Anne Applebaum returning from Munich: farewell to America

 End of an Era 

After Munich 

ANNE APPLEBAUM FEB 20

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The first Munich Security Conference was held in 1963, on the initiative of Ewald Von Kleist, a member of the anti-Nazi resistance. The original purpose was to bring together Germans, Americans and other Europeans for an annual discussion of security, and an annual reinforcement of the shared transatlantic commitment to democratic values and the rule of law. Von Kleist hoped, by doing so, to prevent a return of the fascist regime he hated. 

Over the years the conference grew bigger. Senator John McCain famously brought a a planeload of Americans every year - other Senators, members of Congress, journalists, security analysts. The American Vice-President and the German Chancellor usually make speeches. Foreign and defense ministers from across the NATO alliance come too. At some point it grew too big: at the height of the conference, on Saturday morning, it can be too crowded to walk across the lobby of the hotel that hosts the event. 

I have been to many Munich conferences, including the remarkable one that took place in 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when everyone present vowed to help Ukraine (and yet Zelensky went home to fight alone). This one was different. Vice President JD Vance arrived intending not to express solidarity, or even to solve common problems. He wanted to blow up the transatlantic alliance, and he succeeded. 

In a way, this was helpful: Vance clarified the Trump administration’s position on alliances, especially in Eurpe. It took me a few days to process what had happened, but I wrote about this dramatic shift today: 

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.

The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end.

Vance’s speech was followed by revelations of the extraordinary “deal” that the U.S. Treasury Secretary offered to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a few days ago. Several people in Munich had seen it: 

It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraphreported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.

Having offered Ukraine more or less what the Versailles Treaty offered a defeated Germany, President Trump then launched an extraordinary, dishonest attack on Zelensky. I corrected a few of his points: 

No, Ukraine did not start the war; Russia launched the invasion, Russia is still attacking Ukraine, and Russia could end the war today if it stopped attacking Ukraine. No, the U.S. did not spend “$350 billion” in Ukraine. No, Volodymyr Zelensky does not have “four percent” popularity; the real number is more than 50 percent, higher than Trump’s. No, Zelensky is not a “dictator”; Ukrainians, unlike Russians, freely debate and argue about politics. But because they are under daily threat of attack, the Ukrainian government has declared martial law and postponed elections until a ceasefire. With so many people displaced and so many soldiers at the front line, Ukrainians fear an election would be dangerous, unfair, and an obvious target for Russian manipulation, as even Zelensky’s harshest critics agree.

I cannot emphasize enough the dramatic nature of this change. America has switched side, not only in Ukraine, but also more broadly in the war of ideas. Read the whole article (it’s a gift link) and my recommendations for Europe, right here:

Textos mais acessados na página Paulo Roberto de Almeida em Academia.edu: Anne Applebaum em primeiro lugar

 Uma pequena visita ao Analytics de minha página em Academia.edu: 

O arquivo mais requisitado, no mundo anglo-saxão, foi o de Anne Applebaum, que remonta ainda ao fatídico ataque à democracia americana pelos trumpistas revoltados (e incitados pelo "seu" presidente) pela derrota de Trump. Na verdade, são dois os artigos, uma versão resumida, que aparece em primeiro lugar, e a versão original, que aparece em sétimo lugar. Conjuntamente, tiveram mais de 1.300 acessos, mas a versão reduzida teve 365 acessos nos últimos 30 dias, ou seja, no mês de janeiro (que corresponde à segunda posse do presidente criminoso).

Anne Applebaum se pergunta: "Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?"

Mas, isso foi em 2020, quando ela se perguntava por que os representantes republicanos não se revoltavam contra a tentativa de golpe. Acho que Anne Applebaum precisa fazer um novo artigo sobre as loucuras comerciais de Trump, que atingem prejudicialmente o próprio povo americano. 

