9
How to Topple a Tyrant
History proves that all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government are transient. Only democratic systems are not transient.Whatever the shortcomings, mankind has not devised anything superior.1
Vladimir Putin, president of Russia
Few things in politics are as hard as toppling tyrants, but that doesn’t mean all attempts are doomed to fail.
Given that it’s so difficult, what influence do outsiders realistically have? For better or worse, outside influence is often limited. Topplingtyrants mostly falls to the people themselves, and then to a narrow sub-set of the population. The general rule is this: the closer to thetyrant, the more influence that person will have. The minister of defence will usually have more power than a mid-ranking civil servant andthe power of the mandarin will usually exceed that of a shopkeeper on the periphery.
Just as staying in power involves trade-offs for despots, toppling tyrants involves difficult decisions for the people trying to make ithappen. To topple tyrants without creating a catastrophe the dictatorial cycle has to be broken.
There are two principal ways to do this: the first involves chipping away at his pedestal to weaken it over time, so that a strong gust of windis enough to topple him. The second strategy is more immediate, aiming to take out the tyrant more directly.
When it comes to toppling tyrants, not all countries will have the same set of tools. Some, such as the United States, have all of them – somany you can barely find the one you want, from political pressure to economic coercion to force. In 2019, after disputed Venezuelanelections, the United States moved to recognise Juan Guaidó as president, to weaken Nicolás Maduro, who continued to have de factocontrol over the country.2 When President Carter decided that Nicaraguan dictator Somoza had to go in 1978, Washington used itsinfluence over the International Monetary Fund to prevent it from granting the government in Managua credit.3 And Carter, besidessuspending military aid to the regime, blocked others from shipping arms to it as well.4 In the early 1960s, President Kennedy went a stepfurther when he ordered one of America’s fleets off the coast of the Dominican capital. With the threat of invasion imminent, RamfisTrujillo was told that it was time to step down. He didn’t want to take his chances, so he did.5 In 2003 the United States toppled SaddamHussein in Iraq and, in 2011, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. For a country such as the United States, there are plenty of tools in the box.
Others have access only to specialised tools. Their banks might be where dictatorial cash is stored. Or they manufacture equipment thatkeeps the regime’s jets in the air. Or they might just be in geographic proximity, which can come in handy for opponents of the regimewho are looking for a safe place from which to organise resistance.
If outsiders choose the slower, more subtle method – to chip away and wait for the storm – the first order of business should be carefulanalysis and planning. Who really keeps the tyrant in power? Which are the groups the despot absolutely cannot afford to lose? What getsthem out of bed on a Monday morning? How can their calculus be influenced? Since authoritarian regimes can be so opaque, it can bedifficult to tell – especially in the world’s most closed countries. But despite these obvious difficulties, people are more similar than theyare different. True, cultures differ widely and people have vastly different ideologies, especially if they live in regimes that haveindoctrinated them for decades. That said, a lot of people in these key positions want similar things: power, money, safety for themselvesand their families, respect.
Once this analysis is done, the aim of outsiders should be to damage the pedestal faster than the dictator can repair it. To do that, thereneeds to be not just an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the regime but also of the actor now trying to bring it down. What areyou good at? What are you not?
There are three advantages to taking this more cautious approach. Since the tyrant isn’t toppled by the outsider itself, it can becomparatively cheap. And because this approach is about helping people help themselves, the chances of it going catastrophically wrongare much lower than they could be. (It’s theoretically possible for 100,000 people to die because an outside power has held workshopsfor independent journalists – but thus far, it hasn’t happened.) Moreover, if cautious support from outside contributes to the fall of theregime, the outcome has a chance of being sustainable. As we have learned over the course of this book, non-violent transitions, if theysucceed, are more likely to bring about democracy than violent transitions.
Tyrants need money, weapons and people to stay in power. Importantly, the people around them need to expect that they will continue tohave all three in the future. If that’s not the impression they have, elites may recalibrate the support they provide to the leader becausethey don’t want to bet on the wrong horse. When that happens, the tyrant becomes vulnerable, inviting challengers to take him on.Outsiders can have an influence on all three. If they want to contribute to toppling a tyrant, they should aim to weaken the ruler, strengthenalternative elites and empower the masses. The former tactics make the fall more likely, the latter increases the chance that the cycle oftyranny can be broken.
As a first step, outside powers should stop doing all the things that actively keep the tyrant alive. Many a dictator receives militaryequipment worth billions of dollars. These arms exports aren’t all alike, of course. A submarine’s torpedoes are unlikely to be used inthe internal defence of the regime because neither coups nor popular protests tend to happen out at sea. But a main battle tank capable ofkilling dozens of protestors in seconds? That’s a different story altogether. To make life harder for dictators, the export of militaryequipment that can be used by the tyrant against his own people needs to be stopped. Details depend on the regime in question, but itcertainly means no more armoured vehicles, no more small arms, no more helicopters.
