Even though the second Trump presidency is only a few months old, it has already distinguished itself with so many tremendous things, such as demolishing various institutions that long performed life-saving functions around the world, not to mention other promising things, such as threatening friendly countries like Denmark to rob them of their territory using military force.

Throughout all of this, one of the other more tremendous things is shift in power — how the Republican-led Congress became completely subservient to the Trump White House.

Normally, whenever members of Congress have some free time left from their main professional activities — engaging in insider trading or begging donors for money — there are quite a few of them who like to poke their finger into the eye of the executive branch, demanding respect and recognition, even if their own party controls the White House. Yet, one of the best things about the second coming of Trump is how easily he has been able to make Congress go from acting like a co-equal branch of government to being a dummy yes-man.

To anyone who wants to neuter an entire branch of government that might serve as a check on one’s power and instead turn them into subservient lackeys, you can use the same approach based on three strategies that Trump has used to emasculate the Republican-led Congress.

1. Warm Personal Relations Coupled with Constant Threats Are More Tremendous Than Just Warm Personal Relations

The basic theory of how Trump has gained near total control over the Republican Congress is that it is a mix of two elements — (1) maintaining warm personal relationships with congressional Republicans and (2) constantly threatening to smear them or in other ways to savage them in public if they don’t fall in line.

This for once just happens to be a quite helpful practical guideline in general: yes, you want to constantly threaten other people so that they would fall in line, but you also want to soften it by maintaining warm personal relationships with them.

You see, when you have warm friendly personal relationships with somebody, they are just more likely to indulge you in hijacking power from their branch of government. Friends don’t interfere with their friends’ unconstitutional power grab.

According to some helpful recent reporting, it seems that in contrast to the first Trump presidency, this time he uses more honey than vinegar to reign over congressional Republicans and he now outsources most of the bullying to his advisers and influencers.

And how exactly does Trump dangle the carrot in front of congressional Republicans? It’s a bunch of cheap tricks that every serious political manipulator should use. For example, Trump gives congressional Republicans his personal phone number, which makes them feel important. When he calls congressional Republicans, even those whom he never met, he uses their first name, which also nicely caresses their ego and makes them imagine that he considers them important. He invites them to Air Force One and he tells them they are so special that they sit in the seat in which, he says, otherwise sits only Melania. He also invites members of Congress with their spouses to the kingly palace of Mar-a-Lago, where they take photos with Trump and thus join a select club of only tens of thousands of other people who had their photo taken with Trump. He gives various Trump-branded merch which he signs for them.

While maintaining warm personal relationships is great, it goes without saying it is not enough. You will, of course, want to combine it with constant threats against them.

One the most tremendous elements behind the greatness of Donald Trump is that he is very non-partisan when it comes to bullying and intimidation: he is just as willing, if not more, to bully and launch a smear campaign against Republicans who don’t submit themselves to him as he is against Democrats who oppose him.

Of the two elements in this combination — maintaining warm personal relations and making constant threats — it is, of course, more important to be making constant threats. After all, as Machiavelli himself taught us, if you must choose between being loved and being feared, it is much better to be feared because:

“men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

2. Break It Over and Over Again Before You Take It Over

It is much easier to make another branch of government submissive or entirely take it over if you first make it highly dysfunctional. That’s why chronic parliamentary obstructionism is such an important thing to encourage and promote.

The good thing about the Republican Party is that they’ve been practicing Congressional obstructionism for a very long time. Going back at least to golden age of New Gingrich’s obstructionism strategy, the smart Republican strategy was to intentionally make the Congress dysfunctional so they could run on the platform of fixing it.

So do whatever you can to make the other branch of government highly dysfunctional, and then, when you relegate it to the role of a backup dancer, nobody will be particularly upset about it.

3. A Bogeyman Is Worth His Weight in Paranoia

To emasculate another branch of power, it is of utmost importance that you make use of some bogeyman.

If there is a terrifying bogeyman and you’re the only one who can save your great nation from this bogeyman, then if the other branch of government doesn’t completely submit itself to you, they will be interfering with your fight against the bogeyman and thus acting against the people.

Where is nowadays the bogeyman in the United States hiding when he is not under your bed or in your closet? In the federal bureaucracy and public agencies, of course!

