Anne Applebaum: Planning for a Techno-Oligarchic Regime
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Winning is based on skill. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Couldn't be more delighted to be here today with a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her books include Autocracy, Inc., The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and Twilight of Democracy, The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, A History. It's Anne Applebaum. Welcome back, Anne. How are you doing?

Fine. Thanks for having me back. Fine. Fine. We're fine. We're here. We're doing fine. I've got to be more precise in the opening greetings, I think, given the nature of affairs. I want to start with the seductive lure of authoritarianism.

Because it's more seductive than maybe I'd even anticipate it. Domestically, we've got a series of rich people who have pre-surrendered to the incoming regime. Bezos and Zuck have donated a million to the inauguration. Mark Benioff, who was a resistance CEO for the first time around at Salesforce, went on Maria Bartiromo's show, Maria Bartiromo's Coup Hour, and said, I feel that when we elect a new politician, we have to absolutely support them.

This is a moment where we are turning the page. It's an opportunity for a new chapter. You have covered all of this from the European perspective. What's happening with our domestic oligarchs here? One of the things that's happening is that this is the second time that Trump has won. And when you look at the pattern, whether it's Hugo Chavez or whether it's Viktor Orban, it's a loss and then a return that changes the politics.

Having overcome the fact that he assaulted the Constitution, broke the law multiple times, whichever piece of it bothers you the most, he stole documents, he was a corrupt businessman, all those things we now know, and yet he's been reelected anyway, people are going to say, right, this guy has...

It's not exactly magical powers, but he has some kind of staying ability that I didn't account for the first time. And, you know, I better get along with him or else I'm in trouble. And that's actually I mean, it's a it's not unique to the United States. You can see it in other places, too.

The person who broke the law and yet comes back to power, people are, I don't know if it's more afraid is really the right word, but they're more willing to say, right, you know, we give up. This is the kind of regime that we have. We better learn to live with it. Yeah, more accommodating maybe. Like the best spin you could put on this, right, is that these rich guys are saying, okay, whatever.

Four more years of this, maybe we can butter him up and feed on his ego and get some stuff out of it. And then we're done with this guy. That's probably their calculation, right? Obviously, some of us feel like the risks maybe are greater than that. But how do you sort of assess that and what maybe a more effective way to deal with an aspiring soft autocrat would be?

One of the mistakes that people are making is imagining that giving the state more power or giving the executive more power, including effectively power without control or the ability to bend the law, that that will somehow be good for business. This is a very seductive argument that I think actually a lot of the people around him do believe. I mean, you know, Musk, Thiel, but maybe also Bezos and Zuckerberg, I don't know. They think that this

kind of power that now seems to be different from the first time, where, as I said, he has this support in a particular part of the business community. They think it'll be good for them. They could be right in the short term. I mean, obviously, Bezos is reckoning that all the things he wants to do, you know, go to space or go to Mars or wherever, you know, those things will be facilitated by

Trump administration that will loosen regulations or give him subsidies. I mean, Trump has been known to do that before. The mistake that they make is that in the longer term, and I don't know, life is so accelerated right now that longer term could come faster than it used to. Almost always these kinds of regimes are really bad for business. And if you look around the world, you can see it.

Hungary, which is the state that so many on the far right now admire as a model, is now, depending on how you count, either the second or third poorest country in Europe. Putting all the power in the hands of a few favorite oligarchs, making the political system dependent on the whim of the leader, bending rules and undermining the rule of law actually made Hungary a terrible place to invest. It made it

profoundly corrupt, all kinds of stories there. And I can see the same thing happening in the United States. I mean, if you have a fundamental undermining of our sense that the relationship between the government and business is fair, then

you will have a different attitude to investment and to business and so on. I mean, I can't tell you exactly how it will play out, but it's dangerous. You know, the U.S. works because we have, I mean, it's a lot narrower than it used to be, but some kind of culture of trust. You know, people believe that contracts will be enforced. They think that courts are neutral. And if you've broken the law, you're in trouble. And if you haven't, you'll be vindicated. When people begin to lose that sense,

It has a profoundly undermining effect on business and the economy as well. It's just that it'll take some time for people to see it.

