How Tyrants Fall

The 21st century is shaping up as a showdown between dictatorships and democracies. A new book reveals the surprising evidence of how dictators and despots fall from power—and blows up popular myths.

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“The most powerful tyrants on earth are condemned to live their life in fear. They can make their enemies disappear with a snap of their fingers. They, their families, and their acolytes may control entire countries from the luxury of their palace, but they also have to spend their every waking hour plagued by the fear of losing everything. No matter how powerful they become, they cannot pay for or order that fear to disappear. If such tyrants make one wrong move, they will fall.”

So writes the political scientist

Marcel Dirsus

in the opening lines of his excellent new book, How Tyrants Fall, which was published today in the UK.¹ (Full disclosure: my name appears on the cover because I gave it an enthusiastic endorsement when I read an advance copy, which should tell you what I think of the book).

Dirsus rightly points out that there is a widespread myth that dictatorships are bastions of stability, that despots easily maintain an iron grip on power. The opposite is true. The longevity of dictators often masks an enduring fragility. Dictators live precarious lives, constantly needing to look over their shoulders, relentlessly crushing their enemies and any would-be usurpers.

But everything can fall apart in an instant. And when that happens, the demise of personalist dictators is usually a grim one: two-thirds lose power only to end up in prison, exiled, or dead. It somewhat raises the stakes of clinging onto power if the loss of it leads not to book tours, corporate boards, and riches, but to a jail cell or a hole in the ground.

Peering more closely at the rise and fall of dictators raises several crucial questions. How Tyrants Fall tackles them with fresh insights—insights that also dovetail with some of my previous research on authoritarian regimes.²

1. Are dictators all irrational megalomaniacs?

2. What are the key Catch-22’s of being a dictator?

3. Why don’t dictators quit while they’re ahead and retire to a lavish villa with the money they stole rather than clinging on until the bitter end and getting killed?

4. What’s the best way to topple a tyrant—and should we try to do it?

Let’s take each of these in turn.

I: The rational monster in the palace

Dictators appear to be irrational. They alienate large sections of their population with lavish spending on monuments to themselves.³ They develop narcissistic propaganda that surely nobody believes to be true.⁴ They kill and torture their opponents in grotesque ways that attract attention.

Take Idi Amin, for example. His official moniker was “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.” The Butcher of Uganda, as he soon became known, had a penchant for cruelty. He built a torture chamber in Mengo Palace, where his prisoners were placed on a platform above water with a strong electrical current running through it. They were given the choice of jumping into the water or dying at the hands of torturers. In one instance, his henchmen crammed thirty two rival soldiers into a tiny cell, tossed a lit stick of dynamite inside, then closed the door.

But, as Dirsus explains, to understand dictators, you need to set aside your moral judgments and instead examine their behavior through the prism of self-interest in an unrecognizably warped system. Dictators have one overriding goal: to maintain power. They do so by keeping a small group of elites loyal.

“Despite all the bluster and seeming insanity, most of these leaders are rational. Due to the structure of the regimes they depend on, their biggest threat comes from the people around them – the palace elites, generals and advisors. Sometimes, even members of their own families are willing to destroy them to make it to the top. To survive under such hostile conditions, despots have to manage elites through riches and repression.”

In democracies, the selectorate—the group of people who determine who gets into power and whether they stay there—is broader, comprised of millions of voters.⁵ By contrast, in autocracies—the fancy political science word for authoritarian regimes—the selectorate can be tiny. Kim Jong-un probably can’t afford to lose even dozens of key figures in the military establishment. In Russia, Putin would be toast if the siloviki turned against him. President Xi doesn’t need the support of a billion people, but rather the continued endorsement of elites within the Chinese Communist Party.

This crucial difference in the selectorate creates wildly different incentives for dictators compared to the risk/reward system for politicians who are hoping to gain power through genuine competition at the ballot box. As How Tyrants Fall makes clear, despots who keep a laser-like focus on keeping the elites with guns, power, and money happy tend to survive for much longer than those who lose sight of who really matters. These dysfunctional political structures illuminate how bizarre, often monstrous behavior can, sadly, be a rational way to stay in charge.

