Lawfare Archive: Much Ado About Coups with Naunihal Singh

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I'm Sarah Lourish. In turn, at Walker, with an episode from the Walker archive for August 23, 2020. On August 18, Sanby's president Fokka Yede Hichi Lemma, one real action following a contentious election,

which included the temporary suspension of vote counting, due to concerns about ballot theft and violence. Unlike Sanby, many African countries, especially in Western Central Africa, continue to experience democratic facts lighting,

and a free-crunk regime change,

including through military coups. For today's archive, I chose an episode from September 13, 2023, in which Tyler McBrion spoke with Nani Hulsin, about military coups in Africa and his book on the subject.

They discussed what makes some countries more from the others, changes in international norms around coups, and the myth that if one country experiences a coup, it's neighbors are more likely to as well. I'm Tyler McBrion.

Managing editor of Law Fair. The law fair podcast, September 13, 2023. On August 30, soldiers and high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Gabon, seized control of government buildings

and communication channels in the capital city of Libraville. Detaining Gabon's president Ali Bongo and his residents, and declaring an end to the Bongo family's 56 year rule. It was a coup, one of nine in the last three years in Western Central Africa, including a Niger just one month prior.

I spoke with Nani Hulsin, author of the book Seizing Power, the strategic logic of military coups, to discuss this spade of coups in the region. The origins of coups,

what makes certain countries more coup-prone than others, and the rise in fall of anti-coup norms during and after the cold war. We also dispelled several coup myths, including the myth of the coup contagion. It's the law fair podcast, September 13,

much to do about coups with Nana Hulsin. Nani Hull, I want to start with the lay of the land of sorts as you very well know coups are not a new phenomenon. Why would I be reaching out to you today to talk? Can you talk about where the most recent coups

“have been taking place and maybe some of the context behind them?”

Certainly, so the most recent coups which have occurred have been almost all in Africa, and it depends when you want to go back. But the most recent coup in the world was in the country of Gabon, which has been stable ever since independence. In fact, it's only been ruled by one family.

It is a relatively wealthy African country with oil and uranium, and a very small population, and nobody was anticipating that they would have a coup. There was a coup there. Before that, recently there was a coup in Niger,

and Niger is a very important country in terms of US counterterrorism. There is a US Air Force Base in Agadez in the north of Niger, which was one of the most expensive Air Force projects in the world when it was built, and it provides what the military calls ISR coverage, which is to say unmanned drones flying over the Sahel,

monitoring terrorist activity, and other movements and activities across this large region. There was a coup in Chad,

“another country which is very important for US counterterrorism.”

There what happened is the President died, and instead of the next President coming from the line of success,

who was sort of appointed by the military.

“There was a coup in Sudan where there had been a fragile transitional government,”

which was supposed to be moving in a more democratic way. There had been a previous coup which happened in the context of a democratic revolution, and just when they were supposed to be fully handing over power to the civilians, there was a falling out between the two major military factions. And this resulted in a civil war in Sudan,

which has led to more refugees than the war in Ukraine. And so the consequences of all of these incidents are pretty severe. As a matter of fact, we have had in Africa, we have had coups in Gabal, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea.

And the consequences of all this activity in countries that have, Jihadi violence has been in increase in violence. Some of these countries like Burkina Faso and Mali have turned towards the Wagner group. There are important consequences for both security and foreign policy that are occurring as a result of these coups.

I definitely want to dig into these consequences that you mentioned. These are immense.

But first I want to back up once more and just lay out some definitions on the table.

In your understanding and maybe in the sort of academic understanding, what is a coup?

“And how might that differ from perhaps a colloquial understanding or even a political understanding?”

I'm speaking specifically about the recent adieu about the United States labeling the coup or non-coup in Niger, a coup. So could you first just lay out the definition and then, and then talk a bit about what's at stake when a coup is finally labeled a coup. At least from the United States point of view.

