What If Everyone Is At Their Breaking Point?

A lot has gone down in the past month.

Photo by Jo Van de kerkhove on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has devoted a lot of energy over the past month towards analyzing what has been happening in the United States since November’s election. Readers will hopefully understand that prioritization, given that I am a citizen and resident of the US of A. The opportunity cost of such a focus, however, has been an absence of commentary on the events in South Korea.

And France.

And Germany.

And Canada.

And Georgia.

You get the point. It has been a rocky few weeks for democracy.

This prompted New York Times journalist Farah Stockman to ask recently, “I’m stunned by the number of democracies that are experiencing extreme polarization and no confidence votes. France Germany South Korea. Who has a compelling theory that explains what is happening with democracies right now?”

Now as it happens I do have a theory. I don’t know how compelling it is, but it has the advantage of parsimony: whatever is happening is not happening only to democracies. It is just much, much easier to observe political instability in democratic regimes. This might be counterintuitive. After all, many foreign policy observers believe that authoritarian states are on the rise. But hear me out.

While there has been a lot of debate in political science recently about whether regime type is all that important, there remains a pretty solid consensus that it is easier to observe the internal workings of democracies compared to authoritarian regimes. The latter can look extremely stable — right up to the moment that all that is solid melts into air, and the apparent stability collapses. In democracies, on the other hand, individual governments can fall — as has been the case in France and Germany — without regimes falling.¹

The evidence of political instability within democracies is all too visible, as Stockman correctly notes. But what about authoritarian states? The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, taking so many observers by surprise, should be interpreted as a sign that authoritarian regimes might be experiencing their own technical difficulties.

There have been a bevy of global shocks in recent years that have rattled political institutions of all stripes. In a world in which global inflation has made everyone cranky about their incumbent rulers, autocratic leaders might be facing severe challenges as well. Add to this the authoritarian predilection for sticking to bad policy choices and the recipe for authoritarian instability is set. It is just that this instability might manifest in somewhat different ways.

Consider China. Despite Xi Jinping’s ten-year crackdown on internal dissent, the regime has encountered some significant challenges in the past two years. Mass protests forced the regime’s hand on Covid lockdowns two years ago. This fall China’s economic slowdown is causing some more anti-social behavior. As the New York Times’ Vivian Wang reported last month, there have been multiple instances of large-scale attack perpetrated by frustrated citizens: “The spate of high-profile violence has raised fears about public safety and China’s lack of a social safety net, especially amid the country’s slowing economy. The authorities… suggested that the perpetrators were unhappy with their financial situations.”

Or look at North Korea. Instability in the ROK should be catnip for Kim Jong Un and the DPRK to exploit South Korean instability. But as the New York Times’ Choe Sang-Hun notes, Kim’s decision to send North Korean troops to Ukraine was borne out of desperation as much as opportunism:

A triple whammy of incidents has rocked his dynastic regime over the past decade. First, American-led U.N. sanctions devastated North Korea’s economy by banning all its major exports, including coal, seafood, textiles and workers, as well as sharply curtailing its oil imports. Mr. Kim sought to lift the sanctions through direct diplomacy with former President Donald J. Trump. But the negotiations collapsed without an agreement in 2019,​ tarnishing Mr. Kim’s domestic image as an infallible leader. Then, the pandemic further crippled the North’s economy….

The drain on its supplies may weaken North Korea at home.

​North Korea has already sent so many conventional weapons and ammunition to Russia “it cannot fight a war ​in Korea right now even if it wanted to,” said Doo Jin-ho, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.​ “That may be Kim Jong-un’s biggest vulnerability now.”

Russia is also facing difficulties because of its invasion of Ukraine. While there are questions of how long Ukraine can hold out, I have heard similar musings about Russia. As the war looks approaches its fourth year, cracks in the Russian economy are triggering some loud elite bickering. Last month the Economist warned that the Russian economy was in a bad way. Earlier this month the New York Times’ Anatoly Kurmanaev reported that, “The wartime economy that Russia spurred into overdrive is slowing, causing tensions among the country’s economic elites as the war with Ukraine approaches its fourth year…. The combination of rising prices and falling economic activity has led some economists and officials to warn that the Russian economy is moving toward stagflation, a quagmire where prices rise quickly without growth.”

The Washington Post’s Catherine Belton reported on similar tensions within Moscow last week:

Tension has been breaking out into the open among the Russian elite over the mounting cost of sanctions on the economy. Executives from major businesses have been warning in growing numbers that central bank interest rate hikes to combat rampant inflation — caused by sanctions and Putin’s wartime spending spree — could bring the economy to a halt next year.

There could be a rash of bankruptcies, including in Russia’s strategically sensitive military industry, where the boom in production fueling Russia’s war in Ukraine is forecast to slow next year, the executives have said. The result could be that Russia would no longer be able to replenish the equipment being lost on the battlefield at such high rates….

Sergei Chemezov, the close Putin ally who heads Russia’s state arms conglomerate RosTec, warned at the end of October that if rates remained at current levels, “practically a majority of our enterprises will go bankrupt,” and he said Russia could be forced to curtail arms exports….

For Putin, the pressure is growing, despite the widespread view in the West that time is on the Russian president’s side, said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of France-based political consultancy R.Politik.

“Putin is ready to fight for as long as necessary. … But Putin is hurrying. He can’t maintain such an intensity of military action and losses in terms of people and equipment as he has in the last months,” she said.

It is always worth remembering that 18 months ago a Russian mercenary was able to march very close to Moscow in open defiance of Vladimir Putin.

None of this is to say that democracies are not feeling it as well. But I do not buy that global trends in 2024 are uniquely hitting democratic regimes harder. We are simply able to observe the stresses they encounter far more readily than in Tehran, Pyongyang, or Moscow. Which means that 2025 might be an even more unstable year than 2024.

1. South Korea represents a far more serious wobble, and yet in the end South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s gamble for political resurrection did not pay off.