Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary,

police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and

It has long been possible, in the United States as in many European countries, to buy property anonymously, through shell companies. One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is owned anonymously, just to take one relevant example.

At least thirteen people with proven or alleged links to the Russian mafia are known to have owned or done business in condos in Trump-branded properties. Yet even while he was president of the United States, companies with mystery owners were still buying property in Trump’s buildings; if that was a form of campaign contribution,

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.

At first, these opportunities were open to everyone. Young Venezuelans studying abroad could apply for an allowance of cheap dollars, which they were meant to use to pay for their studies. Thousands of middle-class kids quickly figured out how to game this system, thus producing a boomlet of Venezuelans at English-language schools in and around Dublin. They were there to drink Guinness, learn a few phrases, and profit from the artificial exchange rates as best they could.

Starvation and malnutrition, the Cubans had learned, could be political tools too.

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. That same year, Zimbabwe handed Russia a platinum-mining concession and obtained several MiG-35 fighter jets in exchange. In 2019, Putin

“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.

Americans who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how much time Russian state television devotes to America’s culture wars, especially arguments over gender. Putin himself has displayed an alarmingly intimate acquaintance with Twitter debates about transgender rights, mockingly sympathizing with people who he says have been “canceled.” In part this is to demonstrate to Russians that there is nothing to admire about the liberal democratic world.

But this is also Putin’s way of building alliances between his domestic audiences and his supporters in Europe and North America, where he has a following on the authoritarian far right, having convinced some naive conservatives that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed in part by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in

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.

and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. Although mostly

When someone is quickly scrolling, they might not notice that a headline links to a fake Spiegel.pro website, say, rather than to the authentic German-magazine website Spiegel.de.

an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached more than 400,000 people.

Notable were two kinds of messages: those that promoted images of Mexican violence and chaos—images that might make people feel they need a strongman to restore order—and those that angrily opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and the United States more broadly. Venezuela-based and pro-Russian trolls—one analyst called them an “entire army of zombie accounts”—were also active together in Spain, most notably at the time of the illegal 2017 independence referendum in Catalonia. Organized by Catalonia’s separatist regional government without a legal basis in Spanish law, the referendum was marked by protests and scuffles with police, described on RT as “the brutal police repression against voters in the Catalan referendum.”

Sometimes, autocracies support one another in these kinds of efforts, helping give them a quasi-legal sheen. Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization have agreed to jointly

scale of the violence in Syria helped lay the groundwork for the rise of ISIS, the fanatical cult; for the brutal Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, 2023; for Hamas’s use of hospitals as shelters in Gaza; and for Israeli strikes on hospitals and other civilian objects in Gaza too. 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.

People believed him because the White Helmets were ordinary people who helped other ordinary people, because their work created trust. The Russians knew this, which is why they sought to undermine that trust, linking the White Helmets alternately to George Soros and al-Qaeda, claiming that their rescue operations were “staged,” smearing their donors as supporters of terrorism as well.

When someone is repeatedly vilified, it is hard even for their closest friends not to think that there must be some kernel of truth. When something “secret” is revealed about an activist or political

figure, perhaps through publication of a taped conversation or a hacked email—a tactic deployed in Russia since the 1990s, in Poland in 2014, and in the U.S. elections, through the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, in 2016—it creates an impression that the person is dishonest and has something to hide, even when the tape or the hacked email contains no evidence of wrongdoing.

The Venezuelan government set up a system to transfer small amounts of money to people who retweet or repost government propaganda.

Donald Trump has sought to stoke anger and even violence against people he dislikes, including federal judges. He and his followers harassed election workers across the country who refused to go along with his fraudulent accusations about a stolen election.

He published the telephone number of the Michigan Senate majority leader, who subsequently received four thousand threatening text messages, as well as the personal information of the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, which led protesters to show up at his home. He and his team falsely accused two Georgia poll workers, Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, of stuffing suitcases with illegal ballots, an allegation that led to months of often racist harassment. In 2023, Trump began talking about using the Department of Justice to arrest his enemies, not because they are guilty of something, but because, if

he returns to the presidency, he wants “retribution.” If he ever succeeds in directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies, in combination with a mass trolling campaign, then the blending of...

Putin backs far-right and extremist movements in Europe and provides thugs and weapons to support African dictatorships. He pursues victory in Ukraine by creating food shortages and raising energy prices around the world. Iran maintains proxies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq. Iranian agents have also bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, carried out murders in Istanbul and Paris, plotted assassinations in the United States, and funded media throughout the Arab-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds.

In the autumn of 2023, both the European Union and the U.S. Congress found themselves unable to send aid to Ukraine because minorities with deep Russian ties, led respectively by Viktor Orbán in Hungary and by a handful of MAGA Republicans in Congress, many acting under the instructions of Donald Trump, blocked the majority and delayed the aid. A narrative promoting “Ukraine fatigue” spread across the internet, pushed by Russian proxies and Chinese media in multiple languages.

