1117: Anne Applebaum | Inside The Fortune 500 of Modern Dictatorships

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Karma you can count on. Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Look, I can do this.

I can invade Ukraine.

I can bomb civilians.

I can kidnap children.

He's kidnapped 20,000 children, taking them from occupied Ukraine to Russia.

I can torture people.

I can defy the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, all kinds of institutional language on human rights. I can do all of this and you can't stop me.
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.
On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, Russian chess grandmaster, gold smuggler, or hostage negotiator.
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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, historian, author, and journalist Anne Applebaum joins us to discuss dictators and autocratic regimes, how and why these regimes, these crazy kooky governments work together against their own people and of course against the West, what communism might look like in America, propaganda, censorship, and more.
Anne is a great speaker and writer and I know you'll enjoy this conversation, especially if you're paying attention to geopolitics and you like those episodes like many of us do. Here we go with Anne Applebaum.
This show doesn't fit neatly into a box. It's not like, well, we do right-wing talking points or left-wing talking points.
It's almost like, okay, well, this is a person who's a little bit progressive but but also has a firearm in the house and also believes in this, but also has these thoughts about immigration and these thoughts about the economy. And so if someone's getting their line of thinking exclusively from one side of the aisle or the other, they have so many issues with me that they don't stick around generally.
That's fine with me. Yeah, I figured.
I've always found it strange though. If you think about in today's age, the more you actually think about your positions or change your mind when presented with new information, the less of a team player you are for some reason.
But don't we want somebody who takes new information into consideration and then changes their mind? And it's like, no, we don't want that. We want somebody who's cheerleading for the thing that we believed in before, even if we've long since decided that that's wrong.
We're still sticking to it. That never made sense to me.
No, and also nuance is a problem for a lot of people. But for me, there's actually there's a strange thing where I begin my career writing books about Soviet communism.
And so I'm a hero to some people on the right. And now I'm very frequently described as left wing by people on the right.

Whereas I feel that over the 20 years that have passed, I don't feel that my fundamental positions have changed at all.

I mean, I've changed my opinions about some things, but I have the same general attitude

to the world that I had and that made me right wing 20 years ago and left wing now.

So whatever.

Yeah.

It just shows you how everything is seemed to it's like your position. You think I haven't moved or I haven't moved that much.
And you realize that now you're basically a centrist when you were a Republican 20 years ago or 30 years ago. It's a little disconcerting because that shift in one direction or the other just shows you that the extremes are more polarized, I suppose.
And that leads to scary things, which you are now writing about, such as autocracies. In your latest book, Autocracy Inc., which we'll link in the show notes, I gave it a read.
It was one of those things you can kind of read in one quick airplane ride. Yep, that was the idea.
Yeah. It's not loaded with a history of the Bolshevik Revolution in chapter three.
It's like, okay, we don't have to get that much in the weeds on stuff, which I appreciate because I don't think people realize the characteristics of autocracies and they'll simply parrot news talking points, but they don't realize that there's a kind of an axis of these folks working together. And that might even be a good place to start.
Autocracies and authoritarian regimes, they seem to work together in some ways, but I always found that kind of weird because they're not aligned ideologically, right? It's not like fundamentalist Islamic regime of Iran. They don't really have a ton in common with Venezuela, unless I'm missing something.
But yet these are allies somehow. Yeah, this was actually one of the original insights that led me to write the book.
I spent a lot of years writing about the Soviet bloc and Soviet history. And back in the 20th century, there was a thing called the Soviet bloc, and they shared an ideology, and they had similar principles, at least in theory.
They even had similar symbols on their flags and so on. What we now have in the world is an alliance, but it's not really an alliance.
It's really a network of autocratic states who don't have ideology in common, who are left-wing and right-wing. Some of them are one-man regime.
Some of them are run by single ruling parties. They include communist China, nationalist Russia, theocratic Iran, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe.
I mean, these are countries that don't have a single set of ideas. They do have some things in common.
All of them are regimes who seek to rule without checks and balances, without legitimate democratic opposition, without any real opposition, without independent courts, without the rule of law. So there are countries that are run, it's called rule by law, meaning the law is what the regime says it is at any given moment.
It doesn't have any separate status. They try to rule without independent media or conversation, and that links them.
They're also linked by a kind of set of opportunistic interests. They have financial interests in common.
Quasi-state, quasi-private companies in one country invest in the quasi-state, quasi-private companies of another. That brings them together.
They sell one another surveillance technology, other kinds of technology. The Chinese sell actually surveillance technology to a lot of these countries.
They also see one another as allies in a kind of ill-defined global struggle that most of us aren't even aware of. In other words, they will come to one another's rescue.
So you mentioned Venezuela. So Venezuela is a country that is a failed state.
It was the wealthiest country in South America. It's now the poorest.
It produces more, depending on how you calculate, more refugees than Ukraine, even though it's not at war. Its economy has collapsed.
It has no legitimacy. The regime just lost an election and the opposition proved that they lost an election.
They had the papers and the documents and the data to prove it. nevertheless, Maduro, who's now the dictator, stays in power.
How does he do that? One of

the most important ways is that he has military support from Russia. He has investment from China.

He has investment from China. He has help with his security services from Cuba.
He has, and as he said, he has this weird relationship with Iran. Why do left-wing socialist Venezuela and Islamic Republic of Iran work together? Well, they're both oil states.
They're both under sanctions. They help one another evade sanctions.
The Venezuelans have lent visas, we think, to Hezbollah activists so that they can travel freely. They see themselves as united essentially against us.
And by us, I mean very broadly the democratic world, the world where, at least in theory, we believe in the rule of law and accountability and transparency. And they help one another stay in power working against us.
And they see the ideas that we represent as their biggest threat. So the language of accountability, the language of rights, the language of justice, all that language, which is, of course, in dispute in every country on the planet, but all that language is what they see.
It's the language of their own oppositions. It's the language of the Venezuelan opposition.
The Russian opposition used the language of anti-corruption. The Iranian opposition, the women's movement in Iran, uses the language of rights.
They see that language as their biggest threat to their form of autocracy. And that's the fundamental thing that they have in common.
Yeah, it's almost like corporations that happen to work together on something as opposed to nations that work together. Yeah, this is exactly the metaphor that I wanted in that, you know, it's as if there were a conglomerate of companies and each one of them had their own business model, but they cooperate where it suits them.
So where a moment of trade suits them or where they see a common interest or something that they can do together, they work together. Yeah, they help each other have their intelligence services travel around, launder money and stuff.
I mean, you see this with BRICS, right? One of the funny things that I see online a lot is like, oh, the US dollar is going down. BRICS is getting stronger.
And then you talk to somebody who is like deep Ph.D. economist or something like that that's worked for a large international organization.
They're like, BRICS, you mean the countries that can't even get along or agree on one single thing and have no reason to trust each other are all suddenly going to band together and create a non-dollar international currency

when they won't even float their own currencies on the international market?

Sure thing, buddy.

Yeah, I mean, BRICS doesn't overlap exactly with Autocracy, Inc.

