Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

This book explains how autocracies around the world are cooperating to defeat democracies and why democracies are an existential threat to them (thus Putin’s willingness to expend blood and treasure in his war with Ukraine). For example, they share propaganda techniques (and actual hacker services) for flooding democracies with false information so that citizens of democracies cannot tell what is true.

Since Putin showed the world how to profit from a kleptocracy, autocracies have been married to kleptocracies, which steal their country’s wealth to enrich the ruling autocrats.

The book explains that all the Kleptocracies rely on being able to launder and invest their money around the world, and the democracies have enabled this by allowing and supporting it.

The book has recommendations for fighting back. Democracies need to cooperate in the fight, just as the autocracies cooperate to defeat democracies.
Here are some quotes regarding one idea for fighting back:

“an … oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal ownership to tax authorities anywhere.
American and European intermediaries … [lawyers, bankers, real estate agents, and so forth] … make these kinds of transactions possible.
..we can easily make it illegal …”

[for example]
We could require all real estate transactions, everywhere in the United States and Europe, to be totally transparent. We could require all companies to be registered in the name of their actual owners, and all trusts to reveal the names of their beneficiaries. We could ban our own citizens from keeping money in jurisdictions that promote secrecy, and we could ban lawyers and accountants from engaging with them.

Just as the democratic world once built an international anticommunist alliance, so can the United States and its allies build an international anti-corruption alliance.”

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