Certainly.

So first off, I define a coup attempt as an explicit inaction,

involving some portion of the military police or security forces. Usually the military that's undertaken with the intent to overthrow the government. So this encompasses not only the obvious coup attempts, but also situations where there may have been a popular revolution going on at the same time. Protesters and demonstrators in the street as long as the president is pushed out by military action.

It excludes other cases as well. So if you've had an assassination or an invasion or something like that, it's still a coup. And the consequence of this here is that there are legal consequences for countries that have had coups. The United States, as part of section 708 of the State Department's Appropriation Act, says that we cannot give certain forms of aid to countries which have engaged in a coup.

And that has consequences. Particularly when these are countries which are close partners of the United States. So we did this in order to defend democracy and to make sure that countries that engaged in coups would have consequences and therefore there would be a deterrent effect towards coups.

“And we did all of this after the end of the Cold War when we realized it was very important to protect the norm of democracy.”

And since then the problem is that there have been a number of other important foreign policy considerations,

which have come into mind, countries like Egypt have had coups, but they are too politically important for us to sanction. Other countries have had coups, but they're security partners. And we don't necessarily want to identify what they've done as coups. The way it works in the law actually is that we're only interested in a narrow subset of coups.

We're interested in a coup where the military acts alone, so without outside of the context of a popular revolution. And where the president is fully democratically elected. Sometimes we've dodged and we've said, "Oh, the president was really democratically elected, so we don't need to sanction the new government, which comes into power as a result of the coup." But in general, there was an effort to create and protect this norm.

And it was very effective. It was created not just by the US, other Western countries acted to protect democracy, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and regional organizations, like the OAU in Latin America, the African Union in Africa.

And they were able to reduce the number of coup attempts significantly.

“coup attempts really went down considerably in parts of the world like Latin America.”

And in Africa where they continued, they were still depressed. And so it's clear that this attempt to protect the norm worked.

But the problem is it's costly.

Anytime you have sanctions, they have to be things that hurt both parties, because otherwise you would have been doing the thing already. And so these sanctions are things that cause pain to the United States, and to the countries imposing the sanctions, they don't want to do it. And because they don't want to do it, sometimes they find ways to wriggle out.

And as a result, the norm has been successfully weakened, or it's successfully weakened over time. The norm is no longer as strong as it once was. And I understand this look foreign policy is about making choices. So there was a war on terror. It continues to this day to you're recording me on September 11th,

22 years after the towers were hit. And we became very concerned with counter terror. And we developed partnerships with countries. And we didn't want those partnerships to be disrupted even if there was a coup in those countries. We have important strategic relationships with countries like Egypt.

And that strategic relationship is one we want to preserve, no matter who is in power in Egypt. And now there is great power competition. And so we are concerned about losing out influence with respect to Russia and China. And all of these considerations then reduce the amount of seriousness with which we can prosecute sort of a vigorous defensive democracy democratic norms. You bring up a good point about norms and it actually has complicated my next question.

You published an article in the Journal of Democracy in October of last year. And there was a subsection that you titled The Rise and Fall of Anticune Norms. So I wanted to ask you about whether this seeming uptick perhaps in coups is because of a weakening anti-cune norm. Or thinking about the answer to your last question.

“Is it just part of a trend of just the weakening of norms of democracy in general?”

Or are those two so inextricably linked that when you speak of one you invariably speak of the other? I do think they're linked. If you look at the countries where the coups have occurred. None of these are countries with institutionalized democracy. These are all countries that have had some sort of hybrid regime.

So for example, President Basum and Niger in Niger was.

His administration was the first time there had been a democratic transfer of power from one democratically elected president to another.

In Kabul, the election had recently been held and it appeared to have been fraudulent. There's no way that one family gets to rule in a country for more than 60 years. And so the fact is that if we are not supporting democratic governments and pushing for democratic norms, then many of the governments that are in power are themselves going to be weak in their commitment to democracy. And there are three factors which lead to the probability of a coup, and they're really simple.

