Pulitzer Prize Historian: You Won't Notice Until It’s Too Late | The Diary Of A CEO Transcript

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum discusses democratic decline with Steven Bartlett

Steven Bartlett interviews historian and author Anne Applebaum on the erosion of democracy, authoritarian tactics, and the global political realignment underway.

Summary

Steven Bartlett interviews Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author whose work spans the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the rise of modern authoritarianism. Applebaum argues that American democracy is already in measurable decline, pointing to the politicisation of the Department of Justice, the unprecedented financial conflicts of interest surrounding the Trump presidency, and the use of ICE as a de facto paramilitary force. She outlines five core tactics used by autocratic leaders to dismantle democracies — corruption, electoral manipulation, personnel capture, information control, and monopolisation of violence — and maps each directly onto developments in the contemporary United States. She also addresses the global consequences of American democratic decline, including the rapid hedging by NATO allies and the breakdown of the post-1945 liberal world order. She discusses the war in Iran as an example of a non-strategic, transactional foreign policy approach, noting that Trump appeared to have different expectations of the conflict and that no one around him was willing to push back definitively. Throughout, she argues forcefully against historical inevitability, insisting that democratic decline can be reversed through civic participation and institutional vigilance.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Background: From Soviet historian to chronicler of democratic decline

Anne Applebaum: I started out as somebody who was fascinated by the Soviet Union. I went there when it still existed, as a student. I was lucky enough to watch it fall apart. I was a journalist based in Warsaw at the time the Warsaw Pact came to an end. Then I spent some years writing history books, trying to explain how control was maintained over such a large space by so few people. But all that time, I thought that what I was doing was writing stories about the distant past. I was analysing a system that didn't exist anymore.

What's happened to me in the last decade is that I've discovered that a lot of what I thought was over and done and belonged to some other era has come back. Most people think democracies end with a coup d'état, or tanks in the street, or somebody shooting up the presidential palace. But actually, in the modern world, they mostly end because someone who is legitimately elected begins to take apart the system and take away the things that ensure free elections can continue. I started watching that happen in multiple countries at the same time. I saw this authoritarian instinct start to come back, and that's what I write about now.

Steven Bartlett: Are these just election cycles, or is there something bigger at play here? I spend a lot of time reading articles from decades ago or hundreds of years ago, and in all times in history it seems there were problems, but the democratic system has a remarkable way every four years of clearing out what people weren't happy with and putting something new in. Is this time different from the past?

Anne Applebaum: What feels different to me is that for the first time in several established democracies — most notably the United States, but not only — you have political parties who come to power with the explicit idea that they will alter the system in order to make sure they can stay in forever. The pioneer of this idea was Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He was elected legitimately with a big margin, and then what he did was slowly seek to capture the state.

What a democracy needs in order to survive, in order to maintain its stability, is a few neutral institutions. It needs independent courts. It needs an independent electoral commission. It needs independent media. In the modern world, it needs a meritocratic bureaucracy — people hired and fired to measure pollution or worry about traffic and road construction who aren't cousins of the ruling party, who aren't somebody's friend, but are actual experts who understand how to do things. You need those things to be in place in order to ensure that each time there's an electoral cycle, it's a fair election.

And you see people who are elected who, once they had power, decided to take those institutions apart. If you think about democracy, it's actually a very strange system. You win an election and in a democracy you have to preserve the rules so that four years from now your bitter enemies can contest you and maybe beat you again. You lose an election, you have to say, "Okay, we're allowing our rivals to stay in power, but we trust that the system will remain fair so four years from now we can also contest them again." So it requires a certain level of agreement about the nature of the system. When that begins to break down, you begin to have imbalances, and then you begin to have elections that seem unfair to people, and then you begin to have a completely different kind of national conversation. We can see that has happened in several places, and of course most notably in the United States. And because the United States is the largest democracy, because it's played the role of leader of the democratic world, the influence of America on other countries is pretty profound. So this idea that democracies can possibly break down is suddenly both horrifying people, but also interesting to other people who say, "All right, if you can do it in America, you can do it here."

Could it really happen in America?

Steven Bartlett: There's a part of me that just thinks that could never happen in America. And that's obviously a bias that I have being 33 years old and not knowing a ton about history. I'm sure there are lots of people who think this is some sort of theoretical idea, but it would never happen in America because we would never allow America to not be a democracy. We wouldn't allow a Russia situation where you've got Putin sitting in power for two decades.

Anne Applebaum: Sure, but there are systems in between Russia and liberal democracy. You can have democracies that aren't fair. And actually, I'm afraid to tell you that in the United States, there is a history of that. In the American South before the civil rights movement, you very often had, in effect, in the southern states, these one-party states where the rules were pretty rigged. Everybody knew who was going to win. Not everybody was allowed to vote. Black people weren't allowed to vote, or it was very heavily restricted. That existed in the United States between the Civil War and the 1960s — you had very undemocratic parts of the United States. And I think some of the people who are in Washington right now in the Trump administration are working from that history and from that historical memory.

Steven Bartlett: What is your biggest concern in this regard?

Anne Applebaum: I have two concerns. One is that inside the United States, the deterioration of American democracy — and it's already happening — is already creating a class of people who no longer feel they have a stake in the political system and who won't vote, may never vote, and will be outside of politics and outside of the national conversation. That can lead in the direction of violence. It can lead in all kinds of negative directions. We see the development of new kinds of paramilitary in the United States that we never had before — the development of ICE. We've never before had a single national police force wearing combat uniforms, wearing masks, not subject to the normal restrictions of local police forces. We also have a rise in high-end corruption. The president, people around him, companies close to him seem to have access to ways to make money, and are making money out of doing politics in a way that was also not possible at that scale in America before.

The global democracy map

Steven Bartlett: There's a map in front of us on the table. Could you just explain what this map shows and why it's significant?

Anne Applebaum: The map shows the level of democracy around the world. And of course the thing that's immediately notable to me is that those who made the map don't count the United States anymore as a liberal democracy.

A liberal democracy is a state where the electoral rules are clear, where the electoral system is set up not to favour one party or the next. Instead, the United States is described as an electoral democracy, which is somewhat less free. You see similar systems in South America. In Europe, you mostly still have liberal democracies. In Australia, Japan, South Korea, you still have liberal democracies. And then most of the rest of the world are some form of autocracy — either very closed and very repressive like China or like Russia, or they are in a democratic grey zone, states that could really go in either direction.

If you'd looked at a map like this a decade ago or two decades ago, it would have been a lot bluer — blue being democracy and red or reddish being autocracy. So you do see an absolute process of democratic decline that's been written about by many people over the last few years. I believe very much that states influence one another. People follow and imitate and copy their neighbours.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think it's possible that in our lifetimes the US might become an autocratic country?

Anne Applebaum: The US could become what I think on this map is described as an autocratic grey zone. You could imagine the US as in effect a one-party state — a state where one political party has control and the other just can't win national elections. You already have this system we call gerrymandering, where electoral districts are being drawn in such a way as to favour one party or the other. The effect of that is also that once you have people who don't really have to contest elections anymore, then you have corruption. If you're going to win anyway, why do you have to worry about your constituents? Then you have worse government and worse services, because if you don't have to have an electoral contest, you can pursue your own interests. You can do favours for businessmen who help you in other ways.

We see this decline of democracy already at the state level. And of course there could be a danger at the national level of a fixed system that made sure only one party ever wins. And then you would get all these pathologies that we already have at the state level. We're beginning to have them even now. And remember, we have right now a president who refused to accept the result of an election in 2020 and who staged what was intended to be an electoral coup. It failed. But the idea that he wouldn't do it again, or nobody would ever dare to do that, or nobody would block an election — I think it's pretty naive at this point. It happened already. And so of course it can happen again.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think he's going to try and get a third term in office?

Anne Applebaum: I don't think so, because I don't think he wants one. But I think it's possible that people around him will try to shape and affect the elections in a way that makes sure that a Republican wins — or maybe his children. It's very possible that one of his children will run for president.

Steven Bartlett: Because there's a way to kind of control power in America. When they talk about MAGA — which is a collection of people now — you could say JD Vance is part of MAGA, and the kids, and Trump. So maybe they'd want to keep it within MAGA.

Anne Applebaum: They might want to keep it within the family. What is MAGA now? What is different about Trump's second term from Trump's first term? One of the things that happened after January the 6th, after the attack on the Congress, was that many of the people who'd been around Trump — Republicans, people who do foreign policy, people who do domestic policy — left. They said, "This is too much for us. We're American patriots. We can't support this kind of attack on our political system." And they departed his presence. But that exact moment — that attack on the electoral system — attracted other people.

For different reasons, people who disliked the American political system, who don't like democracy, don't like liberal democracy, thought it was leading America in a left-wing direction. Some of them have political reasons. They were attracted to Donald Trump because they said, "This is somebody who has the nerve to try and overthrow the system, and we like that." And they're not all the same. They have different views. So there's a tech authoritarian group who want influence over the American political system because it's good for their businesses and because they don't get the point of democracy anyway and they think they should be in charge. There's a kind of Christian nationalist group who think the United States should not be a secular state — it should be a Christian state — and they are interested in taking over the system with that aim. And then there's a traditional MAGA group who think the United States should be run by the people who used to run it — kind of white Christian people of a certain kind — and they want to bring the United States back in that direction.

