Anne Applebaum: Autocracy Is “Infecting U.S. Politics”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, next, in a momentous deal struck between Moscow and several western nations, the biggest prisoner swap since the Cold War happened last week. Twenty-four detainees were returned to their home soil, including American Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Many of those released by Russia were opposition figures, captured for their criticism of the Kremlin. In her new book, “Autocracy, Inc.,” journalist Anne Applebaum argues that today’s dictators, though fronted by one figure, are helped up by a series of complex networks. And she joins Walter Isaacson to discuss this phenomenon.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And Anne Applebaum, welcome back to the show.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, AUTHOR, “AUTOCRACY, INC.”: Thanks for having me back.

ISAACSON: Your latest book is “Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.” The word inc. in the title suggests the relationship isn’t just a political one, there’s sort of a business one. Explain that.

APPLEBAUM: So, the book describes a network. It’s not an alliance and not really even an axis. It’s a network of dictatorships who have no — nothing in common ideologically. They don’t — we’re talking about nationalist Russia and communist China and Bolivarian socialist Venezuela and theocratic Iran, but they do share interests. And I was looking for a metaphor to describe their relationship. And the best one I could come up with is a kind of big international corporation where they have their own — you know, they each have their own policies at home, their own interests, but they do have an overall set of group interest, and some of them are financial. They do deals in one another’s countries. They sell — China sells surveillance equipment to the members of Autocracy, Inc. The Russians sell weapons to the members of Autocracy, Inc., or sometimes supply mercenaries. But they also — they cooperate in other ways, militarily in information and in shared narratives, as well.

ISAACSON: So, you’re talking about a particular group, attitudes towards us, part of an axis of resistance in some ways to western liberal democracies, and autocratic, tend to be kleptocratic. Tell me who the five or six top countries in that camp are.

APPLEBAUM: Well, the three largest are Russia, China, and Iran, and they’re the most important. They’re the most aggressive and they have the most — you know, the most influence around the world. I would add to that Venezuela and Cuba in Latin America. Nicaragua, I mean, some of these are less important countries. You know, in Africa, there’s a group of countries that are already very heavily influenced by Russia. So, Central African Republic or Mali. In my book, I write a lot about Zimbabwe, which is a country that interests me partly because I know — I’ve met some of the Venezuelan leaders. And I — you know, they’re really brave extraordinary people. And so — you know, and you begin to see how this group is working together when you look at how they come to one another’s aid.

ISAACSON: You say they have not much ideologically in common. And indeed, a very left-wing socialist, Maduro in Venezuela is part of Autocracy, Inc. and so, is Putin, who’s a right-wing autocrat, nationalist. And yet, we’re seeing Russia and Venezuela, or at least Maduro, coming together. Explain what’s happening there and how that fits into the theme of your book.

APPLEBAUM: So, they don’t have the same ideology, they don’t use the same language. And you’re right, the Venezuelan regime describes itself as a regime of the left, and Russia is aligned more with the right or the extreme right or far right. But they do have common enemies, and their enemies are anybody who uses the language of rights, of transparency, of the rule of law. You know, those are their enemies. And of course, that means their most important enemy is us, meaning all of us who live in the democratic world who use that language, but it also means their own opposition. So, whether it’s the Venezuelan democratic opposition, or whether it was the Navalny movement in Russia, they see them as opponents. And so, that’s why you see, you know, in the last few days, stories of Putin sending mercenaries to Venezuela to help defend Maduro. Maduro has just run an election. He lost very badly. It was actually a landslide for his opponent. The opposition was well prepared and they proved they have the documents to show that it was a landslide. He’s not accepting the electoral result. And for Putin, the idea that — and dictator like Maduro, who seeks to rule with absolute power, like he does, with no opposition and no media and no — and a tame judiciary, the idea that he would lose to an election is damaging to Putin. And so, Putin sees it is in his interest, maybe it’s in his financial interest as well, to try to help keep Maduro in power. And particularly if we get to a moment when the Venezuelan army is no longer reliable, which apparently some parts of it aren’t, you could see Maduro relying on the troops or the mercenaries or the weapons of other countries. And that is how these regimes now work together. They actively try to keep one another in power. And again, it’s not about sharing an ideology, it’s about defending one another — defending themselves against the language and the actions of the democratic world.

ISAACSON: So, in the great sweep of history, which you’ve written about, including the “Twilight of Democracy,” your last book, we’ve moved away from a grand ideological cold war of communism versus free market capitalism, let’s say, and now, left to right haven’t become particularly useful. But we saw both in your book, the “Twilight of Democracy,” people who were anti-democratic aligning with each other. And now, in your book, “Autocracy, Inc.,” people who are autocratic aligning with each other. To what extent are those related phenomenon?

