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

by Anne Applebaum

Just as the democratic world once built an international anticommunist alliance, so can the United States and its allies build an international anticorruption alliance, organized around the idea of transparency, accountability, and fairness, enhanced by the creative thinking found in the autocratic diasporas as well as the democracies themselves.

Modern autocrats take information and ideas seriously. They understand the importance not only of controlling opinion inside their own countries but also of influencing debates around the world.

During the three decades that have passed since the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies imagined that they had no need to compete in this sphere, because good information would somehow win the battle in the “marketplace of ideas.” But there isn’t a marketplace of ideas, or in any case not a free market of ideas. Instead, some ideas have been turbocharged by disinformation campaigns, by heavy spending by the social media companies whose algorithms promote emotional and divisive content, and perhaps, in some cases, by algorithms designed to promote Russian or Chinese narratives in a similar manner.

We can begin to fight back, first, by understanding that we are facing an epidemic of information laundering and by exposing it when we can.

Of course the problem runs deeper: none of these campaigns would have any chance of success if the social media platforms that host them were not so easy to game.

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.

The risks of overdependence on trade with Russia, China, or other autocracies aren’t just economic. They are existential.

Around the world, democratic activists, from Moscow to Hong Kong to Caracas, have been warning us that our industries, our economic policies, and our research efforts are enabling the economic and even the military aggression of others, and they are right.

There is no liberal world order anymore, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real.