5 Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

 5

Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

First pacify the interior then resist the external [threat].1

Chiang Kai-shek

Tyrants are often much weaker than they appear. When an external power tries to unseat them, they don’t necessarily have to use a lot offorce to knock them off their pedestal. In part, that’s because prioritising internal enemies, as many tyrants do, makes them particularlyvulnerable to foreign threats.2

And yet, there’s a common conception that authoritarian regimes have an advantage when it comes to the battlefield. In some respects,that’s true. To give one example, democratic leaders have a real problem when they take their nation to war and flag-draped coffins startcoming back home. Those casualties have mothers and fathers and siblings and friends, and those are the people whose votes are neededby democratic politicians in order to stay in power. In highly personalised systems of government such as absolute monarchies orpersonalist dictatorships, family and friends mourn their dead just as they do in democracies, but they aren’t the constituents the leaderneeds to worry about. As long as the regime can repress dissent from the streets, and ensure that the sons and daughters of their alliesdon’t get shot, the autocrat is much less vulnerable to the immediate fallout of battlefield deaths than the democrat. Autocracies, in otherwords, have a lower ‘casualty sensitivity’ and that helps them to stay in the fight.3

Similarly, twenty-first-century dictatorships are less constrained than liberal democracies when it comes to the use of extreme violence.That’s not to say that democracies are incapable of it, of course. But there are two key differences. The first is that even the mostbloodthirsty democratic leaders can only go so far before they risk being stopped by the courts or people around them. Secondly, ininstances where war crimes are committed, there’s a process for them to be brought to light by a free press and often a realistic chance ofperpetrators being held accountable. In 2023, for example, a former member of the Australian Special Air Service Regiment was arrestedfor murder after an independent inquiry found special forces operators had purposely killed Afghan civilians.4 As part of the process, theAustralian state encouraged anyone who had relevant information to come forward.

It’s difficult to imagine something like this happening in Putin’s Russia or in any other personalist dictatorship. When the Russian AirForce bombs a civilian target and then waits for doctors to arrive before bombing them as well, it will never be reported on Russiantelevision. And even if it is, what is supposed to happen? Nothing.

In combination with a higher capacity for extreme violence, lack of political sensitivity about casualties provides tyrants with a significantadvantage on the battlefield. But that’s largely where the despot’s advantages end, and these are outweighed by the costs ofcoup-proofing and of having an army weakened by the effects of purges, political promotions and a climate of fear.

On 11 June 1937, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the Soviet Union’s most capable generals, was standing in front of a secret court. ‘I feelI’m dreaming,’ he said.5 Weeks earlier, he had been demoted and then arrested. In the meantime, he had been tortured by thePeople’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and beaten into signing a confession.6 The trial was part of the Great Purges, a wave ofterror unleashed by Stalin in the latter half of the 1930s. The Soviet Union had always been a brutal regime, but this was of a totally neworder. Stalin saw enemies everywhere, including where there were none.7 Instead of eliminating the few rivals that might actually threatenhim, the regime proceeded to come up with quotas of people to be disposed of. With a single order, 268,950 people were to be arrested:193,000 of them were to do forced labour, the other 75,950 were to be executed. Thereafter, things only became worse. New lists weredrawn up, more people were killed. Nikolai Yezhov, the ghoulish head of the NKVD, would send ‘albums’ of people’s names to Stalinfor review. The 383 albums seen by Stalin contained around forty-four thousand names.8

By the time General Tukhachevsky went on trial, the purges had become a frenzy. Regional officials were no longer simply fulfilling theirquotas but going out of their way to ask Moscow for permission to kill and torture more. No longer content with killing people in thebasement of Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison, Yezhov had a slaughter room set up in a building across the street. On one side of theroom were logs so that bullets could be caught after exiting the victims bodies; the floor was sloped to allow for easier drainage of blood.9Not even the families of ‘enemies of the people’ were spared. On the contrary: the regime locked up thousands of women for the crimeof being married to the ‘wrong’ man. Children as young as three could be imprisoned.10 The revolution also ate its young: CorpsCommander Ivan Belov, one of the judges sentencing Tukhachevsky, was so scared at the trial that he wondered whether he might benext.11 And indeed, a little over a year later, the regime found Belov guilty and had him shot.

