Lawfare Daily: Why Autocrats Hate Cities with Ambassador Nina Hachigian

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3:06more than an aggregator. It's a combination of a rating system and a focused look at who is reporting what. Like Laugh Air, Ground news is about bringing you high-quality information that you figure out what to do with. For me, the most valuable feature is simply discovering the stories I probably would have missed because of my own media habits. So check out Ground news and subscribe to the Vantage plan for 40% off, which gives you unlimited access to a better way to read the news. Visit GroundNews.com-slashlaw. That's GroundNews.com-slashlaw. One last time, it's really worth checking out GroundNews.com-slashlaw. I think autocrats tend to not like what cities stand for, so pluralism and individual freedoms. They make it difficult for autocrats to really consolidate

4:08politically. It's the Laugh Air podcast. I'm Tyler McBride, managing editor of Laugh Air, with Ambassador Nina Hachigeon, president and CEO of the Alliance for Local Leaders International, and the first US Special Representative for City and State Diplomacy from 2022 to 2025. They are little democracies with free branches of government, with rights guaranteed, with transparency and accountability, and responsiveness, and tangible progress, tangible delivery of what people need and want. And that keeps our norms somewhat preserved. Today we're talking about the ambassador's recent piece in Foreign Affairs, entitled the Autocrats Worst Enemy. We discussed how cities are both laboratories of democracy, and backstops against democratic backsliding, as well as what US mayors can learn about resisting autocracy from their counterparts abroad. Ambassador, I wanted to start if I may with a bit about

5:12your background and the origins of your interest in this relationship between cities, democracy, international affairs, diplomacy. In other words, why did you write this? Yeah, thank you for the question. So I had a relatively traditional career in foreign policy, it was worked at thing tanks, and then it was lucky to be an ambassador under President Obama. And then I came back to the US and got an offer I couldn't refuse from Mayor Eric Arsetti of Los Angeles to be his first deputy mayor of international affairs. And in that job, I learned about just the incredible power of cities, both in improving the lives of the residents of the city, but also in how they network internationally and learn a tremendous amount from each other. So I'll give you two examples of that. So one, the mayor took a trip to Mexico City.

6:12We have a sister city relationship with Mexico City. This was before I came on board. And he met with Claudia Shimbong, now the president of Mexico. And noticed there that they had this earthquake early warning system that she told him about. So he came back to Los Angeles and said, we need to have an earthquake early warning system. And so the city worked on that and set it up. So now you have residents in Los Angeles who have a few seconds to jump under a table before the earthquake hits. And then the state since adopted it. So now we have 40 million residents of California who all can have this app on their phone that gives them a lot of time. So that's one example. Another is that he was chair of a group called C40. And that is the 100 or so biggest cities of the world, all of whom have pledged to attack climate change because of the terrible effects it was having in all their cities, floods, you know, heat. I don't have to go through an expensive energy. And so that collective has done a tremendous amount toward taking carbon out

7:19of the atmosphere. And when you think about it, cities, you know, they have public transit. That's if you electrify your public transit, you know, that's a big step. You can divert your organic waste. And that doesn't then create methane, which is worse than carbon, et cetera, et cetera. So those are two kinds of examples of how cities work internationally. So that was that. And then I got a chance to do that work in the Biden administration, but not just for Los Angeles, but for all cities in the United States. And then we did a lot of connectivity, not actually just cities with cities and states and counties and the whole lot. And in that job, we did a lot of connecting across borders for learning, for shared problem solving, et cetera. And in that job also, and we, you know, we reached, I think something like 5,000 local leaders and answered a lot of questions and helped them with their own international plans. I was expecting the biggest surprise of that job. I was expecting,

8:21you know, I'm coming from Los Angeles, big global city, but there is interest across the United States in some of the smallest towns and cities in international work. But anyway, in that role, we did some a bunch of work on democracy. And so I was aware, I became aware of how cities can preserve and exercise and innovate the systems of democracy, the kinds of things that we take for granted, like guaranteeing people's freedoms, you know, issuing permits, protest, and monitoring elections and working with civil society and being transparent and trying to be responsive to people's needs quickly and tangibly. All of that's democracy. And it happens in these many democracies all around the world. Thank you for that. That's really helpful setup. And we will definitely dig into a lot of that municipal multilateralism as you refer to it in your piece. And before we dig into the meat of your argument in your foreign affairs piece, I'm hoping

