Avigdor Lieberman

Power as Strategy

This essay is part of a broader inquiry into leadership after the exhaustion of charisma. It examines how, when both vision and imagination recede, political authority can be reduced to strategy alone—power exercised for control rather than direction. The case of Avigdor Lieberman offers a particularly stark illustration of this form of leadership.

Who is Avigdor Lieberman?

Avigdor Lieberman is a long-standing figure in Israeli politics, having served in multiple senior roles including defense minister and finance minister. Born in the former Soviet Union and immigrating to Israel as a young adult, he founded the party Yisrael Beiteinu, which originally represented the interests of Russian-speaking immigrants before evolving into a broader nationalist and secular platform.

Unlike leaders whose authority derives from ideology, moral vision, or institutional expertise, Lieberman’s political identity has been defined by decisiveness and tactical clarity. He presents himself as blunt, unsentimental, and uninterested in rhetorical flourish. To readers unfamiliar with Israeli politics, Lieberman may appear as a hard-nosed pragmatist: a leader who values strength, control, and clear lines over compromise or persuasion.

This posture is not incidental. It reflects a conception of leadership in which power itself becomes the primary political language.

The Post-Charismatic Challenge

As explored throughout this series, the decline of charismatic leadership leaves a vacuum that must be filled by some alternative source of authority. Discipline, style, and professional expertise represent different responses to this vacuum. Another response is to dispense with justification altogether and rely on power as its own rationale.

In environments marked by fatigue, fear, and institutional mistrust, such an approach can appear refreshingly honest. It promises clarity without illusion, decisiveness without sentiment. Lieberman’s leadership operates squarely within this logic.

Power as Strategy

Lieberman treats politics primarily as a strategic arena. His interventions are calculated to maximize leverage, disrupt opponents, and impose outcomes rather than to articulate a broader political vision. He rarely frames his positions in terms of collective destiny or moral purpose. Instead, he emphasizes strength, deterrence, and the capacity to act unilaterally.

This approach rejects both charismatic excess and managerial restraint. It neither seeks to inspire nor to stabilize institutions patiently. Instead, it prioritizes control. Political success is measured by the ability to force decisions, redraw boundaries, and demonstrate resolve.

In this sense, Lieberman represents a form of post-charismatic leadership that abandons the search for meaning altogether. Authority is asserted, not justified. Power is exercised, not explained.

The Limits of Strategic Power

The clarity of Lieberman’s approach is also its limitation.

Power without purpose cannot generate a shared political horizon. Strategy can win battles, but it cannot define ends. When politics is reduced to leverage and disruption, it becomes incapable of articulating why authority should be exercised in one direction rather than another.

Lieberman’s leadership offers decisiveness, but no conception of the common good beyond strength itself. It dismisses excess, but also discards responsibility as a moral category. Politics becomes a contest of force rather than a project of collective orientation.

This is not a personal critique. It is a structural observation about what happens when leadership responds to post-charismatic exhaustion by emptying politics of meaning rather than rebuilding it.

Why Lieberman Matters Beyond Israel

Lieberman’s case resonates beyond Israel. In many democracies, fatigue with ideology and disappointment with managerial politics have produced leaders who treat power as an end in itself. They promise action without vision, control without justification, strength without horizon.

Such leadership can feel bracing in moments of paralysis. It cuts through ambiguity and rejects pretense. But it cannot sustain democratic life over time. Without a guiding purpose, power becomes reactive, episodic, and ultimately corrosive.

Within this series, Lieberman clarifies one extreme of the post-charismatic landscape. If Bennett shows the discipline that stabilizes, and Lapid the style that reassures, Lieberman shows what remains when both vision and restraint are abandoned: power reduced to strategy alone.

The next essay turns to a different possibility—the attempt to reintroduce moral language into politics without yet possessing the institutional means to translate it into power.

Part of the series Leadership After Charisma
(See the introduction: “Leadership After Charisma — Why these essays”)