Neocon Reawakening

A Personal Reaction to Anne Applebaum's Autocracy, Inc.

Not since the Second Inaugural address of George W. Bush have I felt so stirred and inspired for the cause of liberty as I did while reading Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. With cold factual clarity, she describes how the world's world's bad actor autocratic regimes– China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and a few others– emulate and help each other to stay in power. They hide money through shady offshore financing. They provide each other with weapons, crowd control tools, internet censorship technical assistance, and other sinister apparatus of authoritarian control. And though ideologically diverse, they brainwash people in similar ways, not into any positive and appealing vision– for they have nothing to offer that can compete with the freedom, democracy, and prosperity of the West– but rather into cynicism and conspiracy theories that rob them of the hope of anything better than the corrupt kleptocracy under which they suffer. 

Autocracy, Inc. (the real thing, not the book) has an increasingly long reach. It has considerable sway in what she calls “hybrid”-- others have called them “illiberal”– democracies, such as Turkey, India, Hungary, and Thailand, which have genuine (though sometimes flawed) elections, but weak rule of law, inadequate respect for human rights, and/or anti-Western leanings in foreign policy motivated by a desire to avoid accountability to the Western moral and legal standards. The tentacles of Autocracy, Inc. reach deep into the Western heartland as well, through foreign manipulation of US and European media, and through covert financial holdings, especially real estate, by which kleptocrats abroad leverage Western economies to get the economic security and transactional options that the inherent instability and closure of autocratic regimes could not afford them, with the complicity of lazy-minded or cynical Western financiers and investors. 

Applebaum also describes some of the brave dissidents who are risking everything to spread the truth to oppressed peoples, dispel the lies, and reform or overthrow the autocracies to bring about a better future for their countries. But the tide is going the wrong way. The thugs are in charge, and they're learning to hone their craft. The good guys are losing. And I think it would be hard to read Autocracy, Inc. and not come away with one's blood boiling to turn things around, to stand with the democrats and the dissidents, and to put the cruel, greedy, lying autocrats on the run.

The book is a wake-up call to take a critical and skeptical attitude to certain words and phrases. For example, “multipolarity.” The autocracies have spread, and increasingly championed, the idea that we have left behind the “unipolar,” America-centric world of the post-Cold war era, and entered an age of “multipolarity,” where several powers enjoy a preeminence like that which America used to monopolize. Very naively, that might sound bad for America but good for everyone else. But clearly it does not mean that every nation is now a “pole.” It means, rather, that some big countries are alternative “poles,” and they think they should be able to bully other countries, in the way that they imagine that America bullies its allies to keep them in line, because they cannot understand alliances among peoples that are based on justice, trust, agreement, and affection. Russia thinks that it's a pole, and that Ukraine, for example, should be in its orbit, whether it likes it or not. Its brutal invasion of Ukraine, justified and sustained by absurd lies, is one practical face of multipolarity. Viable alternatives to the US-led world order should indeed be entertained. There's no reason that the United States should always enjoy such centrality and disproportionate influence as it had in the 1990s. But a multipolarity that doesn't provide security and independence for smaller nations, and which is imposed on them without their consent, is not an acceptable alternative. “Sovereignty,” similarly, is usually a word people use when they want to do something bad and not to be held accountable.

Applebaum repeatedly warned that the current challenge of Autocracy, Inc. is not like the Cold War, where the free world faced off against an ideologically committed and cohesive bloc. The collaboration of freedom's enemies is more transactional, or to the extent that it is ideological, it is merely negative: against liberalism, democracy, transparency, and the rule of law; but not for anything in particular, except the paralyzing cynicism that enables authoritarian kleptocracy to persist. However, I think the Cold War analogy is still useful, up to a point, especially in its implications for how Westerners ought to respond to the threat. It's helpful to think of there being a Cold War II against Autocracy, Inc., following Cold War I in a similar way to how World War II followed World War I. The enemies are embittered by defeat and in some ways more evil, dangerous, and successful. But the tactics with which freedom fights back can be much the same. And we need to stand firm, resist subversion, compete resolutely on a global scale, especially for the moral high ground, and wait for the light of our morally superior ideas to break through the darkness of enemy propaganda and lead the peoples of the earth to freedom.