Let me complicate it further.

So there are the real autocratic states.

There's also a large group of states in the middle.

And here I would put India.

I would put the Emirates.

I would put Turkey, who are their illiberal states. Some of them still have elections, some of them have some freedoms, sometimes which are more hybrid.
They're willing to work both with the democratic world and the autocratic world. Of course, many democracies work with the autocratic world too.
So it's not the Cold War. It's not as if there's a Berlin Wall, and there are good guys on one side, and there are bad guys on the other, and there are clear lines between them.
And BRICS includes, you know, just by including Brazil, by including India, by including South Africa, those are states that are hybrid. I mean, actually, Brazil's democracies.
Those are states with a different set of interests from Russia and China and Iran. Yeah, I should have been clear.
I don't mean that the BRICS countries are an axis of evil per se. I just brought it up as an idea that these countries work together when it sort of suits them.
My outside opinion, but it's these alliances, almost by definition, can't be as strong as say an alliance between the United States and Australia or the UK, for example, because if the only thing you have in common is, man, it sure is hard to make money when we're under sanctions. Man, those Americans are really getting under our skin economically.
That's sort of a weaker tie than we share hundreds of years of common values of language and culture. You've just hit on a really, really important point about alliances.
One of the things that makes the United States different from other large superpowers on the planet is that we have had for many decades these values-based alliances that are based on long-term relationships, trading relationships, cultural relationships, military ties, but also personal ties. The U.S., Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, these are countries that have worked together in ways that are deeper than mere opportunism.
And they've understood those relationships for a long time as being kind of win-win relationships. You know, they're not zero sum.
It's not like one person wins, one person loses. And you're right.
Unlike the relationships of the autocratic world, they're not merely opportunistic. They're not simply to achieve, you know, a business deal.
You know, they're meant to be long term and they're meant to last a long time. And they are, of course, right now under threat.
Look, I'm 45 years old and I'm not a historian, so you might have to explain some relatively simple things to me. I grew up in the 80s, right, in the Cold War.
And the Soviet Union, the main autocracy of that time, at least kind of pretended to care about norms and international order. When I look at these old videos, I wanted to see what the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union were saying about things just like they do now, where they sort of pretend to care about the international order when the United States does something.
But then when they do something like, oh, it's our own affair, don't get involved, right? Ukraine is a domestic affair or whatever. They pretended they cared about the superiority of, say, Soviet communism.
This system is superior. Everyone look at how well we're doing now.
It's like they just don't give a crap. You have the dictator of Belarus or Putin, for that matter.
They just flout any semblance of order of rule of law or like we follow this specific system. It's just all kind of like the mask is off and they're like, OK,

that failed. We don't need to replace it.
We can still do whatever we want. Try and stop me.
That's kind of what I see from them now. This is right.
So, yes, the Soviet Union did seek to appear to be an international law abiding state, and it took seriously criticisms of the Soviet Union at the UN. This is actually before both of our time, But there's a famous scene at the UN, you know, many decades ago when Khrushchev, who was then the leader of the Soviet Union, famously was supposed to have banged his shoe on the table.
OK. And the reason why he which, by the way, it's not clear whether it really happened, but it's one of those things is too good to check.

But supposedly banged his shoe on the table. And the reason he did it was because another delegate, if memory serves, it was from someone from the Philippines.

But I could be wrong, had accused him of violating the rights of people in Central Europe. And that's outrageous.
You know, we would never do that, you know. So what he was objecting to was a criticism of the Soviet Union was depriving of people of rights.
So you are right that what we're seeing now, this began with Russia, actually, is a group of states who no longer even pretend that they are conforming to international law. In fact, one of the primary reasons, I believe, for the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, and we're almost at the anniversary, three years ago was because, I mean, obviously, it was part of the reason was Putin wants a new Russian empire.
Part of the reason was he wanted to show that he would crush democracy in Ukraine to discourage any Russians from wanting to take that route. But he also wanted to say, look, I can do this.
I can invade Ukraine. I can bomb civilians.
I can kidnap children. He's kidnapped 20,000 children, taking them from occupied Ukraine to Russia.
I can torture people. I can defy the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, all kinds of institutional language on human rights.
I can do all of this and you can't stop me. So what he's trying to show is that he doesn't care about any of these documents, any of these laws or rules or norms from the 20th century and from the early part of the 21st century.
And they are seeking really to create a different kind of world. And Putin uses this word multipolarity, which actually, I mean, just on the face of it is a neutral word.
I mean, multipolarity means that there are lots of nations who have power, and that's obviously true. I mean, so multipolarity exists.
I mean, it's real. But he's using it in a very specific way.
He's talking about multipolarity replacing what he calls hegemony. And by hegemony, he means a world in which those kinds of laws and language, the language of rights, the language of borders, the language of the rule of law is abolished in favor of essentially a world in which very big countries get to decide what they want and little countries don't have sovereignty.
And if Russia wants to invade Ukraine, Russia gets to do that and nobody can stop them. That's the world they're seeking to create.
And those are the institutions they want to destroy. And of course, it's very dangerous because, you know, there have been many, I don't want to claim that the last 70 or 80 years have been perfect by any means, but the fact that the US, Europe, so many other countries have been able to invest so much in welfare, in scientific research, in increasing prosperity of their nations, as opposed to spending 20 or 30 or 40 percent of their national budgets on the military, this has been the blessing of the post-war world.
This is one of the reasons we've had so much prosperity. If we return to a world in which might makes right and everybody needs a huge army, then we're going to be living on a very different kind of planet.
But that is what the Russians want. And increasingly, it seems that it may even be what the Chinese want.
It seems like it. But some critics might say that's what the U.S.
wants. They're forcing NATO spending to be higher in these other countries as well.
What would you say to somebody who says, well, hey, you said these countries work together, U.S. and their allies work together? Sure.
NATO is a defensive alliance. It was created to react to attacks on its members.
That has been its role, you know, since it was created, you know, decades ago. NATO doesn't invade other countries.
NATO doesn't have plans to do so, and it doesn't talk about doing so. NATO actually, after the end of the Cold War, reduced its military spending dramatically.
And there was one moment in which there were no U.S. tanks in Europe.
You know, so the U.S. withdrew enormous forces from Europe.
The Europeans reduced their armies. NATO almost began to dissolve.
I mean, if you look at kind of the late 90s, early 2000s, a lot of conversations, you can go back and read the op-eds, people were saying, do we still need NATO and so on? But it existed as a kind of shell just in case. The return of NATO spending and the return of expansion of NATO, because Sweden and Finland have recently joined NATO, is happening because of the perception of Russian threat.
So as the Russians began to change their posture, as the Russians began to express an interest in aggression, in invading other countries, invading Ukraine, they invaded Georgia, they threatened Estonia, they've threatened everybody, they've threatened the British, they've threatened the Germans. As they began to do that in a more regular and a more believable way, everybody began to say, right, we need to think once again about self-defense.
And of course, the invasion of Ukraine was a triggering point where people saw that Putin was prepared for a very large-scale war. He was prepared for civilian atrocities, for the destruction of infrastructure, all of those things.
And that meant that NATO needed to refresh its defenses. And that process is continuing, actually.
I mean, the European countries are now almost all spending more than 2%. Some of them are higher than that.
Poland, where I live part of the time, is over 4% of its, I'm talking about percentages of GDP on the military. And in a way, it's very sad.
That's money that people aren't spending on healthcare, or, I don't know, building nice parks in cities. There are a lot of things that you sacrifice for doing that, but that's all happening because of this perception of threat.
So NATO has been an institution that was interested in keeping the rules. I mean, NATO was very Europe-focused.
The idea of NATO was that it was part of a set of European institutions that would preserve borders in Europe that would prevent the repeat of a large-scale war of the kind that everybody suffered from in the 1940s. It has never been an institution designed to project power into Russia or anywhere else.
So isn't that one of the chief allegations by Putin was that he invaded Ukraine because NATO was expanding? And you're saying, it sounds like you're saying... NATO expanded after he invaded Ukraine.
Well, that's for sure true. Ukraine was not a member of NATO and nor was it on the path to be a member of NATO.
And I have to say, even had Ukraine been a member of NATO, maybe the invasion wouldn't have happened. So one of the reasons the invasion happened was because Ukraine was a country that was in limbo.
It didn't have any real military guarantees. It did have actually there had been security guarantees signed in the 1990s, this famous Budapest memorandum signed by the US and the UK and Russia that guaranteed Ukraine's borders and Ukrainian sovereignty.
But that obviously was abandoned by Russia in 2014 with the first invasion of Crimea. Ukraine was not provoking Russia.
Ukraine was not seeking to invade Russia. Nobody was invading Russia.
Nobody was seeking to provoke Russia. I mean, NATO was a defensive alliance.
Ukraine was without protection. And that may have been the mistake.
It seems like when Putin or whoever says, hey, NATO's expanding towards our borders, they maybe were pointing to what, like Romania or something like that. I just know that it's a common refrain among people who say, well, the reason Ukraine happened was because NATO was right on Russia's doorstep.
It's a common refrain among people who are repeating Russian propaganda. Look, I agree with that.
I'm not arguing that. I'm just having you give me some ammo against these people because I see that argument a lot.
Let me go a little bit farther back in history, you know, in that case. As early as the 1990s, Russia, which had become independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union, already in 1993-94, had begun to make threatening language, threatening gestures towards some of its neighbors.
And there's a famous speech that's given by the president of Estonia in 1994, in which he was given in Hamburg, and he spoke about how happy Estonia was to be a member of Europe again. And he talked about architecture and so on.
He also talked about the reemergence of a threat from Russia. In other words, he was already then hearing language from Russia, threatening Estonian sovereignty, questioning whether Estonia was really an independent nation or not.
And there's a famous thing that happened at that speech. Again, it was in Hamburg.
There was somebody in the room who was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg who walked out of the speech.
And of course, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, it was Putin at that time.

