Autocracy Incorporated?

Autocracy, Inc. sets out, admirably, to explore the rise of twenty-first-century authoritarianism and the financial and media links that knit together global reactionary politics. Applebaum describes the subject of her title as

[a] group operat[ing] not like a bloc but [as a] agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power. This is why I’m calling it Autocracy, Inc.

This group of “incorporated” autocracies includes China, Iran, Belarus, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, various African states, and most notably Russia. Understandably, the United States’ traditionally authoritarian allies —  Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Singapore, and Israel — are minor figures in Autocracy, Inc.’s analysis of the world stage. The role they play in maintaining American hegemony, we are led to think, excuses their ruthless illiberalism at home and repression abroad.

Similarly, the often violent and expansionist foreign policy of the United States, and its sponsorship of global authoritarianism, receives almost no mention. In effect, Autocracy Inc. offers a bifurcated vision of democratic decline: narrowly obsessed with the very real atrocities of America’s enemies, at the cost of a comprehensive analysis of the global scene.

Among the tasks Applebaum sets herself is explaining the relative failure of American foreign policy and sanctions as the effect of coordination between autocratic states. The problem, she writes, is that “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.”

According to Applebaum, the tools that this “corporation” has at its disposal are the power of finance capital, invested through kleptocratic links across the globe, and “fake news” manufactured on social media and state-sponsored outlets. Divided into three central chapters — “The Greed That Binds,” “Kleptocracy Metastasizes,” and “Controlling the Narrative” — Autocracy, Inc. seeks to disentangle this complex web.

For Applebaum, “Autocracy, Inc.” succeeds against the democratic world through a series of corrupt financial flows and disinformation machines that confusingly bind ideologically distant, if not opposite, governments: “The Islamic Republic is a theocracy; the [Venezuelan] 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 to avoid sanctions.”

From Neoconservative to Cold War Liberal

The aim of Applebaum’s writing, collected largely in a series of journalistic essays and books on twentieth-century history, consists in framing contemporary politics around the anxieties, triumphs, and imagination of a center-right, animated by the spirit of an increasingly elderly, liberal, nostalgic, and hawkish elite. Like her liberal centrist compatriot, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, Applebaum got her start writing comprehensive, and entertaining, public history books on Eastern Europe such as Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (1994), Gulag: A History (2003), and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (2012).

As a commentator on elite politics, Applebaum’s credentials are impeccable. Born into an upper-middle-class, beltway, Washington DC, family and educated at Yale, the London School of Economic and St Anthony’s College, Oxford (a specialist in area studies and international relations), Applebaum found herself eavesdropping along the corridors of power as a journalist at the Economist by the age of twenty-four in 1988, reporting from Warsaw. The defeat of Communism and the collapse of the USSR would prove a defining moment for Applebaum, who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in person.

On leaving the liberal center-right Economist, Applebaum joined the avowedly Tory magazine the Spectator, under the editorship of Dominic Lawson, the son of Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor, Nigel Lawson. There, Applebaum came into contact with established and rising Tory right-wingers. Networks with figures like the then Telegraph journalist Boris Johnson and the philosopher Roger Scruton were forged through Conrad Black, the joint owner of both media outlets. The fact that Applebaum’s husband, Radosław Sikorski, was a member of the elite Oxford University Bullingdon Club at the same time as Johnson also helped.

Applebaum’s crusading zeal for the liberal, American-led, international order and domestic centrist politics can, therefore, be explained as a reaction to the journeys fellow conservatives have taken in the opposite direction. Indeed, Johnson has repeatedly flouted both British parliamentary norms and international law. Likewise, the late Scruton grew increasingly skeptical of American-led globalization in his last years, while building a relationship with Orbán’s Hungary: a state Applebaum considers a “soft autocracy.”

Applebaum’s critics often accuse her of being an unreformed “neoconservative,” unchastened by the failed humanitarian interventions of the 1990s or early 2000s. She certainly had, and has, important connections to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush–era figures like David Frum and William Kristol. Yet, her politics now appear to revolve around a defense of “liberal norms” and an increasingly marginal center-right politics, rather than a neoconservative celebration of “Western tradition” as such. It is from this more cautious position that Applebaum writes Autocracy, Inc.

