The 12 Books of Christmas | The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, with Anne Applebaum
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming, Conor Boyle. We're looking back at some of our favourite books of the year in our 12 Books of Christmas. Today's episode is with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum. Applebaum joined us alongside BBC broadcaster, Jonny Diamond, to discuss the themes of her latest book, Autocracy Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Let's go to the episode now. Thank you.

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much indeed and welcome to this fabulous venue. I'll just run through, if I could, the structure of the evening before we get going. And that is that Anne and I will chat for about an hour and then you and she will chat for about half an hour. All of you together. We'll see how the timings go. I should say Anne is convinced that if she and I talk for an hour there'll be people sloping out the back. So it's up to you to stay in your seats, please.

I'm not going to do a long introduction of Anne Applebaum. You obviously know who she is, otherwise you wouldn't have come here tonight. The list of books is long. The list of awards is very long. We're here particularly to discuss her new book, Autocracies, Inc., which...

is sitting high up on bestseller lists. And I think it's fair to say, although we will be discussing it, it walks hand in hand with her previous book, Twilight of Democracy. It can get a bit gloomy at times in Applebaumland, but there is also lots of hope and lots of provocative thought as well. A quick point about questions at the end.

A question has a rising intonation at the end.

A statement does not. And we are looking for questions for Anne. And I will ask for clumps of questions when they come. There are also people watching at home and or at their offices or anywhere. It might be online. Please put your questions in as well. I have a screen in front of me. I will try and take as many of them as I can. And the very last thing is if you do see me at any point squinting horribly at my page, it's because I've

I've annotated it with my terrible handwriting. It's not that I've got bored of anything that you or Anne is saying. I'm just trying to work out what my brilliant questions should be. Let us kick off now, as I say. We'll have a chat for about an hour and then we will go into questions from the audience both here and online.

And finally, just to reiterate, Anne will be signing books at the end up here on the stage. So do stick around for that if you so desire. Let's start off, Anne, with the big picture of the book that you have written. You had a big idea behind the book. Explain it, if you would, to the audience. So, first of all, thank you all so much for coming, for filling this amazing church, or

It makes me feel more important than I am, I think. The book describes a network. It's not an alliance. It's not an axis. It's a network of countries, of governments who work together for transactional reasons. It is not united by ideology. So it includes communist China, nationalist Russia, Russia,

theocratic Iran, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, North Korea and a handful of other countries who don't share a common vision of the world, who don't believe they're building the same kind of society, but who do have a set of common interests.

These are all countries that are autocracies. I use that word specifically precisely because they're all so different. They have different titles and different names, but these are all countries whose leaders feel they should be able to rule without checks and balances, without transparency, without the rule of law. They control all the levers of power in their societies, either as individuals or as political parties or as governments.

in a couple of cases, small groups of elites, and they object strongly to people who think they should be more closely examined or they should be blocked.

Towards that end, they push back against opposition inside their own countries, but increasingly they also push back against the language of democracy, the language of rights, and the language of transparency around the world. And so maybe I can sum it up by saying they don't necessarily have the same goal, but they have the same enemy. And the enemy is democracy.

us, you, pretty much everybody in this room, people who live in the democratic world. I try not to use the word West in the book because I think it's broader than that. And also I would like to include the democratic oppositions in those countries. Anybody who speaks about rights, who speaks about transparency, who speaks about the rule of law,

these are the people who they need to push back against physically, militarily, but also ideologically and in other ways. And that's really the cause that knits them together. Is it fair to say the difference between

the autocrats that you're looking at now and the autocracies of the 20th century is that word network that you used. I think it's the word... I mean, obviously, there have been autocratic alliances before. I think it's a network of, as I said, ideologically dissimilar regimes, although there are a few other things they have that are different too. So mostly we're talking about very, very wealthy people. We're talking about billionaires. Previous generations of dictators didn't have...

you know, billions in secret bank accounts and property all over the world, or not many of them did. You know, so they have a global reach and a set of global contacts. They also have an access to technology that is new. So they have

both surveillance technology, obviously, and maybe we can talk about that a little bit more. They have common methods of doing propaganda, of using the internet. They collaborate actually on their propaganda, sometimes just by imitation and sometimes...

deliberately, and so they have technological means of reaching people that I don't think prior generations did. So those things make them a little bit different. And they, through their networks, reinforce each other in various different ways. Yes, I mean, they're also interested in one another's fate in a very precise way. I mean, actually, I talk about this a little bit in the book, but one of the best examples, and it happens to be a current example, is Venezuela. Yes.

So Venezuela is a country that was the richest country in South America, is now the poorest, probably produces more refugees than Ukraine. It has all kinds of natural resources, oil and so on, but it has a government that is led by a group of people who would prefer to see their country join the category of failed states rather than to give up power.

They probably should have fallen years ago. It's a very unpopular government. It's so unpopular that they're now, as I understand it, very nervous about the lower levels of the army, whether the army is loyal anymore. But nevertheless, it's remained in power. And one of the most important reasons it's remained in power is because the Venezuelan regime has had

weapons from Russia. It has had investment from China, from Chinese companies into Venezuelan state companies and state-linked companies. It's had the secret police reinforcements from Cuba. And it's even had, this is I think one of the most interesting relationships on the planet. It has a very close and intense relationship with Iran. And

And if you think about it, why should a left-wing populist government in Venezuela have a close relationship to a theocracy in Iran? They have nothing to do with one another historically, culturally, geographically or any other way, but they do have a really important common interest and that's evading sanctions. And they have helped one another evade sanctions. The Iranians have helped the Venezuelans with oil and gas technology.