The tough thing to figure out is who exactly are the naive businessmen that think that this is going to help them and who are the ones that are on board with the dismantling of that system and the dismantling of that trust. And to that point, Peter Thiel, we know which side he's on. He was on with Piers Morgan the other day. And I just want to play one clip from that interview. The ancien regime that is liberalism is really exhausted.

The 1990s are over. The 20th century is over. The 2020 election was not a return to normalcy, but it was, in retrospect, a last stand for the Ancien Regime with its very Ancien President. And I think that's kind of what's over.

The Ancien Regime there, the liberal order is over. And I think in Peter Thiel's mind, it's going to be replaced by the autocratic order, maybe the techno-feudal order, I don't know, of him and Elon and Mark Andreessen with Donald Trump as their puppet. Just wondering your thoughts about that. I think that is what they think. Interesting Ancien or old, as we say in English, is a

A word you could also apply to Donald Trump? And to Peter Thiel, if you looked at his face for the YouTube viewers. He's trying to pretend like he's not part of the ancien, but he's looking pretty ancien too. Right. I mean, he's, of course, a product of the United States of America and its educational system and its financial system and so on and on. So it's not like he represents something new, but that's a separate question. Yeah, I do think that there are now, there is a part of the media, there is a part of the business community, there's a part of...

whatever you call it, the online world that now believes we will transition to something different. And I think they do mean some kind of techno-oligarchic regime where ordinary people have less influence on politics. Peter Thiel has been talking for years about how, you know, giving women the vote was a mistake and, you know, the poor being allowed to have influence on politics means it has negative implications for the state.

And I think they, the reason I was talking about Trump being old is they think that they will control him and they will hasten the transition to that regime. I mean, this is not a, this is not some kind of made up dystopian nightmare. This is what they've been saying. You know, this is what Teal has been saying. This is what

Curtis Yarvin has been saying. This is what others have been saying. So, you know, we, why shouldn't we believe them when that's what they say? What exactly that means and how it works, you know, in practice, I don't know. I mean, we still do have a legal system. We still have a Congress. We still have courts. Most judges, federal judges are not

partisan in the sense that they will vote for a different kind of regime. I mean, some of them are conservative and some of them are more progressive or whatever word you want to use, but they have different interpretations of the Constitution, but they still operate out of those interpretations. They still think the Constitution matters. I mean, there are a couple exceptions in Florida and elsewhere, but most of them do.

And so, you know, there will be a lot of systemic resistance or systemic hurdles that you will have to overcome before you can establish a system whereby some version of Musk and Thiel or whoever, whichever puppet they back, whether it's Trump or Vance, are actually controlling the country and have more ability to make decisions and more power than anybody else. But it's clearly what they want. You know, it's clearly the direction they're hoping to go in.

Yeah, I guess I would. I don't think Peter Thiel is listening to me, but I guess I would caution him. You don't really know what exactly is going to replace the current liberal order. You know, excuse me from being a defender of the status quo. But it was funny to me that later in that interview, peers asked him about the Brian Thompson murder. And Peter was like, oh.

I just, I've never seen a stutter. He had like 25 seconds of stuttering before he finally said, I think we should use words to settle our disputes. It's like, well, you know, when the liberal order, when the Ancien Liberal Order gets overthrown, it might be a feudal techno oligarchy, but it might also be something else that they don't like. One more word on that. I mean, once the people understand that the country is run in effect by unelected billionaires, right?

then whatever anti-elite sentiments they have will be directed at those unelected billionaires. You can see that happen in other countries too.

On the corruption front, we also had Trump in the Middle East. In our newsletter this morning, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger write about how Trump's son, Eric, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization, made an announcement about the unveiling of a new Trump Tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Yesterday, the New York Times wrote about the dividing line between Trump's family business interests.

and Trump's power. Eric Trump was in Abu Dhabi celebrating his dad's move to unleash crypto as the family helps launch and profit from a new crypto investment. Obviously, we know about Jared Kushner's investments in Saudi. I want to play a little bit from Chris Murphy and get your reaction to it.

