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The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, with Anne Applebaum

A radical new framework for understanding autocracy in the 21st century

“Trump wants Ukraine to lose. He believes he can build a special relationship between the United States and Russia” Anne Applebaum

In the 20th century most autocrats were brutal dictators whose main goal was to control a domestic population. But in the 21st century autocracy has become much more sophisticated and ambitious in its scope. States like Russia have developed sophisticated cross-border networks of kleptocratic financial structures, innovative security services 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 aim to do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. Propagandists from one country can promote and finance extremists and propaganda in another — pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of the West.

In September 2024 Anne Applebaum came to Intelligence Squared to provide a radical new framework for understanding autocracy in the 21st century. Applebaum argued that autocracies today are best viewed like an agglomeration of companies or what she calls Autocracy, Inc. Their relations are not based on values, but are rather transactional, which is why they operate so easily across ideological, geographical, and cultural lines. In truth, they are in full agreement about only one thing: The destruction of democratic challengers.

Applebaum was in conversation with BBC broadcaster Jonny Dymond to discuss how to understand and thwart this new evolved form of autocracy.


Speakers

Speaker

Anne Applebaum

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose new book is Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.


Historian and political commentator. Her books include Gulag: A History, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which won the Cundill Prize and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine which won the Lionel Gelber and Duff Cooper prizes. She is a columnist at The Atlantic and a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She divides her time between Britain, Poland and the USA. Her latest book is Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends.
Host

Jonny Dymond

BBC News presenter and Royal Correspondent


Presenter of BBC Radio 4's The World at One and The World This Weekend and BBC World Service Radio's World Questions. He is also Royal Correspondent for BBC News. He recently presented the BBC Radio 4 series Putin, in which told the story of Vladimir Putin's life by interviewing guests who have watched, studied and dealt with the Russian president.