How authoritarianism went from defense to offense on the world stage

Artwork for podcast The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth

23rd February 2026 • The Rhodes Center Podcast with Mark Blyth • Rhodes Center

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MARK BLYTH: From the Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics, this is the Rhodes Center Podcast. I'm the director of the Center and your host, Mark Blyth.

The global rise of authoritarianism today is a puzzle, insofar as democracies were supposed to be immune to such impulses. But as countries as diverse as India, Hungary, and even the US show us, this is clearly no longer the case. So why is it back?

On this episode, I spoke with Alexander Cooley and Alex Dukalskis, who take us back to the Nineteen Nineties and early Two Thousands as a moment when global liberalism and the drive for universal human rights overreached and became fragile. The initial successes of such ideas and movements were quickly learned by the countries that were targeted, such as Russia and China. And ultimately, these same weapons were used against them.

These target states went from playing defense, stigmatizing foreign ideas and agents, and shielding their populations from such ideas to offense. Reframing rights. Projecting alternative ideas and institutions, and ultimately dictating the agenda. An agenda that normalizes authoritarian politics.

Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of political science at Barnard College. Alex Dukalskis, is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. Their new book, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, is out now with Oxford University Press. It is, in my opinion, the best out there. You should read it. In the meantime, here's our conversation.

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MARK BLYTH: Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and Alexander Dukalskis of UCD in Dublin, welcome, both of you.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Great to be here.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Thank you.

MARK BLYTH: I'm going to start with a story that happened to me. It must be 20 years ago now. And I think it sets you up for talking about the book. And I'm going to invite Alex C. To talk about it first and then Alex D. So here we go.

Back when I was at Johns Hopkins, there was a student who did a PhD on the Color Revolutions, the Rose Revolutions, all that stuff. And this person was involved in it as well as an activist, as well as an observer of the whole thing. And when we did the dissertation defense, this person outlined how well this NGO was able to do it because they got funding from Soros. And this one was able to do it because they got money from USAID and so on and so forth.

And by the end of it, I kind of instinctively blurted out " you mean Putin's right? This entire thing really is just a front for American foreign policy." And they were rather taken aback by this. I think that you have a slightly different take on this implicitly in the book, which is that the NGOs themselves really weren't part of a wider American project. It may have been part of a wider American hubris, but when the push comes to shove, they didn't really have the support of the US State. And that sets up the original weakness that leads to what you call this authoritarian resurgence. So Alex Cooley give us a set up based on that. What is it that you guys really were trying to get at in the book?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah thanks so much, Mark. And it is a very instructive anecdote. And that was actually one of the first very revealing geopolitical moments about how in this hubris or these post-cold war liberal assumptions, that we regarded NGOs and this entire apparatus that was spreading liberal democratic values as somehow being distinct, right, as somehow being independent and also acting in autonomous and unchecked kind of way. And we just assumed that this was beyond politics.

And instantly after the Colored Revolutions, a bunch of governments across who had been affected and neighbors said, no, wait a minute. These aren't democratic actors. These are regime threats. You want to actually bring us down. Of course, we responded with outrage, right. How can you regard these civil society actors and these NGOs as being threatening? But when you think about it politically, they were threatening, but it also marks a kind of rite of passage from accepting the framework in which these actors were introduced into a place like Kyrgyzstan, or a place like Georgia, or a place like Ukraine, and recoding them right, as something which we are going to delineate on our terms. And that only becomes more and more pronounced over the years.

MARK BLYTH: Alex D, what do you want to add to that by way of setup?

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah, I mean, our basic premise is that since the Nineteen Nineties, authoritarian states have become much more powerful economically and ideologically, and now they are using that newfound power in order to change many domains and areas of international political life that previously we thought were unchangeable, or that we're going to have liberalizing kind of influences. So we explore a bunch of different domains in the book that we can pick up on any of them that you wish. But that's kind of our basic premise. And I think you're right that the Color Revolutions is an important origin story for a lot of the dynamics that we talk about.

MARK BLYTH: So also, in terms of origin story, to set the scene for this whole thing, and this is useful to listeners as well, is you take us back to the Nineteen Nineties, you take us back to the very early Two Thousands. And that was a time when if you were living in the West, in many ways, it was the best of times. I mean, it was cool, Britannia, all that of stuff. Things seemed to be going quite well. And there was this end of history vibe. There was this liberalism is the only thing vibe.

