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- [00:01]
Lawfare Host
The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad free version of the Lawfare Podcast.
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Scott R. Anderson
Become a material supporter of lawfare@patreon.com lawfare that's patreon.com Lawfair also check out Lawfare's.
- [00:20]
Lawfare Host
Other podcast offerings, Rational Security, Chatter, Lawfare.
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Scott R. Anderson
No Bull and the Aftermath.
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Lawfare Host
To get.
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- [01:48]
Carolyn Quinnett
I'm Carolyn Quinnett, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for March 23, 2025. In the two months since President Donald Trump took office, his campaign promises have manifested in attacks on pillars of democracy, with some warning of a shift towards authoritarianism and perhaps autocracy. For today's Archive episode, I selected an episode from March 21, 2023, in which Scott R. Anderson sat down with Charles Dunst, author of Defeating the Dictator, which explores the rise of autocracy worldwide and how democracies can combat it. They discussed how to make democracies more effective, the importance of Singapore as a case study, and how domestic remedies translate into foreign policy.
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Scott R. Anderson
I'm Scott R. Andersen, and this is.
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Charles Dunst
The Lawfare Podcast for March 21, 2020 23. By many accounts, the United States is living through a new era of competition, not just between major powers and strategic rivals, but between ideologies around the world. Many authoritarian governments seem to be on the rise, even as many liberal democracies are facing a crisis of confidence, including by some accounts, here in the United States. In a new book entitled Defeating the Dictators, charles Dunst, a former journalist and current deputy director of research and analytics.
- [03:15]
Scott R. Anderson
At the Asia Group, lays out what.
- [03:17]
Charles Dunst
He sees as the right strategy for making democracies more effective and defeating the appeal of authoritarian government.
- [03:23]
Scott R. Anderson
I sat down with him to discuss.
- [03:24]
Charles Dunst
His new book, the importance he places on Singapore as a case study and how the domestic remedies he focuses on translate into foreign policy. It's the Lawfare podcast for March 21st. Charles Dunst on Defeating the Dictators.
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Scott R. Anderson
So, Charles, let me start with this, which is with you as the author. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you ended up arriving at this topic and making this question of defeating the dictators the focus of such a wide ranging and broad project that you've been working on obviously for a good amount of time now.
- [04:01]
Lawfare Host
Well, thanks, Scott. And I think for me, this came out of years living and working in a variety of countries on kind of a variety on a broad spectrum when it comes to democracy and autocracy. Where I lived in Hungary in 2017, which I personally put somewhere closer to autocracy than democracy at this point. And then I was a foreign correspondent in Cambodia, which has been essentially a one party hardened autocracy for the better part of four decades. And in those countries, living in those countries, talking to people in those countries and then traveling around the region, whether in Central and Eastern Europe that was going to Romania or whether in Southeast Asia that was going to Vietnam and Singapore at a time when the west in particular was really struggling in moments kind of in the Trump era or at moments kind of after Brexit, where people were sitting in Hanoi or sitting in Phnom Penh and saying, well, maybe, maybe Western democracy is no longer the model. Maybe there's something else out there. And when you travel enough around Southeast Asia in particular, but kind of, maybe even the Pacific Islands, Asia more broadly, people are no longer necessarily talking about Korea and Japan and the United States as the model. It's much more so about, well, we want China's double digit growth rates or we want Singapore's really effective governance. I think Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The newish president of the Philippines, has said on more than one occasion that he wants to be like Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father, and deliver for his people. And of course not not mentioning the fact that Lee Kuan Yew was an autocrat. And when you travel around the Middle east, as I have in recent years, the. The example that comes up there is the UAE People go to Dubai or Abu Dhabi as laborers, as migrant workers, and go back to Egypt or go back to Jordan and think, well, why doesn't my country look like that? Why, why are we not following that model? So I think that's really what this came out of for me, was spending time as a foreign correspondent, as a traveler, talking to people around the world, around the developing world in particular, and kind of really getting that notion that it felt like the Western democratic model or the liberal democratic model had fallen out of favor a little bit and thinking, well, what can we do at home to make sure that our democracies are the model once again? Because I think serving as that model and making sure that when the intelligentsia in Hanoi or the intelligentsia maybe in Cairo thinks about what do I want my country to look like in 20 to 30, 40 years, that that answer is, in one way or another, a democracy. And certainly a potential Vietnamese democracy would not look like the United Kingdom's exactly, or does not need to look like exactly like the United States is. Exactly. But you do want a bit of liberalism in there, at least. I do. I think the world would be better off if there are more democracies. So that was kind of pillar one of the book. And pillar two was, of course, as. As an American who was born and raised in the United States and spent the overwhelming majority of my life here, but then also as someone who lived in the United Kingdom and travels back to the United Kingdom fairly frequently. And you think of these two very rich, powerful democracies that both in recent years, for a variety of reasons, seem to be faltering. And even when you go to Germany, if you talk to South Koreans, levels of trust in their. Those democratic governments is way down over the last 10 to 15, 20 years. So pillar two of the book is basically thinking, well, how do we make our democracies so so much more functional at home that to basically stifle the autocratic impulse, how do we make sure that the system's working well enough that people don't turn around in democracies and vote for something else? Vote someone who might come in and do away with the liberal institutions that are so. That are so necessary for democracy? So it really is about, A, making sure democracy is a model, and B, making sure democracy can be strong where it already exists.
- [07:49]
Scott R. Anderson
So you spend a lot of time in this book on one particular Case study. You have a lot of case studies throughout, but one in particular comes back and opens the book comes back throughout. There are parts where it really reads almost like a little bit like a love letter to this particular country, although you're also always careful to then caveat it by noting downsides. This particular country, particularly on the political expression and democracy values sort of perspective, and that's Singapore. Tell us a bit about what made Singapore such a singularly central example in this broader set of questions you're examining and why you keep coming back to it time and time again.
