The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 100. Anne Applebaum: Corruption, Populism, and Ending the War in Ukraine

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

What constitutes an autocratic state? How did populism come to dominate global politics from 2012-2014? When and how will the war in Ukraine end? On today’s episode of Leading, Rory and Alastair are joined by American-Polish journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: Becki Hills + India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen and Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alist Campbell, joined today by a writer, historian, journalist that both of us have known for quite a long time, by the name of Anne Applebaum. And particularly interesting at the moment, because she's written many books, but her latest is about what it's called Autocracy Inc. And it speaks to a lot of the things that we talked about for some time.

I suspect the name Putin may come up quite a lot. I suspect that Ukraine may come up quite a lot. I expect populism may come up quite a lot. I expect Trump may come up quite a lot. But she's somebody who's been, I think, on a pretty interesting political journey herself, but has ended up effectively as something of a political campaigner, even though she might not like to be described like that. So, Anne, welcome.

I want to start by asking you quite a big question that allows you to tell us something about yourself and your life. And that is if you could give us the various chapters of your relationship with Eastern Europe. I thought you were going to ask for my relationship to a more complex relationship. But no, my first experience with Eastern Europe was a trip as a student to the Soviet Union in the 1980s when it was still the Soviet Union. And I actually now, in retrospect, feel lucky that I was one of the last generations of students who, did see it because a couple of years later it was already different. I then lived in Poland in 1989 and watched 1990 and watched the transition year. So that's kind of part two. Part three, I married somebody who became a Polish politician, so had an insider view to how complex that is.

And there was a sort of happy part of that and then a less happy part of that. And then maybe chapter four is I watched Poland be almost taken over by an autocratic populist party that was trying to undermine the political system. And then maybe chapter five is then I watched kind of broad coalition, pro-democracy coalition win an election in October. So we have at the moment we're at the happy endings phase. But of course, life goes on and it could go the other way. Tell us a little bit. You said married a politician there was a happy part and a less happy part to that. What did you mean by that? Well, politics changed in the, some like around 2012, 2013, 2014. You will both know this, too, the way that people talked about politics and the rise in the level of scorn for politicians and the focus on everything you do in your life. And, you know, when you walk out the door, you have to worry about who's going to take your picture and how they're going to use it. The all-encompassing nature of media change the, you know, it's sort of, you know, it's sort of, you know, made it much less fun than it had been a few years earlier. I was interested that the name Putin

didn't come up in your account of your relationship. Is that because you're trying to block it out a bit? It feels to me that that's a very, very important part of your relationship with Eastern Europe. Yes. I mean, it's not really, I was thinking about my personal relationship. I became aware of Putin and who he was very early, and I suppose I've written a lot about him. And I did start, you know, I did feel from the moment he was appointed that I worried about him as a, as somebody who bragged about and talked about his past in the KGB. He talked about himself, you know, using the language of sort of Leninism about himself and how important the secret police were even when he was president.

So I worried about what he was going to do. And then almost the first thing he did, actually, was when he became head of the FSB, which was the new KGB, he put a portrait of Yuri Andropov up in the building. And Dropov was famous for one thing when he became head of the KGB. in the 1980s. He was the one who led the first really harsh crackdown on what was then a really tiny, wasn't even a democracy movement. It was just little tiny dissident groups. Andropov had been the head of the Moscow embassy in Budapest in 1956, and he was obsessed with this idea that you need to crush the opposition. And when I saw Putin do that, I thought right. That's which

way it was going. And it did. So you were born in America, but you spent a lot time in Britain, married, as you say now, to a Polish politician who's also well-known Britain, went to Rory's old school, part of the Bullyingdon, I believe, when he was Oxford University. So let's just set him in the UK context as well. What did you think and how did you feel about the way that we, and I mean we as in the Blair government, but also we, the West, handled Putin when it first became clear that he was going to be president? Were we too soft? Were we taken in? So people were too willing to believe that there was a way to trade with Russia neutrally. In other words, that we can have just an economic relationship with them and that the politics of Russia won't ever affect that.

We were also far too willing to allow our financial institutions to be used by what we came to be known as the Russian oligarchs to essentially steal and launder their money and to hide it, whether they hid it in anonymous companies or offshore accounts or indeed London property. We were much too willing to accept that. And we somehow assumed that it wouldn't affect us, that it was somehow, you know, we could allow this to happen. And it was, you know, it was kind of their problem over there. And there would be no impact on us. But I'm afraid there was an impact on us. And it was corrupting. You studied at Yale.

