Curious Worldview

Marcel Dirsus | Slipping Into Authoritarianism & How Tyrant's Fall

• Marcel Dirsus • Episode 196

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The following is with german political scientist, former beer brewer in the Congo, and author of How Tyrants Fall - Marcel Dirsus

Marcel interviewed coup leaders, dissidents and soldiers to write about the workings and malfunctions of tyrants. Because while the individual personas, eccentricities and reputations might make them all distinct from one another, there are more threads that draw disparate dictator's together than don’t.

I think this excerpt from the book sums up the essence of Marcel’s work and as well, the themes in todays podcast.

“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 the interview is about the workings of various tyrants around the world, both living and dead. 

I ask Marcel in the about applying a prisoners of geography lens to this topic, china and the case for dictators not being all bad all the time, marcel’s rogues gallery of tyrants and as well, Marcel offers a raw reflection of the potential future of authoritarianism in the USA particularly because of the astounding moves made so far under trump. This was recorded the day after the US inauguration.

00:00 - Marcel Dirsus
01:40 - Economist's Book Of The Year
03:55 - Serendipity & The Congo
11:35 - Prisoners Of Geography Lens
17:17 - Singapore A Dictatorship?
20:10 - China
27:50 - Saudi & MBS
30:43 - Marcel's Unconventional Idea's
34:15 - Geographical Concentration Of These Regimes
39:10 - Tipping Point (When Regimes Collapse)
49:10 - Rogues Gallery Of Tyrants
53:25 - The Leader Who's Coming Closest To Power
56:46 - Does Global Order Sustain Or Undermine These Regimes?
1:00:25 - Trump's Chances At Dictatorship
1:07:40 - Bullish & Bearish Country


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SPEAKER_00

The following is with German political scientist, former beer brewer in the Congo and author of How Tyrants Fall, which was one of the economist books of the year, last year, 2024, Marcel Diresus. To research the book, Marcel interviewed coup leaders, dissidents, and soldiers to write about the workings and malfunctions of tyrants. Because while the individual personas, eccentricities, and reputations might make them all distinct from one another, there are more threads that draw disparate dictators together than those that don't. I think this excerpt from the book sums up the essence of Marcel's work and as well the themes in today's podcast. The most powerful tyrants on earth are condemned to live their life in fear. They can make their enemies disappear with the 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 the interview is about the workings of various tyrants around the world, both living and dead. I asked Marcel about applying a prisoner's geography lens to the topic, China and the case for dictators not being all bad all the time, Marcel's Rogues Gallery of Tyrants, and as well, Marcel offers a raw reflection on the potential future of authoritarianism in the USA, particularly because of the astounding moves made so far under Trump. This was recorded the day after the US inauguration. It was a huge pleasure to speak with Marcel. His book is absolutely wonderful, and with no further ado, here he is. Where were you when you learned that The Economist had listed it as a book of the year?

SPEAKER_01

I was at home actually, and uh I was I was really surprised uh because obviously it's my first book, and you're obviously you you hope that it's gonna go well, um, but I couldn't have imagined that this would happen, so you know, pleasantly surprised. You can't expect this kind of thing, right? Because then you're inevitably gonna get disappointed. Um so I think as far as first books go, this has probably been the best case, not just in terms of reviews, but also, you know, I people have have told me that they look at the news differently because they read the book. And to me, honestly, that's probably the biggest compliment that you can get, right? Because what else are you writing a book for? Obviously, you you think you have something important to say, you want people to take it on board. And if they then look at politics even a little bit differently, then it's I think job accomplished.

SPEAKER_00

Have you noticed anything particularly move the needle most when it comes to book sales and notoriety?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think you know one of the sort of difficulties that I had when writing the book was finding the right balance between analysis and stats and studies and telling stories. And I think while I was drafting the book, I was at times on both wrong ends of that spectrum, so to say. So at some point in the draft, I think it was just too many numbers, and then I went overboard with the stories, and then eventually my editor sort of forced me, you know, to get it into shape. And and that's a difficult thing to do when you're trying to write for a more general audience as opposed to just academics.

SPEAKER_00

Was the editor pulling you down these laneways of just tell the most egregious, violent, shocking stories of these tyrants, and you were trying to more, you know, weave a little bit of a broader arc, or were they quite fair at not just hitting on that exceptional list?

SPEAKER_01

No, I think they were really fair. Uh, you know, they wanted the book to be readable, obviously, but they also wanted it to be credible, you know, and and to be serious, and and you know, they wanted people to also be able to take it seriously. So I think they're really fair in that sense, but what they did drill into me was to uh you know t tell stories in a certain way where you can see the details and perhaps you know what the weather was like or you know what hat somebody was wearing. And that's not something that I think comes naturally to a lot of people, you know, coming coming out of PhDs.

SPEAKER_00

So I usually leave this question actually right into the end. It's probably my favorite question to ask, but because you know you're drawn into the Congo at some stage, and I read recently in your newsletter that the way this book came about is that you got an email from an editor asking whether you'd be interested in writing a book. And so I just wanted to ask, like, what those the role that serendipity has played in your life? Massive, massive.

SPEAKER_01

I think you know, whether it's stuff that happens to you, I think even you know, when it comes to the kind of decisions that you make, you know, I mean, uh, I know you had a previous episode, you know, talking about the importance of flukes, and and I think there's there's totally something to that, right? I mean, sometimes I I don't know why I make decisions, you know, they they just kind of happen and uh and and things happen to you, right? Although I would also say, you know, there are ways that you can maximize your chances, right? So I mean, it's lucky in a sense that an editor reached out to me to ask me whether I might be interested in this book. But I've been working on this topic for more than a decade. So obviously, you know, I didn't start from zero and it was a complete chance that that I got that email as opposed to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00

How consciously were you inviting serendipity into your life by going to the Congo?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, the the story of the Congo is sort of as follows, right? So while I was doing my undergrad, I told myself that I was not gonna do a master's. And then I was doing the master's, and I was like, okay, look, I'm not gonna do a PhD. You know, this is the this is the other this. And I thought that, you know, I had some tuition fee debt, so I thought, you know, maybe I'll go into banking or maybe I'll go into like management consulting to pay it off. Well then I thought, you know what, okay, before I do that, let me see a little bit of the world. Yeah because I also I know myself, right? So I think if I hadn't gone then, when would I have gone to the Congo? You know, it's it's not a country that you typically go on on holiday to. Uh so I thought, okay, look, I'll see something different now before I settle into my banking or management consulting or whatever it is. So I decided to take a chance and just go.