Yet Applebaum’s book is, frankly, rather incomplete without a second part in which Applebaum would praise George W. Bush and John McCain, and exhort America to recommit to the neocon project and the forward strategy of freedom. In reading the book, a naive reader might wonder whether the author is even aware that a US president very recently, eloquently, and forcefully shared her commitment to freedom and her determination to defy autocracy and dictatorship. As far as I recall, she never circles back to the neocons and says why she thinks they did it wrong. She is simply silent about them. If anything, I tend to prefer that yawning lacuna to the lame, lazy-minded, and shallow dismissals of neoconservatism that it’s typical for contemporary pundits to parrot. Better to say nothing than to mumble the empty twaddle about the pointlessness of the US-led removal from power in 2003 of one of the world's worst totalitarian dictators. Silence is better than to let clumsy cynicism metastasized into stupid dogmatism litter the intellectual landscape. Yet silence is hardly adequate.

Applebaum has some solutions of her own to offer, but they're pretty weak. More scrutiny of real estate transactions. Purposeful message projection through subsidizing the dissemination abroad of elite Western media (here her self-interest, as an elite journalist, probably biases the argument). And she says in passing that we should regulate AI. Huh? What does that have to do with countering dictators? The idea seems to be that dictators will make skillful use of AI for propaganda if we don't shove the genie back in the bottle. But dissidents may also make skillful use of AI, and anyway, regulating AI must be severely constrained by due respect for free speech principles. And of course, it may be precisely our regulation of AI that provides the most useful practices for dictators to emulate. 

The larger point is that any attempt by the democracies to beat the autocrats at their own game of asymmetric information warfare will be quite insufficient and ineffective, hobbled by our own principles and capabilities. Here it would be useful if, instead of dismissing the Cold War analogy, Applebaum used it and learned from history. The Western democracies didn’t suppress Marxism, even though it mid must have seemed suicidal at times not to do so, a kind of unilateral disarmament of the mind in the midst of an existential struggle. But to win that way, to suppress rather than refute and persuade the opposition, would be to lose. The marketplace of ideas must be free. That’s the whole point of the West.

We can't compete on propaganda. It's essential to the maintenance of democracy that internal critics have full rein to attack the government and the system, and it follows that we’ll be constantly giving our enemies lines of attack against us. The West and the free world, however, have large advantages of their own. We’re not good at lying, but fortunately, truth is on our side. We can win Cold War II if we try hard, but not by micromanaging finance and speech in order to deprive the autocracies of being able to leverage Western institutions for their own objectives. Freedom has its own style of asymmetric cold war. 

Against my better judgment, perhaps, I can't resist the urge to play pundit tennis and offer my own solutions to the global problem of Autocracy, Inc. that Applebaum describes. But let me first preview a disclaimer, which I'll close the loop on at the end of the post. 

Twenty years ago, I was a very, very minor neoconservative pundit. I made a few bucks fervently advocating for the Bush Doctrine and the forward strategy of freedom in an online magazine. I think the articles were pretty good. If anyone knows how to use the Wayback Machine and could help me dig them up, I'd be grateful. It would be fun to read them again. 

You probably think you know my disclaimer. I learned from my mistakes, saw how wrong I had been, felt guilty for my small contribution to the great disaster, learned to doubt myself, and to doubt the universality of the ideals of freedom, gained the wisdom to accept a more complex, diverse world, and to focus my concerns closer to home. Now I'm more circumspect. Etcetera. You’ve heard it many times before.

Actually– no. Not a bit of it. I don’t dance to the beat of the groupthink fashionable disillusionment with Operation Iraqi Freedom. I wouldn’t dismiss it as idiotic, quite. Nonetheless, the grounds for it are really so weak that it's hard to credit even that it's in good faith. 