Venezuelans in turn have, we believe, have offered visas and other kinds of documents to Hezbollah activists so that they can travel in Europe. I mean, they've found a realm of common cause that turns out to be very important. And so as a group, you can say that Autocracy, Inc. has kept Venezuela going. It's probably kept Belarus going. I mean, you could point to it. I write in the book about Zimbabwe, but you could point to some other...

weaker autocracies who've been buoyed by this network. You write in the book, nobody's democracy is safe. When you look around the world, do you see specific countries teetering? Or is that an argument more broadly that the idea of democracy is being eaten up from the water? So I think it's important to understand that nobody's

No democracy is ever safe. There's no such thing as a political system that's guaranteed to last forever. That's not how politics work. And when you look at people, for example, when you look at the founders of the US, the people who wrote the US Constitution, they didn't think democracy was guaranteed. In fact, the very somewhat bizarre US Constitution, the Electoral College, all of our complicated voting systems, a lot of that was put into place

as a guarantee against the demagogue whom they imagined would eventually arise to try to upset the system. Of course, their imagination was based on their reading of classical literature. They were thinking about Caesar. And they imagined somebody like Caesar coming along, and so they put in these checks, and that's what the checks and balances were for. That was what the...

That's what the electoral college was for. Not that it ever worked that way or not that it serves that function anymore. But, you know, obviously the purpose was not so that Michigan gets to decide who wins, who wins the presidential election, you know, or that every year most campaign money is spent in Georgia. That wasn't in the mind of the, of the, of the authors of the constitution. But, but, but the, the, over the last several decades, certain, since the,

Second World War, but even more so since the end of the Cold War, we in our societies have been so fortunate and so lucky and so relatively prosperous and so relatively stable. I mean, we can all point to ups and downs in the last few decades that I think we've forgotten that no, nothing is guaranteed. You know, there's no curve of historical inevitability. And

Everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. And so it's just useful once in a while to remember that. So by the way, I don't think that it's inevitable that dictatorship wins, but neither is it inevitable that democracy wins. We did think.

there was an inevitable curve back in the 90s. We did. There seemed to be a sort of progress. This is too much detail to go into. There was a theory in political science if you've had a certain number of free elections then you'll be a democracy forever and ever.

And there was also, as you say, and this I write about a little bit in the book, this burst of confidence in the 90s when there was a huge wave of democratization, not just in Europe, which is probably what people here remember most, but in Latin America and around the world. The fall of communism inspired a wave of democratic transitions. And it felt to many people like this was inevitable. And there's the famous Frank Fukuyama example

end of history thesis, which he says was written the wrong way and everybody misinterpreted it. And actually, I heard him recently at an event and somebody asked him something about the end of history. This is a book he wrote 30 years ago. And he said, I'm asked that question twice a week. I've been answering it twice a week for 30 years. I can do it again tonight, you know, or you could give me a break. And

But the reason why his essay on the end of history was so popular and was so, was swept up, I think, is because it's what people wanted to believe and somehow it felt like it could be true.

And everybody wants to think we live in the best of all possible worlds, we live in the best possible society, sooner or later everybody will want to be like us. And that's, I think that sense of inevitability also allowed us to be irresponsible in a way. I mean, if we're always going to be a democracy and there's nothing really you have to do to keep, you know, keep it going or participate, you know, then...

You can get on with life. You can go and make money or paint paintings or write books, and you don't have to worry about politics because there's a class of politicians and they'll deal with it. And you don't have to participate. And I think that was a dangerous assumption. So it was that assumption that I think eventually got us into trouble. We let a lot of things happen by rote.

allied to walking alongside that theory that democracy was the sort of inevitable end point for much of civilization was the thought that if you traded with autocracies, they would become bound up with your economic way of life but also your political way of life. And you write of this very early in the book and it runs throughout the book.

You think that that was pretty heavily ingrained in the Western way of thinking about foreign policy? I want to be fair to the 1990s. So people in the 1990s and even earlier, people, particularly Europeans, had had this experience. So after the Second World War...

You know, there were economic deals done first between France and Germany, then the European Union was created and so on and so on. And their experience was that economic integration leads to some political integration, eventually to peace and prosperity and so on. And it was true and it worked.

And in the 90s, that began to happen to Central Europe as well. And you could argue that Poland and the Czech Republic and so on also, that trade and economic links helped to tie them to the rest of Europe. So it wasn't that it was...

It was crazy. And also I should say, I should add another thing, which is that many people in Russia thought that or hoped that. They wanted also these economic links to lead eventually to political integration and maybe the democratization of Russia. And you can find people who believe that in China as well. So it wasn't just like something we imagined. There was, however, a clear moment after which it was no longer true, right?

And it began to become, in my view, it was much earlier in Russia than people thought when it became clear that the Russian elite, the Russian, as we started calling them, oligarchs, were taking advantage of trade as a way of, you know, the essential model for gaining power. This is how Putin came to power, was through stealing money from the state, laundering it through Western financial institutions, bringing it back to Russia, and then taking

using it to win influence and power. And we... I mean, I'm not sure there was that much we could do about it, but we... But we let it happen. We assumed it was okay. We turned a blind eye. We let them use Western institutions, and that was part of what... It was part of, of course, what created the system that we have now in Russia, and it was also what created a lot of cynicism about...

the language we were using at the same time. And I had, the reason, I learned this from the Russian opposition. You know, the Russian opposition would say, you all talk about human rights and democracy, but you, you know, you're enriching these guys and you let them buy houses in London using, you know, anonymous companies. You know, why? So that was a, there was a moment after which the, it was becoming clear that the trade was not creating, I don't know, mutual benefits.

mutual integration, but it was instead building up a very toxic regime. And there's the story, argument in China is a little bit different, but you can also say that there, and this, I think the business community has already reached this conclusion, that the, there was a moment after which it was unclear who was benefiting most. And, you know, was this creating political integration or was it simply enriching a Chinese communist party that had

I don't know, had not 100% friendly feelings about us.