So the language of threat that began coming from Russia towards former Russian colonies and towards former Soviet states begins already in the 90s.

In 2003, 2004 and 2005, there began to be other kinds of threats.

There's a big cyber attack on Estonia at that time. There is a record of Russia threatening its neighbors that goes back 20 years.
And so all of those neighbors, the reason NATO expanded following the Cold War was because those countries felt under direct threat and they were not wrong. So if you look at the history, it goes the other way around.
So people were clamoring to join NATO. Why did Poland want to join NATO? Why did Romania want to join NATO? Why did Lithuania want to join NATO? They wanted to join NATO because they were already felt under threat from Russia.
So in that same period of time, there were gestures made to Russia. There was a NATO-Russian partnership that was created.
Russia was invited to join the G7, which for a while was the G8. Russia was invited to a whole series of other institutions.
There was an idea that Russia was, of course, part of the WTO, but there was an idea that Russia would be wrapped into a series of institutions and would, through trade and through interaction, would eventually cease to be hostile, you know, and then maybe, you know, down the road, there was even talk of Russia eventually being in NATO. That's crazy.
That now seems crazy, but that was a moment of high optimism in the 90s and 2000s when that felt possible. And so the question that you have to ask is, why didn't it happen? And why did the Russians reject that path? And why were their neighbors so frightened of them? The U.S.
was not the power that wanted to expand NATO. It was coming from those states.
They wanted protection. They wanted to be part of Western clubs.
They wanted to integrate with Europe. And they were afraid of Russia.
And they've been afraid of Russia since the 90s. So people who don't know the history of NATO expansion and who don't understand the sequence of events and why it happened are accepting a Russian narrative about why it happened.
It did not happen because those states were aggressive towards Russia. It happened because they were afraid of Russia.
The other thing you need to know is that until 2014, there were no U.S. troops and very few NATO facilities of any kind in Eastern Europe.
You know, so there was no expansion. There was no movement of troops into Poland.
I mean, none of that happened until the invasion of Crimea, which really scared people for the first time. And people said, right, the Russians are serious.
they could really invade, and we need to be protected. Even then, a lot of it was pretty superficial.
Even up until 2022, when the second full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, there was still pretty scarce NATO facilities in Eastern Europe. I mean, that is now beginning to change.
And I mean, you've now had a big military buildup in several of the Eastern states, including Poland, but also others. But that is coming because people are afraid of Russia.
They are afraid of being invaded. They're afraid of their own cities being destroyed.
Some are under economic pressure from Russia. Some of the other tactics that I describe in the book, I mean, there's big Russian propaganda campaigns all over Europe.
There's a Russian sabotage campaign in Europe now. There have been arson attacks and bombs.
So people are now perceived that Russia is looking for ways to put political and economic and eventually maybe military pressure on Europe. And so Europeans are gearing up to defend themselves.
Is it what people wanted? It is not. You know, is it popular in every country? It is not.
Do Europeans want to pay for armies? No, they don't. Nobody wants to pay for an army.
As I said, they want to pay for health care and parks. But this is coming from a really profound shift in Russia that's taking place over the last 20 years and unprecedented levels of Russian aggression.
What do you think of the situation in Ukraine right now, the peace plan to basically just, I mean, it sounds like capitulate to Putin and cut the country in half. Do we think that that's the best way to end hostilities or do we think that's just gonna give Russia time to regroup and attack Ukraine again? So there isn't a peace plan in Ukraine.
The Twitter peace plan, the one you see on Twitter. There is no peace plan.

