Anne Applebaum

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.

And that's part of what keeps them all in power.

And it looks in, you know, the Trump administration is still not free to

behave in that way.

You know, we still live in a democracy and we still have, you know, we still, I hope, will have congressional investigations and we have courts and so on.

But they seem to be pushing the country in that direction.

And clearly there are very wealthy people in the tech world and in the crypto world and in other industries who want the U.S.

to develop very much in that direction, a kind of

A state where political power and economic power are the same thing and, you know, the politicians own the companies and they act in their interests, not our interests.

Yeah, I think Poland sees itself very much as being a country that will play a role in deciding what happens next in Ukraine and will play an increasingly influential role in helping other European countries shape their security decisions.

I mean, there's some interesting, there's a very close Polish-Swedish relationship.

The Poles just bought some submarines from Sweden.

You see this kind of countries around the Baltic becoming, working together in lots of ways, and actually often including the UK.

So you have kind of UK-Scandinavia-Baltic-Poland alliance, which is emerging as a really important alliance of countries just because they share values and they