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Lawfare Host
I wanted to spend time on Singapore not only because I've spent a fair bit of time there and it is really striking. At the time I made that trip I was living in Cambodia. And Cambodia is one of probably in the poorest fifth of the world. And when you jump from Phnom Penh to Singapore, you feel like you've kind of lost your mind and not exactly sure where you are. So I wanted to make that point clear. And I've just lived, spent enough time in Singapore. But also what was really striking to me about Singapore in comparison to some of the other rich, also quasi functional powerful autocracies like Saudi Arabia, like the United Arab, United Arab Emirates, is that Singapore has no real natural resources. Singapore did not find tons of oil in the ground and use that oil to build a really rich autocracy like the UAE or like Saudi Arabia, Singapore's investment or Singapore's resources were and remain its people. The government invested really, really strongly in building human capital all the way up from early stage education to funding their exceptional students to study both at top tier Singaporean universities, but also at Oxford or at Harvard in the West. And I spent so much time in Singapore, kind of for that reason, because it is the exception. Singapore is the exception in, in terms of an autocracy that basically managed to make itself rich and powerful and functional despite having no natural resources. And the other reason I think of Singapore as an exception is it's probably the only one with good governance to the extent that the system does not need to be ripped apart to kind of fix it. Whereas if you think about China or the UAE or Saudi Arabia, I would argue that those autocratic systems are quasi functional most of the time. But if you wanted to implement proper transparency or proper anti corruption initiatives, the system would kind of collapse because those systems are to one extent or another built on patronage. They're not so meritocratic, whereas democracies at our best can be both of those things. So I thought about Singapore as this exception because to me, it is the most functional and the most kind of captivating of the autocracies I've been to, at least particularly when you think about the the uae. And I do want to make clear, and as you kind of alluded to, I definitely do not think the United States should become Singapore. And this is something I've had to say in a few other radio or podcast interviews or TV interviews. It's no, Singapore does a bunch of things really well, but when it comes down to it, Singapore does not innovate at the rate of the democracies in the region or democracies like the United States. There are a ton of social policies from Singapore that I personally are very troubling for a variety of issues that are really problematic for the LGBT community in particular, and not without even getting to the migrant worker issue. So Singapore has these bits of good governance that I think people maybe outside of the foreign policy space wouldn't expect, certainly. But I do not think Singapore is a model for the United States or for the United Kingdom in a broad way, but it really is a captivating country. And something I would say just really quickly is when I've done a bunch of book events in the United States, United Kingdom, and Maybe there are 100 people in the audience and I ask someone to, I say, well, how many of you have been to Singapore, the UAE or Saudi Arabia? And maybe, I don't know, 50, 50% of people raise their hands and I say, how many of you thought Abu Dhabi or Singapore or Riyadh worked better than your, the city you currently live in, whether that's London, Washington or New York. And the same 50% raised their hands. So that's why I thought about Singapore, because it's the problem of people going there and thinking this autocratic system works better than my democratic system.
- [12:01]
Scott R. Anderson
That's really interesting. I will say. I lived in Abu dhabi, I guess 15, almost 20 years ago now, and I'm not sure I would come away at that conclusion. But I'm not surprised to hear people there more recently may feel a little differently. And it may say something about the trajectory of places like particularly the UAE in the last few years. Your book really kind of centers itself around a number of issue set case studies, you know, where you pick out particular policy areas that you identify as being key to strengthening democracy, making democracies more effective in ways that, as I think you described it, kind of counteract the authoritarian impulse, basically do things well as a democracy that authoritarian government might claim to do well otherwise. And they tend to be a variety of things kind of in the domestic space. There's questions about meritocracy, there's questions about humanity and capital. But let's zoom in on a few of these to give a kind of sense of your analysis and how they fit in. And I want to focus on three that are probably most up the lawfare alley for our listeners by the most relevance to stuff we often talk about here. The first of those is accountability, which I take to mean rule of law. Plus not just rule of law, but also rule of law and kind of supporting values and institutions like transparency and effective government. Tell us a little bit about how you think of this accountability demand and its relationship to this autocracy versus democracy divide.