There is no doubt that this administration's policy towards the Middle East is going to be compromised by the fact that they are making money off of the very people that they're sitting across the table from and supposedly having a conversation about the interests of the United States. It's just extraordinary that we have allowed

for the normalization of Trump's financial empire to be woven into the statecraft of this country. All that matters is how much money he makes, how much money his family makes, and it comes at a cost to the rest of us.

So the idea of U.S. foreign policy is that U.S. foreign policy should one way or another benefit the United States of America. It should be good for American prosperity, security. It should be good for international security, which is, you know, in a more distanced way, but it's still good for us.

The idea that American foreign policy would be conducted to benefit the Trump family isn't something that we've had in America before. We could probably find some examples of corruption in foreign policy and people who made decisions that were good for business partners or something like that, but I don't think we've ever had that.

a version of it that's so blatant and so open. The idea that the Trump children would be openly seeking to benefit from their father's decisions. The idea that

that relationships between the United States and whether it's Saudi Arabia or Turkey or India or anywhere else would be shaped in order to benefit, you know, a particular investment. This level of corruption is brand new. It's not something we've had before. It's also, once again, it's something that, you know, the effects of it are going to be felt immediately by ordinary Americans. This is maybe another, maybe this is another piece of bad news, which is that people, you

you know, you, I mean, we, I saw a version of this happen in Poland, you know, when the, when the government begins to do things that are in violation of the rule of law or of the constitution, but they don't seem to affect ordinary people and people don't see it or feel it themselves, there isn't necessarily the reaction and the outrage that you would expect. And that's what I think you were getting from Chris Murphy. He was saying, why are, why is this normalized? And the answer is that most people don't care.

And we are going to discover in a really big way, I think, that most people don't care about this stuff. And that will be an unhappy discovery. But yeah, it's new. It's different. It's a different level of corruption. And Trump's insight on all of this was, you know, if you just get through, if you just power through the round of bad press or the initial investigation or attacks from the counterparty,

And there's no impact on anyone's lives. Then eventually people to get over it. Right. I mean, like this is like, this is related to the Steve Bannon flood the zone with shit as a tabloid guy. Like he knows this. He went through the scandal cycles before. It's like, if you survive it and get out the other side, you know, then you can continue to press on. And like in the past, politicians had folded, you know, when they would get nominated.

New York Times investigations about their family business, right? By the way, I think that's also part of what there's a deliberate aspect to what's happening now. You know how almost every day there's some shocking piece of news, you know, some other totally inappropriate person has been appointed to a job or nominated for a job, or it's Carrie Lake, or it's

yet another relative or somebody else's father-in-law or son-in-law has been appointed to a job. I think that's probably deliberate. You distract people, you put an enormous amount of news on the table and you keep it going all the time. And that's a way of kind of dominating and running the media. And that's also not

not unique to the Trump family and the Trump cronies and people around him. That's also a known tactic. You just keep going. Every day, there's another shocking thing that people have to absorb. And it's been also directed at different groups. So there's the national security people are upset about one set of appointments and health people are upset about RFK Jr. And you keep everybody divided and angry. And that's a tactic.

I hadn't gotten to Tiffany's father-in-law, but since you mentioned it, I do feel like I should at least read the headline for people if they had missed it. Trump's Middle East advisor pick, who's Tiffany's father-in-law, is a small-time truck salesman. He had lied. He made up a George Santos situation. He had acted like he was a billionaire dealmaker, but he has a tiny stake in an African truck company.

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You mentioned Carrie Lake. We have to get our we have to get our chuckles, the absurdity of this when we can. I do want your take on this because Voice of America, which he was, which Trump had nominated her to run. Domestic folks might not just really even understand the remit or the importance of that. So I am curious your take on fake news, Carrie Lake running the Voice of America potentially. Yeah.

So Voice of America is one of a group of U.S.-funded foreign news services. There's RFE, RL, Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty. There's Cuban radio. There's an Arab language radio. There's a group of – I mean, they're called radios, but they're not really radios anymore. They're media properties now.

