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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Madison Schramm. Dr. Madison Schramm is an Associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and a non resident fellow in the reimagining U.S. grand strategy program at the Stimson Center. Today she's here to speak with us about a wonderful book that she has recently published with the Oxford University Press. The book is called why Democracies Fight Dictators. Maddie, welcome to New Books Network.
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C
Thank you so much for having me.
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B
Before we start talking about the book, could you please just briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise and more importantly, why you decided to write this book about democracy and dictators, which is a very topical subject these days.
- [02:02]
C
Yes, all too topical. So, as we mentioned, I'm an assistant professor professor at the University of Toronto. My research focuses on international security and foreign policy decision making. I finished my PhD at Georgetown University in 2019 and the dissertation was the basis for the book. And this project really came about and I think its earliest incarnation was perhaps when I was an undergraduate studying political theory. So I was reading Kant and Rousseau and thinking about Enlightenment theory and perpetual peace, and at the same time in my international relations class, I was encountering articles by folks like Mike Desch and Sebastian Rosado challenging some of the assumptions about the mechanisms underlying the democratic peace. So the democratic peace theory is this empirical relationship that democracies tend not to go to war with one another. And while we know this, we also know that democracies are just as conflict prone as non democracies. So this begs the question, who do they fight and why? Well, looking over the past 75 years, I found across 19 interstate wars, the majority of them were between democracies and personalist regimes. Personalist regimes are a type of authoritarian state where the executive holds undisputed power and prominence, and a long tradition dating back to ancient Greece. And contemporary political theory would suggest that these dictators are more dangerous because they lack higher levels of executive constraints. But interestingly, I found that it's the democracies that that disproportionately were initiating these conflicts and were choosing to resort to the use of force. At the same time, other types of non democracies weren't targeting personalist regimes anymore, suggesting that their institutional configuration isn't sufficient to explain this trend. So this got me wondering, what in fact can explain why democracies, and liberal democracies in particular, are more inclined to target personalist regimes? And I argued that this is a byproduct of a specific cognitive framework that exists within liberal democracies. And one part of that is common cognitive biases, the second is social identity, and the third is emotion. And I argue that when these combine, they tend to produce particularly explosive outcomes when conflicts of interest emerge with personalist regimes.
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B
Fascinating. And that explains the fact that you have drawn upon a number of different disciplines, political science, history, sociology, psychology, in order to be able to make that argument, that interdisciplinary approach. Am I right?
- [05:04]
C
Absolutely. I was fortunate as an undergraduate to study quite a bit of political theory. And my interests initially were actually there. And while in graduate school and while getting methods training, particularly in archival research, I learned a tremendous amount from historians, some of whom have done really extraordinary work on the cases I explore in the book. So Philip Zelikow and Ernest May's 2018 Suez deconstructed, I think, is one of the most comprehensive examples of engagement with the Suez crisis. And so I think from the history perspective, I learned a tremendous amount there. And when I was thinking about decision making and drawing on the political psychology literature, I wanted to push myself to better understand emotion and biases. And to do so, I started to engage with different strands of the psychology Research, to be honest, which first started with me reading several introductory Introduction to Psychology textbooks in the library in my third year of graduate school. But I think this really helped me think about what is a complex cognitive process in different steps, and how to not only understand how these different variables were interacting, but also explain it in a way that was cohesive.
- [06:38]
B
And when you were talking about the book at the beginning, introducing the book. So part of the argument is that these liberal democratic elites are more predisposed to get into conflict with personalist regimes, which it explained. I'll leave it to you if you want to expand on that point. Now that's, let's say, the major point of the book. The question that I'm interested in is how does this predisposition show itself in today's, maybe foreign policy decisions, especially when it comes to dictators like Putin or Kim Jong Un? People are pretty much well known these days. How does it manifest itself in these foreign policy decisions that liberal democracies make?
