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 L.G.B.T.Q. 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. Her previous book, “Twilight of Democracy,” looked at why so many of her former allies on the right — Thatcher and Reaganite activists and journalists in London, Washington, Budapest and Warsaw — had abandoned classical liberalism for some species of reactionary nationalism. Why was John O’Sullivan, a former Margaret Thatcher speechwriter, propagandizing for the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban? Why was the formerly center-right sociologist Rafael Bardají working for Spain’s far-right Vox party? Applebaum’s demeanor in that volume was befuddled outrage: Why had her friends abandoned the values (“pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market”) she thought they shared? Perhaps they were always just wounded narcissists and fame-hungry liars, channeling the “authoritarian predispositions” of the masses.
To her credit, Applebaum’s new book risks a more sophisticated, and less flattering, answer: Globalization did work, only not how she and her friends 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. “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states,” Applebaum writes. Nobody imagined that autocratic and illiberal ideas “would spread to the democratic world instead.”
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 vigor 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 puts Saudi Arabia in the category of autocracies that “mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world,” but it’s hard to see how a nation known for targeting and killing dissidents in more than a dozen countries doesn’t contribute significantly to an oppressive global atmosphere.
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.
There is some evidence they can do the opposite. As the economist Agathe Demarais argues, sanctions can be effective when the shock is quick and the goal is concrete, like accepting curbs on a national nuclear program, but tend to be less successful when the hurt is endless and focused on something big and abstract, like political revolution. In the latter case, the population of the sanctioned country often ends up blaming the sanctioner for their suffering, and the government increases trade with other pariah states — exactly the phenomenon that Applebaum is so studiously recording. 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 U.S. 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 G.O.P.? Applebaum calls it an example of how “different autocracies have extended their influence across different political, economic, military and informational spheres,” 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 — we’d get rich, they’d get free — no trade-offs. Applebaum’s new paradigm isn’t quite so starry-eyed. This time, there will be sacrifices. Trade wars with China will hurt consumers; Wall Street will squeal over tariffs. 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.
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