When U.S. President Donald Trump made his second state go to to China in Could 2026, Xi Jinping escorted him by Beijing’s magisterial Temple of Heaven, the place the Ming and Qing emperors carried out rites that mediated between heaven and the earthly order. However when these two males with autocratic impulses and outsized egos strolled by the complicated, it turned not a Temple of Heaven however a Temple of Thymos – a stage for distributing recognition slightly than cosmic issues. Now, the neoclassical structure of the White Home supplies the set for his or her September 23–25 encounter.
Readers of The Diplomat can discover in it many articles on the “Thucydides Lure” popularized by the political scientist Graham Allison. The Thucydides Lure means that China and america are headed for inevitable battle. A number of students dispute Allison’s studying, and but the traditional historian’s ghost nonetheless hovered as Xi and Trump moved by the temple, with the Chinese language Communist Occasion’s normal secretary, who has a sample of citing Allison, even referencing the phrase.
I wish to suggest a lens for energy rivalry that’s equally historic however totally different and complementary: a Thymos Lure.
Thymos – additionally rendered thumos – is an historic Greek phrase (θυμός) that expresses the need for recognition. Each Xi and Trump show an unquenchable thymos and take pains to look outwardly robust. However in truth, international locations led by strongmen who construct regimes round their personalities are solely outwardly magnificent. Internally, they are usually precarious. Anybody who assumes that the superficial energy of such regimes and leaders makes them completely sturdy could also be falling right into a Thymos Lure.
As popularized by the political thinker Francis Fukuyama, thymos is “the a part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity.” It’s innate to all of us and never a marker of broken, narcissistic males. However Fukuyama makes distinctions between isothymia (recognition as equal) and megalothymia (recognition as superior). The genius of liberal democracy is that it satisfies the human want for isothymia. However megalothymia can by no means be extinguished, as a result of its fossil gasoline is the trauma of prior humiliation, now powering a craving for reversal. Nationalism can switch that dynamic from particular person to nation: Xi wears it on his sleeve as China’s “century of humiliation,” ensuing “harm emotions of the Chinese language individuals,” and his Chinese language Dream of rejuvenation. Trump emblazons it on his “Make America Nice Once more” baseball caps.
This need for standing, because the journalist Will Storr defined in “The Standing Sport,” is pursued by dominance, advantage, or success. These differing ways can rely on the cultures wherein status-seeking people function.
In accordance to political thinker Ye Xue, in america, the place standing is relative and should be defended, the cultural tendency is to pursue shallowness by calls for for honor. China, in contrast, is rooted in a secure hierarchy wherein standing is relational and concord is sought. Trump and Xi signify these totally different cultural approaches to recognition completely; Trump’s is deeply individualistic and even antagonistic, whereas Xi’s is extra involved with a collective megalothymia that calls for deference to China as an entire.
For all their variations, Xi and Trump share a standard insistence on staking their very own legitimacy on the nation’s shallowness, updating French King Louis XIV’s apocryphal line, l’État, c’est moi (“I’m the State”). However they do differ in noteworthy methods. Per Ye Xue’s analysis, Trump calls for conspicuous shows of deference to him as a person, whereas Xi is extra involved with shows of “face” – one thing he has fused with gestures towards China as an entire. In that manner, Xi is a quintessentially Chinese language statesman, in being tactful, understated, and formal.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney mirrored after a January 2026 assembly with Xi how the final secretary had stated one thing to him to the impact of “don’t lecture me in public.” Xi wasn’t averse to listening to complaints, Carney implied, however to be seen being criticized was an unacceptable lack of face.
The U.S. president, in the meantime, has a grammar that’s distinctly American. The historian Walter Russell Mead recognized Trump as following within the line of President Andrew Jackson’s heirs: populist, casual, and fast to answer insults. Trump should win visibly whereas Xi should not lose face. They’re reflective of their totally different cultural traditions however are variations on the identical substance. And so they undergo from the identical paradox of outward energy and inward fragility.
Regardless of the cultural variations, megalothymia is a perennial human temptation, which is why institutional safeguards are wanted to forestall the emergence of strongmen. Liberal democracies have flourished by centuries by erecting precisely these guardrails. “Ambition should be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison in “The Federalist Papers.”