And that created, if you will, a world in which if you lived in the middle of it, you didn't really notice that this was itself, if you will, a propaganda campaign. It was selling a particular vision of the way the world works and the way that it should work. I mean, I lived through that. You lived through that. Why didn't we see that more clearly for this kind of moment of, if you will, getting over your skis in terms of your own ideological presumptions? Why didn't-- was the West aware of what it was doing in a sense?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: So when you think back to that time, and debates about globalization, and the homogenization and the marketization of the West and the spreading, the terms of the debate were usually along the lines of are things becoming globalized and westernized, or are we going to have local backlash. Jihad versus McWorld, for instance. So The Tom Friedman books, other examples. What we didn't think about was really that there would be an authoritarian resurgence to become the main kind of opponent or antagonist in global governance.

This was really a story about local cultures reacting badly, getting decimated. That was the nature of the critique of globalization 1.0 and authoritarians themselves kept relatively quiet. They were on the defensive. So it's not until later that you start seeing of financial power, coupled with market power and geopolitical power, than becoming more assertive in the global governance domain.

MARK BLYTH: Alex, you start the book with a comparison of two Olympics, because in many ways, the Two Thousand and Eight Olympics was the absolute peak, if you will, of liberal expansionary hubris, if I want to put it that way. Can you tell us what was going on there and then what changed by the time you get to Twenty Twenty?

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah so the lead-up to the Two Thousand and Eight Beijing Summer Olympics are very interesting for our story. They were awarded in Two Thousand and One, actually. And so there was a kind of a seven year lead-up time in which international human rights organizations and other governments and a whole range of actors intentionally sought to use the games as leverage to get China to improve its human rights record. And so the level of activism was high. It was intense. It was across a lot of different issue areas, and it met with some successes.

So if you recall the activism around China's support for the government in Sudan that was committing a genocide at the time, activists hooked on to that and got China to distance itself from Sudan in some respects. And at that time, China felt the need to tactically adapt to the International Liberal Human Rights sphere and make some tactical concessions. But what's perhaps even more interesting is the aftermath of the Two Thousand and Eight Games was basically a wake up call for the party.

It began to understand that it failed to control the global conversation. It began to reflect on the fact that Tibet rights groups are able to use the Olympics to get Tibet back on the international agenda, when it had been quite frankly, off the international agenda for so long. And so they started to invest. The government started to invest a lot of money in its external media apparatus, in working with public relations firms in the West, in order to basically better control global conversation, to better steer global conversations.

We think about a lot of China's assertiveness as rooted in Xi Jinping's rise to power. And a lot of it is. But the story we're telling actually predates that. Around Two Thousand and Eight, Two Thousand and Nine, the Beijing Olympics was a major wake up call for the party. So if you fast-forward then to Twenty Twenty-Two, the Winter Olympics in Beijing, there were some efforts to try to engage in some human rights activism and other sorts of advocacy around the Games.

There was a diplomatic boycott that was attempted, but really it more or less fell flat and China was able to parry any kind of pressure that it was confronted with, partly because it had learned lessons from Two Thousand and Eight, and partly because in the 14 years in between, it just became much more powerful. So companies were less willing to lose market share by taking human rights stances and the. So those two Olympics, we think, bookend a really important era and reveal a lot of lessons. And processes that occur during that time.

MARK BLYTH: So at the heart of the book, you guys have this idea of authoritarian snap-back. So there was a book that came out in Nineteen Ninety-Eight backing psychic activists beyond borders, and they had this idea, basically, of how activism can become transnational. And this is what we're essentially describing with NGOs influence campaigns, whether it happens to be, Uyghur cotton or the Nike stuff back 20 years previously, et cetera, which you talk about in the book. And this is the sources of pressure.

So just two things to Alex C, the first one is just a quick question. When these countries see these pressures or affect these pressures, we're talking about the Rose Revolutions are basically-- the Color Revolutions. That's Russia. This is Russia with Putin. And it's-- China is the other big case. But there's lots of other cases where the supply as well. Do they actually-- do these countries see this as annoying foreign NGOs or do they really identify them as regime change state projects, or do they just say that to basically get at the NGOs? What do you think?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah, it's a really good question. I actually think it might depend on country. So in Russia, for instance, there's very little acceptance that these could ever be independent actors, civil societies. It's just a genuine belief that sphere doesn't exist. I think there are other countries that had long accepted and tolerated the presence of liberal actors, whether it's foreign correspondents or NGOs or activists, and then they change their tune. So I think it depends a bit on the country. I do think, though, to get at your question, there's a lot of learning going on.

