Anne Applebaum on autocracies and signs of America’s move to join them

This is The Guardian.

Back in December, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud when he announced he wanted to be a dictator, if only on day one.

He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator.

Looking around the world in the 21st century, autocracy is getting a new lease of life. Authoritarian regimes are working together, and the danger to democracies like the United States is getting closer to home. This week, I'm joined by political commentator and author Anne Applebaum to look at what the U.S. should be doing to tackle the growing threat of autocracy. I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist for The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

It's actually a book I've been thinking about for a long time. It's a network that I watched forming. It's been in formation for a decade or longer, and with the outbreak of the Ukraine war, it became clear that it's now functional.

In a special televised address on Russian state TV, Mr. Putin said Russia had been left with no choice but to defend itself against what he said were threats from Ukraine.

What the book is about is Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, plus others. you haven't thought of, Belarus, Venezuela, how they work together, how they now use common language, how they have a common set of policies, even though in many ways, they remain very different and they remain ideologically very different. But the effect of what they're doing is beginning to be clear, and, of course, you can see it in Ukraine.

Right. We will get into all of that and how it works, but obviously, because our focus, Politics Weekly America, is American politics, I'm tempted to ask you, the dictators who want to rule the world, is one of those people, Donald Trump?

My book is not about Donald Trump, I'm not writing about him, but it is true that Trump has a transactional attitude to politics, and I can well imagine him having a transactional relationship with Russia or even China, which is the kind of relationship they have with one another. In other words, I can imagine him not wanting to be the leader of the democratic world anymore, not caring about or seeing the value of America's traditional alliances, and therefore, I can imagine him reinforcing this network. There was nobody tougher than me with Russia, and yet I got along with Putin. Let me tell you, I got along with him really well, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. He's got 1,700 nuclear missiles, and so do we, but look, that's a good thing.

I mean, people listen to you on this subject because you've studied so closely and lived in the countries that we're talking about very often, authoritarian states or ones where they've moved away from democracy, and therefore, people turn to people like you for their assessment. When he says Donald Trump, something like, I'll only be a dictator on day one, is that sort of just flippant and not to be taken seriously? Or, given that you've seen societies where that's real, how seriously should we take?

I take it very seriously. I mean, in a way, it's part of a broader package. So he uses, for example, language about judges or language about the media, or even language about business people, you know, all business people should support me and the ones who don't should go out of business. I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like that, you know, in recent days and weeks. He talks about my generals in the military.

We have the greatest military in the world, and they've done a job as usual.

So we have, you know, my people, you know, in a way that reflects a deep misunderstanding of how the U.

Well, let's get to the sort of thesis of the book. You know, among the key points it makes is that these regimes work together, that they are in a sort of, hence, ink, as if they are a sort of international kind of network and conglomerate. Not to push an ideology, because we're sort of used to that. In the old Cold War era, there was a whole lot of regimes that worked together in the name of advancing communism, say.

But this is quite different from that, for exactly that reason. So there is no unifying ideology. There is Chinese communism. There is Russian nationalism. There is Iranian theocracy.

We'll come on to the Americans specifically because it's fascinating what you have to say about them. In the pretty different model, Cold War model, it was about pushing a, you know, positively an ideological system, whatever you thought about it. Here, what they have in common is a negative agenda, to tear down, condemn, undermine democracy, to make it seem less appealing to people in their own countries and elsewhere. And a big part of that is messaging, communications, media, propaganda, whichever word you use. And it's quite interesting how the categories are quite sort of porous.

So the Chinese have made a major investment in media around the world. And in some cases, this is their own media, they have television, they have internet, they have news organizations, they have news, wire service, Xinhua, alongside investing in their own media, they've invested in courting journalists around the world, in doing deals, kind of content sharing arrangements with newspapers and television stations around the world. And their big idea, actually, is to get Chinese messaging through local spokesmen. So they would rather not people learn about China or learn about China's point of view from watching Chinese state television, they would rather that people learn it from their local television in Zimbabwe or in Argentina. And so they make an enormous effort to do that.

