Taking on the global brotherhood of despots

In 1999 Hugo Chávez made a choice. He had won Venezuela’s presidency promising revolutionary change. His chief of internal police brought him evidence of graft within his regime: some top officials were stealing from a fund for the poor. Chávez listened, said nothing and sacked the whistleblower. Insiders got the message: if you are loyal, you can steal. Chávez (pictured) wanted to stay in power for ever. He bet “that corrupt officials would prove more malleable than clean ones, and he was right”, writes Anne Applebaum.

Ms Applebaum, a journalist, made her name with “Gulag”, a history of the Soviet Union’s prison camps that won the Pulitzer prize. Her new book, “Autocracy, Inc”, is shorter and more urgent. Whatever their professed ideology, today’s strongmen typically crave little besides power itself and the loot it brings. They share an enemy: checks on power, and the democratic world that espouses them. That common enemy spurs them to collaborate, spinning global networks of mutual support.

For example, when America slapped sanctions on Venezuela, Russian energy giants stepped in to invest in its oil business. Cuba helped it spy on its people and weaponise rations to starve the opposition. Iran’s theocrats sent petrol and food to Venezuela’s socialist rulers, who allegedly laundered money for Hizbullah, a pro-Iranian militia. Zimbabwe’s president summed up the new autocratic mindset pithily. A veteran anti-colonial warrior, he warmly endorsed Russia’s colonial invasion of Ukraine and was rewarded with a helicopter. Gloating over it, he said: “The victims of sanctions must co-operate.”

Such relationships are transactional, so they have limits. But all autocrats want to paint the democratic alternative as ghastly. Their propaganda is mendacious (European governments take children from straight families and give them to gay couples!), but based on a shrewd understanding of the West’s divisions. “Americans who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how much time Russian state television devotes to America’s culture wars,” writes Ms Applebaum. Mr Putin’s pose as a guardian of the traditional family against Western cultural imperialism is so effective that other despots, from Africa to Central Asia, have copied it.

Sometimes repressive regimes lend each other megaphones. When reputable satellite networks dropped RT, a Kremlin mouthpiece, China’s StarTimes started carrying it. Across Africa and the Middle East, despots welcomed the way it ignored their abuses and heaped bile on the West.

If Ms Applebaum emphasises autocrats’ strength, Marcel Dirsus of Kiel University in Germany stresses their weakness. From 1946 to 2010 69% of them were jailed, killed or forced into exile when they lost power. All shudder at what happened to Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator who was overthrown, dragged from a drain and sodomised with a bayonet.

In “How Tyrants Fall”, Mr Dirsus looks at how other autocrats seek to avoid such a fate. They face several dilemmas. They must keep their cronies happy, since insiders are best placed to knife them. But if they let them steal too much, they may provoke unrest. They often keep the security forces divided to make coups harder. But divided forces are less effective against external foes, as Saddam Hussein found when he invaded Iran.

Dictators ferociously punish dissent. Yet by silencing critics, they deprive themselves of honest advice. And if they surround themselves with spy chiefs who are paid to spot threats in every shadow, they develop a paranoid worldview. This is terrible for their subjects and neighbours.

Mr Dirsus mines history for evidence about how to get rid of dictators. He finds that non-violent uprisings, if they succeed, are nearly ten times more likely to lead to democracy than violent ones (57% to 6%). And autocrats who allow democratic reforms are much likelier to enjoy a serene retirement than those who try to maintain an iron grip to the end. Autocratic party states, meanwhile, are more durable than personalised dictatorships—which China’s Communist Party might bear in mind, as Xi Jinping’s personality cult thickens.

The historical data in “How Tyrants Fall” are thought-provoking, but will the techniques that toppled despots of old still work in an age of mass surveillance? Mr Dirsus notes how hard it is for rebel armies to hide from drones, or for dissidents to organise when the state can monitor every bus trip and keystroke.

Ms Applebaum worries that “autocracy, inc” is poisoning minds and corrupting decision-makers in the democratic West. “Nobody’s democracy is safe,” she asserts. With Donald Trump a strong favourite to win back the presidency on a platform of vengeance and startling proportions of Americans saying they approve of political violence, it is easy to share her pessimism.

But democracies are not defenceless, and both authors offer useful tips for resisting. Ms Applebaum would do more to police where kleptocrats hide their cash: no more anonymous real-estate deals, shell companies or trusts. Mr Dirsus says outsiders should aim to “damage the pedestal faster than the dictator can repair it”, by training exiled activists and supporting the free flow of information. Since democracy has, by far, the better story to tell, it should ultimately prevail. ■