There's Radio Free Asia, which has, I think, it used to be at least the most Uyghur language broadcasting of any outlet outside of China. They play a really important role and they could play a more important role in countering

Russian and Chinese propaganda outside of the United States. So there is an enormous effort to shape narratives and conversations in Africa that the Chinese invest in. They've actually invested billions and billions of dollars. I mean, they're way more money than we spend on Radio Free Europe and all those

all those media properties put together. The Russians have a huge investment in information campaigns of different kinds in Europe and Asia, elsewhere. One of the few tools that we have is Voice of America and those other properties, which are designed at least to put a... It's not so much... They're not meant to be American propaganda. I mean, I'm sure sometimes that's what they are, but mainly they're designed to be

outlets that build trust because they report things that are true. They're meant to contradict the Russian and Chinese messaging. You know, they're meant to build a different set of arguments, you know, mostly, as I said, in third countries. I mean, they're most important in places where the U.S. and the democratic world are competing directly with the authoritarian world in narratives and in arguments.

The idea that Carrie Lake would be the head of Voice of America is absurd on many levels. I mean, she's...

She has no journalism experience. She has no public diplomacy experience. She's a liar. She has journal. I mean, she has technically, she has a local TV anchor. Oh, right. Okay. Well, she hasn't run, as far as I know, she hasn't run a large international media institution. And of course, she's a liar. I mean, she's somebody who supported a false narrative about multiple elections, actually, you know, Trump's elections, her own elections. And actually, her

her anti-election sort of campaigns or her election denial campaigns in Arizona had a big effect, I think, on the culture of Arizona. I mean, I did a podcast last summer and we interviewed an Arizona election official whose life was essentially ruined. I mean, he was just a guy who said, you know, Trump didn't win the election and he was

was harassed and doxxed and his family was attacked. And, you know, you can imagine what people go through if you're a Maricopa County election official and you live in a world in which Carrie Lake dominates. So the idea that she would be somehow the spokesman for American values around the world and, you know, fighting Chinese authoritarian propaganda in Africa is ludicrous. I mean, on top of that, on top of that, last year, the Senate confirmed

board of it. There's an institution that governs all of these media properties. And there's a board. I know it's half half Democrat, half Republican by law. I think it's three and three. It's three and three. And there's a I think the Secretary of State is the is the fourth vote on it. The Senate confirmed that board. And actually, that board is what decides who will be the next leader of these various institutions. VOA has a current leader. It's somebody who was just appointed a few months ago.

Mike Abramowitz, who used to be the leader of Freedom House, which is one of our, it's like a Cold War era democracy promotion organization that also did most of its work outside of the United States. So he's not by any means some kind of left wing or progressive figure. He's just somebody who's worked on democracy issues for a long time. So that board would have to agree that Kerry Lake will replace him and we'll see what it does. I'm not that optimistic about the board.

If Marco Rubio is the tying vote, I don't know, maybe we'll have Kerry Lake. It will be a good investment for the Russians, you know, to then having the head of the American VOA also being sympathetic to their messaging.

The NATO Secretary General this week gave a speech, Mark Rutte, issuing a warning. He said, among other things, we are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years. The Russia economy is on war footing, you know, obviously with your husband, the government officials in Poland. Talk to me about kind of the view from our NATO allies here in December 2024.

Okay, for clarity, I don't speak for my husband, who's the Polish foreign minister. I don't represent him or, you know, or the great nation of Poland, you know, in any way. But I mean, I think what Ruda was saying is something that's becoming increasingly clear, which is that the Russian economy is now increasingly a war economy. It's built around and for the purpose of producing weapons, which is making it look a lot more like the Soviet economy, actually, from the 1970s, which is an interesting interpretation.

interesting parallel and also shows where it could end up. But at the moment, they're building this weapons producing economy and they're putting all their best technology and their best researchers and engineers and so on are all pushing in that direction. That's what they're doing now.

