Authoritarian regimes flourished by bending or breaking international rules. Once the US started to do the same, autocracies learned that a world without rules is far more dangerous for them than they had imagined.
Syria, Venezuela, and Iran show that authoritarian resilience is much less solid than it looks
The latest escalation around Iran should be read as more than a regional crisis. It is part of a larger historical reversal. For years, authoritarian regimes learned how to survive and even profit in an increasingly permissive international environment: they bent rules, hid behind grey schemes, weaponized uncertainty, and relied on the hesitation of democratic powers. But once the world’s strongest democratic actor began acting less as guardian of the rules and more as another great power willing to break them, the old beneficiaries of disorder found themselves in a paradoxical position. They had flourished in a system where norms were weak and selectively enforced. Now they are discovering that a world without rules is far more dangerous for fragile autocracies than for those they once thought they had outsmarted.
The events surrounding Iran in recent weeks are important not only because of what they may mean for Tehran, the Gulf, or global energy markets. They matter because they reveal something larger about the transformation of the international order. When the United States strikes Iranian military targets on Kharg Island, the key hub for most of Iran’s oil exports, it is not just another episode in a long confrontation. It is also a sign that the old distinction between rule-breaking outsiders and rule-defending insiders has become much harder to sustain.
Iran is therefore not an isolated case. It belongs to a broader chain of developments that should be understood together. Syria’s Assad regime collapsed in December 2024 after years of war, internal decay, and the inability of its allies to save it. In January 2026, the United States captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Cuba, meanwhile, has been pushed into renewed hardship as pressure on Venezuelan oil flows has tightened the island’s already precarious fuel supply. These are different countries, different ideologies, and different regional contexts. Yet they all point to the same uncomfortable truth: authoritarian resilience is often much less solid than it looks.
Authoritarian regimes thrived as long as their oil was needed and Western powers followed rules
For several decades, many observers spoke of an “authoritarian international” or, in more refined academic language, of the rise of modernized autocracy — the kind of regime that Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman defined as “spin dictatorship,” a concept they later developed at length in their book “Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century”. The point was never simply that dictatorships survived. They adapted. Unlike the blunt, openly repressive regimes of the twentieth century, many contemporary authoritarian systems learned to imitate the outer shell of democracy while emptying it of substance. Elections remained, but without real competition. Media still existed, but under managed pluralism. Institutions were preserved, but mostly as scenery. What mattered was not to abolish democratic forms, but to domesticate them.
This was, in many ways, the answer authoritarian regimes found to the shocks of the post-Cold War period: the color revolutions, the Arab Spring, the repeated fear that public anger, civic mobilization, and external pressure might sweep them away. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was still possible to believe that history was moving, however unevenly, in the direction of liberal democracy. That mood was strengthened by the collapse of the Soviet bloc and by the widespread conviction that the West, for all its faults, represented the institutional center of gravity in world politics.
That was the world in which Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis was often simplified and misunderstood. Its popular version was not that conflict had disappeared, but that the basic direction of political development had been settled. Liberal democracy and market capitalism seemed to have no credible systemic rival. In such a climate, many in the West grew accustomed to treating hard power either as a last resort or as something that required broad coalitions, legal cover, and rhetorical restraint. Even when the United States and its allies acted forcefully, they usually still felt compelled to justify themselves in the language of law, norms, alliances, and multilateral legitimacy.
Authoritarian regimes learned how to exploit precisely that hesitation. Their strategy was not to challenge the system in a fully frontal manner, but to live in its grey zones. They relied on plausible deniability, shadow trade, offshore networks, informal coercion, and selective repression. They built domestic stability not through efficiency, but through managed fear, patronage, and the fragmentation of opposition. Internationally, they survived not because they were inherently strong, but because others chose not to use force against them.
Energy-rich autocracies were especially well placed to play this game. Iran, Venezuela, Libya, and, in a somewhat different but related way, Russia all benefited from the same structural advantage: when a regime controls resources that the world still needs, sanctions are rarely total, isolation is rarely complete, and moral condemnation is rarely enough. There is almost always a route to survival. Buyers can be found. Cargoes can be relabeled. Tankers can sail under opaque ownership structures. Political isolation can coexist with commercial profit.
Iran offers perhaps the clearest example. For decades, despite sanctions and deep political isolation, it managed to preserve its regime, maintain regional influence, and continue exporting energy, particularly to China, often through opaque shipping arrangements and a shadow fleet. That same toolbox has become familiar elsewhere, including in Russia’s energy trade after 2022. The lesson many authoritarians drew was obvious: if one is patient, sufficiently ruthless at home, and economically useful abroad, one can outlast pressure.
But this logic contained a hidden assumption: that the strongest liberal democracies would remain constrained by their own norms more than authoritarian regimes were constrained by anything at all. Once that assumption weakens, the whole model becomes more vulnerable.
The authoritarian regimes are no longer safe in a world where the force of law is replaced by the law of force
This is where Donald Trump becomes less an exception than a historical accelerator. His approach to international politics did not invent disorder, but it helped normalize a more openly transactional, punitive, and force-centered worldview inside the leading democratic power. Tariffs against allies, contempt for multilateral frameworks, sanctions used not only as policy tools but as instruments of pressure bordering on economic warfare, and now direct military escalation against Iran: all this suggests that the world is moving away from the force of law toward the law of force.
In a strange way, this puts authoritarian regimes in a newly uncomfortable position. For years they benefited from a gap between what the liberal order claimed to be and what it was willing to do. They could cheat, repress, and maneuver under the assumption that the other side remained bound, at least partially, by norms. But when a major democratic power also begins to think in terms of raw leverage, informal coercion, and exemplary punishment, the old authoritarians lose one of their most useful advantages.
That is why the Iranian case matters beyond Iran. It shows that authoritarian toughness may be, in reality, a form of brittle fragility. These systems often just look durable. But their durability depends on a carefully managed external environment: access to resources, a measure of diplomatic ambiguity, the caution of adversaries, and the possibility of hiding behind international complexity. Once the environment becomes more openly predatory, their room for maneuver shrinks dramatically.
There is an irony here. The regimes that long mocked the West for being soft, procedural, and decadent are now learning that they were safer in a world where their main opponents still cared, however inconsistently, about procedure.
This does not mean that the answer lies in romanticizing the earlier liberal order, which was always more selective, more hypocritical, and more self-interested than its defenders liked to admit. Nor does it mean that authoritarianism is on the verge of disappearance. Some regimes will adapt again. Others will survive through repression, Chinese support, resource rents, or sheer geopolitical fatigue on the part of the West.
But the broader lesson is perhaps more unsettling. The era in which authoritarian regimes could breach the international order with limited risk and few serious consequences for themselves appears to be coming to an end. What is emerging instead is a world in which the law of force is once again taking precedence over the force of law.
Yet even if such a world proves more dangerous for authoritarian regimes, it does not follow that what comes after them will necessarily be democratic or liberal. More likely, their collapse may give way to a new intermediate order — harsher, less predictable, and far less attractive than many of those who once welcomed the downfall of authoritarian rule might have hoped.
