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becomes suspect, and national security takes precedence over the benefits of global integration.

• Foreign aggression: The revival of Russia as a military power has been a central goal of Putin’s leadership. He increased troop levels, devoted billions of dollars to equipment modernization, and instituted a series of reforms designed to enable the military to engage in several limited conflicts simultaneously. To compensate for the material advantages of the United States and NATO, the Russian military developed a strategic approach known as hybrid warfare, which seeks to combine conventional tactics, espionage and subversion, cyberattacks, and propaganda so as to limit the role of traditional battlefield operations and, where possible, sow confusion as to who is responsible for the aggression and how it should be dealt with. The strategy has been put into action in Ukraine, and intrusive Russian patrols have also harassed foreign navies and air forces across Northern Europe. In Georgia, Russian troops have constantly encroached on the Tbilisi government by simply moving border fences encircling the Russian-backed separatist region of South Ossetia.

China has also engaged in a massive military buildup, and is pressing its maritime territorial claims with huge fleets of coast guard vessels and new island bases that bristle with armaments. Its tactics at sea are openly aggressive, but stop just short of the sort of action that might trigger live fire.

Iran has long cultivated indirect methods of foreign aggression, particularly through the covert equipping and training of allied Shiite militias in Arab states. In recent years, however, it has openly deployed these militias in large numbers—overseen on the front lines by high-ranking Iranian officers—to battle zones in Syria and Iraq, and it has increasingly drawn on Afghan recruits in addition to Arabs. Iran’s regional rivals, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have responded with more direct foreign interventions of their own, most notably in Yemen.

The recent embrace of more overtly repressive policies stems in part from the common structural flaws of the modern authoritarian model. The question of succession in authoritarian governments is a constant source of tension, producing crises—such as Putin’s return to the presidency after his circumvention of term limits in 2012—that require new crackdowns on dissent.

Moreover, because these regimes do not allow peaceful rotations of power through elections, they rely in large part on the promise of economic growth as a source of legitimacy. However, they also feature systemic corruption as a means of maintaining internal cohesion. All of this leaves them ill-equipped to cope with economic shocks and related public anger. The global economic downturn of 2008 and the more recent drop in energy prices have shaken economies and political establishments around the world, but while citizens of democracies can take their frustrations to the ballot box, authoritarian rulers must treat protests against austerity or unemployment as existential threats.

The promise of national greatness and the menace of external enemies are tried-and-true alternatives to economic prosperity as sources of regime legitimacy. Unfortunately, promoting these narratives also generates new cycles of dissent and repression, and damages ties with the outside world, further undermining the economy.

A transition from bad to worse
While the return to the blunt instruments of the past suggests a fundamental weakness in the modern authoritarianism model, it would be a mistake to conclude that these regimes are doomed to extinction. The emergence of this model was in fact a remarkable demonstration of adaptability on the part of authoritarian rulers, who faced a uniquely inhospitable environment in the years after the end of the Cold War. Democracy, human rights, and the rule of law were newly ascendant as the governing principles of the international order, and undemocratic leaders made the changes necessary to survive without surrendering their political dominance.

If they are now reversing some of these changes, it is not just because the basic structures and incentives of authoritarian rule tend to encourage greater repression over time. It is also because the external pressure to conform to democratic standards is rapidly disappearing.

Leading democracies have absorbed the economic blows of recent years without revolution or repression, but voter frustration has increasingly lifted up antiestablishment, populist, and nationalist politicians

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