The next step is to make it harder for the dictator to find and control opponents. Nowadays, the key to this is digital surveillance ofcomputers, tablets and phones. When it comes to the surveillance of mobile phones, there’s one software that stands out.
In the spring of 2011, executives of the NSO Group, makers of the spyware Pegasus, were sitting in a room used for storing cleaningmaterials on a massive military base outside Mexico City.6 Even though this was already inside a secure perimeter, an armed guard stoodoutside the door. This wasn’t an ordinary engineering team and as few people as possible were supposed to find out about the visit. Aftertheir wait ended and the guard stepped aside, the presentation began. In attendance were the Mexican president Felipe Calderón and hissecretary of defence, Guillermo Galván Galván. The company’s chief technology officer gave attendees a BlackBerry.
The phone looked and acted as normal. There were no warning signs, no flashing lights, no error messages. But as the Mexican officialsused the phone, they could watch on a large screen as data from the phone were transmitted live. It was the perfect attack: not only was thephone completely compromised, the victim wouldn’t know a thing about it.
With the hack completed, the attacker gains access to just about everything on the phone: contacts, text messages, call logs, themicrophone. Shortly thereafter, NSO Group had their first major customer: the state of Mexico. The country had long been fightingpowerful drug dealers, and software such as this would be perfect to fight cartels. If the authorities knew where they were, who they spoketo and what they planned, they could fight back much more effectively.
But over the next couple of years, more and more governments became interested in the technology, and it wasn’t just to fightorganised crime. In 2013, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was offered access to the software. In the hands of the UAE, the software wasreportedly used as part of a broad and intense campaign to target Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati engineer who had committed no wrongother than to criticise his government. As the New York Times reported:
His car was stolen, his email account was hacked, his location was monitored, his passport was taken from him, $140,000 was stolen fromhis bank account, he was fired from his job and strangers beat him on the street several times.7
In addition to all this, he was reportedly targeted by the NSO Group’s software. All in all, it was terrifying. As Mansoor himself put it:‘You start to believe your every move is watched. Your family starts to panic. I have to live with that.’8 Eventually, he was also forced tolive with sleeping on the floor of the desert prison into which the regime threw him.9
If you had never heard of this software before, you might assume that it was developed in a dictatorship before being sold to otherdictatorships. Far from it. NSO Group developed their software in democratic Israel before selling it abroad. It’s big business, but morethan that it also became a tool of Israeli foreign policy. Since the government controlled the countries to which the software could andcouldn’t be exported, it could use it to forge new partnerships or cement existing alliances. In the case of the United Arab Emirates, theexport licence was reportedly granted after Israeli foreign intelligence agents assassinated a high-ranking member of Hamas in Dubai.The spy software was an ‘olive branch’.10
If democracies genuinely want tyrants to fall, they shouldn’t make such peace offerings.
Dictatorships collect less information about their opponents when they don’t have access to these tools and as a result, it becomes moredifficult to use repression discriminately. And indiscriminate repression vastly increases the chance of a backlash: if people are punisheddespite not having done anything ‘wrong’, what incentive do they have not to start opposing the ruler?
Next, it needs to be harder for the incumbent to please the selectorate. In theory, one way to do that is sanctions. Sanctions againstauthoritarian regimes are popular with policy makers because they allow them to ‘do something’ when they don’t want to take muchrisk. As a result, the number of sanctions has ballooned: during the 1990s, more than 50 per cent of the world’s population was undersanctions and President Bill Clinton complained that the country had become ‘sanctions happy’.11 Since then, it has only become moreso. When President Trump was in office, the administration reached ‘an average of almost four sanctions designations every workingday’.12
But do they work? That depends what we mean by ‘work’. Sanctions are intended to apply economic pressure on another country sothat it changes its behaviour.13 In practice, that’s almost impossible to do when it comes to incentivising tyrants to step down. ‘Askinga tyrant to step down is like asking him to sign his own death warrant,’ Agathe Demarais, a sanctions expert of the European Council onForeign Relations, told me.14 To the extent that economic coercion does work, it’s not by changing the mind of the dictator but theminds of those around him. Sanctions can work by reducing the ability of the dictator to distribute cash to elites which the regime hasderived through trade or foreign aid. But how much of a difference sanctions make partly depends on the type of regime that is beingtargeted. A 2010 study showed that personalist regimes and monarchies are comparatively more vulnerable to sanctions in that they relyparticularly on revenue from outside – for example, foreign aid – to fund patronage.15
In theory, a collapsing economy should lead to problems for authoritarian regimes by angering both powerbrokers and the masses. Theformer become less rich, the latter poorer. To try to overcome this unfortunate situation, a personalist dictator might be tempted to userepression. But if he attempts it, there’s no certainty that his generals will follow through it because they will probably be aggrieved aswell.
In comparison to personalist dictatorships, both military dictatorships and one-party states have an advantage in this situation.16 Juntas,on average, have an easier time using repression to deal with the fallout of sanctions because their forces are less likely to splinter underthe weight of their own repression. Party-based dictatorships, on the other hand, can often co-opt elites by giving them something otherthan money because they tend to have more functional institutions. So even though this or that important political figure may no longerreceive a steady delivery of wads of cash, they can be promoted to become a delegate to a national congress or the head of a publiclyowned conglomerate.