- [07:25]
C
Great questions. I'll start by expanding on the causal explanation. Explanation. So there are these three variables that I argue interact in this cognitive framework. So the first is these cognitive biases. So cognitive biases or heuristics or shortcuts help us make sense of complex information. And two are particularly relevant for this project. So the first is the attribution bias, which might be more familiar to listeners, or the tendency to focus blame on an individual and their personal characteristics rather than structural constraints. And the second is the vividness effect. And this predisposes us to weigh information that seems more concrete more heavily. And so combined, we can think how these might make us consider certain focal points or individual opponents to be more salient than depersonalized or abstract threats. At the same time, I argue that these conflict tendencies aren't universal. Right. They are specific to liberal democracies. And I argue it's because these cognitive biases are augmented by a particular identity, one that over the past 75 years has become debatably one of the defining features of liberal democracies foreign policy. So liberalism over the past several hundred years has taken quite a few different forms, but we can trace back a tradition of opposition to tyranny, not only in the American and French Revolution, but in early Enlightenment thought and in the past 75 years in particular since the Second World War. This situating liberal democracies fundamentally in opposition to these individual dictators has become part of the self identity of these states. And some of this emerged after the personal individual experiences of leaders who had come to Power in the Second World War, how these histories were codified in monuments, in museums, and passed down through generations. But in this way, liberal democracy and identifying these individual dictators as liberal democracy's primary opponents strengthen the tendency of the vividness effect and attribution bias oftentimes in international politics. We can explain why threat perception might be heightened or increased. So these two interacting forces can get us to increase threat perception, but I still would argue that it can explain why we get to conflict and force. So it's possible that we respond to increased threat by running in the opposite direction, right, by retrenching. And so why is it that this interaction tends to produce an increase in conflict behavior? So I argued that this is because this interaction tends to produce anger. And there are three characteristics that would lead us to believe that it would be highly salient in these contexts. So first, anger has been closely tied to attributional processes. So respondents and different experimental work have been more likely to respond to anger against a personalized opponent or threat than a depersonalized one. Secondly, anger is more likely to manifest against norm violations or others in an out group. And as I described, if this social identity has evolved to identify these personalist leaders in opposition to themselves, then these are fundamentally maybe the largest example or strongest example of outsiders, right, because they are the negative reflection of the democratic self. And lastly, anger, unlike fear, tends to produce more risk acceptance and a preference for aggressive action. And so we see this in the leader self statements of their own emotional state in the cases I look at in the book, as well as some of the content analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, I've done. Looking at these cases, we find a tremendous amount of evidence that anger was informing this, creating this cognitive process with three variables that, when combined, lead to these explosive outcomes. I'm glad you asked about how this is manifesting in today's foreign policy decisions. So I think we still very much are seeing how liberal democracies are conceptualizing the threat from these types of states, particularly personalist regimes. As you mentioned, Putin and Kim Jong Un are excellent examples, but we're also seeing democratic backsliding around the globe. And with it, I think, is the erosion of the social identity described in the book. So although we understandably have been talking quite a bit about the erosion of these democratic and liberal institutions, the social identity is very much a part of that. And oftentimes, unfortunately, in international relations, we have had a tendency to be a bit US And Eurocentric. And so oftentimes the US is the reference when we're talking about. We're talking about how our theories hold. And so I would make the case that the US, by a lot of measures, is no longer a liberal democracy. And one indication of that is the erosion of this social narrative and identity. But other liberal democracies, states that are still liberal democracies, we still very much see this in action.
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B
We'll come to this figure. You made a very good point in terms of the fact that you're seeing backsliding of democratic institutions everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, to me, the effective power of the argument that you're making is very important. I used to be a lot into affect theory myself. Can you more talk about. Yeah, Nassera Ahmed. I've read some of her works. They were not easy for me to digest because I don't come from that background. I studied literature myself, so that's where I became familiar with Africa theory. But anyway, I'm digressing that emotional imprint that democratic elites have on personalist dictators. And then part of the argument is that you kind of make them or view them as your canonical foe. Is it a new phenomenon or maybe is there some sort of historical narrative that have shaped these emotional and moral framings around these personalist regimes?