O outro mais acessado, também no exterior (e não sei porque acessaram pela minha página) foi o arquivo sobre o potencial militar das grandes potências, e dos países em geral, tanto na versão de 2024, quando na de 2023. Depois vem o "declínio do Ocidente", tema angustiante, ao que parece.

Outro, tema da moda, é meu capítulo sobre "assédio no Itamaraty", numa obra coletiva sobre o mesmo tema no serviço público.

Analytics em 3/02/2025 (30 dias de acessos)

 

Title	30 Day Views	All-Time Views
History Will Judge the Complicit - Anne Applebaum (Abridged version)	365	658
The Military Balance 2024	287	454
The Military Balance 2023 International Institute for Strategic Studies	271	4,929
4688) Emmanuel Todd: La Defaite de l'Occident: notas de leitura (2024)	104	321
2784) Academia.edu: uma plataforma de informação e colaboração entre acadêmicos (2014)	97	2,641
4051) Assedio institucional no Itamaraty: breve abordagem e depoimento pessoal (2021)	92	92
History Will Judge the Complicit - Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic, June 2020)	67	675

 

 Visitem minhas páginas: 

https://unb.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Paulo_Almeida2

E meu blog: diplomatizzando.blogspot.com

A linguagem de Trump, como a de Hitler, de Stalin e outros ditadores - Anne Applebaum

 

On vermin 

Some closing thoughts 

ANNE APPLEBAUM NOV 1

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A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a collection of Hitler’s speeches and started going through them. I also searched my own files, especially the notes I took when working years ago in Russian archives. I was looking for the word “vermin.” Also “parasite.” And, in the Hitler speeches, references to “blood.” 

The result was an article that mostly just quoted Donald Trump, noting that some of language he uses comes directly from the 1930s. Not just Hitler but Stalin, Mao and the East German Stasi liked to talk about their enemies as vermin and parasites who “poison the blood” of the nation: 

The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponentsas “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this:Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

I also tried to find previous examples US presidents or presidential candidates over the past century talking like this. But I found that even the most openly racist figures did not.

George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

This was a fairly straightforward argument, mostly just quotations. Read the whole thing here:

Trump's language, from The Atlantic

I was not the only person to hear these historical echoes in Trump’s speech. General John Kelly, the former chief of staff in Trump’s White House, has also described, on the record, in both the New York Times and the Atlantic, how Trump would frequently praise Hitler’s generals. Not only did Kelly use the word ‘fascist’ to describe Trump, thirteen former Trump White House officials signed a statement agreeing with him. 

But not everybody agreed. Normally I wouldn’t write about reactions to my writing: I have opinions and others have them too. But this time, the response of Trump supporters - or rather, people who are going to vote for Trump because he might lower their taxes – interested me, because it reminded me of things I’ve seen in other places.  Other than the usual suspects – posters on 4chan, the website of Russia Today, and Elon Musk - I also got a response from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Under the headline “the fascist meme re-emerges,” the editorial board dismissed my article and others as “hyperbole,” said that there’s nothing to worry about and, tellingly, threw some insults at Joe Biden. A couple of weeks later the historian Niall Ferguson, writing in the Daily Mail, dismissed the whole conversation about “fascism” and then attacked Kamala Harris as undemocratic on the grounds that some people around her have argued for constitutional change. This is a phenomenon that the Poles call symmetrism: whenever something ugly emerges about  someone in your political camp, search immediately for something ugly to say about your opponents, whether or not it is equivalent. 

Something else was going on too. These are intelligent, well-read Trump supporters; they also hear the echoes from history, but they don’t want to draw conclusions from what they are hearing. They belittle, undermine, excuse and ignore his language, his scorn for the rule of law, his allusions to violence and his constant predictions of chaos because if they were to take this language seriously, then they would also have to draw uncomfortable conclusions about themselves. 

With just a few days to go, let me step back and make the case, once again, for why Trump’s language, and Trump’s propaganda, matter so much. Do note that, despite the criticism, it has not stopped. Right up until the final moments of the campaign, Trump was still casting his opponents as “enemies,” as was everyone around him. At his Madison Square Garden rally, one speaker after the next described Puerto Rico as “garbage,” Harris as “the anti-Christ” and Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch.” At an event with Tucker Carlson on Thursday, he called for violence against Liz Cheney: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."