The effectiveness of sanctions also relates to geography. If a country has significant oil resources, they have a huge advantage.17 Oil issuch a valuable commodity that it will be sold one way or another. If some countries sanction an oil exporter, others will step in to buy theoil. They might get a discount, but money will keep flowing and dictatorships can often stave off threats to the regime by distributing thatmoney around their capital’s villas.
Evidently, a lot of non-democratic states against which sanctions might be imposed with the aim of destabilising their governments fit oneor other of these criteria. Does that mean these states should never be targeted because sanctions won’t work?
Not necessarily. Economic coercion can also make sense when targeting petrostates, for example, because they make life harder forpeople who shouldn’t have it easy. Asked about sanctions against Russia, a political economist recently told the Washington Post: ‘Theway I think about sanctions is that we are shaking the tree on which the regime sits.’ ‘We are not shaking it enough for it to fall down,’he went on to say, ‘but we’re creating problems for them.’18 That’s not perfect, but depending on the situation, it can be better thannothing.
There are other options to keep tyrants on their toes. One way of doing it is to drop external defence guarantees. That’s not necessarilybecause an external actor is likely to topple said tyrant, but because it forces the dictatorship to devote more of its limited resources tomilitary effectiveness, thereby increasing the risk of coups. As that risk increases, so a new problem arises, then another, forming adistraction that invites the tyrant to make unforced errors.
In conclusion, the strategy to weaken the tyrant begins with withdrawing external support. It continues by making it harder to userepression while reducing his ability to redistribute the gains of tyranny to the people that keep him in power. All these measures weakenthe tyrant vis-à-vis others who could replace him.
To increase the pressure, outsiders can then encourage rivals and strengthen their hand while the incumbent struggles. Yoweri Musevenibecame Uganda’s ninth president in 1986, a time when the Cold War was still raging. In the twenty-first century, his biggest politicalproblem has been the activist Bobi Wine. A musician turned presidential candidate, his hallmark a red beret with the outline of Uganda onit, Wine excites people. When he landed at Entebbe International Airport on 5 October 2023, his supporters had planned somethingspecial.19 Since he had been abroad for two weeks, they wanted to march him all the way to his home, some fifty kilometres to thenortheast in Kampala.
But instead of a welcome home party, Bobi Wine was met by unknown men who twisted his arms behind his back as he got off the plane.Instead of marching along with his supporters, he was driven off in a car before being kicked in the head. And when he arrived home, therewas no peace there either because of the dozens of security officers inside and outside the compound. ‘I am surrounded by the military,and nobody is allowed to leave and no one is allowed to come,’ Bobi Wine told a journalist.20
Wine was effectively detained, but at least he wasn’t killed. And, as one activist close to Bobi told me, that was no coincidence. Accordingto him, Wine could be harassed and put under house arrest by the regime, but he couldn’t be killed. Despots might be happy to kill a foe,but no dictator wants a negative headline in the New York Times or the Washington Post. And Bobi Wine, being so charismatic, commandsincredible attention. On Instagram, Bobi Wine has more than 700,000 followers; on what used to be Twitter, more than 2 million. Ugandaisn’t exactly the focus of the world’s media, but when something happens to Bobi Wine, the BBC, CNN and other major mediaorganisations take note. All that makes it significantly more difficult for Uganda’s dictator to eliminate the opposition leader.
Clearly, support for alternative leaders can go way beyond medical care, exile or sympathetic media interviews. High-ranking regimeinsiders can be encouraged to defect or turn against their boss. They can be bribed or given money to build their own power base withinthe country. Maybe they can also be given compromising information at the right time.
But simply weakening tyrants and strengthening their rivals is not enough. The masses have to be empowered, because while the principalthreat to most tyrants comes from other elites and not the streets, popular uprisings can bring down leaders within the blink of an eye. Justas importantly, they can help alternative elites to put pressure on the leader. Even in highly authoritarian regimes, popular support (or lackof it) still matters – if only because it can tell other elites that the current leader might be at serious risk of falling.
The people can also exert pressure on the incumbent’s rivals in the event that they succeed. In that way a change in leadership can, at leastpotentially, lead to a meaningful change in policy. If this isn’t done, there’s the risk that chopping down the tyrant will simply produce anew one – that the cycle of tyranny, chaos, tyranny will simply keep turning.
One of the main difficulties of discussing the utility of outside support with people engaged in trying to promote democracy is that thesegroups face a dilemma. On the one hand, they clearly believe in the work because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing it. It’s not asthough these people drive fancy cars or live in big houses. But on the other hand, they are reluctant to talk up its value too much because itwould take away from the people who have effected change on the ground. That would be all the more upsetting because it’s thesepeople who face the greatest risk. Additionally, tyrants themselves love to talk up foreign influence when they face any opposition. If thepeople trying to promote democracy from abroad are too vocal about their contribution, they risk playing into the hands of the rulersthey seek to weaken.
