The Rival World Order: Autocracy Inc.

 US President Joe Biden has issued warnings that the world is moving towards a consequential conflict between democracies and autocracies.  By democracies are meant the United States, European nations, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and Japan, nations with strong economic relationships and military ties such as NATO.  The most aggressive autocracies include Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  This group of states has avowed geopolitical goals opposing those of the democracies, and are actively collaborating politically, economically, and militarily in “creating a new world order.”  Anne Applebaum tells her readers that if this is all you recognize as the problem, you are missing half the conflict.  She presents the argument in her book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Applebaum argues that the nature of autocracy has changed, and it is critical that we recognize the differences.

“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 to not only one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.  Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another.  The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others.  The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.”

The author then makes statements that demand clarification.

“Unlike political or military 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.”

“Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.”

Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela provides a good example of a beneficiary of Autocracy Inc.  Despite sanctions by the US and others, he thrives as he continues to extract wealth from his country.

“Yet President Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans from Russia, which also invests in Venezuela’s oil industry, as does Iran.  A Belarussian company assembles tractors in Venezuela.  Turkey facilitates illicit Venezuelan gold trade.  Cuba has long provided security advisors and security technology to its counterparts in Caracas. Chinese-made water cannons, tear-gas cannisters, and shields were used to crush street protestors in Caracas in 2014 and again in 2017, leaving more than seventy dead, while Chinese-designed surveillance technology is used to monitor the public too.  Meanwhile, the international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime, along with their entourages and families, well supplied with Versace and Chanel.” 

 Applebaum has stated that modern autocracies are not driven by ideas and ideology, but she then details how they are unified in participating in the destruction of democracy as a viable form of governance.  Democratic nations, with their traditions of basic human rights, are viewed as an existential threat.  Autocracies have tended to focus on the sovereignty of each nation, a concept that allows a regime to do whatever it wishes to its people, as a more convenient goal.

 “Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors.  But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy.  That enemy is us.”

“To be more precise, that 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.”

If the long list of autocracies view “us” as their enemy and wish to destroy our way of life it seems appropriate to consider our chances of winning this conflict.  Applebaum provides numerous examples of how the institutions of democratic nations are being attacked by autocracies in an attempt to discredit democracy as a form of governance and promote autocracy as a more efficient option.  Most of this international activity is situated in the big four: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  Less emphasized is that these same four are also planning for possible future warfare by building up their military capabilities.  Planes, ships, soldiers, and even missiles are fairly easy to track, but cyber weapons are often known only after they’ve been activated.  It is abundantly clear that the four mentioned nations are working on cyber weapons that could severely damage the people and infrastructure of democratic nations, primarily the US.  We will not know what they are capable of until they demonstrate their capabilities.

Applebaum sticks with her notion that our opponents are a loose agglomeration of criminal states intent on kleptocracy.

“…the democracies…should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition between specific autocratic states, and certainly not as ‘war with China,’ but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States…The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder.  We can stop them.”

The author provides little to cheer about when it comes to countering kleptocrats, assuming that is our main issue.  Criminals are active, law enforcement is reactive.  And the history of international finance suggests there is way too much money to be made helping kleptocrats deal with their resources to ever be able to shut down the undesirable practices.

“…Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming—nice, normal American states, full of nice, normal Americans—have created financial instruments that nameless investors can use to hide their money from the world.”

The terms “existential crisis” and “existential threat” appear in Applebaum’s analyses, yet she refuses to pose the democracy versus autocracy conflict in such terms.  Her relevant situation from the twentieth century is the postwar conflict between the West and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War.

“In no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of what we faced in the twentieth century.  There are no ‘blocs’ to join and no Berlin Walls marking neat geographic divides.  Many countries don’t fit comfortably into either category, democracy or autocracy.  As I’ve written, some autocracies—the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam—seek cooperation with the democratic world, don’t want to upend the UN Charter, and still see the advantages of international law.  Some democracies—Turkey, Israel, Hungary, India, the Philippines—have elected leaders who are more inclined to break conventions on human rights than to uphold them.  Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.”

What if Applebaum is wrong, and the proper twentieth century analogy is not postwar but prewar?  Putin’s western yearnings are not very different from Hitler’s eastern yearnings.  China’s world-dominance yearning exceeds Japan’s goals for Asian-Pacific dominance.  In that earlier era, the democracies failed to realize the threats they faced until it was very late and nearly lost a world war.  Could they be making the same mistake again?

Putin has made it clear that he intends to take control of not only Ukraine but also NATO countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, or even the Russian Empire.  Yet, NATO is not preparing for war, it is half-heartedly assisting Ukraine in what it hopes will continue to be a proxy war.  To survive, Ukraine must assemble at least the second most powerful army in the region, along with a defense industrial base that can produce a significant share of the armaments needed to contend with Russia.  This is necessary because NATO, in spite of its avowed responsibilities, doesn’t seem to have the will to arm for war.

The democracies continue to treat China as if it is a nation that would be satisfied peacefully existing as a member of a family of advanced societies and economies.  China has repeatedly proven such thinkers wrong, yet this optimism persists.  Meanwhile, China openly pursues world economic, political, and military dominance.

The threat from autocracies is bigger than Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.  Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have a mission: the discreditation of democracies.  They are collaborating in Russia’s battle with Ukraine.  If Ukraine should fall to Russia, they will have succeeded.

 

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.

Source: http://letstalkbooksandpolitics.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-rival-world-order-autocracy-inc.html