How tyrants fall and how.., p.13
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive, page 13
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 surroundings with a chemical that would induce hallucinations before an important speech. Plans were not limited to discrediting Castro: the United States government was willing to assassinate him. In one scheme, Castro was to be given an explosive cigar; in another, a contaminated diving suit was supposed to give him a ‘debilitating skin disease’; and in another, which made use of Fidel’s love of scuba diving, he was to be blown up with explosives hidden underwater in an attractively painted seashell.32 Needless to say, all of these plots were either abandoned or they failed – in blunder after blunder. Fidel eventually died at the age of ninety a few years after handing power to his brother 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 not only tyrants who make irrational decisions when they feel threatened. Their opponents, whether they be democratic leaders or fellow dictators, can make exactly the same mistakes. But despite all these failures, we tend to imagine intelligence services as omnipotent puppet 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. Toppling foreign 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 coming into 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. Others are 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. If there’s an invasion and the invading army reaches the presidential palace, the dictator will obviously lose power. But tyrants can fall much 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 war over 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.35 Let’s imagine a scenario in which war breaks out between two regional rivals over a contested province that both claim as theirs. The defending state, which previously controlled the province, is beaten badly. To prevent the attacker from marching even further, the dictator 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 dictator could now find himself in serious trouble. With the public upset over this embarrassing defeat, they might well be out on the streets calling for 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 is weak. 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 their military, or leave the military as it is and find another way to protect themselves. To those looking to do the former, the most rational strategy is to build up military strength to a point at which an attack from outside is too costly even to be contemplated. In international relations, this is referred to as a ‘deterrent’. Once that deterrent has been established – and only then – do they go all out on coup-proofing. The key to this is developing a deterrent that doesn’t disappear as the military becomes more and more geared towards taking 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 of regional powers such as South Korea or Japan. With more than a million active-duty personnel, it is also among the world’s largest. More importantly, North Korea has thousands of artillery systems, many of which are deployed near the demilitarised zone that has divided the peninsula 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 find themselves in a situation which would seem apocalyptic. Skyscrapers would be reduced to rubble, office buildings would burn, windows would shatter. With the ground shaking from the impact of an artillery round, the next round and the one after that would already be on their 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 and the South Korean population density, and also at the way targeted populations would react in the event of an attack. How many would panic? 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, Seoul proper ‘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 Korean artillery would turn Seoul into a ‘sea of fire’ by sending over around fourteen thousand rounds within a single hour. If that happens, the casualty 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 a huge deterrent effect because everyone knows that war against North Korea would inevitably lead to hundreds of thousands of casualties.
There is only one form of deterrent that works better than Kim’s artillery: weapons of mass destruction. These weapons, whether they are chemical, biological or nuclear, are so destructive that leaders pursue them because they know that having them will provide their regime with a deterrent that’s powerful enough to ward off other states. These weapons also mean that dictatorships don’t need to go back on their 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 so destructive. That differs from conventional forces: every extra main battle tank given to the military can be used by the military against the regime. But a nuclear bomb? Exceedingly useful to deter a nation-state but useless to overthrow the government. Nobody is going to nuke 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, five countries have seriously pursued nuclear weapons programmes (Iran, Iraq, Israel, Libya and Syria), and all of them except Israel were or are 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 weapons expert 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 if tyrants 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 incumbent in power, simply don’t support such institutions because anything that restrains the incumbent is seen as a threat by the presidential palace. 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 personality quirks. 