Adam Casey on How Military Aid Can Stabilize and Destabilize Foreign Autocrats

That’s a great question. So first of all, thanks so much for saying the kind words. I think these books are really long and sometimes lonely processes. It’s really fun to have people find something insightful or interesting from them when it ends up finally coming across the finish line. So, the book emerged about 10 years ago out of this project where I wanted to look at what the relationship between foreign military and economic support and the stability of authoritarian regimes really is. I think it’s one of those relationships that’s often posited by people that certain autocrats are propped up by foreign aid and in order to understand their durability, we need to look not just at their own politics, but also at the preferences and behaviors of places like Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Paris, et cetera.

So, the book tries to systematically investigate what is the real relationship between military aid and the stability of allied dictators. The finding is that it isn’t always as helpful necessarily for the regime survival of dictatorships as you might think. Overall, foreign military aid, if you take all foreign backed dictatorships and compare them to other autocracies, they’d last on average a little bit longer. But that relationship is entirely driven by those supported by the Soviet Union. Autocrats backed by the United States, as well as France and Great Britain, were not associated with longer regime tenures. These autocracies actually stay in power about the same number of years as autocrats that don’t have any foreign support at all, despite the billions in economic and military aid provided.

Meanwhile, Soviet backed ones are some of the most resilient dictatorships of the 20th century. So, the book starts with this core puzzle. Why is it that military aid seems to stabilize some dictatorships and not others? But what mattered was not just the amount of money and guns and budgetary support and advisors that foreign powers gave to dictatorships in the Cold War but who was giving it to them and what kind of advice they were giving. Military aid doesn’t just strengthen dictatorships, it also transforms them. The core finding of the book is that military aid from the United States did very different things for the domestic politics of allied dictatorships than military aid from the Soviet Union.

The United States and the Soviet Union both set about building up militaries in partner regimes in their own image. This had the unintended effect, in terms of the United States, of actually destabilizing some of their foreign autocrats by helping support the creation of a formidable internal political rival. That is the armed forces. Whereas in Soviet backed regimes, the Soviet Union provided vital support in subordinating these militaries to the ruling party. This accounted for very different regime survival rates and the surprising resilience of Soviet backed autocracies.

In the process of gathering the data, I did start to see this pattern seemingly to emerge. I think I was genuinely surprised right away. And not just trying to claim methodological purity, but I really didn’t know the answer that I was going to find out when I set about doing this. I came from a background of authoritarian politics and the book has ended up being probably equally as much about civil military relations and security force structure as it is about the general theories of authoritarian durability. In part because I found that what really seemed to be accounting for this was this very different threat of military coups. I mean, one of the early findings for the dissertation was just the military never ousted any of these Soviet backed regimes. That was really surprising given how common military coups overthrow dictatorships.

The reverse was absolutely not true in the case of US backed regimes. There were just countless coups and I think trying to understand why that was the case was genuinely interesting and surprising to me. And I think the book does a nice job. I was able to add some time in the postdoc after the PhD to explore how these different models of military organization came about in the US and the Soviet Union and why they worked very differently for autocracies and countries in the developing world than their proponents in Moscow and Washington expected. So, I was genuinely somewhat surprised.

It’s one of those things where I was really excited to actually see what the numbers really showed and what these tenures actually look like, because there are some long lasting US backed regimes, the Saudi royal family, for example. But how comparatively common is that? Is it more common to be one of several military juntas in Guatemala or is it more common to be the Saudi royal family? The real answer is Guatemala overall.

In some ways, the top line finding is not too shocking, that the United States is not as good at producing dictatorships as the Soviet Union. I mean, you would think that a communist dictatorship, a single party state, would have a better idea on how to produce a durable autocracy than the United States, a country that’s founded on the idea of being maybe not a democracy, but having more liberal democratic principles behind it or a sense of its political identity. So, the top-level findings, not that surprising in a lot of ways.

Although it’s not really what we think when we talk about it, I mean, we assume that the United States is propping up dictatorships all over the world and that the reason why a lot of these dictators continue to exist is because the United States is providing all of the support for them. But it does raise a fundamental question, just an even bigger question, which is, why would the United States even want to support autocratic regimes in the first place?