Nevertheless, there are a few things that can be learnt from talking to people who do this every day. To strengthen the masses in theirconflict with the incumbent and regime elites, outsiders can create networks, train activists, support mobilisation outside the regime’scontrol, allow them to gather force in exile and support the free flow of information.
When activists are struggling against a seemingly omnipotent regime that does everything it can to keep opponents in the dark, it can feelto them as if they are alone; that nobody else thinks the way they do and that the responsibility is theirs to work it out. This, of course, isexactly what tyrants want to achieve because it reinforces the coordination problem that prevents protests from being launched.Outsiders can help to bridge this gap by bringing people together.
In some cases, that also means mediating between people’s conflicting interests. Before the amateurish coup that failed to bring downYahya Jammeh, the Gambian opposition struggled to unite in the face of an overwhelmingly cruel regime. After the attempted coup, theycame together with the support of outside non-governmental organisations after realising that they could no longer go on the way theyhad.21 In an ideal scenario, bringing people together also leads them to learn from each other. How do you mobilise people? How doesone go about organising a nationwide strike? These are questions about which generations of activists have thought so there’s no needto reinvent the wheel.
Every dictatorship is different but they’re similar enough for it to be possible to provide practical advice to people organisingopposition. Outside actors can provide support to domestic groups as they train supporters in strategy and tactics. With the twenty-firstcentury came entirely new categories of things to learn. How does one create viral content for social media? What messengers are safe;which definitely aren’t? These are the practical lessons that activists can learn from each other. Outsiders can help by facilitating networksand training.
The people together are harder to beat than any collection of individuals. For that reason, anything that makes it easy for people to cometogether and mobilise can increase the power of the masses. Where laws don’t yet make it impossible to support civil societyorganisations which are critical of the regime, that should be the focus. Where they do, the next best option is to provide support toorganisations that aren’t directly engaged in holding the government accountable but still allow large groups of people to coordinatewith each other. If that can be done as part of a church, so be it; if it’s a trade union, so be it; if it’s a disability advocacy group, so be it.Anything that allows for coordination and popular mobilisation that isn’t controlled by the government may provide an advantage.
Strengthening opposition movements can also include support of political exile. Political opposition movements don’t just consist offigureheads, they are communities. There are people who organise, raise funds, get the message out to journalists and so forth. Whenthings become too dangerous, not one, but many of them will often be forced to leave. Over the last couple of years, as transnationalrepression has become the norm rather than the exception, a significant number of these communities have come under increasingpressure from their authoritarian tormentors because many democracies have pushed refugees away from their own borders tocountries that are more susceptible to pressure from dictators. Reversing this would undoubtedly create significant political challenges,but if the intention is to make life harder for tyrants, it could well be helpful.22
A further aid must be the free flow of information. The internet, as much as tyrants have attempted to use it for their own ends, continues tobe of use to activists. Not only can they use it to coordinate and spread their message, when the moment comes and it looks as if theregime is staggering, they can use it to mobilise. And existing democracies can help activists help themselves: for example, they cansupport the development of safe messenger applications and help activists circumvent governmental censorship.
If these measures are implemented and the stability of the tyrant’s fiefdom is in serious question, outsiders will then have to decide abouta different kind of exile: that of the despot rather than his opponents. As discussed with reference to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos,this is a difficult problem. If democracies don’t grant exile, innocent civilians will die because the dictator will have an incentive to do all hecan to remain in power. He may give an order to torture, he may give an order to shoot. Those orders might not be followed, but there’salways the chance that they are. If democracies grant exile, a truly vile person will get to live out his days in Hawaii or on the Côte d’Azur.Not only that, but it will also undermine international justice and accountability efforts, and send a signal to others that they are free totorture and kill.
Taken together, these measures will be corrosive enough to destabilise many dictatorships. It might not happen overnight, but it willhappen. Some will fall and most will struggle as soon as even a little opposition arises. In the cases in which tyrants do fall, there’s a decentchance that the dictatorial cycle will be broken.
But there’s a limit to these strategies because many of the most powerful and most damaging despots will have anticipated an attack ontheir rule; they are prepared. As a result, there might not be enough people within the country who, even when supported, could make ameaningful difference. As the historian Rory Cormac noted, ‘covert action doesn’t create opposition groups.’23 That is to say thatyou can only support something that is already in existence because even the most powerful external actors cannot create partners out ofthin air; or it might be that opponents of the current regime could be supported, but they are worse than the people in charge; or finally,the regime itself might also be so established that it is difficult to break even if opponents can be supported. This is more likely to happenafter the regime has already survived for a while; if the machine works better than it initially did.24
Under those circumstances, the best one can realistically achieve as an outsider is to accelerate the fall of the tyrant. An end to tyranny isunlikely. The key problem is that the most destructive regimes are the least likely to fall in ways that are likely to generate a good outcome.To bring down those regimes, the measures outlined above might well be insufficient.
