MixedJacobin\"The liberal West is under threat. Its enemy: a collection of antidemocratic forces which Applebaum lumps together under the reductive moniker Autocracy, Inc. ... In effect, while Autocracy, Inc. gestures toward the complexity of both twentieth-century and contemporary geopolitics, it too often resorts to liberal mythmaking ... On a surface level, Applebaum’s analysis is functionally correct, yet it reflects strangely back on the author through omission ... Frequently, Autocracy, Inc.’s analysis comes up short, omitting a critique on Western capitalist society for the same sins, or is fatally undermined by Applebaum’s personal political positions. Indeed, there is a long paper trail of articles by Applebaum supporting: the disastrous Iraq War in 2002 through a comparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and the bombing of Palestinian media operations during the Second Intifada ... Applebaum’s role in manufacturing consent for US wars is quickly forgotten, or at least repressed in Autocracy, Inc. Throughout the book, she rightly lambastes the expansionist foreign policies and human rights abuses of states like Russia and China while remaining silent about her own side’s crimes and wars. Applebaum seems aware of the negative effects that US interventionism and war have had on trust in democracy and human rights law, but she is unable to identify the cause of the widespread cynicism toward the idea of the rules based international order ... Autocracy, Inc.’s most engaging analysis focuses on the oligarchical money that is effectively laundered through the financial institutions of the City of London, Wall Street, and European real estate markets. Here we get a glimpse of an Applebaum more skeptical of the effects of global capitalism, at least when it props up dictators ... After hundreds of pages detailing the rise of dictatorship globally, Autocracy, Inc. comes to an anticlimactic conclusion about how to counter authoritarianism. In Applebaum’s mind, the solution to Autocracy, Inc. is technocratic expertise, and not economic redistribution, popular politics, or the extension of democratic practice into everyday situations like workplaces.\
