Thanks for reading! The best way to make sure that you don’t miss any of these conversations is to subscribe to The Good Fight on your favorite podcast app.
If you are already a paying subscriber to this Substack or Persuasion, this will give you ad-free access to the full conversation with Anne Applebaum, plus the exciting bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Senior Fellow of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Anne Applebaum discuss how dictators use the system of international finance to maintain power and thwart regime change; how democracies can reform themselves internally to better resist authoritarian infiltration; and why autocratic regimes tend to be hard yet brittle.
The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You have a new book called Autocracy, Inc.; we've been collectively writing about the threat of populism and dictatorship for the last 10 years. We taught a course on democracy together. Why is it that after decades in which democracy was on the march around the world, for the last 15 or 20 years or so, democracy has gone into recession, and dictators really feel like they've, for lack of a better word, come into their own?
Anne Applebaum: So there are a lot of ways to answer that question—some of them have to do with the internal politics of democracies. But my new book is mostly about the ways in which the former Soviet world, primarily (as well as China, Iran, Venezuela, Zimbabwe), after the transformation of 1989, spent a decade or so opening themselves up, and then slowly closed themselves back down again, and partly using our money and our financial systems, reinforced and rebuilt their dictatorships. It was a process. It didn’t happen all at once.
There's a particular moment in 2013-2014, when you can see both Russia and China say, “If we're going to stay in power, then we need to compete with our own democracy activists and our own dissidents who are talking about the rule of law, transparency, fighting corruption, rights, human rights, and we need to squelch those ideas inside our own countries and around the world.” And that's the moment when you begin to see the autocratic world kind of pull itself together and reassert its ideas and kind of join in a competition with democracy, which I have to say most democrats in most parts of what you broadly call the “democratic world” didn't notice. There's a simpler version of that, as well: Fareed Zakaria invented the expression the “rise of the rest.” The world that we had in the 1990s when the US was somehow the dominant power, both economically and militarily, simply gave way as other countries enriched themselves and became competitive.
Mounk: Samuel Huntington has this old idea of democratic waves and then reverse waves, right? There's been these historical moments when a lot of countries democratized, some of them sort of managed to actually consolidate as democracies, some of them end up falling by the wayside, and there were these moments of democratic recession. Clearly there was a big democratic wave that Huntington dates to the late ‘70s, with Spain and Portugal and then all of the Central and Eastern European countries becoming democratic over the course of the 1980s, as well as a lot of places in Latin America and elsewhere. I guess at that time, if you were a dictator, you sort of felt like you were just holding on for dear life. You're seeing all of your colleagues, many of your allies, being toppled. But then the democratic wave seems to have washed ashore, when these dictators said, “Hey, we've kind of survived this moment. It's been 10 or 15 years in which a lot of our colleagues went, and we are still here.” And then it seems like they went on the offensive.
What is it that allowed those dictators to survive that democratic wave in the first place?
Applebaum: I think that what happened initially, and you can see this from the ‘90s and the 2000s—again, I'm just talking mostly about Russia and China—is that they democratized. They opened up. China began trading with the outside world. Internally, it allowed capitalism to begin—let people get wealthy, let people invent things, let them build companies. There were genuine efforts to democratize Russia, to change the way the political system worked, to have some version of free elections. In the early ‘90s, there was quite a strong free press in Russia. There was competitive television and interesting newspapers. So I think they did open. And if you had asked Russians then, including some people who were close to Vladimir Putin, what was happening, they would have said we are catching up with the democratic world economically, and we're also catching up politically. We are becoming more sophisticated. And you would have found people who also believed in this theory that globalization will bring democracy and who were hoping that that was what was going to happen. You find the same kinds of people in China, and I met some. So I think there was an opening. It wasn't fictitious. It's just that what happened was, as the leaders of those societies looked around at what was happening, they realized that if they allowed this opening to continue, they were not going togonna be able to keep their power, especially not in the untrammeled, unchecked form that they wanted to have it in. And of course, they were also not going to be able to keep their money.
The change of government in Ukraine, which ended a kleptocratic, very illiberal, declining government presidency in Ukraine and replaced it with a more democratic political system—Putin saw that, he saw the young people demonstrating in the streets, holding EU flags and talking about anti-corruption and transparency. And he thought, right, that's not going to happen here, and I need to prevent it at all costs. And the Chinese seem to have gone through a similar process at about the same time. There's a 2013 document. It's actually got a fantastic name; it's called Document Number Nine. And in Document Number Nine, they list the seven perils to the Chinese Communist Party, and number one is Western constitutional democracy. Somewhere on the list is civil society and activism. Also on the list is a free press. So they begin to see those things as threats to, in their case, the Communist Party and their form of power or in the case of Putin, his personal power. And that perception is shared by others around the world. The belief that many of them had in the ‘90s and 2000s that they could maintain control through manipulating elections a bit here and there, through controlling a bit of the media, arresting of the occasional oligarch or the murder of the occasional journalist, that gave way when they said “No, we need full-on, open competition. These values and these ideas can remove us from power.” And you can hear that echo of that change all around the world.
