Is Autocracy Really Winning?

A depressing magazine piece argues it is.

I had Anne Applebaum‘s Atlantic feature “THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING” (less childishly, “The Autocrats Are Winning” in the URL) on my reading backburner because it’s long, ponderous, and depressing. Given her neocon tendencies and marriage to a Polish politician, the subhed, “If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse” 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’s 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’t Russians want to do the same?

Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail—but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder.

Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country—and 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’s 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—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’t care about democracy but because it doesn’t care enough to, say, start World War III over the conditions in Russia’s 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—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and 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’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which 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—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s 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 “foreign interference” in the country’s 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’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s 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’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”

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—like 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—they 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’t 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 “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.”

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—why, they held elections and everything—doesn’t mean they weren’t monsters. Indeed, today’s autocrats are pikers in comparison.

Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy  Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t 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 “imperialists.” 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 “Western” concepts don’t 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 “prisoner of conscience,” 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’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d 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’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” 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—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else.

It’s true! The Taliban is going to Taliban and they laugh at feeble words coming from the West that they know won’t 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 “we accept the Chinese version” 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’s 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’s 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’s 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’s favor—a 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’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s 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—mishaps 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’t criticize China’s 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—the 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’s 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’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. 

[…]

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’s probably not even news to the average OTB reader. It’s 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—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “Democracy Under Siege.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja 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, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t 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’t 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’re actually much better at targeting sanctions to regime leaders and other powerful figures than we used to be. But we’ve 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’re 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 “democracy assistance,” 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’s 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’t yet have a real answer to China’s 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’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t 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’t and likely won’t devote much study to the efficacy of various propaganda outlets like RFE but must admit that I’m skeptical. And, frankly, they seem outmoded in the Internet age.

Much of what we’re 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’t think that’s fixable.

At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not 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’t 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’s 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 “forever wars,” 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’t 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—and 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’s 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’t think we’ve lost our commitment to democratic values in our foreign policy (although, alas, the Trumpist right may have) but it’s not obvious what it is that Applebaum thinks we should do about it. We’re not going to go to war with Russia or China to impose regime change and thank goodness for that.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. wr says:

    I understand that foreign policy is important, but more important to me right now is the question of whether autocracy is winning in the USA, and we’re going to have a pretty good idea of the answer a year from now. But watching state after state essentially give up on democracy in favor of rigged elections in which Democrats can win a majority of the votes and come away with a tiny minority of seats, and in which Republican office-holders have granted themselves the power to overturn any election whose results they don’t like, I’m not betting on good news, and am seriously working on plans to move abroad.

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  2. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @wr:

    Speaking seriously here, consider France. I suspect you’d love it here.

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  3. Sleeping Dog says:

    We’re ~30 years from Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, GHW Bush’s New World Order and Clinton’s legitimate, but failed efforts to coax Russia into the liberal sphere and oh so close to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today, that has all been wiped away and we have returned to 1935. While, as @wr: points out, illiberal political forces are set to destroy our democracy. A return of a Trump presidency, which I believe we all understand is quite possible, will likely seal or fate. To borrow from David Frum, the petrodactyls have learned to use doorknobs.

    Yes, from a world view, we’ve been here before, but this time the firewall is weaker.

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  4. Sleeping Dog says:

    @HarvardLaw92:

    It is difficult to tell, are you being serious, snarky or seriously snarky?

  5. Michael Reynolds says:

    Is autocracy winning? I’ll tell you in November 2024. If the US falls to Trump, yes, autocracy wins. If not, then no, autocracy won’t ‘win’ because despite all the wearing of sack cloth and rending of garments, the United States is still the only global superpower, and we have immutable advantages the Chinese cannot match. The Belt and Road initiative is an attempt by China to find a way around US control of all the world’s salt water. They can challenge us in their home waters, but can they keep the straits of Hormuz open to tankers en route to China? Not in this century. Can they force the straits of Malacca if we choose to block them? Nope.

    China is facing a demographic nightmare. Their publicly stated fertility rate is 1.6. Some people think that’s b.s. and the real number is closer to 1.1. With a male to female ratio of 120 men per 100 women, and given the long-observed fact that with prosperity comes lower fertility still, China’s inverting the pyramid – too many old people on the backs of too few young people. And very much unlike the US, China can’t recruit skilled foreigners to immigrate.

    Meanwhile India is forced to move closer to the West, and there goes the Chinese population advantage. We should encourage India to build up its naval forces because that would further increase China’s insecurity at sea.

    The Russians are as usual, thugs, it’s really all they’re capable of. Russia is the belligerent, bleary-eyed drunk of nation states. Russia’s future is as the tail of the Chinese dog, and they’d better be good little puppies because the real threat to Russia isn’t from NATO, it’s from the hundreds of millions of Chinese living right next to vast open, unpopulated and resource-rich Russian spaces.

    The US hand includes the US itself, plus Japan, Germany, UK, France, Australia, Canada and South Korea. Plus the rest of the EU, and increasingly, India. China’s hand includes Russia, Pakistan, Belarus, North Korea, Cambodia and Laos. As long as the US remains free, we win.