APPLEBAUM: They’re related. I mean, I don’t want to confuse everything. I mean, I think the world of genuine autocracy of dictatorship is different, even from the illiberal world. I don’t think, you know, what happens in the United States or in European countries is exactly the same as what happens in Russia or China. But I do think there is a kind of battle of ideas going on, and it is between people who believe there should be a powerful executive, you know, a leader who has no checks and balances, you know, closed states against people who believe that there should be checks and balances. There should be the rule of law. Citizens should have more influence over their governments. You know, there’s now a kind of contest between open societies and closed societies.

ISAACSON: Well, wait, wait, wait. I’m going to interrupt you here because I’m hearing you, what you’re saying, and there’s a little bit of echoes of Trump in what you just said, which is above the rule of law and finding it. Do you feel that’s infecting U.S. politics? And can you even pin it on the Trump phenomenon?

APPLEBAUM: It is absolutely infecting U.S. politics. I don’t want to connect it directly to the autocratic world. Although, I do think that the narratives, the information operations that Putin has run in the United States and in Europe over the last few years have had an impact. The idea that autocracy is stable and safe and democracy is divided and degenerate, all that language that you can hear coming out of Russia, coming out of even some African states, you can hear it echoed in America very often, and not by people who are somehow paid by the Russians. It’s not like some kind of secret — our secret operation, but by people who also believe it. You now have a part of the American political spectrum, which I think is willing to accept a leader who has fewer checks and balances, an executive who has no — you know, whether it’s a no neutral institutions who are able to stop him, whether it’s a neutral judiciary or whether it’s a neutral civil service or whether it’s other bodies in America, there’s a tradition that the Justice Department doesn’t — you know, isn’t there to go after the president’s enemies, which is what prosecutors would do in autocracies. You have seen people around Trump talking about changing that. So, having the Justice Department be, you know, operate at the will of the president or at the whim of the president to carry out, you know, operations and investigations according to his political needs. That’s not how it operated in the past. And we could — you know, we see increasingly acceptance for those kinds of ideas in the United States. And it is one of the things that is at stake in the November election.

ISAACSON: Let me ask you a question that sounds odd, because I know where you come from and you probably know where I come from and believing in democracy and everything else. But why is it that the United States or we in the west have the right to say to other countries, this is the way you should rule yourselves. You shouldn’t have strong leaders. You should have the messiness of democracy. You should have checks and balances. Maybe they look around and say, wait, why do we need that? We looked at what’s happened to your societies. Are we morally on a high ground where we can say they’re wrong?

APPLEBAUM: So, first of all, yes, I do think we’re morally on a high ground where we can say they’re wrong. And I don’t have any problem with saying that. And I don’t think most Americans should. But secondly, you know, the disintegration of Venezuela, the crisis that, that the autocratic regime has created, you know, what was the wealthiest country in the — in South America, now, it’s the poorest. It creates millions of refugees, many of whom show up at the southern border in the U.S. You know, Venezuela is a destabilizing factor in our hemisphere and in our direct area. These countries are a problem for us. So, it’s not just that, you know, we — this is some kind of moral or, you know, philosophical issue about how people should run their countries. I mean, these — there is a — direct challenges are being presented to us, to our allies, you know, in South America, Europe, in the Middle East by this group of countries. And in addition to being a challenge, you know, kind of war of ideas, it’s — it is also a real geopolitical challenge. So, I — you know, I don’t think we can be neutral in this argument or say, we don’t care, you know, live and let live. And although, I should add that I do think there are other monarchies or dictatorships who we can have a relationship who don’t have the same focus on undermining us or destroying us.

ISAACSON: You’re talking about like Saudi Arabia?

APPLEBAUM: Yes, like — yes. Or, you know, Morocco. You know, even a country like Vietnam, which is a communist dictatorship doesn’t seem to have — has not put at the center of its foreign policy, you know, the undermining of the United States or the undermining of other democracies in its region. So, there are different kinds of dictatorships. I’m not saying that this the Cold War, and there’s some kind of Berlin Wall, and there are kind of good guys on one side and bad guys on the other. I’m saying — I’m talking about a very particular group who has a particular, you know, set of attitudes towards us, and I don’t think we can just ignore it.

ISAACSON: You use words like kleptocracy, which describe the type of governance in which people are stealing money and that sort of thing, corruption. And also, autocracy. Is there some interrelation between autocracies and kleptocracies?

APPLEBAUM: Yes. I mean, it’s not exactly the same word, you know. By kleptocracy, I mean, not just ordinary corruption, but grand scale corruption. So, that you have a state, for example, like Russia or Zimbabwe, where a very small number of people become very rich only because of their relationship to the state, and they’re able to take money out of state coffers and privatize it and take it abroad and hide it sometimes in western financial institutions. And that’s what I mean by a kleptocracy. Very often when you have that kind of corruption, it leads inexorably in the direction of greater and harsher authoritarianism or autocracy, because once people have that kind of money then they need —

ISAACSON: Is that what happened in Russia?