- [14:20]
C
This is a great question, and this is something I struggled quite a bit with, especially as I was writing, I think as we were starting to see more and more of this democratic backsliding. So one thing I began to look at throughout the dissertation and the book process was thinking about how historical narratives regarding liberalism and liberal identity have changed significantly over time. And so I mentioned there are some of these dimensions we can trace back, right, to early Enlightenment theory and to the American and French revolutions. At the same time, we've seen in international relations a tendency to read this identity back, I would say consistently in the historical narrative. So this tendency to oppose authoritarianism externally. And I. That has not, unfortunately, always been the case. So if we're actually to look at the interwar era is a great example of this. In the United States, there was some support for Mussolini, some admirers of Mussolini. This is the time when corporations were coming out with big products that were named after kings. So Burger King was established during this time, and the Studebaker came out with the dictator, right? And these were popular, and it's hard to imagine that these were seen as somewhat enticing. But World War II played a really large role in codifying this. But in addition to that, you see a shift in, I would say, norms regarding human rights and humanitarian intervention. Martha Finnimore has written about this. But we see that in this period, the populations in these autocratic states or opponent states became understood as victims of these dictators, rather than responsible for their crimes, necessarily. And with that shift in who deserves rights, who deserves protection, and this also is interwoven into the League of Nations and eventually the United nations, we see that the dictators become the primary focal point rather than the country writ large or the population or people. And this isn't to say that we don't still see the demonization of other populations, especially states, opponent populations, but that it has become much more common to focus or emphasize these opponent leaders. So you have normative evolution. You have this, I would say, shock or critical juncture of World War II, codifying some of these tendencies, all of which really paved the way for this identification of these individual dictators as sort of anathema to liberal democracies. And Duncan Bell, who's written extensively about the history of liberalism, has, I think, produced a lot of really interesting insights on how our understanding of liberalism today really differs from how prominent it has been in the public and academic discourse and education over the past 200 years. And so I think thinking about liberalism as a liberal social identity in this context maybe gives me a little bit of hope in this moment, because I think if we think of it and understand it seriously as something that's not static, it also means that it can move in the right direction again.
- [17:54]
B
And you're right. Yeah. And if I. And I've done a lot of podcasts on liberalism, and it's extremely difficult to come up with a definition these days, but anyway. But that could also be a source of hope, as you mentioned. And when you were speaking about the question, it was quite. To me, it was one thing that came to my mind. I'm originally from the Middle east myself. I'm from Iran. And when you talked about, when I was reading your book, and also just now, I was just reminded of Syria, for example, how everything was centered around Bashar Assad, as if he's the only problem. Well, he was, of course, big part of the problem, but now he have removed it. He's been removed. There's another guy there. I forgot his name, but he used to be wanted by the US it was a $10 million price. And now the media has kind of lost interest in Syria in that sense. Well, I don't think much has changed. There is still a lot to be unfolded, but there was a lot of emphasis just on Bashar as a person, that emotional imprint and the narratives were about him rather than the institutions, you know, that enabled him to come into power and stay in power for he and his father for. For almost half a century.
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C
Absolutely.
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B
Yeah. That's a great thing, I guess, in other countries as well. I mean, Russia.
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C
Yeah, very much so. And no, this is. Yeah, this is such a great point. A great point. And, you know, I think we absolutely saw this in the Syrian case. And I think this. You're getting at one of the dangers of this tendency, which is first that the removal or getting. Getting rid of these individual dictators is seen as the goal. And that's not sufficient for a country to. To change, for its population, to be safe, and to improve bilateral relations. So none of these things are logically follow from that. But because we attach so much to these individual leaders, and again, by no means is this a defense of them, but it's to understand that this produces a tendency to fixate on their removal. And as you said, so much of our emotion and policy goals are tied up with that, that once they're gone, even though it hasn't solved a lot of problems, we tend to lose interest. I think we saw some things that were similar with Iraq after Saddam Hussein and also after Osama bin Laden was assassinated. And it's interesting you mentioned Iran. Iran was actually, for me, one of the early puzzles that got me thinking about this book. So, as I'm sure you know, in the early 2000 and tens in New York City, where I was living at the time, there was this campaign, I think I'm not sure who the organization involved was, that had posted these billboards, a few in the subway. There was one in Times Square that had a picture of the, at the time, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a mushroom cloud next to him, saying, time to stop Iran. And I found this fascinating. At the time, I was doing a little bit of work on U.S. foreign policy toward Iran. And I knew that in Iran, especially at this point, there had been a bit of a falling out between President Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, that the institutional structure is a little bit different, but the president doesn't control foreign policy and doesn't control the nuclear program. That's the Supreme Leader, but because he's more of a religious, private actor. And so I found this really interesting. And to me, what this seemed to indicate was that this is not just about institutions. This is about perception. Because if, you know, this was all about institutions. When I looked at the Congressional Record, I found that in this period, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was mentioned about three or four times as often as the supreme Leader. And so this wasn't just a campaign or coverage. This was actually happening in elite circles. And this drove me to the book.