Yeah, it’s a, it’s a great question. The fact that the US is not particularly good at stabilizing autocracies is probably not terribly surprising. I think that the argument for why the US entered into these alliances with despots is that ultimately, US preference for the regime types of its prospective allies really changed a lot over the course of the 20th century, when the US felt like the most distinct answer to this is essentially anti-communism trumped the preference for democracy among allies. So, in World War II, a lot of these right-wing military juntas in Central America and South America who had previously expressed admiration for Hitler’s Germany or had proto-fascist orientations are suddenly born again democrats, defenders of the free world, and want to join the United States and its allies in hemispheric defense.

Then after the Cold War, they were all avowed anti-communists. I think the US was not naive to the fact that foreign autocrats were constantly attempting to portray themselves as friends to America and America’s foreign policy interests. But the triumph of the Soviet Union in 1945 and a series of other postwar events like the Greek Civil War, the Yugoslav Communists seizing power in Albania, the French Communist Party and the Italian Communist Party poised to what looked like they were going to reap major electoral victories in Western Europe, the Chinese Revolution in 1949, and the invasion of South Korea by the North in 1950 made the world seem profoundly more dangerous for American interests than it had before.

Looking at the US relationship with somewhere like Thailand is a really instructive window into how shifts in this perceived threateningness of communism really changed American evaluations of why on earth to work with some kind of regime that we find fairly abhorrent. I mean, Phibun was a field marshal who seized power in 1947 in a coup during the war. He’d allied himself with fascist Japan, not exactly a friend of the United States. The United States was not enamored to him really at all. They were extremely upset about his coup in 1947, such as we were upset about anything in Thailand, which is that it was fairly marginal and the people were upset in Foggy Bottom. But I don’t know that the American public probably registered much here.

At the time he was pledging himself to be an anti-communist, wanted to be a member of the free world, and the US was totally uninterested in supporting his government. The events I just mentioned in East Asia really changed our evaluation of whether or not it was worth entering into an alliance with one of these dictators. We hoped that they could be pushed to gradually liberalize or to adopt at least the window dressings of democracy.

So, institutionally, if you squinted, sometimes these looked like democracies and I think we were quite concerned with prodding them on the margins to appear a little bit more democratic. We pushed Park in South Korea after his coup to abandon the military fatigues for a business suit and rule as a civilian, even though in practice it was a military regime through and through. So, we were able to convince ourselves that some of these autocrats weren’t terribly autocratic or even if they were, they weren’t as bad as the totalitarian communists. Then lastly, I think there was a pervasive racist paternalism that thought, eventually, yes, they could become democracies. They were just maybe too underdeveloped to sustain democratic institutions and so we ended up coming to terms with the problems of supporting dictators with varying degrees of comfort throughout the Cold War.

Yeah, absolutely, I think that’s exactly right too, just in the way you framed that. I think we focus a lot on that sort of the context in the war in South Vietnam and we sometimes forget the complicated and messy and extremely robust politics that was going on at the same time. Even after we had sent combat troops, the politics didn’t end. I think the book tries to take that seriously in Afghanistan as well with the Soviets. I think we often think the Soviets just took that war over but they were actually doing a very similar thing in Afghanistan as we were doing in South Vietnam, which was attempting to build an ally and save an ally during a war, rather than taking over all of the fighting themselves.

That certainly wasn’t their goal and it certainly wasn’t our goal. I mean, in South Vietnam, the story begins really in 1950 or 1954, I suppose, when the first  US military advising mission comes in. Our goal in South Vietnam was that we thought we’d be able to build Saigon into this outpost of anti-communism to demonstrate the effectiveness of the American principles of how to build a government and how to build an economy. This was very early on identified as a key battlefield in the Cold War with the PRC and later Soviet aid in North Vietnam to the north. What we did was we set about building the South Vietnamese army to look like our army. This is something we did throughout the Cold War as the book tries to demonstrate.

I think that’s something that’s been criticized a lot among scholars who’ve looked at US military aid for failing to incorporate effective indigenous cultures, relying on excessively complicated logistics chains. All these reasons are why a lot of the same stuff happened after the Afghan army collapsed in 2021. We built this military that was just too complicated and it looked too much like ours. These countries probably aren’t institutionally capable of fielding forces like this, but there was also the political problem of building a military that looked like ours, which is that we pushed consistently to make the military autonomous, professional, effective, and in theory, nonpartisan and apolitical.

