Definition of "tin-pot" [tin-pot]

• Insignificant or unimportant; minor. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The region's history has been so fraught and often incomprehensibly savage that simply reporting the plain facts—the slave trade and sugar plantations, the depredations of tin-pot dictators, the numerous noxious creatures—requires considerable dialing back simply to make it believable."
• "He described them as filled with, third-world variety Runyonesque people, tin-pot dictators."
• "The GOP can then share responsibility with Mr. Obama for losing in Libya and emboldening a tin-pot dictator."