The Growing Threat of a World Run by Dictators By Michael Abramowitz & Sarah Repucci
Early Thursday, an authoritarian ruler deployed troops into an embattled democracy in clear defiance not only of that country’s sovereignty, but of condemnation and threats from the rest of the democratic world. The Putin regime’s incursion into Ukraine is just the latest symptom of a much larger pattern of antidemocratic aggression.
In 2021, for the 16th consecutive year, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report found that respect for political rights and civil liberties declined globally. Military coups proliferated, and authoritarian regimes staged utterly uncompetitive elections in Hong Kong, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, and elsewhere. An astonishing 8 out of 10 people in the world now live in countries rated by Freedom House as Not Free or Partly Free.
Fueling the spread of authoritarian practices has been a new kind of mutual aid society for dictators – less formalized than the Communist International (Comintern) of the Cold War era, but perhaps more effective. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the global dominance of democratic states meant that all nations needed to move or – appear to move – toward democratic standards of governance in order to gain credibility, access international trade and financing, and receive development or military aid. Over the last decade and a half, however, wealthy and powerful authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and the Middle East have made it possible for an increasing number of despots to openly pursue antidemocratic systems, safe in the knowledge that any repercussions from the world’s democracies will be offset by assistance from their autocratic friends.
Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have long been propped up by other authoritarian regimes: Havana, Moscow, and Beijing in the former case and Tehran and Moscow in the latter. More recently the practice has benefited Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and the leaders of military coups in Myanmar and Sudan.
When tens of thousands of Belarusian citizens turned out to protest the fraudulent presidential election of August 2020, Russia’s Vladimir Putin came to Lukashenka’s aid – not only with words of support, but also with a $1.5 billion loan. The Kremlin sent propagandists to “report” on the election when real journalists in Belarus went on strike, provided security forces to backstop the regime’s brutal crackdown, and dispatched election observers to validate the farcical results.
Myanmar and Sudan, at different times, had both been beacons of hope during the global democratic recession, with old-guard military establishments agreeing to at least share power with civilian representatives. But Russian and Chinese diplomatic support for the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar has blunted the international response, including at the U.N. Security Council, and the coup leaders have turned to Moscow and Beijing for trade and arms purchases. Similarly, Chinese and Russian envoys used their influence on the U.N. Security Council to water down a resolution on the ouster of the civilian-led government in Sudan in late 2021.
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are not the only autocrats offering help to their foreign counterparts. Barely two years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between his country and the deeply repressive regime in Eritrea, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed evidently welcomed Eritrea’s armed forces, which are known to rely on forced conscription, into Ethiopia to help fight his enemies in a civil conflict centered on the Tigray region, which has been characterized by atrocities against Tigrayan and other civilians.
Less-visible autocratic cooperation is taking place with respect to transnational repression, in which authoritarian regimes reach beyond their borders to silence their critics abroad, sometimes through physical attacks. Authoritarian security forces often work hand in hand to detain, extradite, and illegally render human rights activists and dissidents back to their countries of origin. There is evidence, for instance, that Kyrgyzstan’s government assisted the Turkish intelligence services last year in kidnapping educator Orhan İnandı, who was accused of links to the Gülen movement that Erdoğan blames for the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey.
The regimes in China and Russia are the most prominent proponents of a worldwide effort to marshal authoritarian partnerships and shatter the global consensus that democracy is the form of government that best serves the interests of all people. If history is any guide, a world dominated by this emerging autocratic order would in reality be one of disorder, replete with armed conflict, lawless violence, corruption, and economic volatility. Crises like the one surrounding Ukraine are already becoming more common.
U.S. and European leaders are clearly awakening to the threat, but if the displacement of global democratic norms by authoritarian powers is to be reversed, the world’s democracies will have to mount a much more serious and comprehensive response. At stake is the right of people everywhere to live freely within an international system that upholds their fundamental rights.
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