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  6. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @Sleeping Dog:

    100% serious, zero snark (intended or otherwise)

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  7. Michael Reynolds says:

    @HarvardLaw92:
    I’m of two minds on living in France. I love Paris, and in a few months I’d get back to a reasonable level of fluency – it’s all in my brain, buried under decades of other things. But Paris has the same weather as London, and my wife and I are both very much solar-powered. So if it was France it’s likely be Provence or Languedoc.

    Also, after a while French up-tightness – more a Paris than an Aix-en-Provence thing – gets on my nerves.

  8. wr says:

    @HarvardLaw92: Thanks. I do love France, and my French is okay. And if we could afford Provence…

    But our primary destination is The Netherlands — which is pretty unbothered by the kinds of political problems we want to get away from (and where I’ve had pretty steady work over the last few years). And from where it’s really easy to get to France!

  9. Gustopher says:

    From the Applebaum article:

    But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey.

    No.

  10. Gustopher says:

    Autocrats are becoming more prominent in the democratic countries, which makes it much harder for those countries to support democracy abroad. I don’t know if autocracy is winning, but democracy is definitely under attack.

    Democracy requires an informed, at least semi-rational electorate. And right now the misinformation mongers (both foreign and domestic) are not being held in check. There’s no accountability for peddling lies designed to enrage and divide and demonize, not even when people are dying as a result. Free speech has been weaponized by autocrats and lunatics.

    If we don’t find a way to address that, while still preserving the core of our free speech rights, I don’t see democracy surviving.

    Part of it is social media, with the very distributed nature of information sources, but we don’t even have an answer for the very centralized Fox News.

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  11. Sleeping Dog says:

    @HarvardLaw92:

    Sigh. My wife won’t establish residency outside North America and is even reticent about Canada. I’d do France in heartbeat, though Paris is too expensive.

  12. dazedandconfused says:

    Applebaum:
    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.

    “We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

  13. CSK says:

    @Sleeping Dog:
    Oh, well. Remember that legendary bumper sticker displayed on so many pick-up trucks: NEW HAMPSHIRE IS THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.

  14. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Agreed. Paris and France are two different countries.

  15. HarvardLaw92 says:

    @wr:

    The NL is great as well, agreed. We have friends who decided on Brussels for badiclsly the same reason – it’s not a bad place to live and it’s literally in the the middle of everywhere.

  16. Sleeping Dog says:

    @CSK:

    Yes the small universe.

  17. Michael Cain says:

    Fleeing isn’t really in the cards. Between the wife’s developing dementia and being old enough (and not rich enough) that most countries would be reluctant to take us permanently, we’re here. In a relatively sane state, though.

  18. Andy says:

    I admit I didn’t read the article except for your excerpts, but I guess I don’t see anything surprising here. It seems the author subscribes to the naive notion that liberal democracy is the natural end-state for every society. The whole thing strikes me as a stalking horse for a more activist foreign policy, which gets my non-interventionist hackles up.

    A big part of the problem is that we’ve long neglected our soft power or spent it on supporting our stupid land wars in Asia. That is capacity we need to focus more on and redirect.

    The globalization of media and ideas also present problems. Smith-Mundt, for example, was designed to keep US propaganda designed for foreign audiences from being used in the US. But that’s just about impossible with globalized media and the internet. The 2012 amendment removed this barrier, but the problem of government propaganda remains.

    We don’t need to give an eff about Venezuela or Belarus and we can take whatever measures we want to make life difficult for them with little consequence. Not so with China.

    China is a special case because of its size, market power, and integration with our own economy. You look at the NBA, or Blizzard or Hollywood and it does bother me to see them whoring themselves to the fragile sensibilities of the PRC in exchange for dollars. But I don’t know what the government can do about that where the cure wouldn’t be worse than the disease.

    It will be interesting to see what happens with Enes Kanter. I bet Chinese money will win out.

    But I think the US can do a much better job with diplomacy and soft power. A lot of countries that have accepted Chinese money for development haven’t liked the deal they got, and the way the Chinese have conducted themselves. That’s a vulnerability the US could and should exploit.

    And, IMO, we ought to give anyone with a Hong Kong passport the ability to stay in the US. The same goes for other countries with despotic governments. The best weapon we have against them is to attract their best and brightest to come here.

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  19. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @HarvardLaw92: I think that’s the situation almost everywhere. There was a joke when I was living in Korea: South Korea has a population of 45 million people. 25 million of them (some versions said 32 million) live in Seoul. The rest live in South Korea.-

  20. Michael Reynolds says:

    @Andy:

    And, IMO, we ought to give anyone with a Hong Kong passport the ability to stay in the US.

    I first proposed that with the British withdrawal. HK is to human potential what Saudi Arabia is to oil.

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  21. JohnSF says:

    @Michael Reynolds:
    One of the (relatively few) things our rather silly government has done that I applaud is offer a fast track to UK citizenship to about 5.5 million Hong Kong residents.
    About two thirds of the total HK population are eligible.

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  22. Michael Reynolds says:

    @JohnSF:
    We’ll take the other third. We should be more like Canada. Got a skill? Cool, we’ve got plenty of room in Saskatchewan.

    I have long maintained that the ultimate defeat of the Axis was determined before the Axis was even a thing. In 1933 Albert Einstein moved from Germany to the US and brought most of physics with him.

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