You specifically detail the agreement to build gas pipelines, shipping Russian gas into Central and Western Europe, providing it relatively cheaply to Western Europe. Again, that was seen clearly as one way of drawing Russia in. It was seen as a very reliable supplier up to a certain point. Do you see it as an attempt to make the West dependent upon Russia?

So it's very funny. When you look back in the history of the gas pipeline, it's a very weird story. I mean, it starts in the first meetings between, it was West German and Austrian industrialists and what was the sort of the Soviet Ministry of Gas kind of people was in a Habsburg hunting lodge.

And at the time, there were still Russian and American soldiers looking at each other across the wall in Berlin. The Russians had only just recently left Vienna a few years earlier. So it was a very weird moment to be talking about pipelines. But it's also clear that from the very beginning,

there were, aside from the economic benefits, and there were some, I mean, the gas was much cheaper and the pipeline technology was better than it had been. And it was, you know, very important for German development in particular, but also the rest of Europe to have the gas. But it was pretty clear from the beginning that there were big political interests on both sides that were slightly different. So the West Germans were,

There were a series of West German leaders, famously Billy Brandt, who believed that if we build these pipelines, this will be a solid economic interest that will keep us linked and it will prevent war. I mean, you know, and we won't go to war because we'll have these big economic interests. So from the beginning, he wanted there to be more pipelines and more, he wanted this dependency.

What the Soviet Union wanted is probably also depended on who was in charge at the time, but I think they also saw that there could be a political gain from having this advantage. And of course, Americans from the very beginning worried that that was the real purpose of it, that there was some interest in blackmail. But what was never really resolved at the time was this weird morality. I mean, on the one hand, at that time, the Soviet Union was...

locking up dissidents, sponsoring terrorist movements in Europe.

creating havoc in various ways. And at the same time, it wasn't just West Germany. West Germany, the Netherlands, lots of other countries who benefited from the pipelines were effectively supporting the Soviet state and keeping it going through buying gas. And nobody really worked it out. I mean, there was a kind of... Everybody stepped away and said, hmm, that's a very interesting problem. And no one really debated it. And...

some people questioned it, as I said, lots of American presidents worried about it. But then as the, you know, when the Soviet Union came to an end, it was almost like the, even that debate just disappeared and everybody said, right, you know, we'll trade with them and we'll have democracy. It was almost as if the, that ambiguous early era was forgotten. And then when the trading relationship built and built in what you might call the new era of autocracy, you see money,

pouring through places like the City of London. And again, you write about this and you say it may be time to make the very wealthy choose between autocracy and democracy. When we're talking about very wealthy, we're talking about law firms, accountancy firms, reputation management firms, public relations, this gamut of people who have serviced autocrats and their helpers. Do you believe the

that is realistic that this very important sector of society could be made to choose. Well, I mean, you know, we decide what the rules are. I mean, you know, we created the world in which money laundering is, you know, is in effect happening. We allowed the existence of anonymous companies and anonymously purchased properties.

we created the legal system around the offshore world, we can de-create it. I mean, it's not like these things are natural, you know, it's not like they're volcanoes or natural rock formations that can't be moved. I mean, they're creations of the law and of our own customs. And so we can de-create them. And actually, we're moving in that direction already. It's beginning to happen. I mean...

complicated. But, you know, it's almost like we allowed these things to emerge and they became natural and part of the landscape. And maybe there's a moment where we say, right, why do we need this? Why is that legal? Why is there one world in which people have to obey the law? And, you know, most financial institutions are highly regulated and they worry all the time about

transparency issues and they have compliance officers and lawyers who, you know, and yet there's this alternate world that exists alongside where people don't worry about it or they seek to avoid it or, you know, the point of what they're doing is to avoid, not just avoid tax, but to hide money or channel drug money or channel

stolen money and we effectively have allowed that to happen. When you've been looking at, crude phrase, democracy versus autocracy...

Do you think now autocracies have got better than democracy in responding to all their environmental challenges and critically cooperating? No, I mean, we still manage to cooperate in lots of ways. I mean, it's not that they're better. It's that they, you know, they've learned some things from us. So...

you know, they learned how to use globalization to their advantage. I mean, for example, you know, that the internet is now a global conversation and it's, you know, you can intervene in it just as well from St. Petersburg as you can from, I don't know, Plymouth. So it's a, you know, they've begun to understand some things and I think there are some ways in which, and this is, the jury is still out on this, but there's some

of modern technology that are working to their advantage to obviously surveillance technology. If they, you know, it's the Chinese really who've mastered that. Could work in their interest.

And it's really incumbent upon us to think about how to make that kind of technology compatible with democracy. And that's not just surveillance technology, but the internet more broadly as well. Do you think the autocrats themselves, this generation, I don't know, autocrats 2.0, are cleverer than the ones of the last century? Yeah.

I mean, some of them are very clever and some of them are very stupid. I mean, there's also, I mean, look at what kind of regimes we're talking. I mean, anybody who says autocracy is better has to explain to me why Zimbabwe and Venezuela are better than, you know, I don't know,

any of their neighbors. I mean, the autocracies are in some ways as economically as different from one another as democracies are too. Also, just to be clear, the book isn't an argument that there are two camps and that the two camps sit on opposite sides of some metaphorical Berlin Wall.