So it's not just Russia that's looking at the Color Revolution. A lot of other countries are doing so as well. Russia is then looking at the Arab Spring. And what happens there regarding clamping down on social media. And so does China. So you don't have to be in a formal alliance to engage in authoritarian learning. It's just very obvious by news coverage, the kinds of actors that are threatening to autocracies and the fact that autocracies are taking countermeasures.

MARK BLYTH: So the Keck and Sikkink model, which for people who are interested was called the boomerang model. You reverse engineer this and talk about snap-back and it comes in stages. So I want to talk about each of these stages because I buy this, I think this actually really describes what's going on. So for everybody else out there just a margin, a five-stage model there.

Not to say that there don't happen at the same time, they do under certain circumstances, but think about them as if you're an authoritarian and you're faced with these pressures from outside to liberalize, to democratize human rights, whatever it happens to be. How do you oppose this? And the first one is this one just jumps at me as two things is Russia, but also really trick number one in the authoritarian playbook stigmatize. Alex D, talk to me about stigmatization.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah so the basic idea there is that you have actors that are promoting liberalism or even potentially promoting liberalism, NGOs or media outlets or even in some cases companies, universities. And when they are perceived as threatening state interests, the first step is always to stigmatize them. And probably the most common way in which that's done is to associate them precisely, as you were saying earlier, to associate them with the political agenda of a foreign rival.

So to just to say, they're not journalists, they're actually spies or it's not a human rights NGO, they're just there to cause chaos and overthrow our regime. And that basically stigmatizes the group. It makes other people look on that group with suspicion. And it means that they're kind of softened up as a target for later stages.

MARK BLYTH: And this is something that we see lots of authoritarian regimes adopting because it seems to be a very successful tactic. I believe, in Georgia just now there's a struggle over exactly this.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Let me add something to this because part of the book is also trying to make sense of if anything could have been done. And I think for the most part, I think we agree that these trends were always going to happen as authoritarian states grew in power. But one of the mistakes that Western philanthropists and donors made is that they didn't take stigmatization seriously. They didn't come up with counter stigmatization strategies.

There were some major donors that preferred to withdraw rather than answer accusations or defend their particular agents, which left this lurking as a framing of what they were and what they were doing. In fact, one major donor would repeatedly say, we're not in the business of geopolitics. We're in the business of helping citizens. And the minute that we're viewed geopolitically, we'll just go elsewhere. I think in retrospect, that was a real mistake.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah no, that makes sense. Next stage: shielding. You basically cut off the information flow. Give me an example of that?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah you cut off the information flow censored the activities. If you want to use Russia as a model, stigmatization would be the foreign agent law where if you take external money, basically, have to declare yourself a foreign agent. Shielding is the Twenty Fifteen Undesirable Organizations Law where you're just banned. And association with you is a criminal penalty. And the difference in the complement is that you stop that activity altogether, or that information flow or that of line of advocacy.

MARK BLYTH: And it's also internet blockages. It's also deliberate misinformation campaigns domestically, et cetera. So this becomes more sophisticated over time.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah, absolutely.

MARK BLYTH: Alex D, back to you. Alex C and Alex D, I feel like I'm running some kind of pop-culture thing here. Reframe, engagement, new ground rules. Now again for background for everybody listening, what's kind of animating this in the background. And they're quite upfront about this in the book, is that market power matters. That ultimately when you're talking about the Nineteen Nineties, the GDP footprint of what are to be the large authoritarian states is really quite small. And in China in particular, it becomes really, really quite big.

And what begins to happen is all the Western companies, whether they're car companies, apparel companies, sports franchises, they all want into this Nirvana, which is called the Chinese market. And once you're there get a version. Jeff Colgan pointed this out this morning of what political scientists call the obsolescent bargain. You go in with a set of agreements. Watch me change the agreements, you don't like that deal. I'll give you another deal. This kind of stuff. Alex, tell us about that. Give us some examples of how that's played out.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah that's right. So once you enter that kind of market, then you are subject to changing regulations or actors who changed their mind over time or public opinion changing over time. And so what you have is the government will reframe engagement in order to frame attacks or criticisms as not criticisms of the government, but attacks on the people, attacks on us as a group. And there's a lot of excellent research that shows that this can be a very effective tactic.