So this is one of this very weird phenomenon, which might even be described as experts talking to themselves. This war will be over when the Russians no longer believe they can win.
In other words, the war will end when the Russians can't fight anymore or don't want to fight anymore. And so far at this moment, as we're speaking, you know, in February 2025, I don't see any evidence that the Russians want to stop fighting.
Everybody who says there's a peace plan and that includes there was a fake one that was going around recently. I mean, there have been several.
That's probably the one I saw. Everyone who thinks there's a peace plan, they're speaking to other people.
They're not speaking to Putin himself. Maybe this could change, you know, in the coming days and weeks.
But right now, I haven't seen evidence that Putin has changed his goal. So Putin's goal is to destroy all of Ukraine, to put a pro-Russian government in Kiev, and to remove Ukrainian sovereignty.
That's why he's fighting the war. That is his goal.
He has not verbally or in any other way given up that goal. So the issue with creating a ceasefire is not persuading Ukraine to have a ceasefire.
The Ukrainians would have a ceasefire, and we could put pressure on them to have a ceasefire. But to have a ceasefire, you need two countries.
Both sides have to stop fighting. And as of right this second, I don't see that Russia's ready to stop fighting.
So I am a little mystified by what everybody thinks is the plan, because right now there isn't one.

If we were to get to a ceasefire for whatever reason, Putin wants a break or something, then we are in another wherever they draw the line. Then we would be in another danger zone, which is that a ceasefire that did not emerge from Putin deciding that he couldn't win the war would be in danger of falling apart, you know, one month or two years down the line when Putin decides to renew the war.
So the war is really only over when the Russians acknowledge that Ukraine is an independent state and that it deserves its own sovereignty. And then we end the war.
And then we can argue about where the border will be. Whatever happens over the next few months, when you hear this discussed, just remember that.
The question is not where the line is drawn or, you know, how we do peacekeeping. The question is, have the Russians given up on their most important goal? And so are they stopping because they need a pause? They're losing an extraordinary number of people right now.
I mean, just thousands and thousands of people every month. And it's something like I saw a statistic actually just today where the proportion of Russians dying to Ukrainians dying is either one to seven or one to 10, depending on whose numbers you're using.
So they're throwing fantastic numbers of people and they're dying. And I've also seen recently the Ukrainians keep track of how many objects they hit.
They have video, you know, prove it.

There are sort of video tracking of what they hit. And the Ukrainians are hitting every month, again, thousands of Russian pieces of equipment, radar, troops.
I mean, they are hitting enormous numbers of people and goods. So the Russians are losing an enormous number of people and equipment, and they won't be able to keep it up indefinitely.
What they are hoping is that support from Ukraine will somehow disappear or dissolve. That's what they were hoping they would get from the election.
They may still get it. I don't know.
We're not at that stage yet. We don't have a resolution.
But at some point, they will give up. But if that hasn't happened, then the war isn't over.
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Now back to Anne Applebaum. I've heard even if Putin did want to end the war, let's say this week, he would have trouble doing so not just because he would look really bad having not achieved his goal, but also and I don't know how much you know about this, but the entire economy of Russia at this point is on a wartime footing.
So if you just go, all right, we don't need radar tanks, guns, ammunition. It's kind of like saying, all right, no tech companies in California.
Well, that's kind of a big number of jobs and GDP that we're just turning off with the flip of a switch. So it's almost like they can't afford to stop the war at this point.
It's not something you can grind to a halt overnight without causing massive damage. Yeah, that's correct.
I mean, they've restructured their economy, which is now focused on producing military equipment. Of course, that has traps, as we know from American history and from the history of other countries.
If you're spending an enormous amount of money to produce military equipment, I mean, if you produce a car, then it exists for 20 years. If you produce a tank, it's a kind of dead-end product.
I mean, it only has one use. It goes to the war, it's blown up, and that's it.
And there's a limit to how long Russia will be able to simply pump the money it earns from oil and gas into tanks and guns and maintain the rest of the economy and maintain some level of prosperity for people. And this is actually how the Soviet Union fell apart.
So this is a story that we know. Eventually, they spent such a high proportion of money on the military that they impoverished their people.
And that's more complicated than that, but that eventually led to the end of the system. So it's not something they can do indefinitely.
This is an unrelated sort of tangent here, but why do autocratic states spend so much time disparaging the West? What does it do? I noticed that there's almost like a, it's not a part-time job, it's several people's full-time job to think of reasons why the West sucks. I see it from China a lot and I see it from Russia a lot.
I see it from other places and alliances a lot. I see it from people who pretend to be Americans a lot online as well, or Europeans.
And some real Americans who... For sure.
Actually Americans. That's for sure.
Yeah. What is the function of this? So this is because the language of democracy, which is language that quite a lot of Americans also now disparage, the language of the rule of law, the language of, you know, independent courts, transparency, accountability.
This language is the thing that threatens them the most. What is Putin most afraid of? What's the movement he worries about the most? What he worries about the most is what he saw happen in Ukraine in 2014, which was a mass uprising that was focused on anti-corruption.
So young people saying, we don't want corrupt leaders anymore. We want the rule of law.
That was actually what that moment was about. This is the 2014 Maidan, so-called Maidan revolution.
That language and those movements is the one thing that threatens them ideologically. And the same is true in China.
What was the biggest threat to Chinese stability in the last several years? It was the Hong Kong democracy movement, which also used that language. The Chinese actually came to this conclusion a long time ago.
There's the document that I cite in my book, dating from 2013, which has a marvelous name. It was written by the ideologues at the Chinese Communist Party, and it was called document number nine.
Very evocative. And the document is a famously describes a set of perils to the Chinese Communist Party.
What are the things that are most dangerous to the Chinese Communist Party? And number one was Western constitutional democracy. So the idea of Western constitutions, the idea that people should have choice, the idea that people should have rights, the idea that there should be a legal system that's separate from the will of the Chinese Communist Party.
This is the thing that the Chinese Communist Party decided was most threatening to their form of government. There is actually a war of ideas going on.
We may not know it. We might not care about it.
We don't probably wake up in the morning, most of us, thinking about the Chinese Communist Party. But at least some people in the Chinese Communist Party, they wake up every morning thinking about us because they perceive us as a threat to them.
And that's why they've gone to extraordinary lengths. They've produced huge propaganda campaigns, as you've noted, designed to smear the West, smear democracy, smear Americans.
They've looked for allies in the Western world, political parties, political leaders, propagandists, newspaper columnists who will join them in this smearing of and attacking of the West and of American and European democracy. The Chinese have invested hundreds of millions, if not more, in networks of television, radio, newspaper, media, all over Africa, Latin America.
They use those networks partly to put out this language that criticizes, roughly speaking, our values. This is something they consider to be extremely important.
It's one of the sources of their feelings of competitiveness with us. They think that their systems are incompatible with ours.
As I said, we don't think about it much. And there was a period in the 90s and 2000s when I think we hoped that we would all eventually be compatible.
We could trade on the basis of win-win for everybody. If everybody's making money, then why not keep going? And that was, I think, also, to be fair, that was what they believed at the time.
And you can find Chinese and Russian writers and politicians in that period saying exactly the same thing. But for a variety of reasons, this idea has fallen apart and they don't believe that anymore.
They believe that they are in a war of ideas against us and they need to win. So a critic might say, come on now, we spend a ton of time disparaging China, Russia, North Korea.
How is this different? It's not. I mean, we, not all of us, but some democratic world politicians understand both the economic challenge and the ideological threat that comes from the autocratic world.
And they have invested also in seeking to fight their ideas and to fight their language and to fight the autocratic narrative. This is a pretty sophisticated battle.
So there is something like an autocratic narrative that the autocratic world has been building for a long time, and you'll recognize it. It's the idea that autocracies are stable and safe, and democracies are weak and divided, and autocracies defend traditional values, and democracies are degenerate.
And they've worked on that and they've built it. And there are people in the democratic world who have tried to fight back by arguing that democracy is better and so on.
I don't think we're as engaged. We haven't invested the kind of money we are right now as we're having this conversation.
We're beginning to dismantle some of the institutions that have been used to fight that battle. USAID, for example, the American aid agency that's being dismantled this week was one of them.
So maybe we're not going to continue fighting it. But yeah, we have been fighting it for a long time.
And I think we should have been doing it more. Yeah, this is one of the things that keeps me up at night.
I know USAID trained a lot of journalists from, say, Belarus who write for Belarusian people outside of Belarus. They're one of the only sources of actual free information in Russian, for example, that these people can get.
And now they're like, what am I going to do? Take cryptocurrency donations? Who's going to fund this? So that makes me quite nervous. One thing I never quite understood, and I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this, but you mentioned document nine.
Number one thing that the Chinese Communist Party was afraid of was Western democratic constitutional democracy. How can communists who are supposedly building a worker's paradise by and for the people also find that the biggest threat to them is democracy? Isn't that governance by the people? How is that not a part of this whole idea? So it's even weirder than that.
So the Chinese would describe themselves as the real Democrats. And you can actually find documents where Putin and Xi describe themselves as the true Democrats.
So the word democracy begins to lose its meaning over time, you know, in a lot of these conversations. But, you know, the Chinese Communist Party's argument would be that the desire and will and beliefs of the Chinese people are expressed through the party.
Their idea of how the people express themselves is different. And it's not expressed through elections.
It's not expressed through competition. It's not expressed through rights.
So it's for citizens taking action expressed by the greater knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party. That's an autocratic way of thinking, you know, that the people don't participate through activism or voting or anything else.
Instead, they are represented by their leaders and the leaders wisely take the decisions on their behalf and in their favor. That is the essential argument for autocracy, whether it's in China or Russia, you know, or anywhere else.
It reminds me, North Korea has a clunky version of this, where if you ask them why Kim Jong-un, for example, is the best person to lead the country, they basically get into the supernatural elements of his powers immediately. Whereas if you ask somebody who's an educated Chinese person, why the CCP or Xi Jinping is the best person to run the country, they know better than to be like, well, he can fly on a winged unicorn.
But it's the arguments that it seems like they're making are kind of that same thing. Don't you want to know what the people want so that that will of the people gets expressed? No, no, actually, we just have this.
And then it's like word salad about how the CCP somehow can sublimate the will of the people and you don't need elections or any sort of input from them on this. It just it doesn't actually make any freaking sense when you distill it.
There's always an element of magic. Literal magic, though.
Literal magic. So I am the expression of the will of the people or I alone can fix it from our own history, recent history.
I remember reading a speech that Trotsky gave us because it's very down in the weeds and very long time ago, and, you know, before crowds. And he would talk in exactly this way, like, I speak for you, I am representing you.
Whenever you hear a leader talk like that, when he says, you know, I am your voice, that's actually a moment where you should worry, because leaders are not meant to have a magic ability to feel and embody and be the nation. Leaders are meant to make rational choices based on evidence and they're meant to consult with other politicians and they're meant to come to consensus.
That's how we do it in democracies. We don't have magic.
Yeah, I just kept thinking to myself, what am I missing? Where this isn't just a supernatural power that this person has to essentially claim to have,