The argument is that there are a lot of mixed countries. There are a lot of illiberal democracies. There are autocracies that aren't seeking to undermine the West. You can look at the Arab world monarchies. You can also look at Vietnam, which is a country that is clearly not a democracy, but it's also not particularly interested in undermining democracy.

America or Europe in fact is I think hoping to trade more with us I mean so there's a range of countries the book is and the solution or the answers to the dilemma created by this network is not some kind of new cold war I don't believe in that at all

I think what we should be doing is looking not at particular autocracies, you know, as our enemies. I mean, that serves no purpose. But looking rather at autocratic behaviors, you know, the anti-transparency, the deliberate sowing of disinformation. You know, in some cases, you know, in the case of...

you know, of the war in Ukraine, you know, the use of, the illegal use of violence and force. I mean, we could look at those behaviors and think about how to counter them. And some of those behaviors are here. I mean, they're in London or they're in,

Washington or they're in Paris. So it's more about thinking about how do we change those things rather than... So I'm not calling for us to go to war with China, just to be clear. But you are, to some degree, calling on the West, democracies, whatever you want to call it. The democratic world. It's a very useful phrase. To try and counter the narrative that is put forward by autocratic networks. And

It begs the question about why you think autocracies have become so interested in the narrative and in shaping opinions in the West. This is... They've told us. I mean, this is both...

particularly China and Russia, have become very clear about the need to defeat what they see as the ideas coming from our part of the world. There's a marvelous document that was produced in China in 2013 by the Chinese Communist Party, and it has this great name, and it's called Document No. 9.

And it lists the perils facing the Chinese Communist Party. And number one is 2013. Number one is Western constitutional democracy. And also on the list are the ideas about free press. There's something about civic engagement. There are a series of ideas and practices that are considered to be very dangerous to Chinese communism.

And this was, this is because, again, these are the ideas that if they were to be put into practice, you couldn't have a one party state or you couldn't have one that rules opaquely and

And so they began to see this set of ideas as a threat to them. And partly it's a threat because it's the language that their own opposition uses. So that's the language of the Hong Kong democracy movement or the Navalny movement or the women's movement in Iran or the Venezuelan opposition, which is very, very well organized and very articulate.

That's the language that threatens them. And so they began to see this as a problem. Around about the same time, this is when, in 2014, after the revolution in Ukraine, remember what that looked like. This is the revolution in Maidan of 2014. This was a popular uprising that was calling for anti-corruption laws and for joining the European Union, by which they meant joining the world of rule of law.

It was, it wound up scaring the pro-Putin, you know, he was a kind of illiberal president of Ukraine. It wound up scaring him. He ran away from the country, you know, and then the mob came and sacked his palace, which was full of gold taps and ostriches and so on.

That was Putin's nightmare. That's what he's afraid of. And there had been, remember there had been a few years early in 2011, there had been a kind of popular anti-corruption movement taking hold in Moscow too. So he saw that and he thought, right, that is the thing that threatens me. And it was that movement in Ukraine that he identifies with Ukraine, by the way, it's part of his, I think it's a part of the reason why he's fighting the current war, that

That was the inspiration for the first invasion of Crimea, and then for a series of

illiberal and worse crackdowns that happened in Russia in the year afterwards. So they begin to see this language and the possibility of popular uprising as a threat to them and their particular form of power. So on the one hand you have the risk of importing these dangerous ideas like freedom of speech and freedom of association. But the other part of the control of the narrative is also about undermining

democracy undermining the countries. I mean, and there is, you know, dozens of examples. There's also, there's talk about a specific attempt to stir up trouble during the recent disorder here in Britain as well.

Again, what is the goal there, do you think, of autocracies or an autocracy in trying to undermine institutions? So we don't see it this way. So I imagine most people in this room don't wake up in the morning and worry about Putin, right? We don't worry about Russia. We don't think about China. We don't think of them as our enemies or as a threat.

There are people in Moscow and Beijing who wake up in the morning and worry about us. They think that the ideas coming from our part of the world could be a threat to them. And so they think about...

how to undermine not just the narrative's democracy but actual democracies, how to create chaos, how to disrupt elections, how to support the far right or sometimes the far left, how to pump up extremism, how to encourage rioting.

how to encourage protest because anytime we look bad for whatever reason, they, you know, that gives them extra points. So they have a, in a way they have a, they really have just one narrative that matters and then everything else kind of circulates around it. And that is, you know, they want us, they want their own populations to be, to believe that autocracy is stable and safe and,

and will keep you protected from change. And democracy is violent and dangerous and divisive, and you don't want that. And it's a zero-sum game. This was particularly a problem for Putin. So most Russians, until fairly recently, thought of themselves as Europeans. I mean, they're part of European culture, and Tolstoy spoke French, and so on. And

And so it's been very important for Putin to say, no, you know, Europe is dangerous and degenerate, by which he means sexually degenerate. And, you know, you don't want any part of that divided, ugly, divisive place. You know, we have a different, separate, different kind of culture. And so towards that end, I mean, if there was, I think this is cited in the book as one of my favorite political science studies ever was a

And there are not that many that are this much fun. But there was a... I think they were Estonians. They did a survey of Russian television and they monitored it over a period of time and looked at every single... On two or three of the channels, every single news item about Europe. And repeatedly, over and over again, it was about immigrants murdering people. It was about social workers taking away your children. It was about...

