Natan Sharansky, an erstwhile political prisoner in the Soviet Union, writes about how to accurately tell a free society from a "fear" society (one in which people do not enjoy basic liberties and are kept in check by their leaders through fear of punishment). He makes a good case for why it is in the interest of free societies to conduct their foreign policy in such a way as to link benefits granted to fear societies with requirements that the fear society reform its domestic practices.
Fear societies tend to be poorer and less innovative than free ones, so they often need aid, technology, and other things from free societies, but two of the ways they keep their population in check is 1) to distribute the benefits received so as to keep their population dependent on the dictator's good graces and 2) to present the free society to their people as an enemy in order to produce a state of internal solidarity and hostility against it (as if there were a war going on). Appeasement of dictators is therefore counterproductive as it leads to a vicious circle of increasing their power, aggravating tensions between the countries, and further appeasement by the free society.
It was particularly interesting to read this book shortly after George Kennan's At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995 because Kennan has a more traditional view on foreign policy, i.e. stay out of other countries' domestic policy and just concern yourself with their foreign policy. Sharansky uses the relations between the US and USSR during the Cold War and the (seemingly endless) Israeli-Palestinian peace process as examples to illustrate why the traditional approach doesn't work when dealing with fear societies.
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