One of the most perplexing questions of the Iran war has been why so many people, both in the Trump administration and among the punditry, thought the regime would collapse as soon as its most senior military and political officials were killed.
The answer lies in a common category error: Not all authoritarian states are brittle dictatorships.
I’ve seen my share of dictatorships fall apart after decapitation. I saw it in Haiti, where I began my foreign reporting career covering the fall of “president-for-life” Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986; the country fell into violent anarchy that persists today. In the early 1990s I witnessed the chaos left behind in Somalia following the fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, is still a partially failed state years after Mobutu Sese Seko was run out.
When those dictatorial regimes collapsed, it’s because the dictator had hollowed out all the normal organs of a state. Because power was concentrated into one man’s hands, all other institutions just atrophied.
But more often than not, authoritarian regimes are deeply institutionalized. They can rule their populations with ruthless efficiency because they are embedded in every province, city and village. They can survive the removal of the leader because the regime is decentralized, built to endure and buttressed by a sprawling elite whose power and wealth depend on the system’s survival.
Consider China. President and Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. But the Communist Party of China consists of roughly 100 million members, and is deeply rooted in every village, classroom and factory. China has seen its share of leadership turmoil; I was in Beijing in 2012 when the charismatic Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai was sacked and later imprisoned, partly because he was suspected of plotting to derail Xi’s ascendancy. Chinese social media was filled with wild rumors of attempted coups with tanks in the streets.
Despite the turmoil of that relatively recent episode, it illuminates the paradox of authoritarian states. Had Bo won out over Xi, the system would in all likelihood have reconstituted itself around the new leader. There simply is too much at stake for the whole system to collapse over a leadership struggle. If Xi were removed tomorrow, the Communist Party in China would carry on.
A mistake observers often make — and I count myself among past offenders — is to personalize regimes and oversimplify complex geopolitical issues. If only such-and-such leader were removed, the country would be transformed. Unfortunately, it’s not how things work.
In 2011, I was living in Beijing when North Korean leader Kim Jong Il died unexpectedly. I interviewed various Chinese and Western analysts who were optimistic that Kim’s death would lead to reform and modernization of the notoriously closed country. Many opined that Kim’s son and heir, Kim Jong Un, was too young and untested to hold the reins of power for long. Others said the younger Kim had studied in Switzerland, likely to have made him more open, less doctrinaire.
My story in The Washington Post was headlined: “With elder Kim’s death, some see window for change in North Korea.” Whether the young Kim was transformed by the system he inherited or whether he received all the relevant upbringing at his father’s feet, North Korea has largely stayed the same: a hereditary totalitarian state with a pervasive cult of personality, extensive political prison camps and extreme information control — and nuclear weapons.
Another regime I thought was solely reliant on one man was Robert Mugabe’s 37-year dictatorship in Zimbabwe. Under Mugabe, a once-heralded liberation fighter, Zimbabwe was by the 2000s in economic shambles. In 2017, at the age of 93, the frail Mugabe was detained by his military and forced to resign. Zimbabweans were jubilant. So was I, from afar. But more than eight years later, Zimbabwe is much the same mess under a new “Big Man” dictator, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was Mugabe’s former spy chief known as “the Crocodile.” The new president promised change. But at 83, he’s still in charge, and the repressive system remains very much intact.
Israel has long relied on the decapitation strategy to eliminate its enemies. One was Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas in Gaza, who was killed in a 2004 Israeli missile strike. Israeli officials boasted the assassination would hamper Hamas’s ability to conduct future terrorist attacks. I had interviewed Yassinin his Gaza City office four years earlier. I was stunned to meet a sickly quadriplegic using a wheelchair whose voice was so faint, it could barely be picked up on my tape recorder. The frail figure I met could not possibly have been the sum total of Hamas. And sure enough, Hamas not only continued, but became more vicious and extreme under new leadership.
The lesson is that decapitation of deeply institutionalized authoritarian regimes often doesn’t create a vacuum. It may trigger a power struggle. But it also stokes vengeance.
President Donald Trump has reportedly expressed surprise that Iran responded to the killing of its supreme leader not with capitulation but retaliation. He should not have been. Iran’s new rulers may be wounded, paranoid and diminished. But regimes like that don’t fade away when a few men at the top are carted off or blown away. Removing leaders is easy. Dismantling the oppressive system they built is much harder.
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