They're different views, and they don't all agree with each other, but they do agree that the system requires radical change. And that's the difference between the first and second term. Trump's first term — I think he has never cared much one way or the other for American democracy. He personally sees himself as someone who should be allowed to act in any way he wants. He doesn't like any kind of constraint. He admires foreign leaders who have no constraints. But he was one way or another constrained in his first term by the system, and now he's surrounded himself by people who are seeking to help him avoid those constraints. And that's new.

Why democracy matters — and what autocracy actually feels like

Steven Bartlett: I think when we have these conversations, we assume that everybody agrees that democracy is the better path, and that they understand the downsides of an autocracy.

Anne Applebaum: There are different kinds of autocracies, to be clear, and some are more repressive than others. The main thing that you would notice — the first thing — would be the absence of the rule of law. Rule of law means that judges and courts and the legal system make decisions based on the constitution or on the laws. In an autocracy you have rule by law, and that means that the law is what the person in power says it is.

So if you did a programme, for example, and someone on your programme said something that was offensive to the leader of the country, you could be arrested and put on trial. And instead of the court saying, "We've looked at this case and according to the law we have freedom of speech and you can do whatever you want," somebody could ring up from the Kremlin or from the White House or from whatever is the leadership of your country and say, "No, actually, we want this guy in jail and we don't care what the courts think." That's the big difference.

I'll tell you a real story that happened in Hungary when Hungary was going down the road in the direction of a one-party state. You can be the CEO of a company and people can come and knock on your door and say, "We would like you to sell us a majority share in your company." And you say, "No, why should I? I built it. I invested in it. I don't want to sell it." And then what happens the next day? Somebody breaks the windows of your house. A few days later, your children are harassed on the way to school. People who work for you start having legal problems — some kind of mortgage issue, and your company encounters regulatory issues. There's a tax inspection. And one by one, the state finds a way to harass you, to harass your company, your workers, so that eventually you say, "Okay, I give up. I sell and I'm leaving the country." And this happened to somebody I know.

It sounds like Anthropic in the United States recently, where Anthropic — the AI company — refused to give the United States access to its AI under certain conditions, and then very quickly Pete Hegseth did a post and Donald Trump did a post basically saying that they were going to restrict their ability to work with the government.

We aren't used to the idea that the government decides which companies thrive and which ones die. Once you have an autocratic state that can do what it wants legally, it can decide which companies succeed. It can base government contracts — which are very important in every country — not on who's the best company or on some kind of blind procurement process, but on who's your friend, or who's donated to your political party, or in the case of the United States, who's invested in your company.

One of the things we have in the United States for the first time ever, I think, is a president who is actively doing business in countries and in areas that are of interest to the people he's doing business with. For example, the Trump family does business in Saudi Arabia. It has a deal with a Saudi company called Dar Al-Arkan, which is a sort of development company, and that company has close relations to the Saudi leadership. The Saudi leadership is interested in political arrangements with the United States, and the money is going into the Trump family coffers in order to make a better arrangement for the country of Saudi Arabia. So because we have a declining democracy and an increasingly kleptocratic system, decisions are being made by the president of the United States — by the White House — not based on what's good for Americans, but on what's good for his company. And if you look at Russia, that's exactly how the political system works there.

Trump's net worth and the corruption question

Steven Bartlett: We have two jars of money here. This was Trump's net worth when he went into office — $2.3 billion reportedly. And this is his net worth now, just two years later — $6.5 billion. Looks like being a president is a profitable job.

Anne Applebaum: That has never happened before. This is completely new in American history. There have been presidents who had whiffs of corruption around them. There have been presidential relatives who tried to trade off the president's name. But we've never had a president running businesses while in office in such a way that the people with whom he's doing business are hoping to benefit politically or in other ways. That's completely brand new.

And if you go back to your original question — why is democracy better? Churchill was the person who said that democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others. Democracies require an immense amount of tolerance. There's always a lot of cacophony. There's a constant flux and change that people find enervating. But at the very least, what democracies can do is force issues like this into the public sphere. You're allowed, at least in a democracy, to question whether decisions are being made on the basis that they're good for everybody, or whether they're being made for the benefit of the president.

Steven Bartlett: I guess supporters would say Trump's not running the businesses himself — it's just his kids' activity that is generating this net worth.

Anne Applebaum: Yeah, but everybody knows they're his kids. Why did the Saudi government invest $2 billion in Jared Kushner's fund? It wasn't because they just like Jared Kushner. It was because Kushner is Trump's son-in-law. And now, of course, Kushner is the Trump administration's negotiator in the Middle East. So he's negotiating with his business partners. The appearance of conflict of interest is overwhelming. And we've never had in American history — or I think in recent British history — that kind of conflict of interest so clear at that high a level.

The wars in Iran and Venezuela — and the breakdown of the world order

Steven Bartlett: Do you spend much time thinking about what's going on in the Middle East, the wars in Iran and Venezuela, and the bigger picture of what's happening and how this might link back to what you were saying about authoritarian regimes? It's all very confusing. I feel like we went through a period of relative peace through the Biden era, and Trump obviously ran on this promise that he wasn't going to start new wars. And we seem to be having a lot of wars. Russia and Ukraine still raging on, doesn't seem to be nearer to any conclusion, and now there's this war in Iran that threatens to be a never-ending war.

Anne Applebaum: There are several things going on. One of them is that in declining democracies, and historically in autocracies, you have leaders who conduct wars as a way of consolidating their base and consolidating their support. One of the things that Trump likes to do — if he declares a war — is use foreign policy, use the fighting of wars, in order to consolidate his support at home. I believe he had a different expectation of the Iran war. So that's part of what's happening.

But some of this has nothing to do with Trump. We are now living in a world where the historical political system — the one that was built after 1945, the one that was somewhat based on the UN, that was based on a set of rules and treaties — that order has begun to break down. It's breaking down for several reasons. One we've started to discuss already, which is changes inside the United States. But it's also breaking down because the autocratic powers — Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela until recently, and others — have been challenging that order for a while themselves. They didn't like American dominance of international politics. They were competing with America at a strategic level, but also in what is really a war of ideas.

If you are the leader of Russia or the leader of China, what is the thing that is most threatening to you? The answer is the language of liberal democracy. All this stuff that we find boring and are used to — this idea of freedom of speech, separation of powers, rule of law, all those things that we have come to take for granted — are a huge challenge to the political system in Russia or China. What is Putin most afraid of? He's most afraid of a street revolution of the kind we had in Ukraine in 2014. When people are standing on the street with signs saying "we're against corruption, we want democracy, we want to be in the European Union," he's afraid of that happening in Russia. Because if you live in an autocratic state where you don't have freedom of speech, where there is no justice, where the government decides what all the rules are, then those ideas are explosive and exciting — the same way they were in the 18th century when they first appeared in the Declaration of Independence. People can be motivated by them. People will go into the street for them. People will risk their lives for them. And the autocrats know that.

So really for the past decade, since 2013, 2014, you see them seeking to spread those ideas — to promote them. We all know now about Russian propaganda campaigns. We know what Russian disinformation looks like. There's a Chinese version too, which we don't see that much in English, but it appears in other countries. We see them seeking to undermine democracy, trying to spread the influence of a different set of ideas.

The war in Ukraine is exactly that war. The Russians are firstly trying to destroy Ukraine as a nation. They want it to disappear. They're an empire. They want Ukraine to be their colony. And they understood perfectly well that by challenging Ukraine, by invading Ukraine, they were defying this liberal world order. They were defying the rules of post-war Europe, because in post-war Europe there was a decision made after 1945: we're not going to invade each other anymore, we're not going to have wars, instead we're going to decide everything by diplomacy, borders will not be changed by force. The Russians understood that they were breaking that norm. They also invaded Ukraine because the Ukrainians were using that powerful democratic language that we take for granted. And Putin said, "If they can do it in Ukraine, then people could do it in Russia, and so I need to crush this Ukrainian democracy movement." So that war really is a fault line between the democratic world and the autocratic world.

Do democracies or autocracies last longer?

Steven Bartlett: Through history, which lasts longer — democracy or autocracy?

Anne Applebaum: Autocracies. If you look back in history, most human societies in most times have been what we would now call autocracy — they were monarchies, they were led by tribal leaders, by warlords. There have been very, very few liberal democracies, and most of them have not lasted. And I should also say the people who wrote the American Constitution knew that. When they wrote it, they were reading the history of ancient Rome. There was a Roman Republic and it fell when it was taken over by Julius Caesar. They were reading about the Greek democracies — Athens — which also fell. When they wrote the US Constitution, they were thinking: how do we make this last? What can we put in it to make it last? Everybody who created democracies, whether it was after World War II in Europe or America in the 18th century, understood that this was a fragile system. And they tried to put in checks and balances — judicial, legislative, and executive power — to create systems that would ward off the impulse towards autocracy.

Steven Bartlett: I don't know if you have the answer to this question, but where are people happier on average — in a democracy or in an autocracy?

