Anne Applebaum on the new axis of autocrats

Russia, China, Syria, Zimbabwe and Venezuela don’t have much in common when it comes to ideology or politics. But their autocratic leaders are bound by one shared interest: Personal power.

In her latest book, Autocracy, Inc., Anne Applebaum says the new twist is that those autocrats now work together to keep that grip on power.

Today, On Point: A new world of autocratic alliances.

Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. Her latest book is "Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World."

Excerpt from "Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World" by Anne Applebaum. Not to be reprinted without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The Axis Powers. These were Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. They were united by their expansionist ambition via military conquest during the Second World War. Then there was the Axis of Evil. These were Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Never formally allied.

In fact, Iran and Iraq were sworn enemies of each other. The term was a creation of President George W. Bush in 2002 and was meant to conjure a tripartite group united by their support for international terrorism and a desire to amass weapons of mass destruction. Though these nations often deeply distrusted each other, their leaders were united in one other belief, contempt for democracy, contempt for governance by the people. Now, is there a new axis asserting itself in the world? An axis of autocracies.

(MONTAGE)

ANDERS RASMUSSEN: If Putin wins in Ukraine, it would strengthen the axis of autocracies under the leadership of China, joined by Russia, North Korea, and Iran.

JENS STOLTENBERG: So what we see is that authoritarian powers, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, they are more and more aligned. They support each other more and more. And that makes it even more important in like-minded countries, NATO allies, but also our partners in the Asia Pacific, that we also work more closely together to stand up against this stronger alliance of authoritarian powers.

CHAKRABARTI: That was Anders Rasmussen, former head of NATO, speaking to The Voice of America, and Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's current Secretary General, he was on the BBC, both issued those identical warnings in April of this year. Anne Applebaum joins us today. She is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book is Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Anne Applebaum, welcome back to On Point.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, respond to what you heard the former and current NATO Secretary Generals just say there.

Do you think they're right in applying the political metaphor of an axis to these new powers that they were talking about?

APPLEBAUM: In my recent book, Autocracy, Inc., I tried not to use the word axis, and I tried not to use the word alliance, because I wanted people to get away from thinking of some kind of unified, organized group.

I do think they're absolutely right in pinpointing those powers, and I would probably add a few more. As powers who share tactics, they share interests, they don't share an ideology and they do share a common enemy. And the enemy is, as both of those former NATO secretary generals said, the enemy is the liberal world in the broadest sense of the term.

I would call it a network. I think that's the best way to understand it. It's not coordinated, there's no secret room where they meet, and there's nobody giving them orders, and China is not necessarily in control of everything. But they are a network, they interact when it suits them, and they share, as I said, they share a common enemy.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so then tell me more about why you, in your book, Autocracy, Inc., liken these new autocratic, I shouldn't say new, but the autocratic nations currently rising now, more as companies or corporations rather than a formal political access, as you just mentioned.

APPLEBUAM: So I was trying to think of what was the right metaphor to describe them.

And the best one I came up with was to imagine an enormous international corporation in which there are many different companies. And each one of them has their own projects and their own interests. But they're linked by some common interests, and when they can overlap and when it makes sense for them to overlap, they do.

And that was the metaphor I was looking for. I thought that explained this relationship. And of course, Autocracy, Inc. also has a financial implication, which I think is also correct. These are regimes that are now run by very rich people, often billionaires. They have personal financial interests, as well as the interests of their state. And actually the interests, their interests are the interests of the state.

In other words, the interest of the small group of men who own most of the companies in Russia, Russia's foreign policy is their foreign policy. It's their business policy. So they do have, they act, in that sense, more like businessmen. Business conglomerates than they do, for example, like the dictators of the 20th century, who didn't have access to that kind of money or wealth.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, okay. So then before we get deeper into the analysis and ideas that you put forth in the book, I feel like I found myself caught in a trap over recent years of just throwing out the phrase authoritarianism, autocracy, democracy, et cetera, without actually really specifically defining what we mean in specific context by those phrases.

So when you autocracy, how would you specifically define it, in the terms that you're using and thinking about in the world as we know it now?