But in practice, we were building this potentially lethal rival to the government in Saigon, who if we didn’t recognize the political problem posed by a strengthening military that was closely tied to the United States, advised full of new individuals who were coming up and maybe didn’t necessarily have political ties to the regime, it was something the regime was very much aware of. They were much less naive about the problems posed by this military than we were that we could strengthen a nonpartisan, apolitical military in a fragile dictatorship and not have it becoming a massive political prize for both sides to fight over.

We often complained that our allied government under Ngô Đình Diệm was irrational or like why was it that he was doing all these things like subverting our aid to make it so that political cronies sat in top commands and why was it that he was basically trying to divert the resources given to build up an effective military to make sure that the military never ended up reaching effectiveness. It was because these were the rational behaviors of an autocrat worried about a coup. We were often confused about why that was the case. But what he did was he built up a paramilitary alternative. He built several overlapping intelligence agencies. He continually interfered in politics of who staffed the military and who held which sensitive commands.

All of this served to further upset American advisors who were messing with this institution that Eisenhower thought would be the key to building an effective South Vietnamese state. In 1960, in November, this US built military inculcated a very serious coup attempt that very nearly ousted his regime and Đình Diệm found that we were a far less effective partner when the coup was underway than he might’ve thought. I mean, he phoned our embassy and the embassy basically did not give him the unequivocal support he was expecting and his US trained paratroopers very nearly ousted his government. But his coup proofing strategies worked in this case. The paramilitary civil guard fought off the coup attempt until loyalists could come.

But it reinforced for him that he was, in fact, correct to view the US trained army as a serious threat to his rule. The failure of the coup made him redouble rather than walk back from his efforts to coup proof the military. The end result was even more purges of the military command and disgruntlement. And ultimately, we ended up providing support for a coup that ousted him three years later. After that there were a half a dozen other regime changes over the next couple of years. So, this coup, the 1963 coup hardly brought the stability we were hoping for. In fact, a series of additional coups that didn’t really stabilize until the mid 1960s.

Vietnam, South Vietnam, is also a great example of how autocrats sometimes get in the way of creating an effective military force. So, the United States wants the most effective military force possible to take on the North Vietnamese while the person in charge of the country doesn’t want a military that’s too effective because that means that that military could actually seize power. That they could actually attack him and take the country over. So, you’ve got this really weird dynamic and this happens in so many autocracies where the autocrat doesn’t want a powerful military when normally we would think of an autocrat wanting this all-powerful military. We just think of them kind of like a Darth Vader figure.

But in reality, a lot of times they want super weak militaries that aren’t very effective at fighting wars. And yet that’s exactly what the United States government desperately wants, desperately needs, is an effective military to fight the communists. It’s such a bizarre dynamic and dance that you’re dealing with when you’re providing military aid for these dictatorships.

So, the West, the United States, France, Britain, tried to build militaries that reflect democratic principles where you have a division of power, separation of power where the military is somewhat independent. It’s professional. It’s apolitical and that becomes a problem because you’re creating a separate power center within the country and that’s the reason why that becomes a coup threat to a dictator who’s in power. If he wants to tell the military to do something that they don’t want to do, he’s less professional, less legitimate in a lot of ways, so the military feels that they’re entitled to run the country if they think that the political leaders are incompetent.

You mentioned the Soviet system. I don’t want to say it does a better job because this is all about creating stable autocrats, and I’m not sure that that’s ever a good thing to happen, but they do a better job of creating stable autocracies even while giving military aid. What is the Soviet system? How is it different than what the United States and other Western countries are doing?

You know, the Soviet Union is often remembered for its institutional failures. The command economy being maybe the most famous example. When we think of Soviet institutions, we think of them negatively as things that were abysmal failures. But I think one of their most underappreciated organizational innovations was the partisan army. The Bolsheviks seized power in their lightning insurrection in Petrograd. They had a really big problem, which was that they had only a smattering of armed supporters and they had sympathetic soldiers in the local garrison and that was about it. I mean, the Tsarist army was in a state of collapse at that point, but it was still this giant military behemoth full of officers who had a lot to lose from radical communists taking over.