The particulars range, however the strongman model has clear commonalities. Because the columnist Gideon Rachman outlined in “The Age of the Strongman,” it’s outlined by 4 overlapping traits: a cult of persona, contempt for the rule of regulation, populism, and a politics of worry and nationalism. The model runs alongside a continuum, starting from unchallenged autocrats like Xi and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un by strongmen in hybrid regimes – assume Russia’s Vladimir Putin – to wannabe dictators working in democratic methods, reminiscent of Trump.
The insatiable want for recognition is the engine of those males who faux to be (and maybe want to be) really bigger than life. However each actor wants a stage. And for strongmen, the summit supplies that. All summits are manufactured encounters the place protocol and positioning grow to be deeply necessary shows of honor for each states and their statesmen. Notably in China, a summit is as carefully choreographed as a Broadway play or Peking opera. That’s why in Could Trump’s effusive rhetoric – and Xi’s comparatively aloof demeanor – was so important. The U.S. president described his counterpart as his “good buddy” and “a person I love tremendously.” He even waxed poetic about receiving “essentially the most lovely roses anybody has ever seen.” It was an ideal instance of political scientist Todd Corridor’s analysis displaying how affective ties – love, affection, attachment, and devotion – form, constrain and manipulate leaders. China’s officers probably aimed to induce heat emotions from Trump by the summit’s flattery, and so they succeeded.
Xi’s language didn’t method Trump’s rhapsodizing. He did, nevertheless, oversee the prolonged Chinese language readout of the assembly, which consisted of a brand new four-pillar framework of stability – what the Communist Occasion calls a tifa – centered on Taiwan. The White Home readout, in contrast, was only one paragraph. That’s as a result of, for the CCP, a summit that reveals the U.S. president as an equal (or lesser) statesman is an important second in a legitimating narrative of how it’s returning China to greatness. That story is bolstered when a strong overseas chief who’s determined for a way of superiority feels flattered by the pageantry.
What sort of man is most prone to this theater, and most hooked on constructing one? With out direct scientific psychoanalysis, it will be inappropriate to presume any formal analysis. However there are psychological constructs that provide an interpretive framing for leaders who spend a number of time within the public enviornment. The Darkish Triad, original by psychologists Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams, suggests {that a} mixture of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy types a singular persona assemble. Psychologists have noticed that Trump and Xi align effectively with these traits in some respects.
Lengthy earlier than he ran for the presidency, Trump gave a revealing interview in Playboy journal in 1990, the place he praised China’s leaders for his or her “energy” in crushing the earlier 12 months’s Tiananmen Sq. protests and conversely referred to as Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev “weak” for his restraint. Equally, analysts Ursula and Dennis Wilder have famous Xi’s “iron Machiavellian detachment.” Climbing to the apex of the Chinese language Communist Occasion requires calculated ruthlessness. To make certain, this tidy mapping is a metaphor, not a psychological discovering. However it pinpoints one thing very actual.
These traits actually grow to be an enduring drawback – a structural problem – as soon as a person fuses himself with a state and a regime stakes its legitimacy on his recognition. That’s as a result of, satirically, the institutionalization of megalothymia is what makes it notably susceptible. Finally, the leaders of all personalist regimes are likely to fall prey to the deadly sins of isolating themselves, suppressing dangerous information, overreaching, and overly centralizing decision-making. The very ego that builds the regime is exactly what hollows it out. The insatiable lust for standing that represses critics makes vital suggestions unattainable. That is the Thymos Lure.
Internationally, it’s equally fragile, as a result of when a regime stakes its legitimacy on delivering ever-more recognition to a lone particular person, then overseas humiliation turns into a home survival menace. The insistence on recognition is just not a persona footnote however important to nationwide identification, requiring shows of deference. In “The Purple Emperor,” Michael Sheridan associated an anecdote from 2011: Xi informed a visiting U.S. Vice President Joe Biden the lesson he’d drawn from historical past was that China must not ever make concessions. However compromises, power-sharing, and subtle energy facilities are inherent to the character of the trendy state system, which suggests such perceived humiliations are inevitable.
