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.

Charles Dunst, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2023).

Several recurring debates animate foreign policy. The most basic is how much foreign policy to have, or how to strike the right balance between addressing domestic issues and problems abroad—in extreme form a debate between isolationism and internationalism. Then there are debates over tools (diplomacy versus sanctions or military force) and means (unilateralism versus multilateralism). In some countries, there are also debates over how foreign policy should be made and carried out; in the United States, for example, this debate involves the role and powers of Congress versus those of the president and the executive branch.

For democracies, though, there’s an additional debate over goals. To what extent should foreign policy seek to shape other countries’ internal characteristics, namely by promoting the spread of democracy and human rights, rather than focusing on influencing other countries’ external behaviour in an effort to promote hard interests such as security and trade. Call this the debate between idealism and realism.

This is an eternal debate for US leaders and policymakers. Take the case of Saudi Arabia. Relations between the two countries had for three-quarters of a century been mostly cooperative, above all on oil-related matters: in exchange for the Saudis pumping copious amounts (thereby reducing price pressures), the US provided the advanced arms and intelligence the Saudis required for their security.

The two countries also collaborated against the Soviet Union during the Cold War, most notably in Afghanistan. Such common interests more often than not offset persistent differences over the Saudi government’s poor human rights record and the kingdom’s hostility towards Israel.

President Joe Biden’s administration came into office a year and a half ago determined to alter this pattern and treat Saudi Arabia as a ‘pariah’. The US had concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (widely known as MBS), the country’s de facto ruler and heir apparent to the throne, ordered the 2018 murder in Istanbul of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist and Saudi dissident who was a US permanent resident.

The Biden administration was also deeply opposed to Saudi participation in Yemen’s civil war, a conflict responsible for enormous human suffering. With oil prices low and supplies plentiful (in no small part because of much-expanded US output), and Biden determined to reduce the US footprint in the Middle East and focus on Asia, values appeared to take precedence over economic and security interests for the first time since US–Saudi relations developed in the 1940s.

Now, however, the Biden administration is reportedly considering a change of course, with Biden planning to visit the kingdom and meet with MBS this summer. It’s not difficult to figure out why. Energy prices have skyrocketed, owing to high demand associated with the post-pandemic economic recovery and the sanctions now in place against Russia, Iran and Venezuela, all of which limit supply.

Higher energy prices are fuelling inflation, which has emerged as the greatest economic and political challenge facing the Biden administration. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia, the rare oil producer with the ability to increase output relatively quickly, is a much-needed partner again.

Other factors are at work as well. Several Arab countries in recent years, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, have made peace with Israel. Bringing Saudi Arabia, host to the holiest sites in the Muslim world, into the peace camp would have great symbolic and political value. Also paving the way to a presidential visit is Saudi Arabia’s embrace of a ceasefire in Yemen.

What could ultimately prove to be the most important reason, though, is Iran. The US and Saudi Arabia find themselves sharing mounting concern over Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, as well as its support for violent groups in Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. It’s a classic case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Close cooperation between the kingdom and the US will be essential if, as seems increasingly likely, diplomatic efforts to restore the 2015 nuclear pact with Iran fail—or fail to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear breakout with little or no notice.

Despite these new considerations, the Biden administration is treading carefully, as it’s sure to be attacked for changing its stance. The good news is that there’s no reason for the US to abandon its commitment to human rights. The Saudis need US support to stand up to Iran, and as a result can be pushed to improve their treatment of government critics, women and religious minorities. The result won’t be perfect, but the emergence of a more open society is achievable.

There is a larger lesson here. A successful foreign policy for a global power such as the US cannot choose values over interests. A pure, values-centred approach to Saudi Arabia—or towards China, Russia, Iran or North Korea, for that matter—is unsustainable. The principal measure of a foreign policy is that it prioritises the country’s security over its preferences. Realism must prevail over idealism. History suggests that the ability of a country, even one as powerful as the US, to bring about political reform in other countries is limited.

But that doesn’t mean the US should ignore democracy and human rights. Foreign policy must reflect the country’s values if it is to enjoy public support and lead over time towards a more democratic world, which is more likely to be peaceful and prosperous and open to cooperation. It is always a matter of degree and of balance. What the Biden administration is contemplating in Saudi Arabia appears to be righting the balance.

Weapons and expertise provided by Western countries have enabled some of the world’s richest nations to bring high-level mechanised warfare to Yemen, one of the poorest places on the planet.

In the process, air strikes and artillery bombardments have slaughtered more than 12,000 civilians and exacerbated famine and outbreaks of disease that have killed hundreds of thousands more. It’s time for governments that are approving the flow of arms and ammunition to the Saudi Arabian–led coalition fighting in Yemen to accept their share of responsibility for the carnage and to turn off the tap.

