[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to Independent thinking the weekly podcast from chattam house I'm bronwin Maddox well we've had a brief summer break and we're back now for a third season and we're kicking off with a fantastic guest the piter prizewinning journalist an alal bam who has written extensively on power and the changing nature of authoritarianism she's examined all kinds of forms of authoritarian power from the Soviet era communism that dominated Eastern Europe to the modern manifestations and I've just finished reading her latest book autocracy Inc in which she explores a network of autocracies that includes China Russia Iran and Beyond so we're going to talk about what these very different autocracies have in common what this means for us and indeed what other countries might do about it an a really warm welcome thank you so much for having me let me just start with the title I have got further than that but the I just to take us and listeners to this into why you've called your book autocracy Inc the book describes a network it's not an alliance it's not an axis uh it's a group of countries who do not share an ideology so we're talking about communist China and nationalist Russia and Theocratic Iran and bolivarian socialist Venezuela and a and a host of a dozen or so others um they don't have a common ideology they don't have the same Aesthetics um but they do work together uh and they work together opportunistically and when it suits them uh and I was looking for a metaphor to describe how it is they collaborate and the one I came up with was it's a it's a kind of international conglomerate so you know group of companies they each have their own business model but when it suits them they cooperate and there's a particular um a particular aspect of this group is that they often cooperate in helping one another out when they're in trouble so whether that's the Iranians sending drones to Russia to help Russia in its war in Ukraine or the North Koreans sending ammunition or the Chinese sending components for the Russian defense industry or whether it's uh you know a bevy of Investments and police help from Cuba and Russia and China for for Venezuela to keep the Venezuelan dictatorship going they're able to collaborate I mean I don't think that there's some kind of secret room where there's somebody coordinating it um it's just that they they see they have a common interest and actually if I were to Define what it is they have in common I would say it's a common enemy and the enemy is us and I by us and who do you mean by else I mean you and me I mean the the the liberal Democratic world I I don't even know if Democratic is the right word but anybody who uses langu want to come on to the language of um rule of law the language of transparency accountability rights human rights those ideas are first of all those are the ideas that the opposition movements in those countries use and so those and but those ideas are the biggest challenge to their form of absolute dictatorship so they don't want independent judges or independent press or independent civil servants um stopping um whether it's some cases a single person in some cases it's a a political party or or an elite from exercising power and they see those ideas they connect them to to the Democratic world uh and they see them they hear them also from their own opposition and they're you know they we probably don't most of us don't wake up in the morning thinking that we're involved in some kind of War of ideas but I think they do when would you date that from would you've used the term 10 years ago 20 years ago I actually think there is a there is a there is a moment that's a turning point I mean actually in in Russia I think this the awareness that of The Challenge from this set of ideas days back a lot earlier much earlier than most people saw I think Putin was aware of it in the early 2000s um but there's a big Turning Point around about 10 years ago I would say 2013 2014 as xiin ping began his rise to power in China and as Putin faced the possibility of a liberal Democratic Ukraine in other words a successful anti-corruption revolution in a neighboring country that had a very similar political system or was anyway heading in the direction of a Russian style kleptocracy um and it was successfully blocked by a Civic movement and he identified that as the biggest threat to him to in his form of power and so I think really it's from that time that you begin to see change I mean in China there's a there's a there's a moment there's a very famous Chinese document and I'm not the far from the first person to write about it famously known as document number nine it's a marvelous name and which is published in 2013 By the Chinese Communist party and it lists the perils to the party and number one is Western constitutional democracy and they you know civil Civic organization Free Press and so on so what we're saying is an increasingly explicit awareness as set of statements by China by Russia that they have a different system they think theirs is better and they think the Western if I can use that word that this anyway this Democratic this uh freedom of ideas model of organizing people and relations between countries that that is a threat to them do you think that that is getting even stronger what I'm thinking of is the way that when Russia invaded Ukraine most recently two years ago that China stayed on the sidelines at least rhetorically in the beginning but over this summer it has come out quite explicitly and so we're on that side I mean I think that the Chinese were surprised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine they they didn't think they weren't expecting something of that scale um and in some ways it threatens you know they have a whole um you know whole kind of rhetoric that they use about sovereignty and protection of borders and so on and clearly this was in in defiance of that but I do think they are watching very carefully the Democratic world's response to the invasion they may well see it as a as a dry run for an invasion of Taiwan and I think they're also anxious about what would happen if Putin fell um and of course many there are many people who fear what would happen for with Putin fell I think wrongly fearing it in some cases but um I think it would be a great Boon to the world but there is a sense of kind of solidarity among this group they don't they don't want to see one another defeated because that would be a bad