The Dilemma of with Dictators

By Strobe Talbott

It has been a bad year for right-wing dictatorships--and for the U.S., which has often supported them. First Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, then General Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua were swept into exile by largely home-grown revolutions. Each had long been taken for granted as the absolute ruler of his country and as a friend of the U.S. Yet in the end, Somoza's national guard, cloned from the U.S. Marine Corps, was as ineffective against the Sandinista guerrillas as the Shah's army and secret police--the best that petro-billions could buy--were against the mostly unarmed followers of a cranky, theocratic graybeard, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini.

At the climactic moment, U.S. friendship for this Persian Ozymandias and this quintessential banana-republic strongman did not seem to count for much. His Imperial Majesty the King of Kings became overnight an international outcast with a price on his head, wandering from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico, discouraged from seeking asylum in the U.S. When Somoza desperately tried to telephone from his bunker to Jimmy Carter for help, the White House switchboard shunted the call to the State Department, where Somoza left a message. Cyrus Vance cabled him back, urging him to quit.

The sudden and ignominious collapse of the Pahlavi and Somoza dynasties came as a shock to Americans and raised troubling questions. How can the U.S. determine which dictatorships are relatively stable and which are unstable or transitory, and how should the U.S. deal with them?

Few Americans have ever felt entirely comfortable with their Government's support for clearly and often cruelly undemocratic regimes. When an old fascist like Spain's Francisco Franco died in 1975, thus finally permitting the restoration of democracy, or when the junta of Greek Colonels self-destructed in 1974 by instigating an abortive coup in Cyprus and made way for the return of Constantine Caramanlis, the U.S. reacted with general relief. Still, the world is full of dictatorships, the U.S. has to deal with most of them, and simply condemning them on moral grounds is not a policy. Support for many of these regimes is widely accepted as necessary in a divided and dangerous world. Since the height of the cold war, American policymakers have been saying of one right-wing despot or another, as Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have said of Somoza's dictatorial father "Tacho" in the late 1930s, & "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

The Soviet Union has its client dictators too. Rather than just tolerating leftist tyrannies, the Kremlin justifies them with dogma and defends them with tanks. Those that call themselves socialist and persecute in the name of the proletariat often seem more enduring than ideologically reactionary, avowedly anti-Communist dictatorships. Most of their staying power is due to the Soviet tanks, ready to roll over incipient democratization as they did in Prague in 1968. Political geography also helps leftist totalitarianism. It has been most durable in Eastern Europe, wedged snugly within the postwar Soviet sphere of influence, though even in that bloc there have been occasional upheavals and gradual evolutions, as witness the sporadic steps toward some liberalism in Hungary, Poland and Rumania.

Dictatorship, like misery, loves company. Right-wing military rulers have enjoyed their longest runs side by side in Latin America.

Where a despot of either the right or the left has ruled in relative isolation, he has been more likely to fall of his own weight and more vulnerable to internal enemies. To wit: the Greek Colonels, who were America's sons of bitches, and Sukarno of Indonesia, who was Moscow's and who was ousted in an anti-Communist military coup in 1966. Even today the Soviet Union is hard pressed to save the tottering Marxist dictatorship of President Noor Mohammed Taraki from an Islamic rebellion in Afghanistan.

The spectacles in Iran and Nicaragua did not fit the pattern that Americans have grown used to in watching the rise and fall of client dictators. Far from propping up the Shah and Somoza, as the U.S. had so often been accused of doing, the Carter Administration seemed to be helping topple them, or at least undermining them with criticism of their human rights abuses.

Henry Kissinger feels that the Administration's campaign of proselytizing for democracy in Iran and Nicaragua aggravated, even if it did not cause, the crises in those countries. Viewing what he regards as a dual debacle from the perspective of a once and possibly future Secretary of State, Kissinger told TIME: "I'm convinced that trying to bludgeon societies into behavior analogous to our own either will lead to a deadlock and American irrelevance, or it will lead to the collapse of existing authority without a substitute compatible with our values and, therefore, the emergence of a radical outcome, as in Iran and Nicaragua. When we begin overthrowing a government, as indirectly we did in Nicaragua, we should either have an idea of what we are going to put in its place, or we should think through the foreign policy consequences if the radical alternative takes over. If there is no moderate alternative and our choice is between the status quo and the radicals, it is a serious question whether the radicals are more in our long-term interest than the status quo."

Carter Administration officials vehemently reject Kissinger's complaint that they overthrew Somoza. The Sandinistas did that themselves. All the U.S. did was to administer a diplomatic coup de grace in order to end the civil war. To preserve the status quo in Iran or Nicaragua--i.e., keep the Shah or Somoza in power--would probably have required direct military intervention, with G.I.s fighting alongside the Shah's imperial troops and Somoza's national guard. Even then, the Islamic and Sandinista revolutions might well have triumphed, leaving American prestige and strategic interests far more badly damaged than they are today.

Aside from quarreling over who "lost" Iran and Nicaragua, many in the Carter Administration would agree with Kissinger that there are great risks in pulling the rug out from under a longtime client without a plausible, acceptable successor well positioned to take over. "It's an unhappy fact of life," observes a White House policymaker, "that destabilizing our friends is a hell of a lot easier than destabilizing our enemies, and undoing a friendly regime that we have lost patience with is a lot easier than putting it back together again." So some of the men around John F. Kennedy learned in 1963 when they decided to authorize covert U.S. backing for an army coup against South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose anti-Buddhist repressions, they felt, were contributing to the political turmoil of the country and hampering the war effort. Diem was killed in the coup. What followed was a series of military Presidents who were unable to stem the deterioration of the situation.