So you'll have local journalists putting their own byline on the copy and putting a new top and bottom in it. But it's the Chinese messages somehow coming into the, you know, into the media bloodstream.

Yeah, no, no. And I think the turning point, which happened recently, was, you know, historically, a lot of this content has been fairly boring, you know, it was kind of the Chinese Communist Party saying nice things about China, which, you know, people would come to expect. More recently, it's become clear that they are beginning to also reflect Russian messaging, for example, about the war in Ukraine. China's national broadcaster, CCTV, looking increasingly like Russian state television. these days.

And so what this seems to be is that the immediate approach, particularly associated with Vladimir Putin and Russia, which was just the idea of contradictory and throwing up lots of different, you know, at one point you talk about the firehose of falses, just different versions, contradictory, a whole fog of confusion. But as long as it undermines the West, that approach, which had always been, or in the last 20, 20-plus years, associated with Russia, a country you know extremely well, that that has spread among autocracy, ink, so that the other regimes are all now in that sort of Putinist game.

Exactly. You know, they borrow ideas from one another. They borrow tactics from one another. And one of the things they've borrowed, really, it's a set of anti-democratic narratives ranging from democracies are chaotic, autocracies are stable, to democracies are degenerate, and by which they literally mean sexually degenerate, morally degenerate. Whereas in autocracies, we have traditional marriages and traditional ways of doing things, and we're more stable and safe.

Just to get us into how America is drawn into all this, there's one particular episode which you go into in some detail. And it illustrates your wider thesis very well, but also how America gets drawn in. And that is the story of the biolabs. So just explain what this was, and how it, sort of, you know, took wing as a theme, and how America comes into it.

So, immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a rumor spread on the internet, but not just on the internet. It was stated by Russian diplomats, Russian foreign ministry figures.

As I said one week ago, Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories. Not near Russia's border. Not anywhere.

Nevertheless, it really caught fire. And the Russians continued to push it. The Chinese pushed it on their huge network, the one we've just been talking about. And a few people in the U.S. picked it up as well.

That is not a conspiracy theory at all.

And so there were a couple of internet accounts that picked up that story and began pushing it. You know, we're just asking questions. Tell us about these biolabs.

U.

So we don't trust these labs that the U.

Last night, we told you that the Biden administration is funding a number of secretive biolabs in Ukraine, labs that are conducting experiments on highly dangerous pathogens.

Now, that's not. And it was so effective that, something like at one point, 30 percent of Americans thought it was possible that there were biolabs in Ukraine. And, you know, there are laboratories in Ukraine, like there are in every civilized country in the world. What there aren't is laboratories manufacturing biological weapons. But whatever piece of the story they could seize, on, whatever grain of truth they were, they used it to propagate this theory.

So you make the point that there are people in America who are echoing these messages that the Western America is sort of morally degenerate, that actually Russia, maybe, is a sort of white Christian state. And you actually explain why. that's pretty shaky thinking. But do the people echoing that messaging, and I'm thinking, you know, almost at random of, say, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was there in Congress pushing very hard for there not to be American aid to Ukraine.

The federal government continues to fund the military industrial complex. And this is a business model that requires Congress to continue to vote for money, to continue to fund foreign wars. And this is a business model the American people do not support. They don't support a business model built on blood and murder and war in foreign countries, while this very government does nothing to secure our border.

Does she know she's echoing the messaging of autocracy, Inc.

I think at some level she knows. And I think some of the other people who do it know. Some people are doing it accidentally. And I wanted to stress, actually, I say this in the book, that it's not that I blame Russia for the rise of the far right in America. I mean, that has its own national and local roots.

And then the related question is, if they do know, do they care that they are funneling Russian messaging?

