Autocracy, Inc

From the Pulitzer-prize winning, We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes,;pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don''t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren''t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan''s essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

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After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, ANNE APPLEBAUM became a staff writer at The Atlantic in January 2020. She is the author of five critically acclaimed and award-winning books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C.

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From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

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The Greed That Binds

In the summer of 1967, Austrian and West German capitalists from the gas and steel industries met a group of Soviet communists in the quiet confines of an old Habsburg hunting lodge near Vienna. The atmosphere must have been strange. Soviet troops had left Austria only twelve years earlier. West German soldiers still stared down East German soldiers across a fortified border in Berlin. Fears of imminent Soviet invasion had faded, but only thanks to the large American military presence in Europe.

Nevertheless, everyone in the room had interests in common. Soviet engineers had just discovered huge gas fields in western Siberia. New technology meant that gas was becoming cleaner, cheaper, and easier to transport. Pipelines from the communist East to the capitalist West seemed an excellent way for both sides to benefit. The group talked and agreed to meet again. The conversation then continued in other cities, moving from the price of gas to the cost of loans to the technology of pipeline construction. In February 1970, West German and Soviet officials finally concluded the agreement that would lead to the construction of the first gas pipelines from the U.S.S.R. to Western Europe.

Prior to that deal, economic exchange between Western Europe or the United States and the Soviet Union had been minimal, involving nothing much more complex than trade in icons, timber, and grain, plus a few dodgy mining deals. From the moment the hunting lodge talks began in Austria, everyone knew that the gas trade would be different. Pipelines were expensive and permanent. They could not be laid down one day, removed the next, and they could not depend upon the whim of a particular leader. There had to be long-­term contracts, and these contracts had to be enveloped within a set of predictable political relationships.

For Willy Brandt, the West German foreign minister at the time, these predictable relationships were a large part of the project’s appeal. He did not fear that his country would become dependent on the Soviet Union. On the contrary, he leaned on his negotiators, urging them to make the deal bigger. His reasoning was mostly political: he believed that a mutually dependent economic relationship would make a future military conflict unthinkable. As chancellor, which he eventually became, Brandt made his Ostpolitik—­his “eastern policy”—­one of the central pillars of postwar German foreign policy. In subsequent years, the pipelines provided a physical link between Moscow and Bonn, and eventually Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Helsinki, and dozens of other European cities. They remained at the center of German foreign policy after 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up and Germany reunited.

Along the way, Germany’s Ostpolitik also became a theory of change, explaining not merely how democracies could trade with autocracies but how they could slowly and subtly alter them. Egon Bahr, a longtime adviser to Brandt, described the idea in a famous speech in 1963, calling this concept Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement). If the West could tone down the confrontation, engage with the East German regime, and offer trade instead of boycotts, he argued, then a “loosening of the borders” might be possible. Bahr never called for boycotts or sanctions against the East Germans and rarely mentioned political prisoners, even though he knew the political prisoners were there: West Germany frequently paid for the release of dissidents from East German prisons, spending more than 3 billion deutsche marks on this strange human trade in the years before 1989. Instead of speaking clearly about prisoners or human rights, Bahr deployed what the writer Timothy Garton Ash has called “emotive imprecision” to evade the subject.

Not everyone else was so certain about the pipeline deals. Richard Nixon always believed that the Soviet Union’s true purpose in trading and talking with Brandt and Bahr was, as Nixon put it, “to detach Germany from NATO.” Jimmy Carter, who wanted to prioritize the promotion of human rights over trade, disliked Ostpolitik so much that he imposed a boycott on the sale of some U.S. pipeline technology to Germany after the Soviet Union imprisoned two dissidents, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Natan Sharansky, in 1978. Helmut Schmidt, Germa…