SPEAKER_00

And in the back of the mind as well, you knew that I'm sort of pursuing at least a deep interest in political science, and I maybe want to carve out a little bit of a niche for myself writing about authoritarian regimes in a way, and that by going to the Congo, it would add this really definitive layer that separates you from your colleagues. So there is, in a sense, a way of driving serendipity, or is it just pure adventure, saying, here's a place on the map, a country with incredibly rich history, and I'm gonna go and brew beer there?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, honestly, I would like to say that it was part of some cunning plan and that you know I knew that things were gonna shake out this way, but it really didn't. I mean, I basically asked friends uh while I was you know nearing the end of my master's, I was like, look, I want to do something weird, like I want to see something different, right? Um, and I asked, okay, like who do we know? You know, what do we know? You know, how do we can we make this happen? And then there were some options. Initially, I thought I was gonna go to Ethiopia, actually, uh, also for the beer brewing. The great German tradition. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, what else would you do after uni, right? Um, and then I was asked whether I'd be willing to go to the Congo, and I was like, Yeah, okay, I'll go. You know, I'll I'll see what it's like. And it was super interesting.

SPEAKER_00

Oh shit, I can only imagine. I I loved it as a detail from the book because as an undergraduate myself, I was thinking, I'm gonna go to Botswana, I was working at the very high-end restaurants at the time in Sydney, and I thought, I'm gonna go to Botswana because I kind of like the idea of mining, and I'd love to work for a mining company, but you know, I don't have the academic chops nor the network to really get into it. So I'm gonna go to Botswana, I'm gonna work in one of their best hotels and just serendipitously meet the network of all the people coming into town. And I never did it. It's a huge regret. I mean, who knows how it could have gone either way. You know, you could have just gone for three months, decided, helly hell, nothing happened for me, and you go back. It's a necessary trade-off nonetheless. But um anyway, I had a sort of uh a deep, a deep admiration for that decision and especially because of the Congo. But as you uh go on, it does inform the book eventually.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's right. But I I think in general, though, it's a good good idea for people that you know spend a lot of time at university that study these types of you know phenomena that are not common to, let's say, Germany or the UK or Australia to spend some time either going to these places or talking to people from these places because otherwise I think social scientists run the risks of sort of separating themselves from reality.

SPEAKER_00

And so your dorms in Congo was also in the brewery. Just take us there for a little bit. How long were you there? What were you actually doing day to day? What part of the country were you in? Who were the people that you met?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so I spent uh I think just six months uh, you know, in the Congo. I was in Lubumbashi, which is in uh I mean the Congo's giant, right? It's in the southeast of the country, right on the border, so very, very far away from the capital. And essentially what I was supposed to do uh was to look at the beer, uh look at the beer, yeah, look at the beer, that's true. But look at the the the flow of beer, right, which is the product. So, you know, you have an idea how much beer you brew, obviously, but once it goes out of the gate, you might not know, okay, what is actually happening to this. I mean, is this being exported? Uh, is this being sold in bars? Is this being sold in kiosks? And and all the rest of it. And obviously, if you want to come up with any kind of sales strategy, you need to know what's going on. Um, so that was part of my job. And the way that you did that in the Congo was to basically have a team of people that would go around with a smartphone, go to every kiosk, go to every bar, go to every little shop, and say, Hey, do you sell beer? Okay. What type of beer? Okay, what price? Right? This kind of thing. So very basic, and obviously everything is made really different by the lack of just infrastructure and the dysfunctionality that you have in a place like that, at least at the time. Uh so you know, it it it's difficult. I mean, it's difficult because you, you know, the internet access might not be great, you know, there might not be proper signs on the roads, there might be some places that you can't really go to because it's too dangerous. So there's a there's a lot of challenges that come up in this in this type of environment. And and that was sort of my day-to-day. Um, and the this the sort of I I guess the original thing that spawned the book in a way uh was when a coup attempt happened in Kinshasa, and it had an impact also in Lubombashi, which is sort of the tail end that I that I kind of experienced. So you have essentially uh in the Congo, you had a leader that had been in power also for a while, uh, not a great guy, and he was challenged by a self-declared prophet, essentially, uh, who carried out a coup attempt. And over in Lubba, and this was in Kinshasa, but over in Lubombashi, you then had fighting in the streets, and you know, you had shots being fired, you know, at one point I heard an explosion, and it was really worrying because you know you're thousands of kilometers away from the German embassy, uh, airports are closed, so you can't really fly out, and you don't just hear shooting from one direction, but you hear it from three. And in that situation, having never experienced it, I got very, very worried. And then I would talk to people that had spent a lot of time there or that were Congolese, and they were sort of like, you know, it is what it is. Right. And to me, I mean, it it blew my mind because if something like this happened in Germany, it would be the biggest news ever. Everybody would be extremely concerned, and we would talk about nothing else, and nobody would say, Well, you know, it is what it is, there's not really much that we can do. So, really, I think that experience led me to ask myself how that's possible. I mean, why are there some countries in the world where you have this type of leadership, where you have these types of challenges, and why do these leaders stay in power as long as they do, and when do they fall? And that led me to working on this topic, and it eventually led to how tyrants fall.

SPEAKER_00

I was just reading Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography, and so it's that sort of worldview is top of mind. And um, having read that and then listened to your book over the last few days, I was wondering like, are there any cases where a nation's geography actually gives authoritarian regimes a permanent advantage? And and how much do you think geograph geography constrains the ability of nations to democratize or for authoritarian regimes to thrive?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's a good question. I think geography makes a difference in a lot of specific scenarios that you know tyrants might be struggling with. Um, and sometimes, you know, geography can be to their advantage, and sometimes it can be a disadvantage. So if you look at, let's say, rebellions, for example, um, you know, a lot of rebellions, or a lot of successful rebellions, I should say, happen in countries that have a very particular geography. So in the book, what I go through is an imaginary rebellion in the Netherlands. And obviously, politics aside, that is extremely difficult to imagine, because if you are a rebel, you need a place to hide. You need to be somehow outside of the control of the central government. And in the Netherlands, that is extremely difficult because it's quite small, there's not a lot of mountains, uh, there's not a lot of big forests that you can hide in. So a rebellion is very difficult in the Netherlands. And then when you look at a country like the Central African Republic, the geography and sort of the makeup of you know where the settlements are and so forth makes it much, much easier to hide from the government, and as a result, it's much easier. Uh, you know, it's much easier to be a thorn in the side of the of the capital of the of the central government. And that's not only because the Central African Republic is so remote, but also because it borders on regions of countries that are also extremely remote. So, unlike in the Netherlands, in the Central African Republic, it's almost impossible to control the entire territory. It's just too remote.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that that exact same phenomenon happened uh in the Congo, right? After the Rwanda genocide, millions of people just fled into the Congo and essentially lived in the jungle for so long because it was a safe haven, in other words. Whereas if you can ride a bike across the Netherlands, you can't really jump in a canal for more than a few hours.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, there are regions in the Congo that are incredibly difficult to access, right? So you first of all, like I said, the country is gigantic. I mean, I think as Europeans, we don't, well, or as you know, maybe also as Australians, well, Australia is big, I guess. So maybe it doesn't count for Australians, but as Europeans, I think we we struggle to imagine how big some of these countries like the Congo are. So you have a massive country, and in big parts of the country, there's not really much infrastructure, and it's incredibly difficult to access for that reason. And again, this makes it very, very difficult for the country to establish, for the government to establish something like a monopoly over the use of force. And I think this is something that many of us just take for granted. I mean, it's just it's just the way it is, but in many countries in the world it's not like that, and that obviously invites challenges.

