By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What Really Threatens Authoritarians?

Not long ago in the sweep of history, countries that had once been buried behind the Iron Curtain, and even some Soviet republics, were transformed into members of the solidly democratic club. Some of those that weren’t, such as Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, experienced mass revolts against rigged elections and corrupt misrule amid widespread public yearning to join the West. Free trade was again celebrated as an instrument of peace; Kant’s “democratic peace theory” enjoyed a revival.

Western democracy promotion, inept as it could be, struck fear into authoritarian corridors of power. Ever-shriller authoritarian denunciations of supposed Western conspiracies to foment “color revolutions” seemed to confirm a direction toward democracy. In the early 2010s, spontaneous uprisings rocked the heavily autocratic Middle East and North Africa. Hopes for political loosening persisted in the stubborn holdouts of China, Iran, and Russia. Large-scale demonstrations had broken out in Iran in 2009 and, in 2011–12, similar protests accompanied Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he would return to the Russian presidency after a brief stint as prime minister. Many clung to what they considered signs that Xi Jinping, who rose to become China’s top leader in 2012, would be a reformer.

The inner workings of China’s top leadership remain an enigma to outsiders.

Xi’s purge caused him “psychological damage yet Xi continued to insist that all he wanted to do was to “struggle his entire life for the party.” 

Opacity may have been a skill Xi learned as a child, according to Joseph Torigian’s prodigiously researched epic The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. Torigian quotes the Chinese historian Gao Wenqian, who suggests that after watching his father’s fall from grace within the CCP, Xi learned the art of “forbearance and concealing his intentions, not revealing anything.” Xi Zhongxun, a close colleague of Mao Zedong’s, had been intensely loyal to both the party and its revolution, only to be repaid with political persecution, abuse, imprisonment, and domestic exile. This was the world in which Xi Jinping came of age.

In the blink of an eye, however, the authoritarians flipped the dynamic, driving the democracies onto the back foot, where they remain. Arab autocrats, Iran’s mullahs, and Putin cracked down viciously. In China, Xi elevated himself to something akin to emperor, driving an even more resolute version of authoritarianism. In well-established democracies, meanwhile, fear spread about the decay of liberal institutions and norms.

The authoritarians relied on an innovative set of tactics to suppress democratic influence from abroad or from within their societies: branding organizations that receive overseas funding as “foreign agents” (essentially, traitors) and using tax inspections to disqualify opposition candidates from running for office. These techniques were combined with the tried-and-true practice of dominating the media. And then, the coup de grâce: continuing to decry nonexistent Western plots to take them down, the authoritarians—thanks to technological innovations produced by free societies—developed new ways to meddle forcefully in democratic polities and sometimes even destabilize them. Now, the authoritarians watch as freely elected democratic leaders praise and emulate them.

And yet: beware those who once hailed “the age of democracy” and now proclaim “the age of autocracy.” Formidable as these regimes appear—and, in fact, can be—they are shot through with weaknesses. They can mobilize vast resources and personnel in pursuit of ambitious national projects but suffer debilitating incapacity stemming from corruption, cronyism, and overreach. They last far longer than generally anticipated, but all the while remain prone to sudden runs on their political banks. With the right strategies, they can be jolted off balance. Democracies, despite a growing loss of confidence bordering on despair, retain innumerable strengths and deep resilience, and can get back on the front foot.

China's path was not preordained. The 1980s were a period of great open-ended contestation and imagination. Chinese elites argued fiercely about the future. Official ideology, economic policy, technological transformation, and political reforms all expanded in bold new directions.

President Xi Jinping had consolidated power within the Chinese Communist Party. He had elevated himself to the same official status as the CCP’s iconic leader, Mao Zedong, and done away with presidential term limits, freeing him to lead China for the rest of his life. At home, he boasted of having made huge strides in reducing poverty; he claimed to be raising his country’s international prestige to new heights abroad. For many Chinese, Xi’s strongman tactics were the acceptable price of national revival.

Outwardly, Xi still projected confidence. In a speech in January 2021, he declared China “invincible.” But behind the scenes, his power is being questioned as never before. By discarding China’s long tradition of collective rule and creating a cult of personality reminiscent of the one that surrounded Mao, Xi has rankled party insiders.

If Xi were to attack Taiwan, his likeliest target, there is a good chance that the war would not go as planned, and Taiwan, with American help, would be able to resist invasion and inflict grave damage on mainland China. In that event, the elites and the masses would abandon Xi, paving the way for his downfall and perhaps even the collapse of the CCP as we know it. For precedent, one would have to go back to the nineteenth century, when Emperor Qianlong failed in his quest to expand China’s realm to Central Asia, Burma, and Vietnam. Predictably, China suffered a mortifying loss in the First Sino-Japanese War, setting the stage for the downfall of the Qing dynasty and kicking off a long period of political upheaval. Emperors are not always forever.

