Autocracy, Inc. The dictators who want to run the world

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that image bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned by sophisticated networks composed across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran.
They pose a threat not just to their own citizens but to democracies all over the world. In 'Autocracy, Inc.', Pulitzer prizewinning author Anne Applebaum exposes a new danger that requires an urgent response. Today's autocracies, she shows, are supported by a web of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists that operate beyond their own borders. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another.
The police in one country can arm and train the police in another. The autocrats are re-writing the rules of world trade and governance as their propagandists pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America and the West. The members of Autocracy, Inc., aren't linked by a unifying ideology but rather by a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity, and by their belief that democratic ideas, whether they come from their own internal opposition or from the democratic world, are dangerous and must be destroyed.
If democracies are to survive, Applebaum argues, we must reframe our worldview and learn how to fight back.