Yesterday, we talked about the global Authoritarian Movement or Authoritarian International (with the convenient acronym “AI”). Today, I wanted to talk about something slightly more specific. It’s part of the same phenomenon, perhaps a subset of it, but it’s distinct.
Back during Trump’s first term, people in the anti-Trump world became intensely, if superficially, engaged with the inner-workings of Russia under Vladimir Putin, particularly the aggressive use of influence and disruption operations in competitor states, as well as the use of “kompromat” to maintain control over Russian oligarchs and key people — allies and enemies — abroad. One of the features of that world is that it’s really not extortion. It can be an oddly stabilizing system because everyone kind of has something on everyone else. In any case, this became a big part of the Trump opposition world during Trump’s first term. What did Putin have on Trump? What did he want? When did it start?
When a lot of highly motivated people suddenly get interested in the pretty opaque functionings of a society and government, a lot of nuance and key facts are going to be missed. But at a minimum, this was a fairly accurate view of how the elite functioned in post-Soviet, post-democratic Russia. How much it related to Trump, specifically, is hard to say. But later in Trump’s presidency it became clear to me that this was by no means limited to Russia. There was a big chunk of what I’ve described as the Authoritarian International that seemed to organize itself and operate in a pretty similar way.
I first started to understand this in deeper reporting on #metoo, especially Ronan Farrow’s book account of his early reporting which broke out key stories that really moved the meta-story to the front pages. This part of Farrow’s story was inevitably murky. But someone, quite likely Harvey Weinstein or those working on his behalf, had sicced Israeli private-sector intel firms on and were surveilling him and perhaps hacking his devices in ways that go far beyond what even a high-end private investigator can do. Every major power has highly effective digital warfare capacities. Israel has some of the best. And it has a private sector intel industry where, for the right money, you can get access to stuff that is pretty close to what the big states use.
In any case, a recurrent pattern came up. People in the Gulf wanting to pressure, harass or control key people abroad. By whatever level of indirection they get the access to the private sector Israeli intel stuff. And they’re using it in countries like the U.S., in Europe, etc. In a way, Trump’s “catch and kill” arrangement with The National Enquirer was just a somewhat more primitive version of this dynamic.
Another strand of the story comes from the fact that Silicon Valley, U.S. hedge funds and lots of other parts of the economy are highly dependent on money from the Gulf states — principally the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which appears to be increasingly used at the discretion of Mohammad bin Salman but also those of the other Gulf emirates, particularly the UAE. Those relationships are now deepening. And none of these players can write off Gulf money as at least a major part of their investor portfolio. A lot of this predates Trump. In some ways it produced Trump. But in ways I still don’t fully understand, Trump’s first presidency helped to congeal this, make a lot of these people decide they were on the same team and to see how much more easily “business” could be done with someone like Trump in office. There isn’t the same concern with lobbyists and interagency processes and historic U.S. policy or U.S. domestic stakeholders and certainly not Congress. You get a meeting with the president, and if you convince him what you want is awesome, that’s it. You’re good to go. Throw in some lost-money investments in one of his family firms and you’re set.
So what we see here is something like that system out of Russia being brought worldwide, particularly with the people in the particular power groupings I’ve described above — a lot of wholesale use of non-state or quasi-state intel capacities to collect information on friends and enemies, a lot of use of those Israeli private intel firms. In a way, it’s bringing the Putin model of state and state stakeholder management to the global stage. But in a different way it’s taking the oligarch system and taking it worldwide. It’s the oligarchization of the global elite. Because we’re no longer talking just about post-Soviet oligarchs. (For all the regalia, the Saudis run the ultimate oligarch government, running a whole country on the basis of a single, primitive extractive economy.) This is happening because oligarchs and hyper-billionaires across the globe are becoming more united, growing in influence, power and a common perception of their own proper role in a new global order. Meanwhile, the representatives of the old elite — government stakeholders and leadership of more conventional global businesses — are declining in power and losing coherence as a definable group because of the fraying of the post-war world order.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, this isn’t identical to the global Authoritarian Movement. It also doesn’t include the voters who have elected authoritarian parties to power in the U.S., Brazil, Hungary, Poland, arguably India, Israel and so many other states. But it involves many of the same key and central players — what we might call the Global Authoritarian elite, or significant parts of it. We have a fairly clear sense of how the movement operates domestically. This, I would argue, is how it operates internationally, above all on the basis of opacity, private deals between national leaders which mix national interest with individual financial interest, a complex and subterranean world of secrets and compromising information and a general aim of keeping states under the leadership of national governments who play by these rules. Beyond what we in the United States face at home, this is what we face abroad.