Trump will not personally try to kill Cheney. But he wants us to get used to the idea that someone might, and that would be ok. Also, he wants us to get used to the idea that he might transgress, break the law - or try, once again, to steal the election. 

As I wrote, again in the Atlantic, 

You are meant to accept this language and behavior, to consider this kind of rhetoric ‘baked in’ to any Trump campaign. You are supposed to just get used to the idea that Trump wishes he had ‘Hitler’s generals’ or that he uses the Stalinist phrase ‘enemies of the people’ to describe his opponents. Because once you think that’s normal, then you’ll accept the next step. Even when that next step is an assault on democracy and the rule of law.’”

This campaign has had a purpose. It has prepared Americans - even serious, establishment historians, or members of the Wall Street Journal editorial board - to accept what comes next. If Harris wins on Tuesday, you can expect a massive campaign to change the result. Accusations that “illegal immigrants” are voting, for which there is absolutely no evidence; shenanigans with vote certification; maybe even games played by the House of Representatives. 

Again, read the whole article here: 

Trump Wants You To Think This is Normal

And if Trump wins? He and the people around him have already told us what they will do. They will seek to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and it will become reality. The Justice Department, the FBI, the IRS and maybe others will focus on harassing Trump’s enemies in the media and in politics. Whole branches of the federal government will be farmed out to cronies who will build kleptocracy on a new scale. 

These changes will not come overnight. They will happen slowly, over time, as they did in Hungary, Venezuela or Turkey. And at each stage, there will be people arguing that we should accept or ignore them. 

Don’t listen to them. And do vote. 

Read my book, Autocracy Inc

Listen to Autocracy in America

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Autocracy Inc. de Anne Applebaum, Introdução (Inteligência Democrática)

 Autocracy Inc. de Anne Applebaum

Inteligência Democrática, 4/08/2024

 

Reproduzimos abaixo, numa tradução automática do ChatGPT4, a introdução do mais recente livro de Anne Applebaum (2024), Autocracy Inc. Os ditadores que querem governar o mundo. O PDF com o texto integral pode ser baixado aqui: APPLEBAUM Autocracy, Inc.

 

INTRODUÇÃO

Todos nós temos em nossas mentes uma imagem caricatural de um estado autocrático. Há um homem mau no topo. Ele controla o exército e a polícia. O exército e a polícia ameaçam o povo com violência. Existem colaboradores malignos e, talvez, alguns dissidentes corajosos.

Mas, no século 21, essa caricatura pouco se assemelha à realidade. Hoje em dia, as autocracias não são dirigidas por um único homem mau, mas por redes sofisticadas que dependem de estruturas financeiras cleptocráticas, um complexo de serviços de segurança — militares, paramilitares, policiais — e especialistas tecnológicos que fornecem vigilância, propaganda e desinformação. Os membros dessas redes estão conectados não apenas entre si dentro de uma dada autocracia, mas também a redes em outros países autocráticos, e às vezes em democracias também. Empresas corruptas controladas pelo estado em uma ditadura fazem negócios com empresas corruptas controladas pelo estado em outra. A polícia em um país pode armar, equipar e treinar a polícia em muitos outros. Os propagandistas compartilham recursos — os fazendeiros de trolls e as redes de mídia que promovem a propaganda de um ditador também podem ser usados para promover a de outro — bem como temas: a degeneração da democracia, a estabilidade da autocracia, o mal dos Estados Unidos.

