Dr. Marcel Dirsus

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177 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard Jan 2025

Dr. Marcel Dirsus’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show · 1103: Marcel Dirsus | How Tyrants Fall and Nations Survive · 14 Jan 2025 podcast

Yeah, I think the case of Kim Jong-un in particular is super difficult. Generally speaking, the question is really, what do you want to achieve? Because most of the time, people don't just want to get rid of dictators. They also want some sort of sustainable outcome, right?

Usually a democracy, because oftentimes, what good is it toppling one dictator if that dictator is then replaced by another one? So we know that your best chance of a good outcome happens when you top people through nonviolent protests. So if you can topple these types of tyrants through nonviolent protest, then that tends to work out very well. But there's two problems with that.

The first one is, A, the type of leaders that can be toppled through nonviolent protest don't tend to be the worst of the worst. So somebody like Kim Jong-un is not going to be brought down by peaceful protesters because peaceful protest is essentially impossible in North Korea. There's no free media. You can't access the internet, really.

There's punishments across generations for people that oppose the regime. And the regime can just use brute force in order to suppress protests. So that's the first problem. So we're stuck in a situation, essentially, where the people closest to power tend to have most of an influence on these leaders, as we discussed.

So if you were looking for somebody to bring down Kim Jong-un, that person would probably not sit in the White House and also wouldn't be on the streets of Pyongyang, but it'd be one of his generals. It would be a sister or it would be a child. And clearly... that is not the most desirable scenario that we might want.

So I think when it comes to the most difficult cases, like Kim Jong-un, where something like nonviolent protests are unlikely to work, sanctions are unlikely to work, outsiders are really forced into making some very difficult decisions because oftentimes there are things that we could do, but they are much more risky and they would exact a much larger price, both in terms of blood and in treasure.

And even if outsiders decide to use these means, the outcome is often terrible. So the track record of foreign and post regime change, for example, is abysmal. It's not just Iraq. The overall track record is absolutely tragic.

No, there's other examples. So when researchers looked at this, they looked at dozens and dozens of American regime change operations. They found that just above one in 10 of them led to the creation of a democracy. Japan, Germany, there are a couple of others. So it's not like it never works, but it rarely works. And there's a bit of a paradox here.

All things equal, it is easiest, quote unquote, easiest to bring democracies to countries that are functioning institutions and that have a history of democracy. And conversely, it is most difficult to bring democracy to countries that don't have that history and that don't have functioning institutions.

But if you are, let's say, an American president and you make that decision on whether you go to war or not, the problem is that those same institutions that make democratization more likely also generate military effectiveness. So if you're Germany during World War II, for example, part of the reasons why the German military was so powerful is because Germany functioned.

obviously did absolutely terrible things.

If you are an outsider in this situation, you can either invade a strong country that might actually turn into a democracy, or you can invade a weak country that is unlikely to really turn into a democracy. And given that these sort of strong countries can lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, you're probably not going to do it unless national security is at stake.

Even though presidents say, yeah, we're doing this for democracy, we're doing this for the good of humanity or whatever, they rarely do because it's usually not worth it.

I think both countries were initially occupied, right? So they couldn't really decide much because in the case of Germany, the other allies were in charge. Even in that case, right? So even once you've beaten these adversaries, it's really difficult to actually go through then creating a democracy. So let me give you one example and one difficulty that is universal to all of this.

So let's say you go in militarily for whatever reason and you get rid of that old regime. Now you have to make a decision what you're going to do with the remnants of that regime, right? Are you going to purge them? Are you going to get rid of them, or are you going to say, maybe, okay, we'll purge people at the top, but everybody else we're going to keep?

It's a little bit separate, right? Okay. So let's take Iraq, right? So the Americans, when they went into Iraq, they had the same decision to make, right? They could either prioritize the functioning of Iraqi society. And if they were going to do that, they would purge very few people. Because again, if you purge tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people,

society is going to cease functioning effectively, or you're going to do the opposite. And again, there's a trade-off here, right? And this is also what they saw in Germany. So in Germany, they decided to let a lot of Nazis just keep working. So Germany still had judges, policemen, teachers that were Nazis.

And the Allies did that because they cared more about a functioning Germany than they cared about getting rid of all the Nazis. And in Iraq, they almost went the opposite approach where they purged a lot of people But that ultimately led to a situation where the country was just not able to function. Some guy who worked at an electricity station was previously affiliated with the regime.

So now he was jobless. The military was disbanded. So all of a sudden you have hundreds of thousands of people with military training who no longer have a job. And these decisions are incredibly difficult. And once again, there's not really a good choice here. And you're always going to be forced into this.

Yeah, I think over the last couple of decades, we've had a big push for international justice and holding these types of leaders accountable. And that's a great thing because it can be deterrent. So if you haven't yet committed the worst of the worst, if you haven't yet committed these types of atrocities,

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