Anne Applebaum: I know a little bit about happiness surveys, and over and over and over again, the happiest place in the world is Finland. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway — Scandinavia is very happy. The reasons for that may not be anything to do with the nature of the political system, but the happiness is certainly connected to democracy. It's connected to stability and of course connected to wealth.

Democracies, by definition, are at least in theory structured in a way to benefit everybody. Whether it's a national healthcare system or a system of roads and railroads, the state is building things that are designed to serve everybody. In an autocracy that doesn't necessarily happen. In Russia, ordinary Russians have no influence on decisions. They have no way of expressing their views. They can't say what they think. They have no ability to influence the state. They can't say, "We'd like to build a hospital instead of bombing another city in Ukraine." And so they have very little ability to change the system, and that of course creates frustration and unhappiness.

Steven Bartlett: If that is true — and this is why I asked the question — if it's better for the people, and at some degree I think informed people would choose it — I say the word "informed" because I understand that in a lot of these countries where they don't have democracy, they limit the access to information so that people don't know what they're missing out on, or don't have those potentially disruptive ideas. I would think a person would choose to live in a democracy if given the choice and the information.

Anne Applebaum: I would think so. Although there's a deep human need for a sense of stability and security and hierarchy for some people. It's true that authoritarians seem to offer that. In a democracy you do have this constant change of leaders. There are more demands on citizens — you have to participate if you care about your country. It's not just enough to vote. Autocracies, I think falsely, offer stability. And so the argument of the Russian and Chinese governments — the argument they make in those social media campaigns they run inside the US or the UK or Europe — is exactly that: authoritarianism, stability, safety, traditional values, hierarchy. And there are people for whom that's deeply appealing. I wouldn't discount that instinct. And when people like that are also able to control information, when they control the security services, when they monopolise the use of violence, they can be very hard to undo even if the majority of the country wants something different.

Steven Bartlett: It's almost hard for me to understand how the people in Russia are okay with the fact that their leader has been there for several decades and isn't moving. But it's hard for us to understand because in the UK or in America there would be people on the streets.

Anne Applebaum: It doesn't matter what they think.

Steven Bartlett: Really?

Anne Applebaum: Because they have no way of expressing what they think. There's no such thing as public opinion or public debate. There's no forum you can join where you can express your views in a way that's fair. And if you do say, "I think Putin should retire," you could be arrested. So people begin to adjust what they think and change their behaviour because they know it's dangerous to say things.

This is a phenomenon I found in the work I did years ago on the Soviet Union. The propagandists said how successful we are and how much hay we've grown this year and how many bits of steel we've made, and it was always fake. The question was always: did people really believe that? Did people believe in the system? Did they believe in the propaganda? And the answer was a little weird. It was convenient for them to believe it. In other words, in order to get on in life, you had to believe it or you had to say you believed it. And at a certain point, what they really thought — deep in the back of their mind — didn't matter, because there was no way to say what you think. And that's what you have in Russia again now. It's very tragic, because there was a period in Russia in the '90s and 2000s when there was open debate and people were speaking freely and clearly about the state of the country. But right now it's once again a situation where expressing your views is dangerous, and so people just don't do it. They try to stay out of politics altogether. Politics is dangerous and ugly and nasty — just stay home. And remember that this has developed over years. It didn't happen from one day to the next. It was a decline that's been happening since the year 2000.

The five tactics autocrats use to dismantle democracy

Steven Bartlett: I've heard you say that there are five core tactics that autocratic leaders use to dismantle a democracy. Could you walk me through the five tactics and maybe also link them to things that are happening now in the West which might be warning signs?

Anne Applebaum: Well, corruption — we've done that one already. Corruption exists in any political system, and you often have it in democracies too. But in an autocratic society you have more corruption because the legal system is controlled. In the United States, for example, the fact that Donald Trump has taken over the Department of Justice and installed loyalists who are looking, among other things, to prosecute his enemies just because they're his enemies — that means you've lost a check and balance. Normally, if there was high-level corruption in the White House or in the administration, you would have people inside the Department of Justice and the FBI who would investigate it. But now we don't have that happening.

Steven Bartlett: Is that different from the past?

Anne Applebaum: It's different. We didn't have anybody try to use the White House to make money in this way before. We didn't have a completely politicised civil service, a completely politicised FBI that would avoid any kind of investigation. Corruption is a particular symptom of authoritarianism, and it's also a tool. It's something the president can offer people: you get along with me, you don't criticise me, your business will prosper, you will get government contracts.

Steven Bartlett: Is that what we're seeing with all these big tech CEOs who seem to be going frequently to the White House and saying wonderful things about him, having dinner with him, and none of them speaking out — when if you look at their Twitter feeds a couple of years ago, they were all saying the most horrific things about Trump?

Anne Applebaum: Yes. They've understood that if this is going to be an American administration where you have to genuflect to the president, where you have to be sycophantic to the president in order to get business deals, then they'll do it. If you have to donate to his White House reconstruction fund, which many of them have done, then you'll do it. If you have to donate to his inauguration, you'll do it. The question is who is supposed to be the beneficiary of government regulation. It's supposed to be Americans — ordinary people. We're supposed to become more prosperous. The beneficiary is not supposed to be the president and his family and his entourage. And that is a big shift in American politics.

Steven Bartlett: When I look back at someone like the CEO of OpenAI's statements on Trump — if you go back to 2016, he said he was an unprecedented threat to America and called him a potential disaster for the American economy. He said he was irresponsible in the way dictators are and compared his rhetoric to the big lie tactics used by historical authoritarians like Hitler. He described him as erratic, abusive, and prone to fits of rage. And then I see him side by side at the White House saying nice things about him and saying nothing critical at all.

Anne Applebaum: It's one of the most bizarre things about this whole administration. If I were that rich, what's the point of being rich if you can't say what you think? I don't understand the value of it.

Steven Bartlett: Can I hazard a guess as to why — the incentive structure they're trapped in? I think that being rich for these people is actually just a proxy of status. And I think the thing that risks their status — which is what they care about more than anything else in the games they're playing — is losing to their direct competition. It's quite clear to me that if someone like Sam Altman was to say anything negative about Trump, it would of course hurt his business, but actually it would hurt something more, which is his status. He would lose to Anthropic and xAI and Gemini. To lose in your category of peers — which all these tech oligarchs are in — would hurt more than anything. I think it would hurt more than losing a gazillion dollars. It's just like losing the game.

Anne Applebaum: There are two things about it. One is it's very shortsighted, because ultimately who will suffer if there is a decline in the American political system, in the American legal system? It's them.

Steven Bartlett: Maybe they've gotten used to paying to play.

Anne Applebaum: They have, but it's a mug's game. It's fine as long as you're one of the people who are winning, but what if the rules change?

Steven Bartlett: Like in Russia with the oligarchs.

Anne Applebaum: That's right. "I'm sick of these oligarchs. I want different oligarchs." And that happened in China too. That's one argument against it. The second argument is — and I think Anthropic might have figured this out already, and some of the law firms have figured it out — there's also a game to be made by saying, "No, I'm independent. We have our own corporate rules. We have our own legal code of ethics and we're going to behave as patriotic Americans." And then you attract business.

There was a parallel thing that happened with US law firms. There were some frivolous lawsuits and they settled them, and then there were some who said, "No, we won't settle." And the ones who didn't do it have all won. They're all thriving. So there is also a benefit to be gained — both commercially and financially, and I would think even in that weird world of status — by standing up for what you believe in and by remembering the bigger picture. The bigger picture is what happens to the United States. It's your main market. It's where your employees come from. It's the place where you're doing business. And if the United States begins to suffer, then you suffer too.

Steven Bartlett: Is this just another three years of unusual behaviour before we resume business as usual in our democracies?

Anne Applebaum: I'm asked this by Europeans all the time, and my sense is that a lot of things will not ever be quite normal again, either inside the US or around the world. I would strongly recommend, for example, if you're doing business with the US or you're a security partner of the US, that you have a plan B. It's really time for NATO to have a plan in case the United States flakes out, to have a different security option. What happens to the US after Trump isn't clear. First of all, the next president could be JD Vance, who I think is even more committed to the project of making America into a one-party state. Or the next president could be a Democrat we haven't heard of yet, who decides to use the broken system in order to take advantage of it in a different way. I hope that won't happen, but you can't count it out. Once the norms are broken and once the laws have changed, then anybody can take advantage of it. If Trump can use the federal bureaucracy to threaten media companies, then why can't the next president? Certain things don't necessarily get fixed once they're broken.

Global allies begin to hedge against the United States

Steven Bartlett: On that point of global partners of the US now thinking about their own defence and themselves more — is that a pattern you're seeing? We're sat here in London at the moment. The UK used to consider ourselves to be the great alliance partner of America. We had the special relationship — which I never knew what it meant, but I always liked it. It seems like that's gone out the window. The UK are now speaking a lot to President Macron in France, and it seems like we're having our own little European meetings. Canada don't seem to be a great ally of the US anymore after they threatened to invade them. Are we becoming more individualistic and breaking into our own little groups because of Trump's rhetoric?

