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April 9 - April 14, 2025
“This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order,”32 said Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, soon after the war began. “The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.”
But if Putin had underestimated the unity of the democratic world, the democracies also underestimated the scale of the challenge. Like the democracy activists of Venezuela or Belarus, they slowly learned that they were not merely fighting Russia in Ukraine. They were fighting Autocracy, Inc.
Nevertheless, gas kept flowing west and hard currency flowed east, providing Moscow with funding that helped sustain the same Red Army that NATO had to be prepared to fight and the same KGB that Western security services competed against.
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.
The state that finally emerged in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century was no longer a superpower. But Russia remained influential, more so than many understood at the time, as the model and inspiration for many other modern dictatorships.
In his role as deputy mayor, Putin issued export licenses for raw materials such as diesel fuel, cement, and fertilizer. These shipments, purchased at low state prices in Russia, were meant to be sold at higher prices abroad in order to purchase food. The goods were indeed sold,22 but the money disappeared, diverted into the bank accounts of an obscure group of companies owned by Putin’s friends and colleagues.
The deputy mayor of St. Petersburg made his money thanks to the Western companies that bought the exports, the Western regulators who were unbothered by the bad contracts, and the Western banks that were strangely lacking in curiosity about the new streams of cash flowing into their accounts.
The political system that eventually became Putinist Russia was the product of two worlds: the milieu of the KGB, on the one hand, with its long expertise in money laundering, gained from years of funding terrorists and sleeper agents, and the equally cynical, amoral world of international finance, on the other.
On the contrary, when Americans condemn Russian, Ukrainian, or post-Soviet corruption, they rarely reckon with the role their fellow citizens have played, or are still playing, in enabling it.
The globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.
The Republic of Venezuela, established forty years earlier, was the wealthiest country in South America and had been one of the strongest democracies. But like many oil states, Venezuela was nepotistic and corrupt, albeit in a familiar, old-fashioned way.
During the fourteen years Chávez held power,2 Venezuela took in nearly $800 billion in oil-export revenues. Much of this money did indeed finance state welfare programs, the same programs that persuaded foreign admirers to see Chávez as a progressive hero. But hundreds of billions of dollars from Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the state oil company, as well as other Venezuelan state companies, made its way into bank accounts around the world.
When I was in Caracas in 2020, I saw hard-currency stores where people with access to dollars could buy Cheerios or Heinz ketchup. Meanwhile, people without dollars faced hunger and malnutrition if not outright starvation. The Catholic charity Caritas estimated in 2019 that 78 percent of Venezuelans ate less than they used to, and 41 percent went whole days without eating.
But a state that is a member of Autocracy, Inc., also has other options. There are friends and trading partners to be found among other sanctioned states, and companies not just unbothered by corruption but happy to encourage it and to participate themselves.
Even as North American, South American, and European firms began pulling out of Venezuela, scared away by instability and risk, Russian companies, acting at their own behest as well as on behalf of the state, stepped in to replace them. Rosneft, Gazprom, Lukoil, and TNK-BP (a joint Russian-British venture) all put money into Venezuelan oil, agriculture, even manufacturing.
As international institutions grew wary of lending to Venezuela, China stepped up to replace them. At that time, China would lend money without conditions, meaning that it did not demand economic or other reforms in exchange.
From the beginning of the Chávez presidency, the two countries saw themselves linked by a common anti-American agenda. Venezuela furnished Cuba with subsidized Venezuelan oil. In return, the Cuban government provided Venezuela with soldiers, police officers, and security and intelligence experts—some to replace Venezuelans whom Chávez didn’t trust—as well as sports coaches, doctors, and nurses.
The warm relationship between Venezuela and Turkey, by contrast, seems to have evolved not from ideology but from personal links between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, and Maduro. The two men share a dislike of democracy and anticorruption movements inside their own countries as well as a feeling that they are “disrespected” by established democracies around the world.
But Iran plus Russia, China, Cuba, and Turkey have kept the profoundly unpopular Venezuelan regime afloat and even allowed it to support autocrats elsewhere.
Between 1980 and 2002, new kinds of states emerged, not just tax havens, but “bridging jurisdictions,” as a National Endowment for Democracy study calls them. These are hybrid states that are a legitimate part of the international financial system, that trade normally with the democratic world, that are sometimes part of democratic military alliances, but that are also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth25 or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned.
In order to demonstrate solidarity with Russian kleptocracy, Zimbabwe became one of eleven countries to vote at the United Nations in favor of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, along with North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela.
“Firewall” sounds like a physical object, and China’s system of internet management—in fact, conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases.
Chinese social media was allowed to flourish, but only in cooperation with the security services, which engineered it from the beginning to enable the surveillance of users.
“Chinese algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.”
With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China gets closer to its version of the holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words “democracy” and “Tiananmen” from the internet but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.
Still, the democratic world’s use of spyware and surveillance does help the autocracies justify their own abuse of these technologies. As more countries adopt these systems, the ethical and moral objections will fade.
But many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at
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This tactic, the so-called “fire hose of falsehoods” produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you can never know? If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you will avoid politics altogether. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread that hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world.
Perhaps because it is the wealthiest autocracy, and perhaps because its leaders really do believe they have a good story to tell, China has made the greatest effort to present itself to the world, doing so in the largest number of countries and using the widest range of channels.
