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 mean, I think there's a misconception that a lot of people have that dictators are particularly good at waging war. And there are some reasons why one could suspect that. So one of the things that dictatorships are very good at is taking casualties, for example. So when the caskets come home or when injured people come home...

and they land back in the U.S., the American president is going to have a massive issue. And he's going to have that issue because people that come home dead or the people that come home injured are directly a part of the constituency that keeps him in power because he needs to win elections. And the soldiers coming home, their families and their friends and all of these people can vote.

If you have Vladimir Putin, you don't really have to be concerned about people from some Siberian village dying, because people in that Siberian village have zero influence on you staying in power or not. So that's one of the things that dictatorships tend to be much better at. But there are a lot of flip sides.

So first of all, what we just talked about in terms of coup-proofing is a massive issue for a lot of these militaries, because once again, they are not building militaries in order to actually fight wars. So when they're forced into fighting wars, they're in trouble. So one of the examples that I give in the book is a war between Iraq and Iran.

And essentially what happened is Saddam Hussein was a lot more worried about his own people and about his own security services than the Iranian soldiers. So what he did was he used almost the entire intelligence apparatus that he could in order to spy on his own people and on his own soldiers.

And as a result, you had, I think, three people in the entire Iraqi intelligence apparatus looking at Iran. And two of them spoke Farsi, the language that you need to understand to actually understand what's happening in Iran. So obviously, this type of machine is not good at then going to fight against Iran.

But what he gradually realized is that, OK, the Iranians coming closer, they're not quite within range of my palace yet. But now Iranian soldiers are starting to become a bigger issue than Iraqi soldiers. And in the case of Saddam Hussein, he could still pivot because Iraq is a comparatively powerful country, but has resources that it can trade.

So gradually what he did is he loosened the grip that he had on his own generals. He redirected the intelligence apparatus towards Iran, and he did less micromanaging because he came to realize that actually, okay, I'm not the person that should be determining how wide the trenches should be. I'm going to let the professional... I mean, that's real. He actually did that.

That's, yeah, ridiculous. Yeah. I'm going to give a little bit longer leash to my generals because now I'm more worried about the Iranians than I am about my own people. And it allowed them to maintain power. But not all countries can do that. So a lot of them essentially look for external protection.

If they cannot protect themselves, if they cannot go back on this coup-proofing, they need somebody else to protect them, essentially.

Yeah, chances are high. You can survive in power even if you lose a war. But chances are quite high that you do end up losing power. But I think this is quite interesting when it comes to Russia, for example, because we talked about the influence that outsiders have on the survival of some of these regimes and of some of these dictators.

And I think when it comes to Putin, outsiders actually have much more influence than they often have, but they are less willing to use it. Unlike with a lot of these other dictatorships, we can have a massive influence on whether Vladimir Putin stays in power or not, because we can have an influence on the way that the war goes in Ukraine.

The more likely it is that Putin loses that war, the more likely it is that he also loses power. But I think we're less willing to use it because the consideration is, of course, also, OK, if Putin feels that he has his back towards the wall and that he might actually lose this war, what is he going to do?

And I think in European capitals like Berlin, but also in D.C., for example, the thinking is, OK, if we empower the Ukrainians too much and Vladimir Putin thinks he might lose the war and subsequently might lose power, he may use nuclear weapons. So I think we've got a bit of a paradox when it comes to Russia currently.

Yeah, I think a lot of the time we can, particularly with cases that are not quite as bad. So like I said, somebody like Kim Jong-un, somebody like Assad, it's very difficult. And I think outsiders can have an influence, but it's going to cost a lot. It might lead to dead soldiers. It's going to be very costly. It's going to be very bloody.

So that is something that policymakers have to think about long and hard. But when it comes to some regimes that are more in the middle, right? So they're not the worst of the worst. Maybe they haven't existed for multiple decades. Maybe they're not quite as powerful. There are things that we can do. And the way that I look at this is essentially three parts. So you want to weaken the incumbent.

You want to strengthen alternative elites. And you want to empower the masses. Because if you do not empower the masses, and there are a variety of ways to do it, you risk a scenario where basically one dictator walks out the front gate and another walks in on the other side of the palace. And that can mean sanctions to make it more difficult for the regime to redistribute gains.

It can mean running workshops. It can mean making sure their communication networks stay open. It can mean training people in strategy. There's a bunch of things that you can do. that are very cheap and where the outcome is unlikely to be catastrophic. If you run a workshop for independent journalists somewhere in Central Asia, it is unlikely to lead to a million deaths.

Maybe it happens, but it's highly unlikely.

When it comes to some of these more drastic measures, right, when it comes to things like, do you support assassinations? Do you provide weapons to regime opponents? Do you encourage sabotage? Do you perhaps go to war? I'm extremely skeptical because I know that historically speaking, a lot of the time it has gone wrong.

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