And as you say, you went to Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So there must have been a strange shift from, I suppose, the kind of the Cold War mentality of the 1980s. And you would have seen American anti-communism. You then will have spent more and more time in Britain in the 90s and the 2000s. Did you find a distinctive British view of centuries in Europe that was different to an American view? Was there a form of British naivety or American naivety? What was the strength and weaknesses of the kind of establishment views of those two countries? I mean, the phenomenon of London grad has no American equivalent.

So the feeling that you had at one point, it's not really the 90s, it's later, that you had in London, and that there's kind of Russian money pouring in and Russians dominating the art world and, you know, Russians in Knightsbridge and Mayfair. I mean, I don't think there's an exact U.S. equivalent to that. It sort of felt like London was the place that the oligarchy made its home. And some of that might just be proximity and you have some nice houses here, that kind of thing. But some of it obviously was this is where the, you know, it's not a very nice word, but where the enablers were, you know, the accountants and the lawyers. and the property dealers and so on. And clearly the law made it possible or made it more likely that, I don't know, that Boris Berzovsky would live here or that Abramovich would be here.

It's sort of a bit of history. There's certainly bits of the kind of British establishment that often thinks America is too black and white about the world, too confrontational. I guess we probably would have taken that view about the Iraq War. We probably, many people took that view around the Cold War, particularly the British left. Is that something that you picked up on that was a bits of British political culture, which tended not to want to get into a confrontational relationship with Russia. I mean, that's more of a German problem. You know, the Germans really, really, really don't want any confrontation with Russia.

And that must be some deep historical kind of psychosis. Here, actually, I mean, actually, one of the things I liked about Britain in the 80s and 90s was I liked the clarity. This is not just about, it was more about Eastern Europe than Russia. You know, the welcoming attitude, at least in the beginning, towards the idea of integration of Central Europe into Western Europe. You know, the sort of positive feeling and the feeling that the end of communism was good and that we were going to be a country that led the way in bringing down that system and all the British advisors who went over there. And, I mean, that felt to me very positive. In the case of Russia, it was almost the, there's an American expression, the soft bigotry of low expectations.

You know, we just assume the Russians are immoral. And so if they come here and spend their money in ugly ways or if they kill people in central London, well, that's just what Russians do. And I think it took a long time for people here to understand, as I said, how corrupting that was and ultimately how dangerous. But I liked the British attitude towards central and eastern Europe. And I liked the idea that Britain was an open, welcoming place, as I said, initially. But the word you used was enablers, the enablers, whether that be – and in says your latest book is Autocracy Inc. sort of speaks to this theme of kind of global networks where the policymakers and the law enforcement agencies to some extent are kind of turning blind eye to stuff that they deep down

know is going on and know, as you say, is corrupting. And as that game has gone on, and I think for the Russians partly it has been a game, they must look back at that and think they were winning that game. Not only did they think they were winning it, they saw it as evidence of hypocrisy. And so actually I learned about money laundering from the Russian opposition. It was the Russian opposition who were watching this stuff happen and who became very cynical about Western democracy because they said, you guys talk about human rights, you know, and you talk about the rule of law.

But then you let all this stolen money flow through the city of London, not only the city of London, but it was somehow visible, particularly visible in the city of London. You know, so do you really believe what you say you believe? And so it began by the... Of course it was a fair point. I mean, of course it was a fair point. I mean, I started writing about kleptocracy and the problem of anonymous companies and so on a decade ago, inspired by them.

My understanding of autocratic regimes has often come from their opponents who, of course, analyze them and know them very well. And the Russian opposition were very clear about this a decade ago or more. This word hypocrisy is very interesting, isn't it? Because it's true of the way in which many, many regimes, view us, view us in the United States. You know, they will say, you talk about human rights, but you're doing this in Yemen, or you're doing this in Iraq, or you're doing this in Israel. Or I've met African leaders say, you know, you claim to care about whatever you're talking about how we treat our opposition, but you're still giving us development aid. And those big tropes

going all the way back to the Soviet Union of saying, you know, you claim to care about civil rights, but look at how you're treating people in their own country, etc. So as autocracies build an argument against democracy, it's always been true that hypocrisy is the central allegation and has been for 100 years. Yes, I mean, there's something about foreign policy that is almost inherently involves hypocrisy because you need to deal with people who you disagree with. And I don't sort of disagree with that. I mean, my argument in my book is not that we should not speak to dictatorships or not

deal with them or not have any trade with them. It's just to be clear about who they are. And, of course, the hypocrisy argument works the other way. I mean, the Russians go around the world talking about Western imperialism, and yet they have just launched the most blood. and brutal imperial war of this century. And they talk about conquering neighboring nations and using language we haven't heard since the 19th century.