SPEAKER_00

Would you attribute the same uh explanation to Afghanistan? How despite literally trillions of dollars being spent by the most sophisticated military in the world, the Taliban endured?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think, you know, first of all, we know that the track record of foreign and post-regime change is abysmal. So, you know, it is not just Afghanistan, it's not just Iraq. Uh when political scientists looked at the stats for American uh regime change operations, for example, they found that barely more than one in ten was successful. So Afghanistan, in a sense, is not an outlier because it was unsuccessful, that's normal. Uh, but I do think there are some things about Afghanistan that make it particularly tricky, and one of them is, of course, geography. You know, this is not an area in which a large Western type military has an advantage in fighting uh in the same way that it would have in the Netherlands, for example, because you have all these mountains, and you know, these mountains not only are they beautiful, but you can also use them to hide, and you can take your Koloshnikov and you can take your rocket launcher. And then, of course, I think there there are cultural factors. You know, I think we don't really understand the local culture, we don't really understand what's going on, and and that makes it extremely difficult. And then the other thing that I would say when it comes to insurgencies in general, to an extent, I believe that you know, in our democracies we have we have lied to ourselves because we have spent the last couple of decades telling ourselves that to win these types of conflicts you need to win hearts and minds. And we like to tell ourselves that there can be no military solutions to many of these problems. And that's just wrong. There are military solutions, and you do not need to win hearts and minds in order to win conflicts. If you can use brutal violence for an extended period of time, you can win conflicts even if the vast majority of the population absolutely hates you. Well, and that sounds a lot like Russia Ukraine. That's depressing. Well, yeah, but it but it is, right? I mean it is. So I mean it is it is true in a sense for us, right? Because we cannot go into these conflicts and you just use you know because of our legal and ethical and moral constraints, we cannot fight wars this way. But the Russians can, right? Uh Assad can. So I think there is a bit of a disconnect between what we tell ourselves about how the world works and how it actually works, and I believe partly that's because the truth, as I see it, is incredibly depressing. Right. Because the thought that you can if effectively subjugate people by barrel bombing hospitals or by you know attacking power stations is just depressing, and we don't want to hear it, so we tell ourselves that it's not possible, but it is.

SPEAKER_00

So the authoritarian leaders in your book they all abuse their absolute power. And I just wanted to ask: are there examples of authoritarian leaders creative inclusive institutions and long-lasting economic success?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think so, in general, I I am firmly convinced that the type of leaders that I look at in the book do not create positive outcomes for the vast majority of the population. And that's there's a structured reason for this. Because as countries become less democratic, leaders rely on fewer people in order to maintain power. So if you're a you know, let's say president of the United States, or you're a prime minister of Australia, or you're a German chancellor, you need to convince a large share of the population to support you in order to take power and to maintain it. The less democratic a country becomes, the fewer and fewer people you need to keep on your side. And at the other extreme of that is something like Kim Jong-un's North Korea, where you might only need 200 families in order to maintain power. And because of the setup of these incentives, it doesn't really make sense to create positive outcomes for most people because most people do not matter in order to hold power. So it is rational, even though it might not be moral, but it is rational to prioritize the concerns of the people that keep you in power. That said, there are outliers. So if you look at Singapore, for example, Singapore is not quite the type of country that I'd be looking at in the book, but it is not not a functioning democracy in any sense. You know, it is authoritarian, and yet for most people, Singapore works. It's rich, the institutions function, you can get things done. But you know, the question in my mind is always okay, but what's the counterfactual? I mean, is there no possibility for Singapore to be this rich and to be fully democratic? Because I think there is. But yes, there are some countries in which positive outcomes have been created outside of democracy.

SPEAKER_00

What are the authoritarian aspects of Singapore?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, effectively, you uh you know, it is very difficult to challenge the government. Um, you know, there are there are things you just cannot say. Um, you know, there are things that you go to prison for that you definitely wouldn't in in fully functioning democracies. And obviously, you know, the the same people have been in power effectively for many, many, many, many decades. Uh, and that's not just because they're doing a great job in in the eyes of the people, but because uh it's very, very difficult uh to get in an alternative, and that's always a bad sign.

SPEAKER_00

So by the definitions of authoritarianism, single-party rule, concentration of power, lack of political opposition, suppression of dissent, uh media control, uh narrow judicial systems, surveillance state, human rights abuses, China is certainly an authoritarian regime. However, in the last, I think it's 20, 25 years, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Uh, they're the second biggest economy in the world. There are many instances where you can attribute it to Xia Jinping, but also there is long-term economic success under the one-party rule of Xi Jinping. So, how do you balance the pros and cons of him? How does he fit into your worldview?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so China is the type of country that I'd be looking at because, like I said, you know, this is a country where the government really only depends on a small share of the population in order to maintain power. In this case, Xi Jinping can ignore the vast majority of the population because people who descend can be sent to a gulag. Uh, you know, there's no free media, there's no free social media in any sense, there's massive censorship, uh, lawyers who even defend people accused of something go to jail, right? So all of that. So you're looking at a regime that is only that only requires a small share of the population. Uh so that this is the type of regime that I'm looking at. But obviously within that, there are different types of regimes still. So you've got military juntas, you've got kings, you've got you know theocrats who say they're in power because of God's will, you have personalist dictatorships, and you have one party state where really power flows through the party as opposed to just one man or through the generals. And historically, this is what political scientists saw in China. So it wasn't just this one figure like in Russia, for example, but it was really the party that was in. Charge. Although nowadays there's debate about how far we've gone on the spectrum towards a personalization where really it's moving towards a personalist dictator.

SPEAKER_00

A leader for life.

SPEAKER_01

And these institutions make a lot of things much easier because they can channel popular dissent, they can facilitate succession when a new leader comes in. And in that sense, even though they I also look at them, they are different from, let's say, personalist dictatorships, and they are different from you know kings or queens or you know the mullahs in in Iran or something like that. So they are a little bit different, but I argue in the book that there's also a lot of similarities.

SPEAKER_00

But then how do you balance the pros and cons of Xi Jinping specifically?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, again, I would ask the counterfactual. Obviously, China's rise has been incredibly impressive, and it is true that they have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but I I think to a large extent that would have also been possible in a democracy. I mean, why would China possibly be richer because Uyghur's culture is being destroyed? Totally. Or because they, you know, raise mosques, or because people are not allowed to talk about the massacre on Tiananmen Square. So, you know, it it is quite easy in my mind to imagine a China that is democratic, that functions, and that might even be richer. So I think this trade-off, in a sense, is imagined. And I also think that a lot of the things that people from the outside admire about China look much better than they actually are. So in Germany, we have a lot of trouble building anything, right? We we seemingly cannot lay train tracks, we can't build airports. You know, autobounds are famous, but they're also very difficult to build because there are all kinds of regulations and there might be some animals around and they have to be moved before you can get going, and environmental assessments. And people get upset by that because nothing seems to work and there seems to be very little progress. But the alternative in a place like China is that the government just comes in, you have no say, there are no functioning courts, your property just gets taken away from you. And if you do continue to oppose the government because they have just stolen something from you, you end up in a gulag. So is that really the type of society that you want to live in? I don't. I would much rather struggle with building a new Autobahn or a new airport. Right.

