Anne Applebaum

That is literally the Russian, that is exactly the Russian system.

I mean, the Russian system is that you have companies like Gazprom, which are nominally private, but which are really owned by people who also run the country.

And they use, you know, their Russian foreign policy has been

kind of commercial and diplomatic and political, all mixed up for a long time.

And the purpose of a Gazprom investment in a foreign country would be partly to make money for the people who run Gazprom, and partly it would be to achieve some goal, you know, for the Russian state.

And, you know, and particularly in oil and gas, but not only, you know, Russian companies have been inseparable from the state for a long time.

And it's created, you know, this ugly system where all of government and all of foreign policy is really just designed to benefit this kind of ownership class.

And we are really very much at risk of that in America, that everything, you know, the government isn't for everybody.

It's not for everybody.

to make all of us rich and prosperous.

It's not to project a set of American values into the world, which has been true at least some of the time of American foreign policy, certainly since the Second World War, but you could argue further back than that.

And instead of being this, you know, the kind of outward representation of us and our values and our desire for prosperity and a good life, it's actually just designed for those people.

And that's really how the, you know, I mean, Russia is maybe the most prominent example of this, but you can look at other autocratic states and say the same thing about them.

And this is the argument of my recent book, Autocracy, Inc., is that it's a mistake to look at the world's autocrats, even when they have different ideologies, you know, Russia and China and Iran and North Korea, etc.

Venezuela, Azerbaijan, you know, they have very different ideologies, but they all often work in some of the same ways.

And one of the ways that one of the things they have in common is this kleptocratic model, you know, that the rulers of the country are also the owners of the biggest businesses.

And they use their business relations with one another to make money for themselves.

And they hide money in the same ways they hide money in the Caribbean or in

or indeed in Delaware.

And they move money around the world anonymously, and they share ways of doing that.