And that means that for Putin to somehow reverse course or stop the war has a lot more consequences than people think. You know, so what would happen to all that enormous investment? They would just stop it? I mean, I don't think so. You know, what would happen to the hundreds of thousands of armed soldiers who are now in the field? Would Putin just bring them home and

then they would go back to regular life? Is that something that's going to be good for him or healthy for Russia? I mean, I think what Ruta was saying, the NATO Secretary General, was that naivete about the ease with which you could get a deal or negotiate with Russia is unwarranted. I'm really worried because I hear both in Europe and in the US and in Ukraine, actually, a lot of people who do seem to believe that there's, because Russia

Trump has said he wants a negotiation, that there will be one. I mean, I am happy to be proven wrong. Like I will be, there is no one who will be happier to hear that there's a real negotiation happening and that the war would end.

You know, it's been a misery for so many of my friends. It's a huge political and economic problem for everybody else in Europe. You know, I really want the war to be over. Ukrainians have made clear that they will negotiate, and they've made that clear in public. They've also made it clear in more specific ways in private. They would be happy to do some kind of deal. Of course, they're not going to give up their sovereignty, and they're not going to allow the Russians to replace the current government with a pro-Russian government.

There is right now, as we're speaking, no indication that the Russians want to negotiate at all. Again, maybe I'm going to be proven wrong.

But they haven't said they wanted to. Whenever Putin is asked about it, he's repeated his goals for Ukraine, which include the removal of the government and its replacement with someone he approves of. You know, sometimes the goal is Russia occupies and incorporates eastern Ukraine, creates a little fake state in the middle of Ukraine and gives western Ukraine supposedly, I mean, this is what they say, not what anybody would want, to be divided up by other countries.

So it's a recipe for the destruction of Ukraine. That's what Putin has said. He's never offered a vision of an alternative. He's built his economy around one.

war and the need to continue war. His power base also might depend on him continuing the war. He now has around him people who are dedicated to and are profiting from, because this is an oligarchic corrupt economy, and are profiting from the continuation of the war and the construction of and the building of more weapons. So what Ruda was saying was that this is not a problem that has an instant or easy or short-term solution. You know, once you are a leader who's

power inside the country and who has all kinds of people dependent on you to continue fighting, it becomes very hard to stop for a lot of reasons. And so that's

That was a warning. Yeah, it's interesting. It is that conventional wisdom outside that some deal is coming, but it's now my colleague Bill Kristol, Michael Weiss, now you. This podcast is the home for skepticism of Putin's interest in a deal because everybody has echoed your point of view on that. I want to talk about another news story related to the Russian desired sphere of influence over in Central and Eastern Europe. And that's a story out of Romania, which I kind of have mixed views on.

I guess the basics of it, and you can correct me or add more color to this, was that there was Russian interference in this election, particularly via TikTok and via influencers. There was money in the Romanian elections that went against the laws. And so they called off the election, essentially. Like I said, I have mixed views on it, but I'd like to hear your perspective. I always...

I also have mixed views. It's a very, it's a complicated story. I mean, basically what happened is that one of the candidates whose name barely figured in polling and who wasn't seen much on mainstream television and wasn't taking part in this sort of the debates of the, of the leading candidates turned out to have been conducting a campaign on Tik TOK.

that somebody was funding. I think it's more than a million dollars, which goes a long way on TikTok. And there were influencers being paid to support him. And there was some kind of network of bots or accounts that were activated on his behalf. And so there was this whole huge campaign on TikTok, which was under Romanian election law, illegal. So

So he broke the law or someone broke the law on his behalf in order to campaign on TikTok. I mean, it's maybe worth saying just a couple sentences about him. I'm writing something about him that will appear soonish.