Its recent traumatic experiences in Iran and Nicaragua have plunged the Carter Administration into an overdue reappraisal of the way the U.S. deals with dictators. The President has put the intelligence community, the State Department and the National Security Council on notice that never again must the decline and fall of a friendly government catch the U.S. so much by surprise. That means identifying and assessing the opposition to the existing powers sooner and more accurately, without the ideological typecasting ("Reds," Communists," "terrorists," even "radicals") that has tended to weaken and distort analysis in the past.

The U.S. has rationalized its support for right-wing regimes on the time-honored principle that the enemies of our Communist enemies are our friends. But the converse is not necessarily true: the domestic enemies of right-wing friends may not be Communists or even Communist-backed. They may be motivated by grievances and aspirations that Karl Marx never dreamed of--and certainly would not have approved of--although they may be fiercely anti-American. They may be Shi'ite mullahs in Iran or Catholic nuns in the Philippines.

Moreover, fast industrialization and a vast influx of wealth may not bring stability and democracy in a developing country, as Americans have been inclined to believe, but may lead to instability and chaos. On this point, Kissinger candidly admits to lingering uncertainty about Iran: "In retrospect, it probably would have been wiser for us, in the period 1972-75, not to rely on the conviction that the rapid economic progress of Iran would produce greater stability of the Shah's government. It would have been wiser to recognize that in a society like that, economic development produces new classes and new groups that somehow have to be fitted into the political process. Thinking back to how I would have acted on that insight as Secretary of State, I confess I am still somewhat puzzled."

When Kissinger says that, even with the benefit of hindsight, he is not sure what he should have done seven years ago, the Carter Administration can be forgiven for some puzzlement about how to proceed now, as it tries to deal prudently with undemocratic, potentially unstable regimes.

A large part of the challenge is to distinguish between viable authoritarian regimes and ones that are doomed, especially among those the U.S. relies on to protect regional security. Where is the status quo best sustained, and where is it a lost cause? When should the U.S. stand by a client, despite his internal regime, and when should the U.S. begin to distance itself from him? In the context of statecraft, these questions are neither moralistic nor cynical. They are a matter of differentiating between those with whom the U.S. must live and those who will try to cling to the U.S. as they go under. There are at least four guides that might help in that differentiation:

First, the U.S. should be especially wary of embracing dictatorships that have sprung up in countries with democratic traditions, like Chile and Greece. The Pinochet junta is an aberration in modern Chilean history and may well go the way of the Greek Colonels. The same could be true of Ferdinand Marcos, although democracy in the Philippines has always been fragile and turbulent. Conversely, the U.S. has little choice but to tolerate military rule where it is the norm. For example, South Korea's Park Chung Hee suppresses dissent by an "emergency decree" superficially similar to Marcos' martial law; but different versions of such measures have been the rule in South Korea, while they are a relatively recent exception in the Philippines. Similarly, Thailand for decades has run on a mixture of monarchy, military oligarchy and a mostly rubber-stamp parliamentary system, with the last by far the weakest ingredient.

Second, the U.S. has more reason to regard a strict, perhaps unsavory internal regime in a country as viable if that country faces an external threat. South Korea and Thailand both live with the clear and present danger of hostile, militarily formidable Communist neighbors. Paradoxically, the menace from North Korea and Viet Nam has galvanizing, stabilizing effects on the governments of South Korean President Park and Thai Prime Minister Kriangsak Chamanand. The Philippines, by contrast, is an island nation. Many Filipinos feel isolated from foreign enemies and therefore freer to nurture grievances against their own government and against the U.S. for its support of that government.

Third, it is wiser to support a regime in a country that has a system of succession assuring a measure of continuity than in a nation that does not. It is important to distinguish between institutionalized authoritarianism and autocracy. The latter by definition loses stability in the absence of the autocrat.

If Park or Kriangsak died or was driven from office, either would probably be replaced by yet another one of the generals from whose ranks both leaders came. The Philippines, however, has no credible mechanism to assure an orderly succession. Marcos' one-man rule recalls Louis XIV's declaration, "L 'etat c 'est moi," and the warning sometimes attributed to Louis XV, "Apres moi le deluge."

Finally, the U.S. should be acutely sensitive to fundamental and widespread changes in the nature of internal opposition to right-wing rulers, particularly radicalization, growing resentment of the U.S., and an increased willingness on the part of democratic moderates to make common cause with leftist extremists. Where that happens, as it is happening now in the Philippines, the U.S. would do well to step up regular diplomatic communication with the moderates and thus help strengthen them.

The U.S. does have some influence through trade, investment and economic and military assistance. Yet its options for direct, decisive action are extremely limited, even once Washington has singled out those dictators who are heading for disaster. Arm's-length treatment can help limit the damage to U.S. interests if and when the downfall comes. But strong-arm intervention runs the risk of hastening, perhaps worsening a crisis. Dealing with a dictator means avoiding the appearance of propping him up. It does not mean actively working to bring him down, as many of his own domestic political opponents would like the U.S. to do. They might well learn the lesson that Americans have been taught so painfully in Iran and Nicaragua: whether such regimes survive or fall depends ultimately on their own subjects, not on some act of will by the U.S. -- Strobe Talbott

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.