precedent for for them all right that's a solidarity of objectives do they have a world view that they share beyond that though in the sense of how they want to organize their own societies so I think they do have a worldview so they're they they they would like to remove the idea both the theory and the practice of Human Rights and human rights advocacy from International institutions and international conversation China's been working on that for a long time actually at the United Nations uh and I think actually one of the reasons for the Russian invasion of Ukraine the 2022 fullscale invasion was to demonstrate that they don't care about the UN Charter and the language of the Geneva conventions they don't regard these as universal rights at all there are no Universal rights and so I think they are interested in defeating the idea of universal rights which was part of I mean actually it's been part of the international conversation since 19 1945 I mean it's in all the UN documents every International institution uses words like human dignity and human rights and and so on um and so I think they would like to remove that and they would like to live in a world where the kind of power that they enjoy at home this kind of absolute power that can't be questioned or examined or or checked that they enjoy that around the world as well so Russia Russia would argue that it has sovereignty but Ukraine does not so it is allowed to do what it wants because it's allowed to do what it wants um and that that's the world that they want to create I was very struck in the book by the way that you go immediately for the money where the money is where how it moves around How the West maybe naively has conspired in that can you just tell us a bit more about that so it's funny I mean one learns a lot from talking to the opponents of these regimes and I learned a lot over the years from talking to the Russian opposition and the Russian opposition understood very well how Putin came to power um and it's this story has now been told in several different forms you know Cath belt and a British journalist told it masages and others um but originally told by by by Russians themselves uh you know Putin's first um you know his first moves towards power took place when he was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg and he was involved in a number of schemes to take money out of the out of the state to remove it to send it abroad to launder it abroad and then to bring it back into the country where he used it for for broader influence and he there there were a number of schemes and projects that he executed in the 1990s and several of them were done in conjunction with Western Partners so there's a luxembourgish partner there's a there's some Germans there certainly there accountants and lawyers and so on who helped him do that in that era I suppose people had the excuse well you know it's it's it's a free economy now and any deals that we do with you know with this with these talented new Russians are are legitimate I mean when you look at it in retrospect what you see is that we enabled the rise of this kleptocratic state uh and that we continue to enable and assist the existence of kleptocratic States all over the planet and you were talking in the book particularly about the US and the UK Financial systems us and UK are easier for me to pick on because I I know them better I'm sure if I looked carefully at you know Luxembourg or the Netherlands or or Ireland I would find something I would find something similar but no I mean we have we've tolerated this culture of anonymity you know that there can be anonymously owned companies who own anonymously owned prop um and that those can be used as a store of wealth for people who've either stolen money or hiding money um and you everybody got used to that idea but if you take a step away from it you you have to ask why I mean you know people who run normal businesses if you run a pension fund or something I mean you are subject to unbelievable amounts of Regulation and assessment and uh you know you have to answer questions all the time and what you know why do we tolerate alongside our very carefully regulated financial sector we also tolerate this completely unregulated secret essentially World um a world in which there may be as much as 10% of the world's wealth hidden away uh and that's you know and it's it's it's been an obvious source of power and um and influence of the autocratic world that they've been able to hide their money in institutions that effectively the Western World created where do you place in all this the countries that are autocracies but they're not obviously marching to the same beat as Russia or China first of all there are a number of illiberal democracies who play both sides you know Hungary or turkey even India and there are also a number of autocracies who for reasons of their own maybe equally opportunistic don't always align with Russia and China um and you can think of Saudi Arabia but you can also think for example of Vietnam which is a country that uh it's clearly it's a dictatorship um but it's it's not a dictatorship that seeks to undermine America I mean it's they don't intervene in American elections they don't support the European far right they're not part of Russia's you know effort to take over parts of West Africa I mean so they have a you know they have sort of a different they're part of a different world that it's it's not the I'm not making moral judgments about these being better countries it's just that they're not they're not part of this network and they don't see us as their Prime enemy yeah they are autocracies but not part of the autocracy Inc as you're defining I'm just pushing for where you think the dividing line is between the countries who as you put it are out to get us the answer is that I don't think there's a dividing line so I mean I I don't want to I don't want to be black and white it isn't between democracy and autocracy no it's not a cold war there aren't two sides there's it's not black and white you know it's Many Shades of Gray and actually one of the arguments I make in the book about how we fight this is that we we we don't think necessarily about autocratic countries but rather autocratic behaviors uh that we that are threatening to our system some of which exist inside our own countries let's come on to that question then of how to fight this um how to push back against it how what is your answer first to this um effort that I