He's called Kalin Georgescu, and he is someone who is both simultaneously speaks warmly and favorably of the old Romanian far right. This is the people who carried out the Holocaust in Romania, the Romanian fascists from the wartime era. And at the same time, he has a very weird spiritual, mystical health issue.

anti-vax kind of great so kind of like a chochesco meets rfk jr type candidate exactly right i mean genuinely exactly he's like and he's he's a huge fan of rfk jr and talks about him and there's a video of him where he goes swimming in a pond in the winter appearing to suffer no back you know it's snowing outside there's a voiceover where he says i don't need vaccines i just have my faith and my belief and i'm

you know, and I'm kept safe by God or something like that. That's not an exact quote. That's a paraphrase, you know, but so that it's that kind of combination of stuff, you know, it's appealing to the,

people who are skeptical of medicine plus the people. Oh, he has a thing about water as well, that water is mystical and we have a special connection to water and carbonated water is like pollution. And when you drink carbonated water, I don't know if it's literally or metaphorically, it's like you're ingesting nano chips that will change your brain or something like that. So there's the, my daughter will be devastated to hear that. Uh, as a big carbonated water consumer. Yes. Right. So, so anyway, that's who he is.

He's also very pro-Russian and very anti-war. And he and his wife, who's also a health kind of mystic healer kind of person, have this whole thing about peace. We need peace. We mustn't, you know, contributing weapons to the war, you know, just continues the war. And of course, the truth is that if Romania and the rest of Europe stopped contributing wars to Ukraine, then Ukraine would fall. Russia would be on their border. And actually, it would cost Romania more. It would be more difficult to stay secure.

and the price of weapons would be higher. You know, so it's a, anyway, it's a lie on many levels. Anyway, this is the guy who wound up with 22%, and in a field of, with many candidates in it, he came first. There was supposed to be a runoff between him and the

and the second best candidate, and the Romanian High Court, kind of constitutional court, annulled the election on the grounds that electoral rules had been broken. In addition, they found 85,000 supposedly separate evidence of different kinds of Russian cyber attacks on the campaign and on election infrastructure as well. There have been a lot of weird stories in Romania in the last couple of weeks connected to it. There was a group of

armed people arrested. There were some odd links between Georgescu and some Moldovans have been found and so on. I mean, I can't speak to whether any of that is true or how it's related. The deep question here is whether Romania gets to decide what its electoral laws are. Like, does Romania have the right to decide what its electoral funding laws are, or does TikTok decide?

you know, does ByteDance, the Chinese owners of TikTok, do they decide? I mean, there are other countries that are facing a version of that question too. I mean, you can create laws about, I mean, Germany has laws about hate speech, you know, that other countries have laws about electoral campaigning and what kind of, how much you can spend and what you can do, you know. And, you know, we here in America have no electoral laws anymore, really, and we have a free-for-all and you can spend whatever you want.

And we're used to that and we think it's okay. But like, I think other countries are allowed to have different rules, you know, but are any of those rules enforceable in a world where actually the campaign is conducted on platforms that are owned by ByteDance or by Elon Musk, you know, or by Mark Zuckerberg. And right now the Romanian court made this decision that we still get to decide. And of course, there are a lot of people who think that's unfair and they robbed this guy and

you know, of his chance to be a candidate. And actually the number two, the woman who came in second, she's angry as well. And lots of other people feel that this is the wrong way to fight the far right. And maybe they're right. But it's a pretty fundamental question. And it's going to come up in a lot of election campaigns. We have a German election in a few weeks where there will absolutely be a huge Russian role. You know, there are other elections coming. And in each one of those, we will now face this problem.

And by the way, it's not just a Russian role now. It's also an American role or, I don't know, American of South African origin role. You know, Twitter is now also is not merely a platform that, you know, lets you decide what you want to see. Twitter also has an ideology that it pushes and promotes. And so should countries accept that as well? And I think this is going to be, you know, over the next year, a lot of different places are going to grapple with this problem.

So challenging, because as I'm just listening to you describe the situation, like instinctively, my view is this is bad. Like nullifying an election because of disinformation leads to just myriad other problems and loss of trust. On the other hand, it's like,

what is the punishment for breaking local election laws like what is an appropriate punishment right in this case the candidate hadn't won yet but imagine the case where they can right like then they're controlling the government what is the balance between this decision to nullify the election and as you said are like you know american vegas rules politics where where anything goes

I don't have a good answer either. And, you know, of course, the decision to nullify the election has horrible repercussions. And maybe it's going to result in a surge of support for the far right. I don't, you know, I don't know. I mean, it might. And it's also just to be fair, it's like hard to imagine. It's not like America hasn't tried to involve ourselves in other countries elections before in the past. Like, it's hard to imagine this situation where Western Europe or a European country is like, oh, we're going to nullify the elections because the Americans were putting their thumb on the scale. Right. You know what I mean? Like, it's hard to.

