Book Review - How Tyrants Fall and How Nations Survive

I picked up Marcel Dirsus’ well-publicised and highly rated book “How Tyrants Fall and How Nations Survive” given my interest in politics, history and governance and finished it on the last leg of my summer break. The book is well-written and well-researched, covering the governance style of tyrannical regimes, mostly in Africa and Asia, and how tyrants gain power, consolidate it, and eventually lose it, either peacefully or violently. However, at times the author lacks objectivity, as he looks at the entire world with one lens of Western Democracy. He also fails to objectively criticize the West, especially the USA for both covert and overt operations aimed at regime changes across the world, some of which resulted in heavy bloodshed and instability in the country. Iraq is the most glaring example of that misadventure, where the USA first backed Saddam Hussain for years in the war against Iran, and then turned against him and eventually threw him out of power in 2003, post which the country faced a bloody civil war and anarchy, which the US and Western powers couldn’t stop for years.

Marcel Dirsus is a political scientist and writes The Hundred newsletter and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University. While working at a brewery in Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013, he found himself in the middle of a coup attempt against President Joseph Kabila. Although the coup failed and Marcel managed to safely reach Germany, he decided to conduct research on how tyrants fall. His work focuses on regime instability, political violence, and German foreign policy. He has advised democratic governments, multinational corporations, NATO, and the OECD. His research has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. After reading a few positive reviews of the book and the introduction section, I had high hopes from the book. It is indeed insightful and well-researched but fails to accept the basic truth that not all non-democratic regimes in the world can be termed tyrannical. A democratically elected western politician could well be a tyrant, and we have seen a few in our lifetime. Similarly, labelling a king/emperor ruling a country in the GCC as a tyrant is both unfair and ill-informed. Most importantly, some tyrants manage to perpetuate their rule with the backing of the so-called Western democracies, as they become allies in West led causes and campaigns, such as the infamous “War on Terror”. The author had little to say against those Western democracies.

Dr. Dirsus starts with how dictators in the modern-day fear the end of their rule and equate it to running on a treadmill from which they cannot get off. He says that it is a myth that dictators are all-powerful and maintain an iron grip. The dictators live and rule under a constant fear of being overthrown, either by internal groups or external forces, and hence pursue policies aimed at weakening their enemies. Dictators follow various strategies to maintain their power. They reward civil loyalists with commercial deals, military devotees with promotions and advanced weapons, and foreign allies with unconditional support, both in peace and war. However, a dictator’s rule can end in an instant – an assassination by one’ own bodyguard or a revolt by the public. Dr. Dirsus endorses the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s “3.5% rule” according to which if 3.5% of the population participates in mass demonstrations against a tyrant, the end is nigh. He says that violent efforts to suppress a mob usually fail, as if “you shoot, you lose.” A tyrant’s own security forces could refuse to fire at the public and disobey orders. We saw that happening very recently in Bangladesh.

Dr. Dirsus says that tyrants focus on enriching themselves and plunder national wealth. They keep their cronies happy by letting them steal, providing them lucrative government contracts and enriching them with favorable government regulations. The fruits of economic gains are enjoyed by a few and lead to public unrest and discontent. The tyrants sometimes create divisions within the military and favor a group within the armed forces. This strategy risks making the military weaker against an external threat, as Saddam Hussain found in the war against Iran.

Tyrants hate criticism and punish dissent. They surround themselves with yes-men and sycophants, who tell them what they like to hear. This deprives them of honest and useful advice and eventually results in misreading the public pulse. Dr. Dirsus explains through multiple examples how dictators face risky trade-offs with their choices to retain power. While they could succeed for years or even decades, the dictator’s actions weaken his grip on power in the long-term and cause a costly end. According to the book, from 1946 to 2010, 69% of dictators/tyrants were jailed, killed or forced into exile when they lost power.

