by Michael Ignatieff at Literary Review: Nearly three quarters of the world’s population, according to the experts, live in autocracies. Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc wants us to see the resemblances in these single-party, single-leader regimes, the network of connections they have established and the risk they pose to free peoples. The problem with her analysis is that these regimes differ as much as they resemble each other.
Autocracies, just like democracies, need legitimacy with their people. In each case, the legitimacy principle is different. Xi Jinping’s Communist Party can claim that it has raised people’s living standards for fifty years and made China a world power. It has done so by working within the global economic order put in place by the Americans after 1945. China is now challenging American hegemony, but not the open economy that American hegemony sustains. Putin’s autocracy is totally different. He has no interest in sustaining the world economic order, from which, in any case, he has been shut out by sanctions. Nor does his legitimacy depend on raising his people’s living standards. Most of the country, outside St Petersburg and Moscow, is as poor as it was under the communists. Instead, he has pinned his regime’s future on the reconquest of the lost Russian empire. If he succeeds in Ukraine, the regime will endure for generations. If he fails, it will collapse and China will have to steer clear of the wreckage. As for the other autocratic regimes around the world, they are a ragbag, without much in the way of global influence. This disparate crew, ranging from the Kim dynasty in North Korea to the Iranian theocracy and the kleptocratic governments of Zimbabwe, Syria and Venezuela, holds on to power through force, inertia and corruption.
The crucial question about these autocracies is whether, one day, they will make common cause against America and its allies. The weak ones can’t do it on their own, and the strong ones are still hedging their bets. China eyes Taiwan but hesitates to take it by force. Russia’s struggles in Ukraine have reinforced China’s caution, but if Russia were to break Ukraine and force it into a Carthaginian peace or conquer it altogether, China’s hesitations might vanish and a concerted challenge to US power might begin. In this case, North Korea would supply some of the ammunition and Iran would deploy its Houthi, Hezbollah and Hamas proxies. The United States might then find itself facing a coordinated ‘axis of resistance’ that challenged its power all at once in Asia, the Middle East and eastern Europe.
These are dire possibilities, but for all the gloom aroused by the current world situation, they are not certainties. Applebaum’s survey doesn’t ask the crucial question: whether these autocracies have the capacity to mount a collective and coordinated military challenge to American power and the system of rules that the United States created after 1945. She argues that they certainly harbour the intention to do so. She writes ‘of a conscious plan to undermine the network of ideas, rules, and treaties that had been built into international law since 1945, to destroy the European order created after 1989, and, most important, to damage the influence and reputation of the United States and its democratic allies’.
More here.
