Rory O’Kelly on autocrats
“Autocracy, Inc.: The dictators who want to run the world” by Anne Applebaum published by Allen Lane
This book was published last year to widespread acclaim. The world has changed so much since that it is useful to review it now to see how well its analysis stands up.
Applebaum sees all international relations as revolving around a simple dichotomy. On the one side are a group of states which are both corrupt and autocratic and on the other “democracy” or “the West”, both of which mean in effect the USA and its allies.
One characteristic of the bad states is defiance of America’s systems of unilateral boycotts and sanctions, which the author sees, rather perversely, as integral to the “rule-based international order”. It will be interesting to see if she maintains this position when the USA seeks to use its economic power to constrain the autonomy not only of Russia, China and Iran but also of constituents of the EU.
Applebaum is also concerned with autocracy in a more traditional sense and names like Putin, Lukashenko, Maduro, Xi and Mnangagwa occur copiously in her index. Names like Bolsonaro and Sisi are absent. Where she discusses autocracies politically linked to America, such as Saudi Arabia, these links are regarded as a mitigating factor rather than a flaw in her analysis.
Corruption is seen as a specific aspect of autocracies, with a main focus on Russia. Applebaum is not naïve and does understand that the main centres of corruption are in Delaware and South Dakota (not to mention the City of London). Nonetheless, she still presents it as something that “they” are doing to “us”, rather than the reverse. It is integral to her analysis that she presents Putin as having taken control of Russia on the collapse of the Soviet Union and having turned it into a mafia state. Yeltsin is another name missing from the index.
The book is notable for its extraordinary narrowness of focus. Events in Palestine, for example, are presented as part of an Iranian campaign against the USA, even to the point of seeing the Hamas attack on Israel in 2003 as designed purely to distract the USA from its support for Ukraine. The idea of Palestinian rights as significant in their own right seems beyond the author’s grasp. She often seems to think, in fact, that the sole raison d’etre of the “evil” states is to be evil, just for the sake of it.
Applebaum is certainly strongly opposed to Trump and the MAGA movement, but she sees them exclusively as tools manipulated by the Russians. The possibility that it might be the other way round is not addressed. She complains forcefully about the malign influence of Twitter/X and other social media but these are all controlled by Americans who decide what does and does not appear on them. The idea that they are all following someone else’s agenda is not credible.
In the coming months and years the perception of a state run by an autocrat surrounded by enormously wealthy and powerful oligarchs who control the judiciary, the media and all the organs of civil society will continue to terrify us. In future however we may not be thinking primarily of Russia or China.