Any country that maintains independence and an oppositional character must maintain a strong state, develop a military, and engage in censorship. All 3 get lumped in the vague and clearly now useless category of authoritarian, meaning the US will attempt to destroy your country and people and its citizens will think this is helping "freedom" and "democracy" and "defense" and just what smart people do. Or they will play the ancillary role of demonization while maintaining an anti-war pretense that somehow always means materially supporting American war criminals.