So there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around. And as I said, it's almost a given. I mean, I think it was the money and the way in which the Russians perceived that the money was not only corrupting Russia, but was corrupting us that I think surprised them. How did it corrupt us? So just to sort of spill that out in a little bit more detail. So I suppose the benign way as well, you know,

which presumably the optimists were saying, which is, well, it's going to be bring a lot of money into London. Which it did. Give us the bad side. How did it corrupt us? So first of all, I know this story a little bit better in the US than I know it here, but the vehicles that are used to hide money from tax, you know, or from your regime back home, are also often the same vehicles that are used to hide money in politics. So if you want to donate money to a political cause and you want to do it anonymously, the vehicles that are set up to do it are there.

In the U.S. is actually a huge problem. The modern autocracies operate as opaque, untransparent political systems where people have power and they have money and you don't really know why. And that's the source of their power. It's the source of what makes people afraid of them. And the degree to which our systems have also become like that and that people can become wealthy in strange ways and that there's a lack of transparency in the system and that money can be hidden and so on. And our politicians effectively are becoming corrupt. Our political parties in Britain and the U.S. are being good. bought by these interests? I don't think everybody has been bought, but if you are determined to try

to buy somebody and if somebody is interested in being bought, there are obviously ways to do it. Funny life, in the UK, it's often on very low levels. It's very small amounts of money. You know, I don't know, you're a member of the conservative friends of Russia or something and somebody takes you to dinner. I mean, it's sort of, whereas it can be quite spectacular elsewhere. I mean, if you think about the most famous example, actually, is the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder who left office and almost immediately afterwards went to work for the Russian gas industry and has been doing so ever since. And you can, of course, find examples of American politicians who leave and go and work for all kinds of dictators, usually in the form of a lobbying organization or PR company.

Actually, I think in the U.S., there's also, there are so many hidden ways to donate money now. I mean, we have this PAC system, political action committees, and we don't really know who gives money to them in some cases. Even though it's, I mean, it's technically illegal for foreigners to give money. But a Russian with a U.S. passport who some mysteriously gets a lot of money from his uncle and donates it to a political party, I mean, that's probably legal. What about political funding here? One of the best known routes for buying political influence has been the presence of the Russian oligarchs that you're talking about, particularly conservative party fundraisers, where people like Boris Johnson literally hawk themselves out to go and play tell us with these guys. Yes, that was a famous example. Is that a form of corruption?

I mean, corruption is defined differently in different countries, but it's certainly a form of the Russians seeking to buy influence. And not all of it is illegal. There's also another form of influence, which is there are parts of the business community here and famously, again, in Germany or in the U.S., who do so much business with Russia that they also become, in fact, lobbyists for the regime. In Germany, there's, you know, famously the German gas industry is very good. keen on having a good relationship with Putin or was keen on it and was keen on having a relationship

with Russia. And that was because it was in their interest to do so. So in the way the Russians bought their way into the German establishment that way. There's a version of that here. I mean, here it's a little bit, you know, because the city is so big and the financial volumes are so huge. I'm, you know, I'm not suggesting that the Russians corrupted all of it. But you can make friends for yourself. I mean, there's a third thing that the Russians do, which may have happened here, which is they create business opportunities for politicians they want to encourage or their friends. And so, you know, in Italy, for example, the Salvini's political party, there was a businessman who was close to Salvini, who was offered some business deals in Russia. It looks like

Berlusconi was at one point, offered some business deals in Russia. You know, that's not illegal. There's no, there's not, it's not like someone's passing a bribe in a brown envelope to one of those politicians, but it's a way of influencing them curing favor. And of course, there's clearly, there are a couple of figures close to Farage who are, who were in that position. Help us understand the differences between these donations from different countries. So I guess somebody listening might say, well, there are also political donations and business opportunities being provided by people who have very strong views on Israel, or there are political opportunities and donations being provided by people who are close to China. Is there some way of understanding the

difference between pro-Russian, pro-Israeli, pro-Saudi, pro-Chinese money in this context? I mean, you know, all of them could have, you know, you could imagine negative effects in any of those circumstances. You know, you want to look at what's the ultimate goal, you know, is the goal, for example, to perpetuate an autocratic regime that's then going to cause us trouble in other ways. And so looking back on the long relations with Russia, we may one day say this about China, by the way. Looking back on the long relationship with Russia, I mean, you know, were we creating the monster that then invaded Ukraine, created havoc, caused a security crisis for all of Europe and possibly eventually for the UK as well? You know, did we feed into

something that eventually came back to haunt us? So again, it's not only about internal corruption or it's also about what was the long-term impact of that relationship. You know, I guess the United States probably has, there are plenty of wealthy Americans in London who have the ear of various politicians too, but it doesn't seem very likely, at least at this exact second that we are by cultivating a relationship with the United States that Britain is creating a security threat that will haunt it later on. So there's that aspect of it as well. But that could I presume be true for Israel, could be true for Saudi Arabia, could be true of China. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not picking on Russia. In fact, my book is about the relationship between these altocracy. Networks.