SPEAKER_00

If if there was uh a moment where you could just gaze into the worldview of Xi Jinping, is there a perspective that you would really love to know?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, I look, I think, you know, studying these types of regimes is incredibly difficult because they're a lot more opaque than democracies. So obviously, in democracies you still have backroom deals, and there are still a lot of things that the electorate doesn't really know about. But there's an independent press, there are journalists, and a lot of things do come to light. When you study something like China, there are many, many more things that we don't know. And it would be fascinating to look inside Xi Jinping's head and get a better idea of the way that he views his world and the type of trade-offs that he sees and how he thinks he has to deal with the people around him in order to stay in power, how he can play them off against one another. I I think that would be fascinating. And I do also think that individual psychology can make a difference. So it's not purely structural. There's clearly something that is particular about these leaders that has an influence on their behavior.

SPEAKER_00

Is the economic prosperity the biggest variable in the longevity of these various uh tyrants, for lack of a better word?

SPEAKER_01

I would say that the biggest variable is probably the type of regime that it is. So you know, like we just talked about, you've got your military juntas, you've got the mulas, you've got the party dictatorships and so forth. And particularly when it comes to succession, some regimes, some regime types are much better than others. So, in a sense, the the worst thing really is a personalist dictatorship. Because in a personalist dictatorship, you're looking at leaders that really try to take apart all the institutions of the state because they consider them to be a constraint on their rule, which makes sense. But as you take apart these institutions, you run into a scenario where when that one leader around which almost everything is constructed is no longer around, things often go up in flames. And when you have this setup that is more focused on a party, for example, you have some institutions that can facilitate that succession and that can adjudicate conflicts. So when it comes to the longevity of these types of regimes, I think the type uh really makes a massive difference. When it comes to the economics, it obviously has an impact. And and there are two aspects to this. So the first one is you need money coming in because you need to redistribute it to the people they keep you in power. So when you have money coming in through oil or through diamonds or something else, whatever crooked deal you may have made, you want to make sure that you give it to the oligarchs, the generals, or whoever else keeps you in power. So that's one aspect of it. So if there's less money coming in, you will have a harder time at keeping up these systems of patronage, and that's going to put pressure on the regime. And then the second aspect is the public at large. You know, every time you need to use repression against your own people, it brings a massive risk because things can get out of control. So the fewer people you need to beat, the better it is. And people tend to be more upset when they don't have food, when they don't have housing. So if you can, all things equal, it is better to give people something that they can live with.

SPEAKER_00

How would you characterize the type of regime Saudi Arabia and MBS?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think so. First of all, the interesting thing about Saudi Arabia, I think, is that formal power does not equal actual power because of course uh you know MBS is technically not in charge, but he is. Um but yeah, I mean you're looking at exactly this type of regime. I mean, most people in Saudi Arabia don't matter at all. You've got a narrow group at the top that controls essentially everything, and that is a blessing and a curse for MBS, I believe. Because in a sense, it sounds comfortable, right? So you can ignore the vast majority of the population, you only need to look after very few people, and that sounds good. But there's a flip side to that because it means that even if you lose just very few of these people, you run the risk of losing power. And that's different to a democracy, right? A German chancellor can use, uh can lose millions and millions of people, and it really doesn't matter because there are other voters to run to and other supporters that you can find. And even though the Sori royal family is obviously very extensive, there's a limit to you know the princes or whatever that you can recruit to your side if you lost some others. And that means that somebody like MBS needs to work much harder to keep key supporters on his side than rulers in some other types of systems.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's more that narrow group of people that you need to have influence over rather than the entire country. But someone who blurbed your book, Bradley Hope, um, I thought he had a fantastically contrarian view on MBS in Saudi Arabia. Now I don't think he would agree that MBS doesn't really care about all of Saudi. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. You know, he wants Saudi Arabia to be the greatest country in the world and he loves the Saudi culture and the Saudi people, but he's in this interesting situation where basically all the large government strategy and projects are coming from his own creativity and the few people around him that feed him some ideas. And if he had a heart attack tomorrow, what would actually happen to Saudi Arabia? Would it continue on the same path it's going down? So, in some sense, it definitely should be characterized as this type of authoritarian regime.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think I sorry, I don't mean to imply that none of these leaders care about their country. Um I think, you know, maybe they do. You know, maybe Xi Jinping is really passionate about the future of the Chinese people, maybe MBS really cares about Saudi Arabia, but structurally, to maintain power, he doesn't really have to. Right? So what what some random person in in Jedi thinks is completely irrelevant to somebody like MBS. And it's the same with Xi Jinping, it's just it doesn't matter at all. And that is a structural difference to democracy. So you can still care, but you don't really have to in order to maintain power. And that's bad because that on average will lead these types of regimes to create conditions that are not favorable to the vast majority of the population. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Uh in all your research, uh PhD, pre-book, post-book, during the book, have you drawn any conclusions that really rub against the conventional wisdom of your peers? That's a good question.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, I think there are definitely some counterintuitive things in the book, um that particularly for people that you know might not be in academia, I guess, but maybe in a sense they're also controversial in academia. I'm not sure. But so we already talked about you know this idea of winning hearts and minds that I think is is just not true. Uh another thing is the topic of rationality. Um so I think you know, when people see a Russian rocket hitting a children's hospital somewhere in Ukraine, they think that Putin has lost his mind. Right? They think that he's just this bloodthirsty maniac who's completely out of control because they see no other explanation for this type of behavior, because it is so horrific. I think the vast majority of these tyrants are rational within the system in which they operate. So even though their behavior looks horrendous to us and it can seem as if it doesn't really make sense, in the system in which they are, it does. Because much of it is a way to just survive in power and to survive in general. And the reason that I say that is because these types of leaders need to make incredibly difficult trade-offs every single day in order to maintain power. And if they are no longer able to make these trade-offs, because they actually lose their mind, they lose power very quickly. So one of the leaders that I look in the book is uh a leader named Masya Sngema, who ruled uh a West African country during the Cold War. So what happened with him was that he literally lost his mind. And I'm not saying that sort of figuratively, but he actually was completely nuts, totally delusional. And the problem that he had fed that he faced was that even though he knew that there was something wrong with him, he couldn't actually get his affliction treated because every psychiatrist that could have helped him had either fled or had been killed by his regime. So you have this guy who has completely lost touch with reality. Uh and you know, and what he would do essentially is walk around his compound and cry out the names of the people that he had killed. And in one episode, he invited eight people over for dinner. He asked his servants to lay the table, and when nobody arrived at this laid table, he kept talking to his guests as if they were there, but he was all alone. And obviously, what are you gonna do? If you are around this regime and you see this leader killing almost at random, completely detached from anything that is actually happening, it is no longer rational to not oppose the leader. Because in these regimes, the reason why the elites do not oppose the leader is because they think there's there's some sort of advantage to it. But if that advantage no longer exists because the leader has lost his mind and he's killing at random, regime elites are gonna start opposing him. And that's exactly what happened, and he's toppled very quickly and he was he was killed.

