Opinion: How to stop autocracies from ganging up on democracies

Last month, North Korea and Russia signed a pact covering trade, investment and cultural ties, and pledging aid if either nation faces “aggression.” In exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that bolster its nuclear weapons program, North Korea is continuing to provide Russia with ammunition for its war against Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin praised Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un for supporting “the fight against the imperialistic policies of the United States and its allies.”

This month, soon after he assumed the rotating presidency of the European Union, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — a self-proclaimed champion of “illiberal democracy” who has cracked down on freedom of the press and an independent judiciary — left EU leaders fuming by urging President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and then lavishing praise on Putin and Xi Jinping in Moscow and Beijing. A few days later, Orbán met with Donald Trump, whose reelection he has endorsed. “We discussed ways to make peace,” Orbán said. “The good news of the day: he’s going to solve it.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who has disqualified rivals from running in elections ; muzzled major media outlets; created detention centers aimed mostly at Muslims, whose citizenship is allegedly in question; and secured virtually unlimited authority to designate any individual a terrorist — also made his way to Russia. Aware that India’s purchase of massive quantities of oil has helped the Kremlin evade sanctions, Zelensky expressed “huge disappointment” that Modi chose to “hug the world’s most bloody criminal.”

These incidents indicate that aspiring autocrats and dictators share the same goals: enrich themselves, remain in power, deprive their own citizens of influence, discredit and destroy democracy and create a new world order. And that they are collaborating to achieve these goals.

In a new book titled “Autocracy, Inc.,” Ann Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, documents the scale and scope of their activities.

Aspiring and entrenched autocrats and their cronies, Applebaum reveals, line their pockets and evade sanctions because friendly governments and Western international financiers allow them to set up anonymous shell corporations. The UAE, for example, has made it easier for foreigners, including those under sanctions, to buy property. Foreigners can also transfer large amounts of money into Turkey.

Shared grievances and anti-democratic goals motivate autocrats to help one another. Iran traded food and gasoline for Venezuelan gold and sent equipment and personnel to repair oil refineries. In 2016, Xi Jinping endorsed Iran’s role in helping Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who authorized chemical weapons attacks on his own people, retain power. Iran increased China’s access to its oil, infrastructure, telecommunications and banking markets.

Enemies of democracy have vastly improved their capacity to censor online content. China outlaws posts that “endanger national security, subvert the government, or undermine national unification.” Afraid of losing business in the world’s second most populous nation, American tech companies altered software to protect the “Great Firewall’s protocols.” Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Serbia, South Africa, Turkey, Singapore and Zimbabwe have acquired China’s “safe city technology.”

Autocrats have also ramped up the internal and external dissemination of fake news about democracies. Stories about Europe, many of them shot from a “firehose of falsehoods,” appear at least 18 times a day on Russia’s state-controlled television stations. Increasingly sophisticated Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns, posted on Facebook and other platforms to enhance their credibility, are ubiquitous in the U.S. and Western Europe.

These days, although they are not averse to killing dissidents, including individuals living abroad, autocrats use their own laws and courts to smear, silence and sideline them. The governments of Uganda and Ethiopia have the authority to regulate or dissolve domestic civic organizations. Cambodia has outlawed organizations that “jeopardize peace, stability, public order or harm the national security.” Myanmar’s army leaders engineered the conviction of Aung San Suu Kyi for corruption. China silenced Hong Kong’s democratic activists. Russia poisoned, jailed and may have killed Alexei Navalny. The Wagner Group was invited into Mali and the Central African Republic, providing sitting dictators a Russian-style “regime survival package.”

While acknowledging that 21st-century autocracies and illiberal democracies are not a monolithic bloc, Applebaum maintains that they work together opportunistically, “timing their own moves to create maximum chaos.” And many of them have endorsed a seemingly appealing principle, designed to weaken the legitimacy of post-World War II international law and human rights: a denunciation of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

Along with increasing military and financial assistance to Ukraine, Applebaum believes that to regain the initiative a multinational movement must make money laundering and real estate transactions transparent; require internet posts to be more evidence-based and less anonymous, while holding social media companies more accountable for content; and reduce democratic countries’ reliance on minerals, semiconductors and energy supplies sold by Russia, China and other autocracies.

These reforms won’t occur, Applebaum emphasizes, until citizens of democracies “think of themselves as linked to one another and to the people who share their values inside autocracies, too. They need one another, now more than ever, because their democracies are not safe. Nobody’s democracy is safe.”

At a time of increasing isolationist and nationalist sentiments in Western democracies, implementing this agenda won’t be easy.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

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