 

What’s in a Name?

What is authoritarianism? And what—and who—is an authoritarian? Given how important this phenomenon has always been and the prominence it has recently reacquired, it might seem surprising how difficult it can be to answer those questions. At the most basic level, authoritarianism involves weak or near-absent institutional limits on executive power. Initially, authoritarians unabashedly ruled in the name of the few, but ever since the French Revolution, nondemocratic regimes have taken on the trappings of democracy: staged elections, rubber-stamp legislatures, constitutions granting nominal rights. “Modern authoritarianism,” as the political scientist Amos Perlmutter defined it, is the rule of the few in the name of the many.

Perlmutter, writing in 1981, singled out “authoritarianism/totalitarianism” as “this century’s most remarkable political phenomenon.” But the slash separating (or combining) the two terms concealed a challenge: namely, explaining the difference between them. As it happens, the sociologist Juan Linz had already taken this up, and his experience offers a cautionary tale. Born in 1926 in Weimar, Germany, where hyperinflation bankrupted his father’s business, the young Linz witnessed the breakdown of democracy and the onset of Hitler’s dictatorship. Linz and his Spanish mother relocated to Spain in 1932, where Linz lived through the 1936 military putsch and the civil war that it provoked. During Franco’s dictatorship, he graduated from the University of Madrid. In 1950, he crossed the Atlantic to pursue a Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he soon began to teach. He later shifted to Yale and, in the decades that followed, became one of the world’s foremost experts on regime types and democratic stability.

When Linz entered the profession, the world was seen as divided between two basic regime types: democratic and totalitarian. Where, he wondered, should one place Franco’s Spain? It was patently not democratic, but also not totalitarian like Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union. The classic schema advanced by the likes of Hannah Arendt, as well as Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, had no room for Iberia. In 1963, Linz presented a long paper titled “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain.” Despite its banal title, it constituted a breakthrough in explicating a third type. Linz offered a mostly negative definition: unlike totalitarianism, authoritarianism didn’t have a concentrated single source of power or a pervasive ideology, and it could muster only minimal mass mobilization. The major attribute authoritarian regimes possessed, rather than lacked, Linz suggested, was limited pluralism. The distinction remained uncertain, and for all his achievements, Linz never nailed it down. He tried “Sultanistic regimes,” which fell flat, and by 2000 had come up with “chaocracy” (the rule of chaos and mobs). All the while, a consensus built around the too-broad rubric of “hybrid regimes.”

Typologies can sometimes help one grasp how such regimes sustain themselves or implode, or are overthrown. For example, scholars have shown that authoritarian regimes that rely on hereditary succession tend to be more stable. But such insights do not translate into policy action. For that purpose, it is better to identify not types but constituent parts—what can be thought of as the five dimensions of authoritarianism—and their susceptibility to countermeasures. Admittedly, a policy-oriented framework will not satisfy those who prefer strict definitions and typologies. Nonetheless, it could serve as a foundation from which to push today’s authoritarian regimes onto the back foot.

 

The Iron Fist

The first dimension is obvious: no authoritarian regime could survive without security police and military forces capable of domestic repression. Compared with their social spending or economic investment, authoritarian regimes extravagantly overcommit funds to the agencies, equipment, and training they need for massive repression. They expend staggering resources on surveillance and censorship of the Internet, social media, and related technologies and services, often alongside paid and voluntary human monitoring of neighborhoods and workplaces. Coercive apparatuses vary widely among authoritarian countries, which inherit legacy structures from previous regimes or previous incarnations of their own regimes. Think of the Iranian shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, which the revolutionaries angrily dissolved in 1979, only to carry over many of its practices, prisons, and even personnel into a new organization, SAVAMA.

Authoritarian regimes relentlessly reorganize their repressive apparatuses, but rarely to streamline their functions. On the contrary, they deliberately assign agencies and operatives to overlapping jurisdictions, ensuring that they are, to an extent, at daggers drawn. Sometimes, such agencies engage in sabotage against one another, as officials regard going on the offensive as the best defense against colleagues poised to go after them. In communist China, the jockeying for supremacy between the security police and the People’s Liberation Army has at times been decisive in power struggles. In Russia, the civilian repressive apparatus persecutes the military, which leaps at every chance for revenge. Meanwhile, anticorruption bodies—always more than one—are feared by all, including one another.