In situations like this, policymakers find themselves at a crossroads. If they take one route, need a different set of tools. If they take another,they will need to wait until the moment arises when they can make a difference.
Changing tools means changing aims: instead of trying to weaken the dictator over time, the goal is now to take him out directly. Out goesthe hammer, in comes the dynamite. The advantage of using dynamite to topple the dictator from his pedestal is that dynamite isexceptionally effective and the effect is quick. But not everybody has access to it and that’s probably a good thing because usingdynamite can result in things going very wrong. In other words, these are measures that are more likely to topple tyrants but less likely tolead to a sustainable outcome if the tyrant does fall. They are also vastly more expensive.
Whereas none of the previous measures involved violence, this one does – at least indirectly. The aim should be to make life as miserableas possible for regime elites while giving them the opportunity to break free. If someone can be found who is willing to remove theincumbent from power, help them. If we are talking about a petrostate, encourage sabotage of pipelines or refineries. Identify armedopposition groups and provide them with the weapons they need to wreak havoc. Tell the generals that you would be supportive of acoup d’état. If an assassin needs a safehouse, provide it.
Is that going to work? In the sense of toppling the tyrant – perhaps; in the sense of creating an outcome that’s good in any sense of theword – unlikely. These measures are hugely destructive and can easily spiral into war. And as we know after discussing the advantages anddisadvantages of covert action, such actions are unlikely to stay hidden. Chances are the information about who provided that safehouseor those weapons will eventually see the light of day, with all the consequences that entails for the party that provided them.
The only thing that’s even more escalatory than putting dynamite in the hands of others and telling them to use it is to light the fuseyourself. As a German who enjoyed freedom from the moment he was born, I am not going to argue that force should never be used totopple tyrants.
The famous cases of Japan and Germany aside, there are other cases in which it has worked. Yahya Jammeh, the man Banka Mannehwanted to bring down when he orchestrated a coup attempt in the Gambia, was eventually deposed through the use of force when aregional coalition marched on the dictator’s home village. The forces – drawn from Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria – met barely anyopposition. The Gambia is not a perfect democracy now, but it certainly became a lot freer after the military intervention. And theintervention itself wasn’t costly precisely because there wasn’t much opposition. But, as we have seen in the last couple of chapters,most foreign regime-change operations are not like that of the Economic Community of West African States in the Gambia. They tend tofail.
Since this is a route few want to go down, the tools are put back in the box as decision makers bide their time until there’s an opening todestabilise the despot at an acceptable cost. This is the ‘monitor and prepare’ approach.
Even the most powerful tyrants cannot prevent crises from breaking out forever. The cleverest leaders can anticipate public grievancesand blunt the effects of recessions and so forth, but something unforeseen always happens. Perhaps a spontaneous protest quickly turnsinto a nationwide uprising; a part of the military mutinies because they haven’t been paid, or perhaps the effects of a natural disaster areexacerbated by the regime’s corruption. Even if none of those things happens, tyrants are still mortal. They will eventually get ill or fallasleep and never wake up. When a narrow window of opportunity arises, outsiders have to be ready to prise it wide open.
Until that happens, efforts must be made to minimise the damage the dictator can do while in office. That begins at home. Authoritarianshave found plenty of suit-wearing allies within liberal democracies. A whole army of accountants, bankers, lawyers and public relationsspecialists in cities such as London or New York are busy turning dictatorial cash into political power. The dictators sell oil to the UnitedKingdom (or the United States or Germany or France . . .) and then invest the proceeds in key industries or relationships with influentialpolitical factions. Ten and a half per cent of Volkswagen, one of Germany’s most important companies, is owned by Qatar Holding LLC.25 The Saudi royal family has reportedly invested hundreds of millions, and in some cases even billions, of dollars in American companiesGoogle, Zoom and Activision Blizzard.26 There’s barely a high-ranking European football club that doesn’t have some involvementfrom shady autocrats. Hostile authoritarians are also hoovering up ports, telecommunications infrastructure and other criticalinstallations on which modern life depends. Is all this good business? Hard to tell. But it’s definitely a good way to buy influence andprotect distasteful regimes from external pressure. Where this is still preventable, it needs to be prevented. Where it has already occurred,democratic states need to roll it back – to find the points of leverage that autocrats can use and systematically reduce the risk.
Now that we are on our way to minimising the damage that these people can do, the next thing we need is a big loud siren. When a relevantregime is in serious trouble, we need to be well prepared. This will involve serious planning.
What would be the warning signs for a falling leader? Who might be next in line if the incumbent falls? What happens when the entireregime collapses, and how might you react? Many developments can be planned for before they happen. When the siren goes off,everyone needs to be at their station, ready to respond.