Anne Applebaum: What you're watching is everybody all over the world hedging. Everybody is looking for alternatives. You now have an EU-India trade agreement which nobody would have bothered to do a few years ago. You have Canada initiating a security relationship with the EU. You have conversations inside NATO about what we would realistically do if the United States weren't to help us in case of a Russian attack. Those aren't really public conversations, but privately lots of people are having them.

Everywhere you go, you see these so-called middle powers — this is a term that Mark Carney of Canada first started using. Brazil, India, the EU countries, Japan — you see them beginning to make new relationships with one another. If the United States flakes out and we can't trade with them in a normal way anymore because the president changes the trading rules every five minutes, then at least we'll have a decent trading relationship with somebody else. I travel a lot. I've travelled a lot in the last three months, and everywhere I go, that's the main topic of conversation.

Canada was completely integrated with the United States. It almost didn't have an independent economy. And now Canadians are thinking: how do we benefit from our oil and gas wealth to protect our sovereignty? Who else do we do deals with? Carney's been to China. He's also talking to India. There are conversations between France and Poland and France and Germany about a different kind of nuclear umbrella. It's all pretty tentative, but it's moved much faster than I would ever have expected.

I think the breaking point for a lot of people in Europe was Greenland. You had the president of the United States saying he was going to invade Denmark. The United States was saying it was going to invade Greenland. Trump was hinting at it in public, and behind the scenes there were other signs that maybe they were really preparing to do it. And so what did that mean in Denmark? That meant the Danes said, "Okay, we're preparing for a US invasion." This is a country that's very pro-American. Lots of big Danish companies in the United States, including the ones who create the weight loss drugs. Lots of Danish-American travel, friendship, everything — a security relationship going back to the Second World War. And suddenly: the Americans are invading. What do we do? Do we blow up the airports in Greenland? Do we plan to shoot down American planes? Are we going to shoot at American soldiers? Are they going to shoot at us? And they had to suddenly imagine a real war with their closest ally.

Not only did they have to do it, their close allies in Europe did it too. The Germans were consulting with the Danes all through this period. What if the Danes shoot down an American plane — how does that affect us? And everybody went through this traumatic experience of imagining a US invasion of a NATO ally. And then Trump made a speech at Davos where he somehow changed the subject and confused Greenland and Iceland a few times, and it got put off. But no one has recovered. Everybody remembers that moment and said, "Okay, this is an unstable power. They could do real damage to us. They can't be relied on. We need alternatives." And really since then — since January — this is when you've seen the visits to China, the visits to Canada, the back and forth with India. You see everybody hedging and rearranging the way they think about the world.

Steven Bartlett: If you're an American, is this good news or bad news that the rest of the world is hedging?

Anne Applebaum: It's very bad news. A lot of America's prosperity in the post-war period has been based on the fact that America was dominant in global trade. We make money out of our European relationships. We produce things that we sell all over the world, and we import things from all over the world, and that's good too. The root of American post-war prosperity is these relationships, especially with Europe. And also the root of America's security dominance. Why are there NATO bases in Europe? It's not just to protect Europe. It's also because from there the US can project power into the Middle East, into Africa. It has a window on the world from there. And once those bases are gone, the US is suddenly cut off and far away in a way that it wasn't before.

And there are all kinds of other risks. Will the US dollar go on being so dominant? The US makes money out of that. Will US goods go on being so valued? In Canada, they boycott US products now. When I was in Denmark in February, I was shown an app. You can take a picture of a thing you see in the supermarket and it will tell you whether it's made in the United States. And if it's made in the United States, you don't buy it, because they were so angry. Even the dominance of American tech — which a lot of Europeans have belatedly woken up to as a problem — could be in question. Europeans are looking to do cloud storage in Europe and payment systems in Europe, because maybe the US is unreliable. We're just at the beginning of what could be quite a big change, and yes, Americans would feel that.

The war in Iran — miscalculation and its consequences

Steven Bartlett: Coming back to this point about the war in Iran — you said that Trump sort of misestimated what would happen here. He flew into Venezuela and took Maduro out of bed, and that seemed to go fairly well from what he might have been expecting. But then he attacked Iran, and this war seems to know no end now.

Anne Applebaum: Here's another feature of dictatorships — nobody questions your decisions and nobody offers you alternatives. The people around you don't. So when he was planning the war in Iran, from the reporting that we know, people did say, "Mr. President, the Iranians are not like the Venezuelans. It's a very embedded regime." And the Iranians had a plan already for what would happen if their leadership was killed. They had a decentralised system that would kick into place. They have allies all over the Middle East. They have these proxy groups in different parts of the Middle East, and famously control over the Strait of Hormuz possibly. And he was told that, but it seems he wasn't told it in a very definitive way. Some people said, "Well, maybe this might be the case," but nobody said to him, "Mr. President, this is a bad idea," because he's known to say, "Well, get out of my sight," if you say that. He's not somebody who listens to other people's views or takes them into consideration.

The thing that bothers me the most about Iran — I have friends and I've been involved with organisations that do Iranian human rights — the thing that bothered me the most was his utter failure even to talk to or about Iranians. It is an unpopular regime. It's one of the worst, ugliest regimes on the planet. And yet there seems to have been no communication with the democratic opposition in Iran. No communication even with Pahlavi, the son of the Shah — the monarchists in Iran. There are alternative governments. There are alternative people you could speak to. And he never did that, because his real interest isn't democracy or making Iran into a better place. His real interest was in somehow dominating Iran and getting them to give him a share of the oil revenues, which is what happened in Venezuela.

He's also not even thinking the way previous Democratic presidents thought. Even George W. Bush — also somebody who made huge mistakes — you never heard George W. Bush say, "What I want is to run Iraq and steal its oil."

Anne Applebaum: They wanted to make Iraq into a democracy. Okay, which by the way it is now, but it was a long, bloody pathway. Trump doesn't even think like that. He thinks: my idea is to do some deal with one of the dictators and move on. And actually that's what's happened in Venezuela. Venezuela is still a dictatorship, run by the same regime as before, just led by a different person.

Steven Bartlett: And he's been quite vocal about the fact that they're getting all the oil. Which is a crazy thing to hear — that you'd snatch a world leader and then the same day talk about how you've got the boats taking the country's oil, and proudly say it. It's not even clear what he means by that, but it was not the action of a 20th or 21st century president.

Steven Bartlett: The midterms are coming up, and I was reading that Trump's approval ratings are at an all-time low. It's the first time I've seen people who were devoted supporters of his — like Tucker Carlson — coming out and apologising for supporting him. This war in Iran seems to have really backfired in a way that I don't think he was intending. And you can kind of tell by how Trump's feeling because you just watch him in interviews. The line that he repeats 75 times is probably the exact opposite of what's going on. When I watched him in an interview this week, he was repeatedly saying how great the war is going. So that makes me feel like it's not going well.

Anne Applebaum: He keeps saying, "We've won, we've won, it's over." One of the problems of having a president who lies all the time is that you just stop believing. Even if the war was over, you wouldn't believe it, because his track record is not good.

I think the important thing to understand about Trump is that he's somebody who has no strategy. He doesn't care that much about what happened before he was president. He doesn't know the history of Iran. He doesn't understand much about the history of the region, and he doesn't really care about what's going to happen later. He's interested in what is happening now and whether he is winning in the current moment.

Steven Bartlett: What does winning mean?

Anne Applebaum: Whatever it means to him. I'm winning the contest with this journalist, or I'm winning the argument about Iran, or we're winning the war, or the opinion polls are all in my favour. Whatever the situation, he has to emerge as the winner. That's his narcissistic mentality. That's not very good for strategic thinking, because sometimes you don't win immediately. You have to have a plan. You have to have a long-term aim and a strategy on how to get there. But he doesn't think like that. If you watch him perform on television, whatever is happening, he will convert it into: I'm winning.

The five tactics continued: elections, personnel, information, and coercion

Anne Applebaum: When you begin to see attempts to corrupt and shape elections, this is when you know your democracy is in trouble. When the rules of the election are challenged, when there begin to be arguments about who can vote and attempts to make some people not be allowed to vote, when you try to alter the result in some way — any attack on elections is a classic way in which democratically elected leaders undermine democracy.

An example: Viktor Orbán just lost an election in Hungary after 16 years. He had two-thirds control of the parliament in Hungary. If you have two-thirds of the parliament, you can change the constitution. So he continually altered the Hungarian constitution in order to give himself electoral advantages — changing constituencies and rebalancing the way votes were counted. In the United States, we already talked about gerrymandering.

Steven Bartlett: What's gerrymandering?

Anne Applebaum: Gerrymandering is a great word, actually. It comes from a congressman named Gerry in the early 19th century who drew an electoral map which looked like a salamander. A gerrymandered map in US terms is an electoral map that has been altered to favour one political party. The city of Nashville, for example, instead of having a single Democratic representative — instead of having a sensible constituency around the city that would vote for one member of Congress — has been divided into several constituencies that are designed in such a way that only Republicans win. And once you have maps that are designed to favour one party or the other, you begin to get real democratic decline.

But there are other things happening in the US too. There are fears that ICE — which is the paramilitary organisation created by the president, supposedly to go after immigrants — could be put on the street on election day. Would some people be intimidated from voting? There are fears that he will do that in some states.