9:24you could shed a little light on what happens in these offices of international affairs. It's something that I've been curious about. I live in New York City and it's an inherently global city. And a lot of the work of city hall, regardless of the city, is inherently global in nature or or democratic in nature, of course, which we will talk about. But what's a day in the life like at an international affairs office? And what's the and what types of cities have them versus don't? I just obviously New York LA, I assume Chicago, how small of a city do you get where they don't really exist? Well, sadly, in the United States, the capacity for this international engagement is actually quite limited. So you're pointed out that Los Angeles and New York have the biggest offices. New York has a lovely new commissioner. I really like her. She's really smart. A commissioner of international affairs. And she's got a great team and similarly with LA. And then it's like, you know,

10:27Seattle has one person. Atlanta may have a few. San Antonio has one person. Like these big cities, Chicago has one person. And then most places have nobody. And they're just, you know, the chief of staff is doing it or, you know, someone else maybe occasionally you've got someone in the economic development department who is doing these issues. But so a day in the life really changes depending on what kind of city you're talking about. And let me just draw a contrast here because Tokyo has like 50 people doing international affairs. And Shanghai has a hundred. And even Buenos Aires has like 20. So we really, I mean, in general, we under-resourced cities in the United States. And when it comes to international engagement, you know, there's just no, there are very few cities that can afford to, you know, reap the benefits of someone who's doing international work. But to answer your question, it could be that we are working on a community college program to send low-income community

11:32college students overseas for free to gain that like life altering a mind-expanding experience. It could be that we are trying to attract businesses, foreign businesses to set up. It could be that we are hosting a FIFA game. The mayor of Arlington, Texas was telling me about how he set up office space for the countries so that in case their fans, you know, had visa problems or whatever medical problems that there was a place there near the stadium for the officials to be. And it could be solving this, you know, it could be during COVID, a lot of conversation with other cities around the world about what they were doing for testing, what they were doing for, you know, are they closing their schools or not, and what's calculus. So a ton of sharing of best practices. Thank you for that as well. I want to now zoom out. The global work of cities and mayors is related to the argument you lay out in your foreign affairs piece, but it's not so core to it,

12:32which is more of a democratic renewal, democratic backsliding backstop argument as you refer to it. So I wanted to just give you a chance to just lay out, you know, what you were trying to argue in your foreign affairs piece, you know, special focus on especially the American case. Yeah. Well, I'll say number one, autocrats hate cities, and the mayors who run them, they can be opposition figures like in the case of Istanbul that mayors been thrown in jail. I think autocrats tend to not like what cities stand for. So pluralism and individual freedoms, they make it difficult for autocrats to really consolidate politically. Autocrats then in turn persecute mayors. So you have, you know, mayors who are jailed or slandered, you know, in the media, you know, President Tuterte of the Philippines killed like 28 mayors.

13:37The mayor of the dance Poland was assassinated. The mayor of Karakas was jailed. But one of another reason that they do that is that mayors are preserving democracy. They are kind of reservoirs of individual freedoms. They, as I said earlier, they keep alive these norms and the systems. They, you know, protect houses of worship. They may be giving, you know, funding or space to civil society. They are responsive to the essential needs of their constituents in a, you know, an attainable way that people can really see. They may create civic spaces that give the public a platform to defy the authoritarian. They're very innovative when it comes to democracy. And all of that kind of can be an antidote to the cynicism that autocrats want residents, citizens to feel. Mayors can prevent the worst overreaches. So I can tell you the story

14:40of the Budapest Pride Parade. So the mayor of Budapest is under the, you know, 16 years of Victor Orban fighting the defunding that Orban was leveling against Budapest. They were like going, you know, on the verge of bankruptcy all the time. And so, you know, he would message to his residents using garbage cans and telling them that, you know, the reason that your garbage is being picked up isn't because of the city. It's because Victor Orban took Armani away. That kind of thing. So the central government made celebrating LGBTQ community illegal. And Budapest had been had had a Pride parade, you know, for a long time. So the mayor said, okay, we're going to make this a Budapest Pride Parade, an municipal event. And 10 times the number of people came, as had ever come before. And this was last year. So hundreds of thousands of people were crowding the streets

15:43of Budapest. And just that act, the fact that they were all defying the authoritarian, was kind of burst the aura of invincibility that Orban had. And of course, we know like, you know, our current government is using Orban's consolidation as a blueprint. And that was one of the many reasons. And there were many that Victor Orban's reign fell. Similarly in Caracas, there were huge protests against Maduro. And the prosecutor of Mayor Lopez, the mayor of Caracas, suggested that he had subliminally, you know, talked people into protesting and, you know, through them in jail. And then finally, like, mayors can act collectively as we've spoken about, but they can do so as well for democracy and rule of law in addition to, you know, other topics that we discussed. There's so many rich examples in case studies that you reference throughout the