think you've described very well of China's and other countries to remove some of the language some of the assertions that some rights are Universal and so on that has been with us since 1945 and to say um look we don't accept that at all as a way of governing the world how do we begin to push back on that but also answer those countries who say well you know we we don't want a lawless world we don't want one without any shape we don't particularly want one run by China but we weren't round the table when those old rules were being written and they were actually I mean the Chinese were around the table oh the Chinese the CH the Chinese were I'm thinking about the smaller countries who say well look we're we're up for grabs if if you want us to give support to some kind of governed world but you've got to include us in how that is is um shaped in the future I mean actually the UN does include by definition every country in the world world so obviously a lot of countries take a lot of support from the general assembly where they may be tiny and have one vote and China also has one vote um but how do you begin to salvage some of that if you like apparatus and values of of the post 1945 uh in the in in the in the face of this Chinese assertion I am not 100% sure that the UN in its current form is really salvageable I I you know I'm not advocating for destroying I mean it has see one part after another jam up what I would like to see and this is I'm just at the beginning of thinking this through and you know um H happy to hear other other thoughts about it um I'm I'm beginning to think that you know the this idea that a international institution is a thing that's in a building in New York or Geneva and has a permanent bureaucracy you know chosen by some system um this is a very 20th century way of thinking um and it may be that the problems that confront us internationally require something more flexible I mean maybe almost a kind of Coalition of the willing to deal with kleptocracy for example I mean you would have to you could put together a list of 100 countries who would be interested in this solving this problem or or or parts of it um you could have another slightly different or maybe similar overlapping Coalition that would look at the regulation of the internet I mean and to try and think about how to make the internet the world of online conversation more compatible with democracy um so there are behaviors and ideas that require International cooperation I am not sure that mediating them through the UN General Assembly is going to work anymore so what should we do well we should we should begin to look at you know we should begin to cooperate around the issues that threaten us I mean to some extent this is beginning and so um actually the Biden Administration already named kleptocracy as a security issue for the first time and they moved it so it wasn't just something the treasury did they moved it to the National Security Council um there's some movement here in the UK as well in that direction you've got this top of your list of recommendations I think do something about this International kleptocracy yeah I mean that I mean and because that's something we can do in you know that's an internal problem um that we that we can begin to solve down the line there are going to be other issues I mean the you know the Chinese both China and Russia and the autocratic World more broadly are now engaged in a huge project of weapons production on a new scale I don't talk about this extensively in the book but I'm I'm sure it will it will come to our attention sooner or later you know beginning to think what what are they going to use that for um are we prepared you know have we thought about how we're going to win the war in Ukraine and are we are we planning to do so um that's you know that that's another it's remarkably hard to get an answer to that and the past week or two in Ukraine has really shown that of the cost of um the ambivalence of the many countries supplying Ukraine it's clear to me how the war can end there's only one way it can end the the war can end when the Russians understand that it was a mistake in other words when the Russians come to the conclusion about Ukraine that the French came to a b Algeria you know that it's not our country and not our war and we don't want to do it anymore took the French 10 years to get there they can reach that conclusion for many reasons it can be military it can be economic it can be for other reasons I don't think um we as as a as a group of democratic Powers supporting Ukraine have really thought through how to get there and have and have established that as our goal I I can't articulate exactly why um there are conspiracy theories about why and you know fear of escalation and so on um but we've never done it and the odd thing about it is of course it's really the only way the war can end because all of the other intermediate ideas you know we negotiate we do land for peace there's no guarantee that any of those are permanent Solutions those are just temporary solutions until Russia rearms and invades again so it's really you you need to get to this moment of political change by which I don't mean regime change I just mean they have to change there has to be and we will know when we get there and what is at stake because just in the past couple of weeks it looks as though it may not be heading that way I'm not sure what's happened in the last couple of weeks that make you think that the last couple of weeks the ukrainians have occupied they have has made advances um further into the regions it claims as its own already I mean Ukraine is holding a piece of Russia you know for the first time since the second world war so you know I mean you can you can I'm certainly not arguing for the conclusion that Ukraine Ukraine is uh failing but we are this would not be a point it seems to me after the advances that Russia itself has made in the past couple of weeks uh where it would reach the conclusion that you've just described that this whole thing was a mistake I mean it depends how the Russians look at the fact of uh Russian territory being occupied as I said there are multiple ways in which the Russians can be convinced to stop and we haven't tried all of them yet you talk about decoupling in your um recommendations about what we should do how much of this is about China so decoupling or sometimes they talk about drisking is a little bit nicer way of saying it um is is actually beginning to