Chapter 7 considers the international relations of Tawhid, accounting for the factors behind its recurring tensions with the Syrian regime as well as its foreign alliances with Syrian Islamists, Fatah and Iran. It points to the role of the handful of Tawhid cadres who, as a result of their strong commitment to Islamist ideology, became the principle handlers of the movement’s foreign alliances with like-minded Islamist actors such as Iran. This, it claims, at first reinforced their influence within Tawhid, which they used in order to push its discourse and behaviour in an ideological direction and to make shared ideology the cornerstone of the movement’s foreign alliances with like-minded actors. But the chapter remarks that, as their influence became too strong and their ambition to turn Tawhid into a movement only driven by ideology clashed with the priorities of other factions, a heated debate gripped the movement and violence ensued, leading to the killing of several of them. And, tellingly, the period of late 1984 and early 1985, which corresponds to the decline in the influence of these ideologized cadres, also matches with a Tawhid behavior less driven by ideology than before, as it engaged in criminal practices and as its foreign relations turned more pragmatic.

In this chapter, we show how changing budgets influence the mix of intervention strategies. A non-intuitive implication of our argument is that lack of funds may prompt a liberal intervener to switch to a less democratic intervention strategy. The logic is that money allows a liberal intervener a luxury of sorts: of being able to improve electoral conditions (and so make it harder for the favored government to win) while offsetting any disadvantages with massive aid, for their favored ticket. The case of Greece, in which the United States sponsored a change in electoral rules (in an undemocratic direction) in 1951–1952 conforms to this logic.Our discussion of coups provides scope condition for our argument, by showing how polarization and competitors influence the choice of electoral interventions over coups. We show that high polarization causes outsiders to prefer coups over elections. In that sense, we echo Dahl's central insight, about the conditions enabling democracy to exist. We also show that superpower competition heightens the risk of coups. The reason is that competing in elections becomes costly. The high prevalence of coups during the Cold War complies to this logic.