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)

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.

In a slender new book titled Autocracy, Inc., American historian Anne Applebaum helps us to understand why a post-historical paradise has not materialised, and why hungry revisionist forces now threaten to overthrow what remains of the liberal order. Tyranny, she argues, is not what it used to be. The familiar model of despotism is the one-man or one-party state whose modus operandi is repression at home and aggression abroad. And as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag, Applebaum knows something about this kind of dictatorship. But autocracy in the modern bureaucratic state is an altogether different beast.

In lucid prose, Autocracy, Inc. explores this more sophisticated form of lawless government. Instead of villains in fatigues preaching obscurantist doctrines and presiding over rigid personality cults, Applebaum describes the more complex and furtive means with which today’s autocracies impose and sustain their power: kleptocratic financial structures and more sophisticated systems of high-tech surveillance and propaganda. These networks are no longer circumscribed by national borders, they are transcontinental operations run by ruthless but dynamic mafia states.

At present, a loose and informal alliance of undemocratic regimes is cooperating in various ways to shore up its members’ power and spread their influence. Last summer’s sham election in Venezuela provides a chilling example. After the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro rigged the vote in its favour, it enforced the theft with arbitrary violence against citizens who had the temerity to object. In addition to local security services rounding up and jailing thousands of people suspected of dissent, Russian mercenaries were spotted in Caracas helping to quell the protests. In their campaign for political reform, democracy activists confronted foreign tyrants as well as their own, and it is this multinationalism that Applebaum calls “Autocracy, Inc.” 

Autocratic solidarity does not just involve dispatching armed security forces to help steal elections. Maduro’s regime is the recipient of immense largesse from countries like Russia and Iran, both of which invest in the country’s oil industry. Chinese-designed surveillance technology is used to monitor the Venezuelan public and Cuba provides valuable security and intelligence assistance. Turkey helps to facilitate Venezuela’s illicit gold trade. Drug trafficking, illegal mining, and kidnapping are important sources of revenue for sanctioned states, but they also enjoy the patronage of an international consortium of dictators who share an interest in anti-Americanism and opposition to democracy. 

Presiding over beggared economies and collapsing societies, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc. display boundless personal corruption while expressing unbridled hostility to the liberal principles that threaten their misbegotten political systems. This “marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship,” writes Applebaum, has reached its apotheosis in the Kremlin. The war in Ukraine cannot be understood without appreciating this hybrid regime since democracy and transparency tend to go together. Notwithstanding the phantom “threat” posed by NATO, Vladimir Putin has long been unnerved by the stirrings of free institutions and political liberty on the streets of Kyiv—an example he fears might be emulated by the Russian people in their turn. 

The full-scale war that Putin initiated in February 2022—Applebaum calls it the first kinetic battle in the modern struggle between democracy and autocracy—has exposed Russia’s “special role” in the autocratic network. Putin believes that military force is an essential part of the effort to destroy the European order created after 1989, and to subvert the influence and reputation of the United States into the bargain. As Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has candidly admitted, the war in Ukraine is “not about Ukraine at all, but the world order.” No doubt the People’s Republic of China feels much the same about its plans for “reunification” with Taiwan. Each autocracy fears and despises the spectacle of democracy on its doorstep, and what that democracy represents about the staying power of the Pax Americana. This is what animates autocratic belligerence today more than a lust for land or resources, and it is why Trump’s declared plan to broker lasting peace agreements with these powers is misconceived.

The war in Ukraine demonstrates the internationalist nature of the campaign against liberal democracy. Before Russian armoured columns descended on Kyiv, Xi Jinping signalled his support for that “special military operation” by issuing a joint statement with the Russian president immediately before the invasion. A consumer of Russian oil and gas, China returned the favour for these cheap commodities by selling defence technology to Moscow. The Islamic Republic of Iran has also come to Russia’s aid, exporting thousands of lethal drones that have been used to devastating effect on Ukraine’s battlefields. North Korea also sent ammunition, missiles, and most recently, troops. Even Russia’s client states in Africa—including Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mali, and the Central African Republic—have provided Russia with diplomatic cover.