One of the most curious examples of this was uncovered by journalists at the Associated Press in 2014. Four years earlier, a Cubanjournalism student named Saimi Reyes Carmona at the University of Havana had signed up to ZunZuneo, a social network, under hernickname Saimita.27 Originally small, ZunZuneo (slang for a hummingbird’s tweet) rapidly grew in size over the next couple of months.Before she knew it, Saimita had thousands of followers. When she texted them to let them know that it was her birthday, she got so manyreplies that she excitedly told her boyfriend that it was the coolest thing she had ever seen.28
What neither she nor any of ZunZuneo’s tens of thousands of other users knew was that the entire network had been dreamt up andplanned by a big Washington government contractor and the United States Agency for International Development. Since they obviouslycouldn’t come right out and admit it, the whole operation was made to look as if it was something else. It involved stolen phonenumbers, fake companies in the United Kingdom, Spain and the Cayman Islands as well as a bank account in a tax haven. The purpose ofthis, according to an internal memo, was to ensure that it could not be traced back to America. To fool the users, one proposal went as faras suggesting that fake ad banners should be placed on the website in order to make ZunZuneo look more like a normal business than apolitical influence campaign.29
The aim of ZunZuneo wasn’t to turn a profit or make life easier for its users, but to weaken the Cuban government by mobilising citizensagainst it. At first, it was to be unpolitical. Its users might talk about concerts or their birthday or all their other day-to-day concerns. But if amoment of crisis had ever occurred, the American government could have blasted all of ZunZuneo’s users with messages critical of theCuban regime. Not only that, the same users could have used the site to coordinate with one another. Could that little extra push havemade the decisive difference at a moment of serious instability? We will never find out because the project failed before the plan could beput into action.
ZunZuneo involved a number of thorny ethical questions since the people who it supposedly aimed to help were deceived. On a purelypractical level, it was also incredibly risky. It’s one thing to try to destabilise an adversarial foreign government using a foreignintelligence service, but this work was carried out by a development agency and their contractors. If they claim to drill wells but insteadengage in this type of work, even once, everyone working for the agency across the globe is in danger. It was such a ‘bold’ move thatDemocratic senator Patrick Leahy called it ‘dumb, dumb, dumb’.30 But it was creative, at least.
When that siren sounds, governments need to take action. The flashing red should lead to an activation of contingency plans to deal withthe likely fallout of a sudden change in leadership, or the threat of it. These are volatile moments. In the best-case scenario, a strugglingleader simply steps down to pave the way for a better future, but, given everything we know, that’s always unlikely. Perhaps a naturaldeath leads to a vacuum of power as multiple figures present themselves as ‘worthy’ heirs to the tyrant. Maybe an uprising issuppressed as a struggling autocrat manages to retain power. Worst of all, maybe the uprising turns into full-blown civil war. That wouldmean compatriots would have to be evacuated, people would need to flee and sides would have to be picked. When that moment comes,plans already need to be in the drawer, ready to be implemented at a moment’s notice.
But just because we can topple tyrants and we now know how to topple tyrants doesn’t mean that we necessarily should topple tyrants.
There are plenty of good arguments against becoming involved. To start with, there’s the uncertainty.
If you were in the right place at the right time in the continental United States on 4 October 1957, you could have seen an object movingacross the night sky. It wasn’t a shooting star or some other natural occurrence. For the very first time in history, humans had succeededin building and launching something that left the earth’s atmosphere. It was Sputnik, an eighty-three-kilogram satellite, the size of abeach ball, launched from a cosmodrome in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Sputnik wasn’t just visible to the human eye under theright conditions, you could actually hear it ‘beep’ as it went overhead.31 While American intelligence agencies and PresidentEisenhower had known that this was going to happen for quite some time, the wider public was shocked.32 Had the Soviet threat beenunderestimated? Were they now more advanced than the free world? The space race was in full swing.
In a development that probably wasn’t foreseen by the Soviet rocket engineers working on that launch, satellites are now used by socialscientists to get a better idea of the economic strength of authoritarian regimes.33 Looking at a night-time satellite image of the Koreanpeninsula, the contrast between North and South couldn’t be starker. The democratic South is bright, with Seoul and the surroundingarea looking like a giant ball of light. Across the demilitarised zone only a few spots, such as Pyongyang, are visible.
To use that data, economists overlay the images with a grid before recording the light intensity for every square. Factories create light.Once you know how much light is emitted in a given area, you can determine how much economic activity is going on. It’s an impressiveuse of data. And it’s not just data from satellites: the availability of large datasets on everything from civil wars to assassinations tocoup-proofing mechanisms and protests has increased substantially. The advances in methods and computational power have beenhuge, and governments and international organisations have tried their best to capitalise on it. The CIA is sponsoring research on coups,the United Nations is trying to forecast instability and many European states use quantitative analysis to complement their assessments ofelection-related violence. All this has led to a more accurate understanding of the way tyrants fall. On top of these systematic attempts togenerate insights, there’s been an explosion of open-source intelligence. Given the ubiquity of images and videos coming out of evenclosed societies, it can feel as if we see everything and understand everything.
