Chuck DarwinFears for liberalism and democracy
Autocracy, Inc review –
Anne Applebaum’s book charts the rise of the world’s strongmen.
Has the rules-based international order been defeated?
“There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real,”
Anne Applebaum writes in her new book,
"Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World"
In the eyes of many, US failure in Iraq
coupled with the great recession
discredited rules-based democracy.
Parents of privilege shielded their children from war and economic downturn.
The rest were not so lucky.
The world’s current crop of rising strongmen are not operating on a blank slate.
#Russian belligerence and the rise of #China play out against this roiling landscape,
so too the challenges of #Iran and #North #Korea.
The emergence of a reinvigorated #Brics bloc is another reminder of western unsteadiness.
Indeed the west itself
– from Hungary to Paris to Washington
– is far from immune to the trend.
“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy
but by sophisticated networks relying upon kleptocratic financial structures,” Applebaum argues.
She is a Pulitzer-winning historian, a staff writer at the Atlantic and married to Poland’s foreign minister.
Looking back, Applebaum got it wrong on the Iraq war (she had advocated regime change),
nailed it on Vladimir Putin (“personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people”)
and came close to the mark on Ukraine (“Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist”).
The strength of "Autocracy, Inc" lies in its description of 🔸how autocrats bend and distort opinion, 🔸and find allies across national boundaries.
In retrospect, the west was too eager to treat China as just another trading partner, not as a rival.
The Tiananmen Square massacre signaled what might come next.
Xi Jinping is a product of a system.
In such systems, Applebaum writes, elites operate “not like a bloc
but like an agglomeration of companies,
bound not by ideology but rather by 🔸a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”.🔸
No single caricature-like figure calls the plays alone. Rather, ad hoc collectives are driven by cash and power.
“The members of these networks are connected not only one to another within a given autocracy
but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”
Such elites have lawyers in New York and London,
bank accounts and holdings strewn across the world.
Applebaum notes that Marc #Kasowitz, who counseled Donald Trump during the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, also represented alleged US conduits for a Ukrainian oligarch.
As it happens, David Friedman, Kasowitz’s former law partner, was Trump’s ambassador to Israel.
As Applebaum writes, “the globalization of finance,
the plethora of hiding places,
and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft
now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.”
#Putin is estimated to be worth between $70bn and $200bn, wealth to rival that of Elon Musk.
#Xi and his family clock-in north of $1bn.
Applebaum examines #gas #pipeline deals between the then Soviet Union and what was West Germany. The US was rightly concerned.
Richard Nixon saw the danger that such transactions would “detach Germany from Nato”.
Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on the sale of US pipeline technology, on account of Soviet human rights violations.
Decades later, the Nord Stream pipeline emerged as a battleground between Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin and Washington.