There have been so amazing books written about this. Remember Oliver Bolo, Butler to the World, the one that you talked about, Tom Burgess. Tom Burgess. Tom Burgess. Cleptopia. And this is, we've kind of all turned a blind eye, really. Because, I mean, I remember first really Oliver Bullough's book and thinking, oh my God, this is like all here. And yet, it didn't really make that much of an impact on the political debate, I don't think.

It's one of my favorite subjects. I mean, I don't have the answer. Why this hasn't? Why doesn't it? I mean, because there are other. kinds of impacts. So why can't anybody afford to live in London? You know, why is so much of central London bought up by people who were using London property as a form of wealth storage or money laundering or even just... Or insurance policy? Or insurance policy. Why wasn't there

a citywide revolt led by people in their late 20s who can't afford property? I don't know. I mean, I have a number of theories. I don't have a full explanation. One reason is because it's so complicated. I mean, it's funny, Kleptopia, the book by former FTA, journalist, which I reviewed, is an excellent book. It's brilliantly reported. It's also very hard to follow at times because it's complicated. It's very complicated. You know, we're talking about money that goes around the world, you know, in nine seconds. That's the first piece of it. And so it's hard to understand. It's hard to understand how it relates to you and your inability to afford a flat and made a veil, you know. But part of the job of politics, right, this is a

political podcast. Part of the job of politics is to ensure that people do understand those links, do understand the impact that's having on people's life, but it sort of feels like because it's so complicated, and probably because we did kind of enable as we went, that it's just too complicated to explain so you'd sort of turn a blind eye. Let me just say a couple of specifics. Should Abramovich have been allowed to buy Chelsea Football Club?

That's one. Should Lebedeff have been allowed to become quite a serious, significant player in the British media landscape? So I probably don't have as strong feelings about football. as you do, you know, or as deep a knowledge of what other, I don't really know who else owns football clubs and whether they're nice, upstanding people or not. Probably you could say, before Obama was allowed to do anything, we should have known where his money came from. And so in the way that you would ask if somebody was buying any big company, what's the origin of their money?

But it's pretty obvious why a Russian oligarch might want a Premier League football club. Of course. He wants to launder himself into respectability. You know, he became a benign figure. In fact, the only Premier League football match I've ever been to was a Chelsea match. And Abramovich was there, and people cheered him when he walked into the stadium. So this is something I have to remember. So for listeners who don't know this as well as you do, how did these people make their money? How did Abramvich make them?

How did a Levittornevian? Who are they? I mean, why should we be worried? So it depends. I mean, Abrametch actually, I don't know the full story. But very often, they made money through their proximity to power. So what an oligarch is in Russia, it's somebody who, you know, they haven't earned their money by inventing some new thing and climbing their way up the ladder and, you know, borrowing money from the bank. And they were given access to money. In some cases, they were given roles in state companies. I mean, I'm now oversimplifying. I mean, they're all different.

Am I right in saying some of the cases in London that they've taken against each other make it pretty clear that they were connected some of them to organize crime? Because some of these cases, they're literally saying, this person was my godfather, and this is a traditional mafia relationship. And this is how much I should have given him and not given him. And this was the protection I required. Yes. I mean, mafia is also a weird word because when the mafia is the state, you know, do you talk about it as the mafia or do you call it something else? We're still quite reluctant to look at Putin and call it a mafia state in the way that say Gary Kasparov does. I'm very happy to call it.

I know you are. But it's like we need to get into this sort of battle between democracies and. autocracies because I still think that we sometimes want to apply the judgments about democracies to the way that these guys operate. Even now, even with Ukraine, you will still say that, you know, Sergei Lavrov says something and it's like he's, well, he's the foreign minister of Russia, as opposed to he's part of this kind of what you would define as a mafia state. But this is back to your question about hypocrisy and diplomacy. I mean, you know, at some level maybe somebody has to deal with Sergei Lavrov at a meeting,

and so they don't want to say to the person they have to have a meeting with, you know, we think you're a criminal. But it's nevertheless useful to remember that they're criminals. I mean... Right, here's interesting. You talked about your role as the wife of a current foreign minister, Radaslof Skorski, in Poland. Do you feel you ever have to tailor your views

because he is now in this very sensitive diplomatic position? Well, fortunately, there is no role in the Polish constitution for the foreign minister's wife. Correct. So I don't actually really have to do anything, I mean, in terms of, you know, participating. The other fortunate thing was the one issue where he is, you know, he's now very centrally involved and plays a large role, happens to be an issue that I've been writing about for a decade, which is Ukraine. In fact, in my discussion of my relationship with Eastern Europe, I didn't mention Putin. I also didn't say Ukraine, which I went for the first time in 1990 and have been going ever since. And fortunately, we agree with each other. And the arguments that he is now making are ones I've been making for a long time.

