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 sometimes in democracies too.

illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which

Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.

Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals—deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.

In August 2020, more than a million Belarusians, out of a population of only ten million, protested in the streets against stolen elections. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans repeatedly participated in protests across the country too. If their only enemies had been the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime or the brutal, ugly Belarusian regime, these protest movements might have won. But they were not fighting autocrats only at home; they were fighting autocrats around the world who control state companies in multiple countries and who can use them to make investment decisions worth billions of dollars.

they were fighting against rulers who long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.

Today, the members of Autocracy, Inc., no longer care if they or their countries are criticized or by whom.

Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats feel no shame about the use of open brutality.

Their primary goal is to stay in power, and to do so, they are willing to destabilize their neighbors, destroy the lives of ordinary people, or—following in the footsteps of their predecessors—even send hundreds of thousands of their citizens to their deaths.

Mussolini, the Italian leader whose movement coined the words “fascism” and “totalitarianism,” mocked liberal societies as weak and degenerate. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” he predicted in 1932.

Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual founders of modern radical Islam, borrowed both the communist belief in a universal revolution and the fascist belief in the liberating power of violence. Like Hitler and Stalin, he argued that liberal ideas and modern commerce posed a threat to the creation of an ideal civilization—in this case, Islamic civilization. He built an ideology around opposition to democracy and individual rights, crafting a cult of destruction and death.

enemy is the democratic world, “the West,” NATO, the European Union, their own, internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them. These include the notion that the law is a neutral force, not subject to the whims of politics; that courts and judges should be independent; that political opposition is legitimate; that the rights to speech and assembly can be guaranteed; and that there can be independent journalists and writers and thinkers who are capable of being critical of the ruling party or leader while at the same time remaining loyal to the state. Autocrats hate these principles because they threaten their power.

Modern autocrats opposition to “the West”, NATO, the EU, and their own democratic opponents and liberal ideals.

In 2013, as Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo known, enigmatically, as Document Number Nine or, more formally, as the “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” listed the “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Western constitutional democracy led the list, followed by “universal values,” media independence and civic participation, as well as “nihilist” criticism of the Communist Party.

Since at least 2004, the Russians have focused on the same set of threats.

Civic protest movements are always described as “color revolutions” in Russia and as the work of outsiders. Popular leaders are always said to be foreign puppets. Anticorruption and pro-democracy slogans are linked to chaos and instability.

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.

A leaked document describing these discussions summed them up by echoing Lavrov’s words: Russia should aim “to create a new world order.”

the autocracies believe that they are winning.

From the moment the hunting lodge talks began in Austria, everyone knew that the gas trade would be different. Pipelines were expensive and permanent. They could not be laid down one day, removed the next, and they could not depend upon the whim of a particular leader. There had to be long-term contracts, and these contracts had to be enveloped within a set of predictable political relationships.

Talks between the USSR, who had discovered new gas fields, and the West Germany who had demand for natural gas. This was in 1967.

His reasoning was mostly political: he believed that a mutually dependent economic relationship would make a future military conflict unthinkable.

Willy Brandt, the West German foreign minister at the time. . .

Nixon, Carter, and Reagan were motivated by neither spite nor pure commercial self-interest, but rather by questions about the political consequences of trade with an autocracy.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S.S.R. supported terrorist groups in West Germany and Italy, aided extremist movements across the Continent and around the world, and suppressed political opposition in Eastern Europe, including East Germany. 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.

This was the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History?,” the 1989 National Interest essay that was widely misread as a statement of naive, everything-is-for-the-best-in-the-best-of-all-possible-worlds good cheer. Liberal democracy is victorious, sooner or later everyone will want it, and no special effort is required to promote it; just be patient, and the beneficial effects of trade and globalization will work their magic. Fukuyama’s actual argument was more subtle than that, but the simplified version became popular because people wanted it to be true.

Wandel durch Handel—“change through trade.” This pleasing rhyme not only sounded better in German; it also reflected reality. Trade among the postwar democracies in Western Europe, in the form of the increasingly integrated common market, really had produced peace and prosperity. After 1990, many hoped trade would also enrich the eastern half of the Continent and bring it closer, politically and culturally, to the western half. Wandel durch Handel became popular partly because it suited the world of commerce but also because it described the actual experience of ordinary people.

The Germans believed that trade and diplomacy had reunited their country. They also believed that trade and diplomacy would, eventually, help normalize relations between Russia and Europe.

. . . George H. W. Bush, who had actually negotiated the end of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Empire, was scarcely mentioned. Nor did the American troops who helped deter Soviet attack for so many decades, and who were (and still are) based in Germany, get much attention. Violence, soldiers, armies, and above all nuclear weapons had been written out of the story.

Ronald Reagan visited China and declared, in a sunny, optimistic, upbeat speech, that “there’s much to be gained on both sides from expanded opportunities in trade and commerce and cultural relations.” He was sure he had seen signs of a deeper change: “The first injection of free market spirit has already enlivened the Chinese economy. I believe it has also made a contribution to human happiness in China and opened the way to a more just society.”