or this group of

people essentially has to claim to have in order to run the country. And the propaganda from these

authoritarian regimes, it's often kind of laughable. There was back during the Syrian

Civil War, they were trying to promote, they were saying they were trying to promote tourism,

like this is a great place to go on vacation. It's like, well, except for the barrel bombs,

what are you talking about? And you said something interesting in the book that often the point of this propaganda is not to make people believe the lie, but to believe in the power of the liar. And going back to the Gulf War, there was a guy who was a propaganda minister, and he would say, the Americans are nowhere near.
It's nice and peaceful here. And you could see the explosions in the background.
And they could have not aired that. But they were just like, you know what? We don't care if you believe it.
The point is, we're saying it. That's all you need to know.
So this is another way in which you can recognize authoritarians is the repetitive and constant lying. And as you said, sometimes it's not even lies designed to hoodwink people.
You know, you're not even really meant to believe the liar. Again, there were great examples from Syria where they would describe Syria as a tourist paradise.
There are examples from recent examples from Russia. There are a lot of great old Soviet examples as well.
The point is that if you have the power to lie on TV and nobody's contradicting you, then that gives you also an extra kind of magic and it makes people afraid of you.

So the point of lying in public and constant and repetitive lying that, again, we see in our country is not just to make people believe something that's not true. It's also to express a form of power.
It's almost like if you just turn the level of cynicism up to 11, people would be too, what's the word, I guess, nihilistic to join a freedom movement. Like, hey, look at look how much power they have.
They can tell us the sky is red. Don't believe your own lying eyes.
Believe what I tell you. How can we fight against this? Am I on the right track here? The rationale for this? I mean, the way to fight against it is to return as much as possible to reality and to get people to focus on the real world around them.
We now clearly live in a world in which the online world and the mythologies that can be created online, and I don't just mean social media, I mean, whatever, YouTube, TV, you know, can be more powerful than what's real. In other words, the stuff that you see when

you walk out your door and encounter on your way to work clearly now seems less real to people than the myths that they absorb through media and social media. And that has given new possibilities to dictators and would-be dictators or autocrats and would-be autocrats.
Because if you can get people to focus on myths instead of reality, then all of that stuff, you know, the magic,

the conspiracy theories, the repetitive lies have a lot more power. I used to work at a law firm called Linklater, which I heard you name check actually in the book.
It's funny because I vaguely remember working on projects with Russian law firms. And I think part of the deal you mentioned in the book was Rosneft, Putin run sales of shares for Rosneft.
And it just really brought into stark relief how kleptocracy, so essentially robbing of the people and autocracy, not only do those go hand in hand, but Western institutions and professionals like me as a lawyer, really a kind of an integral cog in that machine. Lawyers, bankers.
I did a show with, I think his name was Oliver Bolo. It's been almost like 10 years now.
He's a friend of mine. He's a super interesting guy.
And he was telling us how homes in England or very fancy streets would be owned by random shell companies. No one's ever been there except for the cleaning or security person.
And it's occasionally the neighbors will see someone go in. But then you find out when they dig enough, it's owned by like a friend of this Nigerian president.
And it's like, well, how does an orchestra conductor have a billion dollars? What's going on here? Let me go back a step. So most of us, you probably and probably most of the people listening to this conversation live in what I would describe as the normal economy, right? We have a salary, we pay taxes, we keep our money in a bank account.
When we sell our shares, whatever, we pay taxes on that. If there are regulations and we have a business, then we abide by regulations.
In addition to that world, there is an alternate world in which people don't pay taxes, they keep their money in tax havens, they operate through anonymous shell companies so that nobody can identify who the true owner is. They have been using those anonymous shell companies to buy properties.
They buy houses in London. They buy apartments in New York bought by shell companies, meaning we don't know who the real owners were.
It's been a very, very common practice. I mean, the real estate market over the last 20 years in particular has been one that has been very penetrated or used or manipulated by these anonymous companies and the money, we don't know who really owns them, but it's to come from the autocratic world, Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.
This system has been allowed to exist. The concept of offshore bank account has been around for a long time.
It used to be a pretty anodyne thing. It was a kind of convenience for some kinds of banking transactions.
But over the last 20 years, I mean, I think especially over the last 10 years, it's really exploded. Something like 10% of the world's GDP might be kept in offshore bank accounts.
And again, that's anonymous money. You know, some of it's drug money, narcotics money, crime money.
Some of it is just money people are hiding from their ex-wife or they're hiding from taxes. Some of it is money that's been stolen in the autocratic world and the autocrats want to hide it, take it out, put it somewhere safer so they can bequeath a London apartment or an education at the London School of Economics for their kids.
So it exists almost alongside our world. And you are right that Western democratic world,