SPEAKER_00

Uh wasn't that the case where it was also uh even though he was killed, uh his son or his grandson is still in charge of the country?

SPEAKER_01

No, I I think it's his nephew.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So he he was related. So yeah, so this this is crazy. I mean, so you've you're looking at a country incredibly resource rich, and uh the the old guy, so this Masyas and Gemma, I think, lost power in the 70s. And since then you have Theodoro Obiang in power. Same guy. It's you know it's 2025, same guy that toppled him, is still in power now. Incredibly repressive country, nobody cares about it, nobody really knows much about it. But so an incredibly durable regime that was created as a result of this guy losing his absolute mind.

SPEAKER_00

How do you explain the geographical concentration on a global map of these authoritarian regimes?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think you know, when you look at let's you know, when you look at Africa, for example, there are a lot of things that that happened as a result of colonization that gave them a massive disadvantage when it comes to the creation of actual sustainable democracies. So one of the things that I go into in the book is a concept called ethnic stacking. And ethnic stacking is an idea whereby you try to prevent coups happening against you by essentially stacking the security forces with a certain ethnicity. So this would be either your ethnicity or this would be an ethnicity that is somehow allied to you. And obviously, this type of thing is not really conducive to creating a sustainable democracy, right? You ideally you want it military forces where it doesn't happen. But the part of the reason why it happened in Africa more than it happened in Europe, for example, is colonization. Because when you know the colonial powers were in Africa, they deliberately set up the security forces in the territories that they controlled to make it less likely that there would be unified opposition. So if, let's say, one ethnicity dominated the civil service, then another would dominate the military. And even though the locals would be used as cannon fodder, they wouldn't actually be promoted to any types of leadership positions because you know you don't want the people that you're colonizing to lead the military force because you want to make sure that that military force doesn't act against you. So you fast forward a bit and you now have independence of these countries. You are now in charge, and you are left with this military where the majority of the officer corps is not actually from your country, but is Belgian or is French or is English. And obviously, these people have very little loyalty to the new independent country. And as a result, these independence leaders immediately perceived their own militaries as a massive threat. And so they they moved to sort of rein it in, and part of the way that they did it was through ethnic stacking. So, yes, you have ethnicity, sorry, sorry, yes, you have geography, uh, yes, you you know you have some other factors, but I think history really people really underestimate the importance of history.

SPEAKER_00

So if in the late 19th century Europe came and drew these border lines uh to define a country, irrespective of the different ethnicities that might make up that geographical place, why have we not seen in the hundred, hundred and fifty years since significantly more countries emerge within Africa that more accurately represent the ethnicities within them?

SPEAKER_01

That's a good question. I mean So I should know that I'm not an expert on on sort of you know Africa, obviously. I think you know part of the reason is that I mean, if if you look at the way that these borders were created in Europe, it was essentially through hundreds or thousands of years of warfare, right? So I mean it's not like Europeans just sat down, you know, we us Germans, we didn't sit down with the French and said, look, how about we do it this way? You know, can't we all come together to some sort of consensus? But we essentially slaughtered ourselves for you know thousands of years uh until you know the the Americans sort of put a stop to it. So um, you know, I I think that's part of the difficulty. I mean, to you know, what really is a natural border, I think is uh is an extremely difficult question to answer. And I think getting to anything like that would probably involve a lot of killing and a lot of death.

SPEAKER_00

But I'm just imagining uh I'm a tyrant and I've got this, I don't know, uh this mountain chain that runs through the middle of my country. And so historically, my people have lived on this side and the other people have lived on that side. I become a tyrannical leader and I just say, this is our new border, guys, you deal with yourselves. I mean, in in some sense, doesn't that seem like kind of a rational tyrannical policy uh that you might want to do which your ethnicity would be stoked with? Because get rid of these guys, they're not a part of us anyway.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think these regimes to a large extent run on perceptions of strength and of inevitability. So I think generally speaking, if you're a tyrant, if you're a dictator, you're this king, you want to avoid looking weak. So what you oftentimes see is the opposite of that, whereby tyrants are very aggressive when it comes to foreign policy. Yeah, very you know, expansion is very aggressive, um as as opposed to this kind of thing. So I think in that position, it's probably not the best move. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Um I think you have answered this, but I want to ask it more directly as well. But do you think there's a tipping point where authoritarian regimes become irreversibly weak, or is it always a matter of timing and circumstance?

SPEAKER_01

When it comes to these regimes, there's a very thin line between you know seeming stability and absolute chaos and absolute madness. So this is different to democracies because in democracies it's possible to lose a little bit, right? So you know, a prime minister or a president can go into an election and they can lose 5% or 10% and still maintain power and be fine. In dictatorships, usually what you have, you either have this perception of strength and this perception of inevitability, or you end up in a jail or six feet under. And the the fall of Assad, in a way, is a good illustration of that. So people defended Assad for as long as they did, in large part because they thought that Assad would keep winning. And his soldiers and intelligence officers and so forth didn't want to be on the losing side because being on the losing side can mean death. But as soon as these soldiers got the impression that Assad might actually lose, that things were going badly for him, they just took off their uniforms, threw away their Kalashnikovs, and that was it. So that's why oftentimes you either have, you know, it either looks as if Assad is gonna stay in power for another 20 years, or he's completely done in a matter of days. So once you lose that perception of inevitability, you're cooked.

SPEAKER_00

And you have this amazing statistic from the book that 69% of all dictators are exiled, jailed, or killed. Which, if we're gonna characterize Putin, Xi Jinping as these sort of dictator figures as well, you know, the odds aren't in their favour that they're going to go into retirement and then see someone else take over their country, it actually might end quite horrifically. And that's, I mean, in our own lifetimes, that that does paint a pretty disastrous future for global order. Two of the biggest economies in the world, most important.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean it's it's unlikely, I think, that Putin will have looked at the statistics or, you know, read the book. Uh, but these leaders intuitively know that they are at massive risk if they lose power. And that's why they have a massive incentive to try to do whatever they can in order to maintain power, because they know that if they lose it, they might end up dying. And I think this question of exile, for example, is a fascinating one. And again, we saw it with Assad. Because finding the right place for exile is incredibly difficult. Because really, you need a place that is able to protect you for an extended period of time, you need a place that is able to withstand pressure to give you up, and you need to do that in a context where your enemies don't just disappear, right? So, I mean, Assad has people, you know, he tortured them, he killed them, he harassed them for multiple decades, and now that he's gone, it's not like you know, everything is just forgiven, right? So you need that protection and you need it for a long period of time. And and this is in a sense something where things have really changed. So if you're a deposed dictator during the Cold War and you stood on the quote unquote right side, you know, it's quite likely that some Western liberal democracy would have been willing to take you in. And as a result, you could have lived out your days on the Mediterranean coast or perhaps on Hawaii, and it would have been a good time. But since then, that has become much more difficult. So you're now looking at an even more narrow list of countries that might take you in.

