How Dictators Are Defeating Democracies
Democracy's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
A few months ago, I met a friend in Lisbon, Portugal. Over coffee, we spoke about the state of the world.
Wars. America. China. Israel. Iran.
At one point, he made an observation that has stayed with me ever since: Fortune favors the dictator.
The more I think about it, the more I believe he was right.
Democracies possess enormous strengths. They are freer, more innovative, more prosperous, and ultimately more legitimate than autocracies. But they also suffer from a profound strategic weakness: They are governed by politicians whose time horizons are often measured in election cycles.
Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, play the long game.
Western governments, from city councils to national capitals, are increasingly dominated by short-term thinking because political careers themselves are short-term. In the next days, for example, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly on the brink of issuing his resignation less than two years in office.
Leaders spend as much time campaigning as governing. Every major decision is filtered through opinion polls, approval ratings, media cycles, and the next election. Democratic politicians govern under the constant shadow of political expiration. In many parliamentary democracies, governments can collapse overnight. In presidential systems, leaders face hard constitutional limits on their tenure.
Vladimir Putin does not. Neither do Iran’s ayatollahs. Nor Erdogan. Nor the Chinese Communist Party. There is no shot clock on any of their tenures.
As a result, they can pursue strategic objectives over decades rather than years. They can absorb temporary setbacks because they are not fighting for political survival every election season. They need only outlast their democratic adversaries.
The Iranian regime has understood this perfectly. For years, its nuclear strategy has rested on patience. The regime knows that American administrations come and go. Presidents serve four years, eight at most. Prior to being assassinated on February 28th, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had ruled Iran since 1989.
From Tehran’s perspective, time itself is a weapon. A five-year restriction on Iran’s nuclear program, for example, would not necessarily represent defeat. It could simply mean waiting out U.S. President Donald Trump, watching his administration leave office, and betting that his successor would be distracted by other crises.
Even now, the Iranian regime has all the reason to delay, stall, and prolong negotiations with the United States. Trump reminded us all a few days ago about the crucial 60-day negotiation period to reach a final deal, before adding more empty threats: “… if I don’t like [the deal], we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs on their heads. … We’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.”
That’s because, in 60 days, U.S. midterm elections will start heating up, and the Republican Party needs a successful deal to sell to voters. The Iranian regime has seen this movie before. They know that in democracies, domestic political calendars are often more powerful than geopolitical ones. Democracies rotate priorities. Dictatorships do not.
The same principle applies to Russia. After years of war in Ukraine, Russia has suffered enormous military and economic losses. Yet the Kremlin continues to fight because Putin understands something fundamental: Democratic coalitions are inherently fragile, Western publics tire, governments change, priorities shift, elections intervene. The Kremlin does not need to win quickly. It merely needs to endure.
This creates a profound asymmetry: Authoritarian regimes govern in decades, while democratic governments increasingly govern in news cycles.
Elections are among democracy’s greatest strengths. They allow for peaceful transfers of power, accountability, and self-correction. But they are also one of democracy’s greatest vulnerabilities. Every election risks resetting national priorities. America’s adversaries understand this. Often, they simply wait for the next administration.
The challenge for democracies is not military weakness. The United States remains the most powerful nation in human history. Rather, the challenge is strategic inconsistency.
America can mobilize overwhelming force, but it often struggles to sustain strategic focus once immediate political costs emerge. This problem is especially acute in the Middle East.
Iran’s revolutionary regime is not merely another regional actor. It is the central engine behind Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and numerous Shiite militias throughout the region. Its ambitions extend far beyond Israel. Tehran seeks regional hegemony and the gradual expulsion of American influence from the Middle East.
Confronting such a regime requires patience, persistence, and strategic clarity measured not in months, but in decades.
Instead, democratic politics frequently rewards the opposite. Leaders seek quick victories, dramatic announcements, and short-term economic gains. A temporary increase in fuel prices may prove politically more costly than pursuing a difficult long-term strategy against hostile regimes. The incentives of democratic politics often favor immediate comfort over future security.
This was Winston Churchill’s great insight.
Churchill understood that statesmen are sometimes required to ask their citizens for sacrifice rather than comfort. “Blood, toil, tears and sweat” was not merely rhetoric. It was an acknowledgment that preserving civilization often demands enduring temporary hardship. Modern democracies increasingly produce politicians who promise precisely the opposite: immediate comfort, lower prices, and the avoidance of difficult choices.
Yet democracies have overcome this challenge before.
The Cold War was not won in a single election cycle. It was won because successive American administrations — Republican and Democrat alike — sustained a grand strategy of containment against the Soviet Union for more than four decades. The Marshall Plan, NATO, America’s alliance systems in Europe and Asia, and the broader architecture of the post-war international order were all products of long-term strategic thinking.
The lesson is not that democracies cannot think long-term. It is that they must consciously choose to do so.