Mounk: So to be clear, in the ‘90s and the early 2000s, depending on which exact country we're talking about, a lot of dictatorships allowed some amount of openness. They weren't trying to control the internet to nearly the same extent. They were allowing certain kinds of civil society groups to function. Perhaps you had some kind of little intellectual journal you were allowed to publish to a few thousand people. And then you're saying in 2013, there was a kind of phase-change, where they said those softer forms of authoritarian control are no longer enough, that they really needed to expand and improve their tools of repression.
Walk us a little bit through what the change looks like.
Applebaum: Let me agree with what you said at first. I've been in China, I'm not a frequent visitor, but I've been there several times. Before 2010, I was there and you could attend public events at bookstores or in other public spaces where there was very, very open conversation. You could be critical of the regime. You could say whatever you wanted as long as it was happening there in that small space and it wasn't spreading any farther. It didn't seem like anybody really minded and it didn't seem like anybody was very afraid. And in Russia, it was exactly the same thing. You could even have a political party, you could have, as you say, a little magazine or a little newspaper, and you could say what you wanted as long as it didn't have any real popular appeal and didn't really rock the boat.
Möchten Sie meine Artikeln und Gespräche auf Deutsch direkt in Ihre Mailbox bekommen? Klicken Sie diesen Link und schalten Sie unter Notifications “auf deutsch” an! 🇩🇪
Mounk: Why is it that dictatorships haven't always been as harsh as they are now?
In political science, there's a framework where you want to have as much repression as possible as a dictator because any form of independent organizing is a potential threat to you. But repression also has costs. It has straightforward monetary costs. It means that you have to sustain a very large security apparatus. It is likely to alienate some of your own citizens. Famously, the East German state was quite happy for its citizens to have access to West German TV because they felt that it was a form of entertainment that mollified people in certain respects.
Applebaum: Yeah, and if I can interrupt you, the Russians still have access to YouTube. Maybe it's going togonna be cut off soon, but they've been allowed to have it, even though all other social media has been cut off for two years for the same reason, because lots of Russians watch movies on YouTube.
Mounk: Right, and there's at least some evidence that the underlying theory, in fact, holds. So there's a great natural experiment where you can study the Tal der Ahnungslosen, the “Valley of the Clueless,” which is an area around Dresden in Germany that for topographical reasons was not able to get West German television. And it appears to be the case that the people who didn't have access to West German TV both disliked their own regime more, because they were more bored, and because West German TV actually revealed to them some of the shortcomings of West Germany; they recognized that there's some worrying things like unemployment or crime in West Germany too. And it actually seems to have changed people's views for the negative.
So when you're looking at this calculus, clearly one way of conceptualizing the shift that happened after 2013 is that people said we have to ratchet up oppression. We can't risk the relative openness of the last 10 or 20 years. But that comes with trade-offs. And so what do those trade-offs look like?
Applebaum: So first of all, you're right. What they're doing in both the case of Russia and China is very expensive. And if you add to that the case of Iran or the case of Venezuela, we have examples of dictatorships who are happy to see their country go into ruin, become a failed state, rather than giving up power. Nicolás Maduro has allowed his country—first Chávez and then Maduro—from being the richest country in South America to being the poorest. Many millions of Venezuelans have gone into exile to escape. And so he was willing to pay an unbelievably high price for power.
For some people staying in power is worth anything, any price. And the destruction of their country is a price they're also willing to pay. In the case of Russia, it's clear that the impact, even just of the last two years of war, and never mind the last 15 years of ever-growing repression, has been horrific for Russian living standards—not to mention the probably half a million Russians who have been killed or wounded in the war, the loss of national wealth through sanctions or military loss. There are all kinds of ways in which the Russian economy is now imbalanced; even very small changes could be enough to create another sense of crisis.
I can't make a prediction about what will happen there. But it's not good for Russia. The decisions that Putin has made have been good for him in that they've kept him alive and very wealthy, but they haven't been good for the country. And that's something he's willing to accept.