I don't know, you know, homosexuals taking over, you know, the schooling system. I mean, some of it was true, some of it was exaggerated, some of it was entirely made up. But the idea was to show that democracy is unstable and dangerous and so on. So anytime they can poison the idea of democracy at home, that's good for them.

And increasingly, it's their interest to weaken us as well. And if they can weaken us politically, then they won't have to fight us militarily. So if Putin can win the war in Ukraine...

just by sowing narratives about, you know, whether it's Ukraine fatigue or, you know, or the inevitability of Russian victory. If they can convince us of that, then they don't have to win on the battlefield. And so they, you know, it's just much cheaper. So they, you know, they invest a lot of time thinking about how to do that. How do you create, you know, how do you create instability? How do you create a pro-Russian sentiment? And so on and so on.

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You talk about the narrative a lot in the book. Obviously, the machinery for narrative control has been boosted inordinately through social media. And yet, democracies seem very wary about trying to regulate, trying to control, trying to weed out bad actors. Why do you think that is? Partly it's because we do have traditions of free speech.

Partly it's because the internet platforms when they began sold us on the idea that they aren't publishers. They don't have to obey the laws that newspaper publishers or TV broadcasters would have to obey. They're platforms. We even came up with a name for them. And the idea that the laws and regulations that apply in the real world somehow don't apply in the online world

seemed obvious from very early on. And I think sort of in retrospect, that was a mistake. To be very clear, I don't believe that we should censor. I don't want a minister of information. It's not about the government taking stuff down. But even just having the platforms conform to laws about political advertising would make a difference. And of course, the laws on child pornography and other restrictions that we accept with no problem in the rest of the world.

But we could also go further because what the platforms really are is they aren't publishers, it's true, but they do produce algorithms. And

There are technologically ways in which, first of all, you could give people control over their own data, so it's harder for the algorithms to take advantage of it. You could make the algorithms more opaque. You could give people some choice about them, what it is that you want to see. There are ways to regulate that piece of what they do that could make...

you know, that could at least make the Internet more reflective or more helpful to democracy. I mean, if you think about it, all conversations, all public conversations, this one included, have rules, right? You said the rules at the beginning. We're going to talk for an hour and then we're going to take questions.

TV stations have rules. TV studios have rules. Parliaments have rules. Some people are allowed to talk and not everybody shouts at once or not most of the time. And those rules are designed to create a certain level of conversation or some intelligent debate.

You know, the rules on the internet, certainly until recently, were set by companies, of course, whose main interest was in keeping you online as much as possible. And for a long time that meant promoting anger, emotion, division, you know, and so on. So their interest was not in promoting good conversation. Their interest was in making you really, really mad so that you stay online and, you know,

because someone is wrong on the internet and you have to stay up all night and tell them why. I have read your tweets. That's right. I've been there.

It's a very effective technology. But the point is you could order it differently. You could change the rules. And, you know, again, maybe we need another separate long conversation to talk about how that could be done. But it's not unthinkable and it's not impossible. I mean, you know, you've seen in the last few weeks, there's beginning to be almost this

very belated kind of knee-jerk, you know, let's arrest the CEO of Telegram. I mean, that's like, we're very late down the road to be doing that. I mean, shouldn't somebody have thought about that, you know, some years ago? So they're beginning to be this kind of belated feeling that, wait, you know, this is speech and

rather online speech is the same as offline speech. The online world is just as real as the offline world. We all live in them both. Shouldn't they be

you know, regulated in the same way. But it's late. I mean, we could have had this conversation 10 years ago. You, I think you dedicate the book to the optimists and you write, you cite some democracy campaigners clearly admiringly about the passion that they bring to the cause of fighting democracy, incredibly brave men and women. At the same time, you say the autocracies believe they are winning.

Do you believe they are winning? No. I mean, I don't think they have to win. I mean, I think they have done better in the last decade or so than we have acknowledged. But I don't think it's...

First of all, I don't think it's a contest that's going to end. It's not like something will happen next year and we'll know who's won and who's lost. Nor is it binary, as you stress. Nor is it binary. And I think this is now, this is the conundrum that will face us for the rest of, for the foreseeable future.

And to be clear, the people who fight autocracy and who live in autocracies or sometimes live in exile, I mean, these are often... These are the people who are often the best equipped to explain those systems and who understand them incredibly well. I don't think we listen to them enough. As I said, it was the Russian opposition who were the first to say...

who were the first to really understand how the oligarchy worked in Russia. And I just don't think they were, you know, in this moment of the early 2000s when everybody was very enthusiastic about trade and Putin was in the G7, nobody was paying attention to them. They were, you know, a lot of this was clear even then. I think we could spend a lot more time listening to them and, you know, thereby make sure that they begin to win.

Can we talk about the pair of books which I mentioned, not just Autocracies, Inc., but also Twilight of Democracy? You don't want to talk about my cookbook? We'll go on to the cookbook later. I should say my customary line now, if you haven't read Gulag, read it. It's superb. That's not a cookbook. That's not a cookbook, I promise you. In this book, you say that liberal democracies can be saved, but only if those who live in them are willing...

to make the effort to save them. But you also write very persuasively in Twilight of Democracy about the raw appeal of populism to very large numbers of people, the desire for black and white, the desire for strong men and strong women, largely strong men, and how...

