Renowned Pulitzer-winning journalist Anne Applebaum has just published an important book, “Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.” It is well-researched and erudite, but still an easy read and only 176 pages of text.
Applebaum emphasizes that autocracies have evolved. They are no longer run by one single bad guy, but have become sophisticated networks that rely on “kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services…and technological exports who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.”
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For three decades, from 1974 global democracy evolved every year, but according to the authoritative Freedom House, it has declined for the last two decades. Applebaum tries to explain how this could happen. She deals with many countries – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, etc.
She argues that the rulers of all these countries “share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.”
Ideology no longer matters. Communist North Korea cooperates happily with theological Iran. Their common aim is to keep their rulers in power. They are unabashed, often maintaining opulent residences and running their regimes as for-profit ventures. They do not care about the well-being of their citizens. The presidents of Venezuela, Syria and Belarus “seem entirely comfortable ruling over collapsed economies and societies.” They just want to stay in power. They no longer care if they are criticized or by whom and they “feel no shame about the use of open brutality.”
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Appelbaum sees Russia as central to this new autocratic world as the primary destabilizer: “Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo.”
The book contains five chapters. Two focus on kleptocracy and three on media. The first chapter deals with greed, with Nord Stream 2 as the prime example. The German belief in transforming Russia through trade gets most of the blame, but Appelbaum rightly points out that similarly, President Bill Clinton claimed that “economic innovation and political empowerment…will inevitably go hand in hand.”
Similarly, the idea that modern technologies would necessarily favor an open society has turned out to be the myth. The autocrats are benefitting from both surveillance and disinformation.
She adds: “Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.”
In particular, “One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is owned anonymously…” Moreover, “The fact that anonymous shell companies were purchasing condominiums in Trump-branded properties while Trump was president should have set off alarm bells.”
The second chapter deals with how kleptocracy metastasizes through offshore havens: Russian property purchases in the United Arab Emirates doubled after the invasion of Ukraine, and “An influx of kleptocratic cash can also empower regimes to become more autocratic and repressive.”
The following three chapters focus on media. It is vital to control the narrative. The current autocrats “lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But when they are exposed, they don’t bother to offer counterarguments.” Instead, they are flooding the media with more, often contradictory lies to create chaos.
The fourth chapter deals with how to change the fundamental concepts. The autocrats dismiss human rights and democracy, favoring alternative concepts such as sovereignty (Putin’s favorite) and multipolarity, abandoning Western universal values.
Finally, the autocrats smear democrats ruthlessly. For the last two decades, democratic activists have continued to stand up to authoritarians, but however brave, they are losing out most of the time. Repressive violence is one explanation, but government media control is another one.
What can be done? Applebaum points in the right direction but discusses it only briefly. She rightly underscores that the kleptocrats’ freedom of action in the West is a Western political choice (primarily of the United States and the United Kingdom). “We can just as easily make it illegal. All of it.” “We could…require all real estate transactions, everywhere in the United States and Europe, to be totally transparent. We could require all companies to be registered in the name of their actual owners.”
True, much more needs to be done. The majority of the actual offshore havens are British territories. The new British Labour government has declared that it wants full transparency of territories such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands. In May 2016 Tory Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that he wanted to do so, but then he was forced to resign because of Brexit the next month. In 2021, the US adopted its Corporate Transparency Act, which is supposed to offer the transparency of ownership that Applebaum suggests, but its implementation has gotten bogged down in bureaucratic and legal battles.
A problem that Applebaum barely discusses is that the kleptocrats use Western courts to their benefit, suing anybody who tells the truth about them for libel or defamation. Few dare to say or write anything negative about a Russian oligarch any longer, because they always sue, and you cannot know where because they pay for the best lawyers. Sanctioned oligarchs should not be allowed to use Western courts like that.
Applebaum has dedicated her book to the optimists, but so far the autocratic kleptocrats are winning.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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