Mounk: I think that the broader question here is that dictatorships always have this really bizarre sort of Manichaean nature, which is to say that they seem incredibly stable because, after all, power is incredibly concentrated. They look a lot less messy than democracies in all kinds of ways. But we know from history that most dictatorships do in fact fail. And sometimes they fail because the dictator dies and there's a succession problem; sometimes they fail because there's a coup from the army. Sometimes they fail because there's a mass uprising. But there's plenty of examples of dictatorships that look incredibly stable on day one suddenly toppling on day two.
That, of course, is part of what drives the paranoia of many of these autocrats, because a democratic leader knows, if they have elections coming up in two and a half years, that until then they should be fine. But a dictator thinks, well, tomorrow, or in two hours, the army general might be in front of the palace and trying to stage a coup—and, by the way, if that happens, I won’t be going home to give speeches to Goldman Sachs for $100,000 a pop and enjoying my retirement; I'm probably dead or, in the best case scenario, in exile.
So how stable do you think these autocracies are? Do you think that when they've ratcheted up repression, they've solved a problem in ways that previous generations of dictators did not, or even they've made themselves vulnerable to new forms of pressure that perhaps we're not quite seeing yet?
Applebaum: Of course, they're always vulnerable to pressure. And the best example of that in the case of Russia is when Prigozhin, who was the head of the Wagner group, someone close to Putin (a general, in effect, commanding an army of convicts in Ukraine) made his strange march to Moscow. He announced he was going to march to Moscow to do something (it was never actually clear what he was going to do), and that morning Putin went on television and made this panicky speech in which he actually referenced Nicholas II, who was the last Tsar of Russia, and was effectively saying “This is 1917, and crisis and catastrophe is about to come.” So clearly he is afraid of that. That's exactly the model that he fears.
But I will also say that there are things about the modern world that give all dictators, not just the Russians and the Chinese, more sense of stability and security than their predecessors had in the past. And this is now one of the topics in my book. Some of them you probably know about already; the degree of surveillance that they can carry out, not just physical surveillance with street cameras and so on but through the internet, through monitoring people's thoughts and observations, through controlling conversations—this is what the Chinese do, and they even try to predict where dissent might be emerging. There are tools and technologies they have that were just not available to a previous generation. That's the first piece.
Souhaitez-vous - ou quelqu'un que vous connaissez - avoir accès à tous ces articles et conversations en français ? Cliquez sur ce lien et activez “en français” sous Notifications ! 🇫🇷
The relationships between one another is another new aspect. Why has Maduro been able to stay in power despite being profoundly unpopular and a disastrous failed ruler who's destroyed his country? It's because he's had investments from Russia. The Russians have sold him military equipment. It's because the Chinese have invested in Venezuelan companies and sold surveillance technology to the Venezuelan state. It's because the Cubans have offered secret police and training for secret police. It's because the Iranians, all the way on the other side of the world, have come to help the Venezuelans avoid sanctions and invest in their oil industry. So it's almost like there's a club of autocrats who come to the rescue in the case when their brother autocrats are in trouble, both because they want to make money there or because they want their natural resources, but also because they have—it's not exactly an ideological tie—but a sense that when one dictator falls, it's bad for the rest of them. It's clear that they're willing to prop up even poor and failed leaders. That network, those links between them, are part of what makes the current moment different.
After Maduro's stolen election, Russia, China, Iran, and a host of other countries in Cuba immediately congratulated Maduro on his great victory, offering him legitimacy right away. They act together in multiple ways, in multiple spheres, economically, militarily, and elsewhere. And I think that is part of what is making them last longer—I mean, Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, would have been gone in 2020 if he hadn't been rescued by the Russians. Maduro would have been gone if he hadn't been rescued by the autocratic network.
Mounk: Certainly, Bashar al-Assad would have been gone without help from Russia and other countries.
What is the goal that they have? So one way you've characterized it is survival: This is a club for survival, for mutual support against attempts, domestically or internationally, to bring about regime change. And it's effectively a defensive alliance.
Another way of thinking about the potential goals might be as inspired by the dominance of the United States in the 1990s when America really was the only superpower. Perhaps that's what Fareed is getting at when he talks about the rise of the rest. It is trying to say we don't want a world completely dominated by the United States, and so we're willing to work with anybody who's willing to be on the other side of the United States in order to provide that kind of counterbalance.
A third characterization might be a more offensive one. Certainly, in the case of Russia, you might think that there is a sense of imperialist nostalgia, a sense of having lost the standing that the country once had and trying to re-establish that kind of dominant position in the region. How should we think about that? Is that different from country to country? Is Russia, with its imperialist nostalgia, different from China in that respect?