The bogeyman in the federal machinery has been intent on doing all sorts of heinous things. USAID, the bogeyman par excellence, was intent on doing the treasonous work of preventing AIDS, Ebola, and similar things around the world for free, not to mention its attempts to spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy condoms for terrorists in Gaza.

It was only thanks to the tremendous efforts of the Trump administration that all of this was stopped. And so, when the executive branch is doing such an important work, no other sane-minded branch of government will want to interfere with this glorious work, and they will instead relegate themselves to a supporting role.

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By relying on these three general strategies Trump has been able to emasculate congressional Republicans and seize control over the Congress. In the United States now, Congress no longer needs to bother the White House by giving advice and consent or in some other way serving as a check on executive power, Now it serves a more tremendous function: to suck up and always say yes.

To gain power, it's very important to make sensational promises that you know you’ll never be able to keep. For example, if there is a major war going and your voters seem to care about it at least somewhat, you could promise them that if you’re elected you will end the war in 24 hours, just as Donald Trump tremendously promised to end the war in Ukraine.

Such sensational promises will help you stand out from competition and grab everyone’s attention. And they can also help you build the myth of your exceptionality, which is a critical ingredient for building your personality cult and other nice things like that.

Should you be bothered by the fact that these promises will be impossible to keep? Absolutely not. All you’ll need is cleverly shift the blame to someone else. And this is the tricky part.

You could try blaming the invading country. Yet, since everyone expects the invading country to be the more problematic element, most people would simply look at such attempts to blame the aggressor as a cheap and unoriginal attempt to justify your inability to stop the war. Everyone would tell you that it was obvious that the aggressor would not give in, so when you made your promise to end the war in 24 hours you were a fool if you expected the aggressor to start acting reasonably.

It is much better, therefore, to blame the victim of the military aggression. It’s much more creative and unexpected, and thus more likely to convince your supporters that you could’ve stopped the war as easily as you had promised if only the victim of the aggression itself wanted to end to the war.

One the basic elements of enduring peace diplomacy has always been about making a victim take part of the blame. Of course, if you want to get away with making fantastic promises to end wars and then not keeping those promises, you want the victim to take most of the blame. For that, it is best to create a public spectacle in which you’ll portray the victim as the bad guy who is not only opposed to peace but who is also ungrateful to your country for all the good you’ve done for them.

A wonderful example of this strategy is Donald Trump’s masterful operation to shift the blame for the Russia’s aggression against Ukraine onto Ukraine itself and the Ukrainian president, all of which last week nicely culminated in the drama in the Oval Office between Trump and his sidekicks on the one side and the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on the other.

1. Prime the Victim in Advance

You may want to start immediately with a meeting which you hope to turn into a public spectacle and make your victim look ingrate and guilty. Yet, that could be a mistake. It’s much better to prime your target beforehand so as to have them already somewhat unbalanced and agitated even before you meet them.

To start with, why not publicly say that the leader of the country that is being attacked is the one who really started the war?! Also, why not call him a dictator?!

This is, of course, exactly how Trump primed Zelenskyy weeks in advance before meeting him in the Oval Office, calling him a dictator and saying he started the war with Russia. (The only way Trump could have acted even more tremendously beforehand is by calling Russia the victim of Ukraine’s aggression and Vladimir Putin the great democratic leader.)

2. Make Them an Offer They Want to Refuse

The next step is to present the target with a deal they will want to refuse. You might, for example, ask them to sign a deal that requires them to give you their natural resources while you understandably promise them nothing of what they really want in return.

Donald Trump wisely presented Zelenskyy with a deal that would give the United States access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals such lithium and titanium, but the United States would not provide any tangible security guarantees to protect Ukraine from further Russian aggression.

Naturally, according to the Trump White House, the mere presence of Americans in Ukraine involved in mining those minerals would be enough to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine. And at the same time Trump was saying that the United States would not directly militarily engage Russia. (It goes without saying that one of the most powerful deterrents against Russian aggression is other countries proclaiming that they will not militarily engage Russia. And it is also unimaginable that Russia would go about robbing Ukraine of its territory without directly attacking Americans present in Ukraine.)

When you try to force your target to accept a fine deal like that which makes them give up their natural resources in return for nothing they really need, it’s very likely they will reject it, and then you can much more easily paint them as being unreasonable and not wanting peace.

