Except people tend to solve the prisoner's dilemma problem well enough that many research experiments lead to cooperative strategies. So it's a poor model of the real world. It's a dilemma for people who believe everyone's a rational optimizer.. for lack of a better word let's call them economists. There are variations of coordination problems that are actually complex enough to go unsolved in the real world and in some cases they don't even necessarily require irrational decisions, they just require a large amount of coordination to adjust the state to something where each individual decision has justified payoff.

Except that the one forcing people will inevitably force people to act in a way that maximizes his/her personal gain.

Which is fine if that is also a way which maximizes those peoples' personal gain as well.

But is rarely or never the case. See pretty much every dictatorship in history.