One of them is if you've had past coups or past coup attempts, you're more likely to have a coup. The second is if you're poor, the third is if you've got some sort of hybrid regime. A fully democratic country or a fully authoritarian country, those are countries where you're less likely to observe coups. But countries in the middle, that's where a coup's occur. And so to the extent to which we have a weakening of pro-democratic norms, we are increasing the probability that we're going to see coups.

“And I think one factor that was conspicuously absent from your list was the presence of neighboring coups,”

which leads me to my question about whether or not coups are contagious. You've written on this topic quite a bit in which you talk about the myth of the coup contagion. Could you talk about a bit about, I think, why that's such a compelling narrative, especially in the media, to talk about the coup belt that is catching fire across the African continent or something like that, and why it actually is a myth in your research that you've found.

So here's the thing, when you have coups which are happening, and they're happening one after the other, it's easy to believe they might be linked,

Like, it looks like there's a coup belt across Africa, but there are a couple of problems with this.

“One of them is that the causes and stories involved in these different coups are all very different.”

So for example, in Niger, what happened is the present was going to fire the head of his presidential guard, and the head of his presidential guard acted to protect himself and his job before that occurred.

In Sudan, you had a fragile transition, and they knew that when they handed over power to civilians, there might be a reckoning between the two branches of the armed forces that had never gone along,

and so one of them acted to preempt the other, and so there's a falling apart over there. The stories that are happening are the stories that explain what's going on in these different countries are all very different. Why is it that they're all happening in Africa? Well, because African countries do have the shared history. These were all countries which were poor, which had less than fully democratic regimes, and which had a history of prior coups and coup attempts. And so it creates a pattern of coincidence.

There are a couple other ways in which you can try to analyze this question.

One of them is by crunchy numbers, and their people who have crunch sort of a million different regressions and tried to see to what extent they can find evidence of contagion.

And they find that certain things are contagious. You find democratic movements being contagious, you find protests and demonstrations being contagious. They do not find evidence for coups being contagious. On the flip side, I've done a lot of interviews with people who were in these countries, including with people who not all of these countries.

I interviewed people in one country and in great depth, but I interviewed them about a series of different coups.

“And when this happened, I asked them repeatedly, how much was your decision amount to coup influenced by the coups that had happened in your neighborhood recently?”

And they said, oh, we knew all about them, like we would discuss them. But honestly, what happened in that country was really not that relevant to what was happening here. And so if you look at sort of a historically nuanced perspective, what you find is that coup makers are primarily concerned with domestic considerations when they engage in coups. If you look at this recent spade of coups, you find that once you look under the hood, they've got very different stories. And then if you crunch the numbers over a large range of different coups, you find that you don't have the evidence for coup contagion that you find for other kinds of social phenomena.

And so what you see here is the power of coincidence and the ways in which particularly as people who live outside of Africa, we look at things in Africa and we reduce difference. And we sort of want to see similarities and patterns. But in fact, these are pretty different animals, one from the other.

“It sort of reminds me of the, I think it was Tolstoy, quote about how all happy families are like, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

You know, each coup obviously has its own specific context. And you know, going back to the three factors that you laid out of the sort of, I guess, characteristics of more coup-prone countries being, first, you know, a recent history of successful coups, second, low economic development, and third, the sort of presence of a hybrid regime rather than a fully consolidated democracy or autocracy. And these strike me as perhaps preconditions or contextual factors that could lead to a coup, but are there similarities in the spark or the trigger that actually set the coup into motion.

So here I argue that they're pretty different. Here's the issue. Often times the justification used for, for mounting a coup is boilerplate. And in fact, you see some very interesting trends in the language that is used over time. But if once you dig a little bit under the surface, you find on different justifications and different actors involved for different reasons. So, for example, in Niger, it was a leader who didn't want to lose his job. In Gabon, it was an insider, the general who's taken power in Gabon appears to be, I'm not an expert on Gabon, a member of the extended Bongo clan, the same family that had been running Gabon this whole time.

