Tim Adams writes:

A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.

“Nowadays,” Applebaum wrote, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources – the troll farms… [that] pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.”

The article took as examples the relationships between Russia and Belarus and between China and Turkey, ad hoc alliances created specifically to preserve their leaders’ authoritarian power and vast illicit personal wealth, and to undermine the chief threats to it: transparency, human rights, any pretence of international law. Three years on, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza further fomenting those forces, with the real prospect of a second Trump presidency, Applebaum has published a book-length version of her thesis: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a necessary, if anxiety-inducing read.

Applebaum, long a scourge of repressive regimes, is the author of Gulag, the definitive history of the Soviet Union’s forced labour camps. She divides her time between her homes in Washington DC and Poland – where her husband, Radek Sikorski, has recently returned to frontline politics as foreign minister (they tend to discover each other’s whereabouts in the world, she says, through Instagram posts). I met her in London for lunch a couple of weeks ago to talk about her book. She arrived making apologies about jet lag, ordered briskly, and shifted gear seamlessly into foreign affairs. The subsequent fortnight has, of course, proved a very long time in geopolitics. The UK has finally elected a grownup government; France has perhaps temporarily averted the prospect of a far-right administration; and Trump has dodged that bullet and raced ahead in the polls. Having Applebaum’s book closely in mind through all those events is vividly to sense the underlying precariousness of our world, the perils immediately ahead. [Continue reading…]