Autocracy, Unincorporated

Autocracy Inc.’s central argument, that non-Western backed autocracies are coalescing into a coherent bloc, seems to reflect Applebaum’s earlier work and expertise in twentieth-century history. But her career-long obsession with drawing analogies from twentieth-century European prevents her from perceiving the complexities of the present. For her, the grand geopolitical crises of our time can only be imagined as potential flashpoints for appeasement, as evidenced by the Munich Agreement of 1938, or incipient liberal capitalist revolutions like those of Eastern Europe in 1989. Nearly all contemporary political actors are understood either as potential twentieth-century dictators or “people power”­–style 1990s liberal revolutionaries.

Applebaum does admit the occasional caveat to her “dictatorship” thesis, arguing that: “Our conflict with [autocrats, is not] a black-and-white, binary contest, a ‘Cold War 2.0.’ Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats.” However, despite brief glimpses of complexity, an argument around the liberal-democratic “West” vs. the rest still predominates throughout the book:

Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs . . . of these older leaders, 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, more important, the liberal ideas that inspire all of them.

Inescapably, the neat binaries of the democratic West against totalitarian fascism, and then Soviet Communism, shape Autocracy, Inc.’s analysis of twenty-first-century geopolitical rivalries. Glossed over throughout her book are the internal incoherences within very weakly constituted alliance blocs.

For instance, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is often at breaking point, with CSTO members Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan engaged in frequent border skirmishes. Armenia and ex-CSTO member Azerbaijan are fighting an internecine war of ethnic cleansing. Belarus mouths support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but provides minimal functional support. China, while also financially supporting Russia, is quietly buying influence in Moscow’s Central Asian CSTO “backyard.”

Similarly, tensions between, and within, NATO and the EU are barely buried under the surface. Tolerance of American-led security policy in the form of NATO is low amongst left-populists such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Sahra Wagenknecht but also the Trump-led GOP. The latter, fully committed to Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” are convinced that there is a zero-sum game between investing in European security and preventing China’s rise. It is very likely that Democratic victory in the upcoming election could lead to a restoration of business as usual, with the United States continuing to provide security support in Europe and giving legitimacy to Atlantcist parties within the bloc. But the Sinophobic rhetoric of both parties has at least called this possibility into question.

Furthermore, NATO’s own liberal-democratic credentials are fundamentally undermined by the current membership of  “illiberal democracies” Turkey and Hungary and the historical founding membership of the clerical fascist Portuguese Estado Novo and the auxiliary collaboration of Francoist Spain. Yet the strategic importance of these nations makes them indispensable, a fact that underlies the cold realpolitik underlying Applebaum’s liberal international order.

In effect, while Autocracy, Inc. gestures toward the complexity of both twentieth-century and contemporary geopolitics, it too often resorts to liberal mythmaking. True, Applebaum admits that dividing lines between autocracy and democracy cannot be drawn neatly: “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.”

However, she cannot help but imagine non-Western autocracies somehow aligning their foreign policies, and therefore their economic policies in some, as yet unspecified, shared pursuit: “In the future, other autocracies will contribute to [support] packages. Chinese investment might be made available to the right kind of regime, undermin[ing] sanctions. Iran could tailor an Islamic insurgency to help topple a wobbling democratic government. Expertise in the international narcotics trade could be provided by the Venezuelans; the Zimbabweans could help with gold smuggling.” This kind of coordination seems unlikely. Instead, governments are pursuing short-term goals, aiding others for their own protection or profit. In short, global autocracy is not an incorporated monopoly as Applebaum suggests. Instead, it is a wild, and ruthless, free market.

One Side of the Coin

When an informed reader consumes state-backed Russian or Chinese media, they recognize that, in effect, they are on the other side of an ideological-looking glass. Much the same effect is produced by Autocracy, Inc. On a surface level, Applebaum’s analysis is functionally correct, yet it reflects strangely back on the author through omission. For instance, the book describes the anti-utopian effect of autocratic propaganda, producing a description that could equally apply to mainstream media and Applebaum’s own writing:

Many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical, 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.