And that means it's a intranessing conflict in there. And in fact, some people in Gabon even argue that he may have acted to protect the interests of the clan against the guy who is currently in power.

In Burkinafaso, one of the grievances that came up was, we don't like the way that the civilians are running the fight against the jihadists.

But other cases, the coup makers are very much insiders like what you saw in Gabon, or in Chad, where the military had been a close governing partner, and when the president died, they put his son in place because they wanted to remain in power behind the scenes. And so in that way, the spark can vary a good deal. One of the things I found when I was doing my extended research for my book is that the grievances vary to good deal, even when the justification offered did not. And the grievances could vary in part within a coup.

So it could be that some of the earlier people who were getting ready to mount a coup, they were thinking largely of their own personal ambition.

And then others might be acting to protect themselves from losing their job, and others might have been acting out of a political motivation.

Sometimes the same individual had two or three different motivations which were at cross purposes with each other. And so if you talked to different members of the coup coalition, and you asked one person about why they were doing it, you might find that when they started plotting, they had one thing in mind and by the end, they had another thing in mind, and so trying to get at grievances and motivations ends up being really messy. At the end of the day, what we find is that it's pretty complex. It's very hard to nip this in the body and make people not want to engage in coups. This is one of the reasons why norms matter is because norms create a change. They say certain kinds of behavior is off limits and certain kinds of behavior is going to lead to fairly bad consequences.

And when those norms are in place and they're reinforced again and again over time, it serves to ring fence certain kinds of behavior. And so there are countries where militaries or military actors may have particular concerns, but they choose to prosecute them in a different way. They might choose to go up to the president and say, "Look, we don't like the way you're running this war. And if you continue, we are going to embarrass you politically." Or if you continue, we are going to engage in military disobedience. We're not going to listen to you.

“But that's a far cry from saying we're going to overthrow you and we're going to take your place. And I think that's one of the ways in which the norms matter very powerfully.”

If you think of a country like Argentina, Argentina used to have a lot of coups. And then Argentina went through a period where they cycled through presidents very quickly. And in that period, the military had an option to intervene. They may even have been welcomed by the people, but they didn't want you. They wanted to stay out. It was pretty clear that if they got involved in governing, it would be pretty bad for the military. And so they stayed out of things. Their other countries as well, Chile is finally going to be digging into human rights abuses.

The Chilean military has said not a peep, and maybe at an earlier time they would have been a lot more willing to do so. But at this point, the consequences for the Chilean military, if they were going to try to overthrow the president, it would be quite dire.

“And I think members of the Chilean military have internalized this.”

So in certain parts of the world, the norm is a very powerful restraint.

But in countries where there have been successful cruise recently, where coup attempts still go on, where democracy is not fully consolidated in these places, the norm against coups, internally is not strong, and if it is not defended externally, then it doesn't serve to restrain the action of powerful militarization. Your point about discouraging coups and/or just simply raising the costs for would be coup plotters being a complicated endeavor as well-taken.

“But I guess in addition to this Yomans work, that can take generations to solidify a norm against coups, what options are on the table?”

At least in the short term, or in countries that don't have a strong of an anti-coup norm, what are the options both for international actors? Perhaps being countries by themselves as regional organizations, the UN, and then also internally, domestically,

So one of the things we could do is we could actually follow through, right?

“So we say that they're going to be consequences, they're going to be financial penalties.”

And so we could actually withhold military assistance, diplomatic recognition, and certain forms of economic assistance, economic assistance, which is not going to benefit the poor. Economic and interest where really the elites are going to benefit a good deal from what we're doing. And you can make it very clear that there will be an automatic cessation of these things, and both sides will get hurt, but that this is the reason why militaries don't want to engage in a coup, and if they do, that they have to move very rapidly towards a restoration of some form of legitimate democracy.

