Book comments: Autocracy Inc.

One thing that seemed to be real and serious was a personal perception that the world’s authoritarians are banding together to mount a global war against democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and transparency in government. Apparently, at least a few others see basically the same thing. 

The Hill published commentary on a new book by historian Anne Applebaum (staff writer at The Atlantic), Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World: 

Last month, North Korea and Russia signed a pact covering trade, investment and cultural ties, and pledging aid if either nation faces “aggression.” In exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that bolster its nuclear weapons program, North Korea is continuing to provide Russia with ammunition for its war against Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin praised Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un for supporting “the fight against the imperialistic policies of the United States and its allies.”

This month, soon after he assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — a self-proclaimed champion of “illiberal democracy” who has cracked down on freedom of the press and an independent judiciary — left EU leaders fuming by urging President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and then lavishing praise on Putin and Xi Jinping in Moscow and Beijing. A few days later, Orbán met with Donald Trump, whose reelection he has endorsed. “We discussed ways to make peace,” Orbán said. “The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it.”

These incidents indicate that aspiring autocrats and dictators share the same goals: enrich themselves, remain in power, deprive their own citizens of influence, discredit and destroy democracy and create a new world order. And that they are collaborating to achieve these goals.

Shared grievances and anti-democratic goals motivate autocrats to help one another. Iran traded food and gasoline for Venezuelan gold and sent equipment and personnel to repair oil refineries. In 2016, Xi Jinping endorsed Iran’s role in helping Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who authorized chemical weapons attacks on his own people, retain power. Iran increased China’s access to its oil, infrastructure, telecommunications and banking markets.

Enemies of democracy have vastly improved their capacity to censor online content. China outlaws posts that “endanger national security, subvert the government, or undermine national unification.” Afraid of losing business in the world’s second most populous nation, American tech companies altered software to protect the “Great Firewall’s protocols.” Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Serbia, South Africa, Turkey, Singapore and Zimbabwe have acquired China’s “safe city technology.”

Autocrats have also ramped up the internal and external dissemination of fake news about democracies.

Along with increasing military and financial assistance to Ukraine, Applebaum believes that to regain the initiative a multinational movement must make money laundering and real estate transactions transparent; require internet posts to be more evidence-based and less anonymous, while holding social media companies more accountable for content; and reduce democratic countries’ reliance on minerals, semiconductors and energy supplies sold by Russia, China and other autocracies.

These reforms won’t occur, Applebaum emphasizes, until citizens of democracies “think of themselves as linked to one another and to the people who share their values inside autocracies, too. They need one another, now more than ever, because their democracies are not safe. Nobody’s democracy is safe.”

At a time of increasing isolationist and nationalist sentiments in Western democracies, implementing this agenda won’t be easy.

The NYT comments on Applebaum’s book (not paywalled):

Something new is happening in the world of oppression. Or so says the historian Anne Applebaum.

Whereas the twilight struggle of the 20th century was waged between formal “blocs” of ideologically aligned allies, today’s autocrats are more diverse — a mix of self-described Marxists, illiberal demagogues, kleptocratic mafiosi, old-school tyrants and new-school theocrats.

Of course, they do share ideas if not ideologies, among them that liberal internationalism is an alibi for imperialism, the means by which Washington and Brussels impose their interests and decadent cultural mores (especially L.G.B.T.Q. tolerance) on the rest of the world. But today’s autocrats principally cement their bonds, Applebaum argues, “not through ideals but through deals.” Thanks in large part to the opacity of global finance, they enjoy a vibrant trade in surveillance technologies, weapons and precious minerals, laundering one another’s dirty money and colluding to evade American sanctions. This venal compact of convenience she calls “Autocracy, Inc.” 

To her credit, Applebaum’s new book risks a more sophisticated, and less flattering, answer: Globalization did work, only not how she and her friends assumed it would. Autocracies became more integrated with one another, while American and European trade dependence on the autocratic world — on Chinese manufacturing and Russian oil, for instance — became a weapon to be used against the West. “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states,” Applebaum writes. Nobody imagined that autocratic and illiberal ideas “would spread to the democratic world instead.”

And not only ideas. Before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, cash robbed from the coffers of the Communist East flowed into bank accounts in London and the Caribbean. More recently, shell companies in Delaware have purchased apartments in New York on behalf of oligarchs in Russia and China, while European and American accountants, real estate agents and lawyers have enjoyed hefty fees for secreting the ill-gotten wealth of the world’s kleptocrats. In short, the world system accommodated the needs of autocracy; the autocrats were not required to change. 

Applebaum is cleareyed about the difficulties of rectifying this situation: “Powerful people benefit from the existing system, want to keep it in place and have deep connections across the political spectrum.” She’s no anticapitalist, but her recommendations for reforms to the financial system — requiring companies to be registered in the name of their actual owners, for example — are concrete and admirable. (emphasis added)

The NYT article goes on to criticize some of Applebaum’s reasoning and conclusions, but I found her reasoning more persuasive and evidence-based than the NYT critic’s subjective evaluations. In essence, she sees even more than what I could see.