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Lawfare Host
Sure. I mean on the accountability front, I always joke that I think the most obvious example is kind of on a slightly silly issue, but it was both the UK and the US where during COVID you would have politicians across the spectrum put down harsh Covid rules saying please don't not please, but do not leave your homes, do not hold fun events with more than three or four people, keep it to one household, and then would turn around and host those exact same events. And of course, Boris Johnson in the UK was the. Was the clear example. And it did feel as if he kind of got off essential for a while until he lost it, lost power for I would say, unrelated reasons that he kind of got off scot free. Whereas if you were a normal person, if you were not a politician, you probably would have faced a fine or something to that extent. And that somewhat silly scenario was indicative to me of the sense when you travel around the democratic world, that people do feel like there are two sets of laws. They feel like there are laws for the normal people and there are laws for the political elite and perhaps even the business elite. And I think that's really, really damaging for system democracy that is premised on equality under the law, where if people do not think that their systems are providing equality, I don't think it's hard for me to understand why they might not trust that government so much or why they would be receptive to a message like drain the swamp. So that's how I thought about accountability. And I think in the United States in particular, those problems are stemming from issues of course like money and politics, the complete lack of transparency about what that entails. It stems from the fact that sitting members of Congress are still allowed to trade stocks. And even if they're doing so legally and fully above board it does fuel this perception that these people are making some kind of insider trades and they're getting rich off their time in Congress when the normal people are struggling, particularly in times of economic downturn. And it only fuels that distrust or that mistrust and that sort real concern for me. And I think you have this somewhat opposite angle in some of some of these autocracies that crack down incredibly hard on any appearance of corruption. Oftentimes those veer into the political, as has happened in Vietnam recently where the General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party ousted the president over a corruption scandal that seems a little bit politically motivated, if not, if not more entirely politically motivated. But it's that perception of that the government is moving so hard against corruption and is holding people accountable both for corruption but also for incompetence or for negligence that does help play a role in boosting Vietnamese trust in government. And I think part of the reason why democracies have struggled is the opposite. And something I say in the book is that France and South Korea get half the equation right, and that they're not so afraid to take former leaders to court for corruption, particularly in South Korea. But I say only half the equation right, because South Korea has pardoned, I think four, if not, I believe the last four presidents, all convicted of corruption one way or another, were all pardoned at some point. And that, sure, you get half the equation right, in that you are convicting them in the first place. But the pardon sends the message of, well, look at this person, this elite, powerful person getting off in a way that a normal person wouldn't. And one example I would point out, that's actually positive and comes from a slightly, slightly unusual country, I would say, when we're talking about strength of democracies is Malaysia, where former Prime Minister Najib Razak was sentenced to a long time in prison for his participation on the one MDB scandal and for about six, seven months has been parading kind of requesting that the UN step in. He's been pushing for a part, a pardon from the King and it hasn't happened. And I think no one really expected that, that Malaysia, which is a democracy, but one really kind of hurt at times by its really complex politics. There have been a bunch of prime ministers in recent years. It's hard for a coalition to stay together, so it's hard for them to deliver. Nonetheless decided we're going to hold this ex prime minister accountable for a huge corruption scandal. So that to me is a little bit of a signal or of a suggestion of what Western democracies and even Japan and South Korea, thinking broader west might, might want to emulate moving forward.
- [17:55]
Scott R. Anderson
So it's kind of an interesting contrast here, right, Because I think when you think of authoritarian government, actually accountability at the top is not something we associate with it. So I'm curious to see or you frame it as this kind of comparative advantage, like the uae, a case study which maybe just doesn't fit as well for this particular theme, has a long record of actually pretty poor accountability for people in the royal family or in the upper echelons. Is it, is it really a difference of across autocracy and democracies here, or is it really a matter of perhaps having such narrow elites in some of these autocracies that you can have accountability, go pretty high up in terms of people in economic power. But I don't know if that extends to people truly in control, at least in a lot of these cases. Why is this, why is this such an endemic, do you see this as such an endemic thing in these two types of government?
- [18:45]
Lawfare Host
So I definitely agree with you that autocracies are not more accountable. Absolutely not. And it's a point I try to make extensively throughout the book, that even when we talk about the singapores or the UAE's of the world, they are the exceptions among a system of governments that are decidedly not accountable, that 90% of them do not deliver good governance. But I think your point about power extending to such a high upper Shalon that you can kind of exclude the royal family in the uae, for instance, from accountability, but the public still thinks that most of the government is being accountable, where I think that's definitely true in the uae. It's definitely true to some extent in Vietnam where there are certain echelons of power that won't be held accountable even for corruption or even for incompetence. And that is of course, the number one problem of an autocracy, that if you have a leader at the top and you're saying, well, we're going to give you all this power and we're going to hope that you deliver good governance, but we have no way of ousting you, you're really betting that that person is going to be a Lee Kuan Yew, which 99% of the time that person is not. I mean, that's the whole problem of autocracy is that once a person's in power, they can essentially do whatever they want with very limited checks and balances and they will not be held accountable for that. So it is one of these massive flaws of autocracy. But when you talk to ordinary people in Vietnam, they are, that is a corruption weary country. Corruption pervades every day of life. But they are very pleased at times when their government takes strong action against, whether it's outright corruption in terms of stealing money or whether it's in terms of incompetence in managing an oil rig or something like that. There's pleasure with the government for taking action against it. So certainly autocracies are not more accountable than democracies are. But it's the ability to demonstrate some type of big action to hold people accountable that does win a fair amount of public trust.
- [20:39]
Scott R. Anderson
So let's go on to the second point here. Infrastructure, the three that, that I want to dig in on. This is kind of, I think a little bit more of a familiar one. People can anticipate where this is going, which is you really make the case for a pretty strong investment, I guess, in public goods, infrastructure being kind of the main public good we're thinking about. Although you also mentioned things like cybersecurity, which is infrastructure, but kind of infrastructure plus. Right. Like a variety of other policies that support the security of infrastructure. Tell us again a little bit how that fits into this picture and why this is an area where you see this competitive advantage with autocracies that democracies need to sort of of find a way to, to compete and rival that effectiveness or efficiency.