3. Let Your Weasel Agitate the Victim and Then Finish Them Off

When you’re in power or seeking power, it is very important to have a skilled weasel by your side. An accomplished political weasel will serve you well in twisting facts, offering tricky justifications and excuses, coming up with insidious arguments to throw off other political players, and so on.

Your professional weasel will come in particularly handy when you need to make someone look bad and disrespectful. To begin with, your weasel can push your target — the leader of the invaded country — to embrace your position by using broad, vague terms like “diplomacy.” When the target will ask what is meant by diplomacy or by responding that they had tried diplomacy before, that’s when your weasel can twist that into declaring that the target is disrespecting your country, your people, and your leadership.

A skilled political weasel won’t stop there and will use a range of tricks to agitate the target and exacerbate the contentious atmosphere. Your weasel can attack some of their policies and decisions, preferably all of that in hostile tone, and when the target pushes back, your weasel can further reframe this into their disrespect to your country and its high office.

An accomplished weasel will be able to turn anything into some evidence that the target is disrespecting your country, including their refusal to sign a deal that seems meaningless to them. In the hands of a skilled weasel, your target will always be greeted with a dilemma of either surrendering to your demands or coming off as disrespectful.

You should help your weasel, for example, by not giving the target an opportunity to fully respond and in other ways making him feel more frustrated, all of which will make him look even more unbalanced and disrespectful.

After the meeting, declare that even though you want peace and you’re ready to make it happen, the leader of the invaded country does not want peace. Here is how nicely Trump’s post used this approach with Zelenskyy:

“I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

It’s really despicable that ingrates like Zelenskyy are resisting peace even though thanks to the tremendous efforts of the peace-loving Donald Trump peace is now easily available to Ukraine — all the Ukrainians have to do to have peace is accept ceasefire under unfavorable terms which would allow Russia in future to rinse and repeat robbing Ukraine of its territory only with better preparation.

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In any case, once you’ve made your target look disrespectful, you can now easily blame the victim and say you won’t fulfill your promise to miraculously end the war in 24 hours — not because you can’t but because the leader of the victimized country disrespected your country. And now you have more free time, which you should use coming up with other fantastic, sensational promises which you won’t have to bother keeping either.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is such a refreshing change from the previous administration that almost never produced any exciting political disinformation, instead resorting to the usual boring political spin and low-key misrepresentation. Now there is finally again someone in office who really knows how to captivate the public with sensational political lies.

Donald Trump also shows one indispensable use of sensational lies - delegitimizing and destroying institutions you don’t like.

Let’s say you want to destroy a 50-billion-dollar agency responsible for managing foreign aid and development. There can be several reasons why you’d want to destroy it.

One reason could be that you don’t like that institution’s radical agenda, such as preventing HIV, building schools and hospitals, reducing pollution, or protecting indigenous people’s lands. Or maybe you want to get your hands on its funding so you could put it to better use, such as creating a sovereign wealth fund which would invest in good people, like friendly oligarchs and their various ventures for which they can’t find enough suckers on their own and they therefore would appreciate some infusion of taxpayer money. Or maybe that agency simply ran afoul of your chief broligarch by investigating one of his companies abroad.

In any case, there are two basic ways you could go about attacking such an institution. You could try to come up with a factual case demonstrating all the ways how it has engaged in wasteful spending and in other ways acted inappropriately. Or you can save yourself a lot of time and instead simply come up with one sensational political lie that brilliantly vilifies that institution. Here is how nicely Donald Trump used this approach last week to cast aspersions on USAID [5 min. 30]:

We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud and abuse. In that process, we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. 50 million. And do you know what's happened to them? They've used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?

Yes, how about that?! You can really appreciate the great skill that this great man and his people demonstrate in producing sensational political disinformation.

Whatever institution you want to delegitimize, you can use the same approach. First, you obviously want to tie it to something nefarious. Muslim terrorists are always a great start.

It would be even better if you could come up with something of sexual nature to tie that institution to the Muslim terrorists. You might find, for example, that the institution funds family planning services, including contraception, in places renowned for their Islamic terrorists. Obviously then you’d want to claim that the institution is supplying condoms to terrorists.

The important thing is not to tie yourself down to objective, demonstrable facts. And also try to pull some bigly number out of thin air to make your claim even more dazzling — tens or hundreds of millions of dollars is a good number.