Steven Bartlett: There's something called voter ID he talks about a lot.

Anne Applebaum: This is also very strange. In the US you have voter ID, and most people have driver's licences. They want to change the law so that you either have to use a passport or a birth certificate. Most Americans don't have passports — I think 60% don't. Many people have lost or never had their birth certificates. If you passed a law like that, it would make it much more difficult for some people to vote, especially certain kinds of people. Married women would have to show a passport, a birth certificate, and a marriage licence, because your birth certificate name is different from your married name.

So many people believe this is a way to get fewer women to vote, and women are more likely to vote Democrat. It's also part of a narrative. The administration is trying to argue that lots and lots of illegal immigrants are voting, which is a conspiracy theory. There's no evidence of it. There's no evidence of almost any illegal immigrants ever voting. And if you think about it, if you were an illegal immigrant, why would you want to vote? It would just be a way of attracting attention to yourself. But they seek to establish this narrative as a way of disqualifying Democratic votes.

Steven Bartlett: Just looking at some of the data — it says young voters between 18 and 29, roughly 24% of them lack the documents that would qualify them to vote. In minority voters, 11% of citizens of colour lack these documents, compared to a smaller percentage in white citizens. In low-income America, only one in five households earning under $50,000 has a passport. And as you said, married women — 69 million women have birth certificates that do not match their current legal name due to marriage.

Anne Applebaum: It's risky, because I imagine lots of Republicans don't have passports either. But I think they've calculated that it would suit them better. So they're looking to shape the voting population in a way that will benefit them. They're looking to find ways to massage the outcome. And that's a classic — when you're in a country which is declining democratically, one of the classic things that happens is the ruling party seeks to alter or change who is able to vote and how votes are weighted as a way of altering the outcome.

Steven Bartlett: What's the third one?

Anne Applebaum: Personnel. We talked about this one a little bit already — the civil service. In a 21st century democracy, government does a lot of things. It manages the road system. It sometimes organises healthcare. It regulates the insurance markets. It manages pollution. And all the people who do those jobs — it's very important that they be people who know how to do them. You want the person who's measuring air pollution to be an expert in air pollution. You don't want them to be the president's cousin. You want the person who is regulating the insurance market to be someone who knows about insurance markets. You don't want it to be the best friend of the vice president. In corrupt autocracies, that is who gets those jobs.

Steven Bartlett: We're seeing this a little bit with the Fed. He doesn't like Jerome Powell at the Fed.

Anne Applebaum: Right. And so he's tried to undermine Jerome Powell. He was investigating him for some kind of fake financial scandal. He tried to put pressure on him to resign. He tried to put pressure on him to change his policy. And honestly, I don't know whether the person who will come in next will be more susceptible, but he's certainly been chosen because Trump thinks he is. What Trump wants is to have civil servants who are historically independent — and that includes the chairman of the Fed, and it includes the Department of Justice, the attorney general, who usually has some independence. What you want is people who are acting in the interests of everybody. In a functional democracy, in the happy Scandinavian countries, at least most of the time that's what they're doing. In a corrupt or failing democracy, you have people whose interests are not everybody in the country, but the president, his family, his party — not Americans. And so that's the danger of undermining the civil service.

Steven Bartlett: The fourth one is —

Anne Applebaum: Information. All dictatorships seek to control information. In China, the entire internet since the 1990s has been constructed so that the government can control it. There is no outside internet. There's nobody who's active on the Chinese internet who isn't somehow known or accounted for by the authorities. And the internet is also connected to a whole system of surveillance cameras and other kinds of databases so that people can be tracked all through the system and all through the country. People do have VPNs in China and they do get out, but the majority of people are inside that system. China is probably the most extreme form of that, and Russia is actually now heading in that direction. Putin has now cut off Russian access to most forms of Western social media — Instagram, for example. There were some amazing videos of really sad Russian Instagram influencers who were losing their audiences because of Putin's changes.

But even inside the United States — which is maybe the loudest and most open democracy in the world — you can see the Trump administration seeking to shape the information space in new ways. We have federal regulators who are now willing to put pressure on television stations if the president asks them to. We have the president putting his thumb on the scale of people who are acquiring new media companies in order to make sure that the new owners are somehow friendly to him.

Steven Bartlett: What about TikTok?

Anne Applebaum: TikTok, CBS, CNN — these are all media companies where the president is trying to get people who are sympathetic to him in charge. And this is, by the way — we all have this idea about censorship that it's like there's a guy in a room crossing sentences out of a newspaper article. But actually nowadays that's not how media control works. In Orbán's Hungary, in Erdoğan's Turkey, what happens is that the leadership encourages or helps business people or groups close to them to acquire media properties. They do it through the level of media ownership. So who owns the media becomes the most important question. And then the person who's in charge of the media can influence in some ways what it's able to say.

It doesn't give you complete control. In Hungary you still had a couple of very small but still existing independent websites who turned out to be very important. But you had an attempt to control — most of the television was controlled either directly or indirectly by Orbán. And it looks to me like Trump is trying to achieve something like that.

There's a piece of that which also involves culture and universities — pressure on universities so that they don't produce people who are too critical. In the US, the Trump administration took over the Kennedy Center, which is the most prestigious arts venue in Washington, and tried to change its nature and who could play there and who couldn't. The result is actually that it's now been shut down for two years.

You see this on both sides of the political aisle, in different ways. I think that when both parties are in for long enough, what we're allowed to say changes.

Steven Bartlett: Yes. Although the mechanisms have been different. I was involved in the argument some years back about what was incorrectly called cancel culture — the argument that was happening inside universities and some press and other institutions about what you could and couldn't say. There was peer pressure and sometimes institutional pressure on people, and people were cancelled — they lost their jobs or were kicked out of whatever group they were in because they'd said something the wrong way. I argued against that and wrote about it. What you have now is a little different. You now have the president attempting to change media ownership, and you're beginning to see what happens when the administration goes into a university and says, "You can't teach this course. You can't hire that teacher." That was the deal that was given to Harvard. The reason Harvard wound up refusing to deal with the Trump administration and started to sue them was because the administration was trying to actually decide who would teach what courses at Harvard. I don't believe there's a precedent for that. But I agree that it is an illiberal instinct to try to control speech. There's a left-wing version of it and there's a right-wing version of it. And the people who are really in favour of free speech — and they're vanishingly few — are the people who are willing to call it out on both sides. One of the things you often hear now from these so-called free speech warriors is that they're perfectly happy to shout about the left cancelling people or left-wing rhetoric that they don't like, but then they keep quiet when it comes from the other side.

Anne Applebaum: Yes. I was looking back through the history of this happening on both sides of the aisle. In Mark Zuckerberg's testimony in front of Congress, he said that he was repeatedly pressured for months by the Biden-Harris administration to remove certain content. And then there's the whole Hunter Biden laptop story, where Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta were asked to demote a New York Post story by the FBI. And there are various other stories about Twitter executives being emailed by White House officials and being asked to change things on their platform.

So there is a difference between someone sending you an email saying, "Look, this has been flagged by a monitoring group as maybe fake or as maybe Russian disinformation or as coming from some kind of foreign influence campaign, so it would be great if you took it down or demoted it," and there's a difference between that and taking over the company in order that the president gets to dictate what's on it. Nobody coerced Meta into doing anything or Twitter. Nobody said Twitter will pay a fine if you don't do X or Y. In the context of people looking for foreign influence campaigns, there were conversations about what was appropriate to print and what wasn't.

Steven Bartlett: I think from what I've observed, it happens on both sides, but in different ways. I remember — was it Elizabeth Warren talking a lot about Section 230? Which I think protects some of the big social media companies from being sued for users' posts. And I think she and other Democratic lawmakers would repeatedly reference Section 230 as a way to get the platforms to take a more aggressive stance on what they called hate speech and disinformation.

Anne Applebaum: Section 230 essentially allows the platforms to escape the rules that newspapers, for example, have to abide by. We do have regulations. We have libel laws. We have laws about terrorist content. There are laws that regulate some parts of speech that we've agreed are good in order to maintain peace. And the platforms are exempt because of Section 230. The platforms have argued that they don't control what's put up on their platforms and they don't bear any responsibility for it.

I'm not sure that removing Section 230 is the best way to deal with this, but making the online world conform to the same laws as the offline world seems to me very basic. It seems obvious to me that child pornography that's illegal if you have it in your house should also be illegal if it's published online. It seems to me that people recruiting for ISIS — that's illegal to do down the street from here, so it should also be illegal to do online. The tech companies have been trying, in recent years — and this is an argument taking place both in Europe and the US and elsewhere — to get out of responsibility for conforming to the law in the countries where they're active.

In one or two places there have been big clashes. I was just in Brazil, which is one of the places where that happened. The Brazilian law said something that was published on Twitter was illegal, and they fined the company for publishing it. Twitter didn't want to pay the fine, and for a while Twitter was shut down in Brazil. But it does seem to me that any given country — and particularly democracies — has the right to say these are our laws. For example, these are our electoral laws. We have laws on election spending. And if the platforms violate those laws, they're in breach of the law. Election spending is a very important one, because if you're spending a million dollars on TikTok illegally, that can be much harder to see than it would be if you were buying television ads. Finding a way to bring the social media companies into the legal system seems completely legitimate.