So that would be one way to push. Another way would be to reinforce the norm of democracy not just against coups, but against a wide variety of anti-ademic radical actions. So, for example, Gabo is a country where the president was elected in somewhat suspicious circumstances. And at the same time, the governor's president is someone who studied in France and he's a darling of the West. And he could have been made clear that it was very important for Gabo to move in a more profoundly democratic way over time.

And we don't do that.

We have become concerned with issues other than democracy.

And so there's a good deal of lip service paid to democratic norms. But at the same time, we say, well, democracy is fine and good, but we also care, perhaps even more for security. We care even more for certain kinds of economic relationships. But here's the problem.

“We say we're concerned with security, but guess what happens when Honda takes power in these countries?”

Security goes down a good deal. Some of these countries might welcome in the Wagner group. And that itself causes insecurity. And so our concern for security over democracy ends up undermining security in these countries. And so there are reasons to understand why democracy is a good which will have a broader impact. Here's another one, when Biden invited African leaders to the United States for a high-level summit.

He tried to restrict the set of leaders he invited to democratic leaders.

But he made one exception, which is the president of Equatorial Guinea.

Why because the militaries concern that Equatorial Guinea might offer the Chinese naval base? And so we said, okay, democracy matters, but there are other things which matter a lot more. This is the constant story of Pakistan and Egypt. But by working with hunters, by either looking the other way or supporting them thoroughly, we have damaged security in these countries considerably. And so what we end up doing is we put our short-term convenience.

“We want to maintain our relationships with these countries against what we think of as a long-term consideration.”

Oh, someone else can deal with democracy. But in the end, there's short-term harms as well. And this is a problem. I've heard, you want your mobile phone number? But it's not easy for you to come here. Who wants a XXL-streaming number? A 2-term view?

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Do you think the answer to my next question, which I was…

“I think the answer to my next question, which I was going to put purposefully flippantly,”

which is if a coup occurs in a highly autocratic country should we care, essentially. But I think put another way. Are there any situations in which counter-intuitively a coup can actually show up democratic norms or if a coup were to occur in an autocratic country and then perhaps the military can assure in elections and then actually solidified democracy.

Has that ever happened? Could it happen? Are there any cases in which, as I asked counter-intuitively, coups actually are a good thing for democracy? Certainly. So yes, in fact, there are very important examples of democracies which have taken root after a coup.

For example, the third wave of democracy.

It started in the 1970s, starts with a coup in Portugal. And Portugal is now a democracy, but that democracy comes about because of a coup. The Arab Spring cases are almost all coups. There was a coup in Tunisia in support of the demonstrators. There was a coup in Egypt as well. My belief is that coups are as coups do.

The question is not is a coup bad or good. A coup against a democracy is clearly bad.

“A coup against an autocracy the way I judge it is what are the consequences?”

What happens as a result of this? To what extent do we move in a more pro-democratic direction? And sometimes, in fact, we do. The democracy that was created in Tunisia lasted for a while, although democracy in Tunisia's gotten weaker recently. The democratic transition in Portugal certainly held.

So when a coup is followed with genuine democratization, that is very important. I want to go back to dispelling, maybe some of the media myths in addition to the myth of the coup contagion. And one of them is perhaps not a myth at all, but I'm just curious whether there has been an uptick in coups empirically speaking in the past couple of years. Our past few years, you've mentioned in an article that in September 2021, Secretary General of the UN and Antonio Guterres stated that "military coups are back".

So simply, simply put our military coups back.

I would argue they never left.

And so there's definitely an uptick, right?

“We are seeing more coups, and I think part of what might be responsible for this is, like I said, an increased permissive atmosphere.”

