The Jordan Harbinger Show
1117: Anne Applebaum | Inside The Fortune 500 of Modern Dictatorships
Tue, 18 Feb 2025
From Russia to China: Autocracy, Inc. author Anne Applebaum reveals how modern autocrats create a new world order by working together against democracy. What We Discuss with Anne Applebaum: Modern autocracies form opportunistic networks rather than ideological blocs, collaborating through financial interests, technology sharing, and mutual support against democratic ideals — despite having different political systems. Russia's invasion of Ukraine represents a deliberate challenge to international law and norms, with Putin demonstrating he can violate conventions without consequences. China's surveillance technology has evolved to potentially predict political dissent by combining online monitoring, real-world tracking, and AI analysis — and this technology is being exported to other authoritarian regimes. The decline of democracy is typically gradual, often taking decades as institutions are slowly undermined, while many citizens may not realize their democracy is eroding until it becomes impossible to elect alternative leadership. Citizens can strengthen democracy through active local engagement: participating in local politics, joining community organizations, and building real-world connections across political divides. This practical involvement in addressing concrete local issues helps counter online polarization and maintain democratic resilience. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1117 And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the focus of Anne Applebaum's book 'Autocracy, Inc.'?
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, OK, well, this is a person who's a little bit progressive, 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 seem to change. 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 and 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.
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Chapter 2: How do modern autocracies collaborate despite ideological differences?
Yeah. It's not loaded with a history of the Bolshevik Revolution in Chapter 3. 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 kind of an axis of these autocracies 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 of autocratic states who don't have ideology in common, who are left-wing and right-wing. Some of them are one-man regimes. 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 they're 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.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Yeah, this is exactly the metaphor that I wanted. 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. You know, 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. I mean, you see this with BRICS, right? One of the funny things that I see online a lot is like, oh, the U.S. dollar is going down. BRICS is getting stronger. And then you talk to somebody who is like deep PhD 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 that 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, some of 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 is a democracy. 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 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.
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Chapter 4: What role does NATO play in the current geopolitical climate?
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 U.S. and the U.K. 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 is 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.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges and perceptions around a peace plan for Ukraine?
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, 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's 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, 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. U.S. tech companies have them in theory.
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Chapter 6: Why do autocratic states spend resources disparaging the West?
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 we'll 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 merely 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.
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