The coalition currently comprises Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt and Jordan. Qatar was involved until 2017 and Morocco until 2019. The UAE has partially withdrawn from Yemen, though it’s still backing separatist movements there.

Beginning in 2015 with a failed political transition after an Arab Spring uprising, the conflict has left Yemen a fractured country with little prospect of stable government. In September 2014, the Houthi Shia Muslim group, loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, took advantage of political disarray to take control of the capital and install its own government. President Adbradduh Mansour Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi-led coalition, backed by the US, France and Britain, entered the conflict in March 2015 in response to fears that Iran, the Houthis’ biggest supporter and regional rival of Saudi Arabia, would gain a foothold in Yemen. Since then, Yemen has been wracked by civil war, food insecurity, and rising poverty levels.

The United Nations has warned that the death toll could reach 233,000 by the end of 2019 as a direct result of conflict and second-order consequences. Almost 80% of Yemen’s 28.7 million people need humanitarian assistance and the country is suffering through the worst cholera outbreak in modern history. Yet, the US, France, Britain and Australia, among other nations, continue to sell arms to the Saudi-led coalition.

The governments of Australia (see pages 39–47), France and the US emphasise that the processes involved in assessing foreign military sales are compliant with international obligations. However, a leaked document from the French Directorate of Military Intelligence shows that Western munitions have been regularly used in strikes targeting civilians. The coalition has launched more than 19,000 air raids over Yemen since 2015, one-third of which are estimated to have struck civilian, non-military or unknown targets.

Between 2016 and 2018, the US signed arms deals worth over US$27 billion with Saudi Arabia, comprising small arms, missile systems, combat vehicles and training. The UAE imports nearly two-thirds of its military weapons from the US.

In February 2019, Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, documented 25 unlawful coalition air strikes that killed nearly 1,000 civilians using American-made weapons delivered by US-built aircraft. Saudi Arabia has bought more than 420 M1 Abrams tanks, 400 M2 Bradley fighting vehicles and an estimated 600 M109 Howitzers from the US, many of which are being used in the Yemen conflict. A CNN investigation found that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been transferring US-made weapons to local militias, some with links to al-Qaeda .

France, too, capitalised on the conflict—it was the UAE’s second-largest and Saudi Arabia’s third-largest arms supplier between 2014 and 2018. French arms sales to Saudi Arabia have included high-end laser-guided missile systems and tanks. These weapons are supplied to the roughly 6,500 UAE soldiers deployed in Yemen and neighbouring countries.

Australia has granted 57 export permits for military-related equipment to be sent to Saudi Arabia and the UAE since 2016. This includes the sale of 500 remote weapons systems made by Australian manufacturer EOS to Saudi Arabia. While the company’s CEO has stated categorically that ‘no EOS product has ever been deployed to or used in Yemen’, the question needs to be asked: how can Australia continue selling weapons to nations accused of horrendous human rights abuses?

France, Australia, the UK and 100 other nations—although notably not the US—are signatories of the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty, which obliges members to ‘monitor arms exports and ensure that weapons don’t … end up being used for human-rights abuses’. The leaked French intelligence report and research by investigative journalists and NGOs make it clear that arms and munitions supplied by Western nations are being used in Yemen and have been deployed in operations targeting civilians, transferred to third parties, and employed in other instances of broader human rights abuses.

Some nations have begun ending arms sales to the Saudi coalition. A non-binding resolution was passed in the European Parliament in late 2018 calling for member nations to halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia. It has been adopted or partially adopted by several states. In June, Britain’s court of appeal found the continued sale of military equipment to Saudi Arabia to be unlawful because it would be used in violation of international humanitarian law. Also in June, the US Congress passed a resolution to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia but it didn’t muster the necessary votes in the Senate to override President Donald Trump’s veto.

A UN-led arms embargo could help end the coalition’s involvement in Yemen. Analyst Nelson Alusala has written that arms embargos ‘remain one of the most effective measures for maintaining or restoring peace and security’. It’s unlikely that the US, France and the UK would agree in the Security Council to such an embargo; however, mounting pressure from EU nations and the public might force their hands.

Susan Hutchinson recently argued that there are significant flaws in Australia’s multiagency system for defence exports and called for a parliamentary inquiry to assess our obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty. Other measures can and should be taken.

The government, the opposition and the parliament have been inexcusably quiet in the face of mounting evidence of war crimes in Yemen. We need to see greater transparency from government and the defence organisation to ensure that Australian weapons will not be used in Yemen.

While the UN-established Arms Trade Treaty requires individual states to monitor and record their foreign arms sales, this obligation is clearly overlooked by many arms suppliers to the Saudi-led coalition. Australia, as a key player in treaty’s establishment, could champion a multinational end-use monitoring body to hold nations accountable for the impact foreign arms sales are having when weapons are used illegally.