So your listeners who are familiar with the Chinese case will certainly the phrase "Hurting the feelings of the Chinese people." This is one that's very often used when there is a company that makes a comment about Taiwan or Tiananmen or Tibet or Xinjiang or something, kind of a quote unquote "sensitive issue" for the Chinese authorities. And so if this phrase hurts the feelings of the Chinese people, then it's kind of seen as an assault on the in-group. And the company is then faced with a choice. It can either back down or accept the new terms of engagement, or it can exit altogether, or it can continue its activities and face the penalties. Now, most actors, most of the time, choose to apologize or choose to somehow reconcile in order to precisely, as you say, try to access that market, basically.

MARK BLYTH: Alex, give me some concrete examples of that. Some companies, for example, you've got great examples in the book.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah. I think the dilemma over the Swedish firm H&M is a really interesting one. Where having put out a supportive statement in response to an advocacy campaign to disassociate from Xinjiang cotton. Six months later, as Xinjiang becomes politicized and there's a wave of sanctions against Xinjiang, Chinese, authorities and social media critics pick up on this statement. They start circulating it.

And all of a sudden there's this massive boycott campaign of H&M. They start closing their stores, their market share plummets. And at that point, their presence in China is a shell of what it was. Now, actually, a related example is what other companies do when they see this happening to H&M. So the Japanese company MUJI, an apparel brand is watching this.

And they take the opposite tack. They start messaging that they're using Xinjiang cotton. And that they're proud to use Xinjiang cotton, which in turn emboldens the Chinese government to insist that their alternative cotton standards that uses Xinjiang cotton, that that should be the global standard. And if for some reason you're not doing that, you're actually discriminating against China. So this reframing has a number of knock-on effects in which the whole question of who is discriminating against who and who is boycotting who does get flipped on its back. Like the jujitsu effect, as you were commenting on earlier.

MARK BLYTH: So if I think about the first two steps here, it's stigmatizing shield. This strikes me as playing defense. And then when you get to the next level, you're starting to play defense and offense mixed. Then you get to the fourth one, which is project control and influence outward. That's really offense. And you really begin beginning to see this in some of your empirical chapters, particularly the one on media. Alex D, tell me about the media story. What's going on with that? This is really about influence outside.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah, that's right. So this is where the audience, so to speak, for these tactics becomes international. And as you say, the aim becomes much more offensive. So in the media chapter, we tell a story about how the media industry in liberal democracies is struggling. This is not a new story. Layoffs are happening across the board, particularly with regard to foreign correspondents, which are very expensive to maintain. But they're very important people because they explain politics and society in other places for the rest of us who don't have the time or resources to do so ourselves.

So with the decline of foreign correspondents, you've seen a change in the international media ecosystem that opens up a space for pro-authoritarian media outlets. CGTN in China, for example, or RTU in Russia or any number of other state-funded external propaganda outlets. And what they can do is they can fill that information void with their own content, essentially. Now, they can do that in a very direct way, just by operating under their own brand. Or they can do that by striking content sharing agreements with foreign media outlets.

And this is an even more effective way of doing it. So Xinhua, for example, which is the Chinese state news agency, has struck agreements that we were able to find with about 300 foreign media outlets for Xinhua, to act as a wire service, basically, and to have its own news, which is, of course, under the purview of the Communist Party's propaganda apparatus, to have that content run in foreign websites means the content is laundered through another source. And that influence then spreads outward, and people reading the content in their own local outlets or national outlets might not even the source of the content.

MARK BLYTH: So that's level 4. We finally get to level 5. Level 5 is dictate the agenda. Are there any particularly clear examples where the authoritarian regimes really now dictate the agenda?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: So let's give you a couple of disturbing near examples from our own profession, academia. Part of the story that we tell in the transnational education chapter is the creation of the transnational campus branch. These agreements that sprung-up at the height of globalization, that period, we were talking about the mid Two Thousands, where a lot of UK and US based universities decided to go global. Global meant pockets in China, Singapore, and the Gulf, many of authoritarian countries.

And the assumption was that we would bring our norms and our model and our values, and this would be paired with authoritarian financing, and somehow this engagement would change them. So this isn't just a story of saying, we're banning certain classes right from being taught or certain political activities. The fifth stage is something changing back home. And actually, I'm going to let Alex talk about an example at home. But I'll mention one that's in the book.

