A depressing magazine piece argues it is.<\/b>
\nI had Anne Applebaum \u2018s Atlantic feature \u201c THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING \u201d (less childishly, \u201c The Autocrats Are Winning \u201d in the URL) on my reading backburner because it\u2019s long, ponderous, and depressing. Given her neocon tendencies and marriage to a Polish politician, the subhed, \u201c If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies\u2014communism, fascism, virulent nationalism\u2014the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse\u201d comes across as bought overwrought and self-serving. After a painfully long anecdote about a probably-stolen election in faux-democratic Belarus, she declares, Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych\u2019s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn\u2019t Russians want to do the same? Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather\u2014a kind of national collective-farm boss\u2014into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin\u2019s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests\u2014a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail \u2014but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder. Lukashenko\u2019s sneering defiance of the rule of law\u2014he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country\u2014and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, could be arrested; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a Kyiv park. At about the same time, Lukashenko\u2019s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by forcing streams of refugees across their borders: Belarus lured Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally. Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community\u2014 laws regarding air traffic control, homicide, borders. None of this is the least bit surprising to anyone paying much attention to the region. Lukashenko is a thug and he gets support from Putin, who is an even bigger thug. Water is wet. The exiled opposition politician is charming and well-connected, however. Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause. But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer. We know the answer. And that answer is No. Not because the free world doesn\u2019t care about democracy but because it doesn\u2019t care enough to, say, start World War III over the conditions in Russia\u2019s near abroad. The West has imposed all manner of sanctions against Putin and his cronies but, at the end of the day, only care so much. Regardless, this insight is interesting: All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources\u2014the troll farms that promote one dictator\u2019s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another\u2014and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don\u2019t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies\u2014call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals\u2014deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich\u2014which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines. Now, this was largely true during the Cold War, with Moscow having all manner of mechanisms to bolster friendly autocrats. (The US and its allies did the same, too, of course, albeit mostly on a bilateral basis.) But, yes, networks are more sophisticated now and, yes, they work well to mitigate the effects of sanctions. Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah\u2014Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus\u2019s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko\u2019s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China\u2019s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to \u201cforeign interference\u201d in the country\u2019s affairs. In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela\u2019s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicol\u00e1s Maduro\u2019s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country\u2019s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo L\u00f3pez, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro\u2019s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it\u2019s \u201cnothing comparable with what Maduro has received.\u201d Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice\u2014like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries\u2014they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity. To some extent, sure. But when was it otherwise? Brutal autocrats are not a newfangled development. They have been with us since, more or less, the dawn of human civilization. The Russian tsars were not known for their liberal ethos and light touch. Hitler and Stalin could pretty much have done whatever they pleased had they limited their depredations to their own people. And Fidel Castro and Idi Amin weren\u2019t exactly Jeffersonian. The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously brandished his shoe at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for \u201cthe peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.\u201d Well, okay. But Stalin murdered millions of his own people. So did his sometimes colleague Mao Zedong. That they felt the need to proclaim fealty to certain universal values\u2014why, they held elections and everything\u2014doesn\u2019t mean they weren\u2019t monsters. Indeed, today\u2019s autocrats are pikers in comparison. Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy Inc. don\u2019t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don\u2019t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are \u201cimperialists.\u201d The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these \u201cWestern\u201d concepts don\u2019t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was arrested earlier this year, Amnesty International designated him a \u201cprisoner of conscience,\u201d a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty\u2019s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group\u2019s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they\u2019d been manipulated by trolls, they restored it. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement. This is, frankly, pure horseshit. Putin and Xi go out of their way to justify their actions under international law and norms. Putin works hard, indeed, to portray himself as a friend to Slavs everywhere. And the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, while many things, is very much about building relationships in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world through soft power initiatives. After more of this sort of thing, though, we at long last get to the real agenda. The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul\u2019s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU\u2019s foreign-policy chief expressed \u201cdeep concern about reports of serious human rights violations\u201d and called for \u201cmeaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule\u201d\u2014as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was \u201cdeep concern,\u201d \u201csincere concern,\u201d or \u201cprofound concern,\u201d whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned\u2014deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise\u2014about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else. It\u2019s true! The Taliban is going to Taliban and they laugh at feeble words coming from the West that they know won\u2019t be backed by action. The alternative is… what, exactly? Maybe we could invade them and conduct warfare against the Taliban for two decades and see how that works out. How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you. Dun-dun-DUHN. The setup is ruined by yet more discursive anecdotes, which finally brings us to the plight of the Uighurs, and then this: For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, even skewed ones, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that \u201c we accept the Chinese version \u201d of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China\u2019s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power. So, it turns out, autocrats around the world care more about good relations with the Chinese government than the plight of a religious minority that\u2019s being oppressed by them. This, alas, does not surprise me. Nor should it surprise anyone with any familiarity whatsoever with human beings. And how different are we? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? We are not only not so sure it\u2019s not even news at this juncture. Finally, after a painful slog, we get to something that is actually a newish development: Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China\u2019s favor\u2014a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China\u2019s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation\u2019s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home. Still others have had strange car accidents\u2014mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don\u2019t criticize China\u2019s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp\u2014the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to The New York Times, the consulting giant at the time of that event advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military. But perhaps it\u2019s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies\u2019 local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny\u2019s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. [\u2026] If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors? Given that I follow foreign affairs for a living, none of this is news to me. And it\u2019s probably not even news to the average OTB reader. It\u2019s something that our national security professionals in government take very seriously but, alas, the very democracy that Applebaum is worried about preserving makes fighting these challenges difficult, indeed. We have freedom of speech in the United States and the West writ large and measures that would stop the Confucian institutes are probably illegal. Multinational corporations have been a thing for decades and their nature makes regulation next to impossible; indeed, Google has more to fear from the Chinese government than from ours. If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies\u2014communism, fascism, virulent nationalism\u2014the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual \u201cFreedom in the World\u201d report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition \u201c Democracy Under Siege .\u201d The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of \u201cdemocratic regression.\u201d Not everyone is equally gloomy\u2014Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date. That, sadly, is almost surely the case. Although the next paragraph illustrates that the tools were never all that robust: The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, do not have the impact they once did. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, \u201can exercise in self-gratification,\u201d on par with \u201csternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.\u201d That doesn\u2019t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven\u2019t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them. We\u2019re actually much better at targeting sanctions to regime leaders and other powerful figures than we used to be. But we\u2019ve had draconian sanctions on some countries for decades with little effect. Yes, we defeated Fascism. But that took a world war and tens of millions of dead. We\u2019re not likely to use that tool to bring democracy to Belarus or get justice for the Uighurs; and, indeed, our attempts at replacing autocratic regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq this century went less than swimmingly. Whether we defeated Communism in the Soviet Union or it died of its own weight is still subject to much debate. But we were quickly disabused of the notion that ending Communism meant the flourishing of democracy. And, of course, Communist regimes still govern China and North Korea with no end in sight. America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called \u201cdemocracy assistance,\u201d but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration\u2019s still inexplicable attempt to destroy them, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world. Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don\u2019t yet have a real answer to China\u2019s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don\u2019t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don\u2019t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don\u2019t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies. I haven\u2019t and likely won\u2019t devote much study to the efficacy of various propaganda outlets like RFE but must admit that I\u2019m skeptical. And, frankly, they seem outmoded in the Internet age. Much of what we\u2019re doing to combat influence campaigns is, presumably, classified. But, again, democracies and their pesky freedoms are always at a disadvantage in these fights. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s fixable. At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that \u201cdemocracy\u201d belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy\u2014not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don\u2019t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America\u2019s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with \u201cforever wars,\u201d they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don\u2019t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries\u2014and inside ours Apartheid was happening in an otherwise Western, democratic county and we ignored it for decades until Black civil rights leaders galvanized the protest. But it\u2019s simply harder to get people to protest the repressive activities of a known despotic regime inside their country and Western protests would, in any case, be far less impactful against Beijing. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve lost our commitment to democratic values in our foreign policy (although, alas, the Trumpist right may have) but it\u2019s not obvious what it is that Applebaum thinks we should do about it. We\u2019re not going to go to war with Russia or China to impose regime change and thank goodness for that.<\/p>\n