It is a common tic for foreign policy commentators to make confident assertions about what dictators are like at the negotiating table. There are apparently “Ten Simple Rules” in such negotiations, including “dictators are dictators for a reason” and “a dictatorship’s core goal is merely to perpetuate itself.” Some advise that negotiators “show [dictators] how the deal could advance their interests” rather than engage in moral preening. Others suggest “when a dictator believes they are winning, that is precisely when they begin to lose.”
It is similarly common for grand claims about a single approach to the challenge of dealing with non-democratic leaders to fall flat upon contact with reality. One reason for this difficulty is simple: there are many authoritarian regimes today and we negotiate with them all the time. Can our deliberations with Mohammed Bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia or al-Sisi’s Egypt or Erdogan’s Turkey be characterized the same was as those with Xi Jinping’s China, Khamenei’s Iran, Maduro’s Venezuela, or Putin’s Russia? This is a too-broad framework destined for failure.
And yet the commentariat often persists, especially in panels, interviews, and the occasional playbook-style essay to make such assertions. Such claims usually offer a formula according to which dictators only understand power; threats; money; or our unchanging values. After that, the argument moves on to criticizing the United States government for failing to emphasize one or more of the above. When put this way, it would not be unkind for the reader to feel this style of analysis can get a bit lazy.
One point worth noting is that ‘dictators’ is often not even the right framing. The word comes from a Roman tradition of temporary, unconstrained, emergency rulership, but its modern association is with permanent one-man-rule, harshly governing as a tyrant, where his desires and wishes are the sum total of all policy. This does not fit most of the real world most of the time, which is why we prefer ‘authoritarian regime’ – a political regime in which the decision-making political offices are not chosen through regular, fair, competitive elections under broad suffrage in which parties can (and do) lose. That is the category we really work with when we negotiate outside the bounds of friendly democracies, in all its highly diverse forms.
Our troubles in understanding how to deal with such regimes and their leaders stem from an understandable overreliance on half-remembered WWII era history. References to Chamberlain and Hitler or Roosevelt and Stalin are commonplace. But they amount to a tiny portion of Western democracies’ experience of negotiating with authoritarian regimes over the last century. Why would we rely on these instances to tell us everything we need to know?
Considering a broader range of examples, we quickly find there is no uniform pattern to such negotiations. That’s a problem for analysis that seeks ‘one crazy trick’ which would apply in all cases. But that doesn’t mean we can’t develop more effective strategies. Understanding the nature of a ruler’s power, the sources of broader regime legitimacy, and the ruler’s personal foreign policy motivations gives us a useful framework with which to work.
Expecting Patterns Where There Aren’t Any
The first bucket of cold water to throw on glib assertions about negotiating with dictators is that there are far too many dictators to make glib assertions at all. Even ignoring the grand sweep of human history prior to the First World War, the majority of states around the world over the last century have been ruled by authoritarian regimes. Some have been stable adversaries for a long time. Others have been our friends. Many are somewhere in the middle, shifting in and out of foreign policy focus depending on the issue of the day or preferences of our own democratic regime’s leadership.
Every so often, foreign debates remind us of this reality. From George Kennan’s framing of the sources of Soviet policy to Jeane Kirkpatrick’s distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, to leftists’ glorification of anticolonial Third World movements, to Thomas Freedman’s roundabout celebration of East Asian developmentalism, political intellectuals have sometimes recognized, even if only implicitly, that ‘dictatorship’ doesn’t always mean the same thing—or have the same relation to American interests.
Rather than fixating on regime type, we need to pay more attention to these distinctions. In the language of international relations theory, a democracy-dictator negotiation ‘dyad’ is going to hinge on a number of fundamental factors, from adversary status and relative power (or what the Soviets used to call the “correlation of forces and means”) to issue-set, time-period, economic, political, or even cultural leverage, and a host of other intangibles. Variation among these factors renders grand assertions difficult or even meaningless.
