In her new book, Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum explains how the world’s authoritarians are united by a common enemy: “us” – that is, “‘the West,’ NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them.”
The challenge the U.S. and its democratic allies face does not constitute a new Cold War, according to Applebaum, a journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author expert about the Soviet Union. She has written about its network of harsh prisons known as the gulag, its subjugation of Central and Eastern Europe, and about the Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine.
Instead, China, Russia, Iran, and a host of less powerful autocracies – from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe – function “rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their wealth and power,” she writes, and above all to “rewrite the rules of the international system” to their advantage.
Language itself is one of the primary battlefields. According to Applebaum, the autocrats hammer away at established definitions of democracy and human rights seeking to undermine and replace them with benign-sounding terms that will fundamentally change what Applebaum calls the “operating system” for democracy — the values, institutions, and treaties established in the wake of World War II.
In their place, the autocrats advance “deliberately dull and unthreatening” concepts such as “mutual respect,” “civilizational diversity,” “multipolarity,” and an expansive, self-serving concept of “sovereignty.” They use these to strike equivalence between their illegitimate regimes and democracies and rebuff criticism of their repression at home and aggression abroad.
It’s not a coincidence that these terms appeared in the belligerent and perverse joint declaration Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin issued shortly before Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In it, the two dictators stated flatly that it is the United States and its democratic allies that constitute “serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order.”
To get deep inside democracies, the authoritarians use other tactics. Russia and China have led a boom in transnational repression – actions against dissidents and critics in other countries.
Russia is expert at poisonings and assassinations, while China specializes in intimidation and threats, often coordinated by diplomats, as well as forced repatriations. Applebaum points out that in addition to achieving their goal of silencing their critics, they see the benefit of undermining confidence in democratic institutions, law enforcement, and public morale.
Less powerful authoritarians seek to emulate them. Applebaum cites Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenka’s brazen capture of a dissident by forcing down a commercial passenger plane by means of a fake bomb threat.
Applebaum is perhaps more outraged by the role democracies themselves play in tolerating, and even enabling, autocrats to launder and shelter their ill-gotten wealth and that of their cronies. “A Russian, Angolan, or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal ownership to tax authorities anywhere,” she writes. “Their work is legal. We have made it so.”
The attraction many people have to disinformation poses one of the most stubborn problems in defeating authoritarian challenge to democracy. Applebaum knows this from personal experience. In her previous book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Applebaum described the fragmentation of her circle of friends after the Law and Justice Party came to power in 2015 in Poland, where Applebaum has lived with her husband. (He is now Foreign Minister in the Civic Coalition government elected in 2023.)
As the party embraced xenophobia, paranoia, and authoritarianism, some of her friends did, too. Applebaum found herself featured on the cover of two pro-government magazines as the “clandestine Jewish coordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland.”
To counter disinformation, Washington, Applebaum argues, has relied too much on the “marketplace of ideas” to winnow out truth and facts from lies and conspiracy theories, Applebaum writes. This passive approach has proven no match for “ideas turbocharged by disinformation campaigns, by heavy spending by the social media companies whose algorithms promote emotional and divisive content, and perhaps, in some cases, by algorithm designed to promote Russian or Chinese narratives.”
By the time a lie has been fact checked and countered, “the falsehood has already traveled around the world,” she writes. Applebaum finds promising an approach known as “pre-bunking,” a strategy the State Department has used to preemptively expose Russian information campaigns and their local collaborators in Africa and Latin America. This simple approach alerts citizens in advance to disinformation campaigns that originate with authoritarian governments and their proxies, before they spread. The objective is to equip consumers with the tools to recognize and reject distortions and falsehoods and their purveyors before the damage is done.
Having sounded the alarm about the threat from authoritarians, I wondered what Applebaum hoped she might write five or 10 years from now.
“The best-case scenario is that the inherent weaknesses of autocracies catch up with them,” she told me, noting that Russia’s mafia state is fragile, and China may overextend itself as it tries to reconstitute its imperial stature with modern tactics including not only military aggression but economic and diplomatic coercion.
In the near term, she hopes that the next American president will immediately upon taking office “commit to shutting down anonymous companies and trusts and to creating an international coalition to ban or restrict offshore tax havens.”
Ideally, “the world of kleptocratic capitalism is shut down and the internet is reformed, so that the underlying financial and algorithmic structure no longer favors outrage and anger,” she says.
Applebaum’s book is a slim, readable, and bracing account of the authoritarian assault on democracy around the world. Despite the grim picture of the authoritarian tactics and gains so far, Applebaum concludes with an essentially hopeful message. Democracies “can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside, too, by division and demagogues,” she says. “Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.”