By one estimate, Stalin’s NKVD arrested 1.5 million people between 1937 and 1938, with most of them never being released again.12Shot at 22.35 on 11 June 1937, Mikhail Tukhachevsky was one of them. As well as the distinguished general, others purged were amongthe Red Army’s most talented and experienced officers.13 The regime even boasted that tens of thousands of officers had been arrested.14 A consequence of this was that other people who were much less capable than the purged officers were now being promoted intomore senior roles due to their perceived ‘loyalty’ to the regime.

As a result of this bloodshed and the promotion of lackeys, Stalin vastly increased his domestic power. Before the terror, the CommunistParty had been the most powerful political actor in the Soviet Union. When the violence began to die down, all power was centred in him.He stood alone at the top of one of the largest empires the world had ever known.

But because the purges were so intense, the disruption of the economy, the administrative state and the Red Army so extreme, Stalin puthimself at risk. He, after all, could only survive in power if the Soviet state survived, and that was no longer assured.15 The situation wasespecially precarious because the international environment had been deteriorating for quite some time. War would break out shortlyand the purge of military leaders was undoubtedly one of the main reasons the Soviet forces initially did so badly when Nazi Germanyinvaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.16

But even if Stalin hadn’t purged Tukhachevsky and other competent generals, the Soviet Army would have struggled. Soldiers can’tfight properly when they are more scared of their own government than the men they see through their gunsights. Whereas generals indemocracies may fight for country and glory, generals in heavily politicised militaries can find themselves in an impossible situation. Ifthey lose too much, they become a liability and that can easily mean death rather than demotion. If they win too much, they become athreat to the tyrant and that can also mean death. With the stakes so high, military leaders have a strong incentive to ‘lie, exaggerate, andshift blame to cover their mistakes’.17

In 1943, Stalin’s Red Army and Nazi Germany fought one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War in Kursk. On the southernfront of the battle, several hundred Soviet tanks stood in opposition to about a third as many German tanks. Despite the numericalsuperiority of the Red Army, the German military won a massive victory. By one estimate, they destroyed ‘as many as 15 Soviet tanks forevery one they lost’. With the fighting done, it now fell to General Nikolai Vatutin to tell Moscow about the defeat. But he refused, soterrified was he that Stalin would sack or execute him. Instead, according to Kenneth Pollack, he fabricated a fierce battle, claiming thatboth sides had suffered terrible losses.18

That story about the Battle of Kursk was repeated again and again, from battle to battle and soldier to soldier. Everybody lied. And overtime, military effectiveness was hindered because lying on this scale is devastating when trying to win a war. It’s as if the tyrant’s owntroops set up such a smokescreen that it becomes impossible for the ruler to see anything at all.

Sometimes the fear can be so intense that officers don’t just lie to their superiors but become paralysed outright. During the Gulf War,Saudi forces and American forces fought side by side, and both broke through enemy lines. American Marines, despite facing strongerresistance from the enemy, pushed ahead much quicker than the Saudi soldiers. Why? Mainly because Saudi commanders were unable tomake decisions in the heat of the moment, constantly looking for their superiors to decide for them.19 They were so scared of doing thewrong thing that they did nothing.

And unfortunately for tyrants, open warfare isn’t all they have to worry about. There’s a world beyond congressional authorisations orprime ministerial speeches – a world of shadows. In that world, external powers can go after the despot despite having said that they neverwould. There are all kinds of options. External powers can train the opposition, give money to armed groups, keep enemies alive orencourage coup-plotters to take on the incumbent. If we travel back to the Cold War for a moment, we can discover what that threattowards tyrants can look like.

In her book Covert Regime Change, the political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke provides a thorough account of the ‘secret wars’ theUnited States waged while it was struggling against the Soviet Union.20 In total, the United States pursued seventy regime-changeoperations (that we know of). Of these, sixty-four were covert. By O’Rourke’s count, twenty-five of them led to a US-backedgovernment taking power. The rest failed.21

The goal of these interventions varied greatly. Sometimes, they were meant to push back the influence of the Soviet Union by replacingsupposedly pro-Soviet leaders with more amenable ones. At other times, they were meant to take out leaders before they could comeanywhere near the Soviet camp. While some of the targets were tyrants, others definitely were not.