Professionals in repression, whether fingernail pullers or computer hackers (sometimes the same), have the means to take down not just their rivals but also their superiors and even their country’s ruler. They at once ensure regime survival and pose the greatest threat to it. That is why, for example, presidential bodyguards are rarely integrated into the main repressive apparatus. In Russia under Putin, just as it was under Stalin, the bodyguard directorate (today known as the FSO) stands alone, separate from the main successors to the KGB (the FSB and Putin's SVR), the multiple counterintelligence units, and the also self-standing National Guard. Paranoia rules.

Cronies and mediocrities might run the critical security police or armed forces, a circumstance observed in Putin’s war against Ukraine, which was planned and overseen until May 2024 by a former construction foreman with whom the dictator had spent some bare-chested time in the Siberian wilderness. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the repressive muscle or the capacity for learning and correction of these mechanisms and militaries. They monitor, disappear, imprison, and butcher. They are highly fractious, however, roiling with jealousies, resentments, and enmities, which rulers aggravate to exercise control. Intelligence agencies in the United States and other Western countries closely follow these cleavages, of course, and can sometimes recruit the disaffected or the ambitious to provide insider information.

These regimes take great pains to cultivate façades of unity and approval, which makes them vulnerable when disunity and disapproval are exposed. Many officials in authoritarian regimes chafe at the conflation of the ruler’s interests with the country’s, at cronies hoarding all the spoils, and at the concealed national debilitation that ensues. Washington and its allies should systematically call out these divisions, as well as the deep resentments felt within regimes over malfeasance and corruption, aiming to drive wedges between the elites and the ruler. Of course, naming specific disaffected individuals could cause their imprisonment or execution. Carelessness could backfire. Still, discontent, thwarted ambition, and offended patriotism are no secret and available to exploit. When such regimes figuratively or literally push their officials out of windows—as they do without any Western pressure—democracies need to emphasize how such barbarism reveals weakness, how it constitutes a tacit admission that dissatisfaction suffuses officialdom, and how the regimes fear its spread. “Outwardly strong, inwardly brittle,” an internal Chinese critique, should be the name of a relentless public campaign that forces the Chinese regime to continually deny it.

An arrest at a memorial for the dissident Alexei Navalny, Moscow, February 2024

 

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

The second dimension of an authoritarian regime is the nature of its revenue streams. All governments require sources of funding, of course, and most get them through a wide array of taxes. Taxes render governments dependent on their people, and although authoritarian regimes do not mind obtaining revenues that way, they are loath to depend on the consent of the people if they can get away without doing so—and many can. They have alternative sources of revenue, often gushing right out of the ground.

Among the most stubborn misconceptions about authoritarian regimes is the idea that they rest on a de facto social contract, whereby the regimes raise living standards and in exchange the people surrender their freedom. Obviously, if an authoritarian regime fails to raise living standards, its ruling circle does not admit its failure to fulfill its side of the contract and leave power. Nor can the people force its exit by taking the rulers to court for failure to comply. Authoritarians are happy to have GDP growth, but they do not require it, and they feel no imperative to satisfy the material aspirations of ordinary people. Unfree people can sometimes be more easily pacified if their incomes are rising and opportunities for their children are expanding. But in China, the authoritarian country where such a contract is most frequently alleged to exist, those conditions have never held for large segments of society. The Chinese people understand the true contract under which they live: if they keep disappointments and doubts largely to themselves and publicly profess loyalty, then the authorities might not come after them.

Authoritarian regimes can survive with little or no economic growth, thanks to those wielding truncheons, but not without cash flow—and the best source of that comes from material that nature deposited into the earth hundreds of millions of years ago, which can be sold on world markets for hard currency. Beyond mother lodes of oil or natural gas, ready cash can also be generated with diamond or gold mines, precious metals, and rare minerals. All it takes is some extraction equipment, labor (often forced), railroads, and ports. But these regimes also find new ways to generate cash flow. North Korea once counterfeited U.S. $100 bills at scale. Then it innovated, discovering that it could hack its way into foreign central bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchanges. The regime also rakes in cash, especially in foreign currencies, the old-fashioned way: by dispatching soldiers and laborers abroad for a fee.

In the case of Putin’s Russia, oil and gas exports help fund the regime—so much so that such revenues have covered as much as a quarter of the costs of the war against Ukraine. China, India, and Turkey have together purchased close to $400 billion in Russian oil since 2023, sometimes to consume it, sometimes to resell it at a markup. Moscow has innovated, too, assembling a shadow fleet of decrepit tankers as well as a coterie of sketchy insurers and shell companies (a time-honored Western invention) to evade a U.S.-devised price cap.