The analyst Christopher Walker has coined the term “sharp power”30—neither “hard” military power nor “soft” cultural power—to describe the Chinese influence campaigns that are now felt in many different areas of culture, media, academia, and even sports.
Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies, not unlike the Goethe Institute run by the German government or the Alliance Française, the Confucius Institutes were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion by policing Chinese students at American universities, seeking to block public discussions of Tibet or Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives.
autocratic information operations exaggerate the divisions and anger that are normal in politics. They pay or promote the most extreme voices, hoping to make them more extreme, and perhaps more violent; they hope to encourage people to question the state, to doubt authority, and eventually to question democracy itself.
In practice, these documents and treaties, sometimes collectively known as the rules-based order, have always described how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war and did not prevent Americans from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.
But in the context of international institutions, “sovereignty” is the word that dictators use when they want to push back against criticism of their policies, whether it comes from UN bodies, independent human rights monitors, or their own citizens.
Since 2021, Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have helped keep a military dictatorship in power14 in Mali, where they have been accused of carrying out summary executions, committing atrocities against civilians, and looting property.
Groups like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are sometimes dismissed as more talk than substance—an annual excuse for a photo op. But they represent something real. Though not every leader who joins these meetings is an autocrat—the BRICS group in particular does not have a unified political position—many want to use these institutions to help spread the same kind of unfettered power they enjoy at home around the world.
That Lukashenko was willing to falsely detain and possibly endanger a European-owned, European-registered airplane carrying mostly European citizens from one European nation to another meant both that he was prepared for a total break with Europe and that he was completely confident of economic and political support from the autocratic world.
Although the hijacking was followed by the usual Western protests, and although the Belarusian national airline was banned from European airspace, Lukashenko paid no higher price. There was no international institution with the clout to punish him or to free Protasevich. The Belarusian dictator was protected by “sovereignty” and by his friends.
Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have agreed to jointly fight terrorism, separatism, and extremism, for example, with each state effectively agreeing to recognize the others’ definitions of those words. In practice that means that if China says one of its exiled citizens is a criminal, then Russia, Kazakhstan, or any of the other members will have that person deported back to China.
Democracies simply come to accept lawlessness, even within their own borders. Which is not surprising, since they are coming to accept violence on a much larger scale too.
Assad might well have lost the civil war that followed, had the Iranian government not sent fighters, advisers, intelligence, and weapons and had the Russian military, in 2015, not entered the conflict on the side of the Syrian regime. If the dictators of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Belarus have been propped up by propaganda, surveillance technology, and economic aid from the autocratic world, Assad was saved in a less subtle manner, by Russian and Iranian bullets.
When the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Palestine was found to be harboring Hamas fighters, no one was surprised: the UN, unable to stop a member of the Security Council from violating its rules, was no longer capable of preventing employees of its own agencies from engaging in lawless violence either.
Over time, Europeans stopped talking about the war. Instead, they focused their attention on an unprecedented wave of Syrian refugees, large enough to destabilize the Continent’s politics and to shape a series of European elections, from the Polish election in 2015 to the British Brexit referendum in 2016, right up to the European parliamentary elections of 2024.
The Arab world accepted the violence in Syria too. Having expelled Assad for shooting at unarmed demonstrators in 2011, the Arab League finally welcomed him back in 2023. With a straight face, the dictator whose regime was saved by Russia and Iran accepted his readmission with a call for “non-intervention.”
Wagner mercenaries arrived in Mali in 2021, invited by a military regime, following a coup, to replace French and other forces who had been helping fight off an Islamic insurgency. Even before the coup,59 pro-Russian media, pro-Russian organizations, and Russian-style disinformation campaigns against France and the UN appeared in Mali; since the coup, Russians have gained access to three Malian gold mines, among other assets.
A parallel story unfolded in the Central African Republic after the president of that country invited Wagner troops to help him fight off an insurgency as well. Now Wagner mercenaries guard the president and brutally repress his enemies. They run a radio station60 that produces Russian and government propaganda and rails against “modern practices of neocolonialism.” In March 2022, a Russian diplomat instructed61 the Central African Republic’s top court to alter the constitution so that the country’s pro-Russian president could stay in power beyond his two-term limit. When the court’s top judge
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A team from Britain’s Royal United Services Institute has described the current Russian offer to sitting dictators and would-be dictators as a “regime survival package.”63 This bundle of aid can include personal protection for the dictator; violent assaults on his political enemies; help in fighting an insurgency; broadcast or social media campaigns that echo the themes of multipolarity and anticolonialism; kleptocratic contacts that help the elite hide money (and possibly benefit the Russians as well).
A world in which autocracies work together to stay in power, work together to promote their system, and work together to damage democracies is not some distant dystopia. That world is the one we are living in right now.
A student of Gandhi, King, and Thoreau, Sharp believed that dictatorships survive not because of the unusual powers or personalities of dictators but because most people who live under their rule are apathetic or afraid. He believed that if they overcame their apathy and fear, and that if they refused to acquiesce to the dictator’s demands, then the dictator would no longer be able to rule.
He opposed the use of violence not merely on moral grounds but because it is an ineffective means of fighting a dictatorship: “By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.”