16:48piece, including Victor Orban's Hungary and Budapest. And many of them, you know, have different makeups of government and are sort of on a, you know, a long as spectrum of autocracy. Can you drill down a bit and speak to how different forms of autocracy lend themselves to different relationships between the autocrat and the city? So from, you know, fully consolidated autocracies in so far as they exist to less so, much less so in the US, for example, how does that change the dynamic? Yeah, it changes a lot. So in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, these are fully consolidated autocracies where any city leader is going to be, you know, a member of the party. And in those cases, they, I think, tend to have relatively friend-really relationships, mean, probably not 100% of the time. But, you know, these were the oligarchs live, like this is where the fancy restaurants are, like this is, you know, they, this is where the,

17:50the economic drivers are typically. So they are assets to a regime that is fully consolidated autocracy. But what's on the rise today are these more elected autocrats. So they, they, they enter office being elected. And in those cases, because elections are still, you know, in the offing, even if they aren't fair, that then that can change because the, you know, autocrats fear a popular, you know, opposition figure, even if that person doesn't have, you know, ambitions to run for higher office. But many do. So the less consolidated, the more elections are still a possibility, the less, you know, cities are cherished by the national government. It's interesting, though, in our country, like the attacks in Minneapolis, for example, it's not like Mayor Frye's, you know, gonna run for, well, maybe he will run for president,

18:50but he's not a, you know, an obvious, you know, he's not like the Mayor of Istanbul, who, like, accepted the presidential nomination. So, you know, I think, I think that the politics are still there, but it isn't necessarily the Mayor. It might just be what cities are standing for. Floralism, individual rights, you know, yeah, I also wonder if you will run because we do have this American convention that you have to be bashful and, and, you know, say, no, thank you, I'm not gonna run. And then that's usually a signal that you will be running. I mean, in the rest of the world, like, Mayor's become president all the time, like, it's a very common place. And I actually wanted to ask about some of the counter examples there, because some of the very same autocrats that you reference in your case studies themselves began their political careers as mayors. So, what about the, what do you make of those contradictions, counter examples? Is it just that mayors of big cities have big platforms? And it's just kind of an obvious springboard? Or, yeah, I don't know what you make of the Erdogan's, the Duterte's. Putin as well.

19:54I will, I think they know how powerful mayors are, right? So, the first thing to do is just squash them, right? So, and they know that's where they came from, right? So, the, the, you know, step one is to squash any popular opposition mayor that comes after you. It seems pretty logical to me. Hey, law fair listeners, Ben Withers here. And I want to give you a piece of advice. If you are starting a national security law podcast, if you're starting a national security law publication, don't do the payroll stuff yourself. When I started law fair, I was the hiring manager, I was the payroll department, I was the benefits team. And that turned out to be a bad idea. Gusto takes a few of those things off your plate quickly and seamlessly. And boy, do I wish that existed back when I started law fair 15 years ago? Because, be honest, there's one task on your list

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27:19AWS AI is how. You mentioned this idea of cities as both generative for democracy, as these laboratories of democracy experimenting with direct democracy like participatory budgeting, and then also as bastions against threats to democracy. So these this backstop idea. Could you break down a few examples of the latter category? You mentioned the LGBTQ pride parade. This opening the discourse or bringing people back out on the streets. What other examples come to mind for that backstop idea? Yeah, sure. I'll give you a couple examples. So in Poland, there was a very draconian abortion law, even more draconian abortion law passed by the right-wing government. There was this uprising of women, what's called the women's strike. The mayor used the bus stop

28:25screens to support them. He marched with them. And again, that was one of the many protests that eventually brought down that government. He ran for president unsuccessfully, but not by much. So that's another example. In this country, I mean, you had Michelle Wu of Boston early in the Trump administration like March. Just speaking truth to power at a time when law firms were folding and businesses were folding and universities were folding. And she was taking the fight to him. That's courageous. And that kind of just even speaking out gives others sucker and is a way to be defying the authoritarian. I mean, obviously we don't know. Our fall in freedoms is faster than anyone else's. Turkey, Hungary, Russia, even. But we're a big country. And there's a lot of cities and there's a lot of states that are going to

29:28make it difficult to really consolidate. And so we'll see. I don't know what the end of our story looks like yet, but I'm hopeful. And I want to lay my cards in the table that I am hopeful as well. And I found the peace and the evidence really compelling. And I've long been interested in city and state diplomacy and subnational diplomacy. And yet I couldn't help but think of some of the limits of the analysis of the mayor and the limits to mayoral power, especially in the federal system we have, even going back to Little Rock, for example, when the mayor of Little Rock requested troops from the president. But it wasn't really statutorily required for the mayor to do so. The president could have done so anyway. And even politically, you know, when Mayor Zoran Mamdani was elected in New York, you kept hearing this refrain that, well, New York is not America. It's it's, you know, those kinds of exceptional arguments of big cities, especially in the US, vis-a-vis a rural population or the rest of the country. So what are the limitations here