But the need for cash also creates vulnerabilities. Oil becomes money only when it traverses seas or crosses international land borders and is then refined and shipped to consumers. Washington and its partners could sanction oil refineries in China, India, and Turkey, raising those countries’ costs and lowering Russia’s revenues while helping coordinate alternative sources. A new EU draft proposal would allow member states to board and detain shadow-fleet tankers, which are already under sanctions. As for pipelines, cyber-capabilities can cause repeated temporary disruptions, reducing Russia’s revenues.

At first glance, China might look like an exception to the idea that Western countries can exploit an authoritarian regime’s need for cash. China consumes most of its own natural resources, and is the world’s largest importer of raw materials. It also collects taxes, including a value-added tax that is its biggest source of income. But its other big source is what it earns from finished-product exports, which account for roughly 20 percent of China’s GDP and on which corporations pay taxes. Retaliatory tariffs and other trade restrictions could thus choke off much of the regime’s cash flow if they are executed by a broad coalition of cooperating countries, which would need to invest substantially in their own reindustrialization and in alternative supply chains—which they should be doing, anyway.

Trump attending a cabinet meeting in Washington, D.C., December 2025

 

Tall Tales

The third dimension of authoritarianism is the stories a regime tells about itself, its people, its history, and its place in the world. Authoritarians always try to suppress the stories they do not want their people to see. But they understand that even effective suppression is insufficient on its own; they also need to propagate visions of the nation and the world that resonate with ordinary people. These stories vary across regimes, but elements recur. They aim to spread fear to bolster national cohesion, featuring the collusion of internal and external enemies: ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, labeled as terrorists; elites, intellectuals, democrats (usually but not always in scare quotes); the International Monetary Fund, Jews, George Soros, foreigners; the Great Satan (the United States), the Little Satan (Israel). Authoritarian narratives also evoke a period of national greatness in the past that was undone by hostile forces but will be restored as soon as today’s enemies are vanquished by the nation’s sole savior: the regime and current ruler.

Anti-Westernism is the core trope of today’s authoritarian regimes, and they can frequently draw on Western sources for material. Some of the greatest hits: NATO attacked Russia, the West encourages coups and installs puppet governments, and the West is striving to maintain hegemony over the world's majority. And then there is the simplest and most effective of all the authoritarian stories: “The East is rising, the West is declining.”

People living under these regimes, however, do not accept regime narratives at face value. Plausible enemies, saboteurs, and spies must occasionally be paraded before them, and plausible tales of U.S. hostility toward China or Russia (preferably straight from the mouths of Americans themselves) must be cited alongside implausible ones. Regime stories must speak to ordinary people, to their sense of violated fairness, their struggles and aspirations. Not everything in these narratives will comport with their experiences, but many people will excuse discrepancies as long as some of it does. The Chinese nation and the Russian nation were, in fact, great imperial civilizations, and few inhabitants of those places dispute that they deserve to be great again.

The centrality of narrative in the operation, legitimacy, and survival of authoritarian regimes makes them vulnerable. They are especially exposed where they are most active: in wielding history. China drills home stories of what it calls its “century of humiliation” beginning in the 1800s, and these resonate with large numbers of Chinese people. But there are also compelling stories about the more than half-century of self-humiliation under Chinese Communist Party rule: the CCP has killed far more Chinese people than foreign interventions ever did. Similarly, the CCP takes credit for China’s economic miracle, but the boom resulted primarily from the diligence and ingenuity of the Chinese people; party officials have often been parasitic on the country’s economic success, expropriating businesses once they have become successful. The party casts itself as the great defender of Chinese civilization and Confucianism. But the CCP continues to be the desecrator of philosophical and religious traditions as well as innumerable monuments, and the persecutor of monks, writers, and artists.

To tell those stories, democracies would have to invest more in penetrative communications and persuasive content. The glory days of the Voices, as American and European radio stations broadcasting into the Soviet Union were known, were gone even before the Trump administration eliminated their funding earlier this year. It has become difficult to maintain virtual private networks (VPNs) that allow people to evade Internet restrictions in countries such as China; then again, Washington has barely tried. The CCP, meanwhile, controls the algorithm on the app TikTok, which serves as a dominant source of news for nearly half of Americans under the age of 30.