- [21:23]
Lawfare Host
Well, I think the infrastructure bit is important on two levels. One level is infrastructure drives economic growth not only in terms of economic downturn, when the state can roll out a bunch of funds to employ people and basically that fuels consumption and all of that is good for the economy. But also when you think about the current cities of London or Paris, they are the wealthy cities. They are because the Romans built roads to them thousands of years ago and basically enabled these big capital cities to become the global hubs they are today because they had infrastructure. And it's one thing I think about very frequently where if you don't have effective infrastructure connecting not only your big cities, but connecting the whole country or you know, your countryside to your capital, it's going to be very hard to deliver economic growth. And I think studies across the democratic world have shown this, where I think the study out of Australia was that if, if infrastructure is not improved to account for population growth in some of these capital cities or some of these bigger cities, it's going to eventually cost the government a ton of money. So you're going to have to pay now or you're going to have to pay later. And that's kind of part one on infrastructure is it drives economic growth. But also getting to this model point, I think it's, unless you maybe live in Japan, I guess if you travel to again, Singapore or a city in China like Shenzhen and return home to Washington or New York or Los Angeles, many people are going to turn around and say, well, why do those autocracies have better infrastructure than I do? Why is the Singapore Metro so much better than the D.C. metro? So investing in infrastructure at home not only fuels economic growth in a very positive way, but it does play a real role in making sure that democracies look like models that it looks like we can deliver. And on infrastructure that includes not only fixing the things that are broken. I mean, I think the, the unfortunate anecdote was when Biden was rolling out his infrastructure plan, the big bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed the day or the day before. And it was kind of this, this moment that was harder. It was, it would have been a harder to find a really helpful image to paint the decay of American infrastructure. And studies show it over and over again that American infrastructure is among the worst in the advanced democratic world. It is certainly worse than most European infrastructure. And it makes me laugh whenever I go to London and my British friends complain about the tube not being great and the tube being old. I'm saying, well, the tube's great compared to DC or compared to New York where I grew up. So I think investment is not only about fixing those existing problems, about rebuilding the bridges that have broken, but making sure we're thinking about future focused infrastructure and that we're actually planning for what infrastructure we're going to need in 10 to 15 years. And as you, as you noted, that is cybersecurity. It is making sure that when we put things on the cloud that we're actually training people to know how to protect them or that we're investing in the cybersecurity for things that are now connected to the, to the cloud. And it includes things like rolling out high speed Internet to rural parts of the country. And that's not just in the, I mean, it's a problem in the United States, but it's also a problem throughout the European Union where it gets more and more difficult to access high speed Internet as you get further away from capital or big cities because it's just not profit. Doesn't make sense in terms of profit for many private companies to think, well, I'm going to build a ton of fiber optic cables into the north of England or into the parts of the American Midwest that are not necessarily. I'm never going to make my money back in terms of subscribers. And that's something where the government will need to step in and either push the private sector or offer some incentives to the private sector. And every country, every country's politics and policies are going to look different on that front. But I tried to give over overriding goals of what type of infrastructure needs to be built and how can we go about it, even if the exact process or the exact decision is going to be different based on different politics.
- [25:15]
Scott R. Anderson
That's actually a good transition to our third of these topics, which is the immigration focus, because it is again, kind of this forward looking perspective that you make this a case for the fact that we need to have a more affirmative openness to immigration in part to continue population flows, expertise, make up for demographic changes, and provide essentially the human resources, or at least one major type of human resources. You also talk about human capital separately, but one kind of avenue for that, for these sorts of growth. It is another pillar of both economic growth and effectiveness. Bring that in again, because that's actually again, something pretty interesting you think about. The UAE has a very unique approach to immigration, if you can call it immigration. Right. There's fairly little actual citizenship immigration. You have a lot of people who come there for extended periods, maybe pseudo permanently on an economic basis, working for, you know, the state, but they don't benefit from the same set of state resources that true Emiratis do. And then you have a whole kind of another class, kind of a subclass of people who are brought in to do labor on often fairly problematic terms and difficult terms, at least from the perspective of many, in terms of labor rights and standards of treatment while they're in the country and they're usually there relatively short term and come back, although lots of people come back and forth. Singapore strikes me as much bigger in that middle group than the lower group, although I could be wrong about that, having not spent much time there myself. How does immigration fit in this picture again? What role is it playing in autocracies? And why is it necessary we take a really different tack in democracies to compete with that?
- [27:00]
Lawfare Host
Sure. I mean, I think when I think about Singapore, I would agree with you that it is somewhere in the middle ground. And I was recently in the UAE and I wrote a piece about this, the kind of, I think I called it a bleak picture of an unending caste system. When you think about immigration, or I guess migration is the Way I would put it in terms of the uae, where I met this guy who, super nice, had been there 30 years as a cab driver and all he wanted to do was go back to Pakistan, but the money in the UAE was too good. But he as 65 year old man was living in one room with four other men. They all have wives and children back at home and they there's no hope for citizenship in the uae. There's no hope for accessing the rights of what one might think of, if not even citizenship, if permanent, even if of permanent residency, there's no hope for that. And that to me is a very clear demonstration of the difference between autocracies and democracies on this front. Where even when people do want to go and work in these autocracies, mainly in the Gulf and mainly in Singapore, there are not only no opportunities for them to stay, but poll after poll has showed for years that if you actually ask, would it be migrants, where do you want to go? The answer for the last decade, decade and a half, even throughout the Trump administration, was and remains the United States. And we've asked them, well, if not the United States, where else? It's Europe or it's Australia. And that is a key thing that I think we don't talk about enough, that we have this comparative advantage that democracies, for all of our domestic troubles, we do still pull on the world's heartstrings in a way autocracies do. Not sure, people want to emulate the Singaporean development model or at times the Chinese development model, but no, really seeking to move to China, I'm certainly there. There are students in Africa or in Southeast Asia who will take advantage of a scholarship to go study in Beijing or study in Shenzhen. But for them, China is a way station. It's not, it's not a home. Whereas when people think about, well, I would like to come to the United States, or I would like to come to the United Kingdom, I'd like to come to Germany, they do that because they