And in fact, I would even go further than that. I would say that if European countries in particular don't do this, then I'm not sure European countries will be able to maintain their sovereignty. Will you be able to run an election in Germany or England if your electoral rules can be easily defied by platforms that are based in the US or China?

Steven Bartlett: Everything is a trade-off, right? And this is what I've learned from being a podcaster and interviewing so many people about so many things. So as you were speaking I was thinking about what the downside of this trade is. What's the slippery slope?

Anne Applebaum: Of course there's a downside. The downside is that some country X has bad laws and then the platforms have to conform to the bad laws. Questions about speech are particularly sensitive. One person's terrorist speech is another person's free speech. But somebody has to make that decision about what the rules are. And I think the person who should make the decision — the people who should make the decision — are the elected representatives of that country. The decision should not be taken by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

Steven Bartlett: It's funny, because to some degree it sounded like what Elon Musk says. I remember watching him in an interview — I can't remember who it was with, but he basically said exactly that. He said, "We'll abide by the laws of every country that we operate in." Oh, it was his interview with Don Lemon, who used to be on CNN. Don Lemon was pushing him, saying there's hate speech on your platform, and then he asks him what the hate speech is. And Elon's response to him is, "We abide by the laws."

Anne Applebaum: But there's a record of them not doing that. So that's just disingenuous. Hate speech is a longer conversation — how you define it, what you say it is, is different. But some countries do have hate speech laws. Germany has them. Germany decided after World War II to ban Nazi symbols. I think Germany is a very, very successful electoral democracy, and if they want to ban Nazi symbols, I think they should be allowed to. In America that wouldn't work — you can't ban Nazi symbols in the United States. But I don't see why America should impose its rules on Germany. Doesn't Germany have sovereignty? Doesn't Germany get to decide what the rules of its national conversation are?

Steven Bartlett: Because in the US, racism is not illegal on the internet due to the First Amendment. So I could be racist on X, and that is fine according to the laws. But I think a lot of people would say that the platform would have an obligation to take down that racism. Someone starts being racist to me on the internet — I understand why a lot of people would say that kind of behaviour should be taken down, but it's within the country's laws. Do you think this is where the clash comes in? Because something can feel deeply immoral but be legal.

Anne Applebaum: Sure, there's a difference between illegality and immorality. And historically, newspapers and other media have decided not to print racist material because it's immoral or because it's offensive. Even social media platforms have a debate about how much ugly stuff they want to appear on their sites, because if people see too much of it, they'll stop going on it. I reduced my usage of Twitter because there was too much antisemitism and too much racism and I didn't want to watch it anymore. I think many others have made the same decision.

Speech is a constant negotiation. What's acceptable, what's unacceptable — the norms do change over time. What the autocrats try to do is something a little bit different. It's not in this grey area of hate speech and free speech. It's controlling the system itself — what are the boundaries of what people can see, what platforms they have access to. What the Chinese are interested in is: are you criticising the Chinese Communist Party? That's the fundamental thing they're controlling for.

Steven Bartlett: I was wondering — if I'm in China, can I just get up and go? Can I just leave?

Anne Applebaum: Where would you go? And could you get a visa to go there?

Steven Bartlett: Could I not just go move to Bali?

Anne Applebaum: Think about it. This used to be a problem for people in the Soviet Union. Theoretically you could leave, you could get an exit passport. I'm sure there are some restrictions on who's able to get passports and who isn't. But say you were able to go — you'd need to go somewhere where you could get a visa, where you could work, where you could set up a life, where you speak the language, where it's reasonable to imagine you could stay there for a long time. Immigration is not always easy. It's not always practical for everybody. I have many friends who left Russia, but I have one or two friends who are still there because they have ageing relatives, or because they don't speak any other languages and they don't feel they'd be at home anywhere else. There are many reasons why people can't leave even if they don't like their state or their political system.

Steven Bartlett: So what's number five on our list?

Anne Applebaum: Control over power ministries and the use of violence. Most autocracies sooner or later want to create some kind of repressive system that's also physical. So it's not just control of the information space — there's also some element of coercion. People who don't go along with the system don't get to just float around. There's some way of threatening them physically.

Steven Bartlett: Like ICE.

Anne Applebaum: ICE is not supposed to be that. ICE is supposed to be an immigration enforcement institution. But the way it's been used is well beyond the way any immigration institution was used before in the United States. Look at what ICE looks like. They are masked. They are wearing military uniforms. They are often driving unmarked cars. They drive in vans — not police vans. And they're not following the rules of local police. They're not accountable to anybody. They're not accountable to the mayor or to the governor of the state where they are. And that gives them a kind of impunity and a kind of ability to behave badly. They seem to be accountable directly to the Homeland Security Department and to the president.

We've already seen how this can affect the behaviour of ICE — during the protests and the arrests in Minnesota. Two people were killed. And what was really horrifying to me wasn't just that they were killed. It was how the administration reacted. Vance and Noem and several other people immediately said of the people who were killed that they were guilty. So instead of saying, "This is horrible — an American police force killed two US citizens, and we need to have an investigation, this must not be allowed to happen again" — the immediate instinct was to give them impunity. The instinct was to put them above the law. And when you have a military force — especially one that's militarised and looks like they're dressed for Fallujah — when you have a military force that's above the law, then it's really a paramilitary. If you have a police force that can harm ordinary citizens and not pay any price for it and isn't accountable, then you're not serving Americans. You're serving the interests of the ruling party.

Is this the decline of the American empire?

Steven Bartlett: Do you think this is potentially the decline of what one might call the American empire? I was looking at how long empires tend to last. There's this 250-year figure which is famously popularised by a British historian called Sir John Glubb in his essay "The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival." After analysing empires from the Assyrians to the British, Glubb found that despite differences in technology, geography, and religion, they surprisingly shared a similar lifespan and life cycle. Glubb argued that empires typically go through a predictable sequence of stages over those 250 years: the age of pioneers, outburst and conquest; the age of conquest, which is military dominance; the age of commerce, which is vast wealth creation; the age of affluence, comfort and a shift from duty to selfishness; the age of intellect, focus on philosophy and education over defence; and the age of decadence, internal division, massive inequality and collapse.

If you view the United States as an expansionist project from its very inception, pushing westward across the North American continent through its power, then the math says — if you take it from 1776 to now, to 2026 — it's exactly 250 years old. So if you use Glubb's 250-year life cycle model from 1776 to now, political scientists argue that we are in the age of decadence of the American Empire. This stage is typically characterised by deep internal political division, vast wealth inequality, massive national debt, and a cultural shift away from a shared sense of civic duty.

Anne Applebaum: First of all, that's a pretty accurate description of what's happening in the United States. However, you have just touched on something that I feel very strongly about, which is that I don't believe in historical inevitability. And I think it's very dangerous. The idea that we are on a slippery slope downhill and we can't stop it because that's the way history is going — or alternatively, the idea that everything is fine and it will continue to be fine because liberal democracy has triumphed, which is what we thought in the 1990s — anytime you think that something is inevitable, that takes away your willingness to act.

What happens tomorrow and next year is completely dependent on what we do today. Whether the United States survives as a democracy or not depends on choices Americans make, things they say, the arguments they have, the degree of civic participation — not some historical rule that some very brilliant political scientist invented. And I think we had this moment of complacency after the fall of the Soviet Union in the '90s. Americans and Europeans became convinced that everything was best in the best of all possible worlds, and we didn't have to do anything in particular to maintain our democracies, because democracy was the best system and we'd just won the Cold War and it was all going to be fine. And we lost sight of the ways in which democracy was beginning to slip. And I think it was a sense of complacency and above all a sense of inevitability. It's inevitable — we've won the war of ideas, the war of ideas is over. And that's why we missed the rise of Russia. We missed the significance of China. We missed a lot of those things because we were so sure that we were just winning.

Steven Bartlett: Isn't that in and of itself a cycle?

Anne Applebaum: It's a cycle. But my point is that the cycles aren't predictable. You can stop the cycle. You can reverse the cycle. Countries can and do change their trajectory. I've lived a lot of my life in Poland. I first went there in the 1980s. My husband is Polish. Poland is a completely different country from what it was 30 years ago. It's a country that has really changed itself in ways that weren't necessarily predictable in 1990. So I do think countries change.

Steven Bartlett: Is all of this downstream from something that doesn't change, which is human nature? And therefore, if we understand human nature as the constant, then one can almost predict these — dare I say the word again — cycles of how humans will go from there to decadence?

Anne Applebaum: Human nature is a constant. But there is so much accident in history and so many random things happen that you can sometimes predict how people will react, but you can't necessarily predict exactly what's coming. When Boris Yeltsin was drunk and sick and had to choose the next leader of Russia, there were a number of choices he had. And the person he chose was Vladimir Putin, who at the time was very low-ranking. He came from the KGB. They chose him because they thought he would be loyal to the Yeltsin family and he wouldn't prosecute them. Nobody imagined him as a dictator or an imperial leader who would be seeking to reconquer the former Soviet Union.