They were in this really vulnerable position after the revolution. Most Marxists of their time were really hostile to a standing military. So, Trotsky, who was later put in charge of building the Red Army was one of the foremost military thinkers among the Bolsheviks. He’d given a lot of thought to what to do about the problem with the army. They were very early on committed to abolishing the Tsarist army, which they saw as an aristocratic bourgeois hotbed. At the time these aristocratic officers were giving way to more professionals, but those were still terrible if you were a communist, because they were thoroughly bourgeois. The men were peasants in uniforms. And Mao was really the first one to appreciate the revolutionary potential of the peasants. The Bolsheviks were not terribly keen on the peasantry.

So, they really were early on wanting to get rid of the military, but they faced this tremendous, looming existential threat. They quickly set about, ‘Well, we can’t just rely on the red guards and we know that we’ve no real control over these sympathetic local soldiers. If they stop being so sympathetic, we’re really in trouble.’ So, they set about building a new military and their solution to the problem of the military was the same solution as their problem to the problem of the revolution, which is that the mass party would be able to solve Bonapartism. They were terrified of this. If you rely, if you create this new military, the military is going to ultimately kill the revolution.

So, they said we need to create a proper military, but it needs to be red and expert. The fundamental problem was they didn’t have that many proletarian Communist Party members who were actually proficient in military science or trained military officers. They put themselves in this terrible position where they decided they needed to enlist former Imperial Army officers. Their solution to how to keep these officers from destroying the revolution was to embed next to them, the name would change several times over the course of the Red Army, but political commissars, which were these party members who would early on under this system called dual command would countersign the orders of the officer. They were there to ensure ideological conformity within the military unit and most importantly, to monitor and provide a check on the behavior of the professional military officer.

A probably equally, if not more important aspect of this system was actually that alongside both the commander and the commissar was embedded a third person. This was a member of the secret police. So, the security service that the Bolsheviks established, it also would come through many different forms. It was first called the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, and it would later gain notoriety as the NKVD and then eventually the KGB. They operated this group within the security service called the Special Department and the Special Department was an embedded military counterintelligence wing.

By military counterintelligence, the Soviets had a particular vision of what that means. In Western circles, military counterintelligence would be making sure that your military services were not penetrated by foreign spy agencies or foreign governments. But the Soviets saw a foreign hand in all forms of domestic opposition. So, anyone who was potentially hostile to the Soviet government whatever political opposition was almost definitionally acting on behalf of Western or enemies of the Soviet state abroad. In practice, these military counterintelligence officers were focused on rooting out potential political opposition.

Exactly. That was the distinction that the Soviets considered to be a distinction of difference. Any domestic political threat, especially in this period, was counterintelligence and almost certainly directed by the enemies of Soviet communism outside of the country. This matrix of the political commissar, the military commander, and the military counterintelligence officer, coupled with a big push to promote party membership in the military ended up jointly comprising the partisan army. The Soviets weren’t the first technically to have any of these exact institutions, but to have them operating in concert at every level of the military responding to a single mass party was an early Soviet innovation. It proved remarkably good at protecting the Soviet government from a threat from the military and it enabled what is, in comparative terms, an absolutely stunning assault on the military hierarchy, which was Stalin’s great purges.

We had 60 percent of people above brigadier generals, or Komandir was the Soviet term were executed by the end of the purges. It’s difficult to conceive of a more stark assault on a military that was unanswered. There was no reactive coup attempt because the embedded security services were able to so thoroughly carry out these purges in the Soviet Union. Anyways, this ends up being a pretty effective tool of Soviet control over its own military. It’s one that the Soviets actually export abroad. It’s one that’s emulated to some extent. There are some organizations that see the Soviet model and attempt to replicate it themselves without much Soviet direction, sometimes not even understanding how that model exactly worked.

In Eritrea, the EPLF emulates the Soviet model, but they’re actually fighting a Soviet backed government. So, the Soviets aren’t aiding them at all. They have some version of what they imagine the Soviet style military is supposed to look like and all of the military commanders just call themselves commissars. So, it’s not a real institutional copy, but the general point being that the Soviets are actually able to export this model really effectively to their allied regimes. It’s quite good at keeping the regime in power.