SPEAKER_00

Do you think a lot of the world's despots are now looking to Russia as a potential retirement home?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I think the the sort of best available option to most of these tyrants would probably be Saudi Arabia. Uh, because Saudi Arabia is quite stable, um, you know, despite the type of regime, you know, it hasn't really it hasn't had a civil war. Uh it is quite likely that the son is going to continue hosting you if if the father gave you exile, and it has shown its qualifications in a sense by hosting many tyrants beforehand. Russia, I think, is a much more risky bet, and partly that's because succession is much more problematic in Russia, and Russia obviously has a long history of massive political upheaval. So if you're Assad, you know, he's still a young guy, he could live for multiple decades, would you really bet on Russia being stable for 20, 25 years?

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_01

I wouldn't. You know, Putin is gonna die at some point. He's very powerful, but he's not immortal. So even if he doesn't get toppled in a coup or in a revolution of some kind, he will die. And when he dies, who knows what happens next? I mean, it it sounds improbable now, but Russia could turn into a democracy, you could have another personalist dictatorship, you could have a military dictatorship. Just about anything is possible when it comes to Russia, and there's no guarantee that the next person in charge is going to honor that deal, particularly because they may decide that their relationship to the new rulers and Damascus is more important than. Protecting this guy who really doesn't have much leverage anymore.

SPEAKER_00

What's an underappreciated historical example of uh dictatorship collapse that you think doesn't uh people don't know as uh as much about as they should?

SPEAKER_01

That's a good question. There's so many. I mean, I think uh let me just give an example for me personally. Um, and that and that's the collapse of the GDR. So obviously, this is not the case that is you know totally unknown or something. You know, people have heard about it, they've heard about the World of Wall and the collapse of the GDR. But I have to admit to my shame, to me personally, that was something that was really abstract. You know, even though I'm German and even though all of this happened a couple of hours, you know, by car from where I'm from, it was, you know, might as well happen in a different universe. Because this idea of a dictatorship on German soil 30 years ago seemed totally absurd to me. Um, and while I was researching the book, I really got more into it and it things became a lot more practical. Um, and I got a much better understanding of how it unfolded. And what was so fascinating about it was also that it was peaceful, right? Because a lot of these changes are incredibly violent. I mean, these leaders get assassinated, you've got coups, you've got civil wars, you've got rebels, just horrific. And in the case of the GDR, you know, they didn't have to fire a single shot.

SPEAKER_00

And what happened to the leader after that? I admit, I don't even know who it was or when it happened or anything.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so I mean, just for background a bit, and maybe also because this is fascinating in general. So, you know, one of the questions that I was asking myself while researching this is okay, but how does non-violent protest actually work? I mean, how can these you know marching pensioners or school children or whatever, you know, bring down these entrenched dictatorships when they've got the tanks and they've got the guns and theoretically they should always win out. And the the reason why it works, again, is about the structure of the regime. So if you are this dictatorship, you don't want people to march in the streets in opposition because again, it shows that you're weak. So you try to prevent them from doing it, you threaten them, you try to make sure that it doesn't happen. When people turn out anyway, you have a choice whether you're going to beat them down or whether you're going to let it go on. And in German, we call this a choice between the plague and cholera. So there's really no good option here once people are in the streets, because you either look weak or you use violence. And when you use violence, you risk more people turning out because you have a backlash oftentimes when you beat women and children. So you beat them and you have more people in the streets. And now you have an even more difficult decision to make because you either need to start actually shooting and killing people, or things could get out of control because, again, there's now so many people that things become unpredictable. And this is where you want to get the regime. You want to force the regime into making this type of decision. Because oftentimes, when that moment comes, regimes crumble under the weight of their own repression. Because not everybody in the regime wants to go along with mass murder. And even though the regime has the guns and the regime has the tanks, they need somebody to fire those weapons and to use them. And they often refuse. Because you know, soldiers are trained to fight external enemies, and that is seen as maybe even honorable. But to shoot at these unarmed protesters is obviously something entirely different. And this is also what happened when the GDR collapsed. So you had these massive protests, and the regime had to make this choice, and in the end, they they couldn't go through with it. They had everything in place. I mean, they had armored vehicles, they had masses of police, you know, they they could have used the military, but they they had nobody that would have actually followed those orders. And that's in the end why it collapsed.

SPEAKER_00

And that was only 30 years ago. Yeah, I mean Is that sort of the last peaceful collapse of a tyrannical regime that we've seen?

SPEAKER_01

No, I think you have many more. Um so one word of caution perhaps about these this nonviolent protest. So we know from the literature that if you can bring down dictators using non-violent protest, you have your best chance of success. If success is measured as in we want to create a sustainable democracy, which is usually what people strive for because they don't just want to topple one dictator for another one to take his place. But the problem with nonviolent protest is there are some cases in which it is incredibly unlikely to work. So if you're Kim Jong-un, you're not gonna be brought down by mass protest because it is essentially impossible to even organize a protest in Pyongyang. Because the media is controlled, protests are banned, you know, you've got punishments across entire generations. So people in North Korea are not gonna go to a protest because they don't want to die. So when it comes to these the most dangerous regimes and the most destructive regimes, nonviolent protests might not actually work. But in cases where it does, there's a good chance that there'll be a positive outcome.

SPEAKER_00

Who's in your rogues gallery of tyrants?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, look. Um, I think when it comes to the worst of the worst, uh obviously there are some people that are always going to be at the top of that list. Um, you know, people like Hitler, obviously, because you've had the industrial murder of millions and millions of people. Uh when you look at death count, obviously you also have to consider Stalin, you also have to consider Mao. But you know, I think the history of humanity is mostly a history of tyrants. So this entire idea of democracy, and as we now understand it, is quite new. Uh, you know, for most people throughout history, they've been governed by some sort of tyrant. It could have been a colonial governor or a sultan or a bishop, but they lived under tyranny. So there, you know, throughout history there have been a lot of people that have been just horrendous uh to the people that they have controlled. I guess the difference in a sense to the modern age is that the our destructive power is now much greater. So, you know, industrial murder is now an actual possibility, whereas you know, a thousand years ago it would have been more difficult, at least.

SPEAKER_00

And so Mao, Stalin, Hitler, I'm thinking names like Charles Taylor, Paul Pott, there's just this totally sadistic nature to their regimes, which although their death count might not rival those of the great powers, there's just there's a real special place in Hellford.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think for all of these people. Um I would I would say though that you know I think part of that is is again uh structural and part of it is about these leaders in particular. So you know, when you talk about that kind of sadism and and you know that kind of pension for violence, in a sense, I think it's baked in. Because to be in this position, you have to be mentally ill. I mean that there has to be something profoundly wrong with you if you want to survive in this position. And part of the reason is because, yeah, you have to use violence, you have to do all kinds of horrible people uh, you know, day in and day out. You know, you one day you might be having a normal chat with somebody, and then that same evening you might be ordering their death. You have to be paranoid in a sense because there generally are threats all around, and you might actually be toppled at any moment. So I think these types of positions, you know, you know, there's a uh sort of self-selection uh factor here whereby you need to be damaged in order to get into this position, and then being in that position is only going to damage you further. You know, I think tyranny is not conducive to a healthy mind in any sense.