APPLEBUAM: When I use the word autocracy, states which are led either by a single person or by a ruling elite or by a party in some cases like China or Cuba, which seeks to have no checks on its power. So no transparency, no independent media, no independent judiciary, and which seeks to, which therefore has the ability to do whatever it wants. A power that operates not according to rule of law, meaning there is a constitution, there is a set of laws, there are judges who seek to adhere to the law, but rather rule by law.

And that means the law is what the person in charge says it is, the person or the party or the clique says it is. And that's a very specific and particular way of running a society. It's very different from a democracy, or even it can be different from even the hybrid, more illiberal states around the world, which have some elections or have some interference or have some media.

And of course, it's very different from full democracies, which have all of those things. And of course, those states see as their primary opponents, or the ideas that bother them the most, are those that come from people or institutions who want to create impediments, protesters or dissidents or activists calling for transparency, calling for the rule of law.

Calling for rights to be given to people, that's their main impediment. And the word autocracy encompasses that. I actually think it's not very different from authoritarianism, and I would use it interchangeably. A dictator or dictatorship usually implies one person, and I'm talking about a group of systems that sometimes are run by one person and sometimes by more than one person.

So I felt autocracy was the best word.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that's interesting. Because I was wondering if in having this conversation with you, if instead of saying Russia broadly or China broadly, that I should be referring more specifically to President Xi or President Putin, but it sounds like the autocracies you're thinking about, it's not necessarily exclusively the individual leader that's at issue.

APPLEBAUM: No, they sometimes, Putin and Xi are both strong men type leaders who have built cults of personality around themselves, and who have unusual power and who come in contrast to previous, in a previous regime. So, prior to Xi, the Communist Party in China had a system of rotating leadership and he destroyed that. And then said, now it's just him.

So there can be an element of a strong man inside the systems, but that is different from the Iranian system, for example, which is a theocracy. And again, in China, there are other centers of power. It's just that what all those centers of power have in common is the desire to not to be hampered.

These are regimes led by people who think they personally have absolute sovereignty. They can do whatever they want. They can do whatever they want inside their own countries, and they can do it around the world increasingly.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then tell me, let's talk more specifically about how these countries, these regimes and individuals work together, even without having those formal alliances as you had mentioned.

Can you give us an example?

APPLEBAUM: Sure. Think about Venezuela, which is topical as we're speaking. There's just been an election there. The election has been stolen. We know from all kinds of sources that the opposition won, but the ruling, the regime has declared that it won.

We don't know as of this conversation how that will come out. The question is why is a regime in Venezuela still in power, which is that unpopular? It's profoundly unpopular. it's managed to destroy what was once the richest country in South America. It's created literally millions of refugees.

So all around South America and on our borders as well, there are Venezuelans who are escaping their country, because it's such a catastrophe. Why, how did they manage to hold power? They have a good opposition. It's well organized. It's popular. And the answer is that Venezuela has been rescued, not according to some secret plan, but in visible ways by other autocratic states.

So the Russians have lent Venezuela money. They have given them, sold them weapons. The Chinese have invested in Venezuelan companies and projects, sometimes with kickbacks to Venezuelan leaders. The Chinese have also sold them surveillance technology that they use to try and stay in control.

Cubans have offered advice on secret police and secret police tactics. The Iranians who are, if you think about it, it's one of the stranger allies for Venezuela than Iran. Iran's on the other side of the world. It doesn't have anything in common with Venezuela historically or geographically.

But Iran has stepped in and helped Venezuela to evade sanctions. And in return, the Venezuelans have offered the Iranians access to visas. They sometimes give visas to Hezbollah activists so they can move around Europe. And so what is that the autocratic world has collectively worked together to keep Nicolas Maduro, he's the leader of Venezuela, in power.

And you may well see that in the coming days. So just today after the election, Venezuela's neighbors, and I should say, including left leaning leaders in Chile and right leaning leaders in Argentina. All condemned the falsified election and asked to see real results. And whereas Russia, China and Iran immediately gathered around and said, we support Maduro and they congratulated him on his election.

And therefore, you can expect them to continue to keep him in power. And that's again, there wasn't a secret plan, they all have a common interest.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI:  Anne, I'm wondering if we could actually go back a little bit in time. You do so in the book, back to even what the mid 1960s and the groundwork that was laid, that has led to these autocratic regimes really supporting each other.