As O’Rourke argues, covert action is such a problem for tyrants because it’s attractive to policymakers.22 In a way, that’s surprisingbecause staying in the shadows while attacking other states inevitably means that the attacker has to operate without their total strength.23 If they can go to war openly against another nation, they can use everything they’ve got to try to topple that unfriendly regime, andthat can maximise the chances it will actually happen. The demonstrative show of massive power can be so useful that generals haveplanned entire military doctrines around the notion that overwhelming force can quickly break the enemies’ will to fight. Shock and aweis a little harder to do when nobody is supposed to find out who was behind it.

That said, the decision as to how to topple a foreign leader doesn’t happen in a vacuum and there are always other considerations atplay. Is there public support to go to war? How expensive is it going to be? What does it mean for the next election if young men andwomen become crippled because they were sent into harm’s way by the government? What will it do to the country’s reputation if thegovernment openly admits to toppling established governments?

Using political violence out in the open is, in other words, not that easy to do. That’s where covert action comes in. To politicians, it’s aconvenient middle ground: they do something and it could pay off but even if it doesn’t, it’s not the end of the world. Indeed, manycovert regime-change operations have been signed off despite it being abundantly clear that they were unlikely to succeed. When the CIAdirector told President Eisenhower that the chance of success in a planned intervention in Guatemala could be below 20 per cent,Eisenhower actually thought a low number made the proposal more convincing. Talking to Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, the presidentsaid: ‘Allen, the figure of 20 per cent was persuasive. If you had told me the chances would be 90 per cent, I would have had a much moredifficult decision.’24 Covert action from abroad can be particularly dangerous to dictators precisely because the allure of ‘plausibledeniability’ makes action against them more likely.

But the men and women working to overthrow dictators in the shadows aren’t omnipotent. More often than not, the high appetite forrisk combined with the need for things to remain hidden leads to mistakes. Blunders have saved more than one dictator.

After ruling with an iron fist for decades, Cuba’s military dictator was overthrown in 1959 by a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro.Unlike Fulgencio Batista, Castro wasn’t content to let rich Americans control much of the island’s wealth. Since Castro was aself-declared Marxist-Leninist, the White House was immediately concerned that he could align Cuba with the Soviet Union. After John F.Kennedy won the presidential election against Richard Nixon, American intelligence agents presented their plans. Kennedy was reluctant.If the United States was going to try to overthrow Castro, the operation needed to be covert. Initially, American intelligence set out to trainexiled Cubans in Florida and Guatemala. Americans would help, but the Cubans themselves were going to be the tip of the spear.

If they were to have any chance of holding out against the inevitable counter-attack, they needed to disable Castro’s air force. Tomaintain the conspiracy, the CIA painted American B-26 aircraft to try to make them look like units of the Cuban Revolutionary ArmedForces before they took off from Nicaragua to bomb the planes.25 While there was some division within the government, mostpre-assessments of the invasion’s chances of success were optimistic. The US Department of Defense and the CIA were of the belief that,at the very least, the invaders would reach the safety of the mountains. And at best, there might be a ‘full-fledged civil war in which wecould then back the anti-Castro forces openly’.26

When the first troops landed in the bay, they saw a B-26 up in the air. ‘We assumed it was ours,’ one of them explained. ‘It even dippedits wing. But then it opened fire on us,’ he added.27 Since they had previously been told that Castro’s air force had already beendestroyed, they could barely believe what they were seeing. But it was real. The CIA’s planes had missed many of their targets and nowCastro’s planes were dominating the skies.28 Out at sea, one of the cargo ships carrying ammunition and fuel was hit. In an attempt toavoid a similar scenario, other supply ships turned back.29 Stranded without adequate supplies and some fifty miles away from themountains in which they were supposed to find refuge if things went wrong, the attempt to topple Castro through force was doomed.Perhaps the enterprise had been doomed before the first shot was fired. The CIA itself later made a good point which indicates that theinvasion plans were probably always destined to fail:

The bay was also far from large groups of civilians, a necessary commodity for instigating an uprising, which may be a moot point, as thebay was surrounded by the largest swamp in Cuba, making it physically impossible for any Cubans wanting to join the revolt to actually doso.30

Would things have played out the same way if Kennedy hadn’t insisted on covert action over an open attack? We will never know.