As political scientist Milan W. Svolik has noticed, most deposed dictators fall to not mass uprisings however to regime insiders who scent weak spot or failure of their nation’s chief – exactly the kind of factor that happens when an ostensibly indestructible chief faces some kind of defeat overseas. As a eager reader of Josef Stalin, Xi’s response has been a ceaseless wrestle in opposition to what John Garnaut memorably referred to as the “calcification and putrefaction that inevitably corrodes and degrades each dictatorship.” The perpetual purges which have engulfed China’s navy previously few years illustrate not Xi’s energy however the regime’s brittleness; a succession disaster turns into way more attainable and severe when competent rivals are absent.
The Thymos Lure is an inclination, not a forecast; a sample, not a promise. For all that males like Trump, Xi, and Putin comply with a script laid down by dictators and would-be dictators earlier than them, every is an actor enjoying distinctive components. Xi’s face-saving tradition and lack of electoral cycles allow him to be extra affected person in service of delayed good points than Trump. Maybe that explains the kind of off-ramps Beijing has taken throughout commerce disputes with Washington.
A development just like the Thymos Lure operates over the long run, and a few caveats ought to be acknowledged. The intense disarray in what was referred to as the Western alliance signifies that autocratic methods in China and Russia look extra harmonious and even enticing to some doomsayers than liberal democracies. After the assembly in Could between Xi and Trump, the headline on a Hal Manufacturers column lamented that “Xi units the phrases for everybody now.”
The very best understandings of the thymotic leaders acknowledge their recurring, ongoing enchantment. The historian Stephen Kotkin, in a International Affairs article aptly titled “The Weak spot of the Strongmen,” acknowledged that such regimes “final far longer than usually anticipated” at the same time as they “stay liable to sudden runs on their political banks.”
One other caveat within the Thymos Lure is that not all strongmen completely match the mildew. For all his predilections towards amassing energy and ego, Trump is working in a rustic with a wealthy democratic custom. The USA Structure has so many built-in checks and balances that almost all presidents have been pissed off by their lack of ability to bend the nation to their will. The U.S. has a vibrant civil society and a strong opposition celebration. All of that constrains Trump’s Thymotic urges.
He has “autocrat envy,” as Fiona Hill, considered one of his former Nationwide Safety Council officers, put it: praising all types of dictators and strongmen whereas insulting democratic leaders for his or her adherence to liberal democratic norms. However his palpable need for the powers of autocrats is exactly what signifies that Trump can’t be considered one of them, a lot as he would possibly wish to be. Xi will be happy with modest gestures of face exactly as a result of he truly is within the place that Trump needs he was, with near-absolute management over the inhabitants over which he guidelines. Conversely, “Trump would like to have the scenario that Viktor Orban has, however he doesn’t,” as his former ambassador to Hungary put it – not lengthy earlier than fed-up Hungarians decisively ejected that deeply thymotic and intolerant prime minister from workplace.
When Trump was escorted by Xi by the Temple of Heaven in Could 2026, it’s truthful to imagine that the U.S. president didn’t know the historical past of the construction earlier than his host extolled it. However there was irony for Xi, too. In response to Chinese language cosmology, the emperor carried out the Temple of Heaven rites as a result of the Mandate of Heaven could possibly be withdrawn. Magnificence and precarity are all the time linked on this custom. So it’s in actuality. As Rachman put it, strongman rule is “an inherently flawed and unstable type of authorities” that “will in the end collapse.” However he hastened so as to add, “there could also be a number of turmoil and struggling” earlier than that occurs.
The Communist Occasion chief radiates the arrogance and gravitas of a person who seems to have mastered his thymos. However the Thymos Lure ensnares leaders as a result of the fragility it engenders is structural, not peculiar to their particular person pathology. Their regimes have the identical architectural drawbacks, no matter their nationwide flavors. The identical impulses that propel a one-man cult grow to be the forces that bedevil it. The lure is that strongmen should preserve showing robust – and whether or not their opiate of alternative is honor or face, the efficiency finally consumes the substance. The counter-model to the thymos-doomed chief could be Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who interrogated his personal status-hunger by wielding near-absolute energy with a brake on it within the type of Stoicism. Xi kinds himself as this kind of contemplative, all-powerful philosopher-king, and but his closely propagandized “Xi Jinping Thought” is most probably the ghost-written output of a CCP committee. Marcus is the inversion, the vanishingly uncommon chief who distrusts and even resists his personal urges for recognition, difficult his personal thymos in a non-public pocket book. Leaders like which can be few and much between, a tragic actuality that solely highlights the ever-present hazard of the Thymos Lure.