Tyranny Is Not What It Used to Be

A review of Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum; 224 pages; Doubleday (July 2024)

A full audio version of this article can be found below the paywall.

For a fleeting moment, after the defeat of communist tyranny in the Cold War, liberal democracy looked like it was destined to spread across the Earth. The fall of the Berlin Wall was greeted in the West as the final and irreversible repudiation of tyranny and a victory for representative government and market capitalism. Although a few totalitarian states survived at the remote edges of the modern world, their days were surely numbered. The dreams of the immediate post-Cold War era foretold a new global convergence, an era transformed by commerce and technology in which oppression and conflict would become relics of a tribal past. The march of knowledge and material progress would bring the lasting improvement of human behaviour and a rules-based international order spawned by America’s unipolar dominance would endure in the absence of viable alternatives.

The world looks rather different today. Smart observers of foreign affairs routinely quip that the “rules-based international order” is neither international nor orderly and certainly not characterised by fidelity to any discernible set of rules. The world’s dictatorships remain strong and influential, and freedom is suffering a prolonged recession around the globe. Even the recent collapse of the Assad regime in Syria is fraught with danger, not least because it was the product of regional geopolitical dynamics. With Assad’s patrons in Russia and Iran weakened and distracted by their conflicts with Ukraine and Israel, respectively, Turkey filled the vacuum by arming the Islamist rebels who overthrew the Ba’athist regime in Damascus. This anti-democratic contagion will continue to metastasise unless it is stopped by a combination of political, military, economic, and ideological measures from what was once called the free world.