Adam Garfinkle & Daniel Pipes 
Friendly Tyrants [PDF ebook] 
An American Dilemma

What do the South Vietnamese government, the Shah and Ferdinand Marcos have in common? All were allied to the United States; all defied democratic and liberal norms; and all three fell in a blaze, creating problems for the United States. These three cases — and another eighteen more — are the subject of Friendly Tyrants, the first study ever to survey the contentious, persistent problem of U.S. government relations with pro-American authoritarian rulers.