Israel offers an interesting case study. Many critics complain, not without reason, that the Israeli prime ministership has no term limits. Benjamin Netanyahu has now served, cumulatively, for more than 19 years across three separate periods in office.
There are obvious disadvantages to such longevity. Extended tenures can breed complacency, polarization, and excessive concentrations of power. No democratic society should ignore those dangers.
But there is also an underappreciated advantage: Political continuity allows states to pursue long-term national strategies.
Israel’s strategic culture predates Netanyahu by decades. David Ben-Gurion spent years laying the foundations of Israel’s security doctrine. Menachem Begin ordered the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 despite fierce international opposition. Successive governments invested in intelligence capabilities, missile-defense systems, and regional alliances long before they became politically fashionable.
The development of groundbreaking defense technologies such as Iron Dome, David’s Sling, the Arrow, and Iron Beam required years of investment across multiple governments. So too did Israel’s long campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, the cultivation of relationships with Gulf states, and the patient construction of intelligence networks throughout the Middle East.
These achievements were not products of a single election cycle. They were products of continuity.
Indeed, one of Israel’s greatest geopolitical strengths has been its ability to identify existential threats early and maintain strategic focus despite constant political turbulence. Governments have changed. Coalitions have collapsed. Prime ministers have come and gone. Yet on core national-security questions, a remarkable degree of institutional memory has persisted.
None of this is an argument for dictatorship. Far from it.
Dictators possess continuity, but continuity alone is not wisdom. The absence of elections can just as easily produce catastrophe. The same system that allows a regime to pursue a 20-year strategy also allows a single leader’s delusions to go unchallenged for decades.
History is filled with examples. Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” led to one of the deadliest famines in human history. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait destroyed his regime. Adolf Hitler launched a war on multiple fronts and brought ruin upon Germany. Democracies make many mistakes. Dictators often make fewer mistakes — but when they do, those mistakes can be civilizational in scale.
The challenge facing the free world, therefore, is not to become less democratic. It is to become more strategically disciplined.
Free societies must rediscover how to preserve long-term national interests despite short-term political turnover. They must rebuild bipartisan foreign-policy consensus where possible, cultivate leaders willing to ask citizens for sacrifice rather than merely promise comfort, and strengthen institutions capable of sustaining long-term strategy.
In fact, institutions are probably more important than politicians themselves. But today, across the West, we see institutions that are increasingly politicized. Civil services, intelligence agencies, universities, regulatory bodies, and even militaries are often drawn into ideological battles that undermine public trust and distract them from their core missions.
A democracy can survive frequent changes in leadership. What it cannot easily survive is the erosion of professional institutions.
Again, Israel provides an instructive example. Israeli governments rise and fall with astonishing frequency. Yet despite this political instability, Israel has managed to maintain remarkable strategic consistency on matters of national security.
The reason is not merely Benjamin Netanyahu, or any other prime minister. The reason is institutions.
The Israel Defense Forces, Mossad, and Shin Bet have, for decades, cultivated professional cultures centered primarily on national security rather than partisan politics. These institutions preserve institutional memory, develop long-term operational plans, identify emerging threats years in advance, and ensure that Israel’s enemies cannot simply wait out a single government.
The campaign against Iran’s nuclear program and its proxies is perhaps the clearest example. It has spanned multiple governments from across Israel’s political spectrum. Labor, Kadima, Likud, and various coalition partners have all come and gone. Intelligence chiefs have retired and been replaced. Yet the underlying strategic objective has remained remarkably constant for decades.
Democracies do not defeat long-term authoritarian adversaries through charismatic politicians alone. They do so through resilient institutions staffed by professionals whose loyalty is to the state rather than to a particular party or ideology.
Indeed, one could argue that the greatest challenge facing Western democracies today is not simply political polarization. It is the weakening of the very institutions that make long-term democratic strategy possible.
Authoritarian regimes enjoy continuity because leaders remain in power indefinitely. Democracies must create continuity through institutions. If those institutions become merely another arena for partisan warfare, democracies risk losing one of their few structural advantages in the contest against regimes that think in decades.
Fortune favors the dictator — unless the democracies learn to make fortune favor them instead.
Wow what an extremely well thought out and well written essay. The danger of partisanship reaches deep. We have entered a time of such hatred between political parties that by the time something does change the next group coming in is more interested in revenge then achieving anything positive for the nation. When the executive branch has such control over Justice that they use them as attack dogs to go after anyone and everyone not many people are willing to remain in government or civil service if they're forced to spend more time defending themselves then running implementing and managing their departments. If we ever hope to go back to a time of having strategic plans that go beyond the current president, people need to realize that there are things bigger than their angers and fear and personal beliefs.
Dictators have an advantage?
Ask Benito, Adolf, Fidel and Vladimir how things turned out. In order for them to consolidate and hold power they have to destroy their people and their economies. Eventually the house of cards collapses.