Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
By Anne Applebaum
Doubleday, 224 pages, $27
In “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published anonymously in Foreign Affairs in 1947, the American diplomat George Kennan introduced the concept of “containment” to American grand strategy. As the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow at the time, Kennan was tasked with assessing the Soviets’ foreign-policy orientation. With Stalin in power, the Red Army in Berlin, and the Cold War taking shape, the postwar status quo was uncertain. Drawing on his expertise in Russian history, Kennan emphasized the Kremlin’s understanding of the relationship between foreign and domestic security. “Ideology,” he noted, “taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders.” The Bolsheviks’ seizure of absolute power was done in the pursuit of realizing Marxist-Leninist ideology, while their belief in an “innate antagonism” between capitalism and socialism legitimized their iron hold on power. Due to the regime’s guiding belief in the inevitable demise of capitalism from its internal contradictions, Kennan concluded that the Soviet Union wasn’t an immediate military threat. Instead, he advocated for the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment” of Soviet expansionism, using all instruments of American political power short of warfare to repel the forward creep of communism.
The historian and journalist Anne Applebaum’s latest book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, nominally shares a similar mission to Kennan’s article. Applebaum claims to offer a general account of autocracy in the 21st century, arguing that “the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others” collaborate with each other to subvert democracy worldwide. They act together, she says, “to undermine the network of ideas, rules, and treaties that had been built into international law since 1945, to destroy the European order created after 1989, and, most important, to damage the influence and reputation of the United States and its democratic allies.”
However, she tells readers, today’s autocratic regimes aren’t your grandfather’s autocracies. Dictators used to have ideologies, but not anymore. Unlike the strongmen states of old, Applebaum posits, autocracies operate “like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology, but rather a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power.” Ideology and circumstance are both junked, as is the nuance of Kennan’s canny insights. What remains in Autocracy, Inc. is a dogmatic and Manichaean depiction of power.