The fact is that one to leaders know that they've got a lot more options than they used to. But beyond that, I see no reason to believe that coups are going to be back the way they were in the 1970s, which was the heyday of coups. I think that instead what we see is that coups are going to continue in the parts of the world where there had been a lot of coups where they've been poor and where democracy is not fully taken hold. And so we will see that in African countries that are coup-prone, we might see it in some Middle Eastern countries, we might see it in other Asian countries, how we got a coup in Burma.

And keeping with this line of questioning about just spelling, perhaps dispelling media myths or not, there's been a lot of coverage about the coup leaders themselves receiving training from Western militaries, namely the United States and France. So what extent have you feel that this is a factor that perhaps military training from the United States could at least give a military leader the tools to carry out a coup or somehow influence would be coup-plotter? Does this kind of thinking hold water with you?

It does not. There is different, there are different strains of research on this, mainly statistical. There were some researchers who found that in fact countries which had received funds for military officers to come to the US and train were more coup-prone. They were looking at the flagship program. Someone else looked at the wide variety of military training we do, and they found that there was no relationship. And this raises the question that maybe what we're doing is we're focusing our training efforts on countries that are important to us because they're unstable.

So we are moving into places which are coup-prone rather than our presence is causing the likelihood of coups.

There's something else as well which is we have widely expanded the amount of military training we do overseas, and it varies hugely. Sometimes it is a one day training on let's say human rights law. Sometimes it is a senior military leader going to France or England or the US for a ten-month masters degree. So the duration varies. The topic varies. Some of the training is very narrowly tactical. Here is how you learn and practice a particular skill. Other times it is somebody going off and studying English in the US and other times it is like I said they're going off to a war college and they're studying a variety of different topics.

I do think, however, and this might be controversial with some friends in the military, I do think that we should stop saying that we are transmitting positive norms.

I see no evidence of that. I see no evidence that people are getting imbued with pro-democratic norms through our training.

“But at the same time, I think that it is likely that we are not in some way accidentally transmitting anti-democratic norms either.”

As a long-term professor, I can tell you it is very hard to shape the opinions of your students. It is hard enough to do that when they are 18, but when they're 30 or 40, it gets a lot harder. And no matter what big abstractions they pick up when they're in the US, when they go back home and they're faced with a very specific question, "Hey, what do I do if I'm about to lose my job at my access to power in this country?"

It could be that a lot of their commitments to norms or particular forms of civil military relations go out the window in a real hurry.

Look, we've seen a weakening of democratic norms not just in countries which are developing and coup-prone, but even countries which had thought themselves to be firmly consolidated democracies. And so if we can see a weakening of democratic norms in countries like the US, we can see a weakening of democratic norms elsewhere as well. So I don't see it happening as a result of teaching, but it does make for a dramatic headline when, for example, in Guinea, the people who mounted the coup actually left an American training at that moment to go do so.

“And you know, that's egg on our face. There's one other factor here too. I think to the extent to which we build close security relationships with militaries in certain countries.”

The military leaders in those countries may feel like they're going to have a good deal of wiggle room if they mount a coup. And this is particularly true if we've invested a lot in our relationship with an individual. And this is again why norms are important. We could say, hey, look, we've been working with you for 20 years and we've been working with a high command of this military for, for just as long. And we've built these relationships and we've invested, we've built military bases, we've invested in a variety of different ways, but you know what none of this is as important as our norms.

And if we could be sincere and consistent for doing that, I think our relationships with these countries would shift. If you look at a country like Pakistan, they know very clearly, as long as the war in terror was going on, as long as the US was heavily engaged with Pakistan, that both the Pakistani military and the ISI had a good deal of wiggle room.

“And where does that lead us while it leads to bin Laden being inobdabad? Because they know that this relationship is so important to the US that they can afford to endanger to that extent.”