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B
Yeah, that's another really good example. You're right. When I sometimes to talk to my friends and say, well, look, it has absolutely nothing to do with the president. He's basically, when it comes to foreign policy, he's not more than a puppet. Even he, his minister is the funny thing, because when president of Iran has to select his ministers and his cabinet, all these ministers have to be approved by the supreme Leader. But four or five of them are directly either suggested. And when I say suggest, you got to choose them anyhow, who are appointed by the supreme leader. And one of them is the foreign minister. So without this green line, you can't have any person you wish in that position. And another thing that it may not be directly relevant to the argument of the book, but you see a lot of dictators have in the Western imagination, like Saddam Hussein, you know, who was in. He was even, even featured briefly in. He was featured, I mean, or is a replica something somebody like him in Seinfeld, even, or even Khomeini, Iran's previous leader, they have all been in the Western imagination. They are the dictators. But the current supreme leader of Iran, very few people know him in the west, so he hasn't really come into the public imagination in that sense. And the reason is that there are several layers, I guess, before you get to him. Several. He has kind of distanced himself from the politics, despite the fact that he's directly involved and he's directly making important decisions. But it's the president that is usually put forward as the face of Iran and he changes everything.
- [23:47]
C
Exactly.
- [23:48]
B
Or eight years.
- [23:49]
C
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it's such an interesting example. It's so unusual to see this, but. And again, not to advise autocratic regimes, but, you know, being a symbol domestically, I mean, this is, you know, this is kind of. I think of this as like the charismatic dilemma. You want to be, you know, a popular authority domestically, but you want to avoid being a symbol or a target potentially internationally. And I think this, how they have structured the regime, has managed to do that in some very interesting ways.
- [24:22]
B
Yeah, you're right. Let's move to the next part of the book. It's another question in the book that I have and you mentioned, and I think the example of Ahmadinejad was a perfect example. So your book shows that liberal democracies usually initiate more conflicts with these personalities, regimes rather than with autocracies. But how much of this threat is real threat or actual threat in foreign policy? How much of it is just the perception of a threat?
- [24:53]
C
So this is a little bit of a Goldilocks problem and something I struggle with quite a bit throughout the book. I would never defend, of course, the actions that were taken by Saddam Hussein. I think Nasser is a little bit of an easier example. So in the Suez crisis, when we're talking about the threat that Nasser posed, absolutely a material one to the United Kingdom with his nationalization of the canal. But for the United States, I mean, debatably, because he wasn't going to play ball with Ben Gurion, this was, I think, and this is where a lot of the change in policy on the US side started. It's hard to make the case that this was a significant threat to the United States, let alone an existential threat. And for the United Kingdom. One of the most interesting things I found in the archival work was a post mortem that was produced by the Foreign Office, I believe, in 1957. And one of the things they say is that that went wrong with their policy during the crisis was that they were unable to decouple their interests in the Canal from Nasser individually. And so it's a challenge to say that this is purely driven by these images and social identity and has nothing to do with material interests. There are always some material interests at stake. Otherwise there's unlikely to be a tremendous amount of engagement one way or the other. At the same time, how much we weigh or value those things is going to be saturated with norms and identity. So these material interests or objective interests that we like to think of in that way are oftentimes colored significantly right by these norms and values. So the power transition or the nuclear program doesn't threaten us. Similarly, in every country, if we're talking about the perspective of the United States, for example, right, we're not as concerned about certain nuclear programs, right, or the possession of weapons as we are with other states. We're not concerned about some of the things our allies might be doing. And so we can't just look to these material issues. And I think we see this again in the Gulf War with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Again, there were some material interests there, but even some of the internal reports and discussions I saw from the State Department and others indicated that they didn't think of oil as the most significant reason. And in fact, one of the low benefit reasons for intervention, the attachment really was to Saddam Hussein. Individually and we see this sometimes because these leaders make trade offs oftentimes sacrificing something we would assume to be a higher material interest in order to pursue the ousting of these leaders.