Northwestern University has a school of journalism in Qatar City. At some point, there was a bill that was introduced in the University Senate that would have altered academic freedom to be contingent on the sovereign laws of the host country. Northwestern faculty saw this. They caught it. This was not passed, but the very fact that some members of Northwestern administration thought that this was a good idea not to change the rules over there, but to actually change their own definitions of academic freedom would be an example of a near-miss of your level 5. But I think Alex can talk more about a case he's familiar with.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah. So actually at my home university, and this is all publicly reported, so I'm not sharing anything new necessarily here, but a few years ago, there was a draft plan circulated amongst all staff at the University to change the university's academic freedom standards in order to better accommodate strategic internationalization. And the document was-- relativized academic freedom encouraged us to understand that there were different types of academic freedom that were legitimate and different relationships with the state, and so on and so forth.

This met with a pretty vociferous backlash amongst faculty particularly as it came out of nowhere. Not many of us knew what was happening or that this was in the works. The University of course, is heavily involved in China and other places, most prominently China, but other places as well, where academic freedom is not prioritized. So eventually, it was walked back.

But again, I think similar to the example Alex C cited there, the fact that this was even on the minds of academic leaders, I think shows you how this process can accelerate over time, without anybody really even meaning for it to happen. And then suddenly you are watering down your own academic freedom standards for yourself. And that's where you see this really come to a head.

MARK BLYTH: So one example of this at the end of the book, my favorite chapter in the whole book empirically is, of course, the one that deals with football and global sports more generally. And this one's always been a bit of a puzzle to me, so maybe you guys can make sense of it. One of you can take on F1 and one of you can take on football. So remember that China tried to do football like 10, 12 years ago. They started doing an Abu Dhabi strategy. They set up they built a whole bunch of players. It turned out they were pretty crap, even though there was huge stadia filled with people, it just fell over. And eventually even G, who was behind the whole thing oh, that didn't work. I walked away.

But now we've got the Saudis, and by Cristiano Ronaldo and anybody else who's willing to move, set this up stadiums with hardly anyone in them, et-cetera nobody watches it as far as I know, internationally. So what's the payoff to doing that stuff and what's the payoff to having F1 run through your city? I get these other strategies we've been talking about. You can dictate the terms for firms. You can basically push back and in foreign policy directly using these means you can de-legitimate the West. What's the sports angle?

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah, I think there are multiple drivers. It's not just one. There is a sense of wanting to be a global player and being acknowledged as being a global player in lots of areas.

MARK BLYTH: So this is a recognition play.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: It's a recognition play, and it's also an attempt to cultivate what they view are industries and spectacles and entertainment sectors of the future. So it's no accident that Saudis are hosting the Esports World Cup. And they put a lot of money into this. And this is something that they want to cultivate and be associated with. These are areas of global entertainment that they perceive to be important and lucrative. So some of it I think is a play to enhance reputation.

Perhaps some of it does have an economic logic going forward, but it's very difficult to economically justify, for example, in your case of the Saudi League, how you can give a $200 million contract to Cristiano Ronaldo when you really have very few global TV rights or even revenues coming in. This is very strange, but as taken as part of a greater attempt to position Saudi Arabia as a cultural global type of destination. It makes more sense, as do the vast amounts being spent on LIV golf and other things.

MARK BLYTH: Alex, you want to add anything?

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: I think there's a normalization effort at play in which you are involved in these sports or activities that are really popular, that people watch, and eventually your government or your governmental brand becomes normalized among viewers. And I think to win the Saudi Public Investment Fund purchase Newcastle United Football Club, there were protests and there was some push-back and more or less now, with the resources that PIF has, I mean, they can wait it out. The bigger complaint now seems to be that the Football Club is losing matches rather than anything about human rights. And so I think over time, these states and their investment funds have the resources to wait out the activists and eventually normalize their involvement in this international industry.

MARK BLYTH: So if I try and pull this together, what you do first, but you continue to do, is you stigmatize. Then you block and control, then you reframe and you reconstruct for what you can and can't do. Then you project your influence outward given your version of the story. Where you can, you literally set the agenda for the rest of the world. And where you can't, what you basically do is make all of your stuff that you're doing normal by doing things like hosting F1 and so on and so forth. One of the most interesting little factoids in the book is in that chapter, which is so obvious, but you need to write it down before you it, which is the shift in World Cup destinations and the shift in Olympic destinations. Just tell people about that because this, but they've never put it together.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah. I mean, we had a massive streak of over 20 Olympics and World Cups being hosted by democracies. And in fact, some of these games, the underlying theme politically, in terms of the packages covered was, say, about Korea's democratization in 88 or Nineteen Ninety-Two Barcelona, the finding peace with the Basques, you know, post-franco Spain, South Africa's coming out party. Themes of democracy in the country.

