When democracies confront rising radical extremists, one of the most dangerous delusions is the belief that, once in power, they will moderate. This comforting fiction has been embraced by some of our most celebrated public figures.
Consider Walter Lippmann, one of the most influential journalists of the 20th century. A native New Yorker born into an affluent Reform Jewish family and educated at Harvard, he was an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson before becoming a columnist and author revered by generations of reporters and political scientists as the paragon of the journalist as analyst and commentator. Which makes it all the more striking that in May 1933 – barely three months after Adolf Hitler seized dictatorial power – Lippmann described one of the Führer’s speeches as “statesmanlike” and “an authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people.”
Long before he became chancellor, Hitler’s speeches and his political manifesto Mein Kampf had made his racial ideology and rabid antisemitism unmistakable, framing Jews as Germany’s mortal enemy and calling for their exclusion from national life. He had also repeatedly glorified political violence, celebrating the street fighting of his storm troopers, romanticizing bloodshed as a means of national renewal and vowing to restore Germany’s greatness through territorial expansion at the expense of other nations.
Once in office, Hitler moved with ruthless speed – banning political opposition, suspending civil liberties, jailing and murdering opponents, opening the Dachau concentration camp, staging the infamous book burnings and launching a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses.
For the dean of American opinion makers to look at Hitler’s record and still divine indications of moderation was not just a tragic misreading. It was willful blindness of the most dangerous kind. Even after Kristallnacht and Germany’s invasion of Poland, Lippmann hesitated to sound a clear alarm about Hitler, clinging to the illusion that he might still be contained through negotiation.
More than four decades later, in 1979, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, made a similarly astonishing claim about Iran’s new revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. Young said that Khomeini, who had already signaled his contempt for democracy and the West, would “eventually be hailed as a saint.”
We know how that turned out. Khomeini delivered theocratic tyranny, mass murder and hostage‑taking.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to Hitler or Khomeini. For generations, romanticism toward revolutionary strongmen has seduced parts of the Western liberal imagination. Fidel Castro, who turned Cuba into a prison island, was lionized by intellectuals and journalists who admired his “revolutionary spirit” more than they cared about his firing squads.
In 1957, New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews famously portrayed Castro as an “anti-Communist” democrat-in-waiting who would restore free elections after overthrowing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. His 1958 dispatches persuaded the Eisenhower administration to cut arms shipments to Batista and helped sell the Cuban Revolution as a popular liberation movement.
Even after Castro seized power on January 1, 1959 – delaying elections, staging summary trials and carrying out mass executions – Matthews still called Castro “decidedly anti-Communist.” When Castro declared the next year that he would adopt Communism to reshape Cuban society, Matthews maintained he had not been a Communist while leading the revolution.
Matthews was hardly alone. In 1960, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called the revolution “the most important event of our time” and praised Che Guevara as “the most complete human being of our age.”
Mao Zedong, one of history’s most prolific mass murderers, received similar treatment. Journalist Edgar Snow’s book Red Star Over China cast Mao as a heroic reformer, introducing him to the Western world with near‑mythical reverence.
In the 1960s, Maoist China became a cause célèbre for Western radicals and intellectuals. The French literary journal Tel Quel adopted Maoism; feminist leaders quoted Mao’s slogan that “women hold up half the sky;” and the Black Panthers sold Mao’s Little Red Book to fund their operations. Meanwhile, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution – campaigns that starved tens of millions and obliterated much of China’s cultural heritage – were excused as the “growing pains” of an inspiring revolutionary project.
That same blindness persisted long after Mao’s death. For decades, many in the West assured themselves that Communist China would inevitably liberalize as it embraced market reforms and grew wealthier. Yet Xi Jinping, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao, has shown the opposite: tightening party control, crushing Hong Kong’s freedoms, persecuting Uyghurs in Xinjiang and threatening Taiwan with menacing military drills. Still, some cling to the fantasy that prosperity will mellow tyranny, ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary.
The Western romanticizing of Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was hailed at home and abroad as a charismatic modernizer when he emerged as the country’s dominant leader in the 1950s, is another telling example. He went on to lead Egypt to defeat in two wars with Israel.
Nasser’s predecessor, King Farouk, had sent Egyptian forces to fight the new Jewish State in 1948, but Farouk’s motives were rooted in prestige and influence. Nasser, by contrast, was propelled by a pan-Arab nationalist ideology and sweeping regional ambitions. Admired by many European and American intellectuals as an Arab Socialist and a champion of the Third World, he recruited Nazi scientists to strengthen Egypt’s military and, on the eve of the Six-Day War, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea.
Unlike his successor, Anwar Sadat – no democrat himself but willing to abandon pan-Arabism and make peace with Israel after the Yom Kippur War, a decision that cost him his life – Nasser’s ideological commitment made a true diplomatic course impossible, despite repeated “peace feeler” claims by sympathetic foreign observers.
More recently, the leaders of Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose charter openly calls for Israel’s destruction, were cast by diplomats, foreign correspondents and policy analysts not as bloodthirsty terrorist chiefs but as “militants” who could be reasoned with through economic assistance and political engagement. Like Hitler, they used a single electoral victory to seize and hold power, winning Gaza’s 2006 election, then crushing rivals and ending further democratic competition.
Many so-called Middle East experts predicted the responsibilities of governance would moderate Hamas. They were wrong, fatally so, as October 7 made undeniable.
Turkey’s Islamist strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has likewise shown no sign of moderation. Far from it. Over two decades in power, he has tightened his grip on the media, purged the military and escalated his anti-Israel rhetoric, while pursuing policies that seem aimed at reviving a neo-Ottoman sphere of influence. Though he still permits elections, his trajectory underscores the reality that long tenure in power can deepen, not dilute, an extremist leader’s ambitions.
What unites these rulers is that they are not simply dictators whose regimes rest on bayonets, as the old saying goes. They are totalitarians. Their regimes are animated by all‑encompassing ideologies that justify extraordinary cruelty.
And yet, Western liberals have shown a troubling tolerance for them. Liberals tend to project their own values onto leaders who share none of them, convincing themselves that wealth will civilize radicals, that power will mellow fanatics, that dialogue will convert the uncompromising.
It never works out that way. From Hitler to Hamas, the pattern is obvious. Dedicated extremists never moderate. They only grow more dangerous.
Put differently, history shows that not all despots are equally threatening. An ordinary dictator may be brutal, corrupt and self-serving, but his ambitions often end at his own borders. Extremists committed to totalitarian projects and ideologies are different. They seek to remake countries, to dominate regions, and, if left unchecked, to subjugate and reorder entire continents.
Assuming such leaders can be managed through run-of-the-mill diplomacy, without extraordinary protective measures, is more than an analytical error. It’s a strategic blunder with potentially catastrophic consequences.
