We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't …
We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.
Russia, China, Iran, a list of African and South American countries…..BAD USA, Western Europe….GOOD.
Little to no mention of the US and its foreign policy interventions over the decades. Oh….and between 2022 to 2024, there was only one war. Ukraine. Apparently nothing else happening. And the Middle East was all peace, love and mung beans.
Mercifully short and deeply flawed.
Summary of the book….
Russia, China, Iran, a list of African and South American countries…..BAD
USA, Western Europe….GOOD.
Little to no mention of the US and its foreign policy interventions over the decades. Oh….and between 2022 to 2024, there was only one war. Ukraine. Apparently nothing else happening. And the Middle East was all peace, love and mung beans.
Well it's a day that ends in 'Y', which means it's a beautiful day to despise the Russian government with every fiber of my being!
This is a powerful argument for asking Western governments to stop treating powerful heads of state as one-off, case-by-case studies; the Francos and Mugabes of the 20th century no longer provide the model of authoritarianism. Seemingly diverse countries with little in common beyond a desire to stay in power in the face of Western pressure (Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe to name a few) are all interconnected now in an effort to provide an air of legitimacy to each other. The overwhelming message they convey to their populaces is, "yes we're bad, but it could be worse, so don't fight to change things."
Rather than acting as a bridge to bring these oppressive regimes into the Western fold, post-Cold War economic overtures have instead acted …
Well it's a day that ends in 'Y', which means it's a beautiful day to despise the Russian government with every fiber of my being!
This is a powerful argument for asking Western governments to stop treating powerful heads of state as one-off, case-by-case studies; the Francos and Mugabes of the 20th century no longer provide the model of authoritarianism. Seemingly diverse countries with little in common beyond a desire to stay in power in the face of Western pressure (Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe to name a few) are all interconnected now in an effort to provide an air of legitimacy to each other. The overwhelming message they convey to their populaces is, "yes we're bad, but it could be worse, so don't fight to change things."
Rather than acting as a bridge to bring these oppressive regimes into the Western fold, post-Cold War economic overtures have instead acted as a rope that can be pulled against democracies for leverage (Germany being so dependent upon Russian gas pipelines and high-tech industries relying on Chinese rare earth suppliers come to mind). And on a smaller scale, cities like Vancouver and London allow powerful foreign nationals from hostile countries to park wealth in the form of real estate without repercussion, and at detriment to their own citizens.
I appreciate that the book tries to end on a more positive note, laying out a potential blueprint for how liberal democracies can combat deliberate misinformation, cyberwarfare aimed at infrastructure that we're pretending isn't already happening, and cultural defeatism in general, but it felt a touch too ambitious to me. Or maybe I'm already bought in to the idea that our enemies have too much of a head-start in the information age.
Anne Applebaum lays out a lot of alarm bells that went ignored and now the US, of course, is about to join Autocracy Inc, with as much corruption, bigotry, and bad governance as Trump and his avatars can muster.
