Anne Applebaum: “China, Russia, North Korea and Venezuela have a common enemy: us”

—After reading ‘Autocracy SA’ it is difficult not to think that we have gone from the clash of civilizations proposed by Samuel P. Huntington to the clash between democrats and autocrats, or between liberals and illiberals.

—There is a war of ideas going on, but it is not a black and white issue. You cannot draw such a clear line between autocrats and democrats: there are democracies that are in decline, where parties that have won elections are changing the norms of democracy. And there are also autocratic states that are not necessarily interested in undermining the West or changing the world order, but only in trading with Europe, with Asia, with North America. This struggle, furthermore, does not only occur between different societies, but also within those same societies. There is a discussion within the United States, within Spain, within the United Kingdom, Poland, Canada, Australia. And also within China and Russia. I mean: there is a debate about what is the best way to run a society, but there is no Berlin Wall dividing one side from the other.

—At the end of the book he proposes the creation of the united democrats of the world, something like a kind of association to defend the very idea of ​​democracy. Are you in danger?

—Democrats in many different countries should come together to change the aspects of our own political systems that are undermining us, that are harming us. We should put an end to money laundering, to kleptocracy, to anonymous companies. The fact that the richest can hide their money, protect it from taxes and do so anonymously, and at the same time continue to influence politically… Furthermore, if democracies do not begin to regulate the information space, the explosion of conspiracy theories and of false information will end up destroying them. I hope Europeans have learned something from the American elections.

-Like what?

—Europe, Canada, Australia, South Korea and other democracies should think about how to generate social networks where algorithms are not designed by definition to generate hatred and anger in people. Some networks that unite. Because today, with current social networks, people consume increasingly divisive, extremist and conspiratorial material. It boggles my mind to think why Europeans allow these American companies that have no benign intentions toward Europe to set the agenda in political conversations. It’s been going on for a long time. Something has to be done.

—Do you consider the United States lost in this fight?

—Right now the United States has an administration that is not going to want to do any of those things I have said. The United States is not going to lead the fight against kleptocracy and it is not going to lead the push to regulate the Internet. The people who have won the elections are precisely those who are in favor of kleptocracy and who have fought hard to achieve the type of social networks that we have. Over the past four years there has been a concerted project by Republican activists and politicians to end any kind of moderation on the Internet. And they have achieved it.

—How do you see the future of the Ukraine war in light of Trump?

—The truth is that I don’t know what Trump plans to do. Many opinions have come out of your circle. There are those who say that for him this is an incompatible issue, that he wants to end the war and that he does not want Ukraine to fall into chaos, because that would make him look very bad. Trump doesn’t care much about Ukraine, but he does care about its image. I have not yet heard any explanation as to how they are going to force Russia to lay down its arms.

—At the moment, you have already appointed Tulsi Gabbard as the new head of Intelligence. She is known for her positions close to Russia…

—She is someone with very long ties to Putin in Russia and to Assad in Syria, and she is a person who in today’s intelligence community would not obtain the necessary authorizations to work in the CIA, for example. So putting her in charge of these agencies is like a clear way of saying that what she wants to do is destroy them. I think it’s part of his revenge. He wants revenge on what we would call the ‘deep state’. During the campaign he said he was going to destroy them and that is what we believe he is going to do. I don’t know if he will be successful, but the appointments he has made indicate that this is what he is pursuing.

—The autocracies of the world, he says, do not act in a coordinated manner but they do cooperate among themselves.

—I used the expression ‘Autocracy SA’ because it is not an alliance, it is not an axis, it is not an organization. There is no secret room like in the James Bond movies where all the bad guys hang out. It doesn’t work like that. But I do think they know how to take advantage of the situation. I don’t know if what happened on October 7 in Israel was coordinated with the Russians or not. There is some circumstantial evidence that says that yes, there were contacts between Hamas and Moscow, but the fact is that after they occurred both Russia and China saw how this gave them an opportunity and opened the door to new possibilities to generate chaos and to undermine the democratic world. They are opportunistic; They are looking for opportunities to see what they can do to undermine the United States and Europe, to see how they can discredit democracies and their ideals.

—He maintains that these countries are united by their enemy, democracy, and economic interests: little else.

—They do not have a political project, they are ideologically very different states: communist China, nationalist Russia, Bolivarian Venezuela, North Korea… They are very different profiles. The best way to understand it is to say that they have a common enemy. And that common enemy is us, the liberal world. Their enemy is the ideas of human rights, the rule of law, transparency and accountability: they need to defeat those ideas. And they seek to defeat them domestically, internally, as we saw with the women’s movement in Iran, and they also seek to defeat these ideas anywhere in the world. At the same time, they seek to make money together. For example: the Chinese sell surveillance technology to Russia, and North Korea has already been paid to send troops to the Russian front…

—It seems that instead of an alternative political project to liberal democracy, what we have are autocrats staying in power to do business.

—It seems so, although some are much more sophisticated. China, for example, has a greater national project, they not only have economic interests… But yes: many of these leaders of the autocratic world, unlike what happened in the 20th century, are billionaires. So they have this added incentive of wanting to keep the money and wanting to keep their secrets. We know that Putin is a millionaire, but we don’t know where he has the money, how he got it. We know that Xi Jinping is also very rich, but we don’t know where the money comes from, or where he keeps it. For them, staying in power, in part, is also keeping this money and maintaining their way of life. They have all committed crimes, they have all stolen: they don’t want to lose power because then, who knows, they could end up murdered or lose all their money.

—Until recently it was still believed that capitalism could democratize the world. Have we overestimated its power?

—Yes, without a doubt. But you were European, especially German in the 90s, it was reasonable to think that way, because since the Second World War you had seen how economic ties created peace, democracy and stability. You had seen the fall of the Berlin Wall. You had just witnessed all that, the clamor for Eastern Europeans to join that democracy and prosperity of the West. And it was initially thought that we could include Russia and China in this democratic world as well, but clearly there was a point at which that was no longer true. I think it was in 2014. That’s where it ended. There it became clear that this was not going to work: Russia was turning against Europe, China was changing its foreign policy… This was ten years ago. And it was ten years ago when we should have said: okay, this project is over, it is not working. But we didn’t do it and we are paying a dear price for it.

—Thirty years have passed since the publication of your first book, ‘Between East and West’, which was a travel chronicle through Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine… How is that world today compared to then?

—That part of the world I traveled through today is much more prosperous than then. People have many more opportunities, much more access to different ideas and experiences that were unthinkable thirty years ago. If we look at Ukraine: what was Ukraine like in the 90s? kyiv was a dark, gloomy, strange, sad place. People were afraid to talk to foreigners, it was a very primitive place. Today kyiv is an open, sophisticated, interesting city, full of young people, with all kinds of ideas… There are many things that are much better today than they were then. I don’t think these thirty years have been a failure, but it is true that there has been an increase in cynicism. We have created a global class of oligarchs who now have their own ethics and their own political objectives. I think that perhaps could have been prevented. That’s where it seems to me that things have gotten worse.

—Do you trust that democratic countries will manage to regulate and fight against kleptocrats?

—It seemed that we were beginning to move in that direction in the United States and the United Kingdom, where they have tried to end the existence of anonymous companies. But it is very difficult to change this situation. There is a lot of money at stake and the people who have that money are using it to pressure politicians, to lobby against these changes. Although if the European Union decides that’s what it wants to do, I think it could do it. We have to get to a point where people understand the huge threat to their way of life that these things pose. Both corruption and Internet deregulation are becoming real threats to our societies.