How to Become a Dictator

“If you decide you want to leave journalism,” Nadim Shehadi said to me over coffee at a café on Beirut’s old waterfront, “if you feel like you've been there and done that and would like to become a dictator, you should hire me as an advisor. I'm expensive, but I'm worth it.”

Shehadi, a Lebanese-born scholar at Chatham House in the UK, has dedicated enough of his life to Middle Eastern dictatorology that he probably would make a solid advisor. He’d never actually do it, but one can be a decent...