Isso não quer dizer que há uma sala secreta onde os caras maus se encontram, como em um filme de James Bond. Nem nosso conflito com eles é um concurso binário preto-e-branco, uma “Guerra Fria 2.0.” Entre os autocratas modernos estão pessoas que se autodenominam comunistas, monarquistas, nacionalistas e teocratas. Seus regimes têm raízes históricas diferentes, objetivos diferentes, estéticas diferentes. O comunismo chinês e o nacionalismo russo diferem não apenas entre si, mas também do socialismo bolivariano da Venezuela, do Juche da Coreia do Norte ou do radicalismo xiita da República Islâmica do Irã. Todos eles diferem das monarquias árabes e outros — Arábia Saudita, Emirados, Vietnã — que em sua maioria não buscam minar o mundo democrático. Eles também diferem das autocracias mais suaves e democracias híbridas, às vezes chamadas de democracias iliberais —Turquia, Cingapura, Índia, Filipinas, Hungria — que às vezes se alinham com o mundo democrático e às vezes não. Ao contrário de alianças militares ou políticas de outras épocas e lugares, este grupo opera não como um bloco, mas sim como uma aglomeração de empresas, vinculadas não pela ideologia, mas sim por uma determinação implacável e única de preservar sua riqueza e poder pessoal: Autocracia, Inc.

Em vez de ideias, os homens fortes que lideram a Rússia, China, Irã, Coreia do Norte, Venezuela, Nicarágua, Angola, Mianmar, Cuba, Síria, Zimbábue, Mali, Bielorrússia, Sudão, Azerbaijão e talvez outras três dúzias compartilham uma determinação de privar seus cidadãos de qualquer influência ou voz pública reais, de lutar contra todas as formas de transparência ou responsabilidade, e de reprimir qualquer um, em casa ou no exterior, que os desafie. Eles também compartilham uma abordagem brutalmente pragmática da riqueza. Ao contrário dos líderes fascistas e comunistas do passado, que tinham máquinas partidárias atrás deles e não exibiam sua ganância, os líderes da Autocracia, Inc., muitas vezes mantêm residências opulentas e estruturam grande parte de sua colaboração como empreendimentos lucrativos. Seus vínculos entre si e com seus amigos no mundo democrático são cimentados não por ideais, mas por negócios — negócios projetados para atenuar as sanções, trocar tecnologia de vigilância, ajudar uns aos outros a enriquecer.

(...) 

(+ 11 páginas)

Leia a íntegra neste link: 

https://www.academia.edu/122602843/Autocracy_Inc_Anne_Applebaum_Introdu%C3%A7%C3%A3o_2024_

Venezuela’s Dictator Can’t Even Lie Well - Anne Applebaum (Open Letters)

 Venezuela’s Dictator Can’t Even Lie Well

Nicolas Maduro stole the election - or wants to - but that's not the end of the story 