Yeah, absolutely. I think of it as there’s three ways that if you’re an autocrat, you can end up getting a military that you thoroughly dominate and institutionally penetrate. The thing is the reason not every autocrat can do this is that the system I described where your commands are being countersigned by a, sometimes much more junior than you, political appointee and a member of the secret police is watching every one of your moods. That’s obviously not a terribly popular system of military organization and it’s not one that military officers like. So, I think the reason not every autocrat does this is it’s very difficult to pull this off. I think there’s really only three ways in which you can get a military like this.

One is luck. One is that you attempt to install this system. You face a reactive coup attempt, but you survive. That is for whatever reason, the coup fails. I think this is the kind of Muammar Gaddafi path to building a subordinate military. He is very nearly ousted in 1975 and several times since he faces near miss assassination attempts and such, but he’s able, with every failed attempt to oust him, to institutionalize more and more subordination of his military. By the time the regime is ousted, the military can’t even access ammunition without the permission of military intelligence. So, you have that path.

You have the kind of luck path, but for every Gaddafi or as I point out Nyerere in Tanzania, you have Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana who tries to do all this stuff. The military oust him in 66, because they identify this as a serious risk to their corporate interests. The second path you have is indigenous revolution. You can build your own army and capture state power on your own. Then the third path is the Soviets can impose it for you. Those are the really the three ways that you get these types of militaries.

But even in the imposition cases, and I think what the book sort of adds in addition to the great work by Steve and Lucan, is some of the benefits of revolutionary origins, mostly being highly loyal and reasonably effective security apparatuses are also possible through Soviet imposition. There’s another path in addition to the you lucked out and won out, even though you very easily could have been ousted path. There’s this Soviet imposed a way to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the book tries to look at the effectiveness of these strategies rather than is this good or bad. But I think it is worth noting for the reader the US certainly tried to prop up plenty of dictatorships. It isn’t that the US was never in the business of attempting to stabilize unpopular autocratic governments. That did happen repeatedly. But as you said, what ended up happening is our methods by which we attempted to stabilize regimes often ended up leading to military coups, which military coups did not necessarily bring democracy or election. Sometimes they brought elections, but they weren’t terribly democratic. What they ended up bringing was sometimes completely explicit military juntas.

Sometimes they brought military regimes where in practice, the whatever sort of officer had led the coup might don a business suit and run in a heavily stage-managed election as a civilian president. But in practice, the military was indirectly ruling. The end result was more autocracy, but it was unstable autocracy. These military regimes are not immune from coup threats themselves. In fact, they’re some of the most coup prone types of autocracy. So, it was not the case that once the military ousted the disliked autocrat, they suddenly solved all their factional political problems. No, they still had all sorts of politics within the military again. Now you’re worried about your brigadier generals and your majors and your colonels.

Actually, one of the most durable findings of coups in recent research is coups beget coups. They end up leading to far more coup attempts. So, it was the case that the US certainly attempted to stabilize friendly autocrats who pledged anti-communism. We ended up not necessarily stabilizing them in the ways that we might have imagined, but the end result was a series of pro-American juntas who replaced other pro-American juntas.

When I’m reading your book, when I’m hearing these arguments, my mind immediately goes to Samuel Huntington and his thoughts about modernization. That’s just where my mind is drawn and one of his big insights about modernization was that political modernization functions differently than economic modernization. They’re not always on the same track. The military is oftentimes modernized much faster than the rest of society, which is part of the reason why we have military coups, because militaries feel that they’re entitled to be able to run the country. They think that they’re the ones who actually are the most professional, the most business oriented, the most legitimate institutions within the country. So, when they see people who are running the country that don’t know what they’re doing, they think maybe we should actually take over and actually fix things.

One of the things in the back of my mind here is why is it that the United States and other Western countries are taking steps to modernize the military significantly faster than all of the other institutions in the country because the easiest fix to this would be let’s not make it so that the military is modernized much quicker than other political institutions like legislatures, rule of law, other things like that. Why is it that we didn’t put more emphasis on other aspects of the country? Why is it that we put all of our eggs into the military basket?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I want to say first, all the while we’re running military aid, in fairness to American administrations in the Cold War, they didn’t think the only way to stop anti-communism would be to build effective anti-communist militaries. They just thought it would be one really key aspect of it and ended up being the primary form of regime support we get. But we gave a lot of economic aid. We promoted land reform. We did these things that we thought might be helpful and lead to good development. So, I think probably the answer to the question is that it’s harder to do those other things. I don’t know that the record suggests that it’s very easy to build legitimate functioning governments or strong institutions in other areas.

