PETER BALE: Lessons from history for leaders who become a joke

Sun, 03 May 2020

Imagine the leader of a nuclear superpower being a global laughingstock, a person so flaky he's not trusted by his own officials or his allies and is the subject of incredulity as he stumbles from one self-inflicted crisis to another, taking his country with him.Boris Yeltsin was such a leader and it didn’t end well. In fact, if it were true that Vladimir Putin helped put Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, then we’re still living with the consequences of what happens when a leader becomes a liability.It was hard not to h...

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