Apr 23, 2006 
Robert Kaplan writes in today’s WaPo (although without the links),
Perhaps the greatest security threat we face today is from a paranoid and resentful state leader, armed with biological or nuclear weapons and willing to make strategic use of stateless terrorists.
These old-fashioned bad guys often have uncertain popular support, but that does not make them easy to dislodge. We don’t live in a democratic world so much as in a world in the throes of a very messy democratic transition, so national elections combined with weak, easily politicized institutions produce a lethal mix — dictators armed with pseudo-democratic legitimacy. And they come in many shapes and forms.
Of course, there are the traditional dictatorships like that of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who have evoked the morbid, crushing tyrannies of antiquity, using personality cults to obliterate individual spirit and keep populations on a permanent war footing.
There are Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, built on economic anger and religious resentment … There is the comic-opera, natural gas-rich regime of Saparmurad Niyazov in Turkmenistan, with his Disneyfied personality cult and slogans (“Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi,” ghastly echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer“) …
These categories are loose and overlapping. What they have in common is that the rulers can exploit the whole panoply of state power, without regard for the will of the people. …
…Because states are harder and more complex to rule now (the result of urbanization, rises in population and independent media), a strongman requires not only coercion but an energizing ideology to whip his supporters into a frenzy and keep opponents at bay.
Television also puts individual charisma at a premium. While advanced democracies in the West tend to produce bland, lowest-common-denominator leaders, less open electoral systems, in which a lot of muscle and thuggery is at work behind the scenes, have a greater likelihood of producing rabble-rousers.
Surely that can’t happen here!
Update: A variation from Billmon.
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