I get that to the ordinary American voter, the facts that a lot of Americans died, and Iraq didn't become a model liberal democracy and US ally, and there were no WMDs, and it was poorly justified in international law, and there was no connection to al-Qaeda and 9/11, are reason enough to think the war was a mistake. People saw news footage of US-occupied Baghdad, and it seemed like a horrible place. How could we be doing good, if life there was so bad? (Answer: it was worse before. And thanks to us, it would get better, not worse like in Syria.) If you're a regular untravelled citizen living in the bubble of American peace and prosperity and freedom, most of the Earth will look pretty bleak by comparison, but you probably know or think very little about it. The Iraq War forced a poor benighted country into American news all the time. The popular reaction to seeing how the other half of humanity lives was “No, make it stop!” When Saddam was in charge, reporters didn’t go to Iraq. That was kind of nice, actually, if you just want to keep human suffering out of your field of vision. At the ear for unpopular.

Pundits, meanwhile, should have known better than ordinary voters. They should be more discerning. I never thought Iraq was likely to become a model liberal democracy. I always expected it to be bloody, if anything a good deal bloodier than it was. I knew the war was playing fast and loose with international law, and that it wasn't against the perpetrators of 9/11. I supported the war anyway. I certainly did expect that they'd find WMDs, maybe when Saddam used them against us when we invaded. But I didn't care that they didn't, because that was never a casus belli that I cared about. The stronger reasons to oppose the war were known before the war began, and I have plenty of sympathy with those who opposed it and continue to oppose it on those grounds, as long as they remain deeply moderate and don't jump on the bandwagon of exaggerated contempt and are still willing to remember the upside that a terrible dictator was removed from power. What's harder to respect is the formerly war-supporting pundits who flip-flopped, because nothing that happened should have been a huge downside surprise. And honestly I wonder if it isn't just that all these folks who make a living scribbling online can't afford to take positions that are too unpopular, too obnoxious to the median views of a mass readership. When support for the Iraq War became unfashionable, they had to follow. Meanwhile, I supported, and support, the 2003 liberation of Iraq, because it made the Iraqi people freer than they were, probably saved them from even more bloodshed at the hands of Saddam or in his aftermath, forced al-Qaeda to fight us in the heart of the Arab world and thereby destroy their appeal, thus winning the Global War on Terror without extensive cooperation and enhanced support for Muslim dictators, dramatically committed the United States (until we walked back the commitment through a decade of self-abasement and foreign policy nihilism) to freedom for the human race and not just the West, combat tested the US military and enhanced the credible threat of American power, set a useful precedent of “coalitions of the willing,” and proved it dangerous to defy international as Saddam had done, thus potentially enhancing the power of the UN when we finally get around to leveraging the precedent.

In Autocracy, Inc., I was struck by Applebaum's remark that while the dictators of Autocracy, Inc. are zealous to suppress challenges to their authority, they try to avoid murder. She mentions that murder makes martyrs and funerals are often focal points of resistance. Fair enough. And maybe even the dictators have a trace of conscience. But I also wondered if they have the specter of Saddam Hussein in the back of their minds, and that scares them away from murdering. Someday, after all, American idealism may reawaken, and it's good not to be the very worst dictator around, lest future neoconservatives make you their target.

Anyway, reflections on this experience led me gradually to a kind of epiphany that I shouldn't really play the political punditry game, as I'll explain in a moment. Nonetheless, if I did, here's what I'd propose against Autocracy, Inc.

First, we need to improve military readiness and signal, and opportunistically demonstrate, our willingness to fight. Spend more on defense. Recruit more soldiers. Experiment with small scale conscription. Draft young men to short spells of military training so they'll have a head start if we get in a war and need a conscript army. Since drones are important in warfare now, organize and subsidize drone hobby clubs. Stage mock Chinese invasions that volunteers can try to defeat. Encourage Americans to volunteer to fight in Ukraine and give big rewards to those who do.  Reverse America's descent into lazy pacifism. 

