians together with their policy failures or hubris in supposing that they know what is best for them and their countries often leaves an entire political process badly wounded.
And then comes the instance of governments falling foul of the judiciary, with judges too happy to decree an end to the rule of governments elected by the people. The frequency with which elected governments in Thailand have been dismissed by the courts is not just alarming but is a permanent threat to the country’s politicians now and in the future.
There is a bottom line to all this, indeed a lesson that historians ought to take into account. It is that politicians in their dotage must not insist on continuing in the game when mentally and physically they are not equipped to do the job. It is that military coups against elected governments leave societies and nations crippled. It is that in many instances the influence of powerful nations on weaker ones push the latter into becoming ungainly sights of hobbled humanity.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a writer.
