On time for the Year of Elections, a deftly crafted book, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman, by Charles Dunst, tackles how liberal democracies can develop resilience in the face of autocratic attractiveness.
Dunst is the foreign policy adviser to US Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado. I recently spoke with Dunst in Washington, DC, about his prescriptions based on the idea that success begins at home. Following is an edited version of our conversation:
Brown: Tell me more about the appeal of authoritarianism. What makes liberal democracy such a hard sell today?
Dunst: I’ve picked up a theme at book events over the last 18 months. I first noticed it at a February 2023 London discussion with UK parliament staffers and think tankers—all people working in a democratic government or supporting democracy from the outside. I opened by asking how many of them had been to Shenzhen, Abu Dhabi, Dubai or Singapore—world-class cities in autocracies. Half of them raised their hands. Then I asked: ‘How many of you felt that some things worked better in those cities? Was Singapore’s metro system better than London’s? What about the Dubai airport? Did it work better than Heathrow? Did you feel that the UAE was better governed than the United Kingdom?’ Those same 50 people raised their hands.
Something similar has played out during other book engagements. Indian journalists have asked me why democracy is better if the Gulf States and Singapore deliver for their people despite not being democracies. Perhaps most striking was a radio conversation I had with John Maytham on one of South Africa’s leading programs. He opened by asking his listeners how many of them would forego some freedoms for a ‘country that works’. Around 90 of the 100 or so people who called answered affirmatively. I was floored, but the host said he understood why callers, frustrated with ineffective democracy, would rather live in what they considered a high-functioning autocracy. For them, he explained, Rwanda is the model, not Singapore or the UAE. This sentiment—an international yearning for a mythical autocracy that delivers better than democracies do—is the crux of the problem and why I wrote Defeating the Dictators.
Brown: What makes China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and other ‘successful’ autocracies so different from past competitors like the Soviet Union?
Dunst: Modern autocracies are flawed. But many are durable, and some have thrived—think China (at least until recently), Singapore and the Gulf states. These ‘successful’ autocracies have similarities. They combine relatively free markets and reasonably secure property rights; some but not all count on natural resources for their wealth. The Asian ones are blessed with historically high-quality (if undemocratic) political institutions and social structures that leaders rediscovered after colonialism.
They are nothing like the Soviet Union. The West won the Cold War, in part, because Soviet illiberalism never succeeded. The system never had legitimacy at home nor abroad, because it never worked economically. The same isn’t true of autocracies today. China is, by some counts, the world’s largest economy when adjusted for purchasing power. Singapore and Vietnam have also successfully married authoritarianism with market economics. Autocracies account for about 35 percent of global income, compared with only 12 percent in 1992. This success means that today’s autocracies are not so brittle. There is no guarantee that China or Saudi Arabia will collapse under the weight of their own flaws as the Soviet Union did.
The Cold War is not a good model for today’s competition. China’s economy is too intertwined with ours to bifurcate the world. Still, the Cold War can serve as a model for how a competitor or a set of competitors can motivate us to get our own homes in order. Fixing problems at home helped us to defeat the dictators then; it is key to defeating them again today.
Brown: Can you say more about shoring up governance at home. How did we get away from good governance principles and practices?
Dunst: After the Cold War, there was a sense that liberalism won and would continue to win—and that we didn’t need to spend so much energy on upkeep. As a result, our social safety nets declined and money seeped into our politics. And while I am a supporter of deepening and expanding America’s trade relationships with the world, the way we did so in the 1990s and early 2000s didn’t account for—or mitigate—the effects on those workers displaced by such trade at home. That displacement has since fuel widespread anger with policymakers in DC and opposition to free trade itself, which is now undercutting America’s ability to deepen trading relationships with critical partners in the Indo-Pacific, Latin America and beyond.
I wrote this book for a global audience—my publisher is British—and tried, for the most part, to avoid offering US-centric solutions. I’ve lived in Cambodia, Hungary and the United Kingdom and leaned on those experiences as well as travel to other regions to offer prescriptions that may benefit many places. Meritocracy in government staffing, for instance, is critical for advanced economies like Australia and developing ones like Malaysia. The same is true, too, of accountability, trust, long-term thinking, reforming the social safety net, investing in human capital and building 21st century infrastructure like undersea cables. Immigration, my last chapter, is probably the only one that applies mostly to advanced economies, where native birth rates are low and the topic is politically charged.
Brown: What is the connection between resiliency in places such as the United States and Australia and democracy promotion abroad?
Dunst: Put simply, loss in confidence at home produces disruptive politics that leads to worse governance and a further loss in confidence. This vicious cycle of ineffective governance and cynical politics then weakens democracy’s attractiveness abroad, where high-functioning autocracies are increasingly seen as models. Southeast Asian policymakers already yearn for China’s previous double-digit growth rates and Singapore’s effective governance, not the US’s perceived political chaos. Across the Middle East, people prefer Saudi- or UAE-style governance over the United Kingdom’s five prime ministers in five years. Many South Africans, as I found, would rather live in autocratic Rwanda than their own democracy. Only better performance at home will inspire people to become more like us, rather than like our autocratic competitors.
Brown: Stephen Krasner makes a case for good-enough governance and for meeting authoritarians ‘where they are’ to promote common interests. What do you make of that argument?
Dunst: I don’t neatly divide the world between democracies and autocracies, and I don’t think most policymakers do, either. Australia and the US should push partners to improve human rights and governance when possible, but democracies need friends beyond their own small clique. Shoring up democracy at home and selling our model abroad does not mean cutting off or downgrading ties with partners like Singapore and Vietnam. We should cultivate these relationships to advance our national interests and produce domestic success through mutually beneficial trade or cooperating on shared security challenges. In the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere, there is, as you say, a need to meet governments ‘where they are’ without compromising our values and interests.
Of course, the egregious abuses and maliciousness of some autocratic governments—like those in Iran, Myanmar (since the 2021 coup), North Korea, Russia and Venezuela—prevent mutually beneficial cooperation. That’s fine; we cannot and should not try to be friends with everyone.
China is a different challenge. To paraphrase US and German officials, Russia is the current storm, whereas China is the long-term challenge of climate change. China is the only country with the intent and potential ability to reshape the US-led rules-based order in accordance with Beijing’s preferences—to, in short, create a China-centric order in which might means right and China, by then holding the most power (in Beijing’s vision), is at the center. This difference is why Canberra, Tokyo, and Washington approach Beijing in a fundamentally different way than Moscow or Tehran, including by building a coalition that includes non-democracies. Maintaining the rules-based order (and then perhaps reforming it to account for the Global South’s rise) requires autocratic partners who, while not liberal at home, broadly benefit from and thus support a liberal international system.
