Both Menon’s and my books deliver important shared insights. First, the international system remains heavily tilted towards great powers. Only they can afford to ponder big questions of intervention—of economic bailouts, humanitarian missions, and military landings—since they alone possess the unilateral resources necessary to transform the internal politics of other states. Second, relatedly, we still have not fully mapped out the long-term domestic consequences of foreign intrusions. There is a vast literature on the institutional legacies of colonialism for democracy and development. Yet inversely, there exist far fewer studies on how post-colonial foreign interventions catalyzed different economic and political outcomes decades after the fact. It would be wise to fill this gap, not least because the strong continue to meddle within the weak—think NATO in Libya, Russia in Ukraine, Saudi Arabia in Yemen, or China in North Korea.

Menon pointedly addresses my work in the Middle East, which construed another way discusses how geopolitics distorted state-building and authoritarian consolidation after the dusk of colonialism. He asks whether leadership personality, not foreign patronage, better explains why different autocracies mobilized such different coalitions and embraced divergent policies after founding crises. Thus perhaps Jordanian autocracy has soldiered onwards because its cunning kings grasped the importance of maintaining some popular loyalties, whereas Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty was doomed to failure once the “tone-deaf and arrogant” Shah took the throne.

Ascribing regime behavior to inherent leadership qualities is tempting but dangerous, and not just because such functionalism is unfalsifiable. My work was partly driven by a desire to shatter the essentializing narratives of nationalists who see every dramatic outcome in their country, from revolution to democracy, as the inevitable expression of ingrained forces (typically, destiny or genetics). Yet not only does this deny human agency, it also isolates regimes from their real domestic and geopolitical contexts. Herein lays the impact of foreign patronage. In Kuwait, Jordan, and Iran, my analytic process-tracing shows how the presence or absence of external support at critical moments visibly changed the behavior of rulers by opening or closing repressive options in dealing with mass opposition. Regime strategies, as I see them, are logical reactions to structural constraints, not the opaque work of historical gods.

Menon also wonders, at the practical level, what choice my work gives policymakers—to “eschew eternal intervention altogether or intervene but demand that rulers build bridges with their societies.” My answer is sobering: great powers like the United States and Russia should do the former because their strategic pathologies foreclose the latter. When, for instance, has the United States ever cancelled an economic rescue of a client regime due to human rights concerns? When has Russia diplomatically protected a subordinate state while also demanding that it liberalize? Theoretically, a great power could support a client state and promote democratization, but too often strategic interests—security, energy, prestige—convince policymakers that they are better off trusting the autocrats they know than the democrats they don’t. And so dictatorships persist, the worst of them fumbling towards revolutions that further impoverish their societies.