The great thing of creating such sensational alternative facts is that they produce an emotional response that persists even if fact-checkers extensively debunk such alternative facts.

For example, after Trump revealed that USAID tried to send $50 million to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas, fact-checkers were showing that no US government funding was used to buy condoms or provide family-planning services more generally in Gaza. And furthermore according to the fact-checkers, for $50 million USAID would buy one billion condoms. One billion condoms sounds a little excessive, even for very virile terrorists, but of course if you’re a terrorist who makes bombs out of condoms, as Donald Trump revealed, then you will be grateful for such a generous supply of raw material for making bombs.

Yet, even if people believed fact-checkers, such sensational lies would still often produce certain psychological effects favorable to their creator. Most importantly, they create negative emotional feelings that often persist even if the information that initially led to those negative feelings is later shown to be false. (In psychology, this phenomenon is known as affective perseverance.)

And that’s the whole point of spreading outrageous political disinformation such as that — not to convince of particular facts but to create negative feelings towards some target.

So, even if people believe the fact-checkers that USAID didn’t try to buy condoms for Hamas for $50 million, people will still have negative feelings towards USAID. And then they won’t mind very much when that institution is destroyed and replaced with something more tremendous.

The previous post explored the key elements that made Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad such a successful dictator and that all aspiring dictators should try to emulate. Yet, it would be wrong to suggest that Assad made no serious mistakes. In fact, had he not made three critical mistakes he could have lasted even longer, remaining the pre-eminent dictator of the Middle East and inspiring new generations of dictators worldwide.

1. Gassing Your People with Chemical Weapons

Using chemical weapons to gas your own people sounds like a great idea in theory. It seems like a perfect tool of state terrorism. Chemical weapons strike terror not only in the hearts of nasty people — i.e. self-entitled political opposition who demand less political repression — but they should more broadly also terrorize civilian population into complete submission.

Yet, despite sounding great in theory, using chemical weapons against your own people has serious downsides.

For one, it usually erodes your support among your domestic or regional partners. More importantly, it usually leads to international sanctions which can cripple your economy. With a crippled economy you’ll have difficult time financing various groups and power structures whose support you need to stay in power.

In Assad’s case, for example, US sanctions and international sanctions crippled the Syrian economy to the point that many soldiers in Assad’s army lacked even basic nutrition. And it stands to reason that the army that is lacking even basic nourishment will not kill innocent civilians and political opposition with the same zeal as the well-fed army.

Another downside to using chemical weapons is that it will limit your personal residence options if being a dictator doesn’t work out for you. After his regime collapsed about six weeks ago, Assad fled to Russia, where he was given political asylum “out of humanitarian considerations.” (In Russia, of course, the most humanitarian thing imaginable is granting asylum to deposed dictators.)

And yet, despite the wonderful feeling of living in Moscow — it’s a place, after all, where everyone dreams of spending a lovely winter — Assad himself would have preferred to stay in the Emirates. But the Emiratis refused to grant him refuge because they feared the international backlash that would result from harboring someone who gassed his own people with chemical weapons.

Overall, however tempting chemical weapons may seem to you, it is usually best to abstain from using them. Instead of chemical weapons, it’s much better to rely on old-fashioned methods of mass murder that are in practice acceptable to all civilized nations, such as heavy indiscriminate bombings.

2. Relying Too Much on a Limited Coalition of Dictatorships

This is another serious mistake that many dictators make when they plunge their country into turmoil. They often rely too heavily on a small group of friendly, supportive outside dictatorships. This leaves them vulnerable when their few dictator friends are down on their luck.

Assad, for example, relied heavily on Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. But Russia, for one, had just plain bad luck getting stuck robbing territory from one of its neighbors when it was all supposed to be an easy territorial robbery. And then Iran and Hezbollah were also beaten down by the Israeli attacks.

So, instead of relying on a handful of friendly dictatorships and supportive terror groups, it is much better to diversify your alliances and build relationships with a broader range of friendly dictatorships and terror groups.

3. Not Rewarding Good People Who Support Your Dictatorship

When you become a highly successful dictator who manages to stay in power for much longer than most of your fellow dictator colleagues, there is a risk you’ll become overconfident and self-centered. This may lead you to neglect the value of your supporters who help you remain a pre-eminent dictator.