But you say that part of that groundwork was laid by the very liberal democracies that these regimes are now opposing, tell us that part of that story.

APPLEBAUM: So I did start the book with a famous story about how pipelines were once built between West Germany and Soviet Union. And it's a fascinating and complicated story.

It begins, as you say, in the '60s and goes into the '70s. And if you think about it, it was very odd. There was a moment when the Berlin Wall was up and you had soldiers on both sides of it and West Germany had American troops there and East Germany had Soviet troops in it. And nevertheless, the West Germans and the Soviet Union began to negotiate the construction of pipelines.

And this would bring gas from the Soviet Union, which then had new technology, was making it cheaper. And it would be good for West Germany as a source of energy. But and the idea of the people who built the pipelines was that they would help prevent war. So they would be good for everybody economically, but they would also integrate Germany and Russia, West Germany and the Soviet Union.

They would be, you couldn't just pick up a pipeline and turn it on and shut it off. This would be a kind of permanent relationship. And the idea was that economic integration between the democratic world and what was then the communist world would somehow lead to more peace, lead to better relationships, make sure that there was no war on the continent.

And some people didn't believe this. Americans actually were always very skeptical of the pipelines, but this idea persisted, and it carried on into the 1990s when it really caught on. So the idea in Germany, it was called Ostpolitik, this idea of Eastern policy was in effect taken up by the whole Western world.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, people said, right, this was a success. This economic integration between warring states was successful. And now we're going to build further economic integration with the former Soviet world, and then later that included China as well. Former, it still was communist China and that will enhance our trade, it will be economically good for us, it will create integration, and people even believe that it would eventually spread democracy.

From what we used to call the Western world, I would call it now the democratic world, to the formerly autocratic world. And I should say that this idea wasn't just the idea of people in Washington or people in London. It was also an idea that people in Moscow and Beijing had, and also believed and hoped that this would work.

And the idea was we didn't have to do anything special. We didn't have to think about institutions or, I don't know, judicial reform. We just had to, if we just all work together, eventually somehow by osmosis things would get better. And that is, of course, not what happened. Instead, as it turned out, that in certainly trade with Russia, and as time went on, trade with China, began to empower a very small elite.

So when a large capitalist complex democracy is doing business with a controlled political system and a dictatorship, it doesn't create lots of small businesses and companies always. It instead empowers a few very rich people. And essentially, through this collaboration, we helped create certainly, Putin's Russia, which was a kind of co effort, between the kind of co project of the Western financial system and the post Soviet Russian oligarchy.

CHAKRABARTI: So, it's interesting cause you really caught my ear when you said this transition from the formerly autocratic world, that was the desire, the transition from that to the world that most of us recognize as having been the post World War II consensus of liberal democracy as an international rule of law.

That makes me wonder, though, if in thinking about the autocratic regimes, that we're discussing today, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc., in a sense, maybe what we're looking at is not necessarily the rise of something new, but the end of something that was essentially anomalous.

That the period of 1945 to now, the roughly 80 years post the Second World War, and the triumph of liberal democracy, is an anomalous period in the grander scope of human history. And we're actually, we being humanity, is actually returning back to a mode of rule, which is more the norm.

APPLEBAUM: No, that's, so I would agree with that in part.

Yes, the democracies are few and rare in human history and most of them have failed. So that's correct. We've all, those of us who lived through the last 30 years in democracies are, consider ourselves very lucky because most of humanity hasn't lived in societies like ours.

So that's true. I would say though, that in addition to that, there are new elements to the kinds of autocracies that are now, that now work together. The ones that I described in my book. They, as I said, they're very wealthy. They can buy influence. They have genuine, real companies that have power.

So they have, they're not, these aren't autarkic, isolated, strange regimes. These regimes are integrated with one another, and of course, integrated with us. And part of the argument of the book is that instead of democracy flowing from us to them. Some autocratic practices and behaviors flowed from them to us.

And that's in fact where we are today.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. This is a really important point. And I want to come back to it a bit later in the show in detail. And my mind keeps drifting back to, quite frankly, let's call it 19th, 17th, 16th century Europe and the monarchies of old, right?