Frequently, Autocracy, Inc.’s analysis comes up short, omitting a critique on Western capitalist society for the same sins, or is fatally undermined by Applebaum’s personal political positions. Indeed, there is a long paper trail of articles by Applebaum supporting: the disastrous Iraq War in 2002 through a comparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and the bombing of Palestinian media operations during the Second Intifada. In turn, Applebaum has also published articles effectively arguing against UN approval of the invasion of Iraq and the drawdown of troops from the quagmire of the US-Afghanistan war.

Applebaum’s role in manufacturing consent for US wars is quickly forgotten, or at least repressed in Autocracy, Inc. Throughout the book, she rightly lambastes the expansionist foreign policies and human rights abuses of states like Russia and China while remaining silent about her own side’s crimes and wars. Applebaum seems aware of the negative effects that US interventionism and war have had on trust in democracy and human rights law, but she is unable to identify the cause of the widespread cynicism toward the idea of the rules based international order.

Corruption or Capitalism?

Autocracy, Inc.’s most engaging analysis focuses on the oligarchical money that is effectively laundered through the financial institutions of the City of London, Wall Street, and European real estate markets. Here we get a glimpse of an Applebaum more skeptical of the effects of global capitalism, at least when it props up dictators:

Kleptocracy and autocracy go hand in hand, reinforcing each other but also undermining any other institutions that they touch. The real estate agents who don’t ask too many questions in Sussex, the factory owners eager to unload failing businesses in Warren, the bankers in Sioux Falls happy to accept mystery deposits from mystery clients — all of them help undermine the rule of law around the world.

But Applebaum never stops to ask how the kleptocratic global system came into existence. Instead, the reader is presented with historically free-floating snapshots of Russian, Chinese, and Latin American money laundering and property deals. For instance, Autocracy, Inc. details the financial outflows witnessed during Hugo Chávez’s rule:

Venezuela took in nearly $800 billion in oil-export revenues. Much of this money did indeed finance state welfare programs. But hundreds of billions of dollars from Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), the state oil company, as well as other Venezuelan state companies, made its way into bank accounts around the world. In 2017, investigators found that officials at PDVSA had been hiding millions of stolen dollars at a Portuguese bank, Banco Espírito Santo. A 2021 investigation showed that Swiss banks were hiding $10 billion.

The historical forces behind these leakages: financial deregulation, the growth of finance, privatization, and offshoring are never fully reckoned with by Applebaum: “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 . . . [this] should have set off alarm bells. That it did not is evidence of how accustomed to kleptocratic corruption we have become.” Indeed, the financial mechanisms that allow the subjects of her book to evade sanctions, while the populations of countries like Iran and Afghanistan are crippled, are only ever presented in moral terms as “corruption” and never systematically analyzed as key components of a deregulated economy predicated on anonymous flows of capital.

No Solutions

After hundreds of pages detailing the rise of dictatorship globally, Autocracy, Inc. comes to an anticlimactic conclusion about how to counter authoritarianism. In Applebaum’s mind, the solution to Autocracy, Inc. is technocratic expertise, and not economic redistribution, popular politics, or the extension of democratic practice into everyday situations like workplaces. This is understandable, given her background as a stalwart of the center-right. Rather than democracy, what we need is, Applebaum tells her readers, “networks of lawyers and public officials to fight corruption inside our own countries and around the world.”

As a solution to the rising tide of antidemocratic forces, Applebaum’s hopes are not just delusional but utopian. However, here, too, she ends up holding a mirror and revealing a bind within which the modern right finds itself. Speculatively, what divides Applebaum from a right-wing populist is her refusal to recognize that popular support must be won for elite minority rule.

In Hungary and Poland, authoritarians have achieved this by handing out cash transfers to families while suppressing civil society organizations and unions, and implementing ruthless immigration policies. But Applebaum still believes that the center, through a coalition of technocrats and the wealthy, can hold off the disaffected without making reforms of any kind. This is a conviction that shows that conservatives, faced with the hard choices imposed on them by neoliberalism, have lost their grip on reality.