I read Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum on Jun 16th, 2025
The autocratic states collaborated to build kleptocratic financial networks, weathered the propaganda and misinformation to perserve their personal wealth and power. They can ignore the drastic ideological difference between communism, nationalism, Bolivarian socialism, Juche, Sia radicalism, Arabic monarchies, or pseudo democracy; — to form the Autocracy, Inc. as the author coiled.
Change through rapprochement
After the cold war, Francis Fukuyama argued in his book The End of History and the Last Man: “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” this underscored Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement) proposed in 1963 by Egon Bahr. With more fund invested from the west, manufactory outsource to the south, this concept was further morphed into Wandel durch Handel, aka change through trade. It was a common consensus that a mutually dependent economic relationship would make a future military conflict unthinkable.
Fukuyama’s version was not materialized. Instead, Putin’s Russia has grown to a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy to favor insiders. In 2004, Mikhail Khodrokovsky was arrested and spent the next decade in a labor camp. His company Yukos was driven to bankruptcy and sold to an unknown bidder who then resold it to Rosneft, a state-owned oil company.
There is also Marduro model described by activities Srdja Propovic, the state leaders accept economic collapse, endemic violence, mass poverty, and international isolation to stay in power. Jorge Giordani, once Chávez’s minister of economy and finance, has estimated $300 billion was stolen before 2013 when Chávez died. A 2021 survey demonstrated that Swiss bank hided $10 billion on behalf of official in Venezuela. Other notable mentions in the hall of shame include Bashir al-Assad in Syria and Lukashenko in Belarus.
Controlling the narrative
The Autocracy, Inc. offered more than the money and security, but also the impunity. The tactic is so-called “fire hose of falsehoods”, given so many explanations, how could an ordinary citizen know what happened? Is it even possible to disclose the truth? The propaganda machine also discredited the journalists and news outlets with conspiracy theory, such as deep state to discourage the truth-seeking discussion, and compromised the corner stone of the democracy.
In contrast to the Soviet leaders who tried to defend their falsehood, today’s autocratic leaders lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. The power to lie without any consequence has a chilling effect for the people to fear the liar.
They no longer offer their citizens a version of utopia, they simply promote cynicism and passiveness:
Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong and the democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.
Collaborate efforts
The Autocracy, Inc. increasingly act with tacit coordination to advance shared interests. The military campaigns of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen destabilized regions, and drove broad displacement in the Middle East. With the help from Belarus’s strongman, Lukashenko, the deluge of refugees were funnelled to the Europe, which created the social strains and fueled the rise of populist. This movement then delayed the European Union and US Congress to extend the support for Ukraine. This geopolitical feedback loop tilted the global balance in favor of authoritarian powers.
Anecdotes
Samuel P. Huntington argued that the conflicts in the post-cold war era stemmed from the civilization-based world order in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.