I'm starting to think about like a way to adjudicate it consistently. It's very difficult. I mean, I think Twitter is going to be a problem for a lot of European countries, depending on how it's used. I mean, Musk has explicitly threatened the leaders of other countries. He threatened Trudeau. He's threatened, you know, Irish leaders. Twitter is thought to have played a role in some riots in the UK, you know, a few months ago. If Twitter becomes a

you know, not a neutral platform where we can all have a debate, you know, but a platform with a clear political agenda, then it's going to become a difficult problem also for, you know, for a lot of countries and not because it's Russian influence, but because it's American far right influence. And I don't know how people are going to deal with it. Maybe, you know, maybe, you know,

They'll discount it or ignore it or we'll all decide that it's free speech and end that. Again, there are countries who have different rules from the United States, you know, who have a different way of conducting elections and political debate. And those are their rules and they created them. And the question is whether or not they get to keep them or not. And maybe the answer is no, I don't know.

Play the game, play the game, play the game.

Winning is based on skill. I want to move on to the Middle East before we lose you. You wrote about the collapse of the Assad regime, the collapse of autocratic regimes tend to happen gradually and then suddenly, slowly, and then all at once. You led the story in a nod to Hemingway. You also wrote on one of these social networks. I forget where I saw you writing this. It's a bad day for the international network of dictators who live in similar palaces.

So the video of the Assad palace being stormed. Just wondering your thoughts on what happened in Syria and the ramifications. So, I mean, you've all know, we all know by now what happened in Syria. What happened was that the Russians withdrew their support from the regime. They were fighting their war in Ukraine. They ran out of stuff and equipment and men and they took it away. You know, the Israeli attack on Hezbollah damaged the main Iranian, you know, form of support for the regime as well.

And then suddenly it turned out that the regime was not only was it bankrupt, but it was unable to protect its people. So here's to me what was the most interesting thing about the fall of Assad was that when the rebel movement came into Aleppo, they took it not after this bloody, bitter battle in which lots and lots of people died. They basically walked in.

And then once they walked into Aleppo, then they walked into a bunch of other cities and villages, and then they basically walked into Damascus. And that is, to me, is really interesting because it means that the army, the police, the security apparatus, you know, the people who worked for Assad suddenly lost their belief that he would protect them.

And all of these people, everybody who's in the army or in the police or wherever, they all also live in this country that has been ruled by this unbelievably brutal system for a long time. And they all have cousins and friends and relatives and acquaintances who were in prison or who were tortured or who are refugees because everybody just everybody does in a state like that.

You know, they're loyal to the regime because the regime pays them, presumably, or because it gives them some kind of access to goods. You know, that's how it works, for example, in Venezuela or in Cuba, but also because it protects them from the wrath of their fellow citizens. And once they lose that, once the regime appears weak, then it was a collapse. Then they just all melted into the woodwork and they took off their uniforms and walked away.

That's a really interesting model because we tend to think about these systems as eternal and they can't be stopped and they're so brutal that their violence, you know, violence controls everything. But again, remembering what the subject that we started with, which is that the long-term effect of brutality and centralization and oligarchy control is poverty, you

And that eventually it destroys any culture of entrepreneurship or business or investment. Those regimes can, once people lose faith in them, then they can go quite closely. I mean, a really interesting country to watch. I have this weird web of connections that I make in my head that is maybe peculiar to me. But when I saw Syria, I started thinking about Venezuela. Yeah.

On the other side of the planet, I realize not really similar culturally or any other way, but it's also a country where the regime is still there because of the army and the police clashing.

continuing to work for it, even though there's a lot of evidence that the army and the police are very uncomfortable with the system and sympathize a lot with the population. And it's another place where you could see maybe some kind of rapid change. All of these apparently stable regimes have some very fundamental, you know, profound flaws. And that includes Russia too, of course.

