Democracies should keep their nerve against dictators

By Bill Emmott

Sir Winston Churchill, was especially famous for his wartime leadership but today his name is often seen as the source of a pithy quotation about political systems. “Democracy is the worst form of government,” he said, “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Faith in democracy certainly rises and falls, especially at times like now when dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping look strong, dangerous and worryingly effective. Yet it is vital that, like Churchill, we keep our nerve.

A main reason why people living in democracies often suffer a kind of inferiority complex regarding dictatorships is that when power is concentrated in one man’s hands, decision-making can look deceptively easy.

The essence of democracy is the dispersal of power and the use of checks and balances to limit the room for leaders to take decisions on their own, so it is obvious that it will be much harder, for example, for a democracy to reorganize industry to serve war aims, or even to build railways and airports.

This is also why would-be dictators such as America’s Donald Trump prefer to meet dictators like Putin or North Korea’s President Kim Jong-un rather than their fellow democratic leaders: they are sitting with what they see as the closest political equivalent to a business billionaire, someone who can make his own decisions and get things done. Yet that apparent decision-making ability can be both dangerous and illusory.

The danger is perhaps obvious: Putin’s ability to decide to invade his neighbor, Ukraine, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, is ample proof of that. Putin’s decision also shows how dictatorship can become more dangerous over time if the concentration of power in one man’s hands grows thanks to his elimination of his enemies and his ability to surround himself only with loyalists and sycophants.

Psychologists argue that holding absolute power over a long period produces changes in dictators’ brains, making them even more egotistical and increasingly blind to risk as they become convinced of their own importance and brilliant judgement.

The Prince of Talleyrand, a 19th cenntury French diplomat and another great European statesman, is often cited for a statement that could perfectly describe Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine: “It is worse than a crime; it is a mistake.”

Dictators, in other words, become blinded by their own power and make terrible blunders. It is the rest of us – which currently mainly means all those fighting and dying in Ukraine – who suffer from those mistakes.

The most important reason to worry about China’s President Xi is that, now that he has removed the Chinese Communist Party’s limits on how long presidents can serve and has succeeded in surrounding himself with loyalists, he, too, could become so convinced of his own rightness that he makes a huge mistake – in his case, attempting to invade Taiwan and thereby causing World War III.

This is why moves such as Japan’s defense build-up and the clear declarations by President Joe Biden that America would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan are so important. If an egotistical dictator such as President Xi is to be deterred from making a huge and devastating mistake, the only effective way of doing so will be through very overt displays of strength and political will. Quiet diplomacy will not be enough. Wishful thinking is not a wise strategy.

This, however, is also the point when people living in democracies can become self-doubting and pessimistic. Displays of strength and political will are much easier for dictators than for democracies.

Moreover, the regularity of elections and changes of government means that a display of political will today provides no guarantee that the next government will act in the same way. No one looking ahead to November’s US presidential election can ignore this basic lack of predictability and built-in sense of discontinuity.

That knowledge of our own democratic discontinuities can, however, lead us to overrate the strength and resilience of dictatorships.

In Japan, the United States or Britain, opinion polls and independent media tell us every day how low the approval ratings of our governments have fallen and how openly their potential successors are fighting to undermine them and to take their place.

In a dictatorship such as Russia or China, those signals are in effect turned off. President Putin won his presidential election this month because all his potential rivals are either dead, in jail or banned.

This makes a regime such as Putin’s or Xi’s look invulnerable. We cannot detect any signs of opposition or weakness because such signs have been suppressed. In the absence of alternative information, many therefore assume that these dictators will stay in power forever.

The pessimists conclude that whatever the cost to Russia of Putin’s mistake of invading Ukraine, his highly concentrated power and his large force of personal bodyguards must mean that he will be able to outlast Ukraine and its backers in the West.

Similarly, it was striking at China’s National People’s Congress this month that Premier Li Qiang, who is nominally the country’s second most powerful leader after President Xi, canceled the traditional media briefing and so took no questions. There are no signs of any criticism of President Xi, despite a stagnant economy and high youth unemployment.

Yet while dictatorships do sometimes last for a long time, we should always ask ourselves whether this apparent invulnerability might be an illusion.

Putin looks invulnerable today, yet last summer his former military ally, Yevgeny Prigozhin, staged a dramatic, if brief, mutiny, following which the only way Putin could deal with him was to have him killed.

It is often forgotten, too, that last year China saw surprising leaks of criticisms of President Xi’s economic failures by party elders. Those criticisms have since been suppressed, but the fact that they became known tells us that his control is not as absolute as it looks.

Our democracies are designed to bring regular changes, of leaders and of governing parties, which can make them seem unstable. Yet so long as the constitutional system is maintained those changes are in fact smooth and are themselves displays of strength. That is why the attempted insurrection by supporters of Trump in January 2021 was so outrageous and worrying: The attack on Capitol Hill was an attack on the constitutional system itself.

Dictatorships are more brittle than they look: There are no advance warnings of collapse or of coups d’etat, but when they come they can be violent and shocking. Democracies, by contrast, are stronger than they look: By building in change, they control both what Talleyrand called “crimes” and devastating “mistakes.” We need to keep our nerve, value that strength, and keep on proving that Churchill was correct.

Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute.