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

by Anne Applebaum

their spread justifies their use at home: if there are fewer objections to mass surveillance outside China, then there is less danger that criticism will be heard inside China.

“[T]heir spread” referring to surveillance technologies China exports to other countries, or free world countries using for non-tyrannical purposes.

The lesson for Autocracy, Inc., was ominous: even in a state where surveillance seems total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can always radicalize people.

If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned. That requires not just surveillance, and not merely a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan, a narrative that damages the idea of democracy, wherever it is being used, anywhere in the world.

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 least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.

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.”

White nationalists marching in the infamous Charlottesville demonstration that ended in violence in 2017 shouted, among other slogans, “Russia is our friend.”

This manipulation of the strong emotions about gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world.

Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, an illiberal hybrid state, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war. He has adopted the pretense that ongoing tension between his government and the U.S. government concerns religion and gender, when in fact the poor relationship was created by Orbán’s deep financial and political ties to Russia and China.

In some ways, his monopoly of the national conversation prefigured Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, although Trump made use of social media, not television, to dominate the conversation. Both men also lied repeatedly, and blatantly, as do other modern dictators.

Hugo Chávez.

Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie; it’s to make people fear the liar.

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.

Iran also offers HispanTV, the Spanish-language version of PressTV, the Iranian international service, which leans more heavily into open antisemitism and Holocaust denialism. One March 2020 headline declared, “The New Coronavirus Is the Result of a Zionist Plot.”

Nowadays, the Xinhua and RT offices in Africa, along with Telesur and PressTV, all produce stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of Autocracy, Inc. These are then repeated and amplified by authentic and inauthentic networks in many countries, translated into multiple languages, and reshaped for local markets.

as Russia swept into Ukraine, fantastical tales of biological warfare began to surge across the internet. Spokesmen for the Russian Defense and Foreign Ministries solemnly declared that secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine had been conducting experiments with bat viruses. The story was unfounded, not to say ridiculous, and it was immediately and repeatedly debunked.

A version of the story appeared on the Infowars website, the conspiracy site created by Alex Jones, who was successfully sued for promoting conspiracy theories about the tragic school shooting at Sandy Hook. Tucker Carlson, then still a host on Fox News, played clips of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesman repeating the accusation and demanded that the Biden administration “stop lying and telling us what’s going on here.”

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman echoed his Russian colleagues, declaring that the United States controlled twenty-six biolabs in Ukraine: “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans.”

the Chinese continued to spread them. So did the Asian, African, and Latin American media outlets that have content-sharing agreements with China. So did Telesur, PressTV, and the various language services of RT. China had a clear interest in this story, since it muddied recent history and helped relieve China of the need to investigate its own hazardous biolabs, including the one in Wuhan that might have been the true source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

all three of these sources—Russian, Chinese, and extremist American—coalesce around many other themes as well. After the invasion of Ukraine, they repeated the entire range of Russian propaganda about the war, from the description of Ukrainians as “Nazis” to the claim that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA. These themes then appeared several links down the food chain, in African, Asian, and Latin American media and social media.

Pressenza, a website founded in Milan and relocated to Ecuador in 2014. Pressenza publishes in eight languages, describes itself as “an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence” and did indeed publish an article on biolabs in Ukraine. But according to the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center, Pressenza is a Russian project, run by three Russian companies.

Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery vehicle for bioweapons, infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread disease. Yala did not invent this ludicrous tale. Russian state media published it first, followed by the Sputnik Arabic website as well as RT Arabic.

African Initiative, an online news service set up in 2023 and designed specifically to spread conspiracy theories about Western public health work in Africa.

In the autumn of 2023, some of the same team that built RRN also launched a project inside the United States. After the Biden administration proposed a large bill to fund military aid to Ukraine, Russian strategists instructed their employees to create social media posts “in the name of a resident of a suburb of a major city.” According to The Washington Post, they were supposed to mimic an American who “doesn’t support the military aid that the U.S. is giving Ukraine and considers that the money should be spent defending America’s borders and not Ukraine’s.

In the months that followed, these kinds of posts did indeed seem to overwhelm some social media sites, as did posts about corruption in Ukraine, including one that infamously claimed, completely falsely, that President Zelensky owns two yachts. Partly because the project was connected, again, to the idea that democracies like the United States or Ukraine are chaotic and corrupt, an idea that appeals to a part of the American Republican Party, the onslaught was successful and some of the false stories stuck. A Republican senator, Thom Tillis, told a television interviewer that during debates over aid for Ukraine, some of his colleagues, who had read the false stories, worried that “people will buy yachts with this money.” Congressman Michael R. Turner, an Ohio Republican and the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told another interviewer that “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages—some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”

In the spring of 2024, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted 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.

In 1946, during the early, still-optimistic days of the postwar world, the brand-new United Nations created the Commission on Human Rights.

The original drafting committee included a Canadian legal scholar, a French jurist, a Lebanese theologian, and a Chinese philosopher. Representatives from the Soviet Union, the U.K., Chile, and Australia joined as well; at a later stage, an Indian delegate, Hansa Mehta, argued successfully that Article I of the document should declare not just that “all men are born free and equal” but that “all human beings are born free and equal.”