So I don't really feel that I have to tailor what I say to him. But you think you get attacked more. So, for example, I think you're on one of the lists of people who you're officially defined as a Russophobe by the Kremlin. Yeah, I think I've been banned from going to Russia. Which actually, it's weird when that happened. It made me sort of sad. I used to spend a lot of time. time in Russia now. I'm also banned. You're also banned. Oh, well, that's it. You can not go together. We can not spend holidays in Siberia together. But I did, I did spend a lot of time there at one point, so it's, so it's sad. Yeah, I probably attract more anger and, you know, hatred and trolling because of that, yeah, and people attack me for it and so on. But it feels to me that I, because I had carved

out my position on these matters, you know, for the last decade. It doesn't bother you. It doesn't, that doesn't bother him. I mean, I'm trying to think if there may be other unrelated issues where I wouldn't say anything. But off the top of my head, I'm not thinking of it. Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a minute. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarach here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny

resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise. People are arguing about Europe. The government has got a few issues with the trade unions. And we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the

rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you?

Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. Your latest work has been on autocracy, but before that, you did a lot of work on populism. I wonder whether you could help us understand, roughly speaking, what is democracy, what's populism, what's autocracy, and what's the relationship between this thing we call populism and this thing we call autocracy. That's a great question. The word populism is one I don't like.

I mean, sometimes you have to use it because there aren't really other words, but it has had a lot of different meanings. I mean, the U.S. there's a populist movement in the 19th century, which is completely different from the populist movement that we're talking about now. But I'm particularly thinking about your work on Poland and Hungary, for example. Yeah, no, no, I understand. But I was going to say that it's a word that we've come to use. What we really mean is movements that are anti-democratic in some way. So I use the expression autocratic populism because I can't think of a better phrase. They can be so-called far right or they can be so-called far left. So you had an autocratic populist movement in Venezuela led by Hugo Chavez, and that also the purpose of that movement was eventually to dismantle the state.

So these are political movements that are part of the democratic system. They seek to win elections democratically. I mean, Victor Orban won his election, no question, democratically. The Law and Justice Party in Poland in 2015 won democratically. But when they took power, they began to change the system to ensure that they would never lose again. And often there are clues as they're running for election. Any party that talks about itself is the only true party. We're the true polls or were the real Hungarians or were the real British people as opposed to the elites and the foreigners and the agents and the traders.

That's an indication that they don't see themselves as having legitimate competitors. And if you don't have legitimate competitors, why should you leave the electoral system in place so that the traitors and the foreigners can defeat you four years from now? So upon taking power, they begin to dismantle the system. And that to me is what autocratic populism is. And that's different, by the way, from just being anti-immigration or having right-wing views. And then you've moved on from those very powerful writing about Poland and Hungary, which are democratic states going in a populist authoritarian direction, towards now discussing states like Russia and China, which I guess are in a very different situation. I mean, those are those are not illiberal democracies. And so those are political systems where, in a way, the dismantling of the state has been completed,

or the ruling party or the ruling elite or the ruling president or dictator, has no opposition. He has no legitimate political opposition. He has no checks and balances. But they use these sort of pseudo-democratic assistance. Sure. They will have, I mean, in Russia, there are endless fake political parties or there's sort of fake elections. In fact, and in practice, they don't have checks and benefits. and when they do, they dismantle them. So they have captured the courts. They control as much as they

can of the media or of the information system. And as I said before, they're untransparent. There's no way to understand what they're doing or to have, understand where their money comes from. Very often, they're billionaires. That's a big difference from the 20th century. And they seek to rule in that way. And of course, this is why they find our language, so the language of checks and balances and the language of not just democracy, but rule of law and transparency, this is why they find that to be such a big problem. It's very often the language of their political opponents. You know, that's how, you know, the Navalny movement in Russia was an anti-corruption movement. So it was a successful version of the thing that you say we didn't have here, you know, which was motivating people around corruption.

You know, or the women's movement in Iran was a rights movement or the Hong Kong democracy movement. And they use that kind of language. And this is why autocracies don't like it. They don't like it at home. And they increasingly don't like it around the world and try to undermine it. And I just say one final thing, which is that the other development of the last decade or so has been the interest that autocratic states, meaning Russia, China, Iran, I don't know, Venezuela, Belarus, North Korea have begun to have in promoting autocratic populism inside the democratic world. So they see the decline of democracy and the rise of illiberalism as advantageous to them. And this started out being largely a Russian thing.