You're talking about wiggle room here, and moments that go, you also mentioned that home to leaders seem to have a lot more options than they used to, so I'm curious how you see some of these current coup situations further unfolding, other common paths that coups take or common ways that coups end, for example, what will you be looking for or at specifically as these situations, especially the countries in Africa you named as they continue to unfold. So one way out will be some form of a managed transition. The problem here is that very often the military wants to maintain an important role behind the scenes.

Or will it be limited or will it be extensive? And sometimes this process of accountability can stretch forward for decades, which is what happened in Chile, but is it possible or is it not possible?

“Another thing you look for is to what extent once the transition takes place, what extent is the civilian leader who's elected able to actually govern?”

And one of the things we saw in countries like Egypt and Sudan is that they're quite limited, and that the military comes back in because they get very worried about the actions that someone might take. And so you want to try to reinforce these civilian leaders, and what becomes hard is that sometimes these are leaders doing things we don't like as an Egypt, and it may be that we like the foreign policy that the military hunt is going to pursue more than we like the foreign policy that the civilian leader is going to pursue, but then there's attention between our different objectives in these countries, and that becomes challenging.

We look for intramulatory relationships, one of the things that happens after a coup is that intramulatory tensions get heightened.

And so sometimes a new leader will come in there and try to pay off or buy out other parts of the military, but that only lasts so long.

“Sometimes what happens is the tensions between different wings of a military or different factions of the military can become increasingly tense, and that's how you end up with the war in Sudan, which is truly horrific.”

The tensions are those which are longstanding between the uniform military and the RSF, the paramilitary which evolves out of the John Joede, the organization which was responsible for the genocide in Darfur, and those two groups never really found a way to work it out.

And so in fact, when there was going to be the transition in towards more democracy, they had a falling out, and we now have this horrific civil war, which is destabilizing the whole region.

So these are a number of the things which we look for, what we want to see is a solid transition towards democracy and continued steps in a pro-democratic direction.

“And there are things which can undercut this, right? We worry very much about what's happening in Mali because the Hunta has engaged in human rights violations, and their partner, the Wagner group is responsible for many of these.”

That's a step which is going in the wrong direction rather than in the right direction. We want to see what's happening constitutionally, we want to see movement towards an election, we want to see that the democracy is substantive that, in fact, different candidates get a chance to run for election and to genuinely campaign. And we want to see that the military gets forced to take a back seat, and over time, please a smaller and smaller role in the governing of the country. And these are all very challenging things to do, and it was easier to do them after the end of the Cold War, and right now it's a lot harder.

One of the things that happened as a result of the war on terrorism became very clear to other countries that we care about democracy, but we care about other things it could deal more. And my worry is that the same thing is happening with great power competition. Yes, we care about democracy, it's a slogan, and it's one of these things that is central to our foreign policy, but at the end of the day, we also care about this competition with Russia and China, and so we're willing to look the other way.

And all of these things lead to a weakening of democracy, and part of this is our own fault for not having pushed countries in a more democratic direction long before the coup is occurred. We've covered a lot of ground, so before we end our conversation, I just wanted to open the floor back up to you if there's anything I missed or you'd like to add or any other coup myths you'd like to dispel or bust the floor as yours. One of the things which I think is very important for people understand is that pursuing democracy worldwide is challenging. It comes with a cost, but at the same time, there is an argument for pursuing it, which is normative, which is about values, and then there are other reasons why we want to pursue it, which are really pragmatic.

And so when we support military coups or huntas or less democratic civilian regimes, this is really going to cost us both in the short term and in the long term.

And so there are very good reasons to commit to carrying about democracy. And what worries me is that once upon a time, this commitment was one which was shared by both sides of the fence in Washington and by a wide range of different actors within the institution. And now I feel like it's become a good deal weaker and we pay the price for this over time.

“Now to all this has been a really illuminating conversation, and I'd like to thank you for your time.”

Great, thank you very much.

Thank you for watching the rational security chatter, allies, and the aftermath. Our latest law fair presents podcast series on the government's response to January 6th.

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