The emergence of autocratic regimes has been one of the defining features of the global political landscape in recent years. Russia, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Belarus. The list goes on and on. In Autocracy, Inc. Anne Applebaum gives a short but compelling account of the phenomenon, focusing less on why these anti-democratic leaders have prospered and more on how they operate. It’s a necessary and urgent read, written with passion, intelligence, and deep experience. Anyone troubled by and curious about what is happening ought to read it. For me the most eye-opening part of her account was the interconnectedness of the autocracies, the sense that they operate very effectively as an international system, a supportive network that offers an alternative world order. It’s a network that relies heavily on the willingness of the international finance community to hide and launder the autocrats’ ill gotten money and on a global diaspora of friends and fellow travelers to sustain it.

I would have liked the author to emphasize more strongly how the autocrats have studied the playbook of Western democracies when it comes to propaganda techniques and other ways of controlling their messaging. The anti-democratic regimes have built upon techniques devised and deployed over many decades by Western democracies to spread their own ideology. Autocracy flourishes for many reasons, not least because the financial systems based in liberal democracies enable it and because it has learned how to use and extend some of its tools to great effect.