There was the Russians who began this, I think, about 15 years ago. But there are now others joining in. We often talk about Victor Orban on this podcast, and I made a failed attempt to get him to come and do an interview with us. Two failed attempts. Two failed attempts. Two failed attempts when I met him in Germany recently. But how has it happened that this leader of a relatively small Eastern European country

has become such a huge figure, for example, within American politics and the American debate and the kind of folk hero to the hard right pretty much around the world. How do you think that's happened? He hid in plain sight. His foreign policy, I first met him in the 90s. His foreign policy has been focused on recruiting, by the way, especially the British right. He was always very interested in British conservatives. He was at Roger Scruton's funeral, for example, the only politician, I think, who was there.

And he made himself a figure on the British far right. And he looked for contacts in the American right. He's a little bit less so in the Netherlands and Germany, but there also. Because he understood very early on that for him to remain essentially an undemocratic leader of a European state, he was going to need allies. And so he's worked on creating allies and persuading others that his methods are acceptable. We were just talking about money. I mean, he puts a lot of money. into think tanks, into events. There's a think tank that's based in Budapest that invites people.

You can have a very nice trip to Budapest and you can meet lots of friendly Hungarians. It's run by John O'Sullivan, who was a former speechwriter for Mrs. Thatcher. He's a very jovial, friendly guy. They create this welcoming atmosphere for foreign conservatives. And it's been, I mean, you forget how in the world of ideas and the world of politics, a little bit of money and a little bit of effort can go a long way. Are there any other European leaders who are using their think tanks and their intellectuals as a way of making friends in the UK? I mean, I don't think so, not in that way. What's Orban's worldview, his dream for the future? What does he think a Le Pen, Orban, Putin, Erdogan, Sieging Ping universe looks like in 1520 years?

He thinks it means he can stay in power and once again he can keep his money and his son-in-law can keep his money and his coterie of business people around him can keep their money. But publicly, what's his geopolitical vision? What would he say that his vision of the world is? Well, he would say his vision of the world is that we break up these international institutions. We allow everybody to run their countries the way they want. We stop using the language of human rights, you know, in international law. We accept the idea that European states can be run as dictatorships and we get used to that. But he'd now call them a dictatorship, would he?

No, he would not ever use that way. He would see himself as being a democratic leader of a moment. modestly sized European power where he's able to wield far more influence. I don't know that he would describe himself anymore as a Democrat, but he would pretend to be a Democrat. Yeah. Do you think he's going to be right? Looking forward 15, 20 years, what's your view on the balance between democracy, populist, motocry? Yeah, he's winning. So I don't think there's going to be a winner, and I don't think there's going to be a moment in the next decade when we say, right, few, you know, that battles over and now we can move on

and worry about something else. I mean, I think this is the contest for the next decade or two, maybe more, the context over what kind of political systems we will have and, you know, how many others will adopt them. I should say one other thing about Orban that's been very successful in his, I mean, and you're right, it's not only is it a small country, it's a small and rather getting poorer country. It's very corrupt. But he also identified something and latched on to it, which was a kind of anxiety about modernity and an anxiety about social change as well as demographic change. One of the sources of his influence is he saw it before others did and used it as a political tool. And that's something that has then been copied and imitated by others. And so it's firstly his

ability to take over the state in Hungary, which by the way is admired by people around Donald Trump who would like to do the same thing. But it's secondly that he saw how to use that anxiety as a political weapon. And so part of the answer to the question of who's going to win is who figures out what's the better way to talk to people who are anxious about modernity. But the kind of traditional governments in the center and center left don't appear to be finding that language very successfully around the world. Well, let's see. I mean, so the election in Poland in October was, I mean, that was the, that was, that was,

that was centered around that. That was around finding a way of countering the rhetoric of autocratic populism. You are about to watch, I mean, we're now in the final run of a, US election, which is also going to be about that. So what Harris is trying to do, and actually, this is my own parochial interest. I mean, some of it is quite similar to what was done in Poland. What she's also trying to do is make a case that we can offer you stability and security inside a democratic structure. And the language that she's using is about that. And that was also what happened in Poland. I guess the other thing that's happening in the world right now that

will be very important in the question of who wins, who loses. And I accept it's not as simple as that, but is what's going on Ukraine. Yeah. So first of all, how does it end? And secondly, how does it have to end in order that what you would define as the right side comes out on top? So the war in Ukraine is very, very important in this contest, kind of war of ideas, actually, which is what it is. One of the reasons why Putin launched the war was to show, us that he doesn't care about our rules. He doesn't care about, you know, the sanctity of borders in Europe. He doesn't care about the Geneva Conventions, you know, he doesn't care about this kind of never again post-war slogan in Europe. He set up concentration camps