What if they'd chosen, for example, Boris Nemtsov, who was another leading Russian politician at the time? I don't know that he was a perfect democrat, but he was very open-minded and he would have been interested in integrating Russia with Europe. What if he'd become the leader of Russia? We would be in a completely different world. And there was nothing inevitable about that decision.

There are always some percentage of any population that's instinctively authoritarian, and there's always some percentage that's instinctively liberal or libertarian. But what is the balance of that group? How the leadership of the country encourages or discourages one set of values or the other — that affects who's winning the arguments. So I don't believe in inevitable cycles.

Steven Bartlett: Have you heard of Ray Dalio talking about the sort of boom and bust cycles through history — when a population becomes very comfortable, you have this sort of inversion that goes the other way? Do you believe in those kinds of cycles?

Anne Applebaum: I suppose there is a phenomenon whereby, yes, as people become comfortable, then — and Frank Fukuyama actually had in his famous book about the end of history a description of this — what happens if everybody becomes a liberal democracy and everybody's pretty prosperous? Then the next thing that will happen is some people will get bored, and out of their boredom and out of their desire for change, they'll attack the system and want to undermine it. It's kind of what happened. So there's some human element like that — there will always be some part of the population that feels left out or feels discriminated against and wants a bigger voice or wants to run the country. You can see that. I just don't think it's something that scientists can predict.

Democracy, capitalism, and wealth inequality

Steven Bartlett: Is there a link between democracies and rampant capitalism? In a democracy, does it tend to be the case that you end up with wealth inequality because you let free markets play out, and then you're going to have these tech oligarchs up here with all their trillions of dollars, and lots of people at the bottom? Whereas in China, I guess they somewhat defend against that?

Anne Applebaum: I would say almost the opposite. Historically, democracies — and there have been different phases, so I don't want to overgeneralise — but certainly in the second half of the 20th century, the democracies since the Second World War have tended towards equality, including in the United States. At their most successful and prosperous moments, there was much less wealth inequality than there is now. The countries we were talking about earlier — the happy countries — those are relatively equal countries. Those are countries with big welfare states and a lot of redistribution of wealth. Those are countries where people feel invested in the system partly because they don't feel completely outclassed by a group of oligarchs.

If you look at the United States in the 1950s, that was a period of also huge social mobility, when lower middle class and middle-class people began to get wealthier. There's this enormous wave of prosperity, and that's a period when everybody is becoming wealthier. And that was also a period when you have very successful American democracy. You have the civil rights movement. You have democracy beginning to spread to new populations or to people who'd been excluded before. So you have a connection between equality and democracy, even wealth equality.

And one of the things that gives critics of the United States most anxiety now is precisely what you just said — the emergence of tech oligarchs who have so much more power than any one politician and who even have the power to organise the information space. How long will that group of people want to live in a democracy where everybody gets a vote and wealth is supposed to be distributed more evenly? There are some members of that community who have become illiberal or anti-democratic for exactly that reason.

What to watch for — and what citizens can do

Steven Bartlett: If we don't believe in inevitabilities, then what is it we have to look out for as those living in a democracy? Are there things coming up where you're worried that as a society we might overlook them or allow them, which results in us falling back down into an autocratic society? And is there anything we can do proactively now to defend our democracy?

Anne Applebaum: We are lucky in that we live in societies where we can vote. And so it's really important that we vote, that we know who we're voting for, that we vote in all elections, including local ones. When people become nihilistic — when they say, "They're all the same, I don't care who wins the election, it's not worth voting because they're all corrupt" — this is what autocrats try to create. What does Putin want Russians to do? Does he want them to be political? No. He wants them to stay out of politics. What do the Chinese want? They want their people out of politics. And so whenever you see too many people who have responded to that kind of negative inspiration, that's when you should worry. And I worry a lot about the United States on exactly those grounds.

Also, look at how the leader of your country talks about the press, how he or she talks about the judges, the judiciary, how he or she talks about the civil service. A real democrat respects those institutions and wants them to stay in place precisely so that democracy can remain, so that at the next election there will be a fair election.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think the mainstream media are politicised? Do you think there's political bias in the mainstream media?

Anne Applebaum: Some of them have business models that are biased. Fox's business model is to appeal to the right-leaning part of the American population and to encourage them in their biases and get them to watch TV. There's some media that are now dependent on polarisation and kind of live off it. There are some who try to be neutral, but even neutrality is hard to achieve now, because a neutral investigation that turns up something bad about the Trump administration will immediately incur the reaction: you're biased. We've lost our assumption that the press are operating in good faith. So it's become much more difficult.

Steven Bartlett: This is so interesting for me as a podcaster who I guess now is considered to be media. The inherent incentives of media mean that if I'm running a newspaper and I've built up a base of people who want me to say something negative about Trump, I have an economic model and an incentive structure that means if I write that article, it's going to get ten times the reach, ten times the engagement, ten times the subscribers. If I write the exact opposite article, I know it's going to get a fraction of the reach and engagement. So as a CEO of such a company, you're going to have to hire more and more people, create more and more output to receive the same rewards, versus just writing something bad about that particular person. So you become incentivised. And then the other factor is that geographically, Democrats and Republicans in the United States exist in certain areas. So if I open my office in New York or LA, most of the people I'm going to be able to hire come with a certain political view statistically. I do wonder if eventually the fate of most media organisations is that they do get politically captured one way or the other.

Anne Applebaum: You have to fight it. And as a podcaster — yeah, because now I'm part of the media. I now understand, because I feel it. I feel that I sit here with Kamala Harris and I'm attacked. I sit here with Ivanka Trump and I'm attacked. I sit here with Michelle Obama — attacked. Gavin Newsom — attacked. And I understand there's this great quote: "You have to join a tribe or you get killed by one." And I get why some of my peers in podcasting have sought defence behind a particular tribe, because just taking the arrows from both sides is not the nicest feeling in the world.

Anne Applebaum: No. But it's not so much about hearing from both sides. It's about trying to establish what's true. And so the job of what you do is a little bit different from what journalists do. Journalists go into the world and they gather information, and if they're good journalists, they try to figure out what actually happened, and then they bring it back and they write it down or they make a video about it, and they try to make sure that it's accurate. And so if you're devoted to that project, then you seek to avoid political bias, but inevitably you might wind up saying the president is lying or the leader of the opposition is lying. And then you're immediately in the world of people shouting at you and saying you're biased.

But I do feel that it's really important that this particular profession — the people who go into the world and try to establish reality — continues to exist. For democracy to exist, for an accurate and meaningful national conversation to exist, we need to have some people who are trying to figure out what's real.

Steven Bartlett: I agree. And I think those people are incredibly important. I very much agree that there are incredibly rigorous truth-seeking journalists out there who have this very unique skill — not one that I possess or pretend to possess at all — that they go deep for long periods of time without bias in search of the truth and then deliver it to the world. And I'm well aware that if we lose that, then I lose so many of the things that I fundamentally care about and that I've built my entire life and career on, especially as a young black man in business who understands that there are lots of people who came before me that revealed things about the way society functioned that have benefited me.

Anne Applebaum: There is a danger that we go down a road in which — especially as AI develops and we get more and more of our information online — we lose touch with reality. If AI is only accessing what's available to the model online, there's still a whole world out there where things are happening that aren't online. Making sure that we're constantly in touch with what's reality on the ground — what's really happening in Ukraine, what's really happening in Iran — and not living on just what's available to us on our phones, is really important.

One of my fears is that the algorithms with AI are becoming better at knowing what to serve me in order to make me dwell, and therefore it creates more ad dollars for the companies. And so I might not just be living in a fake reality — I might be living in a completely personalised one that's completely different from your own. Because as I went on my phone this morning, one of the sections on my phone is "suggested for you." This is obviously showing me things based on my past viewing consumption. So if I viewed this person having a fight in the street, I'm getting more people having fights in the street. So now my perception is that everyone's having fights in the street, and that means it's harder to connect to each other.

Anne Applebaum: We very much — I think this has really happened already — we live in our own algorithms. And when you're asking the more fundamental question about the breakdown of democracy, there's nothing more toxic to democracy than polarisation. Because if you live in a world where the people on the other side of the political divide aren't just your rivals — you don't just disagree with them about taxes — but they are your existential enemies, and if they're in charge then the world ends, then it's very hard to have a normal democratic debate or a normal election.

A personal interlude — marriage, Poland, and public life

Steven Bartlett: Do you know what this is?

Anne Applebaum: It looks like a very old newspaper.

Steven Bartlett: Very old newspaper from a long time ago. And you're in it.

Anne Applebaum: Gosh. Oh, wow. That took a lot of research.

Steven Bartlett: What is that?

Anne Applebaum: That is — they don't even have these anymore. That was a New York Times wedding announcement from 1992.

Steven Bartlett: Married since 1992. I'm still married to the person who it was announced that I was marrying — a Polish man. He was then a journalist.

Anne Applebaum: And now he's the Polish foreign minister. We got married in Washington, but he was born in Poland. It's a long story.

Steven Bartlett: Politics has been a big part of your family's life in various ways.