ANNE APPLEBAUM Open Letters, AUG 1 I visited Venezuela in February of 2020, and saw what two decades of institutional destruction can achieve. I wrote about it at the time: the article was Venezuela is the Eerie Endgame of Modern Politics (and that’s a gift link). It was a haunting, strange visit. Caracas is a once-beautiful city that is now pockmarked by empty office buildings and scarred by neglect. People kept telling me not just about the destruction wrought by bad economic ideas, but also by bad political ideas. Here is an excerpt from my article: Despite the clear historical echoes, the cause of the crisis in Venezuela is not merely the familiar, fanatical application of Marxist theory. If some elements of recent Venezuelan history sound amazingly like a replay of Soviet history, other elements strongly resemble the more recent histories of Russia, Turkey, and other illiberal nationalist regimes whose leaders slowly chipped away at civil rights, rule of law, democratic norms, and independent courts, eventually turning their democracies into kleptocracies. This process also took place in Venezuela. Like the destruction of the economy, the destruction of the political culture took some time, because there were several decades’ worth of democratic institutions to destroy. From having once been a democracy, and the most prosperous country in South America, Venezuela has been reduced to the status of the poorest. Venezuela has produced more refugees than Ukraine, and has food and fuel shortages, despite being an oil producer. So many people have tried to change the state. But violence and bribery, plus the support of the world’s autocrats - a major theme of my new book, Autocracy Inc - has helped the regime stay in power:  Since 2008, the U.S. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors have increased sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers and security technology to the country’s rulers. The Venezuelan regime uses apps and online surveillance technology purchased from China to monitor the public. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags.  This week, the country suddenly has a new opportunity. The democratic opposition, now well organized and unified, has just won an election. Maduro is once again trying to steal it, but there is reason for optimism. Leopoldo López, one of the leaders of the opposition, now in exile after seven years in prison and house arrest, was in Washington this week and I had the chance to speak to him. I wrote about that too. Here is an excerpt from that article, Venezuela's Dictator Can't Even Lie Well, followed, again, by a gift link to the whole thing.  As we were speaking, Leopoldo López’s telephone kept buzzing. The national director of his political movement, Voluntad Popular, had just been arrested in Caracas. López had spoken to Freddy Superlano earlier in the morning. “I know they are coming for me, but I’m not scared,” Superlano had told him. Well, López had responded, “prison is not the end of the world.” López knows about Venezuelan prisons because he spent more than three years in them; three years of house arrest followed. The charges were trumped up. His real crime was first to be elected mayor of Chacao, a part of Caracas; then to become one of Venezuela’s most popular opposition leaders; then to be a leader of mass protests. He finally escaped the country in 2020 and now lives mostly in Spain. But he was in Washington yesterday, two days after Sunday’s dramatic Venezuelan presidential election, and we had a chance to speak. The conversation took place at an extraordinary, almost giddy moment. In the hours after the polls closed, much of the international media had refrained from stating the obvious. “BREAKING,” the Associated Press tweeted on Monday: “Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is declared the winner in the presidential election amid opposition claims of irregularities.” But by yesterday morning, it was absolutely clear that the election was not merely irregular or tainted or disputed—the election had been stolen. The reaction was immediate. Not just marches, not just protests, but assaults on the symbols of the regime, including monuments to Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. “All throughout the country,” López said, “people are tearing down the statues of Chávez. And it’s not just the fact that they are tearing down the statues, it’s the way in which they’re tearing them down—like after the fall of the communist regimes in 1989, we are seeing massive emotional engagement with this. I cannot tell you if it’s going to be days or weeks, but I believe that we are witnessing the end of the dictatorship.” This is a real change. Also, from Venezuela's Dictator Can't Even Lie Well:  The sudden sense of hope, possibility, and optimism that López radiated amid all this is difficult to capture in words. We in the democratic world take regular, orderly political change for granted. In Venezuela, millions of people have worked for years to get to this point, just to experience a moment when change might be possible. López first ran for office in 2000. Machado was a candidate for president the first time back in 2012. Since then, the destruction of the Venezuelan economy has accelerated; the mass exodus of Venezuelans has increased; the hopelessness and cynicism have deepened. Just a tiny shaft of light is enough to cheer even people who gave up long ago.  https://substack.com/redirect/54d74136-e9e2-4f93-833b-71846985babb?j=eyJ1IjoiOG1hOTIifQ.cIj3zdxxgLAE0Kc2Pv6DJk4AEqMTg7YdnfnuGKbdL0Y

Anne Applebaum: Presentation of her book: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World

Anne Applebaum

Presentation of her book:  Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World

Five weeks from now, my new book will be published: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World. It’s a short book, an argument, really, about the way the world now works. I think of it as the opening of a discussion rather than a definitive statement. At the center of the book is a network (not an axis, alliance or bloc) of dictatorships: Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, Belarus, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, North Korea plus a dozen-odd others who are seeking to change the international system in order to keep their regimes in power and to preserve their leaders’ wealth. They are not united ideologically. They do not meet either openly or secretly to make policy. They have many conflicts with one another. 

The only thing that bring them together is their dislike of the democratic world, whose language and ideals are a threat to their form of power. The book focuses on the things they have in common: kleptocracy, information war tactics, diplomatic and military collaboration and a common approach to dissent. 

pre-order Autocracy Inc

pre-order Autocracy Inc (UK)

For a deeper, pre-publication dive - this is the introduction: 

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality.

Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services— military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.

This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t.

Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc. Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.

They also share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth. Unlike the fascist and communist leaders of the past, who had party machines behind them and did not showcase their greed, the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures. Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals but through deals—deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.

Autocracy, Inc., also collaborates to keep its members in power. Alexander Lukashenko’s unpopular regime in Belarus has been criticized by multiple international bodies—the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—and shunned by its European neighbors. Many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the United States or the EU. The national airline, Belavia, cannot fly to European countries.

And yet, in practice, Belarus is not isolated at all. More than two dozen Chinese companies have invested money in Belarus, even building a China-Belarus Industrial Park, modeled on a similar project in Suzhou. Iran and Belarus exchanged high-level diplomatic visits in 2023. Cuban officials have expressed solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN. Russia offers markets, cross-border investment, political support, and probably police and security services too. In 2020, when Belarusian journalists rebelled and refused to report a false election result, Russia sent Russian journalists to replace them. In return, Belarus’s regime has allowed Russia to base troops and weapons on its territory and to use those assets to attack Ukraine.

Venezuela is also, in theory, an international pariah. Since 2008, the United States, Canada, and the European Union have ramped up sanctions on Venezuela in response to the regime’s brutality, drug smuggling, and links to international crime. Yet President Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans from Russia, which also invests in Venezuela’s oil industry, as does Iran. A Belarusian company assembles tractors in Venezuela. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers and security technology to its counterparts in Caracas. Chinese-made water cannons, tear-gas canisters, and shields were used to crush street protesters in Caracas in 2014 and again in 2017, leaving more than seventy dead, while Chinese-designed surveillance technology is used to monitor the public too. Meanwhile, the international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime, along with their entourages and families, well supplied with Versace and Chanel.

The Belarusian and Venezuelan dictators are widely despised within their own countries. Both would lose free elections, if such elections were ever held. Both have powerful opponents: the Belarusian and the Venezuelan opposition movements have been led by a range of charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have inspired their fellow citizens to take risks, to work for change, to come out onto the streets in protest. In August 2020, more than a million Belarusians, out of a population of only ten million, protested in the streets against stolen elections. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans repeatedly participated in protests across the country too. If their only enemies had been the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime or the brutal, ugly Belarusian regime, these protest movements might have won.

But they were not fighting autocrats only at home; they were fighting autocrats around the world who control state companies in multiple countries and who can use them to make investment decisions worth billions of dollars. They were fighting regimes that can buy security cameras from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they were fighting against rulers who long ago hardened themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Autocracy, Inc., offers its members not only money and security but also something less tangible: impunity.

The conviction, common among the most committed autocrats, that the outside world cannot touch them—that the views of other nations don’t matter and that no court of public opinion will ever judge them—is relatively recent. Once upon a time the leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the twentieth century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system, and they objected when it was criticized. They at least paid lip service to the aspirational system of norms and treaties set up after World War II, with its language about universal human rights, the laws of war, and the rule of law more generally. When the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev stood up in the United Nations and banged his shoe on the table, as he famously did in the General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate said that Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe had been “deprived of political and civil rights” and “swallowed up by the Soviet Union.” Khrushchev felt it was important to object.

Even in the early part of this century, most dictatorships hid their true intentions behind elaborate, carefully manipulated performances of democracy. Today, the members of Autocracy, Inc., no longer care if they or their countries are criticized or by whom. Some, like the leaders of Myanmar and Zimbabwe, don’t stand for anything beyond self-enrichment and the desire to remain in power, and so can’t be embarrassed. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela treat criticism from abroad as evidence of the vast imperial plot organized against them. The leaders of China and Russia have spent a decade disputing the human rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many around the world that the treaties and conventions on war and genocide—and concepts such as “civil liberties” and “the rule of law”—embody Western ideas that don’t apply to them.