- [27:59]
B
And the shift is sometimes quite interesting. Like with Saddam Hussein during Iran and Iraq war he was supported by all the countries that attacked him. Didn't go for. So everything suddenly changed.
- [28:13]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [28:18]
B
Something popped up in my mind when we were talking about this. I forgot I might remember it again. But let me ask you another question and you're. When I ask this question I'm sometimes not really comfortable myself because I know that how they could easily be misinterpreted. So I'm happy that you're making. It's. It's. It's not about defending the dictator, it's about seeing how these conflicts play out or how the perception is really perceived. And I understand I'm from Iran, I understand I might be biased when I'm spy and I'm completely against nuclear program but the fact that my family has been personally affected by all these sanctions and the fact that the west has been talking about this nuclear threat for over 20 years now, there might be some justification in that. I don't think it's. I don't think it rises in a close to developing a nuclear bomb. But this threat, you know, keeps. Let me put it this way. In 2015 when Iran signed a nuclear deal with with the west, everything went away. All those reports that Iran is a month or something close to. I think it was a bit of a manufactured crisis and now it's all coming back again. It's all coming back again. I think it was just a few hours ago United Nation there was a resolution they were trying to kind of get. Suspend the rinse rinsed the bringing back of the sanctions. It was not. It didn't get the vote. But anyway I'm just thinking that a lot of it is just manufacture crisis as well. Which brings me to the point of parts of your book which is about perception of threat and actual threat. Anyway, let me ask you another question which is about the civilizational framing when it comes to these conflicts. And I do remember was not that old but I do remember when there was Iran when the United States attacked Iraq in early 2000 after September 11, Iraq, that country was a new country. But that region with that rich history, it was all erased. And the picture of Saddam Hussein became synonymous with Iraq, its history, its legacy. The same thing happened in Afghanistan. I guess Afghanistan became synonymous with Osama bin Laden semiotically speaking, they were attacking Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, but not the culture or the history or the people of those regions. But I'm interested to know, in these conflicts, how does this civilizational framing and emotional response shape this collation of the conflict?
- [30:49]
C
This is a great question. So in the book, in the first chapter, when I lay out the theory, one of the things I try to do is going back to some of this early Enlightenment thought, and particularly some of some of the work by Kant and Locke, is actually identify these civilizational discourses within these canonical works. And so by civilizational, the idea is that there is a status of structures that confer status, a status hierarchy. And oftentimes the civilized is juxtaposed with the barbarous or the barbarian. And one of the things we can read specifically in some of Kant's work is this idea that we have to create the conditions for enlightenment in order to civilize these states. And so there's also a little bit of this imperative that it is the moral responsibility of these now liberal states of these states to actually go in and create the conditions under which these states can be civilized. And we see this, as well as some of these other prominent thinkers work on things like the colony of Carolina and, you know, their support for fairly imperial projects. And so if we read the civil civilizing project within liberalism, and I think other scholars have done this very well, Uri Mehta's book, Liberalism, Liberalism as Empire, it's horrible, I should know offhand, is a great example of this. But we can really read the civilizing process or these civilizational discourses within the history of liberal thought. And this is something that I argue hasn't gone away. And so it's much like these other characteristics of liberalism. It is not been static over time, but it's something that very much contributes and reinforces this social identity of this barbarous other. And so when we talk about removing these dictators, the idea is that this will remove the structures that are inhibiting enlightenment and civilization will bloom. And we see this explicitly, oftentimes in some of the statements very recently that policymakers and analysts have used to describe some of these dictators, even though we also know from history we don't have to do much digging to know about all the, you know, terrible and imperial things that this type of discourse has portended. But I would argue that this type of civilizational discourse has really been implicated in liberalism and in the story I'm telling, particularly in the last 75 years. And so the barbarous other, rather than these large populations, came to be represented as these individual dictators.