Assad’s downfall was in part due to this mistake.

When the rebel forces launched their offensive in December, most of Assad’s supporters, such as middle- and upper-class Sunnis, Alawites, Armenians, Christians, and other minorities, decided they no longer wanted to shed any more blood for Assad. This was because they felt they had sacrificed a lot and gained almost nothing in return for previously helping to defeat most of Assad’s enemies. In fact, they felt that the Assad regime not only didn’t reward them but it became even more rapacious and violent.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being rapacious and violent — that’s one of the best things about being a dictator. However, it should not come at the expense of maintaining power.

Generally, smart dictators will reward their core supporters with a share of the spoils. Not a lot, but just enough to keep their supporters sufficiently motivated to shed blood and kill anyone who stands in their dictator’s way.

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All of this should serve as a cautionary tale for all aspiring dictators who can learn a valuable lesson from Assad’s mistakes. After all, Assad’s own fate might have been very different if he had:

1. Avoided unnecessarily using chemical weapons to gas his own people, a move that led to international sanctions and the crippling of his economy, resulting in his inability to buy internal support.

2. Worked as hard on making new dictator friends as he worked hard on torturing and murdering his domestic political enemies.

3. Better rewarded and kept motivated all the good people who helped him terrorize his own civilian population and brutally murder the political opposition.

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has been one of the most celebrated dictators of our time, skilled in deception, repression, and state terrorism, along with many other core competencies valued by all serious dictators.

Assad and his father before him ruled Syria for 53 years, spanning the terms of 10 American presidents. While so many other great dictators in the Middle East were ousted during the Arab Spring in 2011, Assad managed to hold onto power for 13 years longer than his dictator colleagues.

Assad’s ouster has been the most significant political event of the past month, so it is worth considering all the invaluable lessons on holding onto political power that we can learn from this highly accomplished despot.

1. A Loving Family Makes You a Better Dictator

Having political power is like having a mega-mansion — you’re much more likely to have it if your father had it before you. And Bashar al-Assad was fortunate to have a great father who left his son the Syria’s ruling regime as his inheritance. Such a path to power is even better in its simplicity than launching a successful military coup, which was the way that Bashar’s father came to power in 1971.

Loving parents, however, are valuable in many other ways besides just leaving you their political regime as your inheritance. If you grow up in a family that instills in you the traditional values like love and respect and mutual support and cutthroat pursuit of power, chances are much greater that you too will become great at cutthroat pursuit of power. After all, supportive parents will instill the proper Machiavellian mindset in their children and will teach them the most useful skills in life, such deception, manipulation, intimidation, and traditional family recipes for political repression.

Bashar al-Assad initially was not expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. That role was meant for his older brother, but the older brother died in a car accident in 1994. Bashar, who was then studying ophthalmology in London, was called back to Syria to step into his brother’s shoes and continue the family’s tradition of repressive dictatorship.

Over the next six years, Bashar was groomed to become the kind of dictator that would honor the Assad family name and would make his father proud. He was most likely taught the family secrets of various power plays and political repression tools, as his father himself was very skilled in state terrorism and other ways of maintaining his grip on power.

Assad’s example shows that even if you at first don’t think you’re destined to become a great dictator, you can easily become one if you have loving parents to guide you and teach you the necessary skills.

Parents are not the only useful members of the family. A loving, supporting wife at home who is good at money laundering is a real treasure to have.

Assad’s wife, Asma, was a UK-born Syrian-descent investment banker in London before she married Assad in 2000. So she was obviously perfectly suited to raising a family and, according to a 2022 US State Department report, maintaining “close patronage relationships with Syria’s largest economic players, using their companies to launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime.”

When you have such a great wife at home taking care of your family’s finances from war profiteering and other sources, you have greater peace of mind, so at work you can focus on being the best dictator you can be.

2. Always Practice Deception

If you want to become a ruthless and brutal dictator, the best way to start is by convincing people that you are not the kind of person who would ever want to be a ruthless and brutal dictator. For example, if you want to continue your family’s tradition of repressive rule, try to make everyone believe at first that you’ll be a reformer who will create a more moderate and progressive regime.