think life in the long term will be better in democracies. And democracies are not always good at recognizing that. And we're not always good at making sure we have smart borders. I mean, there, there are a variety of American immigration policies that do not make a lot of sense. I think the way the H1B visa process works is incredibly frustrating. Where it is by nature a temporary visa, but it means you have people who can do an undergraduate degree in the United States, then a master's degree in the United States and maybe speak two or three languages and would just like to stay and work in the United States as permanent residents or as something slightly short of a permanent resident, they can't do it. The law doesn't really allow for it. You have to have an employer sponsor your visa, and then you have to prove that that person's job is not one that can be done by an American. And that's just one example of a policy that is really short sighted, particularly when we are experiencing labor shortages, both of high and low skilled labor. And something is true, something like that is true across the democratic world and not just the West. And I think that's a point I wanted to make clear in the book that as much as we can talk about US And German and British immigration policy being, being broken or being a problem, which I would agree with, it's actually Japan and South Korea that are struggling the most on this front, where Japan's fertility rate is now somewhere around 1.3 children per woman. And South Korea's is even worse at 0.78, when the number that demographers say you need to maintain a healthy demographic balance is actually 2.1. So it means that Japan and South Korea are rapidly shrinking and rapidly aging in a way that will almost surely weigh on the country's economy, where if you have far more older people than you have younger people, it's not exactly clear who's going to pay for the older people's health care. Are you going to do that by taking more taxes from the younger people? Are you going to do that by shifting government spending from one item, maybe defense, towards the social safety net for older people? And one way, not entirely, but one way the US has, and some parts of the broader, the European kind of continent have looked to avoid that problem is by continuing to accept a fairly large share of immigrants who will continue to serve as that tax base. And I'm not the first one to say it, but a way to solve the issue in the United States of thinking about Social Security down the line is to accept more immigrants who want to come here and who are oftentimes very high skilled. And we talk about that. It's, it's at least a debate in the United States. I think it'd be a little hard pressed to find a kind of serious, a serious senator who would say, you know, I want no immigrants. That's, that's never the discussion. It's a question of how many and how should they get here. But South Korea and Japan are not really having the Immigration discussion in the way that we are, it's much more still about, well, how can we roll out subsidies for families that have more children and they haven't worked. I mean, those policies have been tried and tried again and they are not working well enough. So the immigration point across the democratic world, something I wanted to make clear is I personally believe in the moral imperative of immigration. I mean, my great grandfather fled anti Semitism in Europe to come here in the early 1920s, and I'm forever grateful that the United States let him in. But I do think in times of economic struggle or even of political tensions, politicians who are pro immigration would be wise to actually seize the issue and talk about the benefits of immigration rather than letting the issue seize them. So there are all these stats that are just very obvious that if you're a pro immigration senator, pro immigration congressperson, you can say, well, immigrants add around $2 trillion to the US GDP annually. They pay around $460 billion in taxes. Even refugees, people who are, you know, coming often with little more than the clothes on their backs, pay $21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits during their first 20 years in the United States. So the notion that immigrants come here or that and similar, similar, similar studies in Europe as well, the notion that they come here and are kind of leeches of the government is just not based. It's just not based in fact. So I would like politicians to make the more affirmative case for immigration, both high and low skilled immigration. I mean, I don't like the term low skilled, but I went to undergrad at Hamilton College in upstate New York near Utica. The city of Utica, for American listeners will probably know it was this rust belt city that really declined when we stopped manufacturing things as much. And it was a, became a poor kind of pretty bleak city. And the government started resettling a lot of immigrants from the Balkans and from Southeast Asia and spending government money to train them up on jobs that needed to be filled in the city on, I don't know, a hospital, a hospital assistant or a bus driver or something like that. And it worked really well. And now that's much more of a vibrant city. The city's GDP has rapidly risen. And even if that, that's, even if that city is in a, in a red district that may vote for anti immigration politicians. You walk around downtown Utica and you have families who, you know, white American families who've been there for maybe two or two or three or four generations, sitting next to the Vietnamese family kind of happily at the Vietnamese restaurant who've been there for 15, 20 years. And that to me is a really clear and evocative demonstration of how we can make sure that the government is kind of making sure that refugees are contributing to the national US national interest. And thinking about refugees as one of the phrase I the phrases I use in the book for immigrants is as the ammo to kind of help us strengthen our democracies. Rather than thinking of immigrants or refugees as a problem to be dealt with, I think we should think about immigration as an opportunity and think about the fact that people still want to come here more than they want to come to China as a real opportunity, as a real demonstration of what we can still offer.
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- [37:33]
Scott R. Anderson
So I feel like that's actually leads into a good, a good kind of overlying question about these three pillars in particular. Although I think it's actually a recurring theme through a lot of what you're describing because you can look at these three things and certainly from a US perspective they look like actually like a kind of left of center political agenda, right? You know, friendly democracy, friendly immigration to some extent waivers a little bit out over the years. That tends to be at least the current left of center position. Investing in infrastructure, some rule of law in the United States has been a particular big issue. You know, a lot of the other things about that you mentioned about higher civil servant salary, trying to double down on meritocracy systems like investing in safety net and maintaining some sort of safety net. A lot of these aspects sound like a kind of market friendly, progressive or like less of center agenda, but they're not clearly responsive to some of the populist authoritarian leaning movements we actually are seeing in the United States or in Europe, right? Like you know, the United States. We're not seeing the people who are leaning towards authoritarianism saying like oh we need better infrastructure or we need better immigration or exactly the goods that even immigration by your account will deliver. It seems to me like you're, you're kind of responding these things based off a model of, of autocracy, which is the Singapore China model, which has a lot of economic and other benefits, but that's not necessarily you kind of, kind of lumping that in with the authoritarianism trend in a lot of Western democracies, which it's not clear to me, that's the authoritarianism they're gravitating towards. I mean, their touchstones tend much more to be Hungary, Russia, which don't look a lot like those autocracies. So how do you connect those two? Like, why do we think that addressing these issues is actually going to address the concerns that are motivating those authoritarian leaning movements in Western democracies right now?