- [33:49]
B
And this kind of narrative, as you rightly mentioned, manifest itself when you watch the news on television. All these conflicts are described as it's a conflict for democracy. You want to bring those target countries back to the civilized world and all that kind of discourse about civilization. Yeah. And I guess, and that's, I guess that's a perfect segue to my next question, because liberal democratic identity also plays a role in justifying these military interventions. It's not easy to justify spending a lot of money, sending your troops halfway around the world to get involved in a conflict. But what role does that democratic identity, liberal democratic identity, play in justifying these conflicts?
- [34:34]
C
Absolutely. So in the Gulf War, the civilizational framing really situated Saddam Hussein, as you mentioned, as this barbarous other. And I think this democratic identity, what it has done or what has done in liberal democracies, it has created an understanding of the, say, foreign policy modus operandi as being, you know, engaging in conflict, targeting dictators, supporting democracy. And so there is a universalizing aspect to this as well, which we tend to see with different types of civilizational discourses that gives it a very strong moral component. So as I mentioned. Right. Thinking about some of these early thinkers, but how this has been embedded in contemporary identity, this is seen as not just any component of social identity, but a deeply moral one. And so framing it in this way, I don't want to say justifies, is an attempt. If I say it, it's an attempt to justify. I think that gives the impression that I think this was being done insincerely. And I think maybe one of the more controversial arguments I make in the book is that I believe this is sincere, that this is sincerely believed by generations of policymakers, that this is a duty, this is something good we are doing for the world. And so it's motivated by this underlying identity that has a deep moral core.
- [36:11]
B
And they sometimes. I agree with you that some of these politicians truly believe what they're doing is justified and right. And it's sometimes shrouded in a religious language as well. Like with George W. Bushen, you think? Yeah, and also for the other side of the conflict as well, some of it was like Osama bin Laden. He might have truly believed in what he was doing, that he was doing the right thing. But anyway, let us talk about, we'll be talking about how the liberal democracies view these canonical foes, let's say. But like Saddam was saying here, as an Example. But how about non democracies? How did they view these so called canonical foes from their perspective? Did they consider them to be an existential threat the same way that liberal democracies did? Maybe I'm more talking about the Eastern bloc, the terrorism, that side, how they did perceive these people differently from liberal democracies.
- [37:17]
C
Interesting. So in the book I look in the Suez crisis, it's a bit of a different example within the region. You know, Nasser, of course was extremely popular, especially among populations in different countries, sometimes less so among their leaders. And his action in nationalizing the Canal. Because this was an invading, right, A sovereign neighbor. And he hadn't been to war with another state recently. Or he had, but not one that might have a non democracy, let's say, you know, because of this. I think a harder case for the theory is the first Gulf War because Saddam Hussein had been engaged in the eight year war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988 and in 1990 invaded sovereign Kuwait. Right. And as we know, troops, US and coalition troops were initially stationed in Saudi Arabia, Operation Desert Shield before going into liberate Kuwait in early 1991. And so how did these neighboring states, given that Saddam Hussein had also first attacked Iran in 1980 and then invades Kuwait in 1990? So one of the interesting things that I found looking at the secondary literature coverage, journal articles, was that the logic for these different states either supporting or opposing the coalition action in going into Kuwait were quite diverse. Some were more material, some I would say the Soviet Union's collapsing at this point. And there were statements from Gorbachev along the lines of we kind of have to go along with the Americans right now. But they shared in what they lacked, which was this focus on Saddam Hussein as an existential threat. So even in Saudi Arabia in the early days was interested in putting together a group to solve this. At the regional level, we see some states, including the monarchies, who, particularly after the conflict was over, opposed the really strong sanctions regime supported by the United States. And in fact some of this opposition is why we saw the fragmentation of the coalition before the 2003 invasion. There's this great exchange I found between Gorbachev and H.W. bush in the lead up to Desert Storm, where H.W. bush says something to the effect of well, if this were Hitler, would we let him get away with it? And Gorbachev says just plainly it's not the same situation. So we also see how these other states are looking at the US and the UK and some of these other liberal democracies and their invocation of these analogies to World War II and existential threats. And they're having trouble understanding this framing of the conflict in part because they don't see it in the same terms. At the same time, we know that a number of states did support the coalition, as I mentioned, some of this was driven by material interests, some of it was other opposition to, you know, Iraq as a regional hegemon. But rarely did they focus, I would say if ever was the focus on Saddam Hussein as the single existential threat animating the conflict.