As nations that profess to defend the rules-based global order and human rights, Australia, France, Britain and the US should cease arms exports to the Saudi-led coalition and starve the warring countries of the arms and munitions that are being used to prolong the devastating conflict in Yemen.

The Islamic State’s (IS) caliphate project had mostly collapsed by the end of 2017. Even so, terrorism and counterterrorism (CT) in the Middle East were still driven by the fight against IS, a resurgent al-Qaeda and the conflict in Syria. Syria has not only driven jihadist conflict and dynamics, but has become a battleground in which all sorts of regional and international ambitions and conflicts are being played out.

The spectre of jihad is far from over. Islamic terrorism in the Middle East has an ourboros quality to it—a beast continually feeding upon itself. The threat remains because there are many structural factors driving jihadism in the Middle East that have no easy solutions—poor governance and the lack of legitimacy for many states and governments in the region, ultra conservative and militant ideologies that resonate, youth unemployment, civil conflict, and virulent and growing sectarianism, to name only a few. In 2017 a number of developments both pushed back against and fed into those dynamics.

For example, Saudi Arabia, the region’s most proactive player in 2017, had begun to push back against its Wahhabi legacy, a religious strain that influenced modern jihadist ideology. Saudi’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has taken a clearer and stronger stand against radical ideologies. In effect, MBS challenged the alliance between the Wahhabi clerical establishment and the house of Saud, an alliance that has defined the kingdom since its founding.

It was a significant political, cultural and CT development that the kingdom has at long last recognised the ideological elements that drive violent radicalism in the region. However, Saudi Arabia’s continuing military operations in Yemen, its role in fomenting the Qatar crisis and the disintegration of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and its stoking of sectarianism through regional proxy conflicts with Iran continue to feed the jihadist threat.

Lebanon, Syria’s closest neighbour, remained strongly affected by both the civil conflict in Syria and the overlaying regional dynamics. In 2017 it was caught up in the interventionist manoeuvres of Saudi Arabia, which most obviously manifested themselves in the Lebanese prime minister’s bizarre but short-lived detention and resignation on Saudi orders in a desperate attempt to curb Hezbollah–Iranian influence in Lebanon.

Lebanon made significant CT contributions in the fight against many jihadist groups operating in the region. Many Lebanese security institutions had notable successes in 2017 despite the fact that Lebanon lacks a fully functioning government and must contend with Hezbollah’s authority and influence.

But the Lebanese government still doesn’t have a monopoly on the use of force and Hezbollah remains a strong parallel government and paramilitary that controls parts of the country. So while the Lebanese government and security services had successes in 2017, Hezbollah and its Iranian backers came out of 2017 in a stronger strategic position, with more battle experience and with access to better weaponry.

Terrorism financing was another CT focus in 2017, but one that was also politically manipulated to drive a wedge in the GCC and consolidate Saudi Arabia’s regional dominance. In June 2017, Bahrain, the UAE, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and placed an embargo on the country, precipitating the ‘Qatar crisis’. Ostensibly the countries imposed the embargo due to Qatar’s terrorism financing and support of the Muslim Brotherhood. In reality it was due to long-simmering tensions over Qatar’s foreign policy double dealing, its embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood and its engagement with Iran. However, by isolating Qatar the others have promoted growing sectarianism and put the fate of the GCC in jeopardy. Both of those broader trends feed into the terrorist threat.

The rise and fall of IS has largely defined terrorism and insurgency in the Middle East for the past half-decade and this past year was no different. It’s hard to believe that it has been that long since IS formally declared itself in Iraq in April 2013. Though it no longer officially governed much territory, IS remained a powerful insurgent/terrorist force in 2017, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Yemen remained a strong base of operations for AQAP, which was, according to a 2017 Crisis Group report, ‘thriving in an environment of state collapse, growing sectarianism, shifting alliances, security vacuums and a burgeoning war economy’. The conflict in Yemen and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa have led to this resurgence.

Al-Qaeda (AQ) also remains a persistent presence in the region, and is resurgent. In 2017 AQ could boast some 40,000 fighters around the world. Current estimates are that roughly 3,000 IS fighters remain in Syria and Iraq, about three times as many were operating in 2009 when al-Qaeda in Iraq re-emerged to form what became IS.

According to the US spokesman for the military coalition fighting IS, IS fighters have already begun to claw back some territory in Syria and are conducting attacks at a rapid clip in Iraq and elsewhere. IS, AQ and other jihadist groups aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Counterterrorism, wrapped up as it is in the region’s broader structural problems, will remain a challenge for years—if not decades—to come.