The Soviet Union voted against the document when it was ratified in 1948, as did several Soviet satellite states.

The document stated that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.” It also acknowledged that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”

the declaration asserted that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person”; that no one should be subjected to “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”; and that torture and slavery should be banned.

Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into farce long ago.

In 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for President Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, for the crime of kidnapping and deporting thousands of Ukrainian children. Although the Russians dismissed the case as meaningless, the warrants mean the Russian president risks arrest when visiting countries that have signed the ICC treaty.

while leaders in the West have been distracted by other concerns, the Chinese have made the gradual rewriting of rules one of the central pillars of their foreign policy.

China has led the charge to remove the language of human rights and democracy from international institutions. “For the CCP to attain the moral legitimacy, respect, and recognition it needs for leadership of a new world order,” writes the legal scholar and China expert Andréa Worden, “it must remove the threat of Western universal human rights.”

“sovereignty” is the word that dictators use when they want to push back against criticism of their policies,

When anyone protests the Iranian regime’s extrajudicial murders, the Iranian mullahs shout “sovereignty.” When anyone objects to the Chinese government’s repression of the people of Hong Kong, China too talks about “sovereignty.” When anyone quotes the famous phrase from Article I of the UN declaration—“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”—authoritarian advocates of sovereignty dismiss such language as evidence of Western imperialism.

the Russian president adds an extra twist. Sovereignty, in Putin’s definition, includes the right to abuse citizens at...

the Chinese want the UN and other international organizations to talk about win-win cooperation—by which they mean that everyone will benefit if each country maintains its own political system. They also want everyone to popularize mutual respect—by which they mean that no one should criticize anyone else. This vocabulary is deliberately dull and unthreatening: Who could be against “win-win cooperation” or “mutual respect”? Nevertheless, the Chinese work extremely hard—tellingly hard—to insert such language into UN documents. If mutual respect, win-win cooperation, and sovereignty prevail, then there is no role for human rights advocates, international commissions of inquiry, or any public criticism of Chinese policy in Tibet, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang at all. The UN’s already limited ability to investigate UN member states will be curtailed further.

If win-win sounds nice, then multipolarity, the word that Russian information networks now prefer, could have an even greater appeal. A multipolar world is meant to be fair and equitable, unlike the America-centric world, or the American hegemony they are trying to abolish.

multipolarity is now the basis for a whole campaign, systematically spread on RT in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, repeated by information-laundering sites such as Yala News, stated again and again by a thousand other cutouts, think tanks, and paid and unpaid pro-Russian journalists, as well as other spokesmen for Autocracy, Inc. Xinhua celebrated the African Union’s membership in the G20—the Group of 20 conference of the world’s largest economies—as evidence of “the aggressive emergence of the multipolar world.”

North Korea has expressed its desire to cooperate with Russia “to establish a ‘new multi-polarized international order.’

Members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia have observer status)—all agree to recognize one another’s “sovereignty,” not to criticize one another’s autocratic behavior, and not to intervene in one another’s internal politics.

BRICS (the acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and was originally a term coined by a Goldman Sachs economist to describe emerging-market business opportunities) is also transforming itself into an alternative international institution, with regular meetings and new members. In January 2024, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the U.A.E., and Ethiopia were welcomed into the group, the better to give it the flavor of a new, Moscow- and Beijing-oriented world order.

autocracies had reached beyond their borders to harass, arrest, or kill their own citizens. The human rights organization Freedom House calls this practice “transnational repression” and has compiled more than six hundred examples.

Over more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has also killed or tried to kill Iranian exiles in Europe—Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the U.K.—as well as the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States, with the numbers rising sharply over the past decade.

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.

In 2023, Indian agents are alleged to have murdered Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh community leader in Canada, and to have plotted the murder of another in the United States.

The idea that China, Rwanda, or Iran simply can’t be stopped—this is just their nature, this is just the way they are—becomes part of the culture. Democracies simply come to accept lawlessness, even within their own borders.

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. Concerns about the numbers of migrants were amplified by far-right trolling operations and by Russian campaigns, as well as by several prominent terrorist attacks from groups with roots or financing in the autocratic world. 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.” “It is important to leave internal affairs to the country’s people as they are best able to manage their own affairs,” he said.

Like Wagner, Iranian-backed groups recruit professional soldiers, maintain extensive business interests, and conduct propaganda campaigns, all with various degrees of Iranian backing. Hezbollah runs a political party in Lebanon and produces television series and programs. Hamas, before attacking Israel in October 2023, ran Gaza as its own fiefdom, a miniature autocratic state. The Houthis, trained by Hezbollah, control a region of Yemen, but also see themselves as players in a global conflict, with Israel and the United States as their main opponents.

the current Russian offer to sitting dictators and would-be dictators as a “regime survival package.” 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). By accepting this package, the local dictator will also be cut off from democratic allies, either because the violence and repression needed to maintain power make him too unpalatable or because his new Russian allies insist he cut ties with old American and European friends.