In reality, much remains in the dark – and what feels like perfect vision is really just a fraction of the whole image. Economists only use(inaccurate) satellite data as a proxy because basic indicators about economic activity can’t be taken at face value in many countriesaround the world. Authoritarian regimes, whether they be military juntas, hereditary monarchies or one-party states, are more opaquethan liberal democracies. So much of these regimes is based on backroom deals and informal rules that it’s difficult to work out whomatters and who doesn’t, and how stable the situation is at any given moment. When it comes to understanding authoritarian regimes,not even hindsight is 20/20.
That leads to one of the principal arguments against attempts to topple tyrants: predicting what will happen afterwards is nearlyimpossible. Such falls are rare events, and even experts have a poor track record at predicting them accurately. And while what happensnext could be better, it might also be worse. Almost everything we discussed in the previous chapters is based on probabilities. Is one typeof regime change more likely to achieve sustainable results? Yes. But if that type of regime change has historically had a success rate of twoout of three and the stakes are this high, should we really roll the dice? There’s a good case to be made that we should not.
The practical arguments are perhaps even more convincing. To begin with, overthrowing a foreign leader can be costly. The cost, ofcourse, is dependent on the extent of outside involvement. At the lower end of the scale, it’s not usually too expensive (either financiallyor politically) to provide limited monetary support to non-violent opposition figures in an unfriendly authoritarian regime. To go to warto topple a foreign leader, on the other hand, is extremely costly – both in blood and in treasure.
Then there’s the question of competing interests. In the real world, politicians must juggle a thousand different considerations whendevising policy towards a country. What are the commercial ties to the region? Do they need to maintain supplies of a crucial naturalresource that they cannot easily replace? How about that military base – could they really do without it if things go wrong? On paper,democracy is often at the top of the list. But when it comes to policy, it’s usually trumped by less abstract concerns. And if in doubt,‘stability’ wins out. That this stability is often merely a mirage is of secondary importance.
There are other considerations also – one of them being ethical. Most of us would, it is to be hoped, agree that people everywhere shouldhave a meaningful say in the way they are governed. Nobody deserves to live in a one-party dictatorship, an absolute monarchy or undera military junta. But just as we wouldn’t want a foreign country to choose leaders for us, most are probably not keen to have their politicalleaders chosen (or removed) by us. They might want to get rid of their politicians, but that’s different from having someone else do it –even if things go well.
In the real world, toppling tyrants also involves other challenging moral questions. That becomes clear when we look back at the NorthKorean famine of the 1990s.
The situation was so bad that the Kim regime asked for international aid even though its entire ideology was based on the idea that NorthKorea could be independent from, or even superior to, the countries it was now asking for help. At the same time, the North Koreanregime wanted to ensure that the aid came with minimum strings attached. They wanted food, money and medicine, but they didn’twant aid organisations to monitor how it was distributed. The movement of aid workers was heavily restricted and the regime went as faras banning staff who spoke Korean.34 Sometimes hospital patients, including children, simply disappeared.35
It was a nightmarish problem. Should regimes like North Korea, under those conditions, be provided with aid?
Providing aid to North Korea was a difficult option. Kim Sung-il was working on nuclear weapons and much of the suffering of the Koreanpeople was his fault. He could have opened the economy and prioritised the well-being of his people above his personal power. But hedidn’t, and providing aid to his regime would almost inevitably strengthen it.
Not being able to feed its people was an obvious sign of the regime’s failure that would be mitigated by supplying aid. In addition, aid isfungible. Once food is under Pyongyang’s control, it can be sold. If the aid is not sold, the regime still profits: now that it has to spend lessmoney on feeding ordinary North Koreans, it can spend more money on something else, such as soldiers.
And indeed, some aid organisations eventually decided to withdraw. Médecins Sans Frontières, an international charity providingmedical care, announced that it would no longer work in North Korea. It judged that food was being diverted from people in need andinstead given to the military and other politically important groups.36
It’s an understandable choice. But with millions of North Koreans starving and Pyongyang asking for aid, can democracies turn therequest down and let even more people die? They could and have, of course, but toppling a regime with this tactic is far from assured. Inthe end, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aid poured into North Korea to alleviate the effects of the famine the North Koreanregime had created – because sometimes, some things are more important than toppling tyrants.37
But despite all these arguments and the difficulties of going through with an attempt to topple tyrants, there must be a tipping point. Atsome point, despite all the risks that come with it, the price of letting these men run rampant simply becomes too high. Where exactly thattipping point is varies: as the risks of these strategies differ, so do the thresholds at which they become worth pursuing.
Whatever happens, toppling tyrants requires patience. In 1972, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, Chinese premierZhou Enlai is supposed to have replied: ‘Too early to say.’38 As good as the quote might be, that’s not how it happened. According toan American diplomat in the room ‘there was a misunderstanding that was too delicious to invite correction.’39 Zhou was referring notto the French Revolution of 1789 but the unrest that had erupted in Paris in 1968.40 It’s a popular misquote because it contains a grain oftruth: it is difficult to judge what success looks like in the aftermath of such disruptive events. Something can look like success after a day,failure after a decade and success again a hundred years after it happened.