Before Bashar al-Assad took power in 2000, he was appointed to lead an anti-corruption campaign, to burnish his image as a modernizer. Of course, in such a role, you want to remove only lower-level corrupt officials while sparing important senior members of the regime.

The Western-born Asma, some observers argued, was also chosen as Bashar’s wife precisely to make him more appealing to the West and to bolster his progressive image, trafficking in false hopes of democratic and economic reforms.

In the art of authoritarian deception, to mislead others and gain some initial advantage, it may pay off if you don’t look like the archetypical, old-school cutthroat dictator. Instead, if you look like Bashar al-Assad — sort of a slightly autistic supervising accountant — you can get away with much more brutal stuff than you otherwise would, at least initially. “They just didn’t look the type” — this has been the common refrain that everyone in the media has been making about why they so badly misjudged Bashar al-Assad and his wife.

Finally, perhaps the best indication of how much Assad cherished deception is that he faithfully practiced it until his last hours in Syria. Just a few hours before he escaped to Moscow on December 8, he was lying to his military chiefs about Moscow sending military aid. Even as he was about to leave Syra for Moscow, he deceived not only to his closest aides and his cousins but even to his younger brother, Maher, who was a commander in the Syrian army. This kind of habitual deception is highly regarded not only among professional dictators but also within the broader Machiavellian community as well.

3. Exploit Fears of a Common Enemy

If you come from a minority group, it’s crucial to manipulate other groups into supporting you by tapping into their fears of a common enemy.

The Assad family, for example, is part of the Alawite minority, which makes up about 10% of Syria’s population. Despite this, they managed to rule Syria for over 50 years because they had the support of other minority groups, such as the Druze and Christians, as well as some Sunni Muslims, who represent the majority in Syria.

Assad maintained their support by positioning himself as the protector of all minority groups and a bulwark against Islamists, who were feared by both minority groups and secular moderates in Syria.

Any smart dictator in the Middle East should make this pitch to other groups: “We may torture and kill many of you, but it’s all for the greater good. If we don’t, those nasty Islamists will take over and they will torture and kill many of you, and you surely don’t want to be tortured and killed by the Islamists?!”

4. Bigger is Better When It Comes to Secret Police Apparatus

Do you know what’s better than a security directorate tasked with persecuting political enemies and torturing dissidents? Four different security directorates tasked with persecuting political enemies and torturing dissidents!

If Assad had only secret police agency, would he be able to torture and kill more than 100,000 detainees since 2013? Highly unlikely. 100,000 would probably be too many to handle for just one secret police agency, however good they were at torturing and murdering members of political opposition.

By the way, the number of people tortured and killed — more than 100,000 — means that Assad’s regime achieved one of the record-topping numbers since the Nazis. And speaking of the Nazis, Assad was again fortunate to inherit from his father one of the best secret police systems in the world, largely set up by former Nazi and East German Stasi officers, and German efficiency is appreciated worldwide in all sorts of endeavors.

If you have multiple secret police agencies tasked with persecution of your political enemies, you can rest easy knowing that if one secret police agency misses a political dissident, then another intelligence agency will notice them and torture them.

5. Be Willing to Give Up Anything to Hold onto Power

A key test of a great dictator is how much they are willing to sacrifice to hold onto power. And Assad had that one thing that separates truly great dictators from all the mediocre ones — willingness to sacrifice anything to retain power.

When your political power is threatened by some rival forces, and there seems to be nothing you can do, why not sell out your country’s sovereignty to foreign powers in exchange for their protection of your regime?

Any half-decent dictator can bomb and level entire neighborhoods of innocent civilians or kill hundreds of thousands of people who have crazy demands like more civil liberties and democratic reforms or even use chemical weapons to gas his own people, as Assad did. However, many weak-minded dictators would rather lose power than lose their country’s sovereignty.

Assad was not one of those mediocre dictators. When the situation became dire, he had no problem forfeiting Syria’s sovereignty, allowing Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces to take over significant portions of Syria and operate freely in his country in exchange for their protection of his regime.

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It is thanks to these 5 factors that Assad was able to hold onto power far longer than his Middle Eastern dictator brethren could, and that any other smart dictator can emulate. Of course, this is not to say that Assad made no mistakes. He made several, and the next post will explore the three critical errors that led to his downfall from power, and that all smart dictators should avoid.