Applebaum: I would make distinctions between them. I don't think they're all the same. I do think that it's true that all of them perceive themselves as in conflict with a US-dominated world, and they have language to talk about that. The Russians use the word “multipolarity,” which actually could be just quite a neutral word. But what they mean by that in practice is they mean creating a world in which nothing constrains them—no norms, no UN, no international human rights bodies, no NGOs. When they talk about that, that's what they mean. They use that language inside international institutions, they use it in their propaganda and their communications. And that is a thing they all share. In the case of Iran, it's about spreading the jihad to other countries and creating and arming proxies around the Middle East (they've also played strange roles in Latin America and elsewhere, too). In the case of Venezuela, they were talking about invading Guyana not that long ago. And they want the ability to do that without anyone stopping them or saying that this is against international law. And part of the campaign against so-called US hegemony is that they want the freedom both internally and externally to behave however they want. And that, by the way, includes inside our country.
Mounk: How should the democratic world respond to that? Many attempts both at trying to support democracy movements in those countries have failed and, more spectacularly, attempts to export democracy by the use of arms, as in the case of Iraq, have also failed.
How is it that democratic countries can stand up for their values, can ensure that autocracies don't shape the international order of the 21st century—that “Autocracy Inc.” doesn't continue to expand its hostile acquisitions—without falling into the kind of traps that themselves seem to undermine democratic legitimacy, bleed the treasure and, in certain contexts, the blood of democratic nations, and therefore weaken their standing in the international order itself?
Applebaum: So first of all, the original reason given for the invasion of Iraq, the purpose of it and the reason and the explanation for it, had nothing to do with democracy—I don't want to relitigate that now and you probably have a lot of other things to do over the next six hours, but that was not the purpose of it.
It's also true that US support for democracy movements historically has been successful—most famously, probably, the Solidarity Movement in Poland in the 1980s, or more broadly, the anti-communist movements across the Soviet Bloc over a number of decades. And it was through mostly very cheap things like Radio Free Europe and offering people alternative sources of news, which wasn't in the grand scale of things very expensive. Those have been successful and they have worked. So it's not that everything fails. It's that, recently, autocrats have gotten better at pushing back.
My argument in the book is that, first of all, we have to recognize and understand the scale of the problem. Second of all, we need to look at the ways in which we are enabling those systems. And we need to start with some internal reforms. And I talk about the financial system, which is filled with loopholes that are used by the autocracies—money laundering, shell companies, the tax havens that now probably contain something like 10% of the world's wealth. I mean, those things aren't part of the landscape, like trees or mountains. Those are human-created institutions and they can be uncreated and we could uncreate them now and that would have a big impact on how money moves around in the autocratic world. We could also begin to look at our social media, and by social media regulation I'm not talking about banning things or creating a Ministry of Information. I mean, for example, making the social companies obey the same laws online that people have to obey offline. And in both cases, those are things that we could and should do with allies, and even in conjunction with the democracy movements in the autocratic world, because nobody knows more about Russian kleptocracy than the Russian opposition. They track it, they understand it, they know how it works. Nobody knows more about the Venezuelan regime's relationships to narco-trafficking than the Venezuelan opposition. And I don't think we spend enough time listening to them about what works and trying to understand what they do as opposed to imagining that every conflict is a military conflict.
Thirdly, one of the best ways to make sure that the world remains peaceful at a moment when all of these countries are building up their military arsenals very rapidly is to deter them. This is not the moment to abandon NATO. This is not the moment to abandon our other allies in Asia, the Japanese or the South Koreans. This is a moment to remember that if you want peace, you need to be prepared to defend it. And hopefully that means you never will. So I'm not arguing for new wars. I'm not arguing for invading anybody. But I am saying that we should understand what's happening, the relationships between these countries, their ambitions, which are larger and larger, and be better prepared, psychologically, to fight back. And again, in an ideal world, we would be doing this with allies and in consultation with allies. There are 50 or more countries who have been part of the conversation about helping and aiding Ukraine. So that's 50 countries who are allied with more or less the broad goals of the democratic world, and we could work together.
So just to sum up: Internally, we need to clean up our own act, create more resilience, strengthen our democracies in all the ways that you and I have talked about over the years, but also be aware of what's happening and be prepared to counter it.
In the rest of this conversation, Anne and Yascha discussed how much of a threat Donald Trump poses to American democracy; what democracies should do about the seemingly frozen conflict in Ukraine; and how they might respond to conflict in the Taiwan strait. This part is reserved for paying members...
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Yascha Mounk to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