Because I think it's pretty easy to make the argument that they were functionally autocratic around the figurehead of the crown. And they also had deep business interests, right? Colonial interests. They had financial and military global power. Is that an inaccurate metaphor to draw on?

APPLEBAUM: No, you can certainly make that comparison. I it's just that the level of control and the amount of information that today's autocrats can have about their populace, it doesn't really compare to the 17th century. And the scale of the wealth is also very different.

Even Spain at its wealthiest and at the greatest extent of its empire, was able to build some spectacular churches. But there's no comparison to the billions of dollars hidden away in tax havens that today's autocrats have, which enables them, as I said, to buy influence and friends and allies all over the world.

So I think we're talking about a different scale now than then.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. The reason why I ask, I seek out these metaphors, is mostly just to make it real and concrete about exactly what we're talking about here, when we're seeking to understand not just how these autocratic regimes have managed to stay in power, but as you're saying, very rightfully, the influence now that they are increasingly exerting on the world.

For example, you talk about in the book that there's the information influence that the regimes exert, not just internally to their own populaces, but globally, right? Because I have to say, I wasn't aware, shame on me for not remembering this, that after Russia invaded Ukraine, a lot of satellite networks dropped Russia Today or RT.

But lo and behold, who comes along and picks it up and puts it back on their satellite so that RT can be beamed into Africa? It was the Chinese.

APPLEBAUM: It was the Chinese.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And can you tell me like, so how does that decision or why that decision was made and how that factor into this sort of Autocracy, Inc. view of how these regimes work?

APPLEBAUM: So both Russia and China have had for a long-time, international information policy, and they've both been building information networks. And until recently, they were thought to be quite separate and to have different goals. The Chinese have a huge investment in broadcasting, in websites, in newspapers, both their own Chinese state media, as well as they have content sharing agreements with newspapers and television stations all over the world.

They're very particularly keen on Africa and Asia, but elsewhere as well. And they've historically used that to put out messages about how great trade with China is, what you would expect. Not necessarily anything unexpected or unusual. Whereas, of course, the Russians built this huge clandestine network of, we saw a glimpse of it in our election, in the U.S. election in 2016.

But, of course, I've seen it in other elections elsewhere. Fake trolls and fake bots and ways of creating narratives designed to divide people and to influence election campaigns. And so that was their method. And more recently though, they've come together and you can see, for example, one example I use in the book is right after the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians invented a conspiracy theory that there were secret biological weapons, laboratories in Ukraine run by the United States, and this is not true, and it was repeatedly debunked, including by the U.N.

... And then a final piece of that is that there was no biological weapons production in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the Russians kept repeating it.

They put it out on all their networks. And the shocking thing was that the Chinese also put that same conspiracy theory out on their networks. So Chinese state television, all the Chinese linked media in Africa and Asia, all began to repeat that same story. And then a final piece of that story is that in the United States, Americans, who I didn't believe were forced or coerced to do so, also began to repeat it.

And so Tucker Carlson, who then still had his television program on Fox News had a whole episode about these fake biological weapons laboratories. There were a couple of people on Twitter who produced long screeds about it, that had a lot of attention and maybe millions of hits. And so in that sense, you saw that the Chinese, Russian American, plus I went and looked in other media as well, Venezuelan, Iranian media also all published the same story. So it's as if you had that story going out in dozens of different places in dozens of different ways, clandestinely and openly and otherwise.

And that's the way in which they now think and work together. Again, I don't think someone made a decision about that in a room. I think it was just the Chinese saw the story, they saw the Russians putting it out and they picked it up and ran with it. I'm not sure there needed to be a piece of diplomacy around it.

Maybe there was, but you wouldn't even need that. You would just, you just see them imitating one another and doing the same things.

CHAKRABARTI: This makes a lot of sense though, right? Because if the personal goals of the autocratic rulers in these nations in general align with the personal goals of other autocratic rulers, you don't need any kind of like formal alliance on paper.

And that actually, does that make it even harder to break the informal cooperation that you're talking about for liberal democracies to intercede in that?

APPLEBAUM: I think it makes it harder for us to understand. I think that's one of the reasons if we were presented with a modern version of Comic Con, which is the Soviet, international Soviet organization, or the Comintern, we would know what it was.