30:34of, of, of mayoral power? I realize I'm putting you in a, in a, in a non-position, you know, given what you do in, in advocate, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, of course there are, right? I mean, they, they, they have a huge amount of influence in their own metropolis. They can do a lot when they're acting collectively. But, you know, they are not the 100% answer, right? I mean, we need our democracy back at a national level too in order to really, you know, be guaranteed of our freedoms. Otherwise, we can have troops sent into cities and, you know, then there's, there's not a whole lot, you know, mayors and cities are passing ordinances all the time and try to make it more difficult. But, you know, there's limits when you've got marines, you know, that, like, like Los Angeles had. But what I'm saying is that they are places to build back from. They are little democracies with three branches of government, with rights guaranteed, with transparency and accountability, and responsiveness and tangible progress, tangible delivery of what people need and want.

31:39And that keeps our norms somewhat preserved and makes it be that there are places that you can then, you know, rebuild. Rebuild is not really the right word to build because obviously our democracy wasn't working great for everybody to begin with. So we got to rethink it. But if I can get on my federalism high horse for a minute, it drives me crazy that the federal government can withhold money for basic services that cities deliver, like infrastructure, like food and housing. And the federal government has the ability to just say, nope, or not going to give you that money that you need to provide these basic services. Like that is messed up. Like, I know that our form of federalism stops at the state level, but it shouldn't. Like if the principle is, people should govern close, you know, the government should be closest to the people. That is cities

32:44and towns. That's not states. And so not to say that states aren't important. They're important. But it shouldn't be the case that cities get so constricted when what they're trying to do are the very basic, deliver the very basic things that people need for quality of life and for life in many cases, for educating your kids, for, you know, parks, like all the stuff that really makes up our quality of life. So all of which is to say that I hope that the smart folks who are, you know, rethinking what comes next are thinking about that. In those situations, I wanted to ask you about a strategy that some mayors may take that was not mentioned in your foreign affairs piece. A situation in which a mayor takes a more real politic stance and plays nice with an autocrat in the hopes that some of these funds will go unblocked or that they can just deliver services better to their constituents. You know, if a mayor is weighing that kind of calculus or strategy,

33:49what would you advise? You know, I'm thinking, you know, this isn't quite a perfect analogy, but mayor Zoran Mamdani's sort of secret, oval office visits to try to fund big housing projects. While, you know, many people back home would be angry that he was maybe giving a rubber stamp to some of the immigration enforcement policies, et cetera. So what do you make of that kind of, you know, just real politic strategy that some mayors may think about? I mean, every mayor has to make the judgment for themselves. What they're going to do, you know, you have mayors in red states that are that's a different scenario than when you've got mayors in blue states. It tends to be that red states tend to want to curb city actions more than blue states do just as a generality. I haven't proven that, but I that's that's what it seems like in at least anecdotally. But I will maybe repeat the words of the mayor of Budapest, who I extravast this question.

34:51I was like, so what do you, you know, what would you advise us mayors? And he said, he sort of said, well, I'm really happy that I hung on and I'm really happy that I never caved. And Jacob Fry would say something had said similar things like they're coming for all of us, you know, don't think you can duck. On the other hand, I would think that if again, like the mayor knows best and the city knows best what they're going to try to do, maybe it's a tactic they try, you know, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for trying that. I will say we haven't really talked about the international solidarity aspects of this, that there is this network called the Pact of Free Cities that was started by the Visigrad for Capital Cities. So Budapest, Warsaw, Bratislava, and Prague started this just with the four of them

35:53started this Pact of Solidarity, Pact of Free Cities, where they could share lessons about how they were being defunded or attacked or whatnot. They eventually invited more cities to join with them. And when I was Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles, Los Angeles joined, but it's mostly European, European, you know, London, Paris, but also like Amsterdam, but also Kiev and Zagreb and Sofia. And then this year, 10 American cities joined. My organization allies, the Alliance for Local Leaders International recruited 10 American cities across the country to join this network that promotes rule of law and individual freedoms and democracy. And we'll see, we've become the strategic partner allies has, and there is now a little bit of a leadership structure. And so we'll see, you know, what is to come with that organization, but I have a lot of, that's very exciting to me that

