Anne Applebaum writes:

[A]fter a well-organized, highly motivated set of armed opponents took the city of Aleppo on November 29, many of the regime’s defenders abruptly stopped fighting. Assad vanished. The scenes that followed today in Damascus—the toppling of statues, the people taking selfies at the dictator’s palace—are the same ones that will unfold in Caracas, Tehran, or Moscow on the day the soldiers of those regimes lose their faith in the leadership, and the public loses their fear of those soldiers too.

The similarities among these places are real, because Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and, until now, Syria all belong to an informal network of autocracies. Russian troops and mercenaries have spent the past decade fighting in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa. Russian political and information operations actively seek to undermine, dominate, or overthrow democratic governments in Moldova, Georgia, and most recently Romania. Starting in 2015, Russian troops propped up Assad in partnership with Iran and Iran’s proxy Hezbollah. In Ukraine, Russia’s war is made possible by drones from Iran, soldiers and ammunition from North Korea, and covert help from China. Russia, Iran, Cuba, and China collaborate to keep in power a regime in Venezuela that has catastrophically failed its people too.

Many of these are military conflicts, but Russian President Vladimir Putin also believes that he is fighting a war of ideas, and he has persuaded others to follow him. In both Syria and occupied Ukraine, Russia has deliberately backed or created regimes that have not merely sought to repress opponents but have also gone out of their way to demonstrate flagrant disregard for human rights and the rule of law, ideas that Putin claims belong to the past. When Putin talks about a new world order or a “multipolar world,” as he did again last month, this is what he means: He wants to build a world in which his cruelty cannot be limited, in which he and his fellow dictators enjoy impunity, and in which no universal values exist, not even as aspirations. [Continue reading…]