President Maduro said he was contemplating the invasion and occupation of a province of neighboring Guyana. As he was announcing these plans, 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 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.

could, for example, 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, and all trusts to reveal the names of their beneficiaries. We could ban our own citizens from keeping money in jurisdictions that promote secrecy, and we could ban lawyers and accountants from engaging with them. That doesn’t mean that they would cease to exist, but they would be much harder to use.

The individuals who benefit from financial secrecy often seek direct political influence, and this too makes them hard to block. Ihor Kolomoisky, the Ukrainian oligarch who hid his money in property schemes all over the American Midwest, reportedly sought to preserve his empire by angling for influence in the Trump administration, including by offering the president “dirt” on Joe and Hunter Biden, some of which was passed to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

single politician, party, or country can reform this system alone. Instead, an international coalition will have to change the laws, end secretive practices, and restore transparency to the international financial system. An anti-kleptocracy network could include

officials from across Europe, Asia, and North America who have begun to understand how much damage money laundering and dark money have done to their own economies. They could work with community leaders from London, Vancouver, Miami, and other cities whose landscapes, property markets, and economies have been distorted by Russians, Angolans, Venezuelans, and Chinese buying property that they use as a means of storing wealth.

Our old models never acknowledged the truth that many people desire disinformation. They are attracted by conspiracy theories and will not necessarily seek out reliable news at all.

none of these campaigns would have any chance of success if the social media platforms that host them were not so easy to game. Reform of these platforms is a vast topic, with implications that range well beyond foreign policy, and the resistance even to a civilized discussion of social media regulation is enormous. The platforms are among the wealthiest and most influential companies in the world and, like the companies that benefit from money laundering, they lobby against change; so do many politicians, especially on the far right, who find the current system amenable.

After Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the platform quickly became a more powerful amplifier of extremist, antisemitic, and pro-Russian narratives. TikTok, the Chinese-built platform, remains a potent and badly understood source of misinformation, not least because it is entirely untransparent. If it is being used to shape U.S. politics, or to collect data from users, we don’t know how. The American far right has meanwhile shifted the legitimate political debate about online platform regulation into an argument about “bans” and “free speech,” attacking the academics and other researchers who seek to understand how the online world functions and to explore how it could be made more transparent.

Customers of the social media platforms should be able to own their own data and determine what is done with it. They should also be able to

influence, directly, the algorithms that determine what they see. Legislators in democracies could create the technical and legal means to give people more control and more choices or to hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote content tied to acts of terrorism. Citizen-scientists should be able to work with the platforms in order to better understand their impact, just as citizen-scientists in the past worked with food companies to ensure better hygiene or with oil companies to prevent environmental damage.

The United States and its allies may need to join forces with one another and with media companies to make Reuters, the Associated Press, and other reliable outlets the standard source of global news instead of Xinhua and RT. Joint action, taken by governments as well as private companies, might be required to ensure that Chinese programming and Chinese news sources are not always the cheapest option in Africa or Latin America. No democratic government should ever assume that arguments for democracy or for the rule of law are somehow obvious or self-evident. Authoritarian narratives are designed to undermine the innate appeal of those ideas, to characterize dictatorship as stable and democracy as chaotic.

Following the invasion of Ukraine, Europeans learned the hard way how high a price they had paid for their decision to rely upon Russian gas. The shift to more expensive energy sources caused inflation. Inflation in turn caused dissatisfaction. Compounded by a Russian disinformation campaign, this dissatisfaction contributed to a surge in support for the German far right, a political

April 2023, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, spoke to a Washington audience about the risks that a similar kind of overdependence on China might eventually pose. His argument was not for decoupling—meaning the total detachment of the U.S. economy from China’s—but for de-risking: ensuring that the United States and the rest of the democratic world do not remain dependent on China for anything that could be weaponized in case of a crisis. He gave some examples, pointing out that the

United States “produces only 4 percent of the lithium, 13 percent of the cobalt, 0 percent of the nickel, and 0 percent of the graphite required to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of critical minerals are processed by one country, China.” He went on to advocate for the construction of a “clean-energy manufacturing ecosystem rooted in supply chains here in North America, and extending to Europe, Japan, and elsewhere.”

Russia has been using its pipelines not, as the German chancellor Willy Brandt once hoped, to deepen commercial ties and help consolidate a lasting peace in Europe but to wield a weapon of blackmail, to influence European politics in Russia’s favor. Chinese

Russian, Chinese, and other oligarchic money in American and British real estate has distorted property markets in major cities and corrupted more than one politician.

The fact that anonymous shell companies were purchasing condominiums in Trump-branded properties while Trump was president should have set off alarm bells. That it did not is evidence of how accustomed to kleptocratic corruption we have become.

Isolationism is an instinctive and even understandable reaction to the ugliness of the modern interconnected world. For some politicians in democracies, it will continue to offer a successful path to power.

The campaign for Brexit succeeded by using the metaphor “take back control,” and no wonder: everyone wants more control in a world where events on the other side of the planet can affect jobs and prices in our local towns and villages. But did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world? Did it prevent foreign money from shaping U.K. politics? Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.