But let’s say we want to focus on one subset of the problem: negotiating with a relatively powerful authoritarian regime which we consider a major adversary on an issue of high salience of fundamentally competing interests, on which we cannot simply get the outcome we want through plain economic coercion or acceptable levels of conventional kinetic force. Putin’s Russia and the Russia-Ukraine war is a useful example, although not the most typical one.
If we consider this kind of special case, what we really want to ask is how we can move such an adversary towards an outcome acceptable to our side as defined by our own leadership. There are three considerations that structure decision-making in stable authoritarian regimes: ruler power, internal legitimacy, and personal motivations. Rather than generalizing about ‘dictators,’ we need to concentrate on those specific factors.
Ruler Power
Our first concern is assessing the nature of the ruler’s power in our authoritarian regime of interest. Is he truly a ‘dictator’ or ‘autocrat’ in the fullest sense, holding full decision-making authority unconstrained by other institutions? Or does he have to keep in mind a powerful, institutionalized political party? Or a large coterie of upper-tier elites, be they aristocrats, security and military elites, or a clerical or expert cadre with de facto veto authority over decisions?
The latter seems unlikely, except it happens all the time. And it actually makes negotiations simpler. It is relatively easy to negotiate with North Korea, because the Kim dynasty has long held total control over all decision-making.
Not so with a place like the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has a large clerical establishment and multiple layers of bureaucratized institutions with strong input on foreign policy. Effective Iran policy demands a fuller picture of the regime in Tehran (the IRGC, the Majlis, the elected president, the amorphous clerical establishment and its philosophical divides, as well as the Supreme Leader himself). The leader may call the final shot, but he is far from the only one in the picture.
In the present Russian situation, we are in firmer territory, although it has not always been so. Russia’s current wartime government is firmly in the hands of Putin, who has been at pains to assert his sole prerogative in foreign policy decision-making. When we speak of negotiating with Russia today, we really do mean negotiating with Putin and him alone.
But this is a recent development. We saw a different, yet still authoritarian Russia as late as the first Obama term, where President Medvedev felt comfortable agreeing to a series of Western-led international positions that would later be countermanded by Putin even though he was technically out of office. Indeed, disagreements over those interactions were a major reason for Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, as he did not trust the softer, more accommodating figures he had allowed to run Russian foreign policy in that period.
So first we need to assess exactly to what degree we have to think about the political ecosystem in which a leader operates and determine what kind of adversary we are dealing with. But that is only the first step.
Internal Legitimacy
A second concern in negotiating with authoritarian leaders is the source of that figure’s internal legitimacy. Even a regime leader who is largely unconstrained by institutions or a powerful cadre of upper-tier elites still needs to be able to ensure that his directions are followed and his leadership remains publicly unquestioned.
Almost all political regimes have critical pillars of support that contour how much maneuver space they have, what worldview or framework they are perceived by their subordinates to work within, and where implicit red lines exist. For democracies in the West, these sources tend to be political institutions that channel popular opinion into decision-making collections of national elites such as parliaments, cabinets, and presidencies. Such formal constraints are coupled with more abstract considerations pervasive in any democracy. Examples of ideas that influence foreign policy range from anti-communism to democracy promotion to environmentalism, all of which have given moral valence to particular approaches to world politics.
Such ideational factors aren’t necessarily reflected in public opinion. Even when relatively unpopular, they can still influence the expert cohorts that staff foreign policy and national security bureaucracies, as well as thinktank and NGO ecosystems funded by those same bureaucracies, as well as politically engaged donor classes. It may be legally and institutionally possible for leaders to override these considerations. But there is a price for doing so—and it may not be a price they are willing to pay.
Authoritarian regimes also have diverse sources of internal legitimacy, both in general and in respect to foreign policy decision-making in particular. Such regimes are highly varied, but they are all characterized by meaningfully truncated to genuinely nonexistent accountability pressures from the public. Thus, we often think little of formal institutions as central planks in an authoritarian regime’s legitimation profile. That is a genuine difference between such regimes and Western democracies.
