There's been much discussion of the world becoming more illiberal. Is that now changing?
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a happy Monday to you. Time for a Quick Take to kick off your week. I thought I would talk about the state of democracy.
Of course, over the course of the last 10 years, there's been so much discussion of the world becoming more illiberal, lower case, that more people in the world are living under authoritarian regimes or mixed governments, hybrid governments than living under pure democracy. In part because authoritarian states are growing more powerful, in part because some democracies, including the United States, are watching their systems, their institutions erode and watching their political leaders become de-legitimized.
Is that now changing? Over the last few weeks, we've seen a United States midterm election that certainly did not appear to be a win for election deniers, and Donald Trump is doing worse than he has. But you also see demonstrations, major demonstrations, a lot of people that are angry on the streets in some of the most powerful authoritarian regimes around the world, Russia, Iran, and even China. I will say that all of those developments are welcome, but the importance that they have in terms of the political systems themselves are widely varied, and I wouldn't overstate them.
So starting with the authoritarian regimes, I think Russia is in very serious trouble, but I don't see a lot of instability internally at all. The trouble that Russia's in is that their military is being soundly defeated by a much smaller country with a lot of support from NATO and a lot of their people are going to be suffering economically very heavily, not just this year, but for the foreseeable future. The demonstrations in Russia have been very small, they've been sporadic, and they've largely been stopped. First round of demonstrations at the beginning when the war was announced, a couple thousand people arrested, most of them let go. Then a few hundred thousand people were called up on mobilization a few months ago. And you saw more demonstrations, another few thousand arrested, and all of them almost let go.
The interesting thing is that there were almost a million Russians that got out of the country when they announced that mobilization, and the Russians kept the borders open. Why would they do that? Well, in part because a lot of those people are not so happy about the Russian regime, and I assume the Russian government was just as happy to see them out of the country, but there's really not a lot of instability politically inside Russia.
So Russia as a country's losing power, they're becoming much less influential on the global stage. Putin is getting humiliated and angry, but there's no proximate threat to the authoritarian regime. And Putin were removed, it's not like Russia's going to become a democracy. It would be run by another kleptocracy of military and national security elites that also hate the West. This is not Khodorkovsky suddenly coming back from his exile or Nemtsov coming back from the dead.
In the case of Iran, that's the one place that I would say has the greatest possibility of regime change. Though the most likely kind of regime change, if it occurred, would be for the theocrats to be forced out by the Revolutionary Guard Corp, the IGRC. And if that were to happen, there would be some liberalization of religious and social norms, absolutely. But it would still very much be an authoritarian state, kind of between Pakistan and North Korea, as opposed to an open democracy. Now, I mean, there's a tail possibility that the people are effective in rising up and they're able to overthrow the entire regime. That would be an enormously bloody thing, but it would ultimately be fantastic for the Iranian people. I wouldn't be betting on that outcome right now, even though I think we'd all like to see it.
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