America Needs a Better Plan to Fight Autocracy

[CousinIT]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/russia-ukraine-senate-testimony-autocracy-kleptocrats/627061/

By enabling Putin and other global kleptocrats, the West undermined democracy. It’s time to change tactics.

Editor’s Note: Late last year, The Atlantic published “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” a cover story by Anne Applebaum, a staff writer who has written extensively about corruption and political repression in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and around the world. In response to those concerns, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scheduled a hearing today on how the United States should combat authoritarianism. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine made the topic far more urgent. Senator Robert Menendez, who chairs the panel, invited Applebaum to testify. What follows, lightly edited for clarity, is her written submission to the committee. Some parts of this testimony have been adapted from Applebaum’s work in The Atlantic.

All of us have in our mind a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance personnel), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with their counterparts in another, with the profits going to the leader and his inner circle. Oligarchs from multiple countries all use the same accountants and lawyers to hide their money in Europe and America. The police forces in one country can arm, equip, and train the police forces in another; China notoriously sells surveillance technology all around the world. Propagandists share resources and tactics—the Russian troll farms that promote Putin’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of Belarus or Venezuela. They also pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. Chinese sources are right now echoing fake Russian stories about nonexistent Ukrainian chemical weapons. Their goal is to launch false narratives and confuse audiences in the United States and other free societies. They do so in order to make us believe that there is nothing we can do in response.

This is not to say that there is a conspiracy—some super-secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. The new autocratic alliance doesn’t have a structure, let alone an ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. Washington likes to talk about China and Chinese influence because that’s easy, but what really links the leaders of these countries is a common desire to preserve their personal power. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like a loose agglomeration of companies. Call it Autocracy, Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to replace Western sanctions or take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.

we need a completely new strategy toward Russia, China, and the rest of the autocratic world, one in which we don’t merely react to the latest outrage, but change the rules of engagement altogether. We cannot merely slap sanctions on foreign oligarchs following some violation of international law, or our own laws: We must alter our financial system so that we stop kleptocratic elites from abusing it in the first place. We cannot just respond with furious fact-checking and denials when autocrats produce blatant propaganda: We must help provide accurate and timely information where there is none, and deliver it in the languages people speak. We cannot rely on old ideas about the liberal world order, the inviolability of borders, or international institutions and treaties to protect our friends and allies: We need a military strategy, based in deterrence, that takes into account the real possibility that autocracies will use military force.

The war in Ukraine has been launched because we did not do any of these things in the past. As he was preparing for this conflict, the Russian president calculated that the cost of international criticism, sanctions, and military resistance would be very low. He would survive them. Past Russian invasions of Ukraine and Georgia; Russian assassinations carried out in Britain and Germany; Russian disinformation campaigns during democratic elections in America, France, Germany, and elsewhere; Russian support for extremist or anti-democratic politicians—none of this received any real response from us or from the democratic alliances that we lead. Vladimir Putin assumed, based on his own experience, that we would not react this time either. China, Belarus, and other Russian allies assumed the same.

Going forward, we cannot let this happen again. In my written testimony I will suggest some broad areas where we need to completely reimagine our policy. I will leave the necessary changes in military and intelligence strategy, especially the question of deterrence, to others who have more expertise in this area, and will focus on kleptocracy and disinformation. But I hope this hearing sparks a broader conversation. We need far more creative thinking about how we can not just survive the war in Ukraine, but win the war in Ukraine—and how we can prevent similar wars from taking place in the future.[. . ./div]

[PSPS]

1. She should have included cleaning up the financial system

It's very easy to hide and launder criminal money in our financial system (and that of other countries, especially the UK.) Plus get rid of private financing of political campaigns.

[SWBTATTReg]

2. I thought that perhaps when a group of Countries decided to implement a standard taxing scheme

across the board world-wide, that we would start tackling those that avoid taxes all together, by moving to low tax Countries, hiding their assets under multiple shells of corporate hide-and-seek, etc. This is a group that avoids all responsibility towards their fellow man, indeed even brags about their low tax percentages that they pay because they are 'smart' supposedly. Some may be, but I suspect that the vast majority such as tRump avoid paying their fair share by lying big time on their actual expenses (way way too high) and income that they've declared (way way too low).

A group of Countries that can go after these tax cheats is aggressively needed, and those that think they find refuge in rogue Countries to escape the tax man won't have any more places to hide, to shelter falsely their income, their wealth.

This is the bane I feel of our generation, in that this mantra that republicans have been chanting since the 1980s (low taxes, more jobs, etc., and repeat via an endless cycle) has actually gone way too far.

How much relief from taxes is enough? How much of avoiding legitimate taxes is enough for Society to handle, when in many cases, these people will literally never pay a dime in taxes, ever, even though they make the top 5% of income in the world probably and hold probably a good chunk of wealth in the world (over 50% I would say, give or take).

Sad to say, that I suspect that the answer is already here, that this point of no return has been reached.

[appalachiablue]

3. K/R