Bill Clinton, a president of a different generation and a different political persuasion, declared that “growing interdependence would have a liberalizing effect in China….

Clinton’s optimism, in retrospect, was extraordinary. “In the knowledge economy,” he said, “economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.”

There were skeptics as well. A broad coalition of politicians and trade unionists tried to stop Chinese entry into the World Trade Organization, fearing the effects on Western workers.

Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, has said that Britain was “delusional” for imagining that a wealthier China would automatically become a democracy.

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.

“From the beginning, Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.”

Putin’s Russia was not an old-fashioned totalitarian state, isolated and autarkic. Nor was it a poor dictatorship, wholly dependent on foreign donors. Instead, it represented something new: a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leaders.

No “level playing field” was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap. Those who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by—or stolen from—the state. These were the true beneficiaries of this system: the oligarchs whose fortunes depended on their political connections.

Chávez listened but said nothing. Then, a few weeks later, he abruptly asked for Urdaneta’s resignation. Venezuela’s Supreme Court quashed any investigation into corruption. As Urdaneta had predicted, the ruling elite did indeed get the message: If you are loyal, you can steal. Like Putin, Chávez made a choice. No one forced him to turn Venezuela into a kleptocracy, and even his own intelligence chief was surprised when he did.

like Putin, he made a different political calculation, one designed not to make his country prosperous but to keep himself permanently in power. He was betting that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones, and he was right.

President Hugo Chávez.

Corruption lay at the heart of the autocracy that had replaced democracy, and Venezuelans knew it.

Like China, Cuba had both financial and ideological reasons to back Venezuela. From the beginning of the Chávez presidency, the two countries saw themselves linked by a common anti-American agenda.

none of Venezuela’s foreign relationships are more improbable than the regime’s close, deep ties to Iran. The two countries have little in common historically, geographically, or ideologically. The Islamic Republic is a theocracy; the Bolivarian Republic ostensibly promotes left-wing internationalism. What binds them is oil, anti-Americanism, opposition to their own democracy movements, and a shared need to learn the dark art of sanctions evasion.

Iran’s efforts alone would have made a big difference to the Venezuelan regime. 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 wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned. The United Arab Emirates, for example, has in recent years made it much easier for foreigners, even those under sanctions, to become residents or even citizens and to buy property.

In the run-up to elections in August 2023, he pushed through the “Patriotic Bill,” a law that, in effect, made it a crime for any Zimbabwean to say anything negative about Zimbabwe or its government to any foreigner.

Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Dislike of the regime was widespread, they told me, and they were sure they had a chance to win. A few days later, after the election was rigged to ensure another government victory, one of them called me in a panic to ask if I could help him escape the country. Police in his district were arresting his colleagues.

China got minerals: in September 2022, Chinese investors signed a $2.8 billion deal to build processing facilities for lithium, platinum, and nickel for export to Chinese battery factories. In exchange, Zimbabwe got broadband deals and Chinese surveillance technology, including Huawei equipment and surveillance cameras that China has long used to track internal dissent.

Although there is no deep, historic link between Harare and Moscow, Mnangagwa and Putin eventually discovered they had much in common too. Both men stay in power not through elections or constitutions but through propaganda, corruption, and selective violence. Both need to show audiences at home and in the democratic world how little they care about their criticism, their human rights laws, their talk of democracy. 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.

In the aftermath of these events, the Chinese concluded that even this response was insufficient. To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Western Europe from spreading to the East, China’s leaders set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests: the rule of law, the separation of powers, the right to freedom of speech and assembly, and all the principles that they described as “spiritual pollution” coming from the democratic world.

1989 as the USSR imploded and democracy rose in some countries subjected to USSR rule, e.g., Poland.

It’s worth remembering again that room full of foreign policy experts who laughed, back in 2000, when President Clinton said that any Chinese attempt to control the internet would be like “trying to nail jello to the wall.”

China absorbed the technology it needed and then eased the foreign companies out. Google struggled to adhere to the Great Firewall’s rules before giving up in 2010, following a cyberattack orchestrated by the People’s Liberation Army. The company later worked secretly on a version of its search engine that would be compatible with Chinese censorship, but abandoned that as well, following staff protest and public criticism in 2018. China banned Facebook in 2009 and Instagram in 2014. TikTok, although invented by a Chinese company, has never been permitted to function in China at all.

Pegasus mobile phone spyware, created by the Israeli company NSO, has been used to track journalists, activists, and political opponents in Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, India, Bahrain, and Greece, among others. In 2022, the Polish government at the time, led by the national-populist Law and Justice Party, put Pegasus software on the phones of friends and colleagues of mine, all of whom were affiliated with what was then the political opposition.

There are important differences between the way these stories play out in democracies and dictatorships. Snowden’s leaks were widely discussed. Journalists won Pulitzer Prizes for investigating them. In Poland, the Pegasus spyware scandal was eventually exposed and investigated, first by the media and later by a parliamentary committee. If no parallel scandal has ever unfolded in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, that’s because there are no legislative committees or free media that could play the same role.