So one of the things we could do is we could actually follow through, right? So we say that there are going to be consequences. There are going to be financial penalties. And so we could actually withhold military assistance, diplomatic recognition, and certain forms of economic assistance, economic assistance, which is not going to benefit the poor, economic interest where really the elites are going to benefit a good deal from what we're doing. And you can make it very clear that there will be an automatic cessation of these things, and both sides will get hurt. But that this is the reason why militaries don't want to engage in a coup. And if they do, that they have to move very rapidly. towards a restoration of some form of legitimate democracy. So that would be one way to push. Another way would be to reinforce the norm of democracy, not just against coups, but against a wide variety of anti-democratic actions. So for example, Gabon is a country where the president was elected in somewhat suspicious circumstances. And at the same time, the Gabonese president is someone who studied in France and he's a darling of the West. And it could have been made clear that it was very important for Gabon to move in a more profoundly democratic way over time. And we don't do that. We have become concerned with issues other than democracy. And so there's a good deal of lip service paid to democratic norms. But at the same time, we say, well, democracy is fine and good, but we also care perhaps even more for security. We care even more for certain kinds of economic relationships. But here's the problem. We say we're concerned with security, but guess what happens when a junta takes power in these countries? Security goes down a good deal. Some of these countries might welcome in the Wagner group, and that itself causes insecurity. And so our concern for security over democracy ends up undermining security in these countries. And so there are reasons to understand why democracy is a good which will have a broader impact. Here's another one. When Biden invited African leaders to the United States for a high-level summit, he tried to restrict the set of leaders he invited to democratic leaders. But he made one exception, which is the present of Equatorial Guinea. Why? Because the military is concerned that Equatorial Guinea might offer the Chinese a naval base. And so we said, okay, democracy matters, but there are other things which matter a lot more. This is the constant story of Pakistan and Egypt. But by working with juntas, by either looking the other way or supporting them thoroughly, we have damaged security in these countries considerably. And so what we end up doing is we put our short-term convenience, we want to maintain our relationships with these countries against what we think of as a long-term consideration. Oh, someone else can deal with democracy. But in the end, there's short-term harms as well. And this is a problem.

You started to get at a lot of, I think, the answer to my next question, which I was going to put purposefully flippantly, which is if a coup occurs in a highly autocratic country, should we care, essentially? But I think put another way, are there any situations in which counterintuitively a coup can actually shore up democratic norms? Or, you know, if a coup were to occur in an autocratic country and then perhaps the military can usher in elections and then actually solidify democracy, has that ever happened? Could it happen? Are there any cases in which, as I asked, counterintuitively, coups actually are a good thing for democracy?

I want to go back to dispelling maybe some of the media myths in addition to the myth of the coup contagion. And one of them is perhaps not a myth at all, but I'm just curious whether there has been an uptick in coups, empirically speaking, in the past couple of years. Our past few years, you've mentioned in an article that in September 2021, Secretary General of the UN Antonio Guterres stated that, quote, military coups are back. So simply put, are military coups back?

I would argue they never left. And so there's definitely an uptick, right? We are seeing more coups. And I think part of what might be responsible for this is, like I said, an increased permissive atmosphere. The fact is that junta leaders know that they've got a lot more options than they used to. But beyond that, I see no reason to believe that coups are going to be back the way they were in the 1970s, which was the heyday of coups. I think that instead what we see is that coups are going to continue in the parts of the world where there had been a lot of coups, where they've been poor, and where democracy has not fully taken hold. And so we will see that in African countries that are coup-prone. We might see it in some Middle Eastern countries. We might see it in other Asian countries. It's how we got a coup in Burma.

And in keeping with this line of questioning about dispelling, perhaps dispelling media myths or not, there's been a lot of coverage about the coup leaders themselves receiving training from Western militaries, namely the United States and France. To what extent do you feel that this is a factor that perhaps military training from the United States could at least give a military leader the tools to carry out a coup or somehow influence a would-be coup plotter? Does this kind of thinking hold water with you?