Two Books on Autocracy, Dictatorship, and Tyranny
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
By Anne Applebaum
Doubleday, 2024, 224 pp.
World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order
By Rita Abrahamsen, Jean-François Drolet, Michael C. Williams, Srdjan Vucetic, Karin Narita, and Alexandra Gheciu
Cambridge University Press, 2024, 220 pp.
Reviewed by G. John Ikenberry
Foreign Affairs, November/December 2024 (October 22, 2024)
Two studies offer fascinating portraits of the increasingly sophisticated and networked world of autocracy, dictatorship, and tyranny. Applebaum focuses on the growing connections among hard-core autocratic regimes, led by China, Russia, and Iran and joined by Venezuela, North Korea, Belarus, Sudan, and others. These illiberal states vary widely in their ideologies but are building a larger web of financial, military, technological, and diplomatic ties in their common efforts to evade Western sanctions and stay in power. Applebaum argues that what separates these autocratic states from softer illiberal and authoritarian regimes, such as those in Hungary, India, and Turkey, is the ruthlessness and reach of their dictatorial power and their deep hostility to the Western-led democratic world. Russia is the linchpin in this emerging counterhegemonic system, pioneering the modern model of kleptocracy and dictatorship, organized for the self-enrichment of its leaders, and turning its invasion of Ukraine into a wider ideological and geopolitical assault on the liberal international order. Applebaum argues that Western democracies must reckon with their complicity in the spread of kleptocratic autocracy through offshore banking, money laundering, business deals, and ideological support from right-wing fellow travelers.
The authors of World of the Right vividly map the intellectual and political ties of the increasingly globally connected radical right. Focusing primarily on nationalist and populist movements in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Latin America, the authors argue that these seemingly disparate groups have evolved into a global phenomenon. What they share is a common enemy: liberal elites, who from entrenched positions in the leading institutions of society and the administrative state, are conspiring to undermine sovereignty and traditional values. Such cosmopolitan liberals and technocratic experts threaten, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban put it, the “whole of Western civilization.” Through a far-flung network of conferences, think tanks, and political party organizations, the extreme right has increasingly configured itself as a loosely organized transnational radical movement. Its emphasis on civilizational identity and antipathy to liberal internationalism creates opportunities for entanglements with illiberal states, such as China and Russia, that share the goal of dethroning Western liberalism and the U.S.-led international order.
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