We would see it and we would say there's this international alliance and that has this set of ideas and they're pushing them. But we haven't seen that. And I think that's one of the reasons we became very complacent. And we also have a tradition, certainly in the United States, of seeing the world in geographic bits.

We have Middle Eastern experts and we have Russia experts and we have China experts. That's actually not, certainly, it's not how the Chinese think or how the Russians think they see the whole world and they see the whole world as a different in different places. They are in competition with the ideas of liberal democracy, and whether the competition is going on in Russia or China or Africa or Latin America, it's the same competition.

And we simply need to begin to see the world that way, too.

CHAKRABARTI: With that in mind, there's a speech that Chinese President Xi gave that you note in your book, Autocracy, Inc. And this was from October 2017. His address to the Chinese Communist Party Congress. We have a clip of it here where President Xi declares a new era in China and a time of, as he sees it, great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

(XI CLIP)

President Xi there saying, By the mid 21st century, our armed forces will be a first-class military. A military is built to fight. All the work must take combat capability as the criterion to meet and focus on being capable of fighting and fighting to win. The development of our country is still at an important strategic point.

The nation's prospects are bright, but the challenges are severe.

Why did you point out that particular speech in your book?

APPLEBAUM: This was a speech that Xi made at a moment when China, which had historically been actually quite moderate in its international diplomacy, the Chinese philosophy was to get along with other countries to gradually become wealthier, to participate in the rules of trade and diplomacy as they existed.

Chinese was seen to be a kind of consensus player, actually. They benefited a lot from the international trade that we've already talked about. And then there began to be a shift. And the shift had many sources, but the Chinese began to, they began to want to not just accept the rules, but to begin to change them and to say, we don't want to play by these rules anymore.

We want them to be different. And that entailed a whole lot of changes. You actually picked a military piece of the speech, but there are other aspects of it as well. So they've, they began, for example, to try to change the rules of conversation to United Nations. So they don't like conversations about human rights.

Because they see as a challenge to their type of political system. They don't like the fact that within some U.N. and other international institutions there are ombudsman, there are human rights envoys who can investigate China or other countries and make presentations about them.

And so they began to use the word sovereignty, that what the U.N. should do is ensure sovereignty. And sovereignty is a perfectly good word. It can mean many good things, but in the instance that they were using it, it meant something very specific, which is they get to decide about what goes on in their country and nobody else is allowed to have any say or make any comment.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Anne, here's another little snippet of what the other major autocrat that we've been talking about this hour has said about his view regarding Western liberal democracies and specifically the United States. So this is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, along with President Xi, has consistently criticized, professed Western political beliefs and human rights in international law. So Putin, in his annual keynote speech at the Valdai Discussion Club in October 2023, decried what he called U.S. arrogance.

(PUTIN CLIP)

Putin saying, Our western colleagues, especially from the U.S., not only arbitrarily established rules, but also teach who implement them and how who should be behave and how. This is all usually done in an openly bullish manner. He said, this is the same manifestation we hear all the time. 'You must. You were obliged.

We are seriously warning you.' And Putin finally says, who are you anyway, and what do you have to warn anyone?

So Anne, this leads me to, I want to hear more from you about something you say, that these autocracies are aiming to do regarding the expansion of their influence. That it's not just that they're trying to convince people in traditional Western democracies that autocratic rule is better, that their goal is simply to weaken faith in democracy itself.

Can you tell me more about that?

APPLEBAUM: Yeah, no. So they perceive very much the kinds of rules Putin is talking about. And rules, by the way, what he's talking about are human rights standards, norms about large countries not invading small countries. He's talking about the U.N. Charter. He's talking about actually rules that when they were originally written after the Second World War were widely accepted by many countries around, across the planet.

The U.N. human rights documents were written with Chinese Arab world, as well as European or North American input. But he's saying that those rules are no longer, he doesn't want to accept them. And not only that, he's going to demonstrate his disdain for them by defying them wherever he can.

And so his invasion of Ukraine was in part about that. There were other aspects to it, too. But it was about him saying, I don't care anymore about the U.N. Charter. I'm going to invade a sovereign separate country. I am going to build concentration camps on occupied territory of Ukraine because I don't care about your 'Never again' norms and your belief that since the Second World War, we don't commit mass atrocities in Europe.

