The more autocratic you are as a leader, the more important optics tend to be. For full-on dictators like Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin, everything’s an elaborate stage production.

In 2021, The New York Times ran a great piece called “The Art of the Vladimir Putin Photo Shoot.” “Rarely has the leader of a global power embraced the staged publicity still with such creative, yet clichéd, fervor, not just feeding the global desire for a caricature of himself, but actually creating it,” the Times‘s fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman wrote.

With allowances for the fact that Putin’s in on his own joke (as Friedman alluded to in her piece, there’s a winking slyness about Putin’s photo shoots), PR management’s crucial to authoritarians because they tend to lack democratic legitimacy, in full or in part, and so are compelled to overcompensate with shows of machismo.

You see the opposite from legitimate leaders. Democratically-elected heads of state are generally unconcerned when they’re photographed unflatteringly. In 2014, Fox famously juxtaposed a picture of Barack Obama riding a bicycle and looking every bit like a black Doug Funnie, with a picture from one of The Kremlin’s presidential photoshoots depicting Putin looking every bit like Conan the Barbarian while riding a horse. The absurdity of the comparison wasn’t lost on Fox, of course. But it was lost on Fox’s viewers, which was the whole point.

Unfortunately, a lot of Westerners actually don’t understand that in the normal course of business, Putin doesn’t trek around in the Siberian taiga looking for fish to spear. Just like they don’t understand that military parades in Pyongyang aren’t evidence of dynastic virility, but rather of pitiful desperation.

This isn’t confined to photoshoots and military parades. Optics management is an everyday imperative for authoritarians. Recall, for example, the (in)famous “bro five” between Putin and Mohammed Bin Salman at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. It wasn’t stage-managed exactly, but it wasn’t entirely spontaneous either. At the time, Bin Salman was on the outs with the democratic world for ordering the murder of a Washington Post contributor. The overwrought, meme-friendly show of camaraderie was deliberately — gleefully — untoward.

On Monday, Putin made another such show of autocratic affection, this time with Narendra Modi at the annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, where the two men shared a limo for over an hour.

“Conversations with him are always insightful,” Modi said, on social media, where he posted half a dozen pictures of himself with Putin including the one above of a grinning hug.

Do Putin and Modi have a lot to discuss? Sure. Would Modi have posted these pictures anyway? Yes. But context is key. Currently, New Delhi’s in a standoff with the Trump administration which is ostensibly concerned about India financing Putin’s war machine with purchases of Russian oil.

As discussed at length here last month, Trump’s not actually worried about money flowing to Moscow. Rather, he wants trade concessions. The Russian oil excuse is just a pretext to impose punishing tariffs on India.

Modi, as an authoritarian, isn’t a guy who’s especially amenable to bullying, though. The hugs with Putin, as well as a lot of back-slapping with Xi at the same summit on Monday, were a show of autocratic defiance which they knew would sting Trump’s ego given his own pretensions to autocratic authority.

Sure enough, Trump was rankled. “India has charged us, until now, such high tariffs that our businesses are unable to sell into India. It has been a totally one sided disaster!” he seethed. “Also, India buys most of its oil and military products from Russia. They have now offered to cut their tariffs to nothing, but it’s getting late.”

For his part, Modi described “an excellent meeting with President Putin on the sidelines of the SCO Summit,” where the two men “discussed ways to deepen bilateral cooperation in all sectors, including trade, fertilizers, space, security and culture.” Modi also said he “exchanged views” with Putin on a “peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine.”

The Wall Street Journal gets it. “No major decisions were adopted at [the summit] but the carefully choreographed imagery of Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin embracing each other sent a powerful message to Washington as Trump seeks to contain Beijing, to break Russia’s bond with China, and to pry India away from Russian oil,” a Monday article read.

Read that again: “Carefully choreographed imagery.” The best way to combat that sort of stage-managed puffery is to simply ignore it for what it is. Propaganda. By men who, for all their chest-beating, are condemned to flail in one way or another because at the end of the day, they’re autocrats in the post-Soviet era, which is to say in an era which, until about 10 years ago, was defined by the spread of liberal democracy, small “l,” small “d.”

It’s easy enough to lampoon Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” declaration now, at a moment when autocracy’s enjoying a kind of dark renaissance. But — and far be it from me to peddle a hopeful message — it’s not a foregone conclusion that autocracy will prevail as the dominant governing arrangement for nation-states in the 21st century.

Men like Putin, Xi and Modi are strong in some ways, but very weak in others. Trump only sees the strengths, and doesn’t understand that when he emulates authoritarians by holding military parades in his own honor on the streets of the nation’s capital or unfurling banners of himself on government buildings, he’s actually diminishing his own authority and that of America on the world stage.

Finally, as you read accounts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization proceedings in Tianjin on Monday, don’t forget that the SCO is a joint creation of China and Russia. And like a lot of China-Russia-led “alternative” multilateral bodies, it doesn’t really do anything. Well, anything other than legitimize autocrats. In 2018, for example, the SCO described Russia’s electoral procedures under Putin as “transparent, credible and democratic.”