36:56it exists. It was a space that wasn't filled before. And so now there is a way for mayors to collaborate across borders on these, you know, fundamental freedoms. As we, you know, turn to the clothes here, I did want to dig into some of these strategies. Both learned from these international, solidaristic arrangements of the sharing of best practices between mayors who have been through this before or been through worse, but also this domestic solidarity between mayors within the United States. You dug into some of these pretty, some interesting examples to the end of your piece. But specifically, when we talk about the sharing of best practices, what are some of the most compelling practices that you've heard about or, you know, asked mayors about? Well, I think the legal strategy is important. I mean, I think that that kind of pushing back, which many cities have done, I think that's pretty critical. That's just how our system works. It's not the case in every country, but, you know, mayors and states are using it,

38:01I think, pretty effectively, getting a lot of, you know, judgments in their favor. So that's one, using humor, and I think is effective and, you know, in these times, like, it's nice to laugh. So like the mayor of Portland, you know, I think our president called called Portland like war ravaged. And so he started a social media campaign, like, hashtag war ravaged Portland with these like idyllic pictures of the city and his residents joined in. And so I think that's a pretty good one. And then making sure that your residents are with you, that they know their rights, that they understand their rights to protest, and their rights to peaceful, civil discourse, and that they are, you know, understanding, or with you on whatever level of resistance, you know, the city, you as the mayor think is

39:06appropriate. That's something that the mayor of Budapest did. He was always in touch with through pulling of his people to kind of understand like, okay, we're not going to pay this tax, because if we did, you wouldn't get your, you know, your water turned on, your water would be turned off, but is, you know, are you okay with that kind of thing? So I think that would be another, like, important, you know, strategy. And then, you know, just collectively speaking truth to power, the US conference of mayors has issued a number of statements about tariffs, but also after, you know, Minneapolis, very bipartisan group, you know, who said this, this chaos has to stop. And I think that, you know, that kind of collective, powerful messaging is important. They didn't, they had another statement around a group of mayors had another statement around this federal rule that would say that a political appointee can decide whether or not to issue federal grants to cities and states. I mean, that would be really devastating if that rule came to pass.

40:10And so cities and states are mobilized to try to defeat that. So. Yeah, you had mentioned in the piece some of these creative reforms to tax codes that allow cities and municipalities to own more of the, and to spur some more of the funds that they generate through tax levies, things like that. Yeah, I think you're referring to Poland. That happened at the national level after solidarity movement. I don't know exactly the history of how it happened, but it, it was written in national law that cities get to keep a percentage of the income tax that they generate. And so that enabled Warsaw, which is both the city and the county. So it got, you know, to keep about half of its income tax, which made it a much stronger city than Budfest, which did not have that law at the national level. So I think some kind of guarantee that cities are funded to the, you know, for the basic services that they provide, I think would be,

41:14I would recommend that to you to any national government that is, you know, so inclined. Now before we actually come to a close here, I do want to pause and open it up. Is there anything else I should have asked you or anything else you wanted to close on before we do so? Yeah, I'll say one thing, I suppose, that is worth knowing. Mayors are trusted by about 70% of the population versus the federal government, which is somewhere between 30 and 40%. And that makes them also really, you know, powerful political actors. And they, I think they get that trust because they're, you know, as the mayor of Chattanooga says, like mayors have to eat their own cookie, like they're in the neighborhoods, they live in the city, you can bump into them at the grocery store. And they're responsive. The time from, you know, request to response is much shorter than it would be, you know, at the national level or the state level. So yeah,

42:16I think that's another reason why they are, you know, an important part of democracy. Well, I don't have super granular audience data, but I think it's safe to assume that many, if not most of our listeners, are urban dwelling people. So on behalf of the many, 80% of Americans. There you go. And, you know, a lot of our global listeners too, I imagine, are our city dwellers. So this will be a very relevant conversation to most people who are listening. So I really want to thank you for joining me today, Ambassador. My pleasure. And if you are, you know, depressed about the state of democracy, go help your mayor. The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad free, you can become a Lawfare Material supporter at lawfaremedia.org slash support. Supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help.

43:17And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, The Aftermath, and Escalation. Our latest Lawfare presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Gen Patea, with audio engineering by NoMozband of GoBroadio. Our theme music is from Alibi Music. As always, thanks for listening. Ground news. In addition to being the sponsor of this episode of the Lawfare Podcast, is an app that lets you jump out of your media bubbles and see the blind spots that exist in whatever media ecosystem you operate. Ground news doesn't just show you what the news is. It shows you who's reporting the news, how many news sources are covering it, and how coverage is distributed across the political spectrum. For example, Ground news shows that there are 50 different sources reporting that Oman warned

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