It plays upon instincts which you believe are clearly at the heart of a lot of people's way of life. How do you marry up that belief that you can save people but save people? Most of human history, most people have lived in what we would call autocracies. They were monarchies or they were run by warlords or they were empires. That's in some ways the normal, the human norm.

you know, it's also true that particularly at times when there's a lot of political change and we are living through an era of unbelievable change. I mean, I don't think we acknowledge it enough, you know, social change, uh,

you know, the change in the way people get married, demographic change, economic change, the change in the nature of information and the way we learn things about the world, you know, huge amount of change, you naturally have a lot of people who are nostalgic, who want something more stable, who remember some previous time when things didn't change as quickly. And by the way, they're not wrong. I mean, there was an era when

things didn't change as quickly and when things were different. So, you know, acknowledging that there, you know, well, let me just say it's important to begin by acknowledging that some of this attraction to autocracy and stability is always going to be there, but then it's incumbent on

and on anybody else who wants to live in a liberal democratic society to find ways of appealing to people and making our system comfortable for a broader range of people. I mean, clearly it can be done because it's, you know, if you look at U.S. history closely enough,

you know, you see an enormous number of ups and downs, you know, moments of greater repression and moments of greater liberation. And, you know, you can argue that, you know, the Confederacy was a kind of mini autocracy, and that was America, you know, and you can look then at the southern states in the second part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, and those were like little mini, those weren't terribly democratic. These were little one-party states. You could even find the rough equivalent of one-party states in some parts of the U.S. now. So it's a, you

There are ups and downs, and it's sort of an ongoing struggle, but that doesn't mean it can't be won or that it hasn't been won in the past or there haven't been moments of progress. It's just that there's, I would say it again, I mean, there's nothing inevitable about liberal democracy, and assuming that it's inevitable is when we begin to make mistakes. Can I ask you a personal question? Forgive me, but... Depends. Yeah.

Are you, as well as being an historian and a commentator, are you a campaigner? Are you an activist?

Well, if you're a working journalist, you can't be a political activist in a way. But am I involved in various causes in various places? Yeah. I mean, what about the CIA, as they ask in most places? But I don't mean that. I mean, do you see yourself as someone who fights for democracy?

I mean, I don't think I'm, I don't want to, it's too pretentious to describe myself as a democracy activist. I live in a democracy. I'm very, very lucky. I live in a society where I can say whatever I want. So, you

I have my friend Evan Mawariri, who's described in this book, was a real democracy activist in Zimbabwe. And he went to jail and lost almost everything and now lives in exile. I mean, I can't put myself in the category of him. But do I see myself as someone who's on his side? Yes. And do you believe that...

right-minded people should be, in some small way, democracy activists as well. I mean, I'm not sure what... I want to be careful about right-minded people. Forgive my clumsy phrasing, please. I mean, it's not about being right-minded. If you care about the society that you live in and you feel strongly about...

the things about it that are good and changing the things about it that are bad, which clearly there are many, then yeah, it's incumbent upon you to... You don't have to be in a political party or run for office, but should you be involved somehow in your community? Should you...

I mean, not everybody is able to do it. Not everybody has time. You know, not everybody has the money. But if you can, yes. I mean, you know, that's what... You know, when democracy succeeds, it's because people are involved and people are engaged. I mean, there's a reason why the dictatorships, the autocracies that I describe in this book...

why they seek to repress civic engagement. I mean, in a way, we were talking about the authoritarian narrative. The real purpose of it is to keep people out of politics. They say, you know, we have everything. Here is stable and safe. If you do any agitating, if you do any democracy, if you call for something different,

There'll be violence, death, murder, and plus we're going to arrest you and your whole family. And the whole point of their narrative is to keep people scared and silent. They want people to stay home. That's what autocracy is. It's a way of keeping people out of the public square. People often ask me about Russia. What do the Russians think about the war? The answer is it doesn't matter what they think about the war.

There is no public space in Russia where you can discuss the war and have an opinion about it that matters. So the opposite of that, the opposite of a society in which everybody stays home and stays out of politics is one in which people are engaged. And I don't want to give people a formula for how to be involved because it depends who you are and where you live, as I said. But yeah, I do think so. I guess the flip side is that

one of the luxuries of democracy is disengagement, is that you are not sort of putting your shoulder to the wheel constantly to make the country work. You know, that's what we thought for a long time. I mean, we used to say this, you know, in sort of badly run countries,

everybody has to be political. So I remember, I spent some time in the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union, and I also spent some time in communist Poland. Everybody had to be involved in politics. Everybody cared about it. Everybody argued about it. And then you would go back to Washington or London, and you'd say, oh, what a relief. Nobody here has to worry about it because there are some professional politicians and they deal with it. And I actually think that was a mistake. That was my misunderstanding. It's actually...

The threat to democracy comes when people become disengaged, when they don't care, when they say, not my problem, let other people decide.

You have admirably not sloped out of the room whilst Anne's been talking, confounding her worst fears. What I'd like to do now, if I could, is to take your questions. I should say I have some questions also from those watching online and I will try and blend those in to what we have. What I want to do is take two or three questions at a time so that we can...

keep moving and hear as many of your questions, not statements, as possible. And we have, I hope, roving microphones knocking around. I can't see them at the moment, but I'm sure they're there. We can't see anything. I know, I know. It's always this problem with the lights blinding us. This is what the KGB did when they interrogated people. And I'm very keen to get a good mix of people asking questions. I'm going to start with this gentleman here. That's right. And then afterwards, this gentleman at the front.