With the invasion an abject failure on all levels, the United States could have stopped further attempts to overthrow Castro. Instead,Kennedy authorised a follow-up operation that proposed more and more absurd plans for getting rid of Fidel. The man in control of theeffort to find ‘a solution to the Cuban problem’ was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother, whowanted to succeed in order to confirm his position. In one meeting with his team, he said finding a solution to the Cuban problem was thetop priority of the United States government. ‘No time, money effort, or manpower is to be spared,’ he added.31

That effort included some truly absurd schemes, including a plan to cover Castro’s shoes with thallium salts – which, it was believed,would have made the leader’s iconic beard fall out. Someone at the CIA thought the way to get rid of him was to spray his surroundingswith a chemical that would induce hallucinations before an important speech. Plans were not limited to discrediting Castro: the UnitedStates government was willing to assassinate him. In one scheme, Castro was to be given an explosive cigar; in another, a contaminateddiving suit was supposed to give him a ‘debilitating skin disease’; and in another, which made use of Fidel’s love of scuba diving, hewas to be blown up with explosives hidden underwater in an attractively painted seashell.32 Needless to say, all of these plots were eitherabandoned or they failed – in blunder after blunder. Fidel eventually died at the age of ninety a few years after handing power to hisbrother Raúl. The Communist Party of Cuba remained in charge of the island nation.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara would later say that they had been hysterical about Castro.33 What this shows is that it’s notonly tyrants who make irrational decisions when they feel threatened. Their opponents, whether they be democratic leaders or fellowdictators, can make exactly the same mistakes. But despite all these failures, we tend to imagine intelligence services as omnipotentpuppet masters that can shape the world as they see fit. In reality, the Bay of Pigs is in many ways the norm, not the exception. Topplingforeign governments is difficult, especially if it has to be done in secret.

But obviously, simply hoping for the enemy to blunder is not a rational strategy for autocrats especially – because they face a dual threat.Great powers may target them because they are tyrants, whilst their aggressive manoeuvring also means that they run the risk of cominginto conflict with regional rivals.

Not every tyrant faces the same threat. Some hang on by a thread, constantly having to worry about being deposed from abroad. Othersare comparatively safe in the saddle. Either way, they all have something in common: defeat doesn’t have to be total to lead to a fall. Ifthere’s an invasion and the invading army reaches the presidential palace, the dictator will obviously lose power. But tyrants can fallmuch earlier if they are losing on the battlefield – and many of them do. When a team of researchers looked at the effect of losing a warover a period of more than 150 years, they found that 29.5 per cent of leaders who lost a war also had to deal with violent regime change.34

There are multiple ways this can happen – one of them being popular protest as a result of the perceived weakness of the dictator.35Let’s imagine a scenario in which war breaks out between two regional rivals over a contested province that both claim as theirs. Thedefending state, which previously controlled the province, is beaten badly. To prevent the attacker from marching even further, thedictator in charge of the defending state makes a concession: going forward, the defending state no longer claims the contested province.

The attacking army is still far from the palace and the dictator is physically safe from them, but there’s a decent chance that the dictatorcould now find himself in serious trouble. With the public upset over this embarrassing defeat, they might well be out on the streets callingfor his head. While that by itself might not matter too much to the dictator, it sends a signal to the dictator’s opponents that the regime isweak. It’s the perfect time to launch a coup.

To dictators worried about falling, there are two avenues to take to reduce the risk of military defeat: increase the effectiveness of theirmilitary, or leave the military as it is and find another way to protect themselves. To those looking to do the former, the most rationalstrategy is to build up military strength to a point at which an attack from outside is too costly even to be contemplated. In internationalrelations, this is referred to as a ‘deterrent’. Once that deterrent has been established – and only then – do they go all out oncoup-proofing. The key to this is developing a deterrent that doesn’t disappear as the military becomes more and more geared towardstaking on internal enemies. For inspiration, dictators can look to twenty-first-century North Korea.

The North Korean People’s Army is outdated and in many ways primitive compared to the military of the United States or even that ofregional powers such as South Korea or Japan. With more than a million active-duty personnel, it is also among the world’s largest. Moreimportantly, North Korea has thousands of artillery systems, many of which are deployed near the demilitarised zone that has divided thepeninsula since 1953.36

In the event of all-out warfare between North and South, commuters on their way to work in South Korea’s capital could suddenly findthemselves in a situation which would seem apocalyptic. Skyscrapers would be reduced to rubble, office buildings would burn, windowswould shatter. With the ground shaking from the impact of an artillery round, the next round and the one after that would already be ontheir way.

