Power Chooses Its Own Ending

A few years ago I got into reading biographies of powerful dictators.

I noticed something interesting.

No matter how different their ideologies were, no matter how they came to power, if they fell, their bad endings would follow a pattern.

They would fall in character. Their ending matched their energy. Theatrical violence produced theatrical exits. Bureaucratic control dissolved bureaucratically. Low-key repression led to quiet departures. The pattern repeats across biographies, regimes, and eras.

And last weekend, I saw it again.

U.S. forces descended by helicopter onto Nicolás Maduro's residence in Caracas, killed his bodyguards, and flew him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. He wasn't treated like a fallen head of state, he was treated like a criminal defendant. Indicted. Processed. Handcuffed. Absorbed into the federal system like a mid-level cartel boss.

If you followed Maduro, this felt inevitable. Power responds to how it is presented. He projected small-time hustler energy from the start. More gangster than sovereign. More cartel than regime. Half the world didn't even recognize him as Venezuela's legitimate leader.

Not exiled. Not overthrown in a coup. No large military invasion. Not negotiated with as a peer. Just arrested.

The Middle East

The Middle East is useful here because it has produced a wide range of dictators, and an equally wide range of endings.

Take Bashar al-Assad. His end was a comfortable exile in Moscow. He projected mild, technocratic competence: the eye doctor who inherited power reluctantly, spoke in measured tones about reform and stability, and governed through formal institutions. His state was propped up by Russian and Iranian backing. The Syrian civil war was brutal, but Assad himself was never theatrical. He wasn’t a caricature.

So his exit was handled quietly, negotiated between powers. No mob. No spectacle. No humiliation. He left like a failed regional manager reassigned by headquarters.

Now compare Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi ruled as performance. Elaborate uniforms. Endless speeches. The self-styled Guide of the Revolution. The Green Book. Female bodyguards. Power was intimate, theatrical, and personal. There was no state behind him, only him. When collapse came, it had to be personal too.

Dragged from a drainage pipe. Beaten. Killed in the street. His bloodied body was displayed in a meat locker for public viewing. Street theater concluding street theater.

Saddam Hussein.

Saddam projected unstable strongman energy, swinging between grandiose imperial fantasy, casting himself as Saladin reborn, and paranoid terror. Public executions. Purges. A cult of personality held together by fear. The state oscillated between spectacle and violence.

His fall mirrored that instability. Pulled from a hole in the ground, filthy and diminished. Tried in a courtroom designed as spectacle. Hanged in some makeshift room. Grandiosity inverted into humiliation.

Hosni Mubarak.

Mubarak ran Egypt like a dull police state. No ideology. No myth. He administered repression, arrests, emergency laws, elections he obviously rigged but kept procedurally correct. Violence existed, many people died, but was never personal.

He resigned under pressure. Got a trial. House arrest. Died of old age in his own home. No rupture. No spectacle. No symbolic climax. Just administration winding down.

The Energy Has to Dissipate Somehow

Think of it as political thermodynamics

When a leader injects a certain type and intensity of energy into the system, that energy has to go somewhere. Systems don't erase it, they transform it. Over time, the system adapts to what it's absorbing, narrowing the range of possible responses until only a few outcomes remain.

In democracies, this energy dissipates through regular elections, institutional transitions, checks and balances. Power changes hands before it accumulates to catastrophic levels. But in authoritarian systems, there's no release valve. The energy just builds. And builds. Until the only way out is rupture.

That's why the fall always feels inevitable in hindsight. Not because history is moral, but because systems become path-dependent. The persona isn't propaganda layered on top of governance. It is the governance. And once power is built a certain way, both the ruler and his enemies are constrained by that structure.

This pattern holds beyond the Middle East, across the 20th century's most iconic tyrannies.

Take Adolf Hitler.

Hitler injected apocalyptic, Wagnerian energy into European politics, the thousand-year Reich, civilizational struggle. Massive world war. That energy was not going away with a quiet arrest or negotiated exile. It required Götterdämmerung.

So he got it, the bunker, the last-minute marriage to Eva Braun, the dramatic suicide.

Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini's regime was built on street violence, performative brutality, and mob politics, the Blackshirts, intimidation as spectacle, power asserted in public squares. His end mirrored it precisely, captured by partisans, beaten, shot, and hung upside-down in Milan beside his mistress. Mob violence in. Mob violence out. No ceremony, no dignity, no distance.

Joseph Stalin.

Stalin ruled through terror so absolute that subordinates were afraid to breathe wrong in his presence. He spent decades making everyone around him terrified of being wrong, of acting without orders, of disturbing him unnecessarily.

So when he collapsed from a stroke on the floor of his dacha, his guards were too terrified to check on him. They heard him fall. They knew something was wrong. But the fear he'd cultivated was so complete that they left him lying there for hours, possibly dying, because they were more afraid of waking him unnecessarily than of letting him die.

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The paranoia he injected into the system killed him. The energy came back precisely.

When Low Energy Produces Low Drama

Francisco Franco ruled Spain for nearly four decades. His regime killed tens of thousands, enforced repression. Yet he died peacefully in bed at 82, having arranged a monarchical succession.

Franco ruled through the chapel and the barracks. Traditional Catholic order. Methodical conservatism. Institutional stability. The regime operated through institutional mechanisms (Catholic Church, military, bureaucracy)

The repression was real, but it was contained, administrative, processed through institutions. By the 1960s and 70s, the regime had stabilized into boring authoritarianism. The Civil War was decades past. The opposition was dead or in exile.

So the ending matched perfectly, institutional transition, monarchical succession, death of old age. He didn't die in a bunker because he didn't live in one. He died in a hospital bed.

The violence he inflicted didn't determine his fate, the structure and energy of that violence did.

You Eliminate the Off-Ramps

When people choose how to act at the beginning, they also decide which exits remain possible later.

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