No, I think they don't care. I mean, so, I think they don't care. I think they would like to be aligned with people who we would consider the enemies of the United States and the enemies of democracy. And that's part of why this isn't like the Cold War. I suppose in the Cold War, there was a very small American Communist Party that was aligned with the Soviet Union, but it was really small.

And it's such a sort of head spin this, because if you're my sort of vintage, you think of a Republican Party, almost one of its core tenets was being quite anti-Russian in the Communist Party period. Now, and I think partly prompted by Donald Trump, there's quite a lot of pro-Russian feeling in the parts of the MAGA right. And yet, on the other hand, they would say they're very strongly against China. And yet, as you're showing us, the China and Russia propaganda converges. I mean, how do we navigate, how MAGA sees the world in the light of the thesis you're advancing here?

So, I mean, asking me to explain how they think and why is. maybe I'm the wrong person, you know, but I do think it's the case that the language about traditional society they picked up and which the Chinese are now doing a bit of as well. The language about, you know, the degeneracy of the United States, this is language that they find useful because it helps build their identity group. It helps them in their war against mainstream media, in their war against the American political system. And so they find it useful.

I mean, partly why I'm looking confused is that they had a summit recently, President Xi and Vladimir Putin, and said our relations have never been closer.

I think everything. in the case of JD Vance, he gets it perfectly well, but he's playing a different game. You know, he he's trying to suck up to Trump.

And so you write, a part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China and so on, but an active participant in creating them and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American Magorite also wants Americans to believe their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. I just want to pick on that very last bit, because it's such a powerful idea, their civilization dying. Why would it be in the interests of an American right winger, somebody who thinks of themselves as a big America first patriot, to also be arguing that their own civilization is dying?

Because their argument is that the left, whatever you think that means, has taken over America and that the Marxist, Leninist cabal is running the universities and the institutions and the civil service. And what needs to happen in order to restore America is that we need to destroy all of those things. Some of them really believe this, and some of them, I think, pretend to believe it. But they've constructed a view of the world in which what they call the left is so dangerous that they need to just. they need to destroy everything.

You set out the problem, as you see it, the threat is a stronger and more accurate word. What is the United States now, currently under the leadership of President Biden? What is it doing to push back this challenge to it and to democracy? And perhaps a harder question, what should it be doing? What is the solution to this big problem you've identified?

So I think the Biden administration has identified this. I mean, they don't tend to use this language so much. I mean, they do talk about democracy. They have talked about, for example, kleptocracy as a security issue. so that and this is part of the argument in the book is that one of the ways in which this world keeps itself going is through the use of money laundering and international tax havens.

But in terms of the battle over comms, over messaging in the media, social media, for example, there is that proposal of just banning TikTok because that's used, you make clear, that's used by all these actors. Would that be a part of the solution?

So, frankly, I would ban TikTok for a lot of reasons. I mean, I'm not in charge, but it is completely untransparent. We don't really know what people see on it. It is owned by China and the Chinese do know what's on it. So that's a strange situation.

And I suppose, in the light of that, users of these platforms, TikTok, Twitter, and the others need to be vigilant. And there may be a reason why you are seeing these messages, the things that are coming, the videos that are scrolling past. somebody somewhere, perhaps in Beijing or Moscow or Tehran, wants you to see that. And these things aren't all happening by accident. As you know, Anne, because you've been on the podcast before, we do like to ask our guests a what else?

My impression, and it's an impression not based on. I don't have access to any data. My impression is that he's much less influential. I actually don't know whether his little trip to Russia and his interview with Putin and his praise for the Moscow subway system really helped him. It was in a way it aligned him so obviously with the very far left of the 1930s and 1940s, who used to go to the Soviet Union and say how great it was, that I think it put a lot of people off.

And it was terrible timing. Wasn't he praising Moscow just when Alexei Navalny died? I think it was the very same week, so his timing was off too. The book is Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World. Anne Applebaum, thanks so much for talking to me for Politics Weekly America.

Thank you. Thank you.

And we'll add a link to where you can get your hands on the book, Autocracy, Inc.

This is The Guardian.