In 2020, researchers at the RAND Corporation, an American non-profit think tank that works closely with the United States government,estimated just how destructive such an attack would be.37 To do this, they looked at the positioning of North Korean artillery systems andthe South Korean population density, and also at the way targeted populations would react in the event of an attack. How many wouldpanic? How quickly could people take cover in basements or subway tunnels?

One complicating factor is the location and size of South Korea’s capital. Lying about fifty kilometres south of the border zone, Seoulproper ‘only’ has a population of 9.5 million.38 But once you look at the entire capital area, it becomes a metropolis of some 26 million.To put that in context, that’s around the population of Belgium, Greece and Ireland combined. In the worst-case scenario, North Koreanartillery would turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’ by sending over around fourteen thousand rounds within a single hour. If that happens, thecasualty estimates range from around 87,600 (positive) to around 130,000 (negative).39

However much Kim Jong-un coup-proofs the military, those artillery pieces aren’t going away. And while they are in place, they have ahuge deterrent effect because everyone knows that war against North Korea would inevitably lead to hundreds of thousands ofcasualties.

There is only one form of deterrent that works better than Kim’s artillery: weapons of mass destruction. These weapons, whether they arechemical, biological or nuclear, are so destructive that leaders pursue them because they know that having them will provide their regimewith a deterrent that’s powerful enough to ward off other states. These weapons also mean that dictatorships don’t need to go back ontheir coup-proofing. All they need is a small number of soldiers, selected on the basis of their loyalty to the regime, to wield the weapons.40 And even if things go wrong and these soldiers turn on the dictator, they can’t do much with these weapons even though they are sodestructive. That differs from conventional forces: every extra main battle tank given to the military can be used by the military against theregime. But a nuclear bomb? Exceedingly useful to deter a nation-state but useless to overthrow the government. Nobody is going tonuke their own capital city.

For all these reasons, weapons of mass destruction are a popular ‘strategic substitute’ for tyrants. In the Middle East, for example, fivecountries have seriously pursued nuclear weapons programmes (Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya and Syria), and all of them except Israel were orare highly coup-proofed.41 That’s no coincidence.

But while having nuclear weapons is a massive advantage to dictators, the business of acquiring them is perilous. As the nuclear weaponsexpert Nicholas Miller told me, it’s very difficult to develop nuclear weapons in secret. Once other countries find out (or at least suspect)that a dictator is working on building them, there’s a constant threat of economic sanctions or perhaps military action.42 But even iftyrants could proceed secretly, they’d need sufficient resources to turn their bold plans into nuclear reality.

This, ironically, is where the focus on domestic security can hurt despots yet again: nuclear technology is difficult to master. To do so,countries need competent and functioning institutions. A lot of autocracies, constructed with the singular goal of keeping the incumbentin power, simply don’t support such institutions because anything that restrains the incumbent is seen as a threat by the presidentialpalace. This can make it impossible for some tyrants to acquire nuclear weapons even if they wanted to.

Gaddafi’s Libya wasn’t just brutal, it was also highly dysfunctional, with every aspect of the system tied to its leader’s personalityquirks. The resulting incompetence made it challenging to pursue strategic goals, including the development of nuclear weapons.

For a start, the Libyan regime didn’t have enough engineers and scientists – partly because Gaddafi was reluctant to invest in highereducation in science and technology, which he saw as a source of opposition.43 At the time of independence, Libya was a deeplyimpoverished country: in 1948, per-capita income stood at around fifteen pounds a year.44 Moreover, there was almost no state capacityand much of the population lacked even basic education – 94 per cent of the population was illiterate.45 Things could have changed afterthe discovery of oil. The economy grew rapidly and the regime then had the resources to expand the capacity of the state. But that didn’thappen. Gaddafi, in fact, wanted the opposite. He explicitly set out to dismantle what little there was of the state because he saw it as athreat to his rule. His goal wasn’t shared prosperity, but power.