Second, while big frontal wars against great powers should be avoided if at all possible, we should be eager to intervene in smaller affairs, to get experience, as long as we're sure we know which side is in the right. Don't intervene where you can't do good. But the truth is that American military interventions have frequently done a lot of good, directly and indirectly. Directly, because we beat the bad guys and let the good guys take over. Indirectly, because by displaying strength and willingness to fight, we reassure our friends and scare other potential bad guys into beer behavior. So make a lot of threats against the world's small-time bad actors, demanding they do the right thing on some key point, then gloat when they change their behavior, and then fight when they call our bluff.

Third, provide a lot more targeted and conditional foreign aid, both military and for poverty relief and economic development, to smaller democracies all over the world. Work hard and spend generously to help countries with decent, rights-respecting regimes to stay decent and rights-respecting and to become prosperous and strong. Form strong alliances with them, and exchange solemn guarantees of mutual aid. Compete with China all around the world as the best development partner.

Fourth, stir up a global conversation about principles of international law to help resolve edge cases peacefully. The world has a lot of “frozen conflicts,” where both sides have good arguments on their side, and instead of resolving or settling them, the international community has just frozen them in place, preventing the fighting from flaring up. It might be good if Ukraine vs. Russia became a “frozen conflict,” but in general, we should try to spur the world into refining international principles to the point where the frozen conflicts can be authoritatively resolved. We have our own hypocrisies here. By what principle do we deny independence to the Kurds of Turkey or Iraq, yet recognize the independence of Kosovo, while denying de jure but upholding de facto that of Taiwan? Let the world tell us how we should resolve our own hypocrisies, and then submit to its judgement, while along the way strengthening the international community’s power to enforce its judgment elsewhere, such as in Ukraine.

Fifth, we need to live into the role of “world policeman,” which does not mean “world hegemon,” but rather, that someone else– it ought to be a broad consensus of mankind as represented by a reformed and more effective UN– makes an authoritative decision, and we then apply overwhelming force to ensure that it happens. Right now, a well-defined, responsible judicial authority is lacking, so we also need to help it to coalesce, but not to dictate its decisions. We should be ready to let China reabsorb Taiwan in some way if a reformed and more effective UN says so. We might do well to reopen the question of Kosovo independence. We need to work for genuine international rule of law. Make it clear that our power is in the service of global peace and justice, not the “national interest.” And invite others to step up and be world policemen alongside us.

Sixth, stop promoting LGBT pride and gay marriage and abortion and feminism and the Sexual Revolution abroad. All that stuff has been disastrous at home, imposed undemocratically through spurious judicial decisions and devastating millions of lives through the collapse of the working class family. Applebaum shows how much it empowers Autocracy, Inc., because nefarious dictators around the world use the West’s sexual decadence, which it not only practices but tries to impose on others, to persuade people to side with them against the horrifying alternative of sin and family breakdown imposed by lawless judges and cancel culture. Not just dictators but democrats abroad perceive the export of the Sexual Revolution as imperialism, and they're right. This imperialism of sin enables the Autocracy, Inc. dictators to be right about something. Take that away. The US embassy in Kiev, in particular, was intensively engaged in LGBT propaganda, and I think the odds are good that there would be no war if not for that disgraceful and idiotic blunder. Russians let Ukraine be independent for almost thirty years, and the fact that LGBT corruption was invading the historic space of holy Rus was part of what changed that. State Department gay rights advocacy is totally contrary to the national interest and to comity among nations and world peace, and should be erased without residue.

Seventh, open the borders to more immigrants. There are a lot of reasons we should do that, from the biblical case to Niagara Falls economics, but Applebaum makes clear yet another one: information detox. Autocracy, Inc. is brainwashing half the world against us, to destroy the appeal of our societal model and our values. But lots of people still want to come. We should let them come, sometimes maybe on condition that they get a bit of civic instruction first, to undo the brainwashing. Let them learn what America is about, tell them how their governments have lied to them all their lives, then welcome them in our midst. Let them learn for themselves that democracy and freedom really are a better way, and they're stable, and they work. And then send the message back home. 