bankers, accountants, lawyers have been part of making that possible. And of course, our legal system makes it possible.
Some of it is a lot closer to home than we think. I mean, we imagine a tax haven to be something that exists on some kind of Caribbean island, but actually there are products you can buy in Wyoming, in Delaware, in South Dakota, in a number of American states.
You can buy anonymous trusts or set up anonymous companies that do almost the same thing. And so the system has been very much enabled by our laws and by our system, and we could end it.
There have been some progress made actually over the last few years. The Biden administration was beginning the process of ending some of these practices.
There are a couple members of the Senate who've been working pretty hard on ending it. But of course, there's a big pushback, and I'm afraid most of that is going to be rolled back.
Some of that's already started in the new administration. They are going the other way, and they're going to enable this kleptocratic world to grow and spread even further.
And I should say there's another side effect, because there's an instinct that a lot of people have, because it's kind of complicated world, it's hard to understand. Oliver Bullock, actually, who you've interviewed, his book is called Moneyland, and it's one of the best and easiest to understand versions that explains it if you want to know more about it.
The problem is not just that complicated world of finance. The problem is that that money often re-enters the political system.
So when you have anonymous money, if you're an autocrat in Russia, one way or another, entrust your money. In Russia, it's called using wallets.
You make somebody else your wallet. You give them use of your money.
Then they have an anonymous account. You can then begin to do political funding and influence campaigns.
And we know that happens. How much money gets into the U.S.
electoral system? I don't know. I mean, we have plenty of domestic secret money anyway, so maybe it's not important.
But certainly there is evidence of Russian and other money filtering through European politics, other international politics. And once that money is out there, you know, and it's owned and controlled and effectively secret, then it can be used to manipulate politics in all kinds of different ways.
I would say that secrecy and the lack of transparency is a genuine feature of the autocratic world. And of course, it exists in the democratic world too, but it's a very negative influence.
I mean, one of the things I think I want to emphasize, you know, in this conversation we were having before about what's an autocracy, the battle between autocracy and democracy isn't just geographic. It's not just between us and China, you know, or whatever, you know, Iran and Germany.
It's a battle that takes place inside every country, the battle between autocratic practices and democratic practices. And it's happening right now in the United States in a pretty vocal and clear way, but it's also happening in many European countries.
As I said, the battle of ideas isn't just international, it's also domestic.

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ann Applebaum.
I actually set up a shell company a few years ago just to see if it was hard. It's not hard.
And I know people say, well, you're a lawyer. You know how to do that stuff.
Honestly, you could figure it out in a few hours. It's really easy.
It's easy. And if you can't do it because you can't read English, you can hire a lawyer and they can do it on a Saturday afternoon.
I mean, it's so ridiculously simple. Movies would have you think that it's this complicated system that you need half of Deutsche Bank's analyst department working on it.
No, you can do it online. I mean, it's just so damn easy.
The hardest part is finding a place to headquarter it. But once you do a few hours of research, I mean, you can do it in Delaware.
You can do it, I think, in Nevada or like you said, was it North Dakota? There's all these different places you can do it that you kind of wouldn't expect. You think like, oh,

I can't do it in the US. Actually, we're kind of in HQ for a lot of those.
It really is. By the way,

you mentioned Oliver Bullough on the show, episode 228 for people who are looking for that and not

finding it because it's pretty old. You mentioned in the book that Chinese censorship is, of course,

on the rise and the tech has evolved to the point where they're working on being able to predict

I'm not. for that and not finding it because it's pretty old.
You mentioned in the book that Chinese censorship is, of course, on the rise and the tech has evolved to the point where they're working on being able to predict political dissent based on Internet activity. Can you give us an overview of how that would work? That's kind of incredible because you're talking about mind reading.
Yeah. So what the Chinese have is a system of monitoring the Internet.
People talk about the Great Firewall of China like it's a thing, but it's actually many different things. It's listening on social media forums.
It's control of social media forums. The banning of particular words.
So the word Tiananmen is banned. And the Chinese have ways around it.
I mean, they look for substitute words that everybody knows means Tiananmen, when Tiananmen being, of course, the name of the protest in 1989 that was eventually shot down. There's even a funny story about people started, instead of referring to Xi Jinping, the leader of China, directly, somebody decided that he looked like Winnie the Pooh.
And so they would talk about Winnie the Pooh. And then eventually that got banned because people were talking about Winnie the Pooh.
And really, they were talking about Xi Jinping. The Chinese are always finding ways around this, but the state spends a lot of time censoring, monitoring.
They don't cut everything because they want to know what people think, actually. They're interested in knowing this.
But they've also begun to be able to attach that online surveillance to real-world surveillance. So street cameras, being able to monitor transportation that people use.
So they're looking at a person or a group of people. They can track them across time, you know, through different places.
Where are they going? Who did they meet? How much money do they spend? What kinds of things are they buying? The place in China where this has become most extreme and where they seem to be experimenting the most with really trying to understand what people are doing is Xinjiang. This is where the Uyghur population lives.
This is a Muslim minority in China that's very heavily repressed. There's DNA testing they do of people.
So that's another way in which they keep track of people. They keep track of people's electricity usage because if someone has high use of electricity, then maybe someone is secretly staying in their house.
They begin to use all kinds of utilities, transport, credit cards, you know, whatever information they have on people, they can unify it and they can examine what people are doing. It's pretty clear that the point over time is to understand, is to look for political dissent before it happens.
So if they find a group of people who seem to be having intense conversations and are using a lot of electricity and are meeting offline somewhere, then maybe you've identified a political cell or a meeting. And the same thing online.
You can trace the development of ideas. And of course, once you have AI, a lot of this becomes much easier.
You can trace how ideas spread, who's using them, who are the nodes of transport, who are the influencers that people are listening to in terms of politics. And of course, a lot of those capabilities we also have in theory.
I mean, the tech world has them. The U.S.
tech companies have them in theory. I mean, they haven't necessarily been used in practice.
But one of the fears that Americans should have is that eventually they could, if they worked sufficiently together with the government, or they collaborated, that it's not impossible to imagine how you could do that. And the other point about the Chinese surveillance systems is that they are selling those systems, they sell them to other dictatorships.
So apparently nobody else has managed to use them with the sophistication that the Chinese have. But I don't know, if you're the government of Zimbabwe, maybe you'd like the capability to follow people around in Harare and know where they are at any given moment.
The systems of street cameras have been purchased by a lot of countries, sometimes with benign intent. You know, if you have street cameras, you prevent crime.
And the UK has a lot of street cameras. So it's not necessarily to be used for political tracking, but it could be with the wrong kind of government or a lot of ill will.
So I think, you know, although this is so often talked about as these are Chinese capabilities, I think it's important to remember that once the technology exists, it could be used by others. Yeah, I saw a video on Instagram a couple of days ago.
My wife sent it to me. She's like, look how cool this is.
And it was the cops finding somebody who had robbed some institution. And it's like him driving and then another camera of him driving and then him driving this way and that way and this way and that way and then getting out of the car.
And then it just keeps switching cameras. But all the comments are like, oh, my gosh, this is terrifying.
This should be scary. This is not cool.
This is scary. So you do think, wow, it's great they can catch this guy because he's a dangerous armed robber.
But on the other hand, yeah, if you have a government that's willing to misuse this technology, now you can't get away from being observed at all. Right.
Yeah. What if he wasn't a dangerous armed robber? Yeah, exactly.
What if he was a political dissident? Or what if he was someone in Washington wanted to get back at or wanted revenge against? Then you're already in quite a different world.