In her book Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer explores how the Libyan nuclear programme failed. It makes for devastatingreading. According to her, Libya’s institutions were not well-equipped for carrying out simple tasks, let alone planning a nuclearweapons project.46 So the Gaddafi regime tried to buy its way towards becoming a nuclear weapons state. At first, it attempted topersuade Beijing to sell them ready-manufactured nukes. But the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai reportedly said: ‘Sorry . . . but Chinaobtained the bomb through its own efforts. We believe in self-help.’47

That was just the beginning of an odyssey. The regime tried to buy from Argentina, China, France, India, Yugoslavia, the United States,Egypt, Pakistan and the Soviet Union. Nothing brought a breakthrough.48

When the regime succeeded in buying relevant equipment or recruiting scientists from abroad, it struggled to make use of them. Andwhen things inevitably went wrong, Gaddafi’s personalised system of government made it difficult to understand the full extent of theproblem. Gaddafi himself obviously couldn’t understand what the nuclear scientists were doing, but then his bare-bones state didn’thave any of the institutions required to monitor and understand what the scientists were doing either.49 As a result, Gaddafi never gotclose to the nuclear threshold because he had traded protection against external threats for internal security.

If regimes feel threatened by external actors and there’s no time to invest in weapons of mass destruction (or it’s judged too risky), theonly remaining option to increase destructive power is to go back on some of the coup-proofing measures, thereby trading security theother way: less protection against domestic enemies; a more effective military to fight foreign threats.

During the 1980s, Saddam Hussein was at war with neighbouring Iran. For his soldiers, it was an extraordinarily difficult war to wage. Thegenerals were paralysed by fear and the dictator was micromanaging military strategy, even ordering the size of individual trenches.50The regime was also flying blind because almost the entire intelligence apparatus was directed at spying on ordinary Iraqis and themilitary.51 The focus on domestic enemies was so complete that, on the eve of the war, Iraqi intelligence had only three officers taskedwith gathering and analysing intelligence on Iran. Only one of them had actually studied Farsi, the language needed to understandwhat’s going on in Iran.52 It was the classic case of a coup-proofed military losing on the battlefield because it simply wasn’t designedfor the job.

But then, Hussein’s threat calculus changed. Before the war, the Iraqi military was a much bigger threat to his rule than the Iranianmilitary. But as the Iranians got the upper hand and even Baghdad no longer seemed safe, he changed his mind. ‘The true militaryprofessionals were never Saddam’s favourites, even when they were most important. Increasingly throughout the war, he understoodthat he needed them, and more often than not, he heeded their advice,’ an analysis based on the recollections of an Iraqi general latersaid.53 The spies were also redirected: whereas there had previously been almost nobody doing that job, there were more than two and ahalf thousand people generating intelligence on Iran in the final year of the war.54

In the end, going back on some of the coup-proofing measures was enough to achieve a stalemate with Iran – keeping Saddam Hussein inpower for another day. It also meant that the military became a bigger threat to the regime, but that was a risk worth taking because theimminent threat to regime survival had been averted.

The Iraqi dictator was able to pivot from internal to external defence because he had a large military, vast quantities of oil and the enemywasn’t overwhelmingly powerful. When that isn’t the case and tyrants can’t change course, or doing so would make little difference,there are few good options for dictators. They must find a way to deal with external aggressors without using the military.

The immediate option is acquiescence. If an external power that can credibly threaten a tyrant’s rule wants something done: do it.Obviously, that’s not a great option for the tyrant because it reduces the room for manoeuvre and risks demonstrating weakness. Amore elegant solution can sometimes be found in international diplomacy. Perhaps powerful states, whether they are democratic or not,can be talked out of their hostility. Alternatively, there might be a way to give greater powers something else they want. Perhaps that’soil, uranium, market access or indirect control over a strategic maritime route – or 2,498 metres of concrete near Afghanistan. When fiveal-Qaeda terrorists flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, Americanforeign policy changed in an instant. Five days later, President Bush spoke of a war on terrorism. To wage that war, the United Statesneeded new friends in an area of the world that most people couldn’t find on a map: Central Asia.