Anne Applebaum: It would be hard to deny that. Yeah.

Steven Bartlett: Is it stressful? Because it's constant, and it's more polarising than ever before, and it's divisive. It's a lot of energy. Even talking about these things I find to be quite energy-draining.

Anne Applebaum: Yes. It became more stressful in more recent years. Social media made it more stressful than it used to be. The stressful part is living a part of your life in public. We try to not live all of our lives in public. This has been very useful to me as a journalist, actually. You begin to understand the difference between what you look like in public and what your reality is. People react to you in all kinds of ways depending on where they've seen you on TV or what stories they've read about you, some of which might not be true. And there's often a kind of — the way you're perceived is not necessarily the way you are. And so I try to keep that in mind when I meet public figures — that I have a set of perceptions of them based on what I've read about them, which I wouldn't have if I met, say, somebody's next-door neighbour. When you meet a politician or somebody who's well-known, you come with stuff. And I try when I meet people to drop it as much as I can.

Steven Bartlett: Because you've seen that at home.

Anne Applebaum: Because I've seen it at home. Yes. We have compatible lives that are somewhat different. I have stayed well away from Polish politics. I don't play any role in it. I have a different name from my husband — I didn't change my name — and that has also allowed us to be separate. We share a lot of views but not all. We have kind of different trajectories, but as I said, I find that mostly knowing what it's like to be a politician helps me understand them.

Steven Bartlett: Have you ever thought about going into politics yourself?

Anne Applebaum: No. You can't have two politicians in one family. A lot of what I do is journalism, or something journalist-adjacent. I go in and try to find things. I try to explain them. I try to say what I think is happening. And the job of a politician is quite different from that. You arrive with a set of views. You need to explain them to people. You need to convince them. It's a different way of thinking about approaching the public. So I'm not campaigning for a cause.

What Applebaum is trying to achieve — and what we might be missing

Steven Bartlett: Is there a particular outcome you're seeking with the work that you do, with the books that you write, and the conversations you have? Is there one particular outcome above all others that you're aiming at?

Anne Applebaum: There's an outcome that's general but not specific. In other words, I'm not trying to elect any particular person to be president. I do have a goal that is to remind people of why democracy is important, why we need to maintain it, and to pay attention to the ways in which it's declining so that we can fight back. I have a broad goal in that sense, and that's not only inside the United States.

Steven Bartlett: Why is this so personal to you?

Anne Applebaum: It's the thing I've been fascinated by since I was in my 20s. I saw the Soviet Union when it was still the Soviet Union. I was a student in Leningrad when it was still Leningrad. I felt what it was like to live in a heavily autocratic society, even briefly. And I've really spent the rest of my life trying to understand what it was, how it worked, why people went along with it. And I've also spent a lot of time more recently trying to warn people against it, against going in that direction.

It's also not the thing I thought I would be doing. If you look at my books, I wrote three history books. I wrote the Gulag book. I wrote a history of the Ukrainian famine. I wrote a book — this is a book about how the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe, how they did regime change in Eastern Europe after the war. They're about things that happened in the distant past. But I had a realisation in about 2014, 2015, that I was living through a period of history myself. In other words, there was a historical shift happening around me, and I felt the need to start recording it as a kind of eyewitness.

And so that book, Twilight of Democracy, was a description — it starts with a description of a party I gave, and then the book is about how people I knew had changed. I knew a lot of people who had been very radicalised. I knew lots of people on the centre right — we were anti-communists, we were Thatcherites, Reaganites — and I saw many of them become more radical. And I thought, this is a really important moment of change, and so I should record it as a witness. That was the first book I wrote in the first person about something I'd seen. And that was just me being affected by the world I live in. Maybe it did matter that I was married to a politician, because some things that you would have noticed in a more distant way affected me personally. Maybe it was the particular circumstances of being both American and Polish and seeing a similar pattern of things happening in both places. Either way, I felt that something important was happening, and I've really been motivated for the last decade to explain it to people and try to understand it.

Steven Bartlett: In that regard, what is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about?

Anne Applebaum: What would regime change really look like in our countries?

Steven Bartlett: In the West? Isn't it just electing a new person?

Anne Applebaum: What would it feel like to live in a very different kind of society? How would you feel living in a place where suddenly the values shifted? We think, for example, free speech is a value — and we've been arguing about it here. What does it mean? What's hate speech? How do we measure it? What if you suddenly found yourself waking up one morning in a society where free speech was bad — where it wasn't automatically assumed to be good?

We also have an assumption that there is some kind of meritocracy in our societies, right? That if you try hard and work hard and maybe you're lucky and you study, then you can be successful. What if you found yourself suddenly in a society where that wasn't true, and actually the only way to get ahead was to have a cousin in the ruling party?

Being able to imagine that and think about it is important for understanding this bigger issue of democratic decline — what's the change of our system that we're trying to avoid, and what does it feel like to people who experience that? This has been a subject of a lot of my books. That book Iron Curtain is about it. I've written a lot about Ukraine and what happened when the Russians occupied eastern Ukraine. They did regime change. They changed the rules of the society. I think we don't reflect enough about what are the deep rules of the societies we live in and what we would lose if we lost them.

Steven Bartlett: It seems unimaginable and it seems quite far away, and I guess that's a privilege of having lived in a democratic society for my whole life. It almost seems like a theoretical concept. But history, they say, doesn't repeat but it rhymes. And I believe that even if we don't know the time frames, there are certain cycles in history that are accelerated or come about because of human nature. But I'm also well aware that there are things that we can do or not do that could lead us to go down a bad slope.

So then you don't believe in inevitability?

Anne Applebaum: Well, it's interesting. I kind of believe in both, which is — I think that there's this fundamental human nature which drives us, which causes these cycles to occur. And actually, one could even argue that it's inevitable that eventually we miss the signs and we go down the slope. But the time frames of that occurring — or if it occurs — we still have agency and control over that. Does that make sense, or does that sound like a total contradiction? To believe in both — that human nature does cause these cycles, but at the same time, today we have a choice. We have agency over whether we go in that direction.

Anne Applebaum: Human nature is like — we know how it works, and so it offers us some warnings. We know what we should be trying to avoid. As I said, if you focus hard on what it is that you don't want to happen — and that's what strategy is, right? — and then you work backwards and think, how do I make sure to prevent that from happening, then you begin to get a pretty clear idea of what's useful behaviour in the present.

Closing question — and a reflection on personal resilience

Steven Bartlett: We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is: what is the most challenging setback you've experienced, and what's the lesson you want to pass on to others?

Anne Applebaum: I suppose the most challenging things I've experienced have been political shifts — when I saw radicalisation, when I saw the rise of illiberal groups and movements, including among people I knew closely and very well. And figuring out both how to cope with them and how to shift my thinking in order to understand how to explain it and deal with it. That was probably the most important.

Steven Bartlett: How do you cope with them? Someone in your life has a sort of —

Anne Applebaum: I'm bad at it. Really.

Steven Bartlett: Interesting.

Anne Applebaum: I mean, lots of people think that you should be able to be friends with everybody and talk to everybody, and I see that. I see some people are able to do that. I find that I care too much. It becomes hard for me.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think you could interview as a journalist — do you think you could interview anybody?

Anne Applebaum: Probably could interview anybody. I mean, there would be some people who are hard to interview because they lie, and then I don't know how to deal with that. You don't want to have an interview where you're correcting somebody the whole time. I would certainly talk to anybody as a journalist.

Steven Bartlett: Would you interview Trump?

Anne Applebaum: Yeah. He would pose exactly that problem, because how would you deal with the fact that he's saying something that's not true? Would you then say, "But Mr. President, that's not true," and go down that road of arguing with him? Or would you just listen and write it down?

Steven Bartlett: So you're worried it wouldn't be productive?

Anne Applebaum: I'm worried it wouldn't be productive.

Steven Bartlett: That's also my line, to be honest, with some people. There are certain people that are really consequential so you feel you should interview them, but part of me worries that it wouldn't be productive anyway. I wouldn't get anything out of them that is new or useful.

Anne Applebaum: Right. I would talk to anybody with whom you can have an argument and who's reality-based. And my other thing is just people who don't take things off the record. Because sometimes when we ask to interview people, they'll say, "Yes, but as long as you don't talk about this." And for me, that's a no-go.

Steven Bartlett: Well, you didn't take anything off the record.

Anne Applebaum: I didn't.

Steven Bartlett: Thank you. I appreciate that. You have so many wonderful books, and the reason I was very keen for my team to reach out to you and ask you to come today was not just because you write great books, but you're a real demystifying force in a world that's becoming incredibly misty for many of us — in part because there's just so much information accessible to all of us now. I highly recommend people go check out these wonderful books. Many of them are a continuation of the themes and subjects we've talked about, or adjacent stories from history. You're a remarkable storyteller, and that's why I think people love listening to you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time today to help demystify all of this for me. I've actually never had a conversation so centred on the subject of democracy. I've heard people talking about it for the last ten years as this sort of thing that matters. But this conversation has really opened my eyes to both the value of it, but also the risks and the slippery slope that causes societies to lose it.

Anne Applebaum: But thank you for asking such penetrating questions. Thank you.