All right. I want to close with one tough question I've been noodling in my head. So you got, I mean, this has all been, all been heavy material, but similar to the Romania question, this one is one that it's hard for me to see, you know, clearly the right path, but, you know, over the past year,

more at this point. Many in sort of the pro-democracy kind of space have had issues with Bibi, right? And his corruption and the way that he has, you know, had some Trumpian and Orban-ish behavior. But if you look at the past year now and the weakening of Iran and the weakening of Hezbollah and Hamas, almost elimination of Hezbollah,

Do you look at that situation any differently? I mean, do you assess Bibi any differently than maybe you would have a year or two years ago? First of all, I don't find that he fits very easily into any kind of paradigm, you know, like autocrats versus Democrats or whatever you want to look at. There are two things about him that are true. Well, there are a lot of things about him that are true, but at least two things are true at once. One, that he is...

He intends to rule Israel forever if he can. He intends to undermine Israeli democracy if he can. He was trying to do it before the Hamas attack. He was stopped by one of the most massive and well-organized protests that have taken place in any democracy. And he's trying to use the war now to achieve those same things, as far as I can see from a distance. I haven't been to Israel or worked on Israel in the last year, but...

At the same time, Israel is right about Iran. And this is something, you know, Israel, it's not Netanyahu. It's like, you know, the army, which, by the way, is mostly the army and the tech community in Israel were the biggest supporters of the democracy movement. They've all been right that Iran is the source of an enormous amount of disruption and pain and tragedy in the Middle East through its various proxies.

You know, including supporting Assad. And so Israel as a nation is right to try and damage them. So, you know, you have to hold those two things in your head at the same time. I think there's a third thing that really worries me about Israel, which is that the attacks on Gaza and to a lesser extent Lebanon, the attacks on civilians...

Some of which may have been accidental, but a lot of which seem not to have been, are contributing to the general feeling of lawlessness that you can do anything you want. You know, the Russians are allowed to kill as many Ukrainians as they want, and maybe the Chinese will be able to kill as many Uyghurs as they want, and nobody's willing to stop them.

And so Israel, the war is doing a lot of damage to any idea of international law, of protection for civilians during wartime. I would lay those three things on the table and I would say, I think it's too early to judge, but Israel has done both good by destroying Hezbollah and a huge amount of damage by the horrific and unnecessary deaths of thousands of people.

but they've also done an enormous amount of damage, both to their own country and to the region and really to the world. So that's where I am. It's very well put. I'm glad I asked you. I've been noodling on this one in my head. You're bringing some clarity to three points. And I think I fully concur on all three. Well, in Applebaum, uh,

I think there's going to be much to discuss around the world in the coming years. So I hope you'll be coming back to the Borg podcast often. Maybe, maybe with some happy, I guess we had happy news with Assad, but maybe with some other happier news. Assad was really happy news. Let's celebrate Assad. Let's end by celebrating the exit of Assad and the release of people from prison. And, you know, come on. I mean, that was great news. It was beautiful. The video with Clarissa Ward, I'll put it in the show notes. People haven't seen it. It is amazing.

It's really heartwarming. He was such a depraved bastard. So anyway, getting rid of him. And I hope he enjoys the winters in Russia. Anne, thank you so much. We'll be seeing you soon. Everybody else, we'll be back here as always on Monday with Bill Kristol. See you all then. Peace. Like a California woman With a global point of view You wear it well, it's unbearable You found it in her

Well, five stars, great, you got it made I've been reading the review It's a new world, babe, I can't behave As if I know what to do Cause I belong to an older song It's a feeling unrelenting And I might have apologized But I've never been wrong I know the world is ending

Your birth inspired spontaneous choirs, angels heralding you. The psychic's vision came to pass, and the critics all withdrew. The palm leaves laid for you to play on, they sway as you come to. And all of this new happiness makes it all the more. And I belong to an older song.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Play the game, play the game, play the game.

Winning is based on skill.