APPLEBAUM: It is exactly what happened in Russia. And I tell that story in the book, you know, once you have that money, then you can’t tolerate in your society, people who want transparency or people who want the rule of law. You know, no, you need rule by law, meaning the laws, whatever you say it is, because you can’t risk some judge in a court saying that, you know, you’re — you broke the law. And so, very often in many cases, not in all of them, but in many cases, these societies are — you know, they’re run by billionaires. You know, or — you know, by people who have enriched their families or a group of businessmen who are very close to them.

ISAACSON: And that includes Putin, right? I mean —

APPLEBAUM: Absolutely, includes Putin. That’s how Putin came to power. He came to power as somebody who was part of this extraordinary process that took place at the beginning of the 1990s, whereby money went out of Russia. It was laundered abroad. It was hidden in various places, and then sometimes it was brought in, thereby enriching small groups of people. And Putin was one of the leaders of that shift. Essentially, they privatized the money. I mean, they took taxpayers money and kept it for themselves. So, you know — so, that — and very often, when you’re in that kind of position, you know, as I said, you can’t — you don’t want any opposition because the opposition would reveal that you’ve broken the law or that you’ve — or at least that what you’ve done is unjust and they don’t want to acknowledge that and they — you know, therefore, they lock up their opponents. I mean, actually Putin’s most important political opponent in the last decade was Alexei Navalny, who was murdered in a Siberian prison camp. And what was Navalny? Navalny was an anti-corruption campaigner. He didn’t talk so much about democracy as he talked about theft, and that was at the end — first of all, that was what galvanized people and really moved people all across Russia. And that was also what really angered Putin and frightened Putin and the people around him, because they know that how much money they’ve stolen, and they know how unfair their society is. And to have someone like Navalny, someone as eloquent as Navalny talking about it, genuinely threatened them.

ISAACSON: Let me read you a sentence you wrote that struck me, which is everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to the autocratic state. But then you say the opposite happened. And in fact, a broad theme of your last two books is how globalization we thought was going to make the world much more interconnected, and somehow we missed something big.

APPLEBAUM: So, we understood — we believed that somehow our ideas would – – in some kind of free market of ideas, would flow from, as we used to say, west to east, and they would inevitably be adopted by other people. And they would — you know, somehow the world would be transformed through integration. And instead — and I should say, it wasn’t just naive Americans who thought that there were Russians who thought that and there were Chinese who thought that in the 1990s. So, it wasn’t just a western idea. But instead, what happened was, particularly in Russia and in the post- Soviet world, the way that so — it wasn’t really capitalism, but the way markets were changed and the economic system was changed, enriched a very few people. And as I said, then they — then it was in their interest to remain in power. And so, the flow of ideas didn’t work the way that we thought it were.

ISAACSON: But didn’t that happen in the west as well, that somehow this globalization enriched a very few people, and a lot of people got left out, and the powerful rich stayed in power?

APPLEBAUM: That is — that’s very true. And, again, that’s part of the — I don’t think that’s the only reason, that’s not the only explanation for the backlash that we’re seeing. You know, and I think it’s more cultural and economic. But — and — but there’s — the autocratic world plays a role in that as well. The shift in the nature of the economy, the rapid demographic changes, the rapid social changes, all of that left a lot of people feeling cast aside or left out. You know, but also, any era of really rapid change tends to make people look for a single leader or an autocrat or someone who can guarantee their security. When everything is changing, people become more open to autocratic narratives. And I think that’s true as much in the western world as it is in the autocratic world.

ISAACSON: What should we be doing to fight this big trend?

APPLEBAUM: I mean, first of all, we should recognize it and name it and understand it. Secondly, we should think about cleaning up our own act. You know, you’ve asked several times about, you know, aren’t we like that too? And the answer is yes. We should clean up our own internal — the way our financial institutions work. So, to stop the money laundering, stop the secrecy, we should make our own political — the money in our political system more transparent. Again, it’s the lack of transparency, the opaqueness of our — the financial world in the political world that I think is very — is dangerous. Internationally, we should work on our alliances. We should reinforce them. And we can work — you know, many of these problems can be worked on together. You know, the United States is so much stronger when it works together with allies, whether it’s in Ukraine or whether it’s in the most recent prisoner swap, which happened thanks to the cooperation of Germany, but also Poland and several other states. Thinking about ourselves as a member of this global community that wants to protect this set of values, I think is a great guide for foreign policy. It doesn’t explain everything — again, it’s not the Cold War. It’s not like we can identify immediately who our partners are, you know, just by the kind of language that they use. But understanding that this is a global conflict is the beginning of change.

ISAACSON: Anne Applebaum, thank you for joining us. Appreciate it.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you.