in occupied Ukraine. You know, he kidnaps children and takes them to Russia. So he's defying everything. And the autocracies around the world are watching him carefully, and a number of them have come to his aid. So the Iranians are sending drones, the North Koreans are sending ammunition. The Chinese are probably helping, you know, they're exporting components that are useful for the Russian defense industry. India is helping the economy with oil. India is helping the economy with oil. I mean, the oil thing is more complicated because the Russians are losing a lot of money on oil and gas because they used to make more money than they do now. So that's not entirely a win. But it's true that the world's autocrats have been supporting Russia in this effort

to destroy Ukraine. You know, and at the same time, the world's Democrats have been helping Ukraine, a victory for Ukraine. And by the way, let me back up a second. The only way the war ends really ends, meaning it's over and it doesn't start again, you know, next year is if the Russians decide that it's not worth fighting anymore. In other words, if the Russians make the same decision about Ukraine that the French made about Algeria, you know, or I don't know, the British made about Ireland, you know, that it's not our country. It's not worth it. It's too much. time, it's too much money, it's too many people are dead, we don't want to fight it. I mean, that's the conclusion they came to in Afghanistan.

But that's the end for Putin? I mean, I don't care about Putin. No, no, I don't care. Maybe it's the end or maybe not. That is such a big... I don't know, he can rewrite the story any way he wants. You know, he can say, we did what we wanted to do. I don't know, I'm not going to give him his explanation.

Maybe it's the end of Putin. And they can get to that conclusion in different ways. They can lose the war militarily. They can suffer economically. there can be political reasons why they come to that conclusion. But once they get there and we will know when that happens, then we can have a conversation about borders. Final one from me.

You talked about how the world seemed to change 2012, 2013, 2014. And I wonder whether you could tell me a little bit about why you think the world began to change in that way. And whether that's related to something else that we haven't talked about, which is the views of the kind of global south on this Ukraine war, the way in which the U.S. and Europe didn't get the overwhelming support. they were hoping to get in relation to Russia. To be fair, they got some support. There are 50 countries that are part of the defense group who work with Ukraine so that's well

beyond Europe. You know, those are two different questions. I mean, the change in 2012, 2013 was entirely to do with the change in political conversation that came from the change in social media. All conversations have rules. This conversation we're having now has a set of rules, right? I mean, we respect each other. We will wait till the end of the sentences and so on.

conversations in a parliament are conducted according to a set of rules, accepted conversational norms, whatever. Social media also has a set of rules, but the rules are not designed to create civilized debate or better conversation. The rules are designed to make money for the social media companies. And their goal is to keep you online as much as possible. And the way they do that is by feeding you anger and emotion and division and so on. And so once that became the dominant form of conversation and the dominant way in which people were getting their political information, then people's the way that people talked about politics began to change. And of course, it's more complicated than that. And actually the so-called mainstream media, also its business model disappeared.

And so it also began to decline for other reasons. So there are other factors. Once the point and purpose of political debate and participation in the public square, whatever you want to say in a more pompous way, once the purpose wasn't to, to hash out a problem and find a solution, but instead the purpose was to demonstrate your outrage or to perform your anger. Then politics became quite different. And this was something that we saw happen. My final question is really to ask you whether there's much room for optimism.

You talk a lot in your latest book about that you go through the various autocracies and how they operate, how they interlink and so forth. And you've got this line, international condemnation and economic sanctions, cannot move them. Popular opposition movements such as have existed in Venezuela, Hong Kong, Moscow don't stand a chance. That's a pretty pessimistic view of the ability of people to challenge something that deep in their hearts, probably most people in Venezuela do think is wrong and has to be challenged. Deep in their hearts, probably a lot of Russians do. And yet you're essentially saying, we're losing this battle. I didn't actually know what the context of that was

because I don't think it's true that they don't stand a chance. I think the car are stacked against them in ways that they weren't a decade ago, thanks to technology and thanks to this cooperation between the autocrats. They help one another state power. So they do stand a chance. Poland, I guess, is a good example of where they stood a chance. Poland is a good example of how, in a country that was still a democracy, you can change the system. You know, Venezuela is not a democracy. And so the Venezuelan opposition has just won. Clearly they won, and they have evidence that they won. And yet, the ruling party doesn't want to hand over power. I spent a lot of time with very optimistic, idealistic people, whether it's Venezuelans or Russians or Ukrainians or

Iranians. And all of them, even in some of the most hopeless countries, still think it's worth it to be engaged and are still working to change their countries. And they still think there's some idea of justice. And actually, they still think that a lot of the things that we take for granted, you know, again, the rule of law, the relative freedom of speech, you know, the relative freedom of movement. You know, they still think those things are worth fighting for, and they're not doing it because, you know, of some democracy promotion program that we created. They're doing it because they see that those things would make their societies better. People like us, I don't think, are ever in a position to say nothing can happen. And if Iranians are still working for change,

then it's incumbent upon us to remain optimistic. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, Alistair, thank you for that. We don't often interview journalists. In fact, we have a golden rule. Yeah. So we've decided she's not a journalist. She's a historian. Just as I'm sometimes rather unfortunately for this podcast,

a bit reluctant to interview politicians. You as a former journalist, sometimes reluctant to interview journalists. Maybe we see too much applause by our own kind. But I thought very, very interesting. One thing that I thought was interesting is that sometimes you think, if you're not going to interview a politician, they're going to be much more risk-taking and much more outspoken. She didn't give me the sort of facts and figures and examples on the corruption and the way that I was hoping.