 

The Deciders

The fourth dimension of authoritarianism is the control that a regime exerts over life chances: the way the state reaches deep into the lives of its subjects. The more the state serves as the principal employer, the harder it is for people to refuse to praise it, let alone speak out against it. In regime hands, housing becomes a weapon, whether via state ownership, licenses to register property ownership, or residency permits, such as in China’s urban hukou system of household registration. State-controlled education means that the authorities can deny children admission to school if a parent or family refuses to perform whatever political tasks might be demanded of them. Individuals and families begin to volunteer to serve the regime, even if they detest it, in the hopes of obtaining or retaining employment, a place to live, or educational opportunities; having a chance to vacation at state-owned resorts; or just securing a passport or an exit visa. In some ways, control over quotidian affairs empowers regimes more than their repressive apparatuses—and does not require far-reaching forms of “tech authoritarianism.”

Few states control life chances fully, of course. Black markets and corruption flourish, providing alternative spaces and options. But the more the state controls your life chances, the more the state has power over you and the less power you have. At the highest levels of such control, authoritarian states become totalitarian. They push subjugation to the maximum, incentivizing denunciations of any perceived nonconformity. Neighbor is pitted against neighbor, coworker against coworker, as the people themselves undermine the social bonds and trust that might otherwise enable a modicum of autonomy from the state.

An authoritarian regime’s control over its subjects’ life chances is yet another source of strength that also creates weaknesses—albeit fewer than do the other dimensions. The private sector can, in theory, provide a vital antidote. If you can start your own business, join others in doing so, or move freely from one private employer to another based on your qualifications and hard work, you are less subject to state control. The same holds for one’s ability to buy or rent private housing, attend nonstate schools, or form nongovernmental organizations.

Trump attending a cabinet meeting in Washington, D.C., December 2025

The U.S.-led postwar order did not fail. It succeeded. It aimed to facilitate “the rise of the rest,” and it did, spectacularly so. But the countries that built and led the order did not prepare for the predictable results of that success: a relatively smaller share of global GDP for the advanced, wealthy countries of the G-7 and a relatively larger share for everyone else, with corresponding demands for more voice. Now the global order must be updated for a new era, one in which China—a supreme beneficiary of the existing order—possesses the wherewithal, and not just the ambition, to try to supplant it.

After World War II, ordered liberty took hold across much of the world because the United States became a superpower and acted like one, for worse but also for better. Today, the demand for U.S. power is essentially unlimited: bring Ukraine into NATO, defend Taiwan, sign a security treaty with Saudi Arabia. The supply, however, is not. And so Washington must adjust. Commitments must come into alignment with capabilities. This is finally happening. As the United States necessarily (albeit erratically) rebalances its global posture to deal with new circumstances, it is possible to see the advent of what might be called middle-power horizontalism: deeper economic and security cooperation, especially among the countries of northern Europe and the Indo-Pacific. This is a highly encouraging development, partly galvanized by Trump—a kind of latticework of additional integration that does not entail displacing the United States but enhancing its ability to lead. This will be the work of a generation.

All the major authoritarian regimes have shown themselves to be committed to achieving unencumbered sovereignty by driving U.S. power from their immediate regions and collapsing Washington’s alliances. All share the goal of undermining and weakening the United States and its allies in any way they can. Despite not being subjected to aerial bombardment or amphibious invasion, open societies are under constant attack. China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and other anti-Western authoritarian regimes spread disinformation, exfiltrate confidential personnel files, purloin intellectual property, harass and sometimes abduct their own nationals on Western soil for exercising free-speech rights, pay criminals and gang members in Western societies to commit arson or sabotage, plant malware in financial, electrical, and water systems, and much more. “Peace” in the sense of that blissful time between wars has been lost. The gray zone is the new twilight zone.

Nonetheless, the future can still be shaped, and the open and secure global commons can be reinvented for another long run. The Ukrainians stood up to a full-scale Russian invasion and dragged the entire West into the fight. The Israelis knocked the teeth out of Iran’s manifold proxies and even the Islamic Republic itself, and then pulled Washington in. The Taiwanese for three consecutive elections have selected the presidential candidate most despised by the CCP. The United States can neither eliminate nor transform the Eurasian authoritarians, but it can reenergize itself and, in the process, make it harder for the authoritarians to marshal their strengths and easier for their weaknesses to hold them back. The American experiment has always had to contend with bouts of disorder, disarray, and doubt. But the United States has also periodically rediscovered and renewed itself, sometimes in profound ways, and it must do so again. Its authoritarian adversaries are displaying audacity and resolve, but the nature of their regimes always presents an opportunity: their loyalists are their true enemies within.

 

 

For updates click hompage here