It's like that Will Smith movie from the early 90s, Enemy of the State.

You ever see that?

Many times.

Not a standout movie, but yeah, I remember being like, wow, they turned his credit cards off.

This is the future.

It's funny.

I haven't seen it in a while, but I imagine the technology now will seem incredibly primitive.

Right.

It'll be like, oh, we have him on camera at a shopping mall. How are you viewing this camera from this far away? This is amazing.
Yes, it uses satellites. Oh, wow.
Space. That's right.
But there were tags in his shoes or something or his coat, maybe. That's right.
Yeah. This is a long time before you could literally just buy an AirTag for 30 bucks and throw it in your kid's shoes so that they don't wander off at the mall.
Right. What's up with the falling out of windows in Russia? It's a cliche now.
It's a joke now. Surely this is now being done deliberately because otherwise, geez, hit someone with a car.
Switch it up a little bit. They're not trying to make it look like an accident, right? They're trying to say we killed this person.
We just didn't use a bullet to do it because I don't know, it's more poetic. I don't really get it.
What's going on with this? These are political murders, and they want everyone to know they're political murders. They don't, for reasons of delicacy, they don't want to shoot them in the face, but they want other people to be afraid.
So, you know, actually, for a long time in Putin's Russia, there weren't a lot of political murders. There wasn't that much political violence.
Instead, there was kind of targeted violence. So they would pick on one journalist, you know,

or one activist, and that person would be bumped off. The idea was that if you kill one person,

if you kill Anna Polotkovskaya, she was a famous journalist, then you scare everybody else. So

other journalists become afraid to do the kinds of things that she was doing. With the war in Ukraine, there is more opposition and more unrest, and especially in the Russian elite.
This is mostly not happening to people in the provinces. And so there's a greater need to tighten up on internal dissent.
And so it's been happening to bankers, business people, high-ranking bureaucrats, people who are inside the system,

will suddenly fall out a window. There have been some falling down stairs as well, even weirder ones, and a bunch of poisonings.
And those are not just to get rid of the person, it's also to scare the other people because they are afraid of internal dissent and people being anti-war. That makes sense.
The poisoning of, I think, as Alexander Litvinenko with the polonium-212.

That was one of those where it has to be able to only have been us, right? So they get this weird substance that only exists, I don't know, inside a nuclear reactor that's in Siberia, and they use that to kill the guy. That particular murder might have been an accident.
I mean, it seems that the people who had the poison and were carrying it around London and leaving traces in hotel rooms and so on, they may not have known what it was. I mean, so that might have been stupidity.
But you are right that very often they do things in a way that are designed to be followed. I mean, so, for example, when Alexei Navalny was poisoned the second time, it was going to be clear that it was them.
It was a poison that only the FSB had. And yeah, they want it to be known who's done it.
Yeah, it's so interesting because it's counterintuitive, right? The people online who are saying, oh, it's not the Russians. No, they want us to think this.
No need to defend these people for free, especially. They want us to know who did this.
There's a reason they picked this particular method or this particular poison. I want to switch gears a little bit.
It's funny because I'll get a review that's like, this guy is nothing more than a right-wing fascist with a fashy haircut. And I'm like, okay, fine, guilty on the haircut.
But the other stuff, I don't really get. And then the next review is like this left-wing commie idiot tanky.
And I'm just like, guys, make up your mind. Am I a communist or a fascist? Come on already.
Yep. Yeah, I have that problem too.
It's almost like you have to average the two and I end up in the middle. You've written extensively on the failures of communism.
Why do you think the appeal persists in certain circles, especially in the West? This always baffles me. So there was something appealing to people who want simple answers.
And also, I think, let's be fair, there are injustices in capitalism. There are huge gaps between the rich and the poor.
There are people who don't have equal opportunities because of where and how they were born and the kinds of families they grew up in. And injustice is always something that rankles people and bothers them.
And the idea that there could be a perfectly just state in which everyone has the same rights and in which there aren't very rich people, you know, and very poor people, I think is theoretically appealing. I've spent a lot of my life reading about people who were communists, and many of them were in very bad faith.
They were just people who wanted power, or they were sadists. But there were some people who in good faith believed that you could create if you designed it from the beginning, rather than just accepting the ebb and flow of history that created capitalism and some companies.
And instead of just accepting that you could start from scratch, you could design a system and you could make it fair. And I think that had a deep appeal to a lot of people.
Of course, again, the problem was that in practice, imposing a system on people, imposing an economic system and imposing a political system was a disaster from the beginning. I mean, there isn't actually an example of any state that seriously tried it that succeeded.
And they failed from the beginning. I mean, the Soviet Union's, the 1920s were a disaster.
The 1930s were a bloodbath. In the 1940s, World War II basically saved Stalin, you know, because they won the war, partly thanks to the help of the United States.
They were able to somehow rescue the idea of for a bit longer. But I mean, one of the reasons they kept having these cycles of violence, and this is true in Eastern Europe as well, was because they never were able to do what they said they were going to do.
They kept saying, this is the perfect system. We're going to have prosperity for everybody.
We're going to defeat the United States in the sense of we're going to have a better system than them. And it never happened.
And because it never happened, they kept having to look for scapegoats. So why are we all still poor? Why are we poorer now than we were in czarist Russia? You know, why is the system failing? And so, oh, well, the answer is that there are saboteurs and there are traitors and there are Trotskyites who are trying to undermine us.
And therefore, we need to find them and arrest them and put them in the gulag. That cycle happened, you know, repeatedly.
And then there would be a thaw and they would let people out because that wasn't working, and then there would be another wave of arrest. That happens in every one of these countries because the ideal that they had could never be reached.
Also, communism was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature, what makes people work hard, the ideas of ambition. Once you eliminate ownership, for example, you know, nobody can own their own house.
Okay, well, if you don't own your house, then why should you keep it up? Why should you paint it? If somebody else owns it, why should you invest in it? And the same is true of a company. And if you're working for a company and you're not going to ever make any more money and, you know, your time isn't going to produce anything good for you, then maybe you only pretend to work.
Maybe you don't really work. And one of the things the communist system was always doing was inventing incentives.
Okay, so people don't really want to work, so let's have a worker competition and let's have posters on the wall and whoever digs the most coal gets a prize, you know, because they couldn't motivate people in any other way. And so they created these fake motivational systems.
It was

