In Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum sounds a warning that autocracy is not simply a threat posed by individual countries in isolation, but that autocrats, foremost Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, have banded together to destroy the democratic world. She is right, but not quite in the way she portrays. In order to understand this, it is useful to step back and understand the context for Applebaum’s book.
Financial Times journalist and author Gideon Rachman traces the beginning of the contemporary era of strongman leaders to Putin’s rise to power in 2000. Since then, we have had Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, to name just a few. Given that they have been with us for almost a quarter century, the age of strongman leaders would appear not to be a passing wave but a design feature of the contemporary global order.
In fact, the idea of kleptocracy – governance by thieves – is essential to understanding the nature of that global order. According to author Oliver Bullough, kleptocracy is for the 21st century what fascism and communism were for much of the 20th century. Fellow expert on kleptocracy Sarah Chayes defines it as the capture of the politics and economy of a country by a network of politicians, businesses and out-and-out criminals who enrich themselves by plundering the assets of the state.
Applebaum agrees. The goal of today’s autocrats, she writes, is not the pursuit of an ideological vision for their societies but rather the desire to enrich themselves, and to stay in power in perpetuity to enjoy the fruits of their plunder. Creating prosperity and enhancing the wellbeing of their citizens is far down the list of their priorities. In their pathologically narcissistic pursuit of these goals, today’s autocrats are prepared to destroy the lives of their citizens and even devastate their neighbours – in the case of Russia sending hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to their deaths.
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Central to achieving their aims of unbridled wealth and power, Applebaum continues, is their resistance to democracy. Autocrats hate the principles and practices of democracy because they threaten the secrecy and unaccountability of their activities. If judges and juries are independent, they can hold leaders to account. If there is a free press, journalists can expose their theft and corruption. If the political system empowers citizens, then citizens will most likely change the regime. The strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and dozens of other countries therefore share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice.
The kleptocratic system is enabled by offshore tax havens, shell companies and complex financial instruments created by and for western corporations and billionaires. Putin and the other kleptocrats are piggybacking on a system created by western financial institutions
Putin’s almost quarter-century rule in Russia is the chief example of a kleptocracy in which there has been a prolonged and concerted effort to ensure that decorative trappings of democracy are in place while any real democratic oversight and accountability are eliminated. In China, since the rise to power of Xi Jinping in 2013, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has identified the “seven perils” faced by the CCP as including western constitutional democracy, universal values, media independence, civic participation, and “nihilist” criticism of the Communist Party.
Applebaum’s primary argument in Autocracy Inc is that these autocracies do not only pose a threat to democratic voices within their own societies, they also pose a threat to western democracies and to the rules-based global order. She argues that the enemy for today’s autocracies is the democratic world, “the West”, Nato, the European Union and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them.
Prominent among those liberal ideas is the idea of universal human rights. The original drafting committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was united, of course, by the belief that there could be such a thing as universal human rights, a set of principles common to all cultures and political systems. Emerging as it did in the immediate wake of, and in response to, the second World War and the Holocaust, the declaration states that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind”.
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Autocrats, however, Applebaum reminds us, routinely show disregard and contempt for human rights. In 2022, for example, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described the mass arrests and torture of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as crimes against humanity. In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights for the crime of kidnapping and deporting thousands of Ukrainian children. Both China and Russia pushed back on the basis that their “sovereignty” overrides international human rights law – the very argument, not coincidentally, that the universal declaration was explicitly designed to overcome.
Autocracy Inc also sets out how, at the international level, Russia and China are working towards the emergence of a new multipolar world and, as Putin puts it, the end of the “dictatorship of one hegemon” – the United States. Sergey Lavrov, speaking soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said “The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.” What makes such statements more threatening, Applebaum contends, is the fact that there are now a sufficient number of autocracies that can support one another through trade, loans and investments to avoid the worst impacts of western sanctions. They can also share technologies of surveillance, techniques for suppressing civil society and support one another in votes at the United Nations.
So far, so true. But there are two important critiques that can be offered of the analysis in Autocracy Inc.
The first critique is that China is not Russia. Xi Jinping will no doubt be remembered for the genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong and his imposition of the type of unbridled power that the party sought to rein in after the catastrophe of Mao. Nevertheless, the CCP is pursuing an agenda of development for China and is not siphoning off the country’s riches to the point of collapse as in fully fledged kleptocracies.
Autocracies do not only pose a threat to democratic voices within their own societies, they also pose a threat to western democracies and to the rules-based global order
China also has a political system that is potentially capable of changing course, as was demonstrated after Mao by the ensuing spectacular growth in the Chinese economy and the unprecedented reduction in poverty among China’s population. Equating China with Russia closes off the possibility of change and ignores the reality that any path to a just global order involves the further development of China.
The second critique is more fundamental and has been highlighted by Guardian journalist and author Tom Burgis, among others. Burgis insists that it is a mistake to see kleptocracy in geographical terms. Kleptocracies are networks based on criminal and illicit activity and are not geographically separated into Russia, China, etc on the one hand, and western democracies on the other hand. There aren’t two systems – democracy and kleptocracy – there is one deeply interconnected system. Contemporary democracy and kleptocracy are joined at the hip. Just as there are brave democrats in Moscow and Beijing, Burgis points out, so too there are kleptocrats in London and Washington. These include the real estate agents that source property for autocrats and oligarchs, the PR companies that whitewash them, the banks and financial institutions that facilitate theft and secretly hide their money, and the libel lawyers who work to ensure that none of this is exposed.
What is more, as Bullough points out, the entire kleptocratic system is enabled by the global financial system of offshore tax havens, shell companies and complex financial instruments which was created by and for western corporations and billionaires. Putin and the other kleptocrats are piggybacking on a system created by western financial institutions. The real challenge to dismantling this system, which could secretly hold as much as 10 per cent of global gross domestic product, is not opposition from Putin or Xi, it is lobbying from western corporations and the super-rich in London and Washington to maintain the system as it is.
Perhaps the most disturbing and revealing aspect of the entire story, according to Sarah Chayes, is the dangerous degree to which democracies have now come to resemble kleptocracies. Kleptocracies are typically seen as fragile or failing states, although their elites are spectacularly successful in enriching themselves at the expense of their citizens. Chayes argues that when we look at the levels of inequality in some western democracies, the degree to which democracy has been hollowed out, and the ways in which the rules have been written for the benefit of elites, the similarities with kleptocracies become readily apparent.
In Autocracy Inc, Applebaum writes, “In no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of what we faced in the 20th century.” This is true. This time the threat does not only, or even principally, come from without. The greater danger comes from the rot that has taken hold within.
Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy
Further reading
In Thieves of State – Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (WW Norton & Company, 2015), Sarah Chayes masterfully shows how kleptocracy is largely responsible for creating and perpetuating many of today’s global crises, including acute poverty and hunger, war, religious extremism; and global inequality.
Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back (Profile Books, 2019) describes the shadow system of trillions of dollars of hidden assets that transcends national boundaries and is making the rich richer while undermining democracy and impoverishing millions.
The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth (HarperCollins, 2016) by Tom Burgis exposes the global kleptocratic networks of traders, bankers, middlemen, and corporate raiders that link with Africa’s kleptocrats to condemn millions to poverty, violence and oppression across the continent.
Richard Wood’s Psychoanalytic Reflections on Vladimir Putin: The Cost of Malignant Leadership (Routledge, 2024) is a clinical psychologist’s expert analysis of Putin’s personality and behaviour which gives startling insights into the mind of this toxically narcissistic kleptocrat.