- [39:26]
Lawfare Host
Sure. No, that's really helpful way of thinking about it. And I think thinking about those two types of autocracies, of course of I joke all the time that it's very funny to me that there are far right Americans who'd like to become like Hungary, which is one of the poorer countries in the EU and not a particularly functional one. But. But clearly, as you've pointed out in the United States, in the uk, in parts of Europe, the authoritarian populist movement is centered around cultural issues. I think it's centered around things like immigration. It is centered around things like, well, how do I retain my culture when there are supposedly so many immigrants coming in? But if you actually look a little bit deeper, I think there are lots of complaints rooted within that kind of cultural item or at least attached to those cultural items that are rooted very central to the book. Where I think about Bolsonaro, I think about Giorgio Meloni in Italy and recently Yun Suk Yeol in South Korea. And Yoon Seok Yeol is not, not an authoritarian, but is a pretty harsh populist who engaged in a lot of culture war stuff on particularly on women's rights. All three of those people campaigned on the issue of restoring meritocracy and not restoring meritocracy the way I want to restore meritocracy. They wanted to restore meritocracy by banning things like gender quotas in boardrooms or gender quotas in governments. Even Giorgio Maloney, who is woman, said this is not real democracy, real meritocracy, because we are giving benefits to women, we're helping women. Or when you think about something, the slogan of drain the swamp. Well, drain the swamp to me is essentially a call for accountability. It's a call to get out the elites who, when you talk, when you get far, far enough into Maybe Trump aligned QAnon social media feeds, or if you read enough about it, it is about, well, the elites have gotten things so wrong for so, so long. They're so corrupt and no one ever holds them accountable. So I do actually think those are just two examples, but meritocracy and accountability. There is a vision that by electing a strong man type like a Bolsonaro or even like a Trump, that they're going to come in and clean house, that they're going to drain the swamp, that they're going to make everything more accountable. And if you actually look at polls, both more so on the right in the United States, but even on the far, far left in Europe, there is this notion of a strong man coming in and basically just delivering in the way that Singapore in theory has. And there was a good, good poll done by political scientists that said about 20% of Americans find themselves really in favor of some type of strongman, with the notion being that, well, if you remove the messy politics, you remove our complicated Senate, you remove all the things theoretically blocking the President from implementing the policies they want. They'll just be able to fix everything. They'll be able to build the future focused infrastructure. And I think I forget the exact word Trump used for it two weeks ago, but he talked about building these, these grand, futuristic cities. And he. That is about infrastructure, that is about delivering, that is about making the United States just work better. And I think as much as it is at times about culture, and as much as much as it is about, let's become like Hungary, because Hungary, no immigrants, it is also people looking towards autocratic leaning people because they do think that those people are going to deliver better. And there, there is, of course, no evidence for that. And I think the, the example I use in the book that comes up a lot is again, more of a movement in Europe than in the States. But there's this notion on the far left that climate change is bigger than democracy. That's, that's the, the kind of rallying cry that somewhere like the United Kingdom or like France, the politics are too complicated to ever have a leader who can come in and really effectively do all the things needed to address climate change, whether that's banning certain types of cars or limiting people to a certain number of flights per year to limit emissions. That's something that is growing. I would argue in Europe that there are growing calls for that because there is a notion of, well, the, the elected governments are never going to fix it. And of course, there is no proof to that notion, unless you want to point only to Singapore as perhaps fairly efficient and fair, effective country. There is no other example to me of an autocracy being better able to handle climate change. Than a democracy. And of course when you give the keys to the, of the entire system to one person, you are betting on that one person not to become a fascist and you're betting on that one person not to basically come in and do a lot of bad things. And it's something I've been thinking about a lot in terms of autocracies where if you think about the most functional ones. So again, again, Singapore, maybe to some extent the uae, Saudi Arabia, they can implement policy efficiently, but they can also implement really bad policy efficiently because there are no checks and balances on decision making up top, particularly when decisions are being made by one person. So I think that myth, that myth of autocratic efficiency, the myth that an autocrat would come in and just fix everything in terms of meritocracy or in terms of accountability or in terms of infrastructure, is something we need to push back against. But I, I do think that even, even within the kind of anti democratic movements in the United States or in Europe, as much as perhaps the cultural issues do garner headlines, there is rooted in there a sense of dissatisfaction with the way government has been delivering for them and the sense that something new, that's something new being an illiberal and maybe even autocratic leader would deliver better.
- [44:56]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, you know, I want to dig into this because this gets gets to another question that came from reading this piece, which is, you know, a few times it seems like you conflate a little bit liberalism and democracy, where you seem to be operating on the idea that there's a connection between the two. And I query whether, you know, a, that that's kind of was a traditional split that 10 years ago we thought of kind of popular slash academic writing in this very freed Zakaria and other people positing well, what if you can have one without the other? And that was kind of a model of development to some extent that we saw certainly the Gulf states and other states kind of point to at least as a legitimating mechanism, if not actually embrace it as a strategy. Here liberalism is playing a much more problematic role in terms of social liberalism. And then there's this related question, but maybe, you know, we can disaggregate them here a little bit about economic liberalism, markets. Right. Like a lot of the current moment in criticism is above about this kind of neoliberalism era where we let markets run rampant by some accounts and that led to all these inequities and concerns with the status quo, lack of public trust. And you hint at that a few times in the book. I guess the question I have is how much can we actually, or do we need to disaggregate liberalism from the idea of democracy and from the idea of authoritarianism? It strikes me as a lot of the accounts you describe, some degree of liberalism actually is inherent in the authoritarian models. Right, right. Which is kind of like the Sakaria thesis to some extent. Right. You have, Singapore is able to attract international investment and wealthy tourists and lots of other people because it allows for substantial elements of a liberal cosmopolitan lifestyle within this authoritarian system, even though it doesn't have democracy. UAE nods in that way. At least Dubai does, you know, other countries less so. Nods in that way. Less so, though. And then you have, like, Saudi Arabia and other. That very much clamped down on that, although maybe you're moving in that direction. What's the relationship? How does this fit into the picture? Because that's been such a big part of other accounts of this similar problem. And I don't see it as playing a central role here, although it keeps popping up in the narrative.