fundamentally incompatible with human nature. And as I said, from day one, it began with violence.

It needed violence to maintain itself all the way through. And eventually it collapsed because

the people who were running it, even they didn't believe in it. And that became clear by the 1980s.

How long does it take to go, wait a minute, this is not a democracy anymore? Like in history, how does it work with other countries or how has it worked with other countries where you're just a dictatorship now? How does that happen? That takes a long time. You'll be glad to know.
Yes, I am. I'm glad to know.
Usually it takes a long time. So in Poland, we had a sort of would-be autocratic populist political party in power.
They had eight years in power and they didn't complete control, you know, and so they lost an election eventually. Even though it was an unfair election, even though they captured part of the legal system in the courts, even though they had taken over state media and so on, you know, nevertheless, it was still possible to defeat them.
In Venezuela, Chavez was very popular when he was first elected. And he was legitimately elected, democratically elected leader.

He was very popular when he was first elected. I mean, he was legitimately elected, democratically elected leader.
He was very popular. He appealed to the poor.
He did a lot of things, especially at the moment when oil prices were high, when he could give away a lot of money and other things to poor Venezuelans. Even as he was destroying the independent institutions of the state, even as he was wrecking the civil service, for example, Venezuela had a state oil industry.
He fired, I think it's like 19 or 20,000 people from it and replaced them with loyalists. That was the beginning of the end of their oil industry.
Even as all that was happening, I've seen some statistics that say even kind of 10 years into that process, many Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy, even as the institutions of their democracy were dying. It really only became crystal clear when people understood that it was impossible to elect anyone else.
And we've had several attempts of the Venezuelan opposition to elect someone else, including a recent one last fall in which the opposition won and nevertheless were not allowed to take power. And now it's clear that Venezuela is a dictatorship, but that took well over a decade, 20 years.
But the main point is that very often as this is happening, there are many people who voted and were not voting for authoritarianism or autocracy or anything like that. In fact, I would say most people didn't think that's what they were voting for.
So I'm not saying that that happened. The decline of the institutions won't bother them until at a later stage when we see the impact.
So as you begin to lose your independent civil service, your government declines and the capacity of the government to do things gets worse. This I saw in Poland, you know, once the civil service is selected for loyalty to the leader and not because they know how to identify and, you know, stop water pollution, then you begin to have a lot of water pollution.
The state begins to decline, and that can take a long time. There will be many moments when a decline can be stopped, but it is something that all Americans should pay attention to.
I mean, let's go back to the very beginning of this conversation. You know, what is an autocracy? An autocracy is a state where no checks and balances, where there's no parliament, there's no Congress to compete for power, where the media is controlled, where the courts are politicized, where there's a lot of secrecy, where there's no transparency, where there's no accountability for people in power.
You should recognize those things as warning signs. The decline of the institutions of the state and of the government will have, sooner or later, will have effects on people's prosperity, on their way of life, and on the kinds of governments that we could have in the future.
So I would take it very seriously. I know I've taken a lot of your time.
In closing, maybe this will end up on a positive note. What steps can citizens and leaders take to reinforce democratic resilience in the face of these challenges? Be engaged.
Join your local political party. Pay attention to the most basic, the most local elections wherever you live in whatever city or county or state.
Remember that democracy is a gift. You inherited it from the people who invented it in generations past.
People who live in Russia, people who live in Venezuela, envy you because you get to choose who your county commissioner is. So take that responsibility seriously.
It's not even only about politics. Be in your neighborhood association, you know, be part of your community, be engaged in local life at whatever level you can be.
Democracies succeed when they are based on active citizens. Active citizens have to be involved.
The more active you are and the more different kinds of people you meet, the less polarized we are. When you're meeting people who disagree with you on a daily basis, when you're able to talk to them in a reasonable way, when you're all talking about real issues like where to build the bridge or which road to repair first, you know, then you're not off in the world of mythology and celebrity politics that the extremists want you to be in.

I mean, remember we also talked about mythology and the power of the online world and how it can

sometimes be more powerful than the real world. You know, try to live in the real world and base

your politics on what you see, not some threat that's been described to you on TV, you know,

but actually look at your neighbors, look at your neighborhood, look how you live, try to fix those things and live in the real world as much as you can. Anne Applebaum, thank you so much.
This is fascinating. And I really appreciate you humoring all my probably relatively silly questions about elementary topics.
Thank you. No, there are no silly questions, you know, only silly answers, I guess.
You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with geopolitics analyst Peter Zion. Putin will be the last capable, competent president of the Russian Federation.
He's already 70. The Russians know that if they don't do this now, that no matter what the power balances are in the future, they will always be on the losing side.
We haven't seen anything like this in the world since World War II. You should expect Putin moving many, many, many more forces to the border and will probably have a million Russian soldiers in Ukraine before the end of the year.
Russia has been invaded 50-odd times in its history, and all of the invasions have come through one of nine of what I call gateway territories that link the former Soviet space to the rest of the world. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russians went from controlling all nine to just one.
And if they get Ukraine in its totality, they will have nearly plugged another two. Ukraine is not the end of the story.
There's another war after this one. Russia is going to win this.
And we now know that if American forces and Russian forces meet on the field of battle, the Russian forces will be obliterated. And if that happens, the only choice the Russians have is between a humiliating, strategic withdrawal to do whatever the Americans say, or up the ante with nukes.
It is perfectly reasonable to assume that Putin was going to be the last leader of Russia anyway. This has gotten a lot scarier than we ever thought it would be.
If we can't keep Russia locked down in Ukraine, if we can't leave them there till they die, then there will be a direct American-Russian confrontation. We have to prevent that from happening.
There's a point we're going to get to in a few months, probably later this year, where the Russians will have digested Ukraine and Moldova to their satisfaction, their plan, and then they'll have that clash with NATO. And that's when the nukes become a very real question.
For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 781 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks to Anne for doing this one.
She is always kind of hard to nail down. Poland, D.C., Ukraine, elsewhere.
All things Anne Applebaum will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals and discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.
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