Why the global league of autocrats thrives

AUTOCRACY, INC.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

Author: Anne Applebaum

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 209

Price:  $27

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 LGBTQ 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.
 

In the past decade or so, Applebaum has followed a not-unfamiliar trajectory from neoconservative Atlanticist to anti-populist Jeremiah.  To her credit, Applebaum’s new book risks a more sophisticated, and less flattering, answer: Globalisation did work, only not how she 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. Nobody imagined that autocratic and illiberal ideas “would spread to the democratic world instead,” Applebaum writes.
 

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 clear-eyed 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 anti-capitalist, 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.
 

Her foreign policy, however, suffers from a certain fuzzy patriotism. Modern autocrats and illiberal wannabes, “however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy,” Applebaum writes. “That enemy is us. To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, ‘the West,’ NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them.”
 

Many readers, I imagine, will have no objection to this framing, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which hardened trade and security ties in Russia’s sphere (and between Russia and China), while reviving the vigour and moral confidence of NATO. The trouble is, NATO’s allies don’t always behave so righteously either. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, gets much less treatment in this volume than illiberal but functioning democracies more closely aligned 

with Russia.
 

Applebaum places much of her hope for combating the autocratic world order in a stronger and more enforceable sanctions regime. She repeatedly condemns Venezuela and Iran for helping each other practice “the dark art of sanctions evasion.” Nowhere does she second-guess whether sanctions are an effective (much less humane) mechanism for spreading liberal democracy. That the blood sport of global economic coercion produces strange bedfellows might be intrinsic to their operation.

In her zeal to connect the enemies of the free world, Applebaum also sometimes comes to fantastical conclusions. Autocracies, she writes, “keep track of one another’s defeats and victories, timing their own moves to create maximum chaos.” Thus, it was no coincidence, she suggests, that while Ukraine aid was being held up in the United States by MAGA Republicans and in the European Union by Viktor Orban, “hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens, impoverished by Maduro’s policies, were trudging through Central America toward the US border. Their unprecedented numbers were helping to fuel a populist, xenophobic backlash in the United States and boost support for the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which was openly backing Putin in his war to destroy Ukraine.”
 

What can the implication of this passage possibly be? That the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had deliberately starved his citizens and forced them out of the country to help the GOP? But that notion seems absurd on its face, not least because Republicans, including the strongman-admiring Donald Trump, are some of the fiercest critics of Maduro’s socialist government.
 

I abhor many aspects of the regimes Applebaum singles out for ridicule. My position on liberal internationalism has always been like Gandhi’s (perhaps apocryphal) attitude toward “Western Civilization” — it would be a good idea. But Applebaum’s just-so stories make it harder for her readers to see the world clearly, to understand why  some countries align with America’s enemies and some don’t.
 

One of the great failures of neoliberalism was to assume that all good things would go together: The West would get new markets and the East would get democracy — no trade-offs. Applebaum’s new paradigm isn’t quite so starry-eyed. But the notion of Autocracy, Inc. does offer some consolations for those mourning America’s decline: What we have lost in economic hegemony, we can make up for in moral self-certainty.
 

We’re the leaders of the free world again; it’s just a smaller world than it used to be.

The reviewer is co-host of the podcast  Know Your Enemy©2024 The New York Times News Service