Reducing the complexities of international politics to the idiosyncratic personalities of world leaders suggests the Western media believes concision is an antidote to the short attention spans of readers, viewers and listeners. They may be right about this._

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Today, news and analysis is rapidly scrolled on electronic platforms such as X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram. Hard copy is out, especially journals and books, while small screens are in. Despite an interconnected world of unlimited and varied sources — podcasts, blogs, online magazines, journals and newspapers — there is little patience for background history which makes sense of rapidly changing international events.

Information is now processed in a different way, less likely to be read and studied in detail, and more often simply chunked for curiosity and entertainment.

It is therefore unsurprising that when the media seeks to explain Donald Trump’s approach to government, they inevitably focus on his personality: an unstable and capricious transactional negotiator, reactionary but with no fixed ideology, who seems to be both a narcissist and a pathological liar.

The same broad approach is adopted towards Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. All policy decisions are personified and therefore decontextualised, largely eliminating factors such as elite opinion, influential advisers, the distribution of power in the world and the common economic interests of each leader’s political base.

Crucially, little time is devoted to the pre-history of events which provide vital explanatory context that makes sense of them. Often the background is, in George Orwell’s words, “carefully unmentioned”.

For supporters of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the conflict began with the attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Omitted from their accounts is the brutal 20-year siege of the strip, punctuated by regular bouts of what Israel calls “mowing the lawn” – murderous military assaults such as Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defence (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014) on a defenceless civilian population, to name only the most violent.

How many Western critics of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would be aware of the US-backed coup (the Maidan revolution) against President Viktor Yanukovich in 2014 which triggered Russia’s seizure of Crimea? Or Washington (and London’s) sabotage of efforts by Ukraine and Russia to resolve their outstanding issues under a Minsk II general framework (2015) and subsequently during peace negotiations in Turkey in 2022 (the Istanbul Process)? How many who reflexively demonise Putin at every opportunity are even aware of Washington’s decision to break the promise it made to Russia in 1990 not to expand NATO eastwards by “one inch”?

In both cases, it is possible to argue that there was provocation without extenuation. Hamas did not have a legal justification for targeting civilians on 7 October 2023, either to murder or kidnap them. Nor could the attack be morally defended. But can it be explained?

As Norman Finkelstein argues, the slave revolts in antebellum America constitute an interesting analogy. Despite their violence, which at the time even white abolitionists said could not be justified, the revolts were desperate responses to the criminal horrors of slavery in the South which were showing no signs of abating. Though appalled by the savagery of the revolts, the great white champion of black emancipation William Lloyd Garrison, who had warned his contemporaries what was likely to happen when people are continuously dehumanised and abused, did not condemn them. In time, leaders of the revolts such as Nat Turner came to occupy honoured places in the history of modern America.

The Palestinians of Gaza, who have been trapped in a concentration camp for more than two decades and abandoned by the international community, had unsuccessfully tried non-violent resistance to end the siege that had made their land and their lives unliveable. Believing they had no future and therefore nothing to lose, on 7 October 2023 they targeted their prison guards: those they considered directly responsible for their immiseration. Will history judge them in the same way that Nat Turner and his confreres are remembered: that their actions were cruel and could not be justified, but cannot be condemned?

Similarly, it is possible to identify factors which provoked Russia to invade Ukraine without denying the attack was a war crime, a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and illegal under international law. In order to pass judgment, however, the pre-history of these events — the treatment of Russian nationals in Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s application to join NATO, the stationing of CIA bases in eastern Ukraine, etc — needs to be understood from a Russian perspective because it is a better explanatory guide than the psychologies of the principal actors.

Focusing on personalities, whether they be Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin, instead of the historical context of events and the structures which constrain decision-making, provides a distorted and inadequate picture which reduces international politics to simplistic binaries and fickle cheerleading.

For Trump, Murdoch media boosters, his Republican Party base and wealthy supporters on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley constitute a symbiotic cabal. Friends, relatives, media personalities and business partners without any expertise are appointed to government positions on the basis that unconditional loyalty to the president, rather than talent or experience in office, is paramount.

The battle to watch over the next four years will be between Trump and the Deep State (military-intelligence complex, State Department). It should be called Round 2. In his first term, Trump was frustrated by the resistance he faced from Atlanticists who were concerned by his efforts to achieve a rapprochement with Russia, alienate Washington’s European allies, and his insouciance towards NATO.