I'm going to arrest and kidnap and deport children and I'm going to take them to Russia and change their identities. And I'm defying you to do anything about it to stop me. So that is part of the purpose of the invasion of Ukraine, was to show his disdain for these rules. And they're mostly norms, rather than rules, accepted forms of behavior.

But he also shows that disdain in other ways. So for example, by murdering Russians and others outside of the country. There's plenty of mysterious deaths to go around, but there've been one or two very famous ones in in London, one near London. And he's not alone in that. So the Belarusian dictator Lukashenko, who's essentially supported by Putin in the same way that Venezuela is supported by other autocrats.

Took, ordered a European airplane, a Ryan Airplane, Irish owned airline, out of the sky when it was flying over Belarus to force it to land so that he could arrest somebody who is on that plane, put him in prison and torture him. And this is what they're doing. They don't accept that other countries have laws. They're willing to defy them. They're willing to kidnap, murder, whatever it takes around the world, whatever, whoever's laws it is in order to show how little regard they have for any kind of so called international norms.

CHAKRABARTI: So you are very clear about the fact that the persistence and the expanding influence of these autocratic regimes also comes from Western democracies themselves in so far, as you say, the kleptocracy metastasized because of the way specifically when it comes to financial systems.

The United States, the UK are essentially contributing to the increasing financial strength of the very oligarchs that we're decrying here. I'd love for you to give us, there's a great example in your book about an Ohio steel mill in particular. Can you talk about that?

APPLEBAUM: Yeah, this is an interesting story because it's connected to a Ukrainian oligarch who represents exactly the political system in Ukraine that the Ukrainians were seeking to overthrow in 2014.

He was a Russian style kleptocrat who was stealing money from a bank that he owned in Ukraine, and he was essentially laundering it through the Midwest. He bought an Ohio steel mill, properties in Cincinnati there were, if I remember correctly, hotels all kinds of several different kinds of factories.

And he then essentially neglected them. He didn't try to make money out of them. In the case of the Ohio steel mill, there were terrible accidents and the mill eventually went bankrupt. And it was because the purpose of him buying these properties wasn't to make money out of them.

It was simply to hide the money that he'd stolen from Ukrainians, essentially. And there were a long list of Americans who cooperated. Some seem to have done so unknowingly, not everybody who, some people celebrated these local purchases. It was so great that foreign investment was coming into places like Ohio.

But  some people knew exactly who it was, and they knew the purpose of it and they nevertheless collaborated. So lawyers, accountants, company managers had full understanding of what was going on and they understood that this wasn't a real investment, in the sense that the investor cared about the properties.

It was simply basically a kind of money laundering operation. And it would not have been possible had there not been so many American allies and American participants in this project, and you can look around the world and you can find similar stories almost everywhere. I also talk in the book about Putin himself, who was, this is how he originally made his money.

It was also by taking money out of Russia, laundering it abroad, and then bringing it back in. But I also talk in the book about Putin himself, who was, you don't have to just look at Russia and Ukraine. You can look at dozens of countries from Angola to Equatorial Guinea, that you could look at to even the Philippines.

You can look at places where very wealthy people have successfully hidden their money thanks to American and European businesses, banks and systems. The United States, we have their number of U.S. States where it has long been possible to create shell companies. So with very little information, you can set up a company, and then that company can do all kinds of things.

And nobody necessarily knows who owns it. That system may be now coming to an end because some in the Senate finally got around to ending it, although it's  important to understand that all these systems, whether it's money laundering, whether it's shell companies, whether it's tax havens, these aren't natural, naturally emerging phenomenon.

These have been created by our laws and our regulations and we can uncreate them. We can banish them if we have the will to do. And by doing so, we would cut off an enormous source of funding to the autocratic world.

But the will, as you say, would have to come from the very institutions and the people in those institutions who created those laws in the first place.

Do you see evidence of that will there? Because to me, this gets right at why modern-day autocracies are growing in their influence, and I do want to eventually turn the conversation to how it seems as if at least one presidential candidate in the United States right now, oftentimes lavishes praise on those very autocracies.

So where's the will to change the laws, for example?

APPLEBAUM: So there is some will, and I talked through a couple of senators who are very interested in this. There have been a couple of members of the House in the U.S. There's have been campaigns in England for a long time, in the UK to change the system.

