Amid this political and moral complexity that spans disparate regions of the Earth, some patterns do emerge. On the whole, Asian dictators have performed better than Middle Eastern ones. Deng of China, Lee of Singapore, Park of South Korea, Mahathir bin Mohammad of Malaysia, Chiang Kai-Shek of Taiwan were all authoritarians to one degree or another. But their autocracies led to economic and technological development, to better governance, and to an improved quality of life. Most important, their rules, however imperfect, have overall better positioned their societies for democratic reforms later on. All of these men, including the Muslim Mahathir, were influenced, however indirectly and vaguely, by a body of values known as Confucianism: respect for hierarchy, elders, and, in general, ethical living in the here-and-now of this world.
Contrast that with Arab dictators such as Ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarak of Egypt, Saddam of Iraq, and the al Assads of Syria. Ben Ali and Mubarak, it is true, were far less repressive than Saddam and the elder Assad. Moreover, Ben Ali and Mubarak did encourage some development of a middle class in their countries. But they were not ethical reformers by any means. Of course, Saddam and al Assad were altogether brutal. They ran states so suffocating in their levels of repression that they replicated prison yards. Rather than Confucianism, Saddam and al Assad were motivated by Baathism, a half-baked Arab socialism so viciously opposed to Western colonialism that it created a far worse tyranny of its own.
Beyond the Middle East and Asia there is the case of Russia. In the 1990s, Russia was ruled by Boris Yeltsin, a man lauded in the West for being a democrat. But his undisciplined rule led to sheer economic and social chaos. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is much closer to an authoritarian -- and is increasingly so -- and is consequently despised in the West. But, helped by energy prices, he has restored Russia to some measure of stability, and thus dramatically improved the quality of life of average Russians. And he has done this without resorting to the level of authoritarianism -- with the mass disappearances and constellation of Siberian labor camps -- of the czars and commissars of old.
Finally, there is the most morally vexing case of all: that of the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pinochet created more than a million new jobs, reduced the poverty rate from a third of the population to as low as a tenth, and the infant mortality rate from 78 per 1,000 to 18. Pinochet's Chile was one of the few non-Asian countries in the world to experience double-digit Asian levels of economic growth at the time. Pinochet prepared his country well for eventual democracy, even as his economic policy became a model for the developing and post-Communist worlds. But Pinochet is also rightly the object of intense hatred among liberals and humanitarians the world over for perpetrating years of systematic torture against tens of thousands of victims. So where does he fall on the spectrum from black to white?
Not only is the world of international affairs one of many indeterminate shades, but it is also one in which, sometimes, it is impossible to know just where to locate someone on that spectrum. The question of whether ends justify means should not only be answered by metaphysical doctrine, but also by empirical observation -- sometimes ends do justify means, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the means are unconnected to the ends, and are therefore to be condemned, as is the case with Chile. Such is the intricacy of the political and moral universe. Complexity and fine distinctions are things to be embraced; otherwise geopolitics, political science, and related disciplines distort rather than illuminate.