Thank you. I would encourage people other than gentlemen to also put their hands up. Sir. Thank you. I wanted to ask about the fragility of the democratic world, of our democracy, and how much responsibility actually rests on moderate conservatives. It seems to me in campaigns they're always hovering. Things are the fault of single mothers, students, benefits claimants, asylum seekers, gays, whatever. And

That isn't the case for conservatism, but when they campaign on that basis, I think that undermines democratic sensibilities. If you look at, say, John McCain, he tried to do a reasonable campaign but lost. The Republicans learned that they have to go for someone that just takes that othering to their ultimate degree. And so our moderate conservative is responsible for it in part by not standing up and not restraining such campaigning. Thank you. And Sir?

Thank you very much for the talk. And may I have two questions? Briefly, sir. So the first one is, you said, Mr. Obama, that you live in a democracy.

And I would like to know if you consider a democracy the fact that in 2003, 90% of the population of the United States was opposed to invading Iraq and destroying Iraq. But Bush and his party.

Anyway, that is one question. The other one is you mentioned the influence of the importance of the Chinese relationship with Venezuela. But I wanted to know what you think of the

relationship, excellent relationship between China and the United States with China being the biggest foreign investor with America having four and a half thousand McDonald's in China and America buying weapons from China for the American army. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, both of you.

The first question on moderate conservatives. Well, actually, the first question was about othering. Yes, indeed. So actually, by one of the famous, not famous is the wrong word, but one of the prime tactics of autocratic populists is

is to seek to create a majority by identifying an enemy. So if you can polarize the population around dislike of some kind of outgroup,

then that's a way of not just of winning an election, but of claiming some kind of extra legitimacy. I lived in Poland for part of the time, and we had an election campaign in 2015 that was all about hating migrants. And this is, of course, ironic in a country that at that time had almost no migrants. This was actually an imaginary enemy that was...

that was posed by the party that eventually won that election. And they also then used that as a way of saying, we won this election and it's because we are real Poles, we're the true Poles, and our enemies are foreigners and elites and migrants, and therefore we deserve to change the rules of democracy. It was actually a classic example

It's a classic tactic used by autocratic populists or illiberal leaders who want to end or undermine democracy. I mean, some element of it is probably always present in democratic politics, but I'm not sure that you can say it's...

it's a moderate conservative tactic. I mean, it's more of a tactic that can be used by autocratic... I may have misheard. Did you say modern conservative, sir? You did say modern conservative. Yeah.

Okay. I didn't quite get that. Okay. And then the two points made by the gentleman there in front. So I hate to tell you this, but the Iraq war in 2003 was incredibly popular in the United States. I'm sorry to say it, but that's true. It's also true that even if it had been the case that most Americans were against it, the way the rules of democracy worked in the U.S. is it's a representative democracy. So we elect members of Congress. We elect the president.

and they then make the policy. So we don't live in a referendum-based system where

public opinion rules in that way. I mean, you know, some countries there is that works more, you know, works more, there's more direct democracy than there is in the United States, like Switzerland, for example. But, you know, I don't think that's an example of democracy not working. China and the U.S., there's a lot about China and the U.S. in the book and the way in which they become economically intertwined and interdependent. And one of my arguments is that

you know, the relationship is so intense that it's not something that's going to be easy to break up immediately, but some kind of, if not decoupling, then de-risking. So some more careful and strategic thinking about the U.S.-Chinese relationship. I mean, for me to say it's necessary is actually silly because it's already happening. I mean, there's already beginning to be thought about supply chains and

strategic goods that we don't want to be completely dependent on China for, and I'm sure the Chinese may even think the same way as well. But there is an awareness now that over-dependence on a country that doesn't necessarily have the same strategic goals that we did is dangerous. So in that sense, we're already heading that way.

I will come back to you in a moment. And I insist on hearing from some ladies in the audience as well as gentlemen. I've got a quick question from someone at home. I don't have the name. Forgive me. And it starts rather nicely. I believe Anne rightly predicted Brexit and Trump's victory in 2016. Congratulations. Who does she believe will win the US presidential election in November?

I did... So there was... I was part of a dinner party like a week before the Brexit vote where everybody went around and said what they thought the result would be. And I did write 52-48. And then it was a bet, which I won. And then I didn't want to collect on the bet because the host was upset. Yeah. Right. But actually, it's funny. I was just saying to my colleague on the way over here, this election is unbelievably difficult to predict because all...

all, you know, most polling and most predictions are based on past elections. And if you have a situation like I think we're going to have in November, when there are loads of people voting who've never voted before, then all the prediction models fall apart. And so, you know, you can already see that, you know, talking about political engagement, you can see that

the nature of the political shift and the nature of the new Democratic candidate has already created a new kind of campaign that I think is very unpredictable. I think we can pretty safely say that Kamala Harris is going to win the popular vote, probably very, very easily. How she will do in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,

you know, and Georgia and maybe Arizona is really too hard to say. I mean, it may be a matter of a few votes either way. So I would, I don't think at this moment I can predict it. I will just say that the, as I said, that, you know, the previous example, the Polish election of last October also looked very, very close. And actually I thought the then ruling party was going to win.

And they didn't win, again, because of this influx of people, lots of young people in particular, into the campaigns changed the outcome completely. And something like that could happen. But, you know, it's when you're talking about people who've never voted before, maybe voting, then, you know, I don't know how you predict that, maybe with a crystal ball, but...

So I don't know. From you, please, some more questions if we could. I see a lady over there with her hand up and then another lady at the front here as well. We'll come to you afterwards. Thank you. Madam. So a quick question. I work in corruption investigations and what I've come across is

thinking recently was that if oligarchs try to escape the oppressive regimes by investing in other regimes, and I know that it's the crux of your book and the FD article I read recently, is there a way for it to be justified in terms of hiding and in terms of whether the countries, if they had open laws, for instance, in the future...