- [47:03]
Lawfare Host
Sure. I'll start with the economic bit because I think it's easier where. Something I want to make very clear that I said in the book is one of my concerns with the popularity or the kind of increased popularity around the developing world, in particular of the China model or of the Singapore model or even of the Saudi Emirati model, is that they have in Vietnam. Vietnam, too, I don't want to forget about Vietnam. They have successfully married liberal economics broadly with illiberal politics in a way that I don't think we thought was possible 20 years ago. There was this sense, and I'm not. This is not anything new to people, but there was this sense after the Cold War that, of course, it was just liberal democracy and liberal democracy was rooted in. Was tied to liberal capitalism, and that was it, and that was the model moving forward. Whereas clearly China's ability or Singapore's ability to largely disaggregate those two is what makes that autocratic model much more of a challenge today. Whereas no one went to. Not no one, but very few people went to the Soviet Union in the 1980s and returned home to France or the United States and said, well, Moscow's great. I want to be like Moscow. But that is kind of what happens today. When people go to Singapore and come back to Paris or come back to Washington, they say, well, well, that is a lot better. And if you are very increasingly dissatisfied with your system, it's not hard for me to see why some people might say Well, I would give up my liberal, my liberal politics for kind of more functional economics. And I did an interview yesterday on South African radio, which is a really interesting case study, and they did a live poll and they got maybe 200, 300 listeners. When the host asked, would you give up your democratic freedoms? Would you give some, some, some of your democratic freedoms for a country that works? And everyone who responded, I think 98 said they would. And that to me is really indicative of the problem. And of course in the United States, it's not South Africa, but still you have, you have that. Pete, those same sentiments here. So the economic issue, yeah, that's, that's much easier for me. And that's the worry. The worry is that you can have liberal ish economics that will make you rich and that will make your country kind of deliver for people without liberal politics. That is a concern. And it's one of the reasons why I do think, think the challenge posed by China and the Gulf states and even Singapore and Vietnam is more of a challenge than the Soviet Union posed. On the more social side of things, I tend towards the kind of conception of maybe like minimal democracy. I think it's. Shadi Hamid is a Brooking scholar, actually has kind of coined this as democratic minimalism. The notion that when you think about a country, well, can you have free and fair elections? Are you meeting the basic definitions of democracy then? Yes, you're still a democracy. That's his argument. I think I agree with much of it. But you think about a country like Israel, and I've my family in Israel, I've spent a lot of time there. Is Israel a democratic country at this point? I would argue yes, even though I would say probably not a super strong and certainly not at this moment a liberal democracy. And one thing I wanted to make clear in the book is I am supportive of, of democracy as a system, even when it produces results that I might not like or that people in certain, in their own countries might not like. But what worries me is when you trend away from liberal democracy towards illiberal democracy, I think you eventually end up in a. Most of the time you end up with a system that is neither liberal nor democratic. And that's, that's kind of my hungry argument is I think Hungary became so illiberal since I've lived there, where the courts are not really independent anymore, the media is not really independent anymore, the government is so incredibly political or so, so politicized, the voting is not necessarily so free and fair anymore. And I think a helpful example Here is, during the last elections, Hungary opened very few polling stations in Western Europe, where of course, the younger liberal minds and Hungarians are going to move as conservative, because within the EU it's pretty easy to pick up and move to. To Paris, where you can make more money kind of relative. They opened very few polling places in Western Europe, but they opened a lot of polling places and made it very easy for people to vote for ethnic Hungarians in the near abroad. So in places like Romania, even if they were not Hungarian citizens, they were effectively given citizenship so they could vote. And of course, if you are an ethnic minority, you're an ethnic Hungarian in Transylvania, you feel, you know, for lack of a better word, oppressed by the dominant Romanian culture. It's not so hard for me to understand why you might vote for the guy in Viktor Orban who says, well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna maintain the Hungarian ethnicity. I'm gonna maintain the Hungarian culture. So once you have that, that illiberal leader, that a liberal, in theory, democratic leader like Orban, who comes into power and steadily chips away those institutions from within, I think at some point, point that democracy tends to give way to something that is not really democratic, which is what I would describe Hungary as today. So am I going to get mad about every democracy that has some illiberal tendencies? I mean, certainly I think about. People talk quite a lot about India. And are people concerned with the state of democracy in India? I mean, I'm certainly at times concerned about the state of India, but I'm not so concerned about the question of, well, is India still a democracy? I think that's almost kind of a not super helpful framing in a country where Modi very much could lose an election. And that to me is kind of my. My bar. But as I want to make clear, obviously I personally prefer liberal democracy to illiberal, illiberal democracy because I think in a liberal democracy will eventually give way to something not democratic.
- [52:42]
Scott R. Anderson
Let me close with a question about your closing your conclusion, because you take an interesting turn towards the end of the book. The book book, really, the prior eight or so chapters have really delved into policy areas that, as I mentioned at the top, are primarily domestic ways. Countries are strengthening their internal operations to more effectively respond to what I think you view as popular demands, if sometimes indirectly communicated popular demands for effectiveness, for accountability for things like that. But then at the end you take a turn towards foreign policy. You open with this very dramatic narrative about a failed defense of Taiwan or successful takeover of Taiwan by China. Perhaps the better way to put it, which opens up this new era of the appeal of authoritarianism. And it's just kind of an interesting move because you are tying this bundle of internal strengthening policies to a very outward looking foreign policy where it's very much seen in what reads, at least in that instance, although I think you disclaim this later as very zero sum seeming sort of foreign policy. So I guess the question I have is how do all these things link to foreign policy? Given that your focus is so much on these internal things democracies need to do, how do they tie together? Are you advancing a version, kind of an inverse of democratic peace theory, this idea that democracies really need to hang together and push back aggressively in terms of controlling territory from authoritarian governments or defending the current boundaries of democracy? Because that strikes me as such an independent question from addressing domestic demands for domestic political goods. How do they tie together and what makes you bring that out as the closing point, closing message for this book?