Yet legitimating ideologies still play potentially decisive roles even in non-democratic polities. These ideas include forms of nationalism that limit the flexibility of territorial settlements to religious or ethnocultural commitments that determine which allies are difficult to ‘throw under the bus.’ It would be folly to imagine China’s aspirations to annex Taiwan or Iran’s support for Shia insurgency across the Middle East are as easy to negotiate as technical matters of arms control or trade policy. That’s because they are seen as so important that a flipflop could engender a legitimacy crisis within such countries.
The Russian case is again instructive, as its ideological complex of hostility to the West, moral conservatism, imperial nationalism, and polyethnic religious traditionalism is both dominant within elite spheres and pervasive in public media since the mid-2010s. In theory, an institutionally unconstrained leader like Putin could suddenly announce that the West is no longer a civilizational antagonist devoted to destroying Russia. But such a change could prove quite corrosive to regime stability—and Putin understands that very well. It is therefore unlikely that appeals to values which directly threaten theirs will take us very far in negotiation.
Personal Motivations
Finally, while authoritarian regimes do not share a single mode of control, their leadership is more likely to be personalized. Coupled with such regimes’ unaccountability to the public over choices made at the highest levels, negotiations with authoritarian regimes will go best when we understand the personal motivations of the regime leader.
The importance of personalism is not just that one must take into account the leader’s greater agency. It means that his or her individual quirks, ways of thinking, and objects of obsession can all impact negotiation interactions. This can have extreme consequences, such as when Russian Emperor Peter III changed sides in the Seven Years War because he was a deep admirer of Frederick the Great, when Spain failed to enter WWII because the neighboring corporatist leader Antonio Salazar personally persuaded Franco otherwise, or when Stalin simply refused to believe Hitler would betray him after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These factors can be quite complicated and are not easily reduced to considerations of personal reward sometimes overly favored by commentators living in democracies. The motivations of autocratic leaders often include surprisingly strong policy preferences that outweigh considerations of money or status.
Highlighting personal motivations and preoccupations are as far from a structural account of international politics as can be, and we would be wrong to claim this can ever fully explain great power politics. The personal tends to matter more at the micro-level, in condensed periods of critical decision-making, or as a supplement to other logics of action. Yet in negotiations where any leverage or angle that moves the needle even a bit can be of use, it is foolhardy to remove it from the analytic picture.
Naturally, the Russian case looms as an extreme example of personal motivation overriding other considerations. While debate over Russia’s reasons for initiating the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022 remains heated, it is agreed by all that the personal qualities of Vladimir Putin played a vital role, from his gradual shift towards reimagining Ukraine in imperial-nationalist terms to reports of his COVID-era isolation obsessing over maps and other documents from the Russian state archives.
With the war now in its third year, the role of the personal has remained inescapable. It was Putin alone who made the decision for war (to the surprise of many Russian elites), it was Putin who devoted a set-piece speech about Russia’s policy to his particular historical obsessions, and it is Putin who seems attuned to the personal in his interactions with friendly states such as China or India, as much as with adversaries as the United States.
Conclusion
We are poorly served by vague assertions about how dictators act in negotiations. Dictators never ‘always’ do anything. Patterns of practice and tendencies exist but are everywhere complicated by the huge set of conditional features present in any given regime position and international system.
By focusing on three specific components of a negotiation problem-set–leader power, regime legitimacy, and personal motivations–we can put together a useful strategic package, however. And if we can align these factors with a clear negotiation goal, we can get part of the way to an acceptable outcome.
In the modern Russian case, we are faced with a particularly tricky mountain to climb. A regime whose leader is unconstrained and uncontested, with ideological antagonism built into the national justifying story it tells itself, its elites, and its population, and where the apex decision-maker is personally obsessed with an intractable historical grievance is hard to crack.
Yet these same factors help us find potential points of leverage. Unaccountable leaders can be especially concerned with elite defection: finding ways to make a deal particularly sweet to subordinate elites can undermine faith in the ruler. Ideological antagonism can be ameliorated by talking in a similar cant when possible: signaling that civilizational multipolarity is a game we can play too can undermine a sense of existential stakes. And flattering the personal motivations of Putin may open doors down the road: taking up the historical approach he loves so much and framing solutions as natural to historical order may wedge open an entrance, even just a little.
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