Nonetheless, it is obviously true that these men—and they are almost exclusively men—are fundamentally broken people. Anyone who would seek to get themselves made a dictator, or who eliminates democratic constraints to become one, is, by definition, someone with extreme and destructive personality traits. And the act of being a dictator requires extreme cruelty that only abusive, power-hungry megalomaniacs are capable of carrying out.⁶

This combination of traits and systems is why dictators and despots are so dangerous: they are broken people who care almost exclusively about maintaining power and they’re often ruthlessly rational in pursuit of their goals. However, the veneer of stability that is projected by these regimes is just a Potemkin village, concealing the fraught decision-making behind the scenes that force dictators to make strategic trade-offs, to constantly manage the very real risk of being toppled.

II: The Catch-22 of being a dictator

Dirsus showcases how dictators—no matter how savvy—always face trade-offs with their machinations to stay in power. Often, they can manage the risk for years, even decades. But it always gets them in the end, because dictators must sow the seeds of their own long-term demise to maintain power in the shorter-term.

Take the military, for example. No matter how much an authoritarian ruler tries to project toughness—Muammar Gaddafi, for example, had a golden gun—every despot knows that if soldiers storm the palace, it’s all over. A dictator isn’t going to win a shootout. When Gaddafi was toppled in Libya, the golden gun did Gaddafi little good. Once a dictator needs a gun, that gun has already become useless; the battle is over. They’ve fallen. All dictators know that they must keep the military on their side—or else.

However, since many dictators come to power through coups d’état, it’s obvious that they, too, could be overthrown in the same way. The military therefore presents the most dangerous threat. That’s why dictators often purge the army of potentially disloyal elements (Idi Amin, for example, murdered an estimated two-thirds of the Ugandan army).

How Tyrants Fall highlights how dictators must necessarily behave in seemingly irrational ways in order to keep the people with guns happy, lavishing the armed forces with money and promotions. Because of the constant risk of a coup, the military brass can wield significant pressure to extort resources from the authoritarian regime. Generals in dictatorships are rich men. Quite often, there are a lot of them.

I’ve interviewed several top generals for my research in Madagascar, for example, and there are now an estimated 150 generals for an army of 13,500 troops. That’s one general for every 90 soldiers. This top-heavy organizational structure exists because dictators are hoping to buy loyalty through promotions. The message is clear: oppose me and lose your status. Stick with me to get rich and stay powerful. That leads to a lot of generals presiding over a weakened military. But it also reduces the risk of a coup d’état, a tactic known as coup proofing.

However, if you weaken the military to lower the risk of a coup, you inevitably invite a higher risk of a foreign invasion. After all, if it’s apparent that the dictator’s military is a paper tiger, the regime becomes an attractive target for external usurpers. Crush one threat, create another.

Similarly, every dictator has to figure out how to manage their internal enemies (every dictator has a lot of enemies). If the autocrat tries to co-opt adversaries by inviting them close to power—the keeping enemies closer strategy—well, then the risk of a palace coup spikes. The enemy within can usurp a vulnerable tyrant.

By contrast, if enemies are oppressed and kept away from power, the risk of a civil war surges.⁷ If you keep your adversaries weak and distant, they might eventually coalesce in a remote area of the country, fomenting rebellion and launching a war to remove the dictator.

In other words, dictators can manage which kinds of risks they face, but they can’t eliminate the risks altogether. (As I’ve written previously here, Putin outsourced some of the security apparatus to mercenaries in the Wagner Group to mitigate some risks, but the mercenaries eventually developed their own power base and mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Putin’s grip on power. Being a dictator is, in that way, a bit like a game of Whac-A-Mole).

Now, imagine that you’re a savvy dictator who has managed—against the odds—to successfully navigate the risks of coups, civil wars, and foreign invasion. To do so, you’ve had to spend most of your time and resources keeping the elite selectorate happy. Unfortunately, that’s never the right strategy for broad-based economic growth. Keeping generals happy does nothing for sparking innovation or attracting investment. In fact, what dictators do to keep elites happy is typically the opposite of what will create shared prosperity for the citizenry. So, even if you’ve staved off the immediate elite threats for years or decades, the risk of popular uprisings always lurks beneath the surface.