happen anyway regarding China um Western investment or foreign investment into China is going down very quickly and this for a lot of reasons some of it's to do with the Chinese economy some of it's to do with the difficulty of getting hard currency out of China some of it's also to do with some of what I'm talking about the sense that China is not so friendly anymore and you know you know there's now the geopolitical risk is higher you know were China to even blockade Taiwan and the potential for sanctions would I think it's beginning to scare people finally so it's that's it's beginning to happen not as a matter of policy but as a matter of as a matter of matter of practice um I think also um I think the realization and certainly this has happened in the US um the realization that the US cannot be dependent on China for um you know for crucial [Music] whether it's components or Goods or natural resources or raw materials that that's now sunk through that's a that's a bipartisan understanding you can hear that from Democrats and Republicans and so when I when people talk about drisking that's what they mean they mean making H having greater control or greater awareness of the degrees to which the US economy is dependent or not dependent on China um and I think most that's it's either underway or beginning in most European countries as well including the ones that are the most the biggest Traders with China in the UK and Germany and France um that's also beginning and we're getting towards the end of this but let me just pick up one other recommendation you make what your advice on what to do about the information Wars if I can call them that the the Battle For Truth the battle over what is believed understood seen by different populations so partly um that it's a bigger question well beyond the realm of foreign policy I mean what's happened is that some of the the you know the autocratic world has been able to take advantage of you know the particular nature of the internet platforms that we've created I mean my my argument would involve taking a step back and asking what kind of online conversation is good for democracy all conversations have rules this one that you and I are having has a set of rules and Norms there are Parliamentary rules the rules that were created online first actually by Facebook and then and then by others are very different they're not rules that are designed to create consensus or better conversation or to help people sort out truth from falsehood they're rules designed to keep people online and you make money for the platforms and so that means they they favor anger and excitement and Division and false rumors it's a feature not a bug it's what they do first of all beginning to think about how I mean it's technologically possible to regulate algorithms to make them not so opaque to have some transparency about them it's possible to give people more control of their data it's possible to give people more options about what it is that they want to see and it's also possible to think about what are the Alternative forms of online communication or online politics that would work I mean there are some countries but T the Taiwanese for example experiment with um organized online conversation to debate particular topics I the Taiwanese because they're very much on The Cutting Edge of the information war with China um think more about this than almost anybody else but we haven't even started that convers you can find it pockets of Academia that are interested in that but so far not not anybody mainstream I mean you know the in our elections people are still trying to game the platforms as they exist and it's you know the kind of downward spiral continues let me ask you finally the sign significance of the the leaders themselves we're in this extraordinary Global conversation at the moment where people countries governments are speculating about what Putin might do what president G might do and so on what these individuals at the heal of these countries might do in any circumstance and much of the world's events May then turn on those decisions if those individual people go does it change a great deal I mean the strange thing I let me just talk say word about Russia the strange thing about Russia and Putin is that not only do we not know who would succeed Putin if like he fell down the stairs next week or was hit by a bus we don't know how that person would be chosen there is no succession mechanism there's no poit bureau there's no Council of Elders who would make the decision I I know that in China there's there's obviously a party so there would be a party process you know at least there would be that and we can therefore imagine who could who might replace she and what kind of person he would be but in case of Putin there's really no there's nothing I mean and that's a um it makes the Russian regime strangely fragile you could you could imagine it going in many different directions after Putin whenever whenever that's going to be um so you know you could have you could imagine pretty dramatic change in Russia in in in in many different ways I mean China you would assume would be more you know there would be more predictability but you know but again I mean she is playing an extraordinary role that nobody since Ma really has played in China um and so would the party after she want to continue that I don't know that is a completely reasonable question and point on which to end about this so uh we're going to have to stop there but a huge thank you to my guest Ann Apple bam thanks for joining us thank you do follow Anne on X and her details are in the show notes of this podcast and across the house we've got a really exciting season ahead this month we've got David millerand Nick CLE and we're holding hustings for the next Commonwealth Secretary General just some of our list in these over Lively times and the details for them all are on our website as usual chatam house.org reminder too that you can find all the episodes of independent thinking on all major podcast platforms so please do like follow subscribe and leave us a review and I should mention to you the world today is relaunching next week on September 9th that's our quarterly magazine covering many of these questions that chattam house is delving into well with the Autumn now on us sort of in what feels like across much of our work a countdown to the US elections and all that follows it's goodbye from me Brahman Maddox for the moment see you next week [Music]