- [40:48]
B
It's unfortunate, it's a fact, fact you're mentioning, but it's sometimes depressing as well when you beauties. And I think you can also see it in the right now as well in the east where you know, China, North Korea, lots of those countries in the global south. And a couple of weeks ago they all got together in China. How? You know, I don't think more than 80% of those leaders have not really been democratic, elected by their own people, but they're in power anyhow. A question. Maybe it's a question, a reflection in the future as well. Your book is about how foreign policy in liberal democracy's foreign policy is shaped by psychological and also identity driven factors. Not completely, but part of it is driven by those psychological factors. And nowadays in the world we have a lot of problems. There is rising the rise of right wing populist movements, democratic backsliding, wars and conflict. And people can even see how liberal democracies have double standard when it comes to. No, I'm thinking of a conflict between Israel and Palestine right now. How Israel gets away with lots of crimes they're committing which would have never ever been tolerated if it were committed by one of those personalist regimes. But I'm thinking how, how should we rethink the moral and strategic foundations of democratic foreign policy? And how much do you think foreign policy of current world global powers, liberal democracies will still continue to be driven by the same factors? I know I'm all over the place, but I'm trying to bring it all.
- [42:40]
C
No, this is. Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts. I appreciate that. Well, this is a great question and I think a critical one. So you know, one thing, maybe the most important thing I would say is that in thinking about this rising populism and democratic backsliding, I'm hoping that this gently, the book gently suggests that in defining liberal and social democratic identity primarily vis a vis these external foreign tyrants or individual dictators, externally I think there has been a drift in focus from the potential for these things to emerge domestically. I think authoritarianism remains a very real threat. But I think today a lot of that threat to democracies is emerging within their own countries. And I think in defining themselves so strongly by their actions outside their border, some of this may have been lost in the mix. I think secondly, that as I mentioned earlier, often the logical prescription for when these individual leaders come to represent an existential threat is regime change, is policies that are designed to overthrow them or oust them. I make the case that this was what was pursued by Anthony Eden in the UK against Nasser, along with the Israelis and the French, but that the United States was also pursuing a variety of different tactics to covertly erode or oust or remove Nasser in 1990. Even though the focus on most retellings of the conflict don't look specifically at attempts to oust Saddam Hussein, we know that he was very much made a target. And in fact, some in Washington didn't think of this as a true victory because he remained in power. Margaret Thatcher, in any interview for Frontline after the war said she, you know, didn't think everyone had the right information and, you know, there might have been some missteps because ultimately Saddam Hussein is still in power. And so we see that this becomes the symbol of success or failure in the context of these conflicts. And I would argue that this drove the United States and British Middle east policy in some ways until Nasser's death, various machinations trying to force him from power. And in the case of the Gulf War, we saw actually regime change become the formal policy of the United States in 1998. And this continued on until 2003. And as we've seen in the past, you know, over 20 years of US wars in the region, this has had disastrous consequences. Alex Downs, who's a professor at George Washington, recently published a book called Catastrophic Success that looks at foreign imposed regime change. And I think one of the big takeaways and really important takeaways from his book is that these rarely produce any improvement in bilateral relation. So in addition to destabilizing these states and regions, these often aren't even doing anything for the individual interests of these states. And I think lastly, in a period of democratic backsliding and a rise of these charismatic strongmen, we need to think about the narratives, as I mentioned earlier. So again, this emphasis is understandably on institutions and I think democracies and liberal democracies. We need to be concentrating on shoring these up, on strengthening them strengthening the rule of law. But there's also a important part here played by social identity and social narratives. One of the things we heard from the Trump administration when they came to power, before