I think militaries are something that we may have a more defined problem set and some ability to… and again, we’re not terribly good at making them very militarily effective, but we can end up modernizing their structures and building them along our lines. We have a bunch of military officers who can serve as advisors and they recreate institutions we have at home and hope they work and I’ll just say quickly about how you led that question that it was really great. I think Samuel Huntington, his work on civil military relations and political order is so good in that one of his most profound insights is the only way to really ever stop the problem of praetorianism or militaries ousting governments is by making military coups unthinkable.

You need to have a fully legitimate political system in order for the military to never contemplate being involved. I think in practice what autocrats do is they don’t really make coups unthinkable. They make them too difficult to carry out. I think the way that Western democracies prevent coups is it’s not typically by coup proofing. I mean, there is a little bit of that that goes on. I think Wilkinson’s book on India shows really well that there’s traditional coup proofing going on in India. But then there’s also this benefit of the Indian army finding a coup increasingly outside the norms of what a military would do or should do or something like that. So, making them unthinkable is probably the only way to durably remove this threat of military coups.

The second-best thing you can do is subordinate the military institutionally to a ruling party or ruling regime. Your third best option is to fragment the security apparatus and hope that some of your new counterweights will fight back against the others. So, it exists on a continuum of these different strategies and autocrats don’t pick them from a chart and decide what kind of coup proofing strategy should I do now that I came to office. You’re heavily constrained by the constellation of security forces that already exist. So, the revolutionary governments are able to effectively institutionalize control over their militaries because they’re able to build them from scratch. I think it’s much harder to embed these institutions in existing forces that have incentives to resist.

I think it does matter not because we should care if autocrats remain in power or we should find it too upsetting that US aid didn’t actually stabilize dictatorships. Obviously, that seems plausibly like a victory. But the problem is that it destabilized these governments and these militaries in ways that ended up dragging the United States further and further into interventions to have to save beleaguered regimes. So, these coups, again, did not bring actual stability. They brought more countercoups and further spirals of instability in the government that further wreaked havoc on military capacity in ways that ended up dragging the United States further into interventions to save beleaguered governments just when the US was trying to extract itself and build up indigenous capacity.

I think if we are concerned about the types of interventions that led the United States in further and further, we do need to understand and care about these political dynamics. I think the counterargument, obviously, and it’s worth caveating on the autocracy point, that yes, these Soviet backed dictatorships were more stable insofar as they lasted in power longer, but they were horrifically repressive and unpopular and presided over economic devastation. Most autocratic, or all I suppose, or most of the.. I’ll be a cagey analyst. They don’t really bring lasting stability. This is all kind of ephemeral.

The Soviet backed regimes left these militaries that were used to being penetrated by existing regimes and there haven’t been very many military coups in post-communist countries as Brian Taylor showed. So, there are some interesting inheritances and stuff like that, but these were not good governments that they kept in power. It’s squarely focused on explaining authoritarian durability. It isn’t that it was good, what the Soviets did.

Yeah, I think the way it can destabilize democracies is by leading to military coups. Right. So, I think he wasn’t really a Democrat, but like Ree in South Korea. He was early on kind of autocratic and he’s plausibly viewed as an autocrat. But he initially seemed democratic. Ultimately, the US built up this military that viewed its coup in ‘61… well, he was ousted in ‘60, but against the interim government, it viewed its intervention in ‘61 against civilians as an extension of its military duties and not a betrayal of its professionalism.

So, if we teach what proper civil military norms are supposed to look like to these military officers and then in practice these governments try to use the army and repression or they bring it into politics then sometimes these coups can be seen incorrectly. But ironically, as actual extensions of military professionalism than violations of it.