At the time, Uzbekistan was ruled by Islam Karimov, the last first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan. Karimov was a brutaldictator. He became infamous internationally when the bodies of two former inmates of Jaslyk Prison in northwestern Uzbekistan werereturned to their families for burial. Muzafar Avazov, a thirty-five-year-old with four children, reportedly didn’t just have ‘a large,bloody wound on the back of the head’, he was also missing his fingernails. On top of that, ‘sixty to seventy percent’ of his body wasburnt. According to Human Rights Watch, a prominent non-governmental organisation, ‘doctors who saw the body reported that suchburns could only have been caused by immersing Avazov in boiling water.’55 When the victim’s sixty-three-year-old mother dared tocomplain about her son’s brutal torture, she was sent to a maximum-security jail for attempting to ‘overthrow the constitutionalorder’.56

But despite this case and others like it, Uzbekistan received tens of millions of dollars in aid after it agreed to let western forces use (andexpand) Karshi-Khanabad Air Base for military operations in Afghanistan. In late 2001, American secretary of state Colin Powell visited theUzbekistan capital Tashkent. Early the following year, President Karimov met President Bush.57 The two countries signed severalagreements to strengthen their relationship. While in Uzbekistan, Powell referred to the country as ‘an important member of thecoalition against terrorism’.58 Because America derived so much value from the air base in southern Uzbekistan, the United Statesgovernment eventually became reluctant to speak out about human rights abuses in the country.59 Far from seeing the United States as athreat, Karimov turned it into an asset to solidify his grip on power.

An arrangement that is even better for the tyrants is one in which external powers don’t just leave them to their own devices but activelyshield them against outsiders. This is the strategy pursued by multiple middle eastern petrostates. They may expend billions of dollars onAmerican military equipment, but ultimately the external security of the emir of Qatar isn’t guaranteed by the soldiers of the QatariArmed Forces, but by the men and women of the United States military stationed in the country. Hosting thousands of soldiers, Al UdeidAir Base in Qatar is the largest American military base in the Middle East. If an external power wanted to topple the emir, they would haveto face these forces. And who would want to fight the American military? Fighting the Qatari military, maybe. But the American military?No.

For the security provider, it’s a delicate situation. On the one hand, the security provider gains a lot of leverage. In exchange forprotecting the Qatari royal family, for example, the United States gets not just a lucrative arms customer but also access to a giant hub thatcan be used to move soldiers and equipment around, or fly sorties against targets in nearby countries, if need be. But these securityguarantees are dangerous in at least two ways. First, there’s always the risk of escalation. Governments that agree to provide security forautocratic regimes usually do so on the assumption that they won’t have to fight on the regime’s behalf because their military presenceitself provides sufficient deterrence. That, of course, cannot be taken for granted. Whether it’s because of miscalculation or accident,things can always go wrong and suddenly there’s war.

Second, these security guarantees create a moral hazard and they incentivise ‘free-riding’. When countries free-ride, they make use ofa benefit without paying for it. Over the last couple of years, for example, the term has repeatedly been used in the context of Europeandefence spending. While all members of NATO benefit from the deterrence value of the alliance, not everyone is contributing to it to thesame extent. The countries that contribute less are said to be free-riding because they enjoy protection from Russian attack even thoughthey don’t (adequately) contribute to it. Giving security guarantees to autocratic regimes means that the dictatorship has little incentiveto guarantee its own external defence. That’s contrary to the interests of the security provider because it means if war does break out, thebrunt of the fighting (and dying) will have to be borne by the security provider rather than the dictatorship itself.

That’s all the more dangerous to the provider because the security guarantee also creates a moral hazard that means the securityguarantee can increase rather than decrease the chance of war. Because the dictatorship thinks it is protected and unlikely to bear thebrunt of a possible conflict, it has an incentive to act more aggressively than it usually would.

Without such security guarantees, dictators are alone. They can coup-proof their military or have a military that is as effective as possibleto deal with external threats. Having both at the same time is almost an impossibility. Weapons of mass destruction are a potential way out,but obtaining them is difficult. As a result, most tyrants are stuck in the trade-off, moving the needle to one side or another without everbeing able to find the perfect balance.

But even if they did – having now defused both internal and external military threats – nothing they’ve done so far is about goodgovernance. Everything they’ve done is tied to staving off immediate danger and that means they have probably done a bad job oflooking after the needs of most of the population. Without having much choice in the matter, they’ve exposed themselves to popularanger at a scale that could lead to massive protests, a violent uprising or even a popular revolution.

OceanofPDF.com

6