SPEAKER_00

How much guilt and shame do you place at the feet of the accountants and the lawyers who are responsible for the plumbing of all the offshore finance that makes it possible for Marcos to extract billions and billions of dollars from his country?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, a lot. And I I think this is you know part of the reason why we're not innocent. I mean, if you look at London, if you look at New York, if you you know look at the financial capitals of the world.

SPEAKER_00

Sydney.

SPEAKER_01

You know, these are the types of places that dictators need in order to launder their money, in order to whitewash their reputation. And like you say, you've got lawyers, you've got accountants, you've got bankers that are making millions and millions profiting off this misery. And you know, I always ask myself, you know, why? You're already rich. Like who cares? Why do you need another million to help Vladimir Putin? Why do you need another 500k, you know, to help the CCP? We don't. So I think in a way it's even worse. I will also say though that it's not just a question of individual responsibility, because governments, of course, could do things to crack down on this. Right? I mean, that there's no reason why we we have to allow this collectively. But governments either refuse to take action or they don't make it a priority. And in some cases, that's also, of course, because democratic governments are happy to cooperate with some horrible regimes and some dictatorships because they think it's in their interest.

SPEAKER_00

In your estimation, which leader in history has come closest to absolute power? Forget history, modern history.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I mean, I think the central argument of the book is that this idea of absolute power is an illusion in a sense. You know, I don't think absolute power can ever really be attained because all of these leaders need others to stay in power. So you can reduce the total number of people that you rely on to stay in power, but there's always going to be somebody. There's always going to be some general you need, there's always going to be some oligarch you need. Uh, you know, there's always gonna have to be that soldier that actually takes that shot to keep you in power. So I think absolute power cannot be attained, but when we look at the world as it is right now, the person closest to it is probably Kim Jong-un. Because in North Korea, you really have just an extreme centralization of power, um, where you know Kim Jong-un can literally have somebody executed with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep in a meeting. I mean, that's yeah, that's it's pretty crazy. Um, and and what's what also makes the North Korean regime stand out is this ability to deal with succession, uh, which shouldn't be working as well as it does, but somehow it has.

SPEAKER_00

Isn't there something particularly impressive about Xi Jinping? Because if you look at Kim Jong-un, you know, he's the second in line. Uh the all of these systemic problems were sort of set up over a long period of time, and it's a small population, and people haven't had power for such a long time, so to take it back is so hard. But Xi Jinping is as 1.45 billion people in his country, yet somehow still sustains this centralized power. There's just something so remarkable about that. You can imagine it's impossible to even imagine what a billion people look like, and they've got a billion and a half of them.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but I you know, I given everything that we know about the structure of these regimes, that might actually be at risk now. And I would make two arguments on that front. So the first thing is this personalization of power. So as you more power moves from the institution of the party to just one man, Xi Jinping, the entire system becomes more vulnerable to mistakes. Because this one man is gonna make mistakes because you know he's gonna become arrogant, he's gonna be fed inaccurate information, he's gonna take these decisions alone, maybe to the benefit of himself or his family or his cronies, and that's gonna make it much harder to stay on this path of making relatively few mistakes. And the other thing is that obviously, even though Kim even though Xi Jinping doesn't necessarily need a lot of Chinese people in order to maintain power, the system does rest on the promise that the CCP is making ordinary Chinese people richer and that things are advancing for China. And there are obviously a lot of economists who think that the economic environment is going to become a lot more difficult for China in in the next couple of decades. So who knows what happens next? You know, I think we now think that the system is incredibly stable and that things can't change, but you know, stranger things have happened.

SPEAKER_00

Marcel, I just want to make the most out of our time. I've got four completely unrelated questions for you. We'll see if we can sort of get through them. What role does the global order, trade agreements, international norms, media standards, what role does it play in sustaining or undermining these authoritarian regimes? Or in other words, you know, how impl how complicit are the democracies around the world in the sustaining of them?

SPEAKER_01

Good question. Um, I people talk a lot about the international order, and obviously something like that exists, but again, I think we have lied to ourselves to an extent because really the international order is ultimately built on power. You know, you've got a hegemon, which is the United States, and they have created a system after the Second World War that is brilliant in the sense that a lot of other countries want to maintain that order that they have created because they think it's to their benefit. So, you know, a country like Germany readily accepts American influence because Germans think that by and large this type of order is good for Germans. And the same happens with South Koreans and the Japanese and so forth. So I think the first thing that I would say is that you know the international order isn't really what we imagine it to be. It's not, you know, it's not an order designed to democratize these countries, I don't think. That said, if you are an activist and you're hoping for improvement in your own country, it is the best constituency that you have, right? So even though the order is imperfect, and even though democracies might not actually care that much about bringing democracy to other places, that's still the best chance that you have because really you can't appeal to anybody else, right? I mean, the Russians are not going to do anything, neither are the Saudis or the Chinese or whatever. So I think in that sense we kind of get the international order wrong. And the second thing is, yeah, I mean, obviously democracies are complicit in supporting all kinds of dictatorships. You know, whether it's the Chinese, whether it's the Russians, whether it's the Saudis, even the Iranians. And they're, I mean, Europeans are still buying Russian natural resources. You know, American technology is used in Russian arms. We spend billions and billions and billions and billions trading with the Chinese. So obviously we are complicit, but the question is, you know, how could we not be, or what will be the cost if we weren't? And what is the cost? Maybe this is a depressing way to look at politics.

SPEAKER_00

What what cost do we place on the moral high ground?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and I mean, you know, I think the truth is also that not every dictatorship is equally destructive. So again, if you're European, you know, Russia is a different problem than it would be if you have the same country somewhere on the other side of the earth, right? I mean, if God forbid New Zealand turned into a dictatorship, okay. I mean, it'd be great if it weren't.

SPEAKER_00

It'd be the funniest dictatorship of all time.

SPEAKER_01

But you see what I mean, right? I mean, it's not it's not going to be the same concern to us as this personless dictator next door who's, you know, who's waging war, like two hours from Berlin. So, you know, all countries make these kind of trade-offs, and and and the truth is that fighting back against dictatorships can be incredibly costly, both in terms of blood and treasure. So if you're an elected politician in a democracy, you are probably not going to make policy based on some moral idea, but based on interest, because otherwise you will judge it to not be worth it, right? And I think that that's part of the reality. So, yeah, we are complicit and there are things that we could do differently, but some of them would be very costly.

SPEAKER_00

So this is a kind of a ridiculous question, uh, because Trump is a democratically elected leader of one of the most well-functioning countries the world's ever seen, the United States. But I'm sure you saw the stuff that was happening overnight. This sort of uh brazen showiness of how they're just getting rid of the old regime's uh policy, the promotion so blatantly of the tech and business leaders within his country, the sort of ever-narrowing distance between them and the political leader, the most powerful man in the world, Elon Musk, being just giving the keys to deregulating a country within which he has several extremely regulated businesses. Where on the spectrum now into a second term, having seen a first term, is Donald Trump on your tyrant spectrum.