As I put it in the book in the after the Cold War chapter, military coups declined dramatically in the early 1990s and continued to decline through the 2010s. This decline was not, because the US stopped giving military aid to countries, or we stopped providing security assistance or there were some curricular changes. As I point out in the book, some of our military training came to emphasize civilian control of the military more consistently. There’s a little bit more human rights curriculum. Some of that had existed before. You know, coups didn’t decline because we somehow got better at giving security assistance and not building up militaries that were capable or willing to overthrow their governments. Again, not saying the US wanted these coups, but it wasn’t that the US somehow got better at preventing praetorian impulses.

It was that the value of holding office after a successful coup declines because coup makers are met with sanctions. So, it isn’t that officers get worse at carrying out coups or the kind of factors that lead them to be motivated to carry out coups are somehow gone after the end of the Cold War. It’s that when they seize power, it is highly visible to the international community, sort of not ambiguous at all. When you look at the international community punishing democratic backsliding, it’s often very subtle and slow. When under Chavez did it backslide? What is the event that actually led Venezuelan democracy to collapse? It’s not actually necessarily always very obvious.

So, I think coups are a real focal point, a clear violation of democracy and of civilian control of the military, and they’re met by sanctions. They’re met by fairly consistent and unified international sanctions. So, American unipolarity and the alignment of the IMF and the World Bank and the European Union and ECOWAS and the AU end up all coming together to resoundingly condemn these coups. So in 2015, the coup in Burkina Faso is met with this vehement international response that surprises the military officers. They stepped down seven to nine days later. I think that’s a big change and I think that’s something that other analysts have pointed out.

What I found out in the book is as the era of American unipolarity… and I think whatever one thinks about the current period, whether it’s some new cold war or something else, just broad agreement is it’s a period of strategic competition. The president said the era of unipolarity is definitely over or something like that.

So, as that ends, there’s a potential for juntas to seize on fractures in the international response and on a different, no longer unified international response to their coups. I think this period of a major uptick in the last three years as I say in the book is something that, unfortunately, understanding the dynamics of military coups, is unlikely to be only a historically relevant phenomenon. I think some of the factors that led to coups in the first Cold War are probably going to be present in the future. So, yes, these changes in the international environment are playing a role there as I say in the book.

What I notice is that after the end of the Cold War, we put a lot more emphasis into the legitimacy of elections and what we’ve struggled to do is figure out how to react when those elections become less and less legitimate through democratic backsliding. So, you have cases like Venezuela that you mentioned where Chavez erodes the democratic system within the country. Then you have Maduro who takes it down a notch even further, but you have elections throughout the entire process. So, it’s really hard to say that it’s not democratic even as the elections become less and less fair and to a large extent, less and less free. It’s hard to pin down where the line is between democracy and autocracy, if you’re using elections really as the sole benchmark between the two.

In the case of a coup, you’re overriding an election. It’s very obvious what’s going on. So, if you’re using elections as the institution that you’re trying to make stronger that’s the key institution that you’re focused on rather than militaries. It makes a lot of sense that you might have democratic backsliding that’s done by people who win elections. But in cases where people are trying to dismiss elections or try to get rid of electoral outcomes like a military that those would be things that the international community would react very harshly to.

What I’m noticing, though, in Africa seems to be very different where we seem to be putting the focus yet again, instead of focusing on elections, we seem to be putting a tremendous focus on strengthening their militaries. It feels very much like something that harkens back to those Cold War days because we were so focused on destroying terrorism within those areas and the institutions surrounding those countries were so weak that it feels like maybe we were making the same mistakes we made during the Cold War. Do you see any parallels between the way that we’ve been handling the Sahel region within Africa and the way that we handled a lot of other countries during the Cold War?

Yeah, I’ll just say that as we look to the future, I think if we see this return, or we’re seeing this return, to focusing on building up security forces, that failing to consider the political context in which a strengthening military or stronger special forces or enclave units, as I point out in that post-Cold War chapter, failing to appreciate the political uses of these forces in addition to their military purpose would risk a repeat of some of the dynamics we saw before. I think even if we don’t necessarily care about those political effects, it’s worth considering how what we think might be strengthening a military force can end up over the medium and longer term actually undermining political stability.

I think we had periods where we thought we were building stronger militaries and we thought we were strengthening the militaries in the Cold War. In fact, the political effects of those strengthened militaries ended up leading to a longer-term deterioration and instability. So, I think the book tries to grapple a little bit with what we learned and what we didn’t learn from the first Cold War. I think it is a reasonable question.