An unlikely network of dictatorships

Eric and Eliot welcome back Anne Applebaum, Pultizer and Duff Cooper Prize-winning author of Gulag And Red Famine and currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. They discuss Anne’s new book Autocracy Inc: the dictators who want to rule the world. They examine the threat that autocratic regimes represent to their own citizens at home and to liberal democracy abroad, the slowness of the West to recognize the threat that authoritarian regimes represent, the excessive optimism that (after the end of the Cold War and with the advent of globalization) liberal-democratic ideals would triumph without recognizing the danger that authoritarian, illiberal ideas could find their way into democracies, regardless of whether the authoritarians think they are winning and how they measure success , Russia’s role in instigating much of the authoritarian offensive and the role of Western institutions in facilitating Russia’s rise as a personalist, authoritarian mafia state, the weaknesses of the authoritarians and the way in which Western democracies could go on the offensive against the political war that the authoritarians wage every day against the democracies, and the attempt to erase the truth and the truth. promote hopelessness and cynicism among citizens in democracies and pit them against each other.

Autocracy, Inc.: the dictators who want to rule the world: https://a.co/d/ifaCL3E