So I thought, you know, she's really going to say Abramovich, you know, as an organized criminal, and this is how he made his money, and this is who he paid, and this is where the corruption went. Quite a lot of it was sort of structural, well, we don't quite know where the money's going. There are these packs of things. No, I think she's very political. So I think she was assuming that we take us read a lot of the stuff that she was talking about. And interesting how she mentioned the books that we both read. Because I think she is in a very political space.

And maybe that comes from being married to a politician. And I thought she was interesting. She didn't really want to go down that road of whether his position affects the way that she is perceived, the way that she speaks, the way that she works and so forth. Of course, they did go through a very, very rough time. I think there was a time when the party that's just lost power was really going after people like him and people like her. And, you know, could have ended up very, very badly for them. And now he's back as a foreign minister.

But I think she's somebody that has always been very, very thoughtful, very articulate. But I think what I've seen much, much more than when I first knew her several decades ago is somebody who has understood it is possible to be player and spectator at the same time. She is a spectator. She's a journalist. She's a writer. She's a historian. But she's developed a kind of a political theme that she's pushing very, very hard. There's some very interesting elements to her back story, too.

Because her husband was, I think, a close friend of Boris Johnson. And so she knew that whole world very, very well. And then became more and more skeptical of populism and could see more and more the flaws of that. And that must be interesting, too, to how you relate to the fact that your husband's bullying and mates turn out to be. Yeah. It's quite nice, though, isn't it? It's quite nice not having to talk much about Boris Johnson. It's a great relief. Great relief. One other thing that struck me, her analysis of why populism developed 2012 to 2014. She talked almost exclusively about social media. But other people would say 2008 financial crisis, the economy, inequality, the general sense that democracies were not delivering financially for people on low-hour middle-income. And I think also this, I thought she was quite benign. I thought she'd be much harsher about the way that we treated with Putin in the early days.

I remember trying to very determinedly bring him into the G8, signal that our acceptance that Russia was trying to change and modernize and go in the right direction. When basically she's saying the whole time, he was always a mafia boss. You know, so where she said, I don't want to say it was naivete, but there was a bit of that. Also surprising, I thought, that she didn't major more on the Middle East and China. If we're talking about autocracies, if we're talking about misrepresentation, we're talking about political influence, talking about Ukraine, you would have thought she would be talking more about Israel or Gaza, Gulf,

and talking much more about China. No, Russia was the big thing in her head. You can see that. And she obviously got very, very passionate about Ukraine. I thought quite optimistic in her assessment, isn't how the war ends? Yes. Well, I mean, I think there too. I can't see.

Well, she had this very moving thing at the end where she sort of, says, so long as there are brave people in these countries on the right side, we have a duty to remain optimistic. And I think that must be the tension for her. She must see how much the cards are stacked against people in Iran. How often for more than 40 years people have predicted the demise of regime that hasn't gone. She must be able to see just how many more troops and human resources Russia has in Ukraine at the moment and the advances they're making. But that's an interesting thing in this way you talk about her being both an observer and an actor. She has a view on where she wants the world to go, which I think we would agree with a very strong moral

view on where she wants it to go. But that gives that optimism to say. I thought the one thing that I wanted to ask, and it just kind of slipped my mind and we're out of time, was this point about why and how. We've seen it in Germany with the AFD. We've seen it with, we see it with Le Pen, how these parties have been co-opted by Russia in a way that I think. I think back in the sort of Reagan-Thatcher days, you'd have said it was impossible to imagine. Yeah. But it has happened. Fascinating on Orban.

Very good on Orban, yeah. We've got to get him on the podcast. We've got to get him on the podcast. We've got to get him on the book. Come on, Victor. I know you listen. I know you listen. And this is a great chance to access, you know, the main thinkers in the West.

She said that he's always been obsessed with trying to reach the right in the conservative party and the conservative party. Well, they listen, don't they? Yeah, they know from how many of them try to get on the podcast. We know that. Anyway, there we are. That was Anne Applebyme. I hope the listeners enjoyed it. Thank you very much, us.