they made any significant changes with regard to policy, you know, were there plans to do just this before the institutions changed? And part of this is a byproduct of the fact that that Trump himself and quite a few in his administration were socialized radically differently than the modal foreign policy elite in Washington. They don't seem to hold the same ideas and the same narratives. And so I think we shouldn't underestimate this dimension of foreign policy. And I'll say one of the I think a lot of the suggestions I would make to improve foreign policy decision making and not fall trapped to some of the cognitive rigidity and emphasis kind of black and white thinking that I think tends to dominate when discussing these individual autocratic leaders is similar to a lot of the recommendations made in the political psychology leader, political psychology scholarship. So we want to have advisors and folks in the room with diverse opinions. We want to make sure they aren't experiencing groupthink. You want to make sure that we have experts, especially area experts, involved in these conversations. So we've been talking about Iran earlier and some of the, you know, striking misconceptions about the authority structure. I think this is extremely important. And oftentimes these folks have been sidelined. But these are also the people that are going to have a really sophisticated understanding of what happens if you oust the sitting leader or if you pursue conflict. And also different types of tactics, short of conflict, that might work to improve relations or resolve the conflict of interest. And so I think relying on area experts is something that, you know, I'm a big fan of. I really think would, if they were included, seriously, would play an important role here.
- [48:24]
B
That's right. But unfortunately, a lot of politicians are kind of deaf to these things. And when it comes to Iran politics, I do remember a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago, there was an article published somewhere in the New York Times by an Iranian American political scientist who said that, which was about the crisis of expertise in US Administration when it comes to dealing with Iran. And I'm guessing it's more or less the same with many other countries as well. Before we just end the podcast, I know that you've just published this book and it takes a long time to write a book, but I'm wondering if there's any other project, any other books you have that you might expect sometime.
- [49:01]
C
Soon I finished a short book with a colleague of mine that actually looks at patterns in US Foreign and post regime change operations during the Cold War, which was we did a lot of qualitative work on this and I think really helped refine some of my understanding as I was working on this, I'm sorry, starting work on a couple of different projects that I would say invert the puzzle here. So one, thinking about, rather than these threats associated with individual foreign dictators, thinking about what the lack of that enemy image pretends for. Things like the climate emergency or health pandemics, threats that don't lend themselves to being personalized or anthropomorphized in the same way and how this might affect our ability to respond emotionally in the same way and thus I think our mobilization against them. In addition to this, I'm interested in continuing to think about how threats are personalized and I'll say on the flip side of that, how interpersonal close relations and personalization can, in the complete opposite direction, actually lead to improved relations. So there's been some great work looking at how the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev or face to face meetings actually might improve trust. There's work in the psychology literature called the identifiable victim effect, which looks at how having an individual image and narrative can actually increase empathy. So one of the most interesting things regarding personal personalizing, I guess, is in this book I'm clearly talking about how this can increase threat perception, but there's also more research looking at how this can function on the other side. And so I'm interested in looking at the whole spectrum of this and kind of bringing these two sides together and thinking about the different effects that personalizing can have, both in terms of things like increasing empathy and trust and on the other hand, increasing threat. So that's something I'm looking forward to digging into soon.
- [51:17]
B
All fascinating topics and I certainly hope to be able to speak with you sometime soon again about your new works on New Books Network. Thank you very much for your time, Maddie. It was a wonderful book and I strongly recommend it to our listeners. Why Democracies Fight dictators, published in 2025 by Oxford University Press.
- [51:38]
C
Thank you so much. It was wonderful to speak with you.