MARK BLYTH: I mean, we'll never forgive them for the vuvuzelas.

Yeah I mean, that was unforgivable.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: So yes. And then all of a sudden, we see the award, the games in Beijing under the circumstances Alex D reported before it, it was the second time they had bid for them. And this time they gave it to them with these conditions. And then all of a sudden this acceleration into normal. We have Sochi, we have FIFA in Russia. And then, of course, we have the double award of games in FIFA to Qatar and Russia, which we don't talk about them as much about in the book, but of course precipitates this uncovering of a massive influence and bribery scandal within FIFA that James Comey unmasks.

So we start to see that FIFA itself as an organization, is really being driven by power and money. And you say, OK, that's not surprising. A lot of political actors are after those things, but we had never become accustomed to thinking of them that way. They were supposed to be stewards of the world's game, right? And instead, what we see now is a really strong siding with host countries whenever they are criticized, their normative campaigns. And that sets up Infantino's, the presidents of FIFA's own relationship with Donald Trump. Where Infantino awards Donald Trump a world Peace Prize,

MARK BLYTH: The FIFA--

ALEXANDER COOLEY: FIFA Peace Prize, right. Which had no committee, no agenda or so forth. So what we're seeing is the geopolitical presence of these actors, and they're not acting in ways that we would expect liberal actors or transparent international organizations to act.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah, one more thing about sports, if I may. You mentioned the Chinese effort to build up a domestic league and it flopped. The last time I checked, there were more North Korean players in Europe's top five leagues than there were Chinese players. But I think one lesson that these current sports players, these current investors in the sports world learn from that is that a much more effective way to go about exerting influence, including over transnational political speech in the sporting realm, is to have a lot of cross-cutting investments abroad. So invest in clubs, sporting apparel, deals, TV rights and rather than building a domestic and building it up to be competitive, having a lot of cross-cutting investments in foreign sports leagues is a much better way to exert influence and eventually dictate the agenda.

MARK BLYTH: One thing in closing that, pops into the book at certain points, but you don't develop it because it's a different set of topics, but there's a bunch of people in the West who really sympathize with this and think it's a good idea. And I'm not necessarily just talking about events in the US. The right-wing populist backlash throughout the Global North. There's a great deal of receptivity to some of these, not just the strategies, they wouldn't probably actually admit the strategies, but rather the critique that, well, America has always been an empire. To the critique that, well, this was just foreign policy by other means, et-cetera et-cetera. So how do you guys think about the relationship between these internal defensive and external offensive strategies as played by these authoritarians? And how does that interface and interlink with what's going on in the West itself? Because that seems to me to be almost like volume two of this book.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good observation. And what we argue in the book is both of these anti-liberal processes are going on at the same time. We're getting the authoritarian backlash and authoritarian exertions, but we're also getting the rise of, lack of a better term, populism, post-liberalism, parties on the right and the left, going after traditional understandings of the polity or transatlantic commitments and so forth. The two are related in that I do think that the populist rise primes receptivity towards a lot of these authoritarian tactics.

And then we're actually getting a more intertwined connection between the two when we see, for example, UAE sovereign wealth fund investors as part of the group that is bidding for Paramount's takeover, hostile takeover of Time Warner. And so I think this is I think possibly the stage, the next book, the interlinking of the two agendas. Where you actually see specific vectors of authoritarian influence or capital going into funding political allies in democracies.

MARK BLYTH: Alex, do you want to have the last word on this bit or anything else?

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Yeah. So I want to just pick up on the normative implications that you mentioned there. We present this argument and what do we make of it? I presented this argument to a group of diplomats, kind of mid-career diplomats from a non-western country, we won't name the country, but they kind of agreed and thought, yes, we have a lot right And we're fine with that. We think this is not a bad thing, actually. And so I think there is an audience there for a multi-polar is the euphemism for it. But a world order, or a set of institutions and practices that are less linked to Western liberalism.

MARK BLYTH: That certainly seems to be what they're trying to do when they are dictating the agenda. Gentlemen, thank you very much. It's a great book. Again, to everybody it's Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics. It is what's going on. It's going to define the next decade. Go read it.

ALEXANDER COOLEY: Thanks so much.

ALEXANDER DUKALSKIS: Thank you.

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MARK BLYTH: This episode was produced by Dan Richards. I'm Mark Blyth. If you like this episode, leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And be sure to subscribe to the show while you're at it. We'll be back soon with another episode of The Rhodes Center Podcast. Thanks for listening.

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