- [54:25]
Lawfare Host
Sure, I would tie them together because I think if democracies are not working well enough internally to fend off the autocratic impulse, you're going to end up with more illiberal leaders, or at least democracy skeptical leaders at home, who are less willing to stand up for democracies abroad, who are less willing to stand up for the kind of quote unquote rules based order, whether that is by working with institutions like NATO or whether that's things like actually thinking about how to deter an invasion of Taiwan or any type of Taiwan contingency. It is about making sure that democracies are working well enough that there is voter consent for democracies to actually care and spend the money and time on foreign policy. Because you see it time and time again that foreign policy is not featured in American presidential debates almost at all at this point. And I think part of that is because when you think about the economy, really since 2008, that has recovered and kind of been unrecovered. People are much more focused on their livelihoods on a day to day basis than they are really thinking about Taiwan contingencies. And foreign policy is kind of outsourced, forced to the, for lack of a better phrase, the foreign policy elite. And if that elite is not able to effectively explain to the American people, well, why does it matter if we stand up for Taiwan? Or what is the economic benefit of having a close relationship with NATO or something? To that extent, it's very hard for me to imagine those voters consenting to actually allowing the United States and our partners to stand up from kind of muscular rules based order. And that's what I tried to paint in the conclusion was the notion of, well, well, you need to deliver well enough at home to make sure your systems are strong enough that you can maintain this order. And if you don't maintain this order, here's what it's going to look like. Because I do think very often when I talk to people who are far outside of my, my world, people who work in, you know, literally any other city besides Washington, it's not entirely clear to them, well, what's so bad about a world maybe run by China? Or what's, what's so bad about a world in which Saudi Arabia and the UAE are crafting more of the world's rules, whether on trade or security. And I want to make, want to make, wanted to make that point very clear that well, if the flow of innovation and trade runs through China, it means democracies are kind of getting at the short end of the stick fairly frequently. It means as much as there will be free trade, it will be free ish trade in that as China has demonstrated by clamping down on trade with Australia and Lithuania over a really fairly minor political, political slights. That's how I wanted to connect it. I wanted to say, well, here's if we're looking at it from the inverse of here's why it matters to you, you, the average citizen, if democracies do not win in the long term and here are ways to make sure that you believe in democracy enough for democracies to win. Because I do think if we're revisiting this conversation in 20, 25 years and well, American infrastructure is still really broken or our meritocracy has only declined further, I do think we're at risk of electing more people like, like former President Trump, who do not by any, by most indications have an affinity for NATO, are not particularly interested in standing up for Taiwan or anything to that extent. And if those things fall and if we do see kind of a world order that is Sino centric or at least broadly Sino centric with maybe, you know, some rules coming from the Gulf or whatnot, it is going to hurt Americans, it is going to hurt Europeans. So that's how I, how I wanted to connect, to connect them. I wanted to say democracies first off just need to be stronger internally because our internal divisions are going to make it very hard for us to deliver on foreign policy abroad. And even more broadly, something I've said to you repeatedly is this question of serving as a model. All and that's a secondary bit that runs throughout the book, is sure, the overriding problem here is making sure democracies work well enough to defend our way of life. That's the basic point. But I would like more people in the intelligentsia in Hanoi or more people in the intelligentsia in Phnom Penh and Cambodia to think, well, look at how great the United States is, or look at how great Germany is. I would like to become like that. That's the model I want want. But that's not currently the case. I mean, people, I think January 6th was really damaging. The three British Prime Ministers in three and a half months has been quite damaging. So I want to make sure that democracies are strong enough to face the kind of challenges of the 21st century at home, but also that we can serve as a model in the longer term. And even if I don't expect Vietnam to, for instance, to democratize anytime soon, I do think that making ourselves work better, being stronger on this whole variety of issue, on these whole variety of issues, will make it more likely that in the long term some type of liberal or democratic movement, or ideally both, kind of takes hold in a place like Vietnam. So that's how I wanted to connect them. And I know I joke all the time that I did kind of smuggle in a lot of domestic policy through a foreign policy lens, but I do think the two are very much connected because you can't have good foreign policy without domestic policy, without good domestic policy, and without good domestic policy, people are not going to allow you to actually have a good foreign policy.
- [59:46]
Scott R. Anderson
Well, we will have to leave the conversation there as we are out of time. Charles Dunst, thank you for joining us here today on the Lawfare podcast.
- [59:53]
Lawfare Host
Thanks for having me.
- [59:57]
Charles Dunst
The Lawfare podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. Please be sure to rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to check out Lawfare's other podcasts including Rational Security, a casual, light hearted chat about national security that I co host each week with my colleagues Quinta Juresik and Alan Rosenstein. In addition, be sure to visit lawfareblog.com for extensive written coverage of national security law and policy issues. And consider becoming a material supporter of lawfare@patreon.com lawfair to gain access to an ad free version of this and other Lawfare podcasts, among other perks.
- [60:29]
Scott R. Anderson
This podcast was edited by Jen Patcha.
- [60:31]
Charles Dunst
Howell and our audio engineer was Kara Schillen of Goat Rodeo Our music is performed by Sophia Yan. As always, thank you for listening.
- [60:46]
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