The Titans In Their Twilight

They were the titans of their time: larger-than-life figures who, through skill and force of personality, built their homelands into modern states, lifted their populations from poverty and defended them from threats foreign and domestic. They were once so powerful they almost seemed immortal. Yet the end is finally approaching for the strongmen of Southeast Asia. Indonesia's Suharto, 86, is grievously ill; Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 80, is frail, and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohammad, 82, suffers from heart trouble. Though Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew is a hale 84, even he can't live forever.

All of which has observers wondering what comes next. Most of these patriarchs retain powerful bases in a region that, unlike Northeast Asia, remains a bastion of authoritarianism. That said, as the titans finally prepare to exit, there are signs that the old status quo is shifting. Indonesia, the first significant test case, has already abandoned the major tenets of Suharto's dictatorial New Order.

His once mighty political party, Golkar, is out of power, and his pet institution, the military, no longer enjoys a lock on politics. The current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was swept into office on an obscure ticket in free and fair elections. Of all of Suharto's legacies, corruption has been the hardest to live down. But by any other measure, the country looks radically different than it did when he retired in 1998—which helps explain why his imminent death will cause surprisingly few shockwaves.

But Indonesia is unusual in this respect. "The country has gone past Suharto, and that's a great distinction from the rest of the region," says Douglas Ramage, head of the Asia Foundation in Indonesia.

One key difference between Suharto and his comrades is that none of the other patriarchs were forced to retire in disgrace or bore the same legacy of graft (thought in Suharto's case to total an estimated $15 billion to $35 billion). Thus the influence of Mahathir, King Bhumibol and Lee remains much stronger—and their departures are likely to be more destabilizing. These men were "comrades in arms in containing forces for social and political change," says Garry Rodan of Murdoch University in Perth. All were anticommunist, antidemocratic and intermittently anti-Western. But each also embraced the idea that economic growth fueled by trade should trump other concerns. And the formula worked: from the 1970s to the 1990s, incomes in Southeast Asia skyrocketed, glittering cites rose from the jungles and the region became a vital center of resource extraction, manufacturing, trade and even finance.

The problem was that "these guys governed when personal power was in its heyday," says Bridget Welsh, an expert on Southeast Asia at Johns Hopkins. And "the heyday of personal power is [now] gone." New affluence has led to criticism of the strongmen who delivered it, as empowered and informed citizens begin to bridle at the restrictive legacies these leaders left behind.