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What distinguishes Russia’s role in this arrangement is not merely its deployment of brute force to crush democratic governments in its near abroad (Moldova, Georgia, and Romania). It has also orchestrated active measures to penetrate and undermine democratic governments far from its borders. Not content with preaching the degeneracy of democracy and tarnishing the image of American society in its own state-run media, the Kremlin runs covert influence operations aimed at sowing confusion and cynicism in Western Europe and America about the integrity of our political systems. The innumerable fantasies spun by Moscow—inter alia, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in a US laboratory, that America supports jihadists in Syria, and that Ukraine is ruled by Nazis—have been as fluent and lethal as they are preposterous.

Borrowing from the analyst Christopher Walker, who coined the term “sharp power,” Applebaum traces these malign efforts and shows how they have been amplified, wittingly or not, by a bevy of credulous “anti-establishment” voices in the West. This phenomenon has scarcely been confined to unscrupulous gadflies—in 2016, the Trump campaign openly sought and invited Russian interference in the presidential election to help influence the outcome. In this frenetic environment, a united front among patriotic Americans to resist the intrusion of foreign propaganda has never been more necessary. The CCP has established a vice-like grip on Chinese tech firms that must bow and scrape to its intelligence services. Although Applebaum barely mentions the social media platform TikTok, as FBI director Christopher Wray has testified, the CCP could coerce the platform to feed it Americans’ data for information operations, gain access to software on millions of devices, and divide the public through the app’s powerful algorithm. This insidious organ of Chinese power ought to be banned without delay.

Applebaum insists that the open competition and submerged confrontation between democracies and autocracies is not a reprise of the Cold War. In this new contest, there are no “blocs” to join since many regimes do not fit neatly into either category. The dividing line in this battle is not only between countries but within them, and “significant autocratic political movements and politicians” are now ascendant from Washington to Warsaw. Nevertheless, strategic cleavages remain. After Russia’s thrust for Kyiv in 2022, for instance, the West arranged a sanctions regime that conspicuously lacked the support of most nations beyond America and Europe. As a result, Russia has weathered the economic warfare without serious difficulty, forging a more coherent Sino-Russian bloc.

Autocracy, Inc. brims with sensible ideas to reinforce a brittle liberal order. To push back against transnational kleptocracy, Applebaum proposes that all real-estate transactions in the West—the secrecy of which is presently exploited by foreign princes and oligarchs—should be opened to public scrutiny. Money laundering by authoritarian rulers who sustain lives of fantastic opulence should be investigated and publicised. Western nations should begin “de-risking” their economies to ensure that they are not dependent on foreign autocracies for anything that could be weaponised in the event of a crisis. No less important, the autocratic infiltration of the “marketplace of ideas,” especially on social media, needs to be vigorously countered.

But will that program, however necessary and overdue, be sufficient to roll back the surging tide of autocracy? I wouldn’t bet on it. Autocracy, Inc. was published before the presidential election that ushered Donald Trump back into the White House, and that event suggests a deeper crisis besetting liberal democracy than anything that can be resolved by simply curtailing hostile foreign influence. A large share of the problem is at home. It’s certainly true that a broad swathe of voters recoiled from Trump because they perceived his menace to liberal norms and the constitutional republic. But an even greater number of voters broke ranks with the Democrats for similar reasons. It requires no sympathy for the populist turn in the GOP to notice that the MAGA movement is not the only “postliberal” politics on offer in America today. From woke progressivism to managerial technocracy, censorious and coercive forces have congregated on the political Left and wrested control from traditional democratic power centres in our national life.

The problem of autocracy has become entrenched and must be uprooted, but it is hard to imagine that happening against the backdrop of a fragmented West. A polarised America no longer retains a shared democratic culture and its allies in Europe and Asia are gripped by unrelenting demographic pressures and growing economic distress. The decline of the old liberal order has bred a potent new blend of radical politics across the West, and this shift will naturally bring about sustained conflict with anti-liberal powers.

In an era of populist revolt and authoritarian aggression, liberal Americans may long for a respite from history and a restoration of normality. But for the time being, they are likely to be disappointed. History has begun again, and whatever comes next will be influenced by the dictators’ club that was once thought to be living on borrowed time. In preventing the triumph of tyranny, friends of liberty have their work cut out for them. They will find in Autocracy, Inc. a distinctive and indispensable guide to one of the great challenges of our time.