https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/05/06/opinion/examples-of-leaders-who-destroyed-countries/
One bad leader can wreck a nation
History shows that thriving countries can collapse from the very top.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - May 6, 2025
Can a single leader destroy a nation? It’s difficult but not impossible. Modern history offers many examples of leaders who inherited thriving countries and drove them to collapse. Some of those countries never recovered. Their stories show how much damage one-man wrecking crews can do.
Governments establish institutions to guarantee stable rule. Weakening or destroying those institutions is a priority for authoritarian leaders. Once that is accomplished, they can manipulate laws and societies.
Argentina is a vivid example. It may be the world’s only “formerly developed” country. A century ago it was booming. Incomes and living standards were comparable to those in Canada and Australia. Immigrants poured in to share the growing wealth. An educated middle class emerged. Blessed with resources, Argentina seemed poised for a prosperous future. Then came Perón.
Juan Domingo Perón became president of Argentina in 1946. He created mass movements and, with their support, proceeded to undermine every institution that limited his power. He was overthrown and exiled after a decade but continued to dominate Argentine politics from abroad. In 1973 he returned and reclaimed the presidency. He left behind a deeply divided country that would soon explode into civil war.
Rebellion and repression have ended, but Argentina remains caught in the pro-Perónist vs. anti-Perónist paradigm. The country continues to swing wildly. Political warfare is intense. The economy limps along, crippled by lack of investment and periods of extreme inflation. Perón set a robust and dynamic country into a long decline from which it has not recovered.
Half a world away from Argentina lies another country that was once thought to have limitless potential. In 1980 the former British colony of Rhodesia became independent, renamed Zimbabwe. It had a stable currency, modern infrastructure, highly productive farms, and a strong manufacturing sector. A former political prisoner named Robert Mugabe was elected president. “You have inherited a jewel,” the founding father of nearby Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, told him as he assumed power. “Keep it that way.”
Mugabe did the opposite. He ordered all foreigners and whites who owned businesses to sell 51 percent of their holdings to Black Zimbabweans. Then he confiscated hundreds of farms and turned them over to veterans of the liberation war, few of whom had any farming experience. Food shortages soon gripped the country. Famine followed. Investors fled. Jobs disappeared. The educated elite emigrated and the remaining middle class dissolved. Mugabe printed so much money that by 2008, prices were doubling every 24 hours and the annual inflation rate reached 7.9 billion percent. The erstwhile “breadbasket of Africa” was reduced to surviving on food aid. Mugabe was finally deposed in 2017, when he was 93. In 30 years of misrule, he crushed the jewel that Zimbabwe might have been into smithereens.
A thousand miles north of Zimbabwe lies another example of what one terrible ruler can do to a country: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After helping to depose the Congo’s first post-independence leader, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960, the United States made a former army typist named Joseph Mobutu into its principal African ally. Mobutu ruled the Congo like an emperor and became one of the 20th century’s most larcenous leaders. He never bothered to develop a national economy. His country sits on some of the earth’s richest land, but its people live in poverty. The legacy of Mobutu’s 37-year rule is a country racked by war, plagues, and other catastrophes that have taken millions of lives in recent decades. He consigned his country to a hell from which it has not emerged.
Who ruined Iran? By some measures it was Ayatollah Khomeini, who upon seizing power in 1979 imposed strict religious rule on one of the world’s most cosmopolitan societies. Looking further back, one could posit that Mohammad Reza Shah, who ruled for 25 years until Khomeini pushed him from power, was truly responsible, because his dictatorship set the stage for the mullahs’ regime. In any case, the combination of those two tyrants has reduced Iran, potentially one of the world’s leading countries, to an impoverished and unhappy backwater.
Some countries revive after periods of rule by catastrophic leaders. Germany, with its long heritage of culture and entrepreneurship, recovered from the Hitler disaster. Spain and Portugal were ruled by fascists for decades but are now stable democracies. The Dominican Republic became a reasonably well-functioning country after emerging from a suffocating 30-year tyranny.
Most leaders who have wrecked their countries came to power through elections. Once in control, they methodically used the tools of democracy to destroy democracy. They have written a playbook that all may read.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.