When former dictator Ben Ali fled to Jeddah less than a month after a vegetable vendor set himself on fire in protest at his regime, theentire world was hopeful. Even as other transitions quickly petered out or went into reverse, Tunisia became the international symbol ofsuccess of the Arab Spring. Then, after a few years, things changed again. A little more than a decade after Ben Ali’s fall, Tunisia’s futuredid not look so bright as the government consolidated power in its own hands once again. The deaths and the bravery of the Tunisianpeople might have been for nothing; wasted.
But who can tell what the situation will be like in the future? Perhaps Tunisia will turn into another dictatorship. It even seems probable. Butthere’s also the possibility that the ousting of Ben Ali, and the subsequent years of freedom, laid the groundwork for Tunisia’s futuredevelopment as a successful and prosperous liberal democracy. For all we know, the Tunisians could surprise us. History isn’t linear. TheFrench Revolution itself (the one Zhou Enlai wasn’t referring to) was not exactly smooth sailing. France experienced violent repressionand even war. During the Reign of Terror, some 17,000 people were executed by guillotine. The whole episode ended with a coup d’étataround ten years after it started. And yet, we now remember it as a pivotal moment on the path to French democracy. Staying engagedunder conditions of such uncertainty doesn’t come naturally to governments, but it’s the reality of the world we live in. There’s nosingle answer to tyranny, no button to press to make the problem go away. Instead, we have to chip away at the institutions that keepdespots in power and be ready to pounce once an opening presents itself. And when it does happen, it might not go from bad to betterbut from bad to worse before it gets better. We have to live with that.
Tyrants are powerful, but they are constantly haunted by the fear of death. And despite all the bluster and seeming insanity, most of theseleaders are rational. Due to the structure of the regimes they depend on, their biggest threat comes from the people around them – thepalace elites, generals and advisors. Sometimes, even members of their own families are willing to destroy them to make it to the top. Tosurvive under such hostile conditions, despots have to manage elites through riches and repression. And to avoid death, jail and exile, theyneed to pay particular attention to the men with guns. Trained in violence and equipped to kill, these men and women need to bemanaged. Everything else that threatens dictators comes from managing these two groups. With the military weakened and the massessystematically excluded to provide benefits for the tiny number of powerbrokers at the top, both military conflict and popular protest area constant threat. And when the masses rise up, tyrants can’t just shoot their way out of the problem because it risks fracturing the regimeto such an extent that it falls apart. Assassination is something of a wildcard: difficult to prepare for and something that is always apossibility. Not just that, it can actually become more likely when dictators are successful at protecting themselves from other risks,because that means there aren’t any other options to effect change. When the dictator is dead or simply out of office, chaos oftenfollows. Most non-democratic systems of government are bad at managing succession – partly because tyrants usually don’t want toappoint a successor.
Democracy hasn’t yet reached every place on earth and perhaps it never will, but the precedent has been set and there is every chancethat it will continue to spread. There remain some cartoonish leaders with seemingly limitless power over their domain, but they havegone from being the norm to being the exception. These tyrants look like strong men, but they are right to be afraid.
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Acknowledgements
Writing a book, especially on a topic as complicated as this, is hard.
I couldn’t have done it without Joe Zigmond, my brilliant editor. It would be a lie to say I was excited when I saw his first feedback, but hiswisdom has made the book immeasurably better. It’s been a privilege working together and I’ve learned a great deal. In the finalmonths of writing, when words seemed to assume a daunting finality, Lauren Howard’s sharp ideas were tremendously helpful. I’malso thankful to Siam Hatzaw for guiding me through the publication process.
Talking to practitioners and activists has been exceedingly useful. To the government officials, thank you for trusting me. To those whohave stood up against overwhelming cruelty at great personal risk: you are the inspiration that allows the rest of us to believe in a betterworld.
The book has benefited hugely from the expertise of many authorities on their subjects, who have talked to me about everything from theeconomics of dictatorship to the Parthian Empire and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. I am grateful to Allard Duursma, Curtis Bell,Seva Gunitsky, Kristen Harkness, Joseph Wright, Daron Acemoglu, Erica Frantz, Nicholas Miller, Jake Nabel, Ian Garner, AleksandrHerasimenka, Clayton Besaw, Agathe Demarais, Anton Barbashin and Larry Diamond.
I’d also like to mention the following, who have provided invaluable advice and encouragement. A special thank you to: SalvatorCusimano, Anchalee Rüland, Jürgen Brandsch, Livia Puglisi, Caspar Schliephack, Dinah Elisa Kreutz, Reid Standish, Julia Zulver, NicCheeseman, Oliver Moody, Imre Gelens, Inga Kristina Trauthig, Rowan Hamill-McMahon, Philip Mühl, Victor Cruz Aceves, Michael Jacobi,Dave Wakerley and my doctoral supervisor Christian Martin. None of this would have been possible without David Landry and Brian Klaas.
My biggest debt of all is owed to friends and family. Thank you for everything.
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