OK, thank you very much, madam. And lady in the front here, followed by... Oh, I'm going to take this lady here at the back after... Well, in the middle afterwards. I'm going to hand this over to my son and I hope he'll accept you... You cheated! ..over the female. LAUGHTER

Shocked. Can I? Sir. Sorry, you touched on the idea about economic liberalization leading to a spread of democracy and maybe political integration. Why did it work in some parts of Europe and then not in the case of nation states such as Russia and China, despite the trade liberalization and integration?

Okay. And there's a lady there. Could you tell us what you think will happen, A, if Kamala wins, and B, if Trump wins? There we go. Very simple ones there. You can go backwards on that. Maybe we'll ask the question again. Oh, yeah. So, okay. So this is about... So...

I mean, there are individual arguments about, you know, should the sanctions regime be written in such a way that encourages people to leave or encourages people to... Yes, maybe. I mean, unfortunately, sanctions tend to be pretty inflexible

They haven't been designed in a way that makes them easy to take them on and put them off. This is sort of legal. I've had this conversation with U.S. officials. So yes, probably it would make more sense to encourage oligarchs to leave or switch sides. And the way it works now is unnecessarily stiff.

You know, this question about economic integration and about why it works sometimes and not at other times, I mean, again, I don't know that there's a political science rule about it,

I even think that, as I said, in Russia in the 90s, there were people who wanted that to happen and hoped that it would. But I think that the Russian transition was actually from the beginning captured by people who didn't want it to happen. So in a way, we never had a partner who was actively interested in Russia becoming a democracy or even becoming a nation that was fully integrated with Russia.

with Europe. It's funny, we tend to describe and discuss the transition in Russia as some kind of, you know, it was like a failed democracy. Like they had a democracy and then somehow it didn't really work. And actually when you look at the history of what really happened, it's pretty clear that from the late 1980s, a dedicated group of

KGB people, Komsomol people, Communist Party people saw what was happening, began to set themselves up to make money out of it, began to plan to take over the state, and successfully executed that project. There is an argument, isn't there, that

that Western failure or over-enthusiasm for what became known as shock therapy played into their hands. There's also an argument that what we did made almost no difference. It would have happened. The disaster would have happened. We tend to put ourselves at the center of all these stories. Remember there was a famous article in the 90s, Who Lost Russia?,

you know, and I remember Russians saying, well, you know, we're not lost. You know, we had this idea that everything that we did was influential. I mean, you know, the question is whether there was ever capitalism in Russia at all. I mean, in our idea, you know, was there ever rule of law? No. Was there ever, you know, was there ever a moment when you could have a really good idea and, you

you know, work really hard and create your product and borrow money from a bank and sell it. I mean, I'm not sure you ever could in Russia. So I'm not sure that that system was ever created. I also remember that in the late 80s, Russia was in a terrible, you know, it was a system of economic collapse from the end of the Soviet Union. But I mean,

Basically, I think the answer with both Russia and China is that there was the elites and the leaders of those countries didn't want it to happen. I mean, they didn't want to be integrated. They didn't want, you know, or to the extent that they did and they allowed some of it to happen, they regretted it. So by 2013 or 2014, they wanted to push back against this idea. I mean, they began to see liberal ideas as too threatening to the rule of a, you know, to the one party state or to the one ruler state. Yeah.

That would be my understanding. Whereas Poland, for example,

In the early 90s, Poland was led by a group of people, some of whom had thought about it in advance, what they would do if communism had fell, and who as a group had a unified set of goals. And their goal was join Europe, join NATO, integrate with the rest of Western Europe. And they used to even talk about it as becoming normal, and that normal was Western Europe.

and they wanted to be normal and that was a kind of national goal. Whereas I don't think that was the case in Russia and it was certainly not ever the case in China. So you need sort of two sides, you know, it's not just up to us, you know, by the same thing of us being at the center, it's not just up to us to say, right, we're going to do integration and that will bring you democracy. The other side has to also want that to happen. I mean, what will happen if Harris wins versus what will happen if Trump wins? Well...

Gosh, I mean, I suppose if I could answer that question in the very narrow confines of my book, and I can't tell you what world events will play out in either case. We are at an unusual moment where I, you know, it is clear that Trump is a president who does not see himself as the leader of a democratic alliance of the democratic world. So

So most of the solutions and ideas that I talk about in the book, you know, how we could work together, he would not see the purpose of and he would not be interested in doing that. His main purpose in being president is to do with himself, you know, because he wants to stay out of jail. He wants his family to earn money. He's

as a, you know, ego invested in being president. He's not interested in what role the United States plays in the world. And he would be, although I can't predict what he would do because in almost every circumstance it depends on

you know, how he sees the advantage. I mean, he'd certainly be someone who would be more likely to do some kind of deal with Putin that led to the end of Ukrainian sovereignty than, you know, than most other U.S. presidents would be. And he would be most likely to look for accommodation with the autocratic world because if it was somehow advantageous to him.

So I would say that in the context of this conversation, he's certainly a threat to the idea that we could bring together the democratic world and write better rules for ourselves. Harris is again,

Foreign policy is not her métier. It's not something that she's done, although I have been in rooms where I've heard her talk about Ukraine in particular, and her instincts, I think, are the same as Biden's. But she is somebody who is a former attorney general of California, and she is somebody who's interested in the rule of law.

And so I can imagine that Harris would be someone who would be interested in the fight against kleptocracy and the fight for better rules and better governance of the internet among other things. So look at what people's background is, where they come from, you get some idea of what their attitude will be. And that would be my, that's my prediction.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts and Bea Duncan.

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