What Makes World Leaders Tick: Exclusive Interview with Dr Kenneth Dekleva
In an exclusive interview, Brasidas Group (BG) spoke with psychiatrist and former U.S. Department of State officer and medical expert Dr Kenneth Dekleva about the changing geopolitical landscape, expectations from leading world powers, as well as psychological profiling of world leaders.
Dr Kenneth Dekleva is a practicing psychiatrist and Senior Fellow at the George HW Bush Foundation for US-China Relations. From 2002 to 2016, he served as a senior U.S. diplomat and regional medical officer/psychiatrist with the U.S. Department of State, mostly overseas, including 5 years at the U.S. Embassy Moscow, but also in a leadership role (from 2013 to 2015) as director of the U.S. State Department’s worldwide diplomatic mental health program, providing mental health support to 60,000 U.S. diplomats and family members based overseas and in the United States. He has published widely in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, The Hill, The Cipher Brief, 38 North, and The Diplomat, and has given numerous presentations in academic, private sector, and U.S. government settings in the field of leadership analysis, including profiles of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un. Dr Dekleva is also the author of two published novels, The Negotiator’s Cross, and The Last Violinist.
Brasidas Group: Before we get into the main topics of our conversation, could you briefly comment on the recent reported airplane crash involving, among others, the leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Kenneth Dekleva: Vladimir Putin (Putin) has always spoken highly of the value he places on loyalty and, conversely, from comments in his autobiography First Person to more recent interviews, for his utter contempt for disloyalty and treason. In this sense, the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin (Prigozhin) (and other senior Wagner leaders, including its founder, Dmitry Utkin) fits neatly into Putin’s paradigm. The plane crash echoes Mao Tse-tung’s actions in 1969 when a plane carrying President Liu Shaoqi was shot down while attempting to flee to Mongolia. The ambiguity surrounding Prigozhin’s death suits Putin perfectly and suggests that his power remains strong, contrary to those observers who had written him off. Underestimating Putin and his resilience has always been a fool’s errand. And as CIA Director William Burns (Burns) commented last month at the Aspen Security Forum, “Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback.”
Wagner will survive, but in a slightly different form. Like many successful terrorist organizations, it has the ability and capability to mutate. It will remain functional, especially in Africa, allowing Putin and Russia to asymmetrically project power in weakened states such as Sahel, Sudan, and Libya. It would not surprise me if Putin named a person – such as Viktor Bout (Bout), a former Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) officer and businessman who knows Africa well – as Wagner’s new CEO. Bout has excellent relationships with key leaders in security structures, including the Ministry of Defense, GRU, and others (his father-in-law was a KGB general). Most importantly, he served his lengthy sentence in an American prison and remained loyal…