SPEAKER_01

You know, I I only grew up in freedom because of Americans, right? So being German, I'm not gonna tell Americans how to British.

SPEAKER_00

Don't say that, Marcel. The British will come after you like nothing.

SPEAKER_01

No, the Brits and many others, of course. But you know, you know, being German, I'm not gonna tell Americans how to run their country or whatever. But you know, if I were American, I'd be deeply concerned, uh, because I think there's a lot of evidence that Donald Trump's preferred system of government would not be a liberal democracy, right? I mean, he talks about locking up his enemies, he's politicizing uh the court system and the sort of the investigating agencies. Uh he has repeatedly talked about how much he admires various dictators, uh, and obviously he's trying to concentrate power in the hands of himself, his family, and and these sort of you know, oligarchical figures around him. So I think you have intent. So then the question becomes okay, even you know, if he wants to dismantle American democracy as we now know it, what stands in his way? You know, what are the constraints? What would he have to get rid of? What would he have to do in order to achieve his aim? And I think there it really depends on how much faith you have in the various institutions. You know, how much faith do you have in the courts? How much faith do you have in his fellow Republicans? How much faith do you have in the intelligence services in the military? And for me personally, that varies quite a lot. So I have very little faith in Republicans, but I have quite a lot of faith in the American military. So there are things that I think if I were Americans, I'd really be watching out for. And I think at the top of that list would be the security services. So, you know, because ultimately what stands between democracy and tyranny oftentimes is that military. You know, if you if you want to really take control, you either need the military to do nothing or to actively support you. So anything related to the independence of the military would be a major red flag to me. So this could be something like, you know, hiring based on you know public displays of loyalty, you know, deliberately hiring uh incompetent people because they think you know they're sort of bound to you. Uh it could be, uh, and this sounds weird, but I mean you could have the creation of some sort of popular militia, right? So I mean Donald Trump could say, look, this country is in chaos, we need everybody to turn out, you know, wear this, take your guns, right? Um maybe he will try to, I don't know, create a collection of friendly national guards by red governors or something like that, right? You know, these are the types of things you know where where you would really need a big, big red siren and it needs to go out flashing red, because this is the type of thing that that that would be seriously problematic. Because I think you know, democracies can survive a lot of things, but they cannot survive a politicization of the military.

SPEAKER_00

And there's a whole wave of populism that's swept through the globe over the last five, ten years. Is this one of the first dominoes towards a more tyrannical future?

SPEAKER_01

You know, I'm really hopeful. Uh, and actually, writing this book has given me a lot more hope, uh, which might sound weird because parts of the book are quite depressing. Um, but you know, I think we don't think enough about the weaknesses of dictatorships. And we we have talked a lot about the weaknesses of democracy, and obviously they're real. You know, a lot of people are dissatisfied, things can move slowly, you know, in many ways things are worse than they used to for a lot of people, but we underestimate how badly some of these other political systems actually function. And I would also say that oftentimes you can't really tell what trajectory we're on until much later. So when you look at the Arab Spring, in hindsight now, you know, there was a lot of hope. People thought, okay, things are really going to get better. You know, this is the moment when we're going to see the emergence of these Middle Eastern democracies. And then obviously things didn't turn out that way. But I think there's every possibility that historians will look back and they will say, you know what? This was the beginning of something great. You know, this was a key moment on the path towards democracy in this area. I mean, even if you look at like something like Syria now, you know, let's say a year ago, we would have all said, you know, the Arab Spring has totally failed in Syria. You know, there was no there was no progress. You had these protests, then you had a civil war, hundreds of thousands of people dead, millions fled, and Assad is still in power. And now Assad is gone. Obviously, things are still complicated in Syria. You know, it's not the government that we would pick if we had a choice. But things are better than they used to be. And who knows, maybe they're going to get even better.

SPEAKER_00

Another ridiculous question, Marcel, you've uh spoken about Donald Trump in the USA, but look to the UK, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, you know, well-functioning countries by most metrics. What do you think is the possibility of in our lifetime a dictatorship coming into power in one of these countries?

SPEAKER_01

You know, the history of humanity is mostly a history of tyrants, and none of these democracies are God given. And we most definitely have not. Um, you know, things could fail, things get a lot worse. Um, and you know, just looking at Germany now, I mean, at this next election that we're having next month, uh, the second biggest party is going to be the far right. So in Germany, with our history, the second biggest party is going to be the far right. So obviously, we have not learned. You know, these people are radical. So, you know, you know, I generally speaking, I am optimistic, but it is with the understanding that things could get a lot worse at pretty much any moment in time.

SPEAKER_00

Marcel, final question for you. Two countries, one you're most bearish on, one you're most bullish on.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think when it comes to countries that are most bearish on, um, I'm probably gonna say Venezuela. Um, you know, over the last couple of months, there's been a lot of discussion about Venezuela, and you know, for a moment it did look as if Maduro might actually lose power because you had mass protests, there was a lot of opposition, he had blatantly rigged the election in his favor. So it could have been that he actually fought. But he made it through, and part of the reason was quite evidently because he has coup-proofed his regime pretty well. And given that he has survived this, I am not particularly optimistic uh that things are gonna change unless the new American government takes drastic action uh in opposition, which is a possibility because you never know what Trump is gonna do, and it's certainly possible that that he does something, whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_00

I think fold him in as the 51st. That's gonna be the go.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, you know, given America's history in that region and you know, Trump being Trump, you know, the possibility of some sort of intervention can never be excluded. But just looking at the internal dynamics of Venezuela, I'm not particularly optimistic. And I think when it comes to countries that I'm most bullish on, I am gonna say Russia, which is probably something of a contrarian take. But I think people overestimate the stability of the Russian regime. Um, you know, you're you're looking at a regime that seems stable, but that I think is at pretty big risk of some serious political upheaval. And I think there are two reasons for that. The first is the economic situation. Um, obviously they've had a lot of reserves and they've done incredibly well at maintaining the quote unquote strength of the Russian economy, but there will be a point at which they will run into serious trouble. And the other thing is the conflict. You know, they've been doing this for multiple years now. They are advancing, but it's at an embarrassingly slow pace. A lot of Russians are dying, which in and of itself is not necessarily a problem for Putin, as long as the right people are dying. But I think depending on the way that Trump acts now, there could be a point at which Russian generals or Russian intelligence officers ask themselves whether it's really worth it. But again, this to an extent depends on Trump. Obviously, if Trump goes in and he just sacrifices the Ukrainians, you know, it's gonna be a major win for Putin. But if the opposite happens and Trump says, you know what, I'm not gonna take this deal, I'm gonna provide more support to the Ukrainians, I think he could be in serious trouble. Which of these is gonna happen? Again, it's Trump, so no idea.

SPEAKER_00

Marcel, thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic and the book's amazing. Uh, you know, I look at the news differently now.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you very much, and thank you very much for having me.