Who is classified as a tyrant? Dr. Dirsus describes two types of tyrants. First is a leader who uses his power not for the collective good of the community but for personal gain. The second is someone who has taken power without having a right to it. However, in the book he has classified many different rulers as tyrants. An independence leader/founder of a country could end up as a tyrant – Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is an example. An elected leader (in a democracy) who refuses to stand down and rules for decades by winning (manipulating) elections is a tyrant – current day examples are Vladimir Putin in Russia and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda. A military person who overthrows a civilian government is a tyrant, such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. A single party rule in a country where power transfers from one leader to the other is labelled by the author as tyrannical – he has given examples of China and North Korea, which are two opposite extremes in my view. Finally, he terms monarchs of the Gulf as tyrants, which is extremely inaccurate.     

Dr. Dirsus talks about how to topple a tyrant in the last chapter. He says that such attempts can backfire and hence require careful planning and smooth execution. He mentions two approaches. One approach is direct, where an external power acts to take out the tyrant, either covertly or overtly. He has given multiple examples of such an approach by the USA – Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Iraq are among them. Dr. Dirsus says that the US has tried regime change on 74 occasions and only a third of these attempts have been successful. The second approach is to use tools such as sanctions, boycotts, and embargoes to weaken a tyrant. Dr. Dirsus favors the 2nd approach but acknowledges that it doesn’t always work. He quotes John F. Kennedy, who had once said that you make violent revolution inevitable when you make peaceful revolution impossible.

Some excerpts from the book are given here:

“Democracies have rules that prevent politicians from dipping their hands into the coffers of the state. As much as democratic political leaders might want to, there's a good chance they'll be found out if they engage in corruption, as they face investigative journalists, independent policemen and a vibrant civil society. If they do get found out, there are likely to be serious consequences because judges can rarely be swayed (or paid) to look the other way. Tyrants, by contrast, operate in an environment that more closely resembles the Wild West. There may be rules, but they aren't enforced or are enforced selectively. Autocracies are enrichment machines. Unencumbered by the restrictions that hold back democratic leaders, the opportunities for stealing are almost endless.”

“Surrounding himself with incompetent sycophants because they present less of a danger, results in a tyrant being the cleverest person in every room by his own design. Such sycophants are likely to tell the dictator what he wants to hear because, over time, dictators purge the people who tell them unpleasant truths while rewarding those who lie to please. The result of this is a trap that tyrants set for themselves: as their view of reality becomes more distorted due to their own decisions, they become more likely to make catastrophic mistakes based on a version of events that was never real.”

“For dictators, the effectiveness of parallel military forces can be achieved through training, equipment and positioning. If tyrants have done all that, they've taken the first steps towards staying in power. But there's more that needs to be done to prevent unplanned retirement. With the military split and weakened, now is the time to give it a reason to support the status quo. The most straightforward way to achieve the loyalty of the parallel security forces is to spoil them rotten. Give them money, give them toys, increase their opportunities for personal enrichment through corruption. It's no coincidence that parallel security forces tend to be better equipped than their regular counterparts. Another option is to select soldiers based on a certain identity.”

“Some tyrants have, unfortunately, been willing to commit to the 'go big' approach. The most effective way to avoid a backlash when using force is to be so brutal that the barriers to participation increase disproportionately to its mobilisation effect. Put bluntly, people don't join protests if they think they will die.”

“The advantage of using dynamite to topple the dictator from his pedestal is that dynamite is exceptionally effective and the effect is quick. But not everybody has access to it and that's probably a good thing because using dynamite can result in things going very wrong. In other words, these are measures that are more likely to topple tyrants but less likely to lead 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 miserable as possible for regime elites while giving them the opportunity to break free. If someone can be found who is willing to remove the incumbent from power, help them. If we are talking about a petrostate, encourage sabotage of pipelines or refineries. Identify armed opposition groups and provide them with the weapons they need to wreak havoc. Tell the generals that you would be supportive of a coup d’etat. If an assassin needs a safe house, provide it.”