In his second term, Trump has a stronger hand to play and is better prepared to take on those he calls “the enemy within”: generals, heads of intelligence agencies and Pentagon bureaucrats who aren’t sufficiently loyal to him and his program. For the moment, he has successfully neutralised the threat by installing “patriots” and removing those perceived to be unco-operative and disloyal during his first term. Who wins this struggle will ultimately decide what happens to NATO, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine conflict and much else.

In the case of Putin, it is the Presidential Administration, the Russian Security Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other institutional interests which carve out policy areas for which they have specific carriage.

Then there are the individual interests of bureaucrats, advisers, oligarchs and the siloviki who owe their power and wealth to the president’s authoritarian kleptocracy. Putin’s court is not a pyramid-shaped top-down dictatorship, as it is normally portrayed in Western media.

As Mikhail Zygar observes, fiefdoms controlled by regional governors, military factions including hawks and doves, intelligence heads and Kremlin gatekeepers exert considerable power over a president who is moderate, cautious and a procrastinator when compared to influential ultra-nationalists. These factions may not be visible to outsiders, but they hold considerable sway over foreign policy – including the war with Ukraine. Putin, an opportunist by nature, depends on them as much as they need him to succeed: it’s a complex balancing act which requires deft political management and the application of brutal power in equal measure.

The word Putin is therefore less the personification of evil as Western journalists want us to believe, and more a description of a byzantine bureaucratic order where the fight for survival is played out during bouts of domestic political repression and regional territorial conflict. Add Russian nationalism and modern history into the mix and you get a country with a well-founded basis for a persecution complex. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this context for policy making.

Xi’s support base within the Chinese Communist Party, especially its Central Military Commission, is opaque but disproportionately important when compared with his predecessors who enjoyed the cachet of being party founders and heroes of the 1949 revolution. As the prime manager of China’s rapid industrial development and global outreach, Xi has kept his political rivals at bay and swiftly developed a pseudo-cult of personality.

Like Soviet leaders in the final years of their rule, the Chinese political elite does not believe in Marxism-Leninism or communism, and hasn’t for decades. They know that economically it does not work even if they ritually incant its nostrums to justify one-party rule. The only people who believe Chinese communism is an expansionist ideology are Cold War warriors in the West – ambitious people who have carved lucrative bureaucratic, journalistic and think-tank careers out of anti-communism and Sinophobia.

The CCP is full of ruthless pragmatists who use the levers of an authoritarian state to enrich themselves and their friends. As Xi well knows, the party is not monolithic. Just below the surface it is riven by factional battles over both the direction of policy and individual quests for power and political supremacy. Like their counterparts in Russia and the United States, the predilections of the Chinese ruling class are for state capitalism, following an orgy of grand larceny in the 1980s and 1990s only matched in scale by privatisation in post-communist Russia.

Neither Trump, Putin nor Xi can defy their support bases and remain in power for very long. Trump has a maximum of four years, while in the case of Putin and Xi there are plotters and rivals waiting for opportunities to strike. A jittery stock market induced by trade tariffs, plunging energy prices collapsing the ruble, and slower economic growth would threaten the tenure of all three respectively.

As well as masking those around Trump who feed him simplistic ideas and bizarre conspiracies, the lazy shorthand of personified politics feeds into longstanding Western narratives of Russophobia and Sinophobia, raising obstacles to a better understanding of how international politics is actually formed and conducted.

The personification of politics privileges the agency of one individual over the structures within which they must make their decisions. These significantly limit the available policy options for leaders. Outrageous and untruthful remarks for the media make good headlines and shock political opponents, but they often bear little on which policies will ultimately transpire. Individual leaders are important, but they are the product of an existing political system and do not operate in a political vacuum. Does anyone believe removing Netanyahu from power will change Israeli policy towards the Palestinians?

Personified politics also conceals differences of opinion and interests between elites and the general populations in countries. These relationships are often hidden within authoritarian states and can often be stark within self-described liberal democracies. The West has a misleading habit of believing its political enemies — the ayatollahs in Iran, Saddam in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela — are universally despised within their own countries by populations begging for liberation by the West. These assumptions are frequently mistaken, with disastrous consequences.

Focusing on Trump’s personality, therefore, tells us surprisingly little about what US foreign policy will look like over the next four months, let alone the next four years.