Actually, the current British Foreign Secretary, the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is very interested in this subject, and I talked to him about it, and I also talked to some of his staff about it. So it's not that there's no one who cares. It's just that it hasn't been a priority. It's a very complicated subject.

It's hard to understand. And there's an enormous amount of lobbying against it from the companies who benefit from it, from the accountants who benefit from it. And sometimes they work through traditional chambers of commerce or other organizations who pressure and lobby in Congress to prevent any of this from changing. And it just simply needs a bigger political movement or a larger amount of will to make a change.

And it's not impossible, and I hear echoes now, as I say, of change, but they're very, it's not enough yet. There's another issue I get to in the book, which is even a harder one, which is the regulation of social media companies. And that's also something that could be done or could be talked about, but there isn't the political will and the money that's going into lobbying against it is enormous.

CHAKRABARTI: I've always thought that greed is a very powerful motivator towards self interest, self interested behavior, and one that may not necessarily serve the national interest. But at the same time, this takes us back to what's happening here in the United States, because our internal domestic politics have shifted dramatically.

And let me just play a very recent example. This is former President Trump, who, during his presidency and then thereafter has repeatedly criticized international agreements and alliances such as NATO. He claims that they are unfair to the United States. So just earlier this month, here's what he said during his nomination speech at the Republican National Convention.

DONALD TRUMP: We have long been taken advantage of by other countries. And think of it oftentimes, these other countries are considered so called allies. They've taken advantage of us for years. We lose jobs, we lose revenue, and they gain everything and wipe out our businesses, wipe out our people. I stopped it. For four years, I stopped it.

CHAKRABARTI: Anne Applebaum, is Donald Trump of the same or from the same mold as the other leaders we've been talking about today?

APPLEBAUM: So he's still operating within a democratic political system. So not yet, but it is true that Trump's attitude, whether it's to the media, whether it's to judges, whether it's even to the military, is very different from any previous presidents, in that he also sees any checks and balances on his power as unfair and rigged and cheating and evidence of the deep state. And so he has that same instinct that he should be able to have as much power as he wants to do whatever he wants, and nobody should be able to stop him. That's his instinctive understanding of politics.

And in that sense, he is similar to the autocrats whom he often says that he admires. It's funny, when you played that clip, I thought you were going to play something different. He very often says, how much he admires President Xi or how smart he thinks President Putin is or how smart he thinks the dictator of North Korea is, he says this often.

And I think that's his way of saying, I admire people who have absolute power, and I would like to have absolute power too. And in recent history, there isn't a U.S. president who talked like that. And so yes, and he also attracts around himself people who also are interested in not being regulated and not having any checks on what they do.

And so we've seen some very wealthy people who are attracted to Trump. And there's always been, I think, a misunderstanding of him, that his appeal was to people who were poor or people who, you know, who were unemployed. Actually, he is enormously attractive to very wealthy people for the same reason that wealthy oligarchs in Russia are attracted to Putin.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, and I think, yes, he's still operating in, within a democratic system, but there's something, again what I see as having shifted is that not just those other individual billionaires, but we have the entire Republican Party, who's also aligned itself firmly behind Trump.

And even we've had rulings from the Supreme Court that have paved the way for an American version of an autocracy, in Trump v. USA, the Supreme Court has said that a president in doing quote-unquote official acts is totally immune from criminal prosecution. Essentially, is the groundwork laid here now for the United States to move towards an autocracy?

APPLEBAUM: If voters allow it to do, yes, the pieces are being put in place. So you're right that the immunity decision of the Supreme Court was very shocking to a lot of legal scholars for exactly the reasons you've just implied. You do have around Trump, which you did not have in his first term in office, you have around him people who are interested in the kinds of revolutionary change that would be necessary in order to make, to remove checks and balances and to give the president more, something closer to absolute power.

We still have a federal system. And so you couldn't control the United States the way that you can control Russia or even the way that you could control Hungary. Which you would have, whether it's governors in blue states or whether it's other institutions, you would have, you would always have people pushing back at him.

But yeah, I think the intention of many people around Trump is exactly that. It's to make America a very different kind of country, with a very different kind of political system in the future.