All these threats are exacerbated because dictators must make decisions with imperfect, opaque information. Dictators govern through fear, so they can’t exactly poll their population to know what the people really think. (Who’s going to tell a North Korean pollster—if such a thing did exist—that they secretly dislike Kim Jong-Un?). Similarly, it’s crucial to ensure that the people in the inner circle are completely loyal, but dictators know that their henchmen will always appear loyal even when they’re not. Nobody tells dictators hard truths, lest they get pushed out of a window, or their family gets murdered. Comforting lies therefore become a central feature of dictatorships, which eventually leads to autocrats who miscalculate because they believe the lies that are told to them, out of fear.

Dirsus unpacks this dynamic—something I’ve called “the dictator trap”—by showcasing how despots are unable to trust the information they receive or the messengers who give it to them. Despots devise strategies to try to test the loyalty of their henchmen, but the fog of lies that envelops every authoritarian palace can never be cleared.

Worse, because dictators tend to be thin-skinned narcissists, criticizing the dictator is a surefire way to get purged from the regime. Over time, it’s only the bobbleheads who surround autocrats, such that the longer a dictator stays in power the more likely he is to receive bad information, leading to a catastrophic mistake that results in his own bloody downfall.

Or, put differently, from How Tyrants Fall:

“To stay in power, the dictator creates a climate of perpetual fear. That fear silences critics, who don’t dare to speak their minds. But because most keep silent, the dictator never knows what people – even his advisers – actually think. Is this person genuinely loyal or are they only pretending? Does he or she really support the government’s ideology, or is it all theatre designed to buy time until they can stab the tyrant in the back? The tyrant cannot possibly know. He may be the most powerful person in the country, but he can never trust his subordinates to tell him the truth.”

The upshot is that the longevity of dictators is not an indication of their stability, but rather of a carefully managed fragility. Dictatorships are nests of vipers. The vipers pose a constant threat. And it only takes one slip up in a consequential moment to be taken down by a fatal, venomous bite.

III: The Dictator’s Treadmill

One of the key questions that people ask when they look at dictatorships from the outside is this: why don’t these tyrants just take the money and run—before they get overthrown and killed or tossed into a dank jail cell or shunted off to exile in another authoritarian regime?

There are parallels here with drug kingpins. When you consider the stories of Pablo Escobar or El Chapo, it seems obvious how it’s always going to end: riddled with bullets or behind bars. Why don’t they quit while they’re ahead?

The most obvious reason is that they’re temperamentally unable to give up power and riches. They are addicted to both. And yes, this is part of the story.

But the more substantive answer lies in the patronage networks that sustain both kinds of nefarious leaders, be it the dictator of Turkmenistan or a cocaine kingpin. To gain power in criminal enterprises or tyrannical regimes, you need enablers who ride your coattails to their own riches and power. In the drug trade, these might be suppliers, traffickers, deal-makers, or hitmen. In authoritarian politics, these are oligarchs, generals, politicians, and local and regional big men. They trade their support for patronage: access to power, kickbacks, and the economic spoils of the state.

If the kingpin or the despot retires, these power-brokers are left in the lurch. And it’s not just the loss of wealth and power that motivates them; they, too, credibly fear consequences of a regime transition. After all, the networks of power around the tyrant are often full of people who did the real dirty work. As Dirsus writes:

“Just like the tyrant, many of these people will have broken their fair share of laws. Perhaps they were the ones to make the leader’s enemies disappear. Maybe they were the loyalists who received a newly privatised company at ten per cent of its real value.”

Even if an autocrat wanted to step down, there are no good exit options. Can you really trust your successor? Again, from How Tyrants Fall:

“There’s a central trade-off here that cannot be resolved. On the one hand, tyrants looking to step down have to find someone powerful and competent enough to protect them once they are no longer in power. On the other hand, somebody who is competent and powerful enough to protect them can also destroy them”

This is why Dirsus refers to these dynamics as the dictator’s treadmill. Once you get on, you must keep running. Every step forward is necessary to keep you in power. But you can never switch it off. There’s no escape. Try to stop running, and you’ll likely end up flying off the back of it instead, straight into an early grave.

IV: How to topple a tyrant—and should we?

