In this episode, Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer for The Atlantic, joins to discuss her newest book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World, which explores how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how democracies should organize to defeat them. She joins Jeffrey Rosen to discuss new threats from autocratic leaders at home and around the world and how liberal democracies should fight these threats.
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Today’s episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She is also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. She is the author of numerous critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World (2024).
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Additional Resources:
- Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Rule the World (2024)
Excerpt from Interview: Anne Applebaum warns that U.S. institutions face pressures to conform to political agendas, and a second Trump presidency could cause chaos, hindering U.S. progress and international action.
Ann Applebaum: So, as I said, our podcast is about ways in which some kinds of autocratic behavior have arisen. And the first episode was about Republicans who discovered that in order to maintain their status and role inside the Republican Party, they had to accept lies. And we interviewed both a former congressman, but also an election official in Arizona who who went through this process of learning that they have to behave in a different way, which to us seemed like a very East European kind of kind of realization, that if you want to get along in life, you just have to accept a conspiracy theory. You're not allowed to fight back against it. So in that sense, some parts of American politics have already gone down that road. In the case of judges, you know, people pay a lot of attention to the Supreme Court and so on. But there's another factor, which is that if you look at the behavior of a judge like Aileen Cannon in Florida, what's interesting about her is that she's a judge who is technically under no pressure. She's under no political pressure.
She's, the laws on courts that are in our constitution to keep judges independent involve making sure their salaries are paid, that their salaries aren't influenced by Congress, making sure they're well paid, making sure they're protected in various ways from political influence. But the constitution can't prevent a judge who seeks to do a favor for a politician breaking the rules. So it can't prevent somebody who has all the benefits of independence and who's insured against political pressure from nevertheless wanting to play a political game. And so we explore that idea as well. And almost when you go through any set of, if you look at any US institution, you find the same thing. And so the Department of Justice, until now, and again, you're probably a greater expert than me, has been set up in such a way that it's meant not to function at the behest of the president. So it has some independent status. It's not supposed to be a political organ that's used to prosecute the leader of the opposition. Nevertheless, that's how Trump talks about using it. And so the question is, would the old standard hold up under pressure? I mean, the US has one huge advantage, which is that we're a very large country.
Also, we're a federal system. And so even changes at the top don't necessarily affect the way things work at the bottom. And we may be in a situation soon where there are enormous gaps between, I mean, we're really there already, between states and how states are run legally and otherwise. But so there would be a lot of elements inside the system in that sense, just at the state level and at the local level that would push back against any attempt to change the rules. And you would also find, there would be legal challenges and there would be, it's not like you have a tame judiciary that would just collaborate with whatever the president says. So there would be many places where there would be pushback. Actually, honestly, my fear about a second Trump presidency would be not that he would turn the United States into a dictatorship, but that he would try and in trying to create a massive amount of chaos. And that would be all that we would be consumed with that conversation for the subsequent four years. And it would make the United States incapable of acting internationally or doing anything positive. That's really my greatest fear. I don't know. This is your world more than it is mine. I'd love to know what you think.
Excerpt from Interview: Anne Applebaum explains how authoritarian regimes are collaborating on military strategies, weapon sharing, and influence.
Anne Applebaum: In the book, I talk about different ways, whether it's through shared propaganda or whether it's through shared financial tactics, even the quasi-state quasi-private companies in one dictatorship investing in the quasi-state quasi-private companies of another. They share surveillance technology, but yes, they also increasingly cooperate in the realm of security and the military. And this was the, I mean, obviously the most dramatic example is the North Koreans supplying ammunition to Russia to fight the war against Ukraine and the Iranians supplying drones to the Russians, and maybe possibly even ballistic missiles. That's a recent story. The Chinese have also enabled the Russians in a different sense. They have continued to supply components for the Russian defense industry. And there's even a recent story. There was a Reuters investigation. And then I had also heard about it from another source that the Russians are building drone factories in China. So some of the, some of what they've learned from the war, they're beginning to deploy in order to create a drone arsenal with the help of the Chinese.
That hasn't quite yet risen to the level of international diplomacy, but if true, it would show you a different way in which it works. And don't forget, there would be a reciprocal arrangement. So there's also now evidence that the Russians are supplying anti-ship missiles or thinking about doing it to the Houthis who are an Iranian proxy, who are believed to want to use them against American or other ships in the Red Sea. And so this would be another further destabilizing factor. So, once these regimes begin to spread and share very sophisticated weaponry, we're already entering a different kind of reality. Again, it's rumored, and I can't say that it's true, but I mean, think about the significance of Russian and Iranian nuclear collaboration. If that were to happen, the Iranians don't have nuclear weapons yet. They allegedly are very close. The Russians do have them. If the Russians were to begin to help them. Again, it would speed up the process of nuclear proliferation. So that they've begun to share weapons and that they share these security strategies is also new. A few years back, the idea that Putin would be accepting help from North Korea was kind of unthinkable.
And the Russians even played for a time a somewhat constructive role in enforcing sanctions on Iran. And that's obviously that that whole world is now gone and will not come back. So they begin to see an interest in mutual creation of havoc. And I'd say, I should say another piece of that story is now unfolding in Western and Central Africa, where in effect the Russians have a kind of security offer for dictators and would be dictators. They'll provide mercenaries who will help them attain power. Maybe the Chinese can invest and help them out with their economic problems in exchange they want access to, I don't know, diamond mines and other natural resources whose profits they can then take and employ to make their kleptocracy function. They're beginning to also look around the world for other kinds of alliances and other ways in which they can back up and support dictators or as I said, would be dictators who wanna take power. And that's not totally unfamiliar, I mean, it's not unlike what the Soviet Union did in the 1970s in Africa, but it's now returned and it's a particularly ugly version of it.
So the Wagner mercenaries in Africa are not very interested in human rights. They are very happy to beat people up and kill them. They don't abide by any laws either local or international. As I said, they're not exactly an arm of the Russian state. They operate semi-private, semi not but they now have to be understood as a factor in African politics. And that's part of the same system. It's part of the deterioration of norms and the attempt of Autocracy, Inc. To assert its values and to install its values in more places.
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