Eighth, always remember that the great foreign policy temptation of democracies is excessive casualty aversion, and combat that psychologically by valorizing war heroes, military service, and self-sacrificing patriotism. Through all of human history, free peoples have expected that they might need to die in defense of their people, their customs, their laws, their country, their freedom. The virtue to be willing to die for freedom is, in the long run, the price of freedom: that is a fundamental and indestructible truth. But it's harsh. Ever since World War I, the faith to die for freedom has tended to falter and give way to a kind of pacifist cynicism, not a principled non-violence but an excessive readiness to accept degrading myths about the origins of wars in greed or mere powerlust, rather than accept that wars are often just, peace is often cowardly, and it may be your duty or mine to fight and die for freedom at any moment. We've fallen deep into a rut of that mentality since the liberation of Iraq, telling ourselves lies about the nefarious motives and futility of the neocons, to avoid facing the truth that the fortunate and free peoples of the world ought to be much more proactive bringing the blessings of freedom to the rest of the human race. That kind of lazy-minded pacifist cynicism has given Autocracy, Inc. its opportunity. It's time for freedom to fight back.

But all of the above is in a certain sense ironic, and let me tell you why. Here's the disclaimer to which I've been building up.

In political punditry, there occurs a giving of advice among citizens, an implicit or explicit message of “we should.” The “we” is usually US citizens for American pundits; in some cases, it might be more local, or broader, like the whole West. The “should” assumes some kind of common values or goals. The pundit writes from a presumptive position of insight, to persuade others to embrace the policy he or she advocates as the best means to shared goals.

What I realized over the course of the great, slow disillusionment with neoconservatism is that I don't share enough goals with the broad American people to engage in punditry properly, especially when it comes to foreign policy. If I write foreign policy advice like the above, without a disclaimer like this, many will fall into the assumption that I'm advocating for what I perceive to be in the “national interest.” I think it may well be in the national interest, but I don't care. In foreign affairs, I always want the United States to do what best serves the general welfare of mankind, from noblesse oblige. We are so fortunate already that I consider it almost sinful to think of our own interests at all in how we conduct ourselves on the world stage. Our aim should be to give, give, give, redistributing happiness from the world's most fortunate nation to the many benighted peoples of the world. 

If I write in pundit style about foreign policy, and readers will naturally fall into the assumption that I'm advocating for the national interest as I perceive it, and even if that's true, momentarily, since what serves the national interest is often aligned with what serves the general welfare of mankind, I'll still be a kind of false counselor, because if I perceive a conflict between the national interest and the general welfare of mankind, I'll either advocate for the general welfare against the national interest, or else– here's the real trouble– be silent. There's always a temptation to trick people into agreeing with you for the wrong reasons. There can be no fully honest and effective persuasion where there is no harmony of values and motives.

Suppose that we have to make decision X, by which you hope to achieve Y and I hope to achieve Z, where Y and Z are not necessarily incompatible but are quite different. We each know some arguments for why certain courses of action with respect to X are likely to result in outcome Y and/or outcome Z. I know arguments 1, 2, and 3, which support the likelihood that X will achieve Y. Of these, argument 2 also supports that X will help achieve Z, but argument 3 suggests that it won't. In addition, I'm aware of argument 4, which suggests that X will achieve Z but has no impact on Y, and argument 5, which implies that X will achieve Z but work against Y. Finally, I'm aware of faulty arguments 6 and 7, which don't actually make sense but seem to support that X will work, respectively, for Y and against Z, and for Z and against Y.

