This event is hosted by the Centre for Statecraft and National Security, with Dr Anit Mukherjee as chair and Dr Walter C Ladwig III as discussant.

Right-wing populist leaders—from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—often seem to love (especially fallen) soldiers and the trappings of military life. But their romance with the military rarely endures. Romanticising and mythologising the military serves populists’ interests: soldiers who willingly sacrificed their lives for the nation’s good serve as a model for an obedient public that should similarly march into the political battlefield on behalf of the populist leader. But an independent, professional military is always at least a latent threat to populists’ political ambitions. They seek to control the armed forces, erode its autonomy and professionalism, and transform it into a realm of loyalists. If the top brass resists, populists launch attacks on their character and competence, to undermine public trust in the military and facilitate its takeover.

Prof Ronald Krebs is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where he has also been named Scholar of the College of Liberal Arts and Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in the Liberal Arts. He is coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy (Oxford UP, 2021), and author of Narrative and the Making of US National Security (Cambridge UP, 2015), which received both the Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award in International History and Politics and the Giovanni Sartori Book Award, for the best book developing or applying qualitative methods, from the American Political Science Association. His other books include In War’s Wake: International Conflict and the Fate of Liberal Democracy (Cambridge UP, 2010) and Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship (Cornell UP, 2006). Krebs is immediate past editor-in-chief of the leading scholarly journal Security Studies. He is currently writing a book titled The Age of Militarism: How Veneration of the Military Spread Around the Globe.

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