The belief that external intervention can help foster effective governance, even democracy, in strife-torn authoritarian countries has lost luster following the Afghanistan and Iraq fiascos. Yet it still influences parts of the American foreign policy establishment. The lesson they take from those failures is not that shaping societies from without amounts to a fool’s errand but that inept execution botched a laudable, feasible enterprise. Sean Yom does not focus on nation building per se. Nevertheless, his conclusion that great powers’ intervention (economic, political, and military) helps produce the very outcomes it aims to avert (revolution and state collapse) provides a sobering warning—not just about the inefficacy of intervention but, more importantly, its unintended and destructive consequences.

In From Resilience to Revolution, Yom shows that intervention begets a “cliency” relationship that then leads leaders to exclude, marginalize, and even repress pivotal social and political forces: Having a powerful external patron inclines them to believe that they need not form coalitions and build consensus at home. State and society become estranged in consequence. When pent-up grievances eventually explode into mass rebellion, the ruling stratum, lacking broad and deep public support, crumbles. Neither its formidable coercive apparatus—foreign trained and equipped—nor the lionized great power can save it.

This—roughly the story of Iran’s Pahlavi monarchy, which succumbed to the revolutionary tidal wave of 1979—summarizes one of three patterns Yom explicates.

The history of Kuwait’s al-Sabah monarchy exemplifies the second. Here, the state, whether by choice or circumstance, lacks the largesse and protection of an external patron that helps create an intelligence-police-military complex that surveils and represses political opponents. So, in contrast to the Iranian monarchy, it turns to consultation, patronage, and state-led economic policies to co-opt key segments of society. They benefit from its rule, becoming stakeholders and bulwarks.

Thus, in its most perilous period—during and immediately following the 1990 Iraqi invasion—influential sectors of Kuwaiti society, while they may have had particular bones to pick with the House of Sabah, concluded that there was no better choice to govern Kuwait. The lack of economic and military support from an external power proved to be a blessing: its absence had forced the state to seek allies within society.

Jordan under the Hashemite monarchy illustrates Yom’s third, and intermediate, outcome. King Hussein depended heavily on American economic and military support, which was critical in helping him survive two possibly fatal challenges.

The first was the revolts of 1957. They both reflected and mobilized the alienation of nationalist, leftist, urban, political forces in Jordan, in which Palestinians, themselves marginalized, were prominent. The opposition was also inspired and supported by the Arab nationalist rulers of Syria and Egypt.

The second critical threat to the monarchy came from the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It had ensconced itself in Jordan after Israel’s annexation of the West Bank following the 1967 Six-Day War and become powerful, politically and militarily. The PLO reflected the long-standing marginalization of Jordan’s Palestinians. They came to be ruled by the Hashemite state once Jordan had annexed the West Bank following the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. Some 300,000 more moved to Jordan after the West Bank came under Israeli control in 1967, and Palestinians would eventually comprise a majority of the kingdom’s population. Things came to a head in 1970 when the pro-monarchical, Bedouin-dominated army started annihilating the PLO during what has come to be known as Black September.

Jordan received strong economic and military support from the United States in 1957 when President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched the 6th Fleet to the eastern Mediterranean. The CIA began funneling funds to King Hussein and Washington trained and armed the Jordanian military. Still, Yom argues, what proved decisive in enabling the Jordanian monarchy to survive these and lesser crises was that Hussein used multiple means to forge mutually beneficial ties with Bedouin tribes, merchant families, and the Muslim Brotherhood, each of whom, albeit for different reasons, viewed the nationalist, leftist, and heavily Palestinian opposition as a threat. These groups also closed ranks with the monarchy because Hussein provided them patronage (especially public-sector jobs), made the army a Bedouin preserve, and ensured that they benefited from state investments and social services. The regime’s opponents were hounded and repressed, but its supporters were well cared for—and they stood by it in bad times.

Jordan’s politics have been been more turbulent than Kuwait’s but its monarchy has survived. Iran’s did not.

The Shah’s policies alienated the ulama and bazaar merchants, particularly his “White Revolution”, which, partly inspired by his awe of the United States, sought to transform Iran into a modern, urban, industrial colossus and threatened their interests and values. But the Shah failed to create new allies by not wooing the working class, the middle-class professionals, or the fellahin (peasantry). He was convinced that the United States, which saw him as an indispensible anticommunist bastion and Persian Gulf gendarme, would never allow the Iranian monarchy to fall. After all, Washington had restored him to the throne by organizing a coup after nationalists and leftists had ousted him in 1953, and for decades thereafter provided Iran billions of dollars in aid and arms and helped create and train SAVAK, the notorious secret police. Confident about American power and protection, the Shah relied on repression. Not for him the lowly business of coalition building. Having failed to anchor his regime in Iranian society, he was felled by the 1979 storm. Far from saving him, unstinting American support enabled the Shah’s opponents to paint him as a deracinated Washington lackey.

Yom has written an elegantly crafted, theoretically creative book, one strengthened by his use of Arabic and Farsi sources and command of Middle Eastern history. Readers will nevertheless be left seeking greater clarity on some important questions. First, could a more mundane explanation for the contrast between the outcomes in Yom’s cases be the quality of leadership? King Hussein received substantial external support, but unlike the politically tone-deaf and arrogant Shah, he cultivated societal allies systematically. Second, why despite its massive presence in Iran, did the United States not goad the Shah toward compromise and conciliation, even as his political precariousness became undeniable? Did Washington fail to try, or did it try and fail? If the latter, why the failure given its extensive influence in Iran? Third, should policymakers eschew external intervention altogether or intervene but demand that rulers build bridges with their societies? Yom’s concluding counsel that the United States “should get out of the way and support [its authoritarian clients] less” remains elliptical (p. 218; emphasis in the original).