Up in Arms: How Military Aid Stabilizes-and Destabilizes-Foreign Autocrats

An “extraordinary…must-read” (Steven Levitsky, New York Times–bestselling coauthor of How Democracies Die) look at how support from foreign superpowers propped up—and pulled down—authoritarian regimes during the Cold War, offering lessons for today’s great power competition

Throughout the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union competed to prop up friendly dictatorships abroad. Today, it is commonly assumed that this military aid enabled the survival of allied autocrats, from Taiwan’s ...