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 higher education in science and technology, which he saw as a source of opposition.43 At the time of independence, Libya was a deeply impoverished country: in 1948, per-capita income stood at around fifteen pounds a year.44 Moreover, there was almost no state capacity and much of the population lacked even basic education – 94 per cent of the population was illiterate.45 Things could have changed after the discovery of oil. The economy grew rapidly and the regime then had the resources to expand the capacity of the state. But that didn’t happen. Gaddafi, in fact, wanted the opposite. He explicitly set out to dismantle what little there was of the state because he saw it as a threat 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 devastating reading. According to her, Libya’s institutions were not well-equipped for carrying out simple tasks, let alone planning a nuclear weapons project.46 So the Gaddafi regime tried to buy its way towards becoming a nuclear weapons state. At first, it attempted to persuade Beijing to sell them ready-manufactured nukes. But the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai reportedly said: ‘Sorry . . . but China obtained 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. And when things inevitably went wrong, Gaddafi’s personalised system of government made it difficult to understand the full extent of the problem. Gaddafi himself obviously couldn’t understand what the nuclear scientists were doing, but then his bare-bones state didn’t have any of the institutions required to monitor and understand what the scientists were doing either.49 As a result, Gaddafi never got close 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), the only remaining option to increase destructive power is to go back on some of the coup-proofing measures, thereby trading security the other 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. The generals were paralysed by fear and the dictator was micromanaging military strategy, even ordering the size of individual trenches.50 The regime was also flying blind because almost the entire intelligence apparatus was directed at spying on ordinary Iraqis and the military.51 The focus on domestic enemies was so complete that, on the eve of the war, Iraqi intelligence had only three officers tasked with gathering and analysing intelligence on Iran. Only one of them had actually studied Farsi, the language needed to understand what’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 designed for 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 Iranian military. But as the Iranians got the upper hand and even Baghdad no longer seemed safe, he changed his mind. ‘The true military professionals were never Saddam’s favourites, even when they were most important. Increasingly throughout the war, he understood that he needed them, and more often than not, he heeded their advice,’ an analysis based on the recollections of an Iraqi general later said.53 The spies were also redirected: whereas there had previously been almost nobody doing that job, there were more than two and a half 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 in power for another day. It also meant that the military became a bigger threat to the regime, but that was a risk worth taking because the imminent 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 enemy wasn’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. A more 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’s oil, uranium, market access or indirect control over a strategic maritime route – or 2,498 metres of concrete near Afghanistan. When five al-Qaeda terrorists flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, American foreign policy changed in an instant. Five days later, President Bush spoke of a war on terrorism. To wage that war, the United States needed 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 brutal dictator. He became infamous internationally when the bodies of two former inmates of Jaslyk Prison in northwestern Uzbekistan were returned 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 was burnt. According to Human Rights Watch, a prominent non-governmental organisation, ‘doctors who saw the body reported that such burns could only have been caused by immersing Avazov in boiling water.’55 When the victim’s sixty-three-year-old mother dared to complain about her son’s brutal torture, she was sent to a maximum-security jail for attempting to ‘overthrow the constitutional order’.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 (and expand) Karshi-Khanabad Air Base for military operations in Afghanistan. In late 2001, American secretary of state Colin Powell visited the Uzbekistan capital Tashkent. Early the following year, President Karimov met President Bush.57 The two countries signed several agreements to strengthen their relationship. While in Uzbekistan, Powell referred to the country as ‘an important member of the coalition against terrorism’.58 Because America derived so much value from the air base in southern Uzbekistan, the United States government eventually became reluctant to speak out about human rights abuses in the country.59 Far from seeing the United States as a threat, 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 actively shield them against outsiders. This is the strategy pursued by multiple middle eastern petrostates. They may expend billions of dollars on American military equipment, but ultimately the external security of the emir of Qatar isn’t guaranteed by the soldiers of the Qatari Armed Forces, but by the men and women of the United States military stationed in the country. Hosting thousands of soldiers, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is the largest American military base in the Middle East. If an external power wanted to topple the emir, they would have to 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 for protecting the Qatari royal family, for example, the United States gets not just a lucrative arms customer but also access to a giant hub that can be used to move soldiers and equipment around, or fly sorties against targets in nearby countries, if need be. But these security guarantees are dangerous in at least two ways. First, there’s always the risk of escalation. Governments that agree to provide security for autocratic regimes usually do so on the assumption that they won’t have to fight on the regime’s behalf because their military presence itself 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.