When tyrants do fall—and they all do eventually—the most likely outcome is that another tyrant will take his place. Many of us rightly salivate over a time when Putin will fall. But the structural features of Russian politics favor another tyrant rising from Putin’s ashes. The notion that a liberal democracy will automatically sprout, fully-formed, from authoritarian soil is a fantasy.

So, should we try to topple tyrants?

The 21st century is already shaping up to be defined by the geopolitics of dictatorships vs. democracies. The world would unquestionably be a better place if democracy took root across the globe. But many of the most consequential authoritarian regimes—Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Kim’s North Korea, to name a few—are difficult to take on directly, not least because all three have nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, there are dozens of autocracies that are weak. How could they be toppled? And just as importantly, should we be involved?

This is one of the thorniest questions of statecraft. As Dirsus points out, much can go wrong in the efforts to dislodge a tyrant. But he helpfully differentiates between two broad kinds of strategies.

The first is direct action—to try to take out a dictator. History has shown the perils of this approach and Dirsus suggests it’s a wise idea only in the most extreme cases. Once you get to the level of Hitler, inaction is likely to be more damaging and deadly than pursuing risky actions to try to take out an autocrat.

However, for the “mid-level” authoritarian regimes—the crooks who embezzle, who hold sham “election-style events,” and who oppress their people but don’t slaughter them—direct efforts are more likely to backfire. (Dirsus cites a 2013 study showing that over the last century, 11 percent of regime change efforts involving the United States led to democratization—not a great success rate).

Instead, then, Dirsus typically favors the second approach, which he likens to “chipping away at his pedestal to weaken it over time, so that a strong gust of wind is enough to topple him.” The idea here is to help empower legitimate democratic opposition, sanction oligarchs or freeze their assets to pressure them into abandoning the regime, and use diplomatic levers to undercut the government.

Each of these strategies can be risky and some scholars, analysts, and diplomats have philosophical objections to foreign (read: Western) intervention against authoritarian regimes. That’s a defensible position to hold. However, it’s crucial to acknowledge an unfortunate, unavoidable fact: the deck is stacked in these regimes, and without foreign help, pro-democracy forces are likely to be crushed. This is why the geopolitics of facing down autocrats is so often fraught with peril, moral conundrums, and strategic trade-offs. Doing nothing could be catastrophic. So could doing something.

Nonetheless, How Tyrants Fall will help you better understand these monstrous regimes by giving you a window into how dictatorships work—and why the popular myths we tell ourselves about despots are so often simplified and wrong. Let’s hope that its lessons about the inner workings of autocracy and would-be tyrants will come in handy as odious despots fall in the coming years, but that its lessons for how to defeat autocracy will not soon hit far too close to home.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. How Tyrants Fall is out today in the UK and coming soon everywhere else. If you’d like to support my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for the low price of just $4/month.

Here’s the striking cover of How Tyrants Fall, with a blurb from yours truly:

1. How Tyrants Fall is currently available for pre-order in the United States. It’s worth the wait!

2. Despite my somewhat eclectic writing interests in The Garden of Forking Paths, my doctoral research demonstrated how rigged elections in authoritarian regimes substantially increases the risk of political violence. I did field work in several authoritarian regimes (Madagascar, Zambia, Tunisia, Thailand, Côte d’Ivoire, Belarus, etc) for long stretches, interviewing everyone from former heads of state to rebels, coup plotters, soldiers, and torturers.

3. Here is one example from Turkmenistan.

4. The lies they tell are often bizarre. For example, North Koreans are told that Kim Jong-Il, the father of the current dictator, invented hamburgers, which he called “double bread with meat.” Kim, however, would never need to go to the bathroom after eating this world-changing culinary invention because his body was so finely calibrated that he didn’t require the same bodily functions as mere mortals.

5. The decisive group is often smaller, the subsets of voters that cast ballots in pivotal swing states/districts. For more discussion of this idea, see this book by Bueno de Mesquita.

6. For more on the personality traits of who gets power and the nexus between dictatorial systems and psychopaths, see my previous book, Corruptible.

7. Dirsus rightly points to political science research showing that the risks of a civil war are affected by the terrain and the resources in a given country. For example, countries with mountainous terrain are more prone to civil wars because rebel movements have somewhere to hide while amassing enough organizational strength to challenge the regime. It’s hard to launch a civil war from a capital city or a desert.