Suppose I think Z is morally urgent. And after weighing arguments 2, 4, and 5 against argument 3, I judge that X is likely to achieve Z. I'm therefore highly motivated to persuade you to agree to X. Perhaps I also think that arguments 1, 2, 3, and 4 outweigh argument 5, so that X is the best decision for the pursuit of Y, but the problem is still there. I'll be tempted to be selective in the arguments that I present to you. I’ll voice arguments 1, 2, 3, and 4. I'll probably be silent about argument 5. I may put special emphasis on argument 2, which tends to go against my own pet cause and therefore advertises my disinterestedness. If you notice argument 5 yourself, then I may may voice any counter-arguments to argument 5 of which I'm aware. I'll be tempted to exaggerate their strength, or voice counterarguments in which I don't believe. If you voice argument 6, apparently believing it, I may be disinclined to show you why it's false. I might even volunteer argument 6 myself, in hopes of fooling you into accepting it. But I'll be very lucid in accepting argument 7 if that comes up. 

In all of this persuasion, I'm probably not lying, but I'm being manipulative. I'm giving greater force than they deserve to the arguments for doing what I want in pursuit of your goals. And that's why I don't think that I ought to play the punditry game, for the most part. My goals are too divergent from the presumptive reader of punditry, so it's almost impossible to avoid this kind of biased persuasion, this manipulation of people for a higher, altruistic cause. 

I think Bush did that, manipulated people through selective argumentation, and I don't really blame him, for two reasons. First, he never intended to be a foreign policy president, but a huge foreign policy issue landed on his plate on 9/11. He had to deal with it, from within a framework where, on the American side, national interest was held to trump the general welfare of mankind, while in the UN, the interest of bad dictators in bad stability had great weight. I don't think Bush lied about WMDs. I'm sure he believed they were there, as did almost everyone else, since otherwise, why would Saddam take the risk of kicking out the weapons inspectors? But they weren't his real motive. I think he deceived the international community somewhat about his purposes. I think he deceived the American people, too, but incidentally. It wasn't feasible to say one thing to the dictators and another to the American people. But I think he tentatively gave his fellow Americans credit for sharing his goals, and after the liberation succeeded, he stated them openly and boldly. His goal was the liberation of the Iraqi people, and the promotion of freedom more broadly in the world, as he made gloriously plain in his Second Inaugural. 

Bush had to choose the forward strategy of freedom because the US had to fight back against Islamic terrorism after 9/11, and the most straightforward way of doing that, by allying with dictators to crush a movement with considerable popular support, similar to what we had done during the Cold War, was morally forbidden. Many Americans, however, would probably have preferred this cynical course of action. Bush did a certain amount of pandering to nationalism and paranoia in order to pull them along, while at the same time progressively articulating higher ideals that he hoped they would embrace. Ultimately, they refused, and a clumsy, confused, angry retreat from neoconservative idealism into sordid escapisms of left and right has been the dominant theme in US foreign policy, and even in a way of US politics generally, ever since.

Bush had a good reason to steer US foreign policy with the help of biased and manipulative argumentation. US foreign policy was his job. But I don't. US foreign policy is not my job. Moreover, it was more credible in 2003 than it is today that Americans might be persuaded to adopt the general welfare of mankind as the national mission. Since then, it's become excruciatingly clear that at least a large plurality of Americans are stubbornly determined to be a lot more selfish than that. America First. Some Americans, certainly, are more altruistically inclined, but there is no “we” with a plausible prospect of establishing a foreign policy consensus to whom I can advocate that we “should” pursue any grand foreign policy vision, in a sense of the word “should” that we would both accept.

Moreover, as an old chickenhawk, who failed to volunteer to fight under the best leader and in the most just cause that I'm likely to see in my lifetime when I was young and strong and single, I feel unworthy to comment on foreign affairs much. My own example is too uninspiring for it to be fitting for me to try to put myself in the public eye. 

And so I don't want to try to be a foreign policy pundit. But I do want to publicly admire Anne Applebaum for speaking out so bravely against tyranny and for liberty. And I hope that she'll inspire a neoconservative reawakening, and that a great leader like in George W. Bush will rise again. And even though Applebaum was careful not to draw any explicitly conclusions from her survey of contemporary tyranny, I think her efforts to reset the West’s moral compass to truth and freedom make a neocon reawakening more likely.