I came across one of the most brilliant columns of the year. Writing in the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh surfaces a quietly compounding risk in global politics—not artificial intelligence, not populism, not war, but something more mundane and much harder to hedge: the age of global leaders.
Not because they’re senile. Because they’re sprinting toward legacy, unconcerned with the wreckage they may leave behind.
Let’s zoom out. Today, more than half of the world’s population is governed by men in their 70s or older:
Donald Trump (78)
Vladimir Putin (71)
Xi Jinping (71)
Narendra Modi (73)
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (71)
Benjamin Netanyahu (75)
Lula da Silva (78)
What binds them isn’t just a fondness for power and shrinking testosterone levels.
It’s time. Or more precisely, a lack of it.
Ganesh’s argument is razor-sharp: age doesn’t dull ambition—it intensifies it. These aren’t cautious elder statesmen. They’re legacy-maxing CEOs in Q4, jamming risk into the system because they know they won’t be around for Q1.
It introduces a unique form of geopolitical risk—one that markets can’t price: the desperation to cement a legacy.
When the clock’s ticking, these old men stop managing systems and start chasing headlines.
Continuity is swapped for control. The long-term melts into the immediate. They’re not managing institutions. They’re managing tombstones.
It’s more than a trend—it’s a systemic risk factor embedded in today’s geopolitical landscape.
Here's how it manifests:
1. Incentive Misalignment
Strong institutions are meant to absorb shocks and moderate decision-making over time. But aging leaders override those guardrails. Instead of preserving systems, they personalize them—via constitutional tweaks, power grabs, or sweeping populist mandates. Continuity becomes optional. Legacy becomes the mission.
2. Weakening of Checks and Balances
In democracies, elder statesmen are often surrounded by deference. Courts defer. Party insiders hold their tongues. Age gets mistaken for wisdom; longevity, for legitimacy. In autocracies, it’s even worse: the older the leader, the more insulated the inner circle.
3. No Skin in the Future
Political economists call it temporal discounting—the further away the consequence, the less it matters. Younger leaders may still weigh generational costs. Older ones? Not so much. Climate, debt, war—it’s all someone else’s problem. A 45-year-old might consider what a war means for their grandkids. A 78-year-old might only think about the next headline or history book.
This Is Not About Ageism
This is about time horizon distortion—When tomorrow doesn’t matter, today becomes reckless. That’s the mindset shaping global policy right now.
We see it everywhere:
Climate change? Kick the can. Growth wins votes now.
Deficit spending? Borrow today. Let the next guy default.
Authoritarian drift? Strongmen are remembered—technocrats are forgotten.
Populism? The applause of the present beats the judgment of history.
A statesman thinks in decades. A politician thinks in election cycles. The former plants trees whose shade they’ll never sit under. The latter bulldozes the forest to erect a statue of himself.
We are surrounded by the latter.
The Final Risk Factor: Populism + Age
Add bad character and a populist feedback loop to this already fraught equation, and you get a Molotov cocktail: impulsive, glory-seeking leaders with no incentive to preserve the systems that got them elected.
And that’s the true geopolitical wildcard of the 2020s.
